Th e Pentateuch as Scripture and the Challenge of Biblical Criticism 219practicing rabbi and teacher of rabbinics, and in keeping with the enlight-
ened tradition of the Italian rabbinate, he was well versed in scientifi c Ju-
daic studies, as well as in the classics. His original fi eld of research, however,
was the history of Italian Jewry. Th ough he had published an important
work on Deutero-Isaiah in 1911 – 13, it was only aft er he became professor
of Hebrew at the universities of Florence (1925) and Rome (1935) that he
began to concentrate on biblical studies. Th is new interest was reinforced
by the discovery of the Ugaritic literature at the archeological excavation at
Ras Shamra on the Syrian coast in 1929. Cassuto, an avid student of the He-
brew language and biblical stylistics, was fascinated by the potential contri-
bution to interpretation that lay in the closely cognate literature of ancient
Ugarit, and indeed, most of his original work in the Bible is in the class of
comparative study of biblical and Canaanite vocabulary and style. In his
groundbreaking Sifrut Miqra’it ve-Sifrut Kena’anit (“Biblical Literature and
Canaanite Literature,” published in 1942), he laid the foundations for the
study of the literary affi nities between the two cultures and in Th e Israelite
Epic (1943) proposed the existence of a poetic tradition in Israel antedating
the biblical prose narrative. Th e better portion of his biblical studies fur-
ther develop this area of inquiry.
Cassuto’s teaching and writing (he was chief editor of, and a major con-
tributor to, the Hebrew Enziqlopedia Miqra’it) indicate, however, that the
Torah literature was never far from his mind. In contrast to his unques-
tioning acceptance of the anonymous exilic prophet “Deutero-Isaiah,” his
approach to the Documentary Hypothesis may be characterized as skepti-
cal in the extreme and ultimately quite hostile. As distinct from Hoff mann,
he sought to refute the source theory by examining not the law but the
narrative portions of the Pentateuch. Th us, he embarked on a painstaking
study of Genesis, maintaining that the accepted criteria for separating the
sources — style and usage, in particular, the use of the divine names Elo-
him and Yahweh — were not consistent and that the variation could be
explained on other grounds and that the discrepancies in the narrative —
such as contradictions, discontinuity, and repetition — were evidence not of
separate narrative sources but rather of the wealth and variety of Israelite
traditions, employed selectively and judiciously by the Torah literature in
order to further its pure, monotheistic aims.
La Questione della Genesi arrives ultimately at the conclusion that the
Torah in its entirety was composed in the early monarchic period, most
probably during the reign of King David. Cassuto’s primary justifi cation
for this determination seems to be that while he felt compelled to concede