Authorship of the Pentateuch

Authorship of the Pentateuch

This commentary also attempts to discern the sources used to compose Genesis, and in this I depart from most modern followers of "higher criticism," who believe the Five Books of Moses, or Pentateuch, to be a post-Exilic composition that intricately interwove several contradictory source texts. The nineteenth-century theories of Wellhausen et al. were developed when archaeology was in its infancy, and many of their conclusions were founded on evidence that later proved to be false. For example, it was believed that written law did not exist in Palestine before the Israelite monarchy, nor was it then known that a rich western Semitic legal tradition reached back to the third millennium B.C. Similarly, the seemingly digressive, repetitive style of the Old Testament was actually a common literary usage, so there is no need to artificially multiply source texts and propose a convoluted redaction process that makes precious little sense and has no precedent in ancient history.

I contend that the internal and external evidence of Genesis is entirely consistent with, and even suggestive of, a pre-monarchical, second-millennium B.C. composition by a single author, using several oral and written sources which I try to distinguish when possible. It is true that the text includes several glosses that are of much later date, but the main body of the document resembles a much older style and gives evidence of knowledge too detailed to be preserved orally for many centuries. As any good textual historian knows, it is common for ancient documents to have terms that were re-translated or comments that were inserted at a later date. The overall content and form of Genesis, indeed of the entire Pentateuch, are much more consistent with the second millennium B.C. than a post-Exilic composition, and it is arbitrary and arguably bad scholarship to date a document according to its most recent glosses.

The Pentateuch underwent several transliterations, as the Israelite alphabetic script changed several times before and during the monarchy. During this process, some of the names of people and locations were updated to later linguistic forms, though in many places archaic names were allowed to remain. I will examine these on a case-by-case basis.

After the destruction of Jerusalem, the Mosaic books were reconstructed as best as possible by Ezra. The authority of this Law would have been inexplicable had it only been composed in this period. From this point onward, an extremely scrupulous observance of Mosaic Law prevailed among the Jews, and preservation of the text took on heightened religious dimensions in the absence of the Temple. Whereas earlier scribes and priests had less reservation about inserting glosses, now every letter of the text was preserved scrupulously, so there has been relatively little variation since that time.

Despite these efforts of the Jews, the text of the Old Testament would suffer one last upheaval after destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans. The Massoretic edition, dating to the late first century, represents the best attempt to reconstruct the original text of the Torah. Judging from the quality of the document, which contains many omissions, corruptions, and inverted letters (all scrupulously preserved since then), the best Hebrew manuscripts were forever lost.

Due to the inadequacy of the Hebrew text as it presently exists, it is valuable to also use the Greek Septuagint translation from the third or second century B.C. Although Hebrew was the original language of the Bible, the oldest continuously preserved edition is the Greek. The Septuagint was highly esteemed among the Jews, considered by some to be a divinely inspired translation, though it was later rejected by most rabbis in the early Christian era. Although some of its translations of Hebrew words are dubious, the Septuagint in some places preserves the text more coherently than the Massoretic text, so it is by no means to be assumed that the Massoretic version is always closer to the original. There is also a Samaritan version that dates to the first century B.C., but it has not been as scrupulously preserved since then, so its value for reconstructing the original text is limited.

Thus far we have spoken only over the major versions or manuscript traditions of the Pentateuch, but not of actual manuscripts. The oldest extant manuscripts of the complete Pentateuch are neither Hebrew nor Greek, but fifth-century Latin parchments. In many ways we are able to reconstruct the Latin original of St. Jerome much more closely than we can approximate the "original" Septuagint. The oldest Greek manuscripts are of poor textual quality, and often contradict later Byzantine manuscripts as well as each other. It is not always to be assumed that the oldest manuscripts are the most accurate. Early monastic practice regularly transferred the master copy to new parchments, destroying or re-using old parchments. Thus the best fifth-century manuscripts are least likely to have been preserved to the present. St. Jerome, however, working in the fifth century, revised the Latin Vulgate, correcting it with the best Greek and Hebrew manuscripts of the time, sources that we have forever lost. Since St. Jerome was of unquestioned linguistic competence and he used better manuscripts than we currently have available, an accurate edition of St. Jerome's Vulgate would be on a par with, and in many ways superior to, the Greek and Hebrew versions. 

(Commentary on Genesis, Daniel J. Castellano)