Pentateuch Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Pentateuch - Essay Example â€Å"For most of the first eighteen centuries of the Christian era, Pentateuch authorship was considered pretty much settled matter. Most people accepted the view that the Pentateuch was composed by Moses, the great law giver and deliverer of Israel from Egyptian bondage.†(King, 2001)Later intellectuals intervened and did the obvious. Outside the faith based conservative seminaries and churches, the scholars held the view that Moses was not the author of the books and they are compilations of works of many writers over an extended period of time. Jean Astruc (1684-1766) was a renowned Professor of medicine at Montpellier and Paris. Apart from his treatise on medicine, he wrote a book that was published anonymously relating to a critical textual analysis of works to scripture. He discussed the fundamental part in the origins. According to him, the Genesis was composed by using many sources and manuscript traditions. This approach is known as The Documentary Hypothesis. Most of the universities teach in the religious studies that Pentateuch is a composite work relating to four literary strands. These strands are identified by letters, J, E, D and P. Each syllable represents a document or the source that has been incorporated in to the Bible. Documentary theory and the Graf-Wellhausen theory, support this approach. According to this view, the letter "J" stands for the Yahwist ("J" from the German Jahweh) narrative, coming from the period of the early Jewish monarchy, about 950 B.C. "E" stands for the Elohist narrative from the region of the Northern Kingdom dating from about 750 B.C. "D" is best represented by the book of Deuteronomy and is said to have originated in the Southern Kingdom about 650 B.C. or later. And finally, "P" is the priestly document that comes from the period after the fall of Israel in 587 B.C. The composition of Pentateuch reached its consolidated form by about 400 B. C. Some