Jean Astruc

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Jean Astruc was a French physician and professor of medicine whose one excursion into biblical scholarship — a short book published anonymously in 1753 — is conventionally counted as the first step toward the source criticism of the Pentateuch. By profession he was a man of the body, not the text: a successful teacher of medicine at Montpellier and Paris, author of a standard treatise on venereal disease, and at one point physician to the king of Poland and a consultant to the French court. The work that carries his name in another field was a private enthusiasm, issued in Brussels without his name on it.

That work, Conjectures sur les mémoires originaux dont il paroît que Moyse s’est servi pour composer le livre de la Genèse, took up a problem readers of Genesis had long noticed and mostly explained away: the book tells some things twice, in versions that do not match, and it refers to God by two different names — Elohim in some passages, the name rendered Jehovah in others. Astruc proposed that these were not Moses’s own inconsistencies but the traces of older documents. Moses, on his account, had drawn on at least two principal written memoirs, each with its own preferred divine name, and had set them side by side; the seams a careful reader finds are the joins between the sources. He printed Genesis in parallel columns to display the division.

His aim was conservative, and this is easy to mislay. Astruc was a believing Catholic who meant to defend Mosaic authorship, not unsettle it: if Moses had worked from real archives reaching back to the patriarchs, the book’s roughness became evidence of antiquity rather than a problem. The method he reached for to make that defense — sort the text by internal markers, reconstruct the documents behind it — proved to have a life he did not intend. Taken up and extended over the following century, above all in German scholarship, the divide-by-divine-name move grew into the documentary hypothesis, the proposal that the Pentateuch is woven from several distinct sources composed across centuries, a reconstruction that placed much of the material long after Moses and that the churches received as a shock.

What scholarship credits to Astruc, then, is a technique rather than a conclusion. He did not originate the suspicion that Genesis was composite, and the mature source theory associated with later names goes well beyond anything he claimed. His contribution was to treat the divine names as a sorting criterion and to carry the analysis through a whole book — an instrument others would turn to ends he would likely have refused. He returned to medicine and died in Paris in 1766, his Conjectures a minor curiosity until the next century made it a beginning.

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