Who Wrote the Books of Moses?

For over 2,000 years, Jews and Christians believed Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. Then scholars claimed to uncover four hidden sources stitched together centuries later. In this episode, Jimmy Akin unpacks the famous JEDP documentary hypothesis, shows where it falls apart, explains the Catholic Church’s actual freedom on the question, and reveals why the evidence points to a much earlier origin than the critics claim. Who really wrote the Books of Moses—and how can we know?

TRANSCRIPT: 

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For more than 2,000 years, many Jews and Christians have thought that the first five books of the Bible were written by Moses.

Then scholars started analyzing those books and claimed to find hidden sources stitched together underneath.

So who really wrote the books of Moses . . . and how would we even know?

Let’s get into it!

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The Books of Moses

The first 5 books of the Bible—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—are commonly called the 5 Books of Moses.

They also go by 2 other names.

The first is the Hebrew word Torah, which means Instruction, Law.

The second is the Greek-derived word Pentateuch, which means the Five Books.

So the 3 names—the Books of Moses, the Torah, and the Pentateuch—all point to the same writings.

But why are they linked to Moses?

 

The Role of Moses

The answer is that Moses plays an enormous role in these books.

He’s introduced as a baby, in Exodus, and he grows up to become a great leader and lawgiver for the Hebrew people.

Through the power of God, he brings them out of bondage in Egypt, delivers God’s law to them, and guides them through 40 years of wandering in the desert.

He takes them right up to the brink of entering the Promised Land, but God doesn’t allow Moses himself to enter.

Instead, at the end of Deuteronomy—shortly before his death—Moses is allowed to see the Promised Land from a mountain but not go in.

So Moses dominates 4 of the 5 books, and since they form one connected story, it was natural for people to speak of them all as the books of Moses.

 

Did Moses Write Them?

Until relatively recently, most Jews and Christians have assumed that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch.

That would mean they were written in the 1200s B.C., which is when the evidence indicates Moses lived.

But here’s something surprising.

Despite the fact that Moses figures so prominently in these books—and that they quote him constantly, even giving us long speeches by him—none of the books actually say that they were written by Moses.

They simply don’t identify an author.

And they contain parts that Moses could not have written.

One of them is the part at the very end of Deuteronomy that records his death—and even indicates that some time has passed since that happened. As Deuteronomy 34:10 says:

Deuteronomy 34:10

There has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.

Someone recording that Moses was the greatest prophet who had arisen “since” his day is clearly writing after Moses was gone.

There are also passages it’s hard to imagine Moses writing about himself. As Numbers 12:3 says:

Numbers 12:3

Now the man Moses was very meek, more than all men that were on the face of the earth.

It would be a strange kind of humility to write that about yourself.

So for much of Church history, some people made little tweaks to the idea that Moses wrote these books.

They’d say Moses was the main author, but that after his death others added bits here and there—like the account of his death or the description of how meek he was.

Some wouldn’t even go that far. They’d say that Moses did write these passages—at God’s direction. God commanded Moses to mention how meek he was, and then God made Moses write prophetically about his own death. Wow!

But this has never been a widely held view.

 

The Rise of JEDP

Eventually, a very different view developed.

In the 1700s, scholars began to propose that there were certain identifiable sources that had been used to compose the Pentateuch.

It was claimed that what made these sources identifiable were differences of style—like which name for God gets used in a given passage—along with repetitions and apparent contradictions.

The idea was that the Pentateuch had been assembled from a collection of earlier documents, without anyone smoothing out the differences.

In 1883, a German scholar named Julius Wellhausen proposed an especially influential form of this theory.

It’s sometimes called the “Wellhausen hypothesis,” but it’s more commonly called the “documentary hypothesis,” or “JEDP.”

That last name comes from the initials of the 4 major sources thought to lie behind the Pentateuch—J, E, D, and P.

 

The J Source

The first source Wellhausen proposed is called the “J” source, which stands for “Yahwist,” which is spelled with a J in German.

A telltale sign of this source is that it uses the divine name Yahweh when referring to God—sometimes in combination with other names, like Yahweh Elohim.

This source is thought to lie behind the creation account in Genesis 2, which gives us the making of Adam and Eve.

This proposed source has a somewhat intimate tone that you can hear. Genesis 2:7 says:

Genesis 2:7

Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.

So this passage pictures God like he’s right there—like he’s in the dirt, shaping the man with his hands and breathing life into him.

According to those who support the theory, the J source was written around 900 B.C. in the southern kingdom of Judah—which would make it several centuries too late to have come from Moses.

And the dates he proposed for the other 3 sources are even more recent.

 

The E Source

The second source is called the “E” source, which stands for “Elohist.”

It’s supposed to be identifiable because it uses the divine name Elohim—without Yahweh.

Elohim means God.

And according to supporters, the E source was written around 800 B.C.—up in the northern kingdom of Israel.

 

The D Source

The third source is called the “D” source, which stands for “Deuteronomist.”

The Deuteronomist source is found—as you might expect—in the book of Deuteronomy.

It’s also thought that some of the historical books that follow Deuteronomy—Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings—were written by a person—not a source—known as the Deuteronomist—or by people close to him.

This person or group was heavily influenced by the book of Deuteronomy, and so these later historical books are called the “Deuteronomic history.”

According to supporters, the D source was written around 620 B.C. in Jerusalem.

The books of the Deuteronomic history were written later.

 

The P Source

The fourth and final source is called the “P” source, which stands for “Priestly.”

It’s thought to be the source for the account of the creation of the world in Genesis 1, which covers the different days of creation.

You can feel how different its tone is—ordered, cosmic, and majestic. As Genesis 1 says:

Genesis 1:1-5

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.

The Priestly source is thought to reflect the outlook of the priests.

Much of it deals with laws about the priesthood, most of which show up in the book of Leviticus.

And according to supporters, it was written around 500 B.C. by Jewish priests after the exile in Babylon.

 

Weaving the Sources Together

So that’s J, E, D, and P.

Various editors—known as redactors—were then supposed to have combined the four sources to produce the Pentateuch we have today.

Sometimes scholars use the letter R for these Redactors, but R is not considered a separate source by itself.

Wellhausen suggested that the final redactor was the biblical scribe Ezra, who oversaw the rebuilding of Jerusalem at the end of the Babylonian Exile around 450 B.C.

However, today most scholars think that it wasn’t Ezra who served as the final redactor, and the Pentateuch was given its final form between 450-350 B.C.

 

The Church and JEDP

After the documentary hypothesis was proposed, it quickly gained ground—especially among Protestant Bible scholars.

But things were different in Catholic circles.

On the Mosaic Authorship of the Pentateuch

Whether the arguments amassed by critics to impugn the Mosaic authenticity of the Sacred Books known as the Pentateuch are of sufficient weight, notwithstanding the very many evidences to the contrary contained in both Testaments taken collectively, the perpetual agreement of the Hebrew people, and the constant tradition of the Church as well as the proofs furnished by internal criticism of the text, to justify the statement that these books do not have Moses for their author but were compiled from sources for the most part after the time of Moses?”

Answer: In the negative.

In 1906, the Pontifical Biblical Commission issued a ruling that the arguments being proposed at the time were not sufficient “to justify the statement that these books do not have Moses as their author but were compiled from sources for the most part after the time of Moses.”

But matters changed over the course of the twentieth century.

Dei Verbum—Forty Years Later

One has only to think about the controversies of the Modernist period, or recall the statements of the Pontifical Biblical Commission at the beginning of the twentieth century (now viewed as transitory judgments), to appreciate the climate of lingering tensions, especially for Biblical scholars, that existed at the beginning of the Council.

In a 2005 speech, Cardinal William Levada —who was then president of the Pontifical Biblical Commission—said that those early decisions are “now viewed as transitory judgments.”

And long before that, the documentary hypothesis had found increasing acceptance in Catholic circles, right up to the magisterial level.

 

John Paul II on the Sources

In fact, Pope John Paul II referred to these proposed sources fairly often.

In one of his general audiences, he spoke about the 2 sources said to underlie the opening chapters of Genesis. He said:

General Audience, Sept. 12, 1979

From the point of view of biblical criticism, it is necessary to mention immediately that the first account of man’s creation is chronologically later than the second, whose origin is much more remote. This more ancient text is defined as “Yahwist” because the term “Yahweh” is used to name God. It is difficult not to be struck by the fact that the image of God presented there has quite considerable anthropomorphic traits.

So John Paul II was comfortable talking about a Yahwist source and a Priestly one, and about which he thought came first.

That shows that the Church has given Catholics the freedom to hold different opinions on this matter.

And this was not an isolated passage in John Paul II’s writings.

He periodically cited the sources in the JEDP theories when he taught, so his citation of the Yahwist source in this passage was not a fluke.

 

Does the Theory Hold Up?

Now, the Church isn’t in the business of teaching the proposals of biblical scholars as matters of faith.

So the documentary hypothesis has to stand or fall on its own merits.

And over time, the theory ran into trouble.

Scholars who liked it kept proposing modifications.

Some suggested the 4 sources could be broken down into even more refined sources, with an ever more complicated history behind them.

But there turned out to be much less agreement about these proposed sub-sources.

Some scholars even began to question whether the major sources were really there.

For example, some have questioned whether E really existed as a separate source.

Others challenge the documentary hypothesis outright.

They argue that—whatever earlier sources may lie underneath the text—the Pentateuch is fundamentally the product of a single literary vision—not a patchwork of identifiable sources stitched together slapdash.

So while the documentary hypothesis is still very influential today, there’s a strong case against it.

Let me walk you through some of the evidence.

 

What’s in a Divine Name?

One of the main features that’s supposed to distinguish the sources is which divine name each one uses.

That’s what’s supposed to separate the Yahwist source—with the name Yahweh—from the Elohist source—with the name Elohim.

But does a shift from one divine name to another really mean the passages came from different sources? Or could there be another explanation?

After all, Yahweh is a personal name, while Elohim is a descriptive term that simply means “God.”

Maybe the choice between them has more to do with style, and with the feel these words had for Hebrew speakers.

Just like people today switch between saying God and Lord without even being consciously aware of it.

And people have noticed for centuries that Yahweh and Elohim have a different flavor in Hebrew.

In his commentary on Genesis, the great medieval Jewish scholar Rashi —who lived from 1040 to 1105—suggested that Elohim points to God’s attribute of strict judgment, while Yahweh points to his attribute of mercy.

Others have suggested, along similar lines, that Elohim gets used when God is being considered in a broad, cosmic way—as the creator of the universe and the ruler of all nations—while his more intimate, personal name Yahweh gets used in connection with his chosen people.

The twentieth-century Jewish scholar Umberto Cassuto , who lived from 1883 to 1951, studied this in enormous detail.

He looked at how these 2 names are used across the Pentateuch and the rest of the Bible.

He found that they follow a set of rules that are based on subject matter, not on source.

And Cassuto’s explanation is fine-tuned enough that it can even account for why a text switches names in the middle of a single story.

That’s exactly what happens at the start of Genesis 3, in the scene with the serpent.

The passage regularly uses the name Yahweh Elohim—which we translate in English as “Lord God.” But watch what happens after the serpent starts talking. As Genesis 3 says:

Genesis 3:1-5

Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Notice what just happened. In the narration the text says “the Lord God”—or Yahweh Elohim. But the moment the serpent and Eve start speaking, it switches to just “God”—or Elohim.

Cassuto’s point is that the change isn’t a seam between 2 sources at all. It’s deliberate—the text keeps the intimate, holy name Yahweh out of the serpent’s mouth.

 

The Department of Redundancy Department?

If the divine names aren’t a reliable guide to the sources, what about the apparent duplications?

The Pentateuch has stories that seem to happen more than once.

In Genesis 12, Abraham passes his wife Sarah off as his sister to a foreign ruler—and then it happens again in Genesis 20 with a different ruler.

And then it happens again in Genesis 26, when Abraham’s son Isaac does the very same thing with his wife, Rebecca.

Some scholars hold that this shows us different sources telling the same basic story, only they been stitched together in a way we can detect.

It’s like whoever the editor was was so sloppy that he didn’t notice he’d told the same story three times!

But is that what’s happening?

Not necessarily.

It might be that the author wants us to see this as a family tactic—a way the patriarchs used to get out of tight spots.

And there’s evidence for that in the Hebrew text. Genesis 20 says:

Genesis 20:1-2

Abraham journeyed toward the territory of the Negeb and lived between Kadesh and Shur; and he sojourned in Gerar. And Abraham said of Sarah his wife, “She is my sister.” And Abimelech king of Gerar sent and took Sarah.

In English, this sounds like Abraham is telling other people a lie about his wife.

But the contemporary Jewish scholar Gary Rendsburg points out that the Hebrew doesn’t quite say that. What it says is not that Abraham said this of Sarah his wife. Instead, the Hebrew says that Abraham said it to Sarah his wife.

Abraham and Sarah have already pulled this off once before.

And now the text asks us to picture Abraham turning to Sarah and saying to her, “She is my sister”—cueing her to the plan.

You can almost see her thinking, “Oh, we’re doing that one again.”

Since the ruse had already worked twice for Abraham, it’s not surprising to find his son Isaac trying the same thing.

But there’s another reason the duplications don’t point to multiple sources.

 

Hidden Pyramids of the Bible

The biblical authors love to structure their material using a literary form called chiasmus.

The word Chiasmus means Crossing.

It’s named after the Greek letter Chi, which is written like our letter X.

The idea is a sequence of elements that falls into 2 halves, where the second half mirrors the first—like steps going up one side of a pyramid and back down the other—or like the layers in a wedding cake.

A simple example is something Jesus says in Matthew 19:30:

Matthew 19:30

But many that are first will be last, and the last first.

Notice the shape—it runs first, then last, then last, then first, forming an A-B-B’-A’ pattern, a little chiasmus tucked into a single sentence.

But the Bible also has much bigger ones—chiasms that stretch across huge blocks of text and organize whole books.

That’s what we find in Genesis.

Much of the book is built into large chiastic structures.

The whole Abraham story, for instance, is arranged as one grand chiasmus, stretching from Genesis 11 all the way to Genesis 22.

Gary Rendsburg lays out its structure like this.

• A—Genealogy of Terah, Abraham’s father
• B—The start of Abram’s spiritual journey
• C—Sarah in a foreign palace; the ordeal ends in peace and success; Abram and Lot part
• D—Abram comes to the rescue of Sodom and Lot
• E—Covenant with Abram; the announcement of Ishmael
• E’—Covenant with Abraham; the announcement of Isaac
• D’—Abraham comes to the rescue of Sodom and Lot
• C’—Sarah in a foreign palace; the ordeal ends in peace and success; Abraham and Ishmael part
• B’—The climax of Abraham’s spiritual journey
• A’—Genealogy of Nahor, Abraham’s brother

Look at what that structure does.

The genealogies at the top and bottom—Terah and Nahor—act like bookends around Abraham’s whole life.

The start of his spiritual journey at the beginning mirrors its climax at the end, when he’s asked to offer Isaac.

His rescue of Sodom and Lot early on mirrors his rescue of Sodom and Lot later.

And—here’s the payoff—the story of Sarah in a foreign palace early on mirrors the story of Sarah in a foreign palace later.

The 2 “She is my sister” episodes aren’t clumsy leftovers from 2 different sources.

They’re matching panels, placed on purpose, holding up opposite sides of the pyramid.

That’s why Rendsburg can say of the person who arranged all this:

The Redaction of Genesis, p. 29

Far from being carried out “artlessly,” the redactor has performed his task brilliantly and artistically.

 

What a Difference a Covenant Makes

There’s another clue that the 2 Sarah stories were shaped as deliberate mirror images of each other.

The contemporary scholars Isaac Kikawada and Arthur Quinn write:

Before Abraham Was, pp. 96-97

What is striking about these stories of Sarah, when they are placed side by side, is that the second story is consistently amplified to soften the first.

In the first, Sarai goes into the Pharaoh’s house and the implication is that she has sexual relations with him; in the second we are specifically told that Abimelech did not touch her.

In the first Pharaoh is punished “with great plagues” for his taking Sarai; in the second Abimelech is preserved from any punishment beyond the temporary barrenness of his women.

In the first the Pharaoh apparently infers what has happened himself; in the second Abimelech is informed specifically by Yahweh.

In the first Abram, when accused, says nothing; in the second Abraham is allowed to explain away his lie by casuistry.

[In the first,] Abram is summarily sent away; [in the second,] Abraham is allowed to stay in friendship after he has interceded for Abimelech.

They then propose a reason why this softening occurs:

Before Abraham Was, p. 97

This may represent a skillful author trying to teach his people the difference it makes to have a covenant with God. He dramatizes this difference by having the same situation occur twice—once before the covenant, once after.

In other words, the repetition isn’t a bug. It’s the whole point.

 

Is JEDP Wrong?

The same kinds of considerations turn up wherever you look in Genesis.

Cassuto, Kikawada, Quinn, Rendsburg, and a range of other scholars have all challenged the division of Genesis into the J, E, and P sources.

And I’ve been focusing on Genesis on purpose.

Genesis is the most mixed book, according to the documentary hypothesis.

Deuteronomy and Leviticus each basically represent a single source—D in the case of Deuteronomy, and P in Leviticus.

Exodus and Numbers also have less mixing than Genesis does.

So if the supposed sources of Genesis prove to be shaky—as they have—then the whole theory is in trouble.

Now, this doesn’t mean it’s impossible to discern any sources within the Pentateuch.

One might hold, with John Paul II, that the creation account in Genesis 1 reflects a different source than the story of Adam and Eve in chapters 2 through 4—based on their difference in tone, the first being cosmic and the second more intimate.

I’m not a fan of the JEDP hypothesis, but I think it’s basically certain that the two creation accounts come from two different, earlier sources. If you’d like me to explain why, let me know in the comments.

 

When Was It Written?

And challenging JEDP the way these scholars have doesn’t mean that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch.

The scholars who’ve been most vigorous in challenging the documentary hypothesis have not gone back to claiming that Moses wrote it all.

Cassuto and Rendsburg, for example, think Genesis contains a number of clues that suggest it was written in the tenth century B.C., around the time of Solomon , and I tend to agree with that.

Here’s one of those clues. When God makes his covenant with Abraham, listen to the borders he describes. As Genesis 15:18 says:

Genesis 15:18

On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.”

Despite what you might think, the river of Egypt is not the famous Nile River—it’s actually found in the Sinai Peninsula, which is to the west of Israel . And the Euphrates is way over in the east.

These two bodies also were the farthest borders of the kingdom under David and Solomon. As 2 Samuel 8:3 says of David:

2 Samuel 8:3

David also defeated Hadadezer the son of Rehob, king of Zobah, as he went to restore his power at the river Euphrates.

So the land God promises Abraham looks a lot like the map of Israel at its high point, under David and Solomon.

That fits a book written around the tenth century B.C.

And if that’s when Genesis was written, and the rest of the Pentateuch was written around the same time, then its composition sits a good deal closer to the time of Moses than the documentary hypothesis allows.

 

Traditions from Moses?

That means it may contain substantial material that has been passed down from Moses.

And I think that it does. When you read the book of Exodus, God gives instructions to Moses for how to build the tabernacle—which was a movable tent that served as the Israelites’ national shrine before they had the temple.

The preparations and instructions for building the tabernacle are found in Exodus chapters 25, 26 and 27—so 3 chapters.

Then you read a bit further, and from chapter 35 to 40—another 6 chapters.

So 9 chapters deal with the building of the tabernacle.

They really go through “How to build the tabernacle” in mind-numbing detail that a lot of modern readers will—frankly—find boring.

But why would they do that after Solomon built the temple around 970 B.C.

According to scholars who support the documentary hypothesis, the material about the tabernacle comes from the P—or Priestly—source.

And P wasn’t supposed to be written until around 500 B.C.—after the Babylonian Exile.

But by that point, the temple had dominated the Judahite imagination for 470 years!

And getting the temple rebuilt was what the Judahites were obsessed with after the Babylonian exile.

They were focused on rebuilding the temple—not rebuilding the tabernacle.

You might expect the tabernacle would be mentioned in the book of Exodus—but Exodus wouldn’t go over how to build the tabernacle in such mind-numbing detail if the tabernacle hadn’t been used in almost 500 years!

The material about the tabernacle thus looks to me like material handed down from before the temple was built—which means it was from before Solomon and thus may well have come from Moses.

 

Conclusion

So who wrote the books of Moses?

There’s no definitive answer—but the clues are intriguing.

The books themselves never name Moses as their author, and they contain material written after his lifetime.

The documentary hypothesis tries to explain the Pentateuch as a weaving-together of 4 sources—J, E, D, and P—that were finally combined centuries after Moses.

But that theory has been seriously challenged—especially for Genesis, where the divine names follow the subject matter rather than marking seams, and where the so-called duplications turn out to be deliberate, artful mirror images.

What we can conclude is that a faithful Catholic has real room to move here.

You can hold anything from full Mosaic authorship, to the documentary hypothesis, to any number of positions in between—depending on how you read the evidence.

In my view, the clues we’ve seen point to a much earlier date than the documentary hypothesis would suggest.

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