Th e Pentateuch as Scripture and the Challenge of Biblical Criticism 221literary discrepancies are indeed stylistic features rather than evidence for
sources has been given ever-increasing credence — though without Cas-
suto’s blanket denial of the source theory.
Th e early years of biblical studies in Jerusalem, still characterized by
a feeling that the primary task of the Jewish Bible scholar was to refute
whatever Christian scholarship had to say about the origins of Israel, were
sympathetic to Cassuto’s approach. In the summer of 1940, he presented a
series of lectures on the Documentary Hypothesis and the composition of
the Pentateuch, later published in Hebrew and English. Here he summa-
rized, in highly polemical and oft en ironic rhetoric, his arguments against
the source theory as he had set them forth in his Italian work of six years
earlier. Again he asserted that the whole of Higher Criticism rests on the
existence of separate narrative sources; again he (mis)represented the Doc-
umentary Hypothesis as resting primarily on the use of the divine names;
again he claimed that once doubt can be cast on this foundation, the en-
tire structure collapses. Now, however, appreciating the spirit of the time
and place, he all but omitted his own conclusions, couching them in vague
and brief references and preferring instead to allow his listeners and read-
ers to reach their own conclusions. His Italian work, meanwhile, in which
his conclusions were spelled out, remained untranslated, unavailable to the
scholarly community especially in the Jewish world. Th ereaft er Cassuto
was widely believed to have succeeded not only in casting doubt on the
Wellhausenian approach but to have proven the traditional doctrine of a
Mosaic origin for the Torah. Undeservedly, Cassuto has since obtained a
posthumous reputation in certain Jewish circles for having convincingly
disproved Higher Criticism on purely scientifi c grounds — when in fact he
did nothing of the sort.
Cassuto’s method of dealing with the Torah narrative consisted mainly
of emphasizing the overall structure and logic of the narrative, while ex-
plaining the occasional discrepancy as stylistic variety or the result of the
amalgamation of oral tradition. He put this method to use in his commen-
taries on Genesis (chs. 1 – 12) and Exodus, in which, drawing on his compar-
ative studies, he investigated affi nities between Pentateuchal traditions and
the epic, poetic, and mythological traditions of Canaan, carefully pointing
out the similarities in order to stress the diff erences. Cassuto may be said to
have reinstated one of the scholarly theories that preceded the Documen-
tary Hypothesis, known as the Fragmentary Hypothesis, which was largely
discarded in the late eighteenth century, while at the same time anticipat-
ing the redaction criticism popularized in the latter third of the twentieth