(BA) Pentateuch

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The Hebrew Bible tells a story spanning (on its own terms) about (or exactly) four thousand years from Creation (Genesis) to the Maccabees (Daniel).

The Pentateuch tells the story, depending on how you calculate it, of roughly the first 2/3 (2706 years) of this overall chronology, although the Pentateuch itself makes up only about 1/5 of the Hebrew Bible by volume. In fact, Genesis itself -- about 1/18 of the Bible -- covers 2236 of those years.

Genesis recounts legends of the creation of the universe, early humans, the flood, and the origin of the nations of the world. Then it picks up the stories of Israel’s mythic ancestors. First comes Abraham, a Mesopotamian who God calls to go live in the land of Canaan, which God promises him. Genesis has quite a bit to say about Abraham, and then a bit less to say about his son Isaac. Both Abraham and Isaac are considered to be the forefathers not only of Israel, but also of neighboring peoples. Abraham fathers a variety of neighboring peoples, while Isaac fathers both the Israelites and the Edomites.

Isaac’s son, Jacob, however, is the ancestor of Israelites alone, and is himself called Israel. He fathers twelve children, destined to become the ancestors of the tribes of Israel, traditionally numbered as twelve. Genesis tells various stories about these kids, and focuses especially on Judah and, more than anyone else, on Joseph. At the end of the book, the extended family that will eventually become Israel are living in Egypt.

Exodus picks up where Genesis leaves off, and tells the story of how the Israelites become slaves for 430 years in Exodus. The next significant figure, Moses, becomes the primary human actor in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. In this sense, you can read Genesis as the prologue to the four books about Moses. In Exodus, Moses leads the Israelites out of captivity in Egypt, and into the wilderness. Various incidents occur in the wilderness, and Moses delivers a good deal of legal material, including the Ten Commandments, from God to the Israelites. The central incident of the Exodus is giving of the law at Sinai.

Leviticus is mostly filled with legal information, concerning sacrifices as well as purity laws and other legislation. The legislation is repeatedly introduced as being instructions given from God to Moses (1:1, 4:1, etc.). It is almost entirely legislation, although chapters 8-10 and 24 includes narratives on related subjects.

We arrive at Numbers, which begins with a census just over a year (1:1) from the Israelites leaving Egypt. Moses takes a census, revealing an impossibly large Israelite population of 2 million or more (roughly 600,000 men are between 20 and 50 years old). The twelve tribes are assigned their encampments as a military, and the tribe of Levi is counted with its three divisions assigned various tasks. More so than in Leviticus, legislation and narratives are mingled. When chapter 13 rolls around, Moses begins preparations to conquer Canaan. The Israelites are frightened of the task, so God punishes them by making them wander in the wilderness for 40 years (14). After some more laws and stories, Israel begins to fight against peoples in Transjordan (21-25). As the forty years in the wilderness comes to a close, after the generation of Israelites who left Egypt have died, Moses takes a second census (26). After some more legislation, the Israelites go to war against Midian (31). The Gadites and Reubenites and half of Manasseh are settled in Transjordan (32). The book ends prior to the conquest of Canaan (Cisjordan) as Moses outlines the future territories of the tribes, along with various information about land inheritance.

Deuteronomy is set at the very end of all this, and it could stand pretty well on its own as a legal code. It is given in the form of a speech by Moses immediately before he dies, just prior to the entry into Canaan. If we could generalize and say that Leviticus tends to deal with priestly regulations, we could likewise generalize and say that Deuteronomy focuses on civil law. First, Moses gives a prologue, discussing the history of Israel since the Exodus and its relationship with God (1-4). This is followed by a long legal section (5-26). Then there is a section (27-33) which sums things up, discusses the imminent conquest of Canaan, and transfers leadership from Moses to his successor Joshua. 32 and 33 each contain a poem attributed to Moses. 34 narrates the death of Moses, and the transfer of his authority to Joshua.

To put it extremely briefly, the traditional view before a couple hundred years ago was that Moses wrote all five.^[1] One Jean Astruc discovered (1753) some tell-tale signs that multiple documents had been compiled together to produce it, but things really started to change after Wellhausen published his Prolegomena (1878, 1883) which outlined what would become known as the Documentary Hypothesis. In its classical form, this theory holds that four sources, abbreviated J, E, P, and D, were edited together to produce the Pentateuch. The J-E-P-D scheme, in one form or another, was the consensus for quite a while, although in the last few decades matters have gotten considerably more complicated. (See the Documentary Hypothesis.)

To put it simply, the exact details of how the Pentateuch was stitched together have become more murky, and an increasing number of hypotheses have been put forward. Some religious apologists, taking advantage of this situation, will argue that the decline of the consensus over one exact form of the Documentary Hypothesis -- JEPD -- must imply that Moses was the author after all, as if Mosaic authorship and JEPD are the only two ways the Pentateuch could have come into being.

But while the exact details are now much more disputed than they once were, there is no denying in the mainstream scholarly world that the Pentateuch shows clear signs of being stitched together from multiple sources. How exactly it was stitched together is what is being argued over, but there is a general agreement that the Pentateuch was composed much later than the events it describes -- late enough that it could not have been written by any Moses figure -- and that it contains the writings of several authors.

There is also agreement among scholars that, generally speaking, the things recorded in the Pentateuch did not happen. The accounts in Genesis contradict modern science, and the account of the Exodus and wilderness wanderings don’t agree with modern archaeology.

The partial abandonment of the classical JEDP theory has not meant a return to reading the Pentateuch as history.

If the scholarly world can't come to an agreement on the details, I doubt I'll have anything conclusive to say. Nevertheless, there has been no return to Mosaic authorship among mainstream scholars, and the Pentateuch remains clearly a composite work.

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