Th e Pentateuch as Scripture and the Challenge of Biblical Criticism 225predated everything. Th is liberation from the tendentious critical view of
the late, secondary nature of the Torah tradition enabled Kaufmann to
place the Torah literature in the historical context to which it most natu-
rally belonged: First Temple times, preexilic Israel. Yet Kaufmann was not
motivated by any desire to restore respect for Jewish tradition per se but
rather by a driving need to account logically and systematically for the
nature of Israelite culture overall. In accord with his general philosophic
view of the essence of national life, Kaufmann insisted that the organizing
principle for all of Jewish history was its religious idea. Monotheism was
in his view a revolution and not an evolution; the revolution came at the
beginning; once it had occurred, all that followed evolved naturally. Th us,
Kaufmann diverged from nineteenth-century thinkers by insisting on the
autonomy of the genesis of spiritual phenomena, restricting Hegelian dia-
lectic to the stages following the initial, innovative event. Kaufmann was
not an apologist for the Jewish religion but a revisionist historian of the
Jewish nation.
For Kaufmann, the internal, philological analysis of the Pentateuch was
a given. He accepted the essentials of the four-source theory (though with
occasional diff erences and preferring, along with Wellhausen and many
others, to speak of JE as one amalgamated tradition) and endorsed the sty-
listic and terminological basis for the division. He had no quarrel with the
identifi cation of a unique priestly source, and he readily admitted both its
distinctive nature and that of the Deuteronomic source, whose connection
with the Josianic reform, as well as with the Deuteronomistic redaction of
the historiography in Kings, he maintained. He argued fi rmly for the liter-
ary and legal independence of the law codes and their intrinsic connection
with the narrative documents into which they have been embedded. He
had no doubt that the sources of the Pentateuch represent stages in the evo-
lution of the Israelite religion (once that process had been set in motion by
the sudden appearance of the radically new monotheistic idea) or that the
direction of development was from the “epic” sources (J and E) to the more
thoroughly theologized/legalized ones (P and D). His acceptance of the es-
sentials of the Documentary Hypothesis on the one hand and his philo-
logical expertise on the other enabled him to reevaluate the Wellhausenian
scheme of Israel’s history without rejecting the method itself. Kaufmann’s
singular and far-reaching contention was that the Priestly source — the
identifi cation and character of which was not in dispute — belonged to the
preexilic period and was indeed earlier than the Deuteronomic source.
Arguing with the Wellhausenian approach (as Hoff mann had before him,