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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 tradition is first found explicitly expressed in the Talmud , a collection of Jewish traditions and exegesis dating from the last centuries BC to the second half of the 1st millennium AD, but there are indications that the authors of the later books of the Hebrew bible already accepted the idea that Moses had written the Torah. The Talmudic writers 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. The 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 . The tradition 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. Today the idea of Mosaic authorship is held only by conservative Orthodox Jews Conservative Torah and fundamentalist Christians. Lay Evangelism and Answers in Genesis: Moses ORIGINS AND NATURE OF THE TRADITION The Torah itself makes no incontrovertible statement of authorship. The ultimate origins of the tradition are probably to be found in a number of Torah verses which do make explicit reference to Moses receiving instructions from God to write down certain words. Notable among these is Deuteronomy 31:9, 24-26, describing how Moses writes "this law" on a scroll and lays it beside the Ark Of The Covenant . Deuteronomy . As with similar passages, it is not clear that these verses were meant to refer to anything wider than their immediate context (in the case of Deuteronomy 31, the law code described in the preceding chapters). Similar passages include, for example, Exodus 17:14, "And Jehovah 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 Jehovah, and rose up early in the morning, and builded an altar under the mount, and twelve pillars, according to the twelve tribes of Israel;" and Exodus 34:27, "And Jehovah said unto Moses, Write thou these words: for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee and with Israel." Exodus , the authors of which held that Moses received the Torah during the forty years of wandering in the wilderness. The early Christian church with its Jewish roots accepted the Torah, and Mosaic authorship, as part of its own spiritual inheritance. LATER DEVELOPMENT OF THE TRADITION 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 , Benedict 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 not to the benefit of the idea of Mosaic authorship, which today is held only by Orthodox Jews and conservative Evangelical Christians. | ||
| Dr | "http://wwwinformationdelightinfo/information/entry/Mordechai_Breuer" class="copylinks">Mordechai Breuer 's approach is as follows "Emunah U-Madda Be-Parashanut Ha-Mikra," Deot, Cheker Ha-Mikra Be-Machshavah Ha-Yehudit Ha-Datit He-Chadashah, 11 (1959):18-25, 12 (I960): 13-27 See also Hirhurim for some articles on this approach 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 |
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