An influential school of modern critics has come to conclusions which are difficult to reconcile with this external testimony. Instead of the Pentateuch it offers us a Hexateuch, the Book of Joshua being added to those of Moses, and of the origin and growth of this Hexateuch it professes to be able to give a minute and mathematically exact account. Very little, if any of it, we are told, goes back to the period of Moses, the larger part of the work having been composed or compiled in the age of the Exile. It is true, the theories of criticism have changed from time to time; what was formerly held, for instance, to be the oldest portion of the Hexateuch being now regarded as the latest; but each generation of critics has been equally confident that its own literary analysis was mathematically correct. At present the hypothetical scheme most in favour is as follows.
The earliest part of the Hexateuch, at all events in its existing form, is a document distinguished by the use of the name Yahveh, and sometimes therefore termed Yahvistic or Jehovistic, but more usually designated by the symbol J. The Yahvist is supposed to have been a Jew who made use of older materials, and lived in the ninth century B.C. His work begins with ‘the second’ account of the Creation, in the middle of the fourth verse of the second chapter of Genesis, and the last trace of it is to be found in the story of the death and burial of Moses at the end of Deuteronomy. His style is said to be naïve and lively, and his conceptions of the Deity grossly anthropomorphic.
Next in order to the Yahvist comes the Second Elohist (symbolised by the letter E), whose title is derived from the period, not very far distant, in the history of criticism, when what is now known as the Priestly Code was assigned to a First Elohist. The Elohist is characterised by the use of the word Elohim, ‘God,’ rather than Yahveh, and the critics have discovered in him a native of the northern kingdom. To him belong the ‘Ten Words’ which represent the original form of the Ten Commandments, as well as the history of Joseph. He is said to have written with a certain theological tendency, to which is due his predilection for introducing dreams and angels into his narrative. His date is ascribed to the eighth century B.C., and the combination of his narrative with that of the Yahvist (J.E.) produced a composite work to which the name of Prophetic or Pre-Deuteronomic Redaction has been applied. The Redactor endeavoured to reconcile the contradictions between the two narratives by various harmonistic expedients; his success was not great, and the nineteenth century critic accordingly believes himself able not only to separate the two original documents, but to point out the additions of the Redactor as well.
Contemporaneous with this work of redaction was the appearance of a new book, the so-called Book of the Covenant. This was of small dimensions; at any rate, all that remains of it is contained in a few chapters of Exodus (xx. 24-xxiii. 33, xxiv. 3-8). It was added, however, to the Prophetic Redaction, and the Mosaic Law for the first time was introduced to the world.
But now appeared a book which was of momentous consequences for both the history and the religion of Judah. This was the book of Deuteronomy, or rather the middle portion of the book of Deuteronomy (chaps. xii-xxvi.), the rest of the book being a subsequent addition. This abbreviated Deuteronomy, it is assumed, is ‘the book of the Law’ which Hilkiah the high priest declared he had ‘found in the house of the Lord’ in the reign of Josiah, and it is further assumed that the word ‘found’ is intended to cover a ‘pious fraud.’ The Egyptian inscriptions mention books of early date which had been similarly ‘found’ in the temples, and some of these books really seem to have been forgeries of a later date.[[126]] Modern criticism has determined that Hilkiah and his friends imitated the example of the Egyptian priests in the case of Deuteronomy. At all events, the results were instantaneous and revolutionary. The king and his court believed that they had before them the actual commands of their God to the great lawgiver of Israel, and the Jewish religion underwent accordingly a radical reform. Nor did the effect of the supposed discovery end here. Like the forged Decretals in mediæval Europe, the book of Deuteronomy had a continuous and wide-reaching influence upon Jewish thought. Its teaching was matured during the Exile, and out of it grew that form of Jewish religion of which Christianity was the heir. The book of Deuteronomy (symbolised by D) in the first as well as in the second or enlarged edition belongs to the latter part of the seventh century B.C. But the Hexateuch was still far from complete. During the Exile a book of the Law, now contained in Lev. xvii.-xxvi., was written and promulgated, the author, it appears, having been incited to his work by Ezekiel’s ideal of a theocratic state. This book of the Law was followed by a far more ambitious production, the ‘Priestly Code’ (generally known as P, and not unfrequently called the ‘Grundschrift’ by German writers). The Priestly Code embodies what earlier critics knew as the work of the First Elohist; it not only in the name of Moses shapes the ritual and religion of Israel to the advantage of the priests, but it attempts to trace the history of the revelation which resulted in that religion back to the Creation itself. The name of Elohim is again a distinguishing feature in the narrative, which is described by the ‘critics’ as formal and pedantic, as affectedly archaistic, and as disfigured by a strong theological tendency. Wellhausen and Stade assure us that it transforms the patriarchs into pious Jews of the Exile. And yet it was just this narrative, which we are now told bears so plainly on its face the marks of its late age and sacerdotal character, that hardly twenty years ago was declared by the critics themselves to be the oldest portion of the Hexateuch!
By this time the Hexateuch was nearly ready to become the Pentateuch, which should be read by Ezra before the Jewish community as ‘the law of God’ (Nem. viii. 8), and be accepted by the hostile Samaritans as alone authoritative among the sacred books of Israel. All that was needed further was to combine the existing books into a whole, smoothing over the inconsistencies between them and supplying links of connection. The ‘final Redactor’ who accomplished this task lived shortly after the Exile, and has been identified with Ezra by some of the critics. Whoever he was, he was naturally more in harmony with the spirit and ideas of the Priestly Code than he was with those of the Prophetic Redaction, or even of Deuteronomy; indeed, it is hard to understand why he should have troubled himself about the Prophetic Redaction at all. Between the Jewish religion of the days of Asa or Jehoshaphat and that of the period after the Exile a great gulf was fixed.
It is clear that if the modern literary analysis of the Pentateuch is justified, it is useless to look to the five books of Moses for authentic history. There is nothing in them which can be ascribed with certainty to the age of Moses, nothing which goes back even to the age of the Judges. Between the Exodus out of Egypt and the composition of the earliest portion of the so-called Mosaic Law there would have been a dark and illiterate interval of several centuries. Not even tradition could be trusted to span them. For the Mosaic age, and still more for the age before the Exodus, all that we read in the Old Testament would be historically valueless.
Such criticism, therefore, as accepts the results of ‘the literary analysis’ of the Hexateuch acts consistently in stamping as mythical the whole period of Hebrew history which precedes the settlement of the Israelitish tribes in Canaan. Doubt is thrown even on their residence in Egypt and subsequent escape from ‘the house of bondage.’ Moses himself becomes a mere figure of mythland, a hero of popular imagination whose sepulchre was unknown because it had never been occupied. In order to discredit the earlier records of the Israelitish people, there is no need of indicating contradictions—real or otherwise—in the details of the narratives contained in them, of enlarging upon their chronological difficulties, or of pointing to the supernatural elements they involve; the late dates assigned to the medley of documents which have been discovered in the Hexateuch are sufficient of themselves to settle the question.[[127]]
The dates are largely, if not altogether, dependent on the assumption that Hebrew literature is not older than the age of David. A few poems like the Song of Deborah may have been handed down orally from an earlier period, but readers and writers, it is assumed, there were none. The use of writing for literary purposes was coeval with the rise of the monarchy. The oldest inscription in the letters of the Phœnician alphabet yet discovered is only of the ninth century B.C., and the alphabet would have been employed for monumental purposes long before it was applied to the manufacture of books. As Wolf’s theory of the origin and late date of the Homeric Poems avowedly rested on the belief that the literary use of writing in Greece was of late date, so too the theory of the analysts of the Hexateuch rests tacitly on the belief that the Israelites of the age of Moses and the Judges were wholly illiterate. Moses did not write the Pentateuch because he could not have done so.
The huge edifice of modern Pentateuchal criticism is thus based on a theory and an assumption. The theory is that of ‘the literary analysis’ of the Hexateuch, the assumption that a knowledge of writing in Israel was of comparatively late date. The theory, however, is philological, not historical. The analysis is philological rather than literary, and depends entirely on the occurrence and use of certain words and phrases. Lists have been drawn up of the words and phrases held to be peculiar to the different writers between whom the Hexateuch is divided, and the portion of the Hexateuch to be assigned to each is determined accordingly. That it is sometimes necessary to cut a verse in two, somewhat to the injury of the sense, matters but little; the necessities of the theory require the sacrifice, and the analyst looks no further. Great things grow out of little, and the mathematical minuteness with which the Hexateuch is apportioned among its numerous authors, and the long lists of words and idioms by which the apportionment is supported, all have their origin in Astruc’s separation of the book of Genesis into two documents, in one of which the name of Yahveh is used, while in the other it is replaced by Elohim.[[128]]