Mosaic authorship is the traditional ascription to Moses of the authorship of the five books of the Torah or Pentateuch - Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Moses with the Tablets, 1659, by Rembrandt This article is about the Biblical figure. ... “Tora” redirects here. ... Look up Pentateuch in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Genesis (‎, Greek: Γένεσις, meaning birth, creation, cause, beginning, source or origin) is the first book of the Torah, the Tanakh, and the Old Testament. ... Exodus is the second book of the Torah, the Tanakh, and the Old Testament. ... Look up number in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Leviticus is the third book of the Hebrew Bible, also the third book in the Torah (five books of Moses). ... Deuteronomy is the fifth book of the Hebrew Bible. ...

The tradition is first found explicitly expressed in the Talmud, a collection of Jewish traditions and exegesis dating from the last centuries BC to the second half of the 1st millenium AD, but there are indications that the authors of the later books of the Hebrew bible already accepted the idea that Moses had written the Torah. The Talmudic writers advanced several versions of just how Moses came to write the Torah, ranging from direct dictation by God to a less direct divine inspiration stretching over the forty years in the wilderness. Later rabbis and Christian scholars noticed some difficulties with the idea of Mosaic authorship of the entire Torah, notably the fact that the book of Deuteronomy describes Moses' death. The later versions of the tradition therefore held that some portions of the Torah were added by others - the death of Moses in particular was ascribed to Joshua. The first page of the Vilna Edition of the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Berachot, folio 2a. ... Deuteronomy is the fifth book of the Hebrew Bible. ... Joshua, Jehoshuah or Yehoshua. ...

The tradition was accepted with very little discussion by both Jews and Christians until the 17th century, when the rise of secular scholarship and the associated willingness to subject even the bible to the test of reason led to its rejection by mainstream biblical scholars. Today the idea of Mosaic authorship is held only by conservative Orthodox Jews and fundamentalist Christians.

Origins and nature of the tradition

The Torah itself makes no incontrovertible statement of authorship. The ultimate origins of the tradition are probably to be found in a number of Torah verses which do make explicit reference to Moses receiving instructions from God to write down certain words. Notable among these is Deuteronomy 31:9, 24-26, describing how Moses writes "this law" on a scroll and lays it beside the ark of the Covenant.^[1] As with similar passages, it is not clear that these verses were meant to refer to anything wider than their immediate context (in the case of Deuteronomy 31, the law code described in the preceding chapters). A late 19th-century artists conception of the Ark of the Covenant, employing a Renaissance cassone for the Ark and cherubim as latter-day Christian angels The Ark of the Covenant (ארון הברית in Hebrew: aron habrit) is described in the Hebrew Bible as a sacred container, wherein rested the stone...

Similar passages include, for example, Exodus 17:14, "And Jehovah said unto Moses, Write this for a memorial in a book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua: that I will utterly blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven;" Exodus 24:4, "And Moses wrote all the words of Jehovah, and rose up early in the morning, and builded an altar under the mount, and twelve pillars, according to the twelve tribes of Israel;" and Exodus 34:27, "And Jehovah said unto Moses, Write thou these words: for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee and with Israel."^[2]

Joshua,^[3] Kings,^[4] Chronicles,^[5] Ezra^[6] and Nehemiah^[7] all contain verses implying belief in Mosaic authorship of the Torah, indicating that the tradition existed at the latest by the early post-Exilic period. It was certainly well established by the time of the Talmud, the authors of which held that Moses received the Torah during the forty years of wandering in the wilderness. The early Christian church with its Jewish roots accepted the Torah, and Mosaic authorship, as part of its own spiritual inheritance. The Book of Joshua is the sixth book in both the Hebrew Tanakh and the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. ... Book of Kings may refer to: The Books of Kings in the Bible. ... The Book of Chronicles is a book in the Hebrew Bible (also see Old Testament). ... The Book of Ezra is a book of the Bible in the Old Testament and Hebrew Tanakh. ... The Book of Nehemiah is a book of the Hebrew Bible, known to Jews as the Tanach and to Christians as the Old Testament. ... The first page of the Vilna Edition of the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Berachot, folio 2a. ...

Later development of the tradition

The 1st century AD writers Philo and Josephus both held that Moses had described his own death in Deuteronomy, but the more usual view advanced in the Talmud (a compilation of commentary and explanation compiled by Jewish rabbis largely during the first five centuries of the 1st millenium AD) was that this passage was written by Joshua. Until the 17th century AD, Mosaic authorship was an assumption, not a subject of discussion.A few later rabbis - and even fewer Christian scholars - questioned Moses's authorship of other verses as well, but none questioned the belief that the bulk of the Torah was by him. Philo (20 BC - 50 AD), known also as Philo of Alexandria and as Philo Judaeus And as Yedidia, was a Hellenized Jewish philosopher born in Alexandria, Egypt. ... A fanciful representation of Flavius Josephus, in an engraving in William Whistons translation of his works Josephus (37 – sometime after 100 AD/CE)[1], who became known, in his capacity as a Roman citizen, as Flavius Josephus[2], was a 1st-century Jewish historian and apologist of priestly and... The first page of the Vilna Edition of the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Berachot, folio 2a. ... Joshua, Jehoshuah or Yehoshua. ...

This changed with the Reformation and the European Enlightenment, when 17th and 18th century philosophers and scholars such as Thomas Hobbes, Benedict Spinoza, and Jean Astruc (a doctor) undermined the bases of Mosaic authorship, and by the 19th century the idea was no longer entertained by mainstream academic scholarship. In the closing decades of the 19th century Julius Wellhausen, summarising a century of such scholar4ship, put forward the Documentary hypothesis on the origins of the Torah, and this became universally accepted for almost a hundred years. Since the late 1960s the hypothesis has been increasingly challenged, but not to the benefit of the idea of Mosaic authorship, which today is held only by Orthodox Jews and conservative Evangelical Christians. The Protestant Reformation was a movement which began in the 16th century as a series of attempts to reform the Roman Catholic Church, but ended in division and the establishment of new institutions, most importantly Lutheranism, Reformed churches, and Anabaptists. ... The Age of Enlightenment refers to either the eighteenth century in European philosophy, or the longer period including the seventeenth century and the Age of Reason. ... “Hobbes” redirects here. ... Baruch Spinoza Benedictus de Spinoza (November 24, 1632 _ February 21, 1677), named Baruch Spinoza by his synagogue elders and known as Bento de Spinoza or Bento dEspiñoza in the community in which he grew up. ... Jean Astruc (Sauves, Auvergne, March 19, 1684 - Paris, May 5, 1766) was a famous professor of medicine at Montpellier and Paris, who wrote the first great treatise on syphilis and venereal diseases, and with a small anonymously published book played a fundamental part in the origins of critical textual analysis... Julius Wellhausen (May 17, 1844 - January 17, 1918), was a German biblical scholar and Orientalist. ... A relational diagram describing the various versions postulated by the biblical documentary hypothesis. ... Look up Evangelical in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

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