Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/531

 PENTATEUCH 505 PENTATEUCH AND JOSHUA. The name Penta teuch, already found in Tertullian and Origen, corresponds to the Jewish minn E Bin n^DH (the five-fifths of the Torah, or Law) ; the several books were named by the Jews from their initial words, though at least Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy had also titles corresponding to those we use, viz., D oro min, Q nipan E^on (A/z/xecr^eKwSet/.t, Origen, in Eus., H. ., vi. 25), and mm nj^D. The Pentateuch, together with Joshua, Judges, and Euth, with which it is usually united in Greek MSS., makes up the Octateuch ; the Pentateuch and Joshua together have recently been named the Hexateuch. The date of the division of the Torah into five books cannot be made out ; it is probably older than the Septuagint translation. ft i- Moses is already taken for the author of the Pentateuch i( il in 2 Chronicles xxv. 4, xxxv. 12 sq. ; only the last eight in or- verses O f Deuteronomy are, according to the rabbins, not from his pen. From the synagogue belief in the Mosaic authorship passed to the church, and is still widely pre valent among Christians. At an early date, indeed, doubts suggested themselves as to the correctness of this view, but it was not till the 17th century that these became so strong that they could not be suppressed. 1 It was ob served that Moses does not speak of himself in the first person, but that some other writer speaks of him in the third, a writer, too, who lived long after. The expression of Gen. xii. 6, &quot;the Canaanite was then in the land,&quot; is spoken to readers who had long forgotten that a different nation from Israel had once occupied the Holy Land ; the words of Gen. xxxvi. 31, &quot;these are the kings that reigned in Edom, before there reigned any king over the children of Israel,&quot; have no prophetic aspect ; they point to an author who wrote under the Hebrew monarchy. Again, the &quot; book of the wars of Jehovah &quot; (Num. xxi. 14) cannot possibly be cited by Moses himself, as it contains a record of his own deeds ; and, when Deut. xxxiv. 1 (comp. Num. xii.) says that &quot;there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses,&quot; the writer is necessarily one who looked back to Moses through a long series of later prophets. At the same time attention was drawn to a variety of contradictions, inequalities, transpositions, and repetitions of events in the Pentateuch, such as excluded the idea that the whole came from a single pen. Thus Peyrerius re marked that Gen. xx. and xxvi. stand in an impossible chronological context ; and on the incongruity of Gen. i. and ii., which he pressed very strongly, he rested his hypo thesis of the Preadamites. Such observations could not but grievously shake the persuasion that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch, while at the same time they directed criticism to a less negative task viz., the analysis of the Pentateuch. For this, indeed, the 17th century did not effect anything considerable, but at least two conclusions came out with sufficient clearness. The first of these was the self-contained character of Deuteronomy, which in these days there was a disposition to regard as the oldest book of the Pentateuch, and that with the best claims to authenticity. And in the second place the Pentateuchal laws and the Pentateuchal history were sharply distin guished ; the chief difficulties were felt to lie in the narrative, and there seemed to be less reason for question ing the Mosaic authorship of the laws. Spinoza s bold conjecture that in their present form not only the Pentateuch but also the other historical books of the Old Testament were composed by Ezra ran far ahead of the laborious investigation of details necessary to solve 1 Hobbes, Leviathan, cliap. xxxiii. ; Peyrerius, S/jst. thcol. ex 7Va?- adamitarum Hi/pothesi, iv. 1, 2; Spinoza, fr.Theologico-poL,co.^.. ; R. Simon, Hist. C rit. dn V. T., i. 5-7 ; Le Clerc, Sentimens dequebjiies tkeuloyiens de IMlande (Amst., 1685). lett. G. the previous question of the composition of the Pentateuch. Jean Astruc has the merit of opening the true path of Astruc. this investigation. He recognized in Genesis two main sources, between which he divided the whole materials of the book, with some few exceptions, and these sources he distinguished by the mark that the one used for God the name Elohim (Gen. i., v.; comp. Exod. vi. 3) and the other the name Jehovah (Gen. ii.-iv.). 2 Astruc s hypothesis, fortified by the observation of other linguistic differences which regularly corresponded with the variation in the names of God, was introduced into Germany by Eichhorn s Einleitung in d. A.T., and proved there the fruitful and just point of departure for all further inquiry. At first, indeed, it was with but uncertain steps that critics advanced from the analysis of Genesis to that of the other books, where the simple criterion of the alternation of the divine names was no longer available. In the hands of the Scotsman Geddes and the German Vater the Pentateuch resolved itself into an agglomeration of longer and shorter fragments, Frag- between which no threads of continuous connexion could &quot; ien tary be traced 3 (&quot; Fragmentary Hypothesis &quot;). The fragment- lj yp &quot; ary hypothesis was mainly supported by arguments drawn from the middle books of the Pentateuch, and as limited to these it long found wide support. Even De Wette De started from it in his investigations ; but this was really Wette. an inconsistency, for his fundamental idea was to show throughout all parts of the Pentateuch traces of certain common tendencies, and even of one deliberate plan ; nor was he far from recognizing the close relation between the Elohist of Genesis and the legislation of the middle books. De Wette s chief concern, however, was not with the literary but with the historical criticism of the Pentateuch, and in the latter he made an epoch. In his Diss. Critica of 1805 (Opusc. Theol., pp. 149-168) he placed the composi tion of Deuteronomy in the time of King Josiah (arguing from a comparison of 2 Kings xxii., xxiii., with Deut. xii.), and pronounced it to be the most recent stratum of the Pentateuch, not, as had previously been supposed, the oldest. In his Critical Enquiry into the Credibility of the -Books of Chronicles (Halle, 1806) he showed that the laws of Moses are unknown to the post-Mosaic history; this he did by instituting a close comparison of Samuel and Kings with the Chronicles, from which it appeared that the variations of the latter are not to be explained by the use of other sources, but solely by the desire of the JeAvish scribes to shape the history in conformity with the law, and to give the law that place in history which, to their surprise, had not been conceded to it by the older historical books. Finally, in his Criticism of the Mosaic History (Halle, 1807) De Wette attacked the method then preva lent in Germany of eliminating all miracles and prophecies from the Bible by explaining them away, and then ration alizing what remained into a dry prosaic pragmatism. De Wette refuses to find any history in the Pentateuch ; all is legend and poetry. The Pentateuch is not an authority for the history of the time it deals with, but only for the time in which it was written ; it is, he says, the conditions of this much later time which the author idealizes and throws back into the past, whether in the form of narrative or of law. De Wette s brilliant debut, which made his reputation for the rest of his life, exercised a powerful influence on his contemporaries. For several decennia all who were open to critical ideas at all stood under his influence. Gramberg, Leo, and Von Bohlen wrote under this influence ; Gesenius in Halle, the greatest Hebraist then living, taught under it ; nay, Vatke and George were guided by De - Conjectures sur les memoires originaux, dont il paroit que Moyse s est servi pour composer le livre de In Gene.se (Brussels, 1753). Comp. Joitrn. des S^ai-ans, October 1767, pp. 291-305. 3 J. S. Vater, Commcntar iiber den Pentateuch, Halle, 1S02-1S05. XVIII. 64