Pentateuch

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Five scrolls, read in order, carry a people from the making of the world to a grave no one can find. They open with light called out of darkness and close with Moses on a height above the Jordan, looking into a land he is told he will not enter, dying there at the word of God so that, the text says, no one knows his burial place to this day. Between those two points — the first sentence of Genesis and the last of Deuteronomy — lies the Pentateuch: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, the foundation document of Israel and the opening of the Hebrew Bible. In Jewish use it is the Torah, a word that means instruction or teaching as much as law, and it is the most authoritative portion of the canon: the scroll unrolled and read aloud in the synagogue across a fixed yearly cycle, section by section, the reading reaching the death of Moses and beginning again from creation in a single turning of the year. The Greek name, pentateuchos, renders as five scrolls, or the book of five cases — naming the practical fact behind the fivefold shape. The Latin Father Tertullian uses the term around the year 207, and the great Alexandrian Origen after him; but the division into five is older than either, older than the Greek translation of the third century BCE, built into the work itself.

The single sweep in two halves

What the five books contain is one sustained movement, told in two registers. The first is narrative — the origins of the cosmos and of humankind, the flood, the dispersal of the nations, the call of Abraham and the promise made to him, the generations of the patriarchs, the descent into Egypt, the bondage, the exodus through the divided sea, and the long wandering in the wilderness. The second is law: the commandments delivered at Sinai, beginning with the Ten Commandments; the elaborate prescriptions for sacrifice, priesthood, festival, and the purity of persons and the camp; the ordering of an entire people around a covenant. The two are not filed in separate volumes. They are braided. The law does not arrive as an abstract code handed down from nowhere; it arrives as something that happened, at a named mountain, to a people who had just been brought out of slavery, sealed by an event and binding because of it. Genesis and the first half of Exodus are almost pure story; from Sinai onward the narrative slows and the legislation thickens, until in Leviticus the action nearly stops and the text becomes a manual of the holy. Then Numbers sets the people moving again, and Deuteronomy gathers everything into Moses’s last speeches, a recapitulation of the law spoken to a generation that did not stand at the mountain.

The Jewish tradition names each book by its opening word rather than its contents: Genesis is Bereshit, in the beginning; Exodus is Shemot, names; Leviticus is Vayikra, and he called; Numbers is Bamidbar, in the wilderness; Deuteronomy is Devarim, words. The printed volume of all five is the Chumash, from the Hebrew for five. The names register what the books are from the inside — not a library of separate treatises but the five movements of a single utterance, each beginning where the last breaks off.

The Torah of Moses

For most of the history of the traditions that hold it, the question of who wrote the Pentateuch had a settled answer: Moses did. The attribution is old enough to be simply assumed across the long centuries of Jewish and Christian reading. The books speak of themselves, in later scripture and in liturgy, as the law of Moses; the prophet who climbs Sinai and comes down with the tablets is also taken to be the hand that recorded the whole. To call the Pentateuch the Torah of Moses was never, in the first instance, a claim about manuscripts. It was a claim about authority and origin — that the instruction binding Israel came through the one mediator who spoke with God face to face, and that its words therefore carried the weight of revelation rather than of human composition.

Yet readers within the tradition noticed difficulties early. The twelfth-century commentator Abraham ibn Ezra, affirming Mosaic authorship, marked a handful of verses that seemed to look back on Moses from a later vantage — phrases that read as though added by a hand after his — and left the puzzle hanging, hinting more than he said. In the seventeenth century the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, in his Theological-Political Treatise of 1670, pressed the difficulties into an argument: Moses is spoken of throughout in the third person; the account of his death and burial closes the fifth book; certain notes presuppose events long after his lifetime. Spinoza concluded that the five books were compiled later, and pointed to Ezra, the post-exilic scribe, as the likelier hand behind their final form. In 1753 the French physician Jean Astruc, reading Genesis closely, proposed that Moses had drawn on older written memoirs, distinguishable by their different names for God — one using the divine name rendered as the Lord, another using the generic Elohim — and that these had been set side by side rather than fused. With Astruc the seam became a method.

The documentary hypothesis

The observations accumulated across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into a full theory of the text’s making. Duplicated stories — two accounts of creation, two interwoven strands in the flood, repeated tales of a patriarch passing off his wife as his sister — sat awkwardly with single authorship. Divine names alternated. Vocabulary and theology shifted from passage to passage. Out of these seams grew the documentary hypothesis, the proposal that the Pentateuch was assembled from several originally independent sources, each with its own style, theology, and historical setting, combined and harmonized by editors over centuries.

The hypothesis is usually called Graf–Wellhausen, after the scholars who gave it its decisive shape. Karl Heinrich Graf argued that the narrative sources were early and the priestly legislation late; Wilhelm Vatke set the whole sequence inside a developmental account of Israelite religion, moving from simple beginnings toward an elaborate centralized cult; Hermann Hupfeld helped sort the strands. It was Julius Wellhausen who fused these into a synthesis of lasting force. In 1878 he published Geschichte Israels — the History of Israel — whose second edition, from 1883, carried the title by which it is remembered, Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, the Prolegomena to the History of Israel. Wellhausen distinguished four sources, conventionally lettered: the Yahwist (J), which uses the divine name from the first and is rooted in the south; the Elohist (E), which calls God Elohim until the revelation of the name to Moses and carries a northern coloring; the Deuteronomist (D), the source behind Deuteronomy and linked to the law-book discovered during King Josiah’s reform of 621 BCE; and the Priestly writer (P), responsible for the genealogies, the measured first creation account, and the great body of ritual and purity law, which Wellhausen placed last, in the period after the Babylonian exile. The order mattered as much as the inventory: in his account the elaborate priestly system was not the ancient foundation of Israel’s religion but its late crown, and the history of the literature became a history of the religion itself.

Later scholarship has revised, fragmented, and contested the four-source scheme without returning to single Mosaic authorship. The boundaries between sources have been redrawn; the very existence of a continuous Elohist has been doubted; the dating of each strand has been argued and rearranged. What survives across the disagreement is the recognition that the Pentateuch is composite — a work built over a long span of time from materials of different ages and outlooks, brought to its final form, on the most widely held reckoning, in the Persian period, the centuries after the return from exile. The exact account of its making is not settled; that it was made, by many hands, is.

These two readings of the text answer different questions, and need not collide. The documentary hypothesis is a historical proposal about how the scroll came to exist. The ascription to Moses functions, within the traditions that hold it, as a statement about the source and authority of the instruction — about where the Torah comes from and why it binds — rather than as a thesis about the order in which paragraphs were drafted. A reader can hold the second as revelation and study the first as history; many do.

The Samaritan Pentateuch

The five books were never quite one fixed thing, even as scripture. The Samaritan community, whose roots lie in the old northern kingdom around Shechem, preserves its own Pentateuch — and only the Pentateuch, rejecting the prophets and writings that the rest of the Hebrew canon contains. Written in an ancient paleo-Hebrew script rather than the square Aramaic letters of the Jewish scrolls, the Samaritan text diverges from the standard Masoretic version in some six thousand readings, most of them small matters of spelling and grammar, a smaller number of real substance. Many of its distinctive readings are shared by the Greek Septuagint, and — a discovery that reshaped the field — by manuscripts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, where a harmonizing, expansive form of the text close to the Samaritan tradition turns up centuries before any sectarian split. What had once been dismissed as a late and tendentious revision proved instead to preserve a genuinely old strand of the text.

The decisive divergences are theological, and they turn on a mountain. Where the Jewish text commands an altar on Mount Ebal, the Samaritan reads Mount Gerizim; where the Jewish Decalogue numbers its commandments one way, the Samaritan incorporates, as part of the commandments themselves, an instruction to build the sanctuary on Gerizim, gathered from passages the Jewish text places elsewhere. For the Samaritans the chosen place — the one site where God set his name — is Gerizim, near Shechem, not Zion in Jerusalem. The most revered copy is the Abisha Scroll, kept in the Samaritan community at Nablus and traced in their tradition to a great-grandson of Aaron. Two communities, then, read what is recognizably the same five books and disagree, in the text itself, about where the holy meets the earth.

The five scrolls read two ways, and three

The same Pentateuch stands at the head of two larger canons and is read within each toward a different end. For Judaism the Torah is the heart of revelation, the part of scripture from which the binding law is drawn and around which the whole tradition of interpretation is built; its words are not only studied but enacted, and its public reading structures the sacred year. The fuller account of the Torah as law and as revelation — the liturgical cycle, the legal interpretation that grows from it — belongs to that scripture under its own name. Within the Jewish world the five books have also sustained readings that look past the surface: the first-century Alexandrian Philo read them as allegory through the lens of Greek philosophy, finding the Logos at work in the text of Moses; the later mystics of the Kabbalah read the very letters of the Torah as the structure of the divine, a scripture that encodes God before it narrates the world. For Christianity the five books open the Old Testament, read as the prologue to a longer story and reinterpreted in the light of its sequel — law fulfilled, type answered, promise carried forward. Around the Pentateuch’s edges grew further literature that retold or extended it: the Book of Jubilees recasts Genesis and Exodus within a calendar of sevens, and works such as 1 Esdras preserve the memory of Ezra, the scribe to whom the tradition gives the law’s restoration.

The same five scrolls are read, in each case, as the place where the rest begins — the ground that everything afterward stands on and argues from. The patriarch’s call, the night of the exodus, the words spoken at the mountain: the later canon returns to them not as background but as the events it is still living inside. Open any of the books that follow — the histories, the prophets, the gospels, the long shelves of commentary in every century since — and somewhere near the root of the argument lies a sentence first written here, in the scroll that runs from the first morning of the world to the unmarked grave above the Jordan.

Scholarship and the texts

The documentary hypothesis received its enduring statement in Julius Wellhausen’s Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (1878; 2nd ed. 1883), translated as Prolegomena to the History of Israel by J. Sutherland Black and Allan Menzies (Edinburgh: A. & C. Black, 1885) and now in the public domain. The most widely read modern presentation in English is Richard Elliott Friedman’s Who Wrote the Bible? (New York: Summit Books, 1987), which defends the four-source model for a general audience, argues that the editor who joined the sources — whom Friedman identifies with Ezra — has been underappreciated, and stakes its boldest claim on the date and authorship of the Priestly source; his later The Bible with Sources Revealed (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003) prints the Pentateuch with the strands marked out in color.

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have not so much overturned the source approach as split it into rival families. Erhard Blum’s Studien zur Komposition des Pentateuch (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990) advanced an influential composition-historical model in which the text grew by successive editorial layers rather than from parallel continuous documents — a supplementary account characteristic of much European scholarship, alongside the redaction-critical work of Reinhard G. Kratz. Against that current a group of mostly North American scholars have renewed the classical theory: Joel S. Baden’s The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012) defends four sources joined by a single compiler and a strict separation of literary from historical questions. The terms of the present debate are set out by Konrad Schmid in The Neo-Documentarian Manifesto: A Critical Reading (Journal of Biblical Literature 140, 2021, 461–479), a European response to the neo-documentary program. The foundational eighteenth-century move belongs to Jean Astruc’s Conjectures sur les mémoires originaux dont il paroit que Moyse s’est servi pour composer le Livre de la Genèse (Brussels, 1753), and the earliest sustained case against Mosaic authorship to Baruch Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670).

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