(3.) A third principle of arrangement is the rhetoi-i- cal, of which the instances are fewer. Indeed it is very much confined to Deuteronomy, in which Moses appears as the great prophet of Israel. It was a corollary from the plan of these discourses that Moses should jiresent the topics in the form likeliest to tell upon the audience to whom he was giving a parting address; that he should group incidents and laws according to certain affinities or contrasts for the purpose of effect; that he should pass over some subjects in entire silence, should touch upon otliers lightly, and on another class still should enlarge at some length ; and that he should often ])resent them under peculiar aspects, in forms somewhat different from those in which we should liave i>ccn them if we had known them only from the earlier books. Yet such variety, subordinate in its amount, and existing for a special purpose, is in reality an addi'
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tional proof of the unity of the Pentateuch, and of the corapreliensivencss of the plan on which it has been written.
IV. Authority and Date of Composition. — This is pre- eminently the subject which calls for discussiou here, as it has licen largely disputed. The reply we give is the old and common one, namely, by Moses, during the wandering in the wilderness. We shall endeavor to state plainly and fairly the views and reasons both for and against it.
1. Hislorii of the Controversij. — (1.) Adverse Writers. — At different times suspicions have been entertained that the I'ciitateuch as we now have it is not the Pen- tateuch of the earliest age, and tliat the work must have undergone various modifications and additions before it assumed its present shape.
So early as the 2d century we find the author of the Clementine Homilies calling in question the authentici- ty of the Mosaic writings. According to him the Law was only given orally by Closes to the seventy elders, and not consigned to writing till after his death ; it subsequently underwent many changes, was corrupted more and more by means of the false prophets, and was especially tilled with erroneous anthropomorphic con- ceptions of God, and unworthy representations of the characters of the patriarchs (//o?«. ii, 38, 43 ; iii, 4, 47 ; Neandcr, Gnost. Sijsteme, p. 380). A statement of this kind, unsupported, and coming from a heretical, and therefore suspicious source, may seem of little moment; it is however remarkable, so far as it indicates an early tendency to cast off the received traditions respecting the books of Scripture ; while at the same time it is evident that this was done cautiously, because such an opinion respecting the Pentateuch was said to be for the advanced Christian only, and not for the simple and un- learned.
.Jerome, there can be little doubt, had seen some diffi- culty in supposing the Pentateuch to be altogether, in its present form, the work of Moses; for he observes {contra Ilelvid.) : " Sive Mosen dicere volueris auctorem Pentateuchi sive Esram ejusdem instauratorem operis," with reference apparently to the Jewish tradition on the subject. Aben-Ezra (f 11C7), in his Comment, on Deut. i, 1, threw out some doubts as to the Mosaic au- thorship of certain passages, such as Gen. xii, 6; Deut. iii, 10, 11 ; xxxi, 9, which he either explained as later interpolations, or left as mysteries which it was beyond his power to unravel. But for centuries the Penta- teuch was generally received in the Church without question as written by Closes. In the year 1651, how- ever, we find Hobbes writing : " Videtur Pentateuchus potius de Mose quam a IMose scriptus" {Leviathan, c. 33). Spinoza {Tract. Theol.-Polit. c. 8, 9, published in 1679) set himself boldly to controvert the received au- thorship of the Pentateuch. He alleged against it (1) later names of places, as Gen. xiv, 14 comp. with Judges xvili, 29; (2) the continuation of the history beyond the days of INIoses, Exod. xvi, 35 comp. with Josh, v, 12; (3) the statement in Gen. xxxvi.Sl, '"before there reigned any kinr^ over the children of Israel." Spinoza maintained that IMosos issued liis commands to the el- ders, that by them they were written down and com- municated to the people, and that later they were col- lected and assigned to suitable passages in Moses's life. He tonsidered that the Pentateuch was indebted to Ezra for the form in which it now appears. Other writers began to think that the book of Genesis was composed of written documents earlier than the time of Moses. So Vitringa {Observ. iSacr. i, 3), Le Clerc {De Script. Pentateuchi, § 11), and R. Simon {^Ilist. critique du V. T. lib. i, c. 7, Rotterdam, 1685). Ac- cording to the last of these writers. Genesis was com- posed of earlier documents, the laws of the Pentateuch were the work of iVIoses, and the greater portion of the history was written by the public scribe who is men- tioned in the book. Le Clerc supposed that the priest who, according to 2 Kings xvii, 27, was sent to instruct
the Samaritan colonists, was the author of the Penta- teuch.
It was not till the middle of the last century, how- ever, that the (juestion as to the authorship of the Pen- tateuch was handled with anything like a bold criti- cism. The first attempt was made by a layman, Avhose studies we might have supposed would scarcely have led him to such an investigation. In the year 1753 there appeared at Brussels a work entitled Conjectures sur les memoires orir/inaux, dont il paroit que Afoi/se s'est servi pour comjwser le Here de Genese. It was written in his 69th year by Astruc, doctor and profess- or of medicine in the Royal College at Paris, and court physician to Louis XIV. His critical eye had observed that throughout the book of Genesis, and as far as the Gth chapter of Exodus, traces Were to be found of two original documents, each characterized by a distinct use of the names of (iod ; the one by the name Elohim, and the other by the name Jehovah. Besides these two principal documents, he supposed Moses to have made use of ten others in the composition of the earlier part of his work. Astruc was followed by several German writers on the path which he had traced , by Jerusalem, in his Letters on the 3fosaic \Vritin(/s and Philosophy/ ; b_v Schultens, in his Dissertatio qua disquiritur, unde Moses res in libra Geneseos descriptas didicerit ; and with considerable learning and critical acumen by Ilgen (VrJcunden des Jerusolemischen TempelinThivs, 1^'' Theil, Halle, 1798) and Eichhom {Einleitunf/ in d. A. T.).