Pentateuch is considered one of the most influential religious texts in both Judaism and Christianity. Old and New Testaments attribute its authorship to Moses; however, critical scholarship, which has been developing for the past two centuries, is making both fair and biased assumptions on the Pentateuch’s origin, date, and authorship. The nature of divine miracles which were described in the text is also a subject of a heated debate. Rational thinking and scientific reasoning cannot justify some of the crucial points described in the Pentateuch. It is necessary to examine the critical analyses of the scripture to determine which controversial points have valid arguments and which are based on bias and contain logical fallacies.
Critical Scholarship is a study of Historical Books which tries to clarify some of the controversial points connected with any religious text. Contrary to popular belief, critical scholarship should not be associated with criticism and is not negative in nature. Due to the complexity of the Bible and the sheer variety of genres and books it encompasses, it is challenging to determine some of the crucial details of these texts’ origins. Critical scholars utilize linguistic methods to analyze the scriptures and help others interpret and understand them better. These methods focus on exploring the text, its form, genre, structure, the author, and possible editors (Hill and Walton 572). Historical events which happened simultaneously with the creation of the text and potential sources or older editions that the scripture derives information from are also considered.
However, the process of critical study may lead to logical fallacies, biased attitudes, and severe misinterpretations of the original text. Due to the nature of linguistic methods involved in the study, the final result may contain detrimental errors. There are multiple reasons for why these mistakes frequently happen (Madkour 103). The first and most prevalent reason is the age of the scripture. It is virtually impossible for scholars to analyze the text’s original version to come to concrete conclusions. The second reason is the continuous translation and multiple editions of the text. Different languages have terms that sometimes do not have direct equivalents; hence, making fair assumptions about the original meaning of the text complicated. The translator had to either explain the implication of the phrase or replace it with something that inadequately represents the information. The third reason is the mistakes which were made while copying the scriptures. The manual rewriting of the text has led to both grammatical and lexical errors appearing in the copy, which made subsequent copies flawed from the beginning.
One of the crucial topics of the Pentateuch’s critical study is its authorship. The canonical explanation supported by Hebrew and Christian denominations regards Moses as the sole writer of the Pentateuch. It highlights the divine nature of the text that was supposedly passed onto Moses by God and provides arguments of later mentions of the scripture as well as the writer. He was mentioned on multiple occasions in both New and Old Testaments as the creator of the Pentateuch.
However, during the epoch of Enlightenment, a new hypothesis was introduced, suggesting that Moses was not the only author of the scripture, but had several other editors working on the text after him. This theory emerged from the examination of the scripture’s structure. The analyses highlighted the questionable continuity of the narrative that involved historical events from different time periods, repetitions of the same fragments, often containing different versions of the same event and different terminology (Habel 22). These points are valid because it is impossible to exclude the possibility of future generations editing the original text to clarify historical events and figures involved in them. However, different vocabulary can be attributed to the translation and grammatical or lexical errors resulting from excessive copying of the original text.
Further analysis of the Pentateuch’s structural, stylistic, and linguistic features has led several critical scholars to exclude Moses as the author of the scripture and attribute its creation to multiple people. It also implied that there must have been different sources of information which those writers used while creating the Pentateuch. Stylistic and source analysis has proven that glaring inconsistencies are present in the text. A good example of this is two different names for God: Elohim and Yahweh (Hill and Walton 579). However, it can be attributed to the nature of Abrahamic religions, because Islam has retained the tradition of having multiple names for a single deity. The probability of God having various names in the early Christian or Hebrew tradition is likely.
Furthermore, it is worth mentioning that defining the time period when the scripture was written is problematic, which caused some scholars to believe that the Pentateuch was created at a later date. This theory implies that a group of editors collected Hebrew folklore stories, legends, and traditions and arranged them in a written form during the Babylonian exile (Hill and Walton 582). Even though the argument may seem valid, it is impossible to tie the Pentateuch’s creation with this specific time period because Babylonian exile is not mentioned in the scripture.
In conclusion, a critical study provides a better interpretation and helps understand the Historical Books’ origins, relying on linguistic methods. Multiple opinions exist on the subject of the Pentateuch’s authorship and sources, ranging from a canonical single-author creation through divine intervention to the work of various editors arranging Hebrew folklore into a single text. However, it is genuinely impossible to provide valid evidence which supports a certain viewpoint making it the only viable option.
Works Cited
Hill, Andrew, and Walton, John. A Survey of the Old Testament, Zondervan Academic, 2010.
Habel, Norman. “Literary Criticism of the Old Testament.” Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971, pp. 18-27.
Madkour, Magda. “Linguistic Levels of Translation: A Generic Exploration of Translation Difficulties in Literary Textual Corpus.” International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature, vol. 5, no. 6, 2016, pp. 99-118.