Mosaic authorship

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section may be inaccurate or unbalanced in favor of certain viewpoints. Please improve the article by adding information on neglected viewpoints, or discuss the issue on the talk page.

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (December 2007)

Mosaic authorship is the traditional ascription to Moses of the authorship of the five books of the Torah or Pentateuch - Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

The belief in Mosaic authorship is first found explicitly expressed in the Talmud, a collection of Jewish traditions and exegesis dating from the 3nd to the 6th centuries centuries CE, and was presumably based on the several verses in the Torah describing Moses writing "torah" (instruction) from God. The Talmudic commentators advanced several versions of just how Moses came to write the Torah, ranging from direct dictation by God to a less direct divine inspiration stretching over the forty years in the wilderness. Later rabbis (and the Talmudic rabbis as well - see tractate Bava Basra 15a) and Christian scholars noticed some difficulties with the idea of Mosaic authorship of the entire Torah, notably the fact that the book of Deuteronomy describes Moses' death; later versions of the tradition therefore held that some portions of the Torah were added by others - the death of Moses in particular was ascribed to Joshua.

Mosaic authorship was accepted with very little discussion by both Jews and Christians until the 17th century, when the rise of secular scholarship and the associated willingness to subject even the bible to the test of reason led to its rejection by mainstream biblical scholars. The majority of modern scholars believe that the Torah is the product of many hands, stretching over many centuries, reaching its final form only around the 6th and 5th centuries BCE.

Contents 1 Origins and nature of the tradition 2 The challenge of secular scholarship 3 The Mosaic tradition in the modern age 4 Possible evidence of Mosaic authorship 4.1 Literary Evidence 4.1.1 Egyptian terminology in the Torah 4.1.2 Antiquity of the Hebrew found in the Torah 4.2 Biblical manuscripts 4.3 Archaeology 4.4 Other 5 Notes 6 See also

[edit] Origins and nature of the tradition

Part of a series on The Bible
Biblical canon and books
Tanakh: Torah · Nevi'im · Ketuvim Old Testament · Hebrew Bible · New Testament · New Covenant · Deuterocanon · Antilegomena · Chapters & verses Apocrypha: Jewish · OT · NT
Development and authorship
Panbabylonism · Jewish Canon · Old Testament canon · New Testament canon · Mosaic authorship · Pauline epistles · Johannine works
Translations and manuscripts
Septuagint · Samaritan Pentateuch · Dead Sea scrolls · Targums · Peshitta · Vetus Latina · Vulgate · Masoretic text · Gothic Bible · Luther Bible · English Bibles
Biblical studies
Dating the Bible · Biblical criticism · Higher criticism · Textual criticism · Novum Testamentum Graece · NT textual categories · Documentary hypothesis · Synoptic problem · The Bible and history‎ · Biblical archaeology
Interpretation
Hermeneutics · Pesher · Midrash · Pardes · Allegorical · Literalism · Prophecy
Views
Inerrancy · Infallibility · Criticism · Islamic · Qur'anic · Gnostic · Judaism and Christianity · Law in Christianity
This box: view • talk • edit

Deuteronomy 31:9 and Deuteronomy 31:24-26 describe how Moses writes "torah" (instruction) on a scroll and lays it beside the ark of the Covenant.^[1] Similar passages include, for example, Exodus 17:14, "And YHWH said unto Moses, Write this for a memorial in a book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua, that I will utterly blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven;" Exodus 24:4, "And Moses wrote all the words of YHWH, and rose up early in the morning, and builded an altar under the mount, and twelve pillars, according to the twelve tribes of Israel;" Exodus 34:27, "And Yahwh said unto Moses, Write thou these words, for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee and with Israel;"^[2] and Leviticus 26:46 "These are the decrees, the laws and the regulations that the LORD established on Mount Sinai between himself and the Israelites through Moses."

Statements implying belief in Mosaic authorship of the Torah are also contained in Joshua,^[3] Kings,^[4] Chronicles,^[5] Ezra^[6] and Nehemiah.^[7]

The rabbis of the Talmud (c. 200-500 CE) discussed exactly how the Torah was transmitted to Moses. In the Babylonian Talmud Gittin 60a it is written "Said R' Yochanan, the Torah was given in a series of small scrolls". This implies that the Torah was written gradually and compiled from a variety of documents over time. This may account for the composite appearance of the Pentateuch. There is a another opinion there that states that the entire Torah was given at one time. Menachem Mendel Kasher points to certain traditions of the Oral Torah which showed Moses quoting Genesis prior to the epiphany at Sinai. Based on a number of Bible verses and rabbinic statements, he suggests that Moses had certain documents authored by the Patriarchs that he used made use of when redacting that book.^[8]

[edit] The challenge of secular scholarship

Until the 17th century AD Mosaic authorship of the Torah was an assumption, not a subject of discussion. A few rabbis, and even fewer Christian scholars, questioned Moses's authorship of a few verses, notably those in Deuteronomy describing his death, but none doubted that the bulk of the Torah was by him.

This changed with the Reformation and the European Enlightenment, when philosophers and scholars such as Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and Jean Astruc began to investigate the origins of the Pentateuch, and by the 19th century the idea was no longer entertained by mainstream academic scholarship. In the closing decades of the 19th century Julius Wellhausen put forward the Documentary hypothesis, the theory that the Pentateuch had its origins in four source documents composed at various times during the 1st millennium BC and not combined into the final Torah until c.450 BC, and this became universally accepted for almost a hundred years. Since the late 1960s the hypothesis has been increasingly challenged, but general consensus among scholars remains that the five books were composed towards the second half of the 1st millennium BC.

[edit] The Mosaic tradition in the modern age

Many of the supposed contradictions and inconsistencies said to exist in the Torah as noted by critical scholars have been well noted by the classical Jewish sources (and in part form the basis of the Oral Torah). R' David Zvi Hoffman in his commentary to Leviticus made use of rabbinic homiletical and exegetical interpretations as well as some of his own insights to explain the text in light of the difficulties noted by the critics. He also authored a book Die wichtigsten Instanzen gegen die Graf-Wellhausensche Hypothese (2 vols., 1903/1916 translated into Hebrew and available here) pointing out several difficulties in the Wellhasuen hypothesis, most notably in his theory that the Priestly code (and hence the Jewish conception of monotheism) was of late post-exilic redaction. While his approach to biblical investigation was essentially the result of the conditions of his time and place, they have stood the test of time and are still studied.

Another scholar Benno Jacob developed a theory concerning the internal rhythm of the Bible, which is expressed by the repetition of key words in set numbers in the narratives of the Torah and its laws. The programmatic statement in his 1916 book, Quellenscheiden und Exegese im Pentateuch, illustrates his concerns:

The Bible’s means of representation (Darstellungsweise)] may be termed the semi-poetic or dichotomistic. It proceeds like poetry, but without its strict measure [i.e., meter], employing instead paired thoughts, patterns of words and clauses and syntax, in doublets, parallels and contrasts; it is rooted, when all is said and done, in the Semitic [way of thought], which grasps matters dichotomously. This manner of seeing, conceiving and representing dominates the Hebrew language and literature in its entirety, to its subtlest manifestations.

Several attempts have been made to reconcile the results of the documentary hypothesis with the traditional belief that Moses wrote the Torah. This approach accepts the facts that Bible Critics cite as proof of a composite document while differing on the interpretation of these facts.

Dr. Mordechai Breuer's approach is as follows. ^[9] The Torah must speak in "the language of men." But the wisdom that God would bestow upon us cannot be disclosed in a straightforward manner. The Torah therefore resorts to a technique of multivocal communication. Each strand in the text, standing on its own, reveals one aspect of the truth, and each aspect of the truth appears to contradict the other accounts. An insensitive reader, noticing the tension between the versions, imagines himself assaulted by a cacophony of conflicting voices. The perceptive student, however, experiences the magnificent counterpoint in all its power. To use Rabbi Breuer's example: Genesis 1 (the so-called P account) describes one aspect of the biblical understanding of creation; Genesis 2 (the so-called J version) presents a complementary way of apprehending God's creation of the world and of man. Each text, isolated from the other, would offer a partial, hence misleading, doctrine of creation. In their juxtaposition, the two texts point the reader toward an understanding of the whole.

In Revelation Restored, Dr. David Weiss Halivni develops a theory of Chate'u Yisroel (lit. Israel has sinned). He writes

According to the biblical account itself, the people of Israel forsook the Torah, in the dramatic episode of the golden calf, only forty days after the revelation at Sinai. From that point on, until the time of Ezra, the scriptures reveal that the people of Israel were steeped in idolatry and negligent of the Mosaic law. Chate’u Yisrael, as a theological account, explains that in the period of neglect and syncretism the Torah of Moses became blemished and maculated

This process, explains Dr. Halivni, continued until the time of Ezra, when finally, upon their return from Babylon, the people accepted the Torah upon themselves. It was at that time, R. Halivni claims, that the previously rejected, and therefore maculated, text of the Torah was recompiled and edited, by Ezra and his “entourage.” That this is what happened, Halivni claims, is attested to in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. In addition, R. Halivni supports his theory with talmudic and midrashic sources which indicate that Ezra played a certain role in editing the Torah.

He further states that while the text of the Pentateuch was corrupted, an oral tradition preserved intact many of the laws of the Bible. This is why the Oral law appears to contradict the Biblical text in certain details.

[edit] Possible evidence of Mosaic authorship

[edit] Literary Evidence

[edit] Egyptian terminology in the Torah

Certain forms in standard Biblical Hebrew are borrowed from second-millennium Egyptian. This is seen in how the birth narratives of Moses are full of words of Egyptian origin (instead of Hebrew origin), examples include, basket, bulrushes, pitch, reeds, river, and river-bank.^[10] Also Genesis 41 which speaks of the Pharaoh's dream during the time of Joseph uses several Egyptian words such as, the word for magician.^[11] The Torah is also known to use phrases which are of Egyptian origin in which the words are translated word for word.^[12] One may infer that these forms were adopted during the sojourn and were made a permanent part of standard Hebrew by their inclusion in the Pentateuch. ^[13]

[edit] Antiquity of the Hebrew found in the Torah

The Torah has the tendency to use some archaic Hebrew forms, which suggests that its origin antedates the Israelite monarchies.^[14] For example, Genesis has a common 3rd person singular pronoun form -hw; Joshua and later works breaks this into masculine and feminine forms.^[15] Also of note, is that the word "Goshen", which is mentioned extensively throughout the Torah, is only used in the pre-monarchy texts (the latest reference is found in Joshua 15); all subsequent biblical references to the area do not refer to this.^[16] Some of the poetic material preserved in the Torah is incredibly ancient, and reflects syntax and semantic usages that disappeared later in the Old Testament historical period. The poetry of the Bible, like that of other Northwest Semitic literatures, employs a language which differs in various ways from the language of prose, reflecting, in general, an earlier stage of Hebrew and with a closer affinity in language, style, and content with neighboring dialects, especially those to the north." Notable among the biblical passages that best reflect Archaic Hebrew are the Blessings of Jacob (Gn 49), the Song of Moses (Ex 15), Balaam (Nm 23-24), the Oracles of and the Poem of Moses (Dt 32), the and of Moses (Dt 33). One also finds widespread use of the third person pronominal suffix -mo (e.g. Ex 15.5,7), the second person feminine suffix -ky, the third person singular masculine suffix -h instead of -w (e.g. Gen 49.11), infinitive absolute with temporal value (e.g. Ex 15.6), zo and zu used as relative particles (Ex 15.13), use of the negative bal instead of lo, the verbal suffix -t in the third person feminine (e.g. Dt 32.36) traces of the old case endings in nouns suffixed by -i or -o in the construct state (e.g. Gen 49.11; Nm 23.18). "Expressions used almost exclusively in poetry include hapax legomena and other rare words, which tend to be concentrated in the oldest biblical texts. Generally it may be said that these items existed during the archaic period of the language, later disappearing from normal use...The occurrence of so many lexical items of this kind in a single passage is evidence of its antiquity." ^[17]

[edit] Biblical manuscripts

In 1979, two silver amulets, inscribed with versions of the Priestly Blessing of the Book of Numbers were discovered at Ketef Hinnom near Jerusalem. These scrolls have been dated to close to 600 BCE based on late Iron Age artifacts found in the undisturbed area of the tomb where they were located. These are the oldest Torah fragments yet discovered, and indicate that the Priestly Blessing was in use at a period slightly before the fall of Jeruslaem to the Babylonians in 586 BCE. Scholars have cautioned, however, that they do not indicate that the Torah itselfm existed in its modern form at that date.

[edit] Archaeology

In the the early part of the 20th century the work of the American school of biblical archaeologists such as William F. Albright and Cyrus Gordon apparently confirmed that Genesis and Exodus were firmly grounded in the material reality of the second millennium BC,^[18] allowing scholars to conclude that "the Torah accurately portrays second-millennium legal and social customs."^[19] An example of this how the price of 20 shekels price for Joseph was the going price for a slave during the first half of the 2nd millennium, whereas in the 2nd half of that millennium the price had gone up to 30 shekels. ^[20] The legal and cultural patterns present in the Patriarchal narratives simply no longer existed in exilic or post-exilic times. Furthermore, the customs manifested by Abraham & the patriarchs that descend from him are most closely matched by the society illustrated in the Nuzi tablets (of a Hurrian background peoples), dated in the first half of the 2nd millennium BC ^[21]

Furthermore, for those who doubt the historicity of the Exodus completely, by suggesting that it was created only in the sixth to fifth century B.C.E. post-exilic era, a question must be asked regarding Ramesses and Pithom, the cities on which the Hebrews labored, according to Exodus. Why did the biblical editors or redactors refer specifically to Ramesses, when in their own era and for some three centuries earlier the capital of Egypt had been Tanis, a city well known and often referred to in the Old Testament? From the Book of Judges onwards, Tanis is consistently referred to as Egypt's capital. Why would a biblical editor insert Ramesses into a newly composed story when that city no longer existed in Egypt and had not been Pharaoh's residence or the capital for the previous four or five centuries? ...Tanis had been the Egyptian capital throughout nearly the entire span of Israel's monarchic period. What sense would it make for Jews familiar with Saite Egypt to invent a story about an oppressive pharaoh who had compelled their ancestors to labor on his cities, and why fix on Ramesses for this role? In Dynasty XXVI Pharaoh's capital was Sais, and even more pointedly, Jewish exiles in Egypt were valued for their mercenary skills and not consigned to compulsory brick making. ^[22]

The conclusions of Albright and his school were overturned in the second half of the century by the work of later archaeologists such as Kathleen Kenyon and Donald Redford, and the genral consensus is that the Torah describes the physical and political word of the 6th century BC and later. There are still several reputable scholars such as Kenneth Kitchen who continue to work within an Albrightian framework. ^[23]

[edit] Other

There is a trend among scholars to view the Pentateuch as a literary unit again. Scholars are admitting that the way the books use common words, phrases and motifs, parallel narrative structure, and deliberate theological arrangement of literary units for teaching and memorization support viewing the five books as a literary whole.^[24]

[edit] Notes

[edit] See also

• Moses in rabbinic literature
• Moses
• Torah
• Tanakh