206 B a ruch J. Schwartz
Th e Torah, which for the Jews was the law of God, was for the Christians
the law of Moses. Critical inquiry, which from its inception was a Christian
enterprise, naturally began by questioning the latter, not the former.
Since, for Christian scholars, the human (though divinely inspired) ori-
gin of the Torah was a given, two essential postulates of critical thought
arose quite naturally: fi rst, that the historical meaning of the text is the only
true one and, second, that the text — the Pentateuch taken on its own — is
autonomous: it must be understood without any external body of tradition,
since no interpretation is a priori authoritative. Th ough these two postu-
lates are somewhat of a departure from the Christian tradition too, they are
considerably more compatible with it than they are with the Jewish tradi-
tion. Christian thought was more inclined to view the age of Moses as de-
fi nitive, since it in any case believed the Torah to be time-bound. Moreover,
it had long rejected the authoritative nature of the Jews’ “oral law.” Jew-
ish learning, on the other hand, attached little signifi cance to the moment
in history at which the Torah — said to have been composed by God six
millennia before the creation of the world2 — fi nally arrived on earth, and
was quite traumatized by the idea that the body of rabbinic interpretation
might be anything less than the revealed accompaniment to the divine text.
Viewed in this light, the substantive conclusions of classical Penta-
teuchal criticism can be appreciated in the fullness of the challenge they
present to Jewish tradition. In essence, these conclusions number fi ve:
(1) Th e Torah, and the religious teaching it represents — monotheism, a
covenant with Israel, the concept of divine law, the laws themselves, and
the narrative framework — are not “original”; the Torah is not a body of
isolated and insulated, inner-Israelite, phenomena. Rather, it represents,
both substantively and literarily, a stage in the evolution of ancient Semitic
culture, of which the Israelites were a part. Its beliefs, narratives, and laws
locate themselves along a cultural continuum, not in a cultural vacuum.
Th is discovery removes the Torah from the exclusive realm of the divine
and calls into question its timelessness; by demonstrating the Torah’s coun-
terparts and antecedents, it casts doubt on the necessity of assuming its
revealed nature.
(2) Th e Torah is later than Moses. Not only does it contain passages
that could not have been written in the time of Moses, the entire work —
its structures, aims, themes, and every aspect of its style and content — be-
speak a period following Israel’s conquest of Canaan and the establishment
of its national life there. Th is realization breaks the iron link connecting