JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

was gradually developing was that the context of Bible study
would no longer exclusively be the synagogue, the church and
their related yeshivahs, seminaries, and faculties of theology,
but the secular university as well. Among the major names
which must be mentioned are René Descartes (d. 1650), who
with his Cogito ergo sum, “I think therefore I am,” virtually
provided the creed of the rationalism which dominated the
century after his death; Benedict *Spinoza, who applied the
new thought more specifically to biblical study, including a
portentous questioning of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch;
Hugo *Grotius, a Dutch jurist, whose probings have
sometimes earned him the title of the “father” of the historical-critical
method; Gotthold Ephraim *Lessing, with his famous
pronouncement that “accidental truths of history can
never become proof of necessary truths of reason”; and Immanuel
*Kant, whose emphasis upon “practical reason,” i.e.,
man’s conscience and its ethical judgments, was to be of incalculable
influence in succeeding years. With Kant’s divorce of
the “phenomenal” and “noumenal” worlds, the stage was set
for that loss of the authority of an inspired Scripture and of a
sense of the transcendent in general, which dominated most
of the succeeding centuries. Much of the new mood was introduced
into Judaism especially through Moses Mendelssohn. In
both Judaism and Christianity, there was (and sometimes still
is) uncompromising resistance to “higher criticism” (i.e., those
aspects of biblical criticism which deal with literary analysis
and historical and ideological considerations; as opposed to
“lower criticism” which deals with the text, canon, etc.) because
of its original connection with rationalistic and other
anti-supernaturalistic philosophies. In this climate, precursors
of the more technical aspects of the critical study of the Bible
also began to appear, especially Isaac la *Peyrere and Richard
*Simon, who postulated various authors of the Pentateuch,
and particularly the 18th-century Jean *Astruc, who first used
criterion of different Hebrew names for the deity in Genesis.
These and other preliminary critical investigations were summarized
and ordered by Johann *Eichhorn in a three-volume
work on the Old Testament. Two 18th-century scholars were
especially important in developing further the theoretical
foundations of the movement, specifically in breaking away
from the restraints of ecclesiastical dogma and tradition. Johann
Semler (d. 1791), especially in his Abhandlung zur freien
Untersuchung des Kanons, campaigned for an approach to the
Bible exactly “like another book,” free from all dogmatic preassumptions.
Similarly Johann Gabler (d. 1787), often known
as the father of “biblical theology” because of the distinction
he advocated between that discipline and the traditional dogmatic
theology, urged that the latter should concentrate on
biblical teachings of universal relevance, while “biblical theology”
should concern itself with historically and temporally
conditioned matters.
Nineteenth-Century Pentateuch Criticism and Wellhausen
Critical investigations into the *Pentateuch in particular continued
throughout the 19th century by scholars like Martin de
bible
Wette (d. 1843), the first to isolate Deuteronomy as a separate
source and associate it with Josiah’s reformation (II Kings 22),
and Heinrich Ewald (d. 1875), a prolific writer who changed
his own position repeatedly, thus typifying the exploratory
nature of that period’s investigations. By 1850, late datings for
Daniel, Second Isaiah (i.e., Isaiah 40–66), the second part of
Zechariah, and Psalms had become generally accepted, but no
unanimity had been reached on the Pentateuch. W. Vatke’s recognition
of the lateness of the Grundschrift (the later “Priestly
Document”) eventually provided the needed breakthrough,
but his thoroughgoing Hegelianism and Ewald’s rejection of
his views led to a stalemate which was broken only by Wellhausen
and his congeners. When this intermediate period (after
Eichhorn) came to an end, a certain “critical orthodoxy”
was introduced) in the epoch-making Prolegomena to the History
of Israel of Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) in 1878 (Eng. tr.
1965). Others beside Wellhausen were influential in the formulation
of the final hypothesis and others worked alongside
him in its subsequent elaboration, but Wellhausen’s work so
successfully presented and popularized the approach that few
dispute the appropriateness of epithets like “Wellhausenian,”
“classical criticism,” etc.
The great significance of Wellhausen’s achievement lay
in the fact that it represented not only the latest in a series of
isolated critical investigations, but that these were integrated
into an entirely new synthesis and reconstruction of the total
course of Israel’s religious history, to the stages of which the
various literary documents were related. Although L. Perlitt
(Vatke und Wellhausen, 1965) has attempted to disprove it, it
still seems that, however indirect, the ultimate philosophical
inspiration of Wellhausen’s reconstruction was the idealistic
monism of Hegel. (For better or for worse, much of the historicism
and immanentalism of this period survived even in
the later corrections, and it is doubtful if even the most determinedly
conservative today have remained uninfluenced by
this “Copernican revolution” which stresses that things can be
understood only when their history is known.)
Wellhausen postulated a slow evolutionistic rise from
the animism of the earliest, “patriarchal” periods to the “ethical
monotheism” of especially the eighth-century prophets.
The purest of the pentateuchal sources, from this perspective,
was judged to be J or the Yahwist (which used the divine
name transliterated as YHWH; JHWH in German), dated to the
ninth century, followed by a slow but sure degeneration toward
formalism and institutionalism in the subsequent sources, E
or the Elohist (using the divine name Elohim) perhaps a century
later, D or the Deuteronomist (the author of the Book of
Deuteronomy) with his incipient “biblicism,” writing in connection
with Josiah’s abortive ventures shortly before the fall
of Judah, and P (author of the Priestly document) during or
after the Exile, providing the constitution for the small semiindependent
hierocracy within the vast Persian empire. All of
the sources were understood as providing reliable information
primarily only of the period of composition, not of the earlier
periods which they described. The Pentateuch was alleg-
ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3 649