Introduction to the Pentateuch

It has been a belief universally shared by Israelites of all times that the Pentateuch was exclusively and entirely authored and redacted by the great prophet Moses; only the last chapter of Deuteronomy, the one describing the death of the holy writer, was questioned by the sages of the Talmud as to whether it should be attributed to Moses himself or to Joshua: “It is written, ‘So Moses the servant of the Lord died there.’ Now is it possible that Moses whilst still alive would have written, ‘So Moses . . . died there’? The truth is, however, that up to this point Moses wrote; from this point Joshua the son of Nun wrote. This is the opinion of Judah, or, according to others, of Nehemiah.”¹

Against this universal and extremely persistent belief held by the entire Jewish, Christian, and even pagan antiquity, Father Riccardo Simon reacted, about a century and a half ago, by putting forward in his critical history of the Old Testament, the hypothesis that Moses may only be the author of that part of the Pentateuch which deals with laws and divine commands. On the contrary, the part of the book concerning history would have been redacted by certain Scribes, as he calls them, that is to say public writers or prophets as one may call them, who were nothing else, according to his hypothesis, than public officers charged with the task of writing history.

The nonsubstance of such a gratuitous supposition is evident through the simple consideration that the part dealing with precepts and legal provisions, and the historical part, are not in any way disjointed or detached, or even separated and distinct in the book, as they could not help but be if they had been redacted by two different authors: quite the opposite, on almost each page of the sacred code, we find the divine commandments in the course of the narrations themselves, inseparably nested and naturally snuggled. [ . . . ]

It is the second observation that our most ancient notables, with the rightful veneration that they always had for our arch prophet Moses, would never have tolerated . . . that the divine laws emanated through him could be united in a single body with narrations written by others than him. [ . . . ]

And it is my third observation, that the hypothesis of the scribes, charged by public authority with the task of writing history, is completely deprived of any foundation throughout the entire volume of the Pentateuch.

It would be difficult to infer the truth from our critic, especially from the apparent disorder that he thinks can be found in the Pentateuch; this too, much like the previous reason, is an argument that by wanting to prove too much, does not prove anything.

If the hypothesis that I have so far tried to refute seems to be revolting to you, beloved youth, the highly heterodox opinion that the most learned orientalists among the German theologians are presently daring to put forward will seem to you even more disgusting. It is therefore my duty to warn you against the impression that you may one day feel by reading works apparently dictated by much erudition and profound genius; it is my duty to share with you those weapons that my reflections were able to suggest in defense of the good cause.

Therefore, various modern linguists affirm that there exist no example of a language able to preserve itself so unchanged for the whole span of a thousand years as the Hebrew language appears to be from the first to the last writers of the holy canon, from Moses to Nehemiah. These personalities are, as we said, a thousand years distant from each other; from the pretended impossibility of such a durable uniformity in language, they infer that the Pentateuch could not have been written if not various centuries after Moses’ times, for example at the time of David or even later.

This argument is only apparently sound, given the fact that the phenomenon under examination is really extraordinary, and without equal among the languages we know. If however one wants to go back to the causes of things, it is possible to observe that the main reason for the alteration of languages throughout centuries, is not the mere passing of time itself, but the influence of foreign people, be they enemies or friends.

It only remains to me, young scholars, to talk about the integrity of the holy book itself; this will be the longest, most instructive, and most enjoyable part of this introductory treatise. The absurd accusation moved against our nation by certain Christians in ancient times, such as Justin and Irenaeus the martyrs, and in less remote times, by Nicholas of Lyra and Pablo de Santa Maria (of Burgos), I mean the absurd accusation that the holy scriptures had been maliciously maimed and disfigured by us to displease the Christians: this theory is now recognized by modern scholars for what it is, that is to say as deprived of even a shadow of reason, while being on the contrary absolutely repulsive and opposite to reason, neither is it worth dwelling on its discussion.

However, my beloved youth, we should not be afraid to establish as a firm principle that the holy books did not in any way suffer from the dissolution of the kingdom of our fathers, that Ezra did not emend or in any way change the holy code, that he was not a scribe and that the holy text that is between our hands, must not be attributed as some critics would groundlessly like, to Ezra but only to Moses and God.