Th e Pentateuch as Scripture and the Challenge of Biblical Criticism 207the laws to the historical personality of Moses and indeed calls his very
existence into question. Th e religious teaching refl ected in the Pentateuch
could no longer be viewed as the starting point of Israel’s religion; indeed,
for most biblical critics of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the
Torah refl ects evolving expressions of the latest phase of Israelite religion,
arriving on the scene aft er classical prophecy.
(3) It follows that the Torah refl ects, and indeed exists in order to pro-
mulgate, the viewpoints of its period and its understanding of received tra-
dition and is not an eyewitness account of events as they transpired. What
is told is not necessarily historical fact but rather the literary creation of
tradents and scribes, and what is commanded is not necessarily the a priori
terms of a covenant made at Israel’s birth but is rather the legislative norm
of later generations, retrojectively attributed to earlier revelation.
(4) Th e Torah is not a unifi ed literary work. Before the Torah attained its
fi nal form, there existed several “torahs” (in the classical form of the Docu-
mentary Hypothesis, the four documents known to scholars as J, E, P, and
D), each complete in itself, each consisting of a narrative with a law code
embedded in it, and each recounting events, and recording the laws, in its
own unique way. Th ese have been combined to create the canonical Torah.
Th is realization had two distinct ramifi cations:
(a) Th e unity of the fi nished product notwithstanding, on the exegetical
level the meaning of any passage was no longer to be determined in
a way that forced it into harmony with the remainder of the Penta-
teuch. Only the original literary context — the document to which
the passage belonged when it was composed — is decisive in deter-
mining its meaning. Th e Pentateuch could no longer be interpreted
as if it were all of a piece; it was no longer the sum of its parts, since
the parts did not supplement and integrate with each other.
(b) Th e crowning accomplishment of the critical approach, epitomized
in the school of the late nineteenth-century German scholar Julius
Wellhausen (1844 – 1918),3 is the hypothesis that the four separate
documents of which the Pentateuch appears to have been composed
belong to separate periods of time and stand in a dialectical rela-
tionship with one another. Th e contrastive study of the documents
reveals a developmental process. Th e literary study of the history
of the Pentateuch is the evolutionary study of the history of Is-
rael’s religion.