Moses

A. Moses

Torah Commentary from Qumran These fragments of the Miqsat Ma'ase ha-Torah, "Some Torah Precepts," from Qumran contain interpretations of the Torah that differ from those of mainstream Judaism. They date as early as the first century B.C.E. Library of Congress Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibit

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Jewish and Christian tradition holds Moses responsible for writing the Torah. Moses was the religious leader of the Hebrew people who led them out of slavery in Egypt and on to the Promised Land of Canaan in the thirteenth century B.C.E. The books of the Torah are popularly referred to as the Five Books of Moses.
    A number of texts associate the Torah with Moses. Joshua built an altar using the specifications in "the book of the Torah of Moses" (Joshua 8:31). David charged Solomon to keep the commandments "as written in the Torah of Moses" (1 Kings 2:3). Ezra read from "the book of the Torah of Moses, which the Lord had given to Israel" (Nehemiah 8:1). About this same time the Chronicler referred to a passage from Deuteronomy as being from "the book of Moses" (2 Chronicles 25:4). The Jewish philosopher Philo, the Jewish historian Josephus, and New Testament writers (see Matthew 19:7-8 and Acts 15:1), all first century C.E. sources, assumed the Torah's Mosaic authorship, as did the Babylonian Talmud (see Baba Bathra 14b).
    A close study of the Torah reveals that the issue of authorship is more complex. Common sense informed scholars as early as the Middle Ages that Moses could not have written the account of his own death, contained in Deuteronomy 34:5-12. Some then suggested that Joshua, Moses' assistant and successor, might have appended it. Other features of the text suggest non-Mosaic authorship and a complex process of development. Often the text refers to Moses in the third person, rather than with the first-person pronoun "I," suggesting someone other than Moses wrote those sections. In three distinct places Genesis contains the ploy of a patriarch lying about his wife's marital status to protect his own life--twice with Abraham and Sarah (12:10-20 and 20:1-18) and once with Isaac and Rebekah (26:6-11)--possibly suggesting that one basic story circulated in variant forms in different documents, with all being included in the final text.
    Some authorities still affirm the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, often out of a principled commitment to the veracity of the text as the inspired Word of God. Yet many others are convinced that the Torah was given its final shape much later than the lifetime of Moses. While differing considerably in how they reconstruct the underlying sources and the process of composition, most hold that the Torah was composed from a variety of materials assembled over a long period of time. The following discussion summarizes the approach of source analysis, sometimes called the documentary hypothesis.