Mosaic authorship
Tradition that Moses authored the Torah, foundational to Judaism and Christianity.
Mosaic authorship is the Judeo-Christian tradition that the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, were dictated by God to Moses. The tradition probably began with the legalistic code of the Book of Deuteronomy and was then gradually extended until Moses came to be regarded as author of both laws and narrative. It remains an article of faith in traditional Jewish circles and for some Christian Evangelical scholars.
Quick Facts
- Field
- Biblical authorship
- Known for
- Tradition that Moses wrote the Torah
Facts from the source article.
Development of the tradition
The Torah, also called the Pentateuch, comprises Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, and serves as Israel's charter myth. Its development began around 600 BCE, when previously unconnected material started to be assembled, and by around 400 BCE these books had reached their modern form and were recognized as complete and sacred. By about 200 BCE, the five books were accepted as the first section of the Jewish canon. The tradition of Mosaic authorship appears to have been first applied to Deuteronomy, which scholars generally agree was composed in Jerusalem during King Josiah's reform program in the late 7th century BCE. Books such as Joshua and Kings, completed in the mid-6th century BCE, refer to the "torah of Moses" when speaking of this law-code. In later works like Chronicles and Ezra–Nehemiah, the meaning expanded to include other laws such as Leviticus, and by the Hellenistic period Jewish writers referred to all five books as the Book or books of Moses. Authorship was not considered important by the society that produced the Hebrew Bible, and the Torah never names an author. Only after about 300 BCE, when Jews encountered author-centric Hellenistic culture, did rabbis begin seeking authors for their scriptures. Three factors may have influenced Moses' identification as author: passages where he writes something at God's command, though these never apply to the entire five books; his key role in four of the five books; and his authority as lawgiver and liberator uniting the story and laws.
Rabbinic tradition to the modern period
The Babylonian Talmud, composed between 200 and 500 CE, states that Moses wrote his own book and the section concerning Balaam. The medieval philosopher Maimonides, in his Thirteen Principles of Faith, enshrined the belief that the entire Torah presently in possession is the one given to Moses. Rabbis taught that God wrote the Torah in heaven before creation, in letters of black fire on parchment of white fire, and that Moses received it by divine dictation. They also described a chain of transmission: Moses received the Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the Elders, the Elders to the Prophets, and the Prophets to the men of the Great Assembly, who transmitted it to the rabbis. Orthodox rabbis therefore hold that the Torah today is identical with that received by Moses, not varying by a single letter.
Christian tradition
The New Testament indicates that Jesus recognized Moses as author of at least some portions of the Pentateuch, and early Christians followed the rabbis, though these passages may reflect inherited tradition rather than binding historical judgments. Early Christians addressed passages that seemed to cast doubt on Mosaic tradition: Jerome felt that "unto this day" implied an editor long after Moses, presumably Ezra, and Martin Luther concluded that the description of Moses' death was written by Joshua, though both believed the question was of no great importance. In the 17th century, scholars began seriously questioning the Pentateuch's origins, leading Baruch Spinoza to declare that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses but by someone else. The 18th-century Jewish scholar David Levi warned Christian colleagues that if any part of the Torah is proved spurious, a door would be opened for further doubts. By the late 19th century, scholars almost universally accepted that Deuteronomy dated from the 7th century BCE, with the Pentateuch compiled by unknown editors from distinct source-documents. The Catholic Church initially rejected this position: a 1906 decree of the Pontifical Biblical Commission stated that Mosaic authorship was not a subject of discussion. This began to change in 1943 when Pope Pius XII issued the encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu encouraging scholarly investigation using archaeology, ancient history, linguistics, and other methods. On January 16, 1948, cardinal Emmanuel Célestin Suhard, secretary of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, responded to a question about the Pentateuch's origin.
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