220 B a ruch J. Schwartz
that only aft er national existence is established and secured does literary
creativity begin, and therefore that the Torah literature could not predate
the conquest and settlement, once the existence of separate sources is dis-
credited and the connection with Canaanite literature established, nothing
stands in the way of positing such an early date. Of course, having con-
fi ned himself to Genesis, some of the fi ner points of the source division of
which remain disputed even today, Cassuto placed himself from the out-
set in a position advantageous to his goal. More important, as his work
was restricted to the narrative, whereas most of what was so persuasive in
the Wellhausenian model of criticism stemmed from the relationship of
the law codes, he failed to contend with much of the real substance of the
Higher Critical approach. Ironically, the idea that the Torah book is essen-
tially a narrative, in which the law codes have simply been inserted but
whose main aim was to recount Israel’s history, is a radical departure from
Jewish exegetical tradition, which sees imparting the laws as the Torah’s
primary aim and the narrative as a framework for the legal codes. Here,
Cassuto sided, perhaps unintentionally, with the critical assessment of the
nature of the Torah literature.
As distinct from Segal, Cassuto seems to have been willing to sacrifi ce
the traditional view of the Torah’s origin, conceding that it was a human
document, the gradual product of Israel’s religious and literary spirit, dat-
ing from a period later than Moses, as long as he could argue that it was not
so late as the critics supposed and that it was a unifi ed whole. By granting
in principle that sacred literature is created in the context of a historical
setting, Cassuto thus actually embraced Higher Criticism fully; he merely
rejected the specifi c theory, namely, the Documentary Hypothesis, that
had come to dominate it.
Because Cassuto argues so vehemently for the unity of the Torah in its
fi nal form, claiming it to be the result of a single, early redactional process
thoroughly consistent on the literary and theological levels, it would ap-
pear that his motivation was both apologetic and aesthetic. To his mind,
the greatest threat posed by the Documentary Hypothesis was that of the
atomization and eventual disintegration of the Torah book; moreover, his
literary tastes simply refused to perceive criticism’s real challenge to the
Torah’s internal cohesion, which had been assumed by two millennia of
Jewish commentators and defended for so long on sophisticated exegetical
grounds. Cassuto preferred to excuse the lack of literary harmony as char-
acteristic of ancient literature, and it must be said that his case was not en-
tirely without merit. Indeed, in the years since, the possibility that certain