Torah - Composition

Composition

According to Jewish tradition (later adopted by Christianity) the Torah was dictated to Moses by God, with the exception of the last eight verses of Deuteronomy, which describe the death and burial of Moses. This belief is based on what was transmitted as a historical narrative that is first recorded in the Mishnah (100 BCE – 100 CE), the Mishnah being the first time that traditions that were transmitted orally from the time of Moses were put in writing. It is also based on the Hebrew Torah that states in Deuteronomy 31:24–26; after Moses finished writing the words of this Torah in a book from beginning to end. He gave this command to the Levites who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord: "Take this Book of the Torah and place it beside the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God. There it will remain as a witness upon you". The Torah refers to this book of the Torah that was entrusted to the Levites in regard to rules pertaining to a king. Deuteronomy 17:18 states; When he takes the throne of his kingdom, he is to write for himself on a scroll a copy of this Torah, taken from that of the Levitical priests.

Today the majority of academic scholars accept the theory that the Torah does not have a single author, and that its composition took place over centuries. From the late 19th century there was a general consensus around the documentary hypothesis, which suggests that the five books were created c. 450 BCE by combining four originally independent sources, known as the Jahwist, or J (c. 900 BCE), the Elohist, or E (c. 800 BCE), the Deuteronomist, or D, (c. 600 BCE), and the Priestly source, or P (c. 500 BCE). This general agreement began to break down in the late 1970s, and today there are many theories but no consensus, or even majority viewpoint. Variations of the documentary hypothesis remain popular especially in America and Israel, and the identification of distinctive Deuteronomistic and Priestly theologies and vocabularies remains widespread, but they are used to form new approaches suggesting that the books were combined gradually over time by the slow accumulation of "fragments" of text, or that a basic text was "supplemented" by later authors/editors. At the same time there has been a tendency to bring the origins of the Pentateuch further forward in time, and the most recent proposals place it in 5th century Judah under the Persian empire.

Deuteronomy is often treated separately from Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus. The process of its formation probably took several hundred years, from the 8th century to the 6th, and its authors have been variously identified as prophetic circles (because the concerns of Deuteronomy mirror those of the prophets, especially Hosea), Levitical priestly circles (because it stresses the role of the Levites), and wisdom and scribal circles (because it esteems wisdom, and because the treaty-form in which it is written would be best known to scribes). According to the theory of the Deuteronomistic history proposed by Martin Noth and widely accepted, Deuteronomy was a product of the court of Josiah (late 7th century) before being used as the introduction to a comprehensive history of Israel written in the early part of the 6th century; later still it was detached from the history and used to round off the Pentateuch.

Many Jews, including a majority of Israeli Jews, believe that the Torah was revealed to Moses by God, implicitly rejecting a theory that holds that the Torah was complied by an unknown editor from multiple sources. Reasons for this belief can be that it is supported by what they view as the historical narrative, that the Hebrew Torah in Deuteronomy 31:24–26, as well as the Talmud (Gittin 60a, Bava Basra 14b), state that Moses wrote the Torah, and that the Mishnah asserts the divine origin of the Torah as one of the essential tenets of Judaism. Many Jews also accept the 13 Principles of Faith that were established by Maimonides, one of which that states; The Torah that we have today is the one dictated to Moses by God.