Judaism when was the torah written

And the Mesopotamian creation account known as Enuma Elish is also anonymous. Ilimilku was a scribe who copied this text, but he did not author it. Similarly, the Middle Kingdom Egyptian Prophecy of Neferti contains a number of first-person quotations, but Neferti is referred to in the third person, thus, not the author of this tremendous piece of literature.

Along those same lines, you can read the canonical New Testament gospels Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John from beginning to end and nowhere in any of them will you find a statement declaring authorship. That is, these too are anonymous the names that we use for the gospels are second century in origin, and not from the gospels themselves. In short, the Pentateuch is in pretty good company, as many of the great masterpieces of the ancient Near Eastern world are anonymous.

Beautiful, deeply meaningful, and moving, but anonymous. During my youth, I was taught that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. I also believe that there was an exodus of Israelite slaves from Egypt. But I cannot embrace the notion that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. It is just not a Pentateuchal claim—and is in fact contravened by evidence in the Pentateuch itself. I think the case could be made that this language is reversed.

But I suspect that the reader sees the point that I am making. Thus, I have friends in the field who consider me liberal and I have friends in the field who consider me conservative; this is not because my own positions have changed, but it reflects where these colleagues feel they are standing relative to me.

As for the Pentateuch, my own view is that source criticism is alive and well. Please support us. But in the real world of productive work, the technical term is friend, not foe. It facilitates things. But technical terms often have a dogged persistence, and so this one is arguably with us to stay. Soulen and R. Kendall Soulen, Handbook of Biblical Criticism , 4 rd ed. Louisville: WJK, Wellhausen believed that there were four major strata of material in the Pentateuch, that is, four major sources.

Wellhausen died about a century ago but because his work was so detailed, so anchored in the Pentateuchal materials themselves, it became, and continues to be, a touchstone.

For Archer, it was a lightning rod. Colson and G. See especially chapter eight of this work. The book is preserved in Geez; most of the original Hebrew has been lost, though parts of it were found preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls in Qumran. Kugel in Outside the Bible vol. Louis H. Feldman, James L. Kugel, and Lawrence H. Schiffman; Philadelphia: JPS, , Judah he-Hasid or R. This is the one case in which ibn Ezra disputes the point. Nevertheless, Judah the Pious or his son, Moshe Zaltman, who wrote the commentary agrees with Yitzhaki here; see his gloss on Deut Note also the volume edited by Raymond F.

Person, Jr. Indeed, I stopped using these terms a few years ago. After all, labels tend to divide people and they become obstructions to discussion rather than a means of building bridges for dialogue. Therefore, I think that we should just focus on the data, let the chips fall where they may, and forget about labels. I think that this would be the best way forward. Moreover, because the great Raymond Westbrook now of blessed memory of Johns Hopkins University was my teacher of Biblical and Cuneiform Law, I have always read with interest various contributions to the field of Pentateuch and ancient Near Eastern law.

And because of my work on ancient inscriptions from the world of the Bible, I have been involved in subjects revolving around scribal education, writing, and literacy in First Temple Israel and Judah. For this reason, the subject of plausible dates for, and the writing of, the earliest books of the Bible is the very essence of my wheelhouse. Jan C. Gertz, Bernard M.

Christopher A. He holds an M. I would like to receive new essays When published Before Shabbat. Torah Portion. This Week's Torah Portion.

Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers Deuteronomy. Rosh Hashanah Rosh Hashanah. Yom Kippur Yom Kippur. Sukkot Sukkot. Simchat Torah Simchat Torah. Chanukah Chanukah. Purim Purim. Passover Passover. Shavuot Shavuot. Shabbat Shabbat. Yom Yerushalayim Yom Yerushalayim. Instead, you follow the text with a pointer, called a Yad. The scrolls are kept covered with fabric, and often ornamented with silver crowns on the handles of the scrolls and a silver breastplate on the front.

The scrolls are kept in a cabinet in the synagogue called an "ark," as in Ark of the Covenant, not as in Noah's Ark. The words are different and unrelated in Hebrew.

Noah's ark and also the ark that Moses was placed in are called in Hebrew teyvat ship. I was taught that the "Ark" of the Covenant and the ark in synagogue are an acrostic of "aron kodesh" holy cabinet , but others have told me that it is merely an archaic English word derived from the Latin arca cabinet.

The Torah scrolls that we read from in synagogue are unpointed text, with no vowels or musical notes, so the ability to read a passage from a scroll is a valuable skill, and usually requires substantial advance preparation reviewing the passage in a text with points.

See Hebrew Alphabet for more on pointed and unpointed texts. Jewish scriptures are sometimes bound in a form that corresponds to the division into weekly readings called parshiyot in Hebrew.

Scriptures bound in this way are generally referred to as a chumash. The word "chumash" comes from the Hebrew word meaning five, and refers to the five books of the Torah. Sometimes, a chumash is simply refers to a collection of the five books of the Torah.

But often, a chumash contains the entire first five books, divided up by the weekly parshiyot, with the haftarah portion inserted after each week's parshah. In addition to the written scriptures we have an "Oral Torah," a tradition explaining what the above scriptures mean and how to interpret them and apply the Laws.

Orthodox Jews believe G-d taught the Oral Torah to Moses , and he taught it to others, down to the present day. This tradition was maintained only in oral form until about the 2d century C.

Over the next few centuries, additional commentaries elaborating on the Mishnah were written down in Jerusalem and Babylon. These additional commentaries are known as the Gemara. The Gemara and the Mishnah together are known as the Talmud. This was completed in the 5th century C. The Babylonian Talmud is more comprehensive, and is the one most people mean if they just say "the Talmud" without specifying which one. There have been additional commentaries on the Talmud by such noted Jewish scholars as Rashi and Rambam.

Adin Steinsaltz recently completed a new edition of the Talmud, with his own commentary supplementing the Mishnah, Gemara, and Rashi commentaries. The Talmud is not easy to read. It reminds me of someone else's class notes for a college lecture you never attended. There are often gaps in the reasoning where it is assumed that you already know what they are talking about, and concepts are often expressed in a sort of shorthand. The two accounts are interwoven, as we see from the morphing name of God, which switches back and forth between Elohim and Yahweh from passage to passage.

But the merger of the two stories is not seamless otherwise too. Even more strikingly, perhaps, we are told twice that the flood covered the earth: " And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters " followed by " And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered.

If it isn't concrete evidence that there was more than one writer, it's still an impressively smoking gun. Meet the writers: The Yahwist, the Elohist, priests, and the Deuteronomist.

Ultimately the German scholars, led by Julius Wellhausen, came up with "the Documentary Hypothesis," postulating that the Pentateuch was compiled from of four earlier books long lost in time, which were merged by an editor dubbed the Redactor.

The scholars gave each of these four books or writers a name: the Yahwist, the Elohist, the Priestly writers, and the Deuteronomist. The Yahwist was characterized by using the Tetragrammaton "Yahweh" as the name of God. The Elohist writers, who called God "Elohim", were Israelite priests. The Priestly writers were evidently temple priests Judeans serving in Solomon's Temple and their decedents, who dwelled on rite and sacrifice, and evidently engaged in battles over their status as well.

And last but not least, "the Deuteronomist" is called so because he wrote Deuteronomy. Incidentally, the first account of creation was evidently written by a Priestly source, the second by a Yahwist. Scholars bitterly disagree over who wrote what and which texts are truly ancient and which were added later, as certainly much of the biblical sources surely consist of layers of additions and were not completely written by one single person.

The Elohist texts, the oldest in the bible. Israel and Judah were related Iron Age kingdoms whose residents practiced a sort of early Judaism, which was still a far cry from the rigid monotheistic religion we know today. Archaeology tells us that the Kingdom of Israel was the greater regional power, while Judah was a backwater vassal kingdom.

Following Israel's subjection, many of the Israelite elite moved to the Judean capital - Jerusalem. These Israelite refugees brought their sacred texts with them: the Elohist texts, which are probably the oldest in the Torah. These texts were probably written by court scribes in Semairah, the capital of the Kingdom of Israel, or by priests in one of the kingdom's important cultic sites such as Shilo. The Elohist source focuses on locations in the Kingdom of Israel and on the Israelite heroes Moses and Jacob, whom the Israelites saw as their ancestors.

It is not known whether the ancient Judeans also thought Moses and Jacob were their forefathers, but after the "Israelization" of Judah, they probably "adopted" their patriarchy too. With this influx of culture coming in from the Kingdom of Israel, the Judean priestly cast had to come up with their own narrative about Judah with its own mythical leaders and traditions.

This is where the Yahwist source comes from, though at least some may have been written by Judean scribes before the destruction of the kingdom of Israel. Whatever the case, it was shortly after this destruction that the two texts, the Yahwist and the Elohist, were merged by scribes into a single book. The next portion of the Torah to be written is Deuteronomy, and this time we have a lot more information on its author.

We even know his name: Shaphan though some think the author was the prophet Jeremiah. This scribe may have single-handedly changed the entire course of history by leading the king to profoundly change Jewish worship.