Who Wrote the Bible?

By Calev Ben-David

If not Moses inspired by God, then who?

Scholars are still debating this question and putting forward new and controversial theories.

On June 4, the 6th day of Sivan, all the Jews of the world celebrate Shavuot, the festival that commemorates the day Moses received the Tablets of the Law at Mount Sinai. Orthodox Judaism rests fundamentally on the premise that the five books of Moses (the Pentateuch) are of divine origin and that the text has not been modified by one iota since God dictated it to Moses. Yet, as early as the 17th century, these beliefs were called into question by Baruch Spinoza, the Dutch Jewish philosopher, who claimed that the Torah had been written long after the time of Moses. It was on account of this heresy and many others that Spinoza was excommunicated by the Jews and condemned by the Inquisition. But in the 19th century Spinoza’s ideas were taken up and developed by modern exegetes of the Bible. Many traditionalist Jews maintain that Moses was the sole author of the divinely revealed Torah. In Israel and in South America, a group of Orthodox Jewish mathematicians are trying, with the help of computers, to bring to light in the Torah certain hidden alphabetical codes that, in their view, would prove its divine origin. Beyond this Orthodox tradition, there exist, in universities and research institutes throughout the world, exegetes who are still trying to determine by whom the Bible was written, when, where, and how. These researchers do not necessarily cast doubt on the sacred origin of the Books, but only on the “orthodox” aspects of their writing and transmission. Israel Knohl, Professor of Biblical Studies at the Hebrew University and an Orthodox Jew, puts it this way: “I believe that the divine word expressed itself over the course of many generations and among many peoples. The Torah is but the result of a continuous revelation that began when God spoke to Moses at Mount Sinai.”

The theories on the mode of transmission of the Torah in its present form resemble a gigantic puzzle, growing ever more complex as new, sometimes even contradictory ideas are taken into consideration.

First of all, who was responsible for the text? Perhaps Ezra, also called in French Esdras, the 5th-century-BCE scribe whom certain exegetes have identified as the “redactor” or editor of the Torah? A small number of priests, prophets, or even noble women living at the court of King David? Or no specific author at all, since, according to the latest theories, the writing of the Torah would show a gradual evolution over the centuries, making it impossible to identify specific authors?

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Another serious debate concerns the significance of the writing of the Torah in relation to the development of Judaism in the first years of its formation. Does it describe, as the classical school influenced by Christianity proposes, a historical process in which the moral passion of the prophets declined and was transformed, in the era of the Second Temple, into routines of liturgical ritual? Or rather, as many researchers now think, is the text of the Torah instead the reflection of a more varied and dynamic religious climate in which different currents of Jewish thought coexisted, interacting with one another?

In trying to answer these questions, researchers have tackled the ancient languages of the biblical world: Canaanite Ugaritic, the “Paleo-Hebrew” of the ancient Israelites; Aramaic, which constituted the spoken language; and Ancient Greek, used for the first non-Hebrew translation of the Bible, the Septuagint. They examine in detail the various languages used in the Bible and reconcile the data with current historical and archaeological research. Although their work may seem obscure to the man in the street, their research bears witness to the existence of an incredible spiritual and literary creativity in the era of Ancient Israel, a millennium before our era. Their conclusions and their disagreements shed good light on the origins and the meaning of the Book that constitutes not only the foundation of Jewish culture but also that of Western civilization.

FURY AROUND THE J PORTION

In 1991, the Yale University literary critic Harold Bloom caused a sensation by claiming, in his book The Book of J, that the principal portions of the Torah had been written by a woman, a member of King David’s family, in the 10th century before our era. Bloom’s book was strongly criticized by biblical exegetes, and the people interviewed for the present article characterize it as “scandalous” and “shameful.” Their criticisms do not bear on Bloom’s contention that a woman could have written part of the Torah, but on the vague methodology and the non-rigorous approach to the text.

Bloom’s attempt to identify the author of a part of the Torah issues from the School of Biblical Criticism, or “Critical Theory,” developed in the 19th century. Numerous German Protestant exegetes, the best known of whom was Julius Wellhausen, arrived at the conclusion that the Torah is made up of four originally separate texts, written by different people, at different moments in the History of Ancient Israel. One section is named “J” (from the name Yahweh by which God is named in it), the tetragrammaton that Jews pronounce as “Adonai.” Another section is named E, in reference to Elohim. The J and E sections contain most of the best-known texts of the Torah, among them: the Garden of Eden, Noah and the Flood, the Patriarchs, and the Exodus from Egypt.

The third part, named “P” (for Priests), relates to the liturgical rituals, the Temple sacrifices, the detailed description of the sacred objects, etc. The fourth part is named D, in reference to Deuteronomy, the last book of the Torah.

These four sections, according to “Critical Theory,” were brought together later by the redactor or editor into a single book named R. A century after its formulation, Critical Theory remains the fundamental conceptual framework of the Modern Biblical School, with a status analogous to that, in Biology, of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, and drawing the same calumnies from Jewish or Christian fundamentalists.

Within this framework, there are still more serious attempts than Bloom’s to identify the authors of the biblical texts, such as that of Richard Elliot Friedman, Professor of Biblical Studies at the University of San Diego in California, whose work Who Wrote the Bible, published in 1988, remains, for the non-specialist reader, one of the best in the field. Friedman, for example, thinks that the author of the E section lived in the northern kingdom of Israel at the time of the split from the Kingdom of Judah in 931 BCE, and was no doubt a priest at Shiloh, an Israelite site of religious sacrifices. Why? First of all because in this E text there is a positive emphasis on the events of the northern cities such as Shiloh and Shechem and on the ten Tribes that constituted Israel, and moreover because a negative portrait is given of Aaron, whose descendants constituted the clergy of Judah, the rival that controlled the Temple of Jerusalem.

More recently, there has been a change in the thinking of most biblical exegetes, who have come to think that each of the various biblical texts was written by more than one author. It is proposed instead that different schools, comprising perhaps priests, scribes, and prophets, wrote progressively and compiled the Torah over a very long period, in the same way that the Talmud was later written collectively.

Yair Zakovitch, Professor of Biblical Studies at the Hebrew University, recently appointed Director of the Institute of Jewish Studies of the Hebrew University, writes: “I do not believe that there is any indication to think that a single author could have written the various texts of the Torah; I think that the writing and the editing of the Bible are the result of a process that unfolded over the course of the centuries. The classic strategies that consist in

Convoys of exiles, detail from the palace of Sennacherib, king of Assyria at Nineveh, 705-680 BCE

Studies dividing the text into different sections — according to whether God is named Yahweh or Elohim — no longer seem sufficiently convincing.”

The studies carried out on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest existing copies of the biblical texts, reinforce the theory of a progressive and evolutionary development of the Torah.

According to the Dead Sea Scrolls, written over three centuries beginning 200 years BCE by the monastic Jewish community of Qumran on the shores of the Dead Sea, the Torah would have been written several centuries after the postulated date. However, the Dead Sea Scrolls have had an indirect influence on our general view of the writing of the Bible, as Florentino Garcia Martinez, Professor of Biblical Studies at the Rijks University of Groningen in Holland and member of the international team working on the Dead Sea Scrolls, emphasizes.

At Qumran, we found not only several different copies of the biblical texts recopied over the course of the centuries, but also numerous apocryphal writings that are not part of the biblical canon. Thus one can understand how the writing and the canonization of the Bible could have been a more fluid and more complicated process than was thought. At Qumran, versions of the Torah were found containing, within the text, hundreds of minor differences — indications that allow us to think that the text was finalized later than was previously estimated.

Apocryphal writings were also found, such as the apocryphal text of Genesis, which contains other accounts of the biblical stories, such as the sojourn in Egypt of Abraham and Sarah. Before these discoveries, researchers estimated that these other accounts had been written much earlier.

Shemaryahu Talmon, the eminent Professor of Biblical Studies, now retired, says simply: It matters little to me to know who wrote the Torah, for it is impossible to have a satisfactory answer. At best, one can try to know at what era certain parts were written. Talmon was a precursor of the method called the “literary-critical approach,” which is increasingly accepted by exegetes. According to this approach, it is preferable to consider the Torah as a whole rather than to try to dissect it into ever smaller parts in order to discover its sources. He writes thus: “you must consider the Torah as a sovereign entity and ask yourself what the text, once completed, seeks to transmit to us, even if it was written by several people.”

Talmon tries to find the meanings of the “guiding literary motifs” that run through the text as a whole. For example, he has identified the motif of the “barren woman,” which concerns women who could not have children, such as Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel, and who become miraculously fertile and give birth to a son of renown. Talmon believes that “the biblical author thus shows his preference for leaders who bear the mark of a divine choice over a power inherited by succession” — which was the majority political path in Ancient Israel.

THE CONTROVERSY AROUND THE P PORTION

While researchers try to know how the Torah was written rather than by whom, the disagreements on this latter question are no less profound. And the most serious debate concerns the part of the text called P (from Priests). The length of the descriptions concerning the sacred objects and the sacred acts often wears out the patience of the Torah’s readers — thus chapter 19 of Numbers, which describes how the ashes of a red heifer must be used to purify a sacred person or an object contaminated by contact with a corpse; these themes are considered, even by the celebrated medieval commentator Rashi, to be “beyond human understanding.”

Jewish and Christian exegetes are in disagreement as to most of the parts concerning P. The German Protestant exegetes who first formulated Critical Theory believe that the greater part of P was written by priests descended from Aaron during the period of the Second Temple, which began in the 6th century BCE, after Cyrus the Great allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem following their exile in Babylon.

Although this theory is based on numerous texts and historical data, it also reflected the view that the German exegetes held of the Judaism of Ancient Israel, which they considered to be in decline. This decline, characterized by a strict legalism and a more or less mysterious ritual of liturgical texts, was, in their view, distinct from the creative spirituality of the era of King David and that of Solomon, and from the moral vision of the era of Deuteronomy and the Prophets. Most Christian exegetes have remained more or less with this view. By contrast, many Jewish exegetes in Israel and in North America distance themselves from it: “it is not a question of antisemitism,” says Israel Knohl, but this way of seeing things is tinged by Christian beliefs, even if this is unconscious.

Jewish exegetes have thought, since the work carried out forty years ago by Yehezkiel Kaufman of the Hebrew University, now deceased, that the greater part of the P text was written during the period of the First Temple, and that it represented a simultaneous current of thought of Ancient Judaism rather than a kind of spiritual decline. The scholarly arguments over P are essentially linguistic and historical, but one of the aspects the non-specialist can relate to is tinged with the same archaeological mystery that Steven Spielberg used and exploited so skillfully in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The sacred Ark of the Covenant, of great importance in the P book, is described in detail. Then it disappears mysteriously over the course of the centuries during which it had been preserved in the First Temple. If the P text had been written during the period of the Second Temple, as the Christian exegetes think, why would it place such obsessive emphasis on a sacred artifact that would no longer exist?

THE HIDDEN TORAH

Most of the researchers’ earliest hypotheses on the origin of the Torah were inspired by the Bible itself, some of these hypotheses still being current in the contemporary school. Thus, the exegetes were able, without difficulty, to distinguish the D section (Deuteronomy) from the other parts. In the last book of the Torah, Moses, shortly before his death, in a sermon to the tribes of Israel, recapitulates, explains in detail, and sometimes contradicts certain earlier parts of the Bible. This part also describes the death of Moses himself, which leads even certain Talmudists to think that Moses may not have written it in its entirety.

The style of Deuteronomy is quite different from the rest of the Torah. Moses’s final moralizing discourse resembles more the prophetic language of the later books, such as those of Isaiah and Jeremiah, than that of the first four books, which contain historical and liturgical teachings. There are also differences at the level of the writing. Thus Deuteronomy uses the word “shevet” for tribe, whereas elsewhere in the Torah the word used for tribe is “mateh”; it refers to the elders of the tribes and to

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“chiefs,” whereas the preceding books speak of “princes.”

The following book of the Bible itself suggests how Deuteronomy developed and was included among the other texts. The Second Book of Kings (22-23) describes how, during the reign of King Josiah, in 622 BCE, the priest Hilkiah and the scribe Shaphan suddenly discovered within the walls of the temple a “hidden” sacred book called “the Torah.” They presented the book to Josiah, who was so impressed that he tore his garments in justified anger. The king then instituted in his kingdom a wave of religious and moral reforms, suppressing the sacrificial altars throughout the country where idolatrous practices had spread, and centralizing the sacrificial worship in the Temple of Jerusalem.

The exegetes have long postulated that this “hidden” scroll was Deuteronomy, which refers to itself as “the Torah,” contains the only direct contribution of Moses in the Bible as author, and prescribes several reforms such as that of the centralized sovereignty that Josiah subsequently applied.

“This was no doubt an early version of Deuteronomy, which was then, over the course of the centuries, completed and improved,” says Moshe Weinfeld, an eminent biblical specialist who has written much on the Deuteronomist School. The exegetes propose that the writing of the D text began a century before the founding of the Deuteronomist School during the reign of King Hezekiah, Josiah’s grandfather and a great reformer like him. It was in the time of Josiah that the then-completed text was “discovered” by Hilkiah and attributed to Moses to give it more authority. It is because the themes and the type of writing of Deuteronomy resemble so closely the books of the Bible — Joshua, Judges, and Kings — that follow the Torah, that the exegetes think there was, in exile in Babylon, a Deuteronomist School that continued to write and that is also responsible for these other books.

Who were the members of this School? The book of Kings itself tells us of numerous people involved in the discovery of the Deuteronomist text — Hilkiah, Shaphan, his son Ahikam, Josiah, his minister Asaiah, the prophetess Huldah. All these people may have been Deuteronomists, as well as Hezekiah, the prophet Jeremiah, and his scribe Baruch, the son of Neriah, both during the reign of Josiah.

THE REDACTOR

Another aspect of Critical Theory proposes that the interweaving of the different texts of the Torah began during the Babylonian exile and was completed at Jerusalem in the 5th century BCE. Although, in its beginnings, Critical Theory postulated that a single redactor had gathered all the texts into one, the Torah, it now seems that the task was rather the fruit of a collective effort.

However, two people seem to have played a leading role: first Nehemiah, the Jewish governor of Judah appointed by the Kingdom of Persia and who supervised the renewal of Jewish religious life in Jerusalem; then the scribe Ezra, described in the book of the Bible that bears his name as reading the whole of the Torah in the courtyard of the Temple — the first public reader of the Torah described in the canonical Bible.

Ezra has long been cited as the most probable redactor. His authority in the knowledge of the Torah is so great, even in the Orthodox tradition, that the Talmud, in the tractate “Sanhedrin,” curiously admires him while almost giving the game away: “If Moses had not preceded him, it is to Ezra that the Torah would have been given.”

It is because there was necessarily a pause in the gradual evolution of the Torah that Moshe Weinfeld says: “it is still legitimate to think that Ezra was the last redactor of the Torah.”

Most Biblical Schools support this way of thinking, with the exception of a small number of iconoclastic European Christian exegetes who proclaim that the greater part of the Torah is a work of fiction written during the Hellenistic period several centuries after Ezra, by desperate priests of the Second Temple in order to protect Judaism against Greek Culture.

Singularly, Ezra has in a way vanished from the imagination of the Jewish People. In an American book, published last year and giving the list of the “100 Jews who influenced History,” his name is not even mentioned.

Only those who believe that Moses received the Torah from God on Mount Sinai can, without hesitation and without ambiguity, answer the question: “Who wrote the Bible?” But for those who have chosen to look beyond this answer, Ezra, more than any other person, could have shaped the Sacred Book that we read today.

C.B

TO GET YOUR BEARINGS:

1440 BCE

Moses receives the Bible from God at Mount Sinai, according to biblical chronology.

Around 1000 BCE

Period of the monarchies (Saul, David, Solomon) and construction of the Temple of Jerusalem; writing of the first parts of the Torah by different schools: J (Yahweh), E (Elohim), and P (Priests).

931 BCE

Separation of the kingdoms; the E portion is written in the Northern Kingdom of Israel; J (Shiloh, Shechem), J and P are written in the Southern Kingdom of Judah (Jerusalem, Hebron).

722 BCE

The Assyrians scatter the kingdoms of Israel; the E text is brought from the South into the kingdom of Judah and is combined with J.

715/687 BCE

The religious reforms of the Judean king Hezekiah give rise to the Deuteronomist School, which also wrote certain prophetic texts (Joshua, Kings, Jeremiah, Isaiah, etc.)

Translation by Jacqueline London of an article by Calev Ben-David that appeared in the Jerusalem Report on June 15, 1995