Ask who wrote the first five books of the Bible and most people give one name. Moses. Jewish tradition calls Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy the Torah, the teaching of Moses. Christians call them the books of Moses. The New Testament talks the same way. When Jesus quotes the commandment about parents, he puts Moses' name on it.
For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.’
Mark 7:10
The books themselves show Moses writing.
Then Moses wrote down this law and gave it to the priests, the sons of Levi, who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord, and to all the elders of Israel.
Deuteronomy 31:9
So the tradition has deep roots. Now turn to the last page of Deuteronomy.
The last page
Then Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab, at the Lord’s command. He buried him in a valley in the land of Moab, opposite Beth-peor, but no one knows his burial place to this day.
Deuteronomy 34:5-6
Moses dies. He is buried. And no one knows where the grave is "to this day," a phrase that looks back from some later time. Four verses later the book adds a line that looks back even further.
Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.
Deuteronomy 34:10
"Never since" needs enough time to pass for later prophets to come and be compared with him.
Readers noticed early
This is not a modern find. Long ago, a few rabbis wondered how Moses could have written about his own death and burial. In the Middle Ages, some Jewish and Christian scholars said Joshua, Moses' successor, probably wrote those last verses. Others answered that Moses was a prophet, so he could have known by revelation how his life would end. People who hold Moses' authorship as a matter of faith have answers like these for each puzzle, and many hold it today.
In the 1600s the questions piled up. The philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza, and a French priest named Richard Simon, collected more of them. Simon pointed to this line from Genesis:
These are the kings who reigned in the land of Edom before any king reigned over the Israelites.
Genesis 36:31
Whoever wrote that knew Israel had kings. Israel's kings came centuries after Moses. Simon also noticed that the books are not written in Moses' own voice. Apart from his speeches, they call him "he," and the text never says that Moses wrote all of it. Hobbes took a middle position: Moses wrote much of it, but not all.
Two names for God
The next clue came from a man defending Moses. In 1753 Jean Astruc, a French court doctor, saw that Genesis calls God by two names, Elohim ("God") and Yahweh ("the Lord"), and that each tends to keep to its own passages. He decided Moses had two older documents in front of him and copied from both. Later scholars dropped his conclusion and kept his method.
The names matter for a reason. In Exodus, God tells Moses that the earlier generations never knew this name.
God also spoke to Moses and said to him, “I am the Lord. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as God Almighty, but by my name ‘The Lord’ I did not make myself known to them.
Exodus 6:2-3
Yet back in Genesis, people "began to invoke the name of the Lord" in the days of Adam's grandson (Genesis 4:26), and Abraham does the same (Genesis 12:8).
The Documentary Hypothesis, in plain words
In 1878 a German professor, Julius Wellhausen, gave the theory its classic form. It is called the Documentary Hypothesis. It says the five books were woven from four older written sources, each known by a letter:
- J, the Yahwist, who uses "the Lord" from the start
- E, the Elohist, who uses "God" until Moses
- D, the Deuteronomist, found mostly in Deuteronomy
- P, the Priestly writer, with a love of worship, dates and family lists
Editors joined them over centuries. The flood story is the classic exhibit, with two animal counts and two boarding scenes, and we walked through those doubled verses here. In this model P had the last word, so the Priestly writing opens the Torah with Genesis 1 and supplies most of Deuteronomy 34.
One thing to keep in mind: none of the four documents has ever been found. They are rebuilt from the text we have.
Where scholars argue now
The four-document model led the field for about a century. Since the late twentieth century it has been pushed on from several sides.
Some scholars doubt E ever stood on its own; it survives only in pieces. Some date J far later than the age of David and Solomon, to the 500s BC or after. Some will only name two layers they can separate with confidence: P, and everything that is not P. Others think the early material began as separate stories, such as one about the first humans, one about Jacob and one about Moses, which were later linked and filled out. And some defend a renewed version of the classic model against all of these. Scholars in Europe and North America tend to lean different ways.
What they share is the starting point. Almost all scholars agree that the five books rest on distinct sources from different periods. The line between the Priestly writing and the rest is one of the most settled results in the field. The argument is over how to map the sources, and it is a lively one.
So the tradition names Moses. The books show Moses writing down the law, and they end with his death told by someone looking back on it. Readers have held those two things together in more than one way, and they still do.
For further exploration
Three things to read with the text open:
- Read Deuteronomy 34 straight through. Mark every phrase that looks back from a later time.
- Read Exodus 6:2-3, then Genesis 4:26 and 12:8. Ask when people first knew the name "the Lord."
- Read Genesis 1:1 to 2:3, then Genesis 2:4-25. Write down the name for God in each.
Sources
- Mark 7:10; Deuteronomy 31:9; 34:5-6; 34:10; Genesis 36:31; Exodus 6:2-3; Genesis 4:26; 12:8 (NRSVue)
- Michael D. Coogan and Cynthia R. Chapman, The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures, chapter 4, "The Formation of the Pentateuch"
- The New Oxford Annotated Bible, introduction to Genesis, on authorship and composition
- Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?, on the tradition of Mosaic authorship and the sources of the Pentateuch