Who Wrote the Bible

The story is told of a scientist studying a flea, one he had carefully trained to jump on command. In the interest of his lifelong research into insect hearing, he pulled off one of the flea's legs and ordered it to jump. The insect complied, despite its handicap. After a second amputation, its response to the command was somewhat less impressive; after a third, even less so. Finally, after being deprived of all of its legs, all the flea could do when ordered to jump was buzz about ineffectually on the table.

Solemnly, the scientist recorded his findings in his journal: "Fleas apparently hear with their legs."

One by necessity approaches the Torah--what Christians call the Old Testament and Jews consider the only one--with one of two assumptions: either the document is the word of God, or it is the product of men. These are two mutually exclusive, entirely diametric ways of regarding the Torah, and, contrary to popular misconception, there is no conceivable way of "proving" either approach correct or in error by examining the text itself. One simply brings one's prior assumptions to the analysis and proceeds from there.

Thus, oddities like the use of one name for God in some verses and another name in others are, to the reader who believes in the divine origin of the book, indications of different "modes" (Hebrew: "middot") of God's interaction with mortals. To one who assumes the Torah to be the work of man, such things are as good an indication as any that more than one man's work is represented in the text. Similarly, peculiar or recurrent patterns of language, depending on one's pre-analysis point of view, are either sublime indications of wisdom to be mined or further "evidence" of the interjection of the words of this or that human author.

Or take the Torah's textual predictions of future events. To those who accept the divine origin of the Torah, they are prophecies. To those who consider the very idea of prophecy untenable, they are conclusive evidence that those passages were written after the events they describe. How else, after all, could the writer have known?

Both the "Higher Bible Criticism" invented at the turn of the previous century by theology professor Julius Wellhausen and the "Lower Criticism" of more recent decades, take as their alpha-point the implausibility of God's having ever communicated with mankind. Thus, the text of the Torah, to Wellhausen and those who followed him and expanded on his theories, is a ready target for "deconstruction"--for assigning parts of it to one "author" and others to others.

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