Th e Pentateuch as Scripture and the Challenge of Biblical Criticism 205In Judaism, the Pentateuch (and, to some extent, the whole of Scrip-
ture) came to be viewed as the eternal foundation on which all normative
teaching — legal, ethical, ritual, philosophical — must ultimately be based,
whether explicitly contained therein or not. Th e underlying assump-
tion that enabled Judaism to consider the teachings of all generations to
be the intended meaning of the Torah is that, being a transcript of divine
speech, it is omnisignifi cant: all truth is contained in it, and each and every
word, indeed every letter and every grammatical and stylistic peculiarity,
bears independent and inexhaustible meaning. Th ough the precise man-
ner and degree to which Jewish tradition has maximized or minimized the
potentially limitless content of the Torah has varied over the centuries, it
has always assumed a fundamental diff erence between the Torah, which it
conceived as divine verbalization, and all other literature, which is simply
the written record of human speech. Th e Torah, therefore, was studied in
traditional Judaism both as a source text, with the aim of apprehending
the precise connection between it and the extant rabbinic tradition, and as
a living text, with the aim of deriving from it teachings of present signifi -
cance. Th e Torah was not an object of research but rather a tool for edifi ca-
tion. Th ere existed no diff erence between the confessional and the histori-
cal; the historical signifi cance of the Torah was confi ned to its narratives,
the historicity of which was not questioned but was not held to be their
sole, or even primary, signifi cance.
As indicated earlier, Pentateuchal criticism (the groundwork for which
was laid in the seventeenth century by philosophers such as Baruch Spi-
noza but which received its permanent form in the biblical scholarship of
the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries) provides the strongest
possible contrast to the traditional Jewish approach to the study of the To-
rah book. True, medieval Jewish commentators occasionally admitted that
the Torah included post-Mosaic additions, that the physical characteristics
and even occasional substantive details of its text had changed here and
there over the millennia, and that the narrative was sometimes artistic and
not strictly reportage. Still, critical thought concerning the Pentateuch pro-
ceeded from totally diff erent premises. Its point of departure may explain
the diff erence. Whereas Jewish learning was predicated on the notion of
divine authorship, thus on the Torah’s timelessness, critical thought began
with the notion of Mosaic authorship, thereby encasing the Pentateuch in a
defi ned historical context. Th ough the latter notion is adumbrated in rab-
binic tradition, it found full expression in the writings of Philo and thereaf-
ter became prominent in Christian doctrine concerning the Old Testament.