Jean Astruc

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Two men answer to the name Jean Astruc, and the seam between them is the most interesting thing about him. One was a physician of the first rank: born at Sauve in Languedoc on 19 March 1684, his medical doctorate taken at Montpellier in 1703, an anatomy chair at Toulouse from 1710, the professorship of medicine at Montpellier secured in full in 1722, court physician to Augustus II of Poland in 1729 and to Louis XV of France the year after, and from 1731 regius professor of medicine at Paris. His De morbis venereis (1736), the first comprehensive treatise on venereal disease, ran through edition after edition and was put into French, English, German, and Spanish; he wrote also on the diseases of women and on the medicinal waters of his native province. He was, by every measure that mattered to his century, a man of the body. The other Jean Astruc wrote a single short book about a text, issued without his name on it, and it is that book the centuries remember.

Eighteenth-century engraved portrait of Jean Astruc, court physician and professor of medicine. — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

That work is the Conjectures sur les mémoires originaux dont il paroît que Moyse s’est servi pour composer le livre de la Genèse — conjectures on the original memoirs that Moses appears to have used in composing the book of Genesis. It appeared in 1753 under a Brussels imprint, an imprint widely taken to be false, placing the book conveniently beyond the reach of French censors. Astruc did not sign it. The caution was not idle: the milieu in which a Catholic professor of medicine touched the integrity of Mosaic Scripture was not a tolerant one, and a study that took the seams of the Torah as its subject could be read as an attack whatever its author intended.

The problem he took up

Readers of Genesis had long noticed two things and mostly explained them away. The first was the doublets: the book tells certain things twice, in versions that do not align — two accounts of creation, two of the covenant with Abraham, strands of the flood story that count the animals differently and the days differently. The second was the names. In some passages the deity is called Elohim; in others the four-letter name conventionally vocalized in Astruc’s day as Jehovah. The alternation is not random noise scattered through the text; it clusters. Where one name governs, a whole stretch tends to keep it.

The traditional reading folded these features into the single authorial hand of Moses: variation of style, variation of divine title, the natural unevenness of a long composition. Astruc proposed instead that the unevenness was a record — that the two names and the doubled tellings were not Moses’s inconsistencies but the traces of older documents lying beneath the surface of the book. The deity does not change names; the sources do.

The method

Astruc’s instrument was the divine name used as a sorting criterion, applied not to a verse or a chapter but carried through the whole of Genesis. He marked off the passages governed by Elohim as one memoir, which he labeled A, and those governed by the name Jehovah as a second, which he labeled B. Two principal memoirs, then, each with its own steady preference. To these he added a series of shorter, fragmentary documents — by his count ten further pieces, accounting for matter that fit neither main strand — so that Moses, on this reckoning, had at hand something like a dozen written sources, two large and the rest small.

The presentation was as striking as the analysis. Astruc set Genesis out in parallel columns so that the reader could see the division on the page: A in one column, B in another, the lesser memoirs ranged alongside, the text physically pulled apart into the strands he claimed to find in it. Moses, in this picture, was an editor before he was an author — a compiler who placed inherited memoirs side by side. The single running narrative of the received book was the work of a later hand that had woven the columns back into one. The seams a careful reader catches are the joins where the weaving shows.

The aim, easily mislaid

Everything in the reception of Astruc turns on a point that is simple to state and constantly forgotten: his purpose was conservative. He was a believing Catholic — son, as it happened, of a Huguenot pastor who had conformed to Rome at the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and so raised in the Roman communion — and he meant to defend Mosaic authorship, not to dissolve it. The argument runs the other way from the one his method would later serve. If Moses composed Genesis out of genuine archives reaching back to the patriarchs, then the book’s roughness is not a defect but a credential. The doublets and the shifting names become evidence that the writer worked from real, ancient documents he declined to smooth over — proof of antiquity rather than a wound in the text. Astruc held himself, in his own understanding, a supporter of orthodoxy. He did not deny that Moses wrote the Pentateuch; he gave Moses a library.

The defense, that is, was built out of an analysis that could be turned against the conclusion it was meant to protect. To sort the text by its internal markers and reconstruct the documents behind it is to run a procedure indifferent to the piety of the man who first devised it. The same columns that prove Moses had sources can, with the dates of those sources pushed forward, prove that the sources were composed by hands long after Moses and assembled later still. Astruc supplied the operation; the sign of its result he could not fix.

The afterlife: a technique, not a conclusion

The book made little stir in its own decade. The next century made it a beginning. The divide-by-divine-name move was taken up and extended, above all in German scholarship, where it was pressed far beyond Genesis and far beyond anything its author had claimed. Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, in his Einleitung in das Alte Testament (1780–1783), carried the analysis of the two main strands through the opening books of the Pentateuch and gave the enterprise its first systematic statement, treating the divine-name division as a tool of general application rather than a curiosity confined to one book. After him the reconstruction grew layer by layer: Wilhelm de Wette, in 1805, set Deuteronomy apart as a distinct source bound up with the reform under King Josiah; Hermann Hupfeld split the Elohist material into two; Karl Heinrich Graf reordered the strands and pushed the priestly legislation late. The structure reached its classic form in Julius Wellhausen’s Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (first 1878), which fitted four sources — conventionally lettered for the Jahwist, the Elohist, the Deuteronomist, and the Priestly writer — into an evolutionary history of Israel’s religion and placed much of the material centuries after the age of Moses. This was the documentary hypothesis in its mature shape, and the churches received it as a shock: a Bible whose first five books were a weave of documents from across the centuries, the figure of Moses receding behind the seams.

What scholarship credits to Astruc, set against all this, is a technique and not a conclusion. He did not originate the suspicion that Genesis was composite — that the Old Testament bore traces of more hands than one was an older unease, voiced before him and developed in the previous century by the Oratorian Richard Simon, on whose critical work Astruc partly drew, and by Spinoza before that. What was his own was the decision to treat the divine names as a consistent criterion of division and to carry that criterion across an entire book in a form a reader could inspect. The mature source theory associated with the later names goes well past anything in the Conjectures and would have appalled their author. He had reached for an instrument to shore up the tradition; others took the same instrument to ends he would have refused.

The record and its scholarship

The Conjectures survives in its 1753 form and has been digitized from the holdings of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, where the parallel columns can be read as Astruc set them (Gallica scan). The biographical record divides along the same line as the man: the medical career is cataloged in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, with the chairs, the court appointments, and the editions of De morbis venereis (Encyclopedia.com), while the early reference notices fix the dates, the Huguenot-to-Catholic descent, and the conservative intent of the Genesis book (Catholic Encyclopedia, 1907). The classic scholarly recovery of Astruc as the starting point of source criticism belongs to A. R. S. Kennedy’s 1896 study, which laid out the two memoirs, the fragments, and the four-column page. The far end of the line he started is set out in Wellhausen’s Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (1878; 2nd ed. 1883), the work in which the four-source documentary hypothesis received its classic expression — read today as the destination Astruc did not foresee and would not have endorsed.

He himself put the book down and went back to medicine. Astruc died in Paris on 5 May 1766, his analysis of Genesis a footnote to a career in physic. The columns he printed to defend Moses outlived the defense and became the opening move of a discipline that read them the opposite way — a manner of attending to a text that later critics, on books and questions Astruc never raised, would carry into the study of the New Testament and the historical figure of Jesus, the line that runs toward Hermann Samuel Reimarus and the radical criticism of the following generation. For the comparison of internal evidence as a key to a text’s making, the eighteenth century had other practitioners in other fields — the classical philology of Richard Bentley ran a kindred operation on Greek and Latin — but on the Pentateuch the parallel columns were Astruc’s, his Conjectures a minor curiosity until the next century made it a beginning.

→ Related: Richard Bentley · Pentateuch · Elohim · Jehovah · Moses · Torah · Old Testament · Bible · Abraham · Hermann Samuel Reimarus