The Documentary Hypothesis by Cassuto Umberto Moshe David

Author:Cassuto, Umberto Moshe David [Cassuto, Umberto Moshe David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Critique of the so-called Higher Critisism approach to Hebrew Bible
Published: 2011-10-17T16:00:00+00:00

day father arrived home feeling depressed, but his children, who came running joyfully to meet him, cheered him up’. On the other hand, in the sections that portray him in the circle of his students at the university, he used the designation by which he was generally known in that circle, to wit, 'the professor’; and similarly in the sections that treat of his scientific labours, his researches, inventions and discoveries. Let us now picture to ourselves that centuries or millenia later a scholar will come and seek to determine the authorship of the book. If he adopts the methods of the documentary hypothesis, this scholar will declare: Since I observe that the hero of the work is called in some places 'Father’ and in others 'the professor’, it follows that we have here fragments culled from different writers, and the dissimilarity between the narrative and scientific sections corroborates this. On this basis, I divide the text of the volume into three categories, each of which derives from a separate source: all the passages using the name 'Father’ emanate from one source; those in which the usual appellation is 'the professor’ and their content has a narrative character are taken from source two; and those that likewise designate their hero 'the professor’, but have a scientific content belong to a third source. He will then add: The three authors, it is seen, depict their hero differently. According to the first writer, he was a simple man completely devoted to his wife and children, always to be found in the circle of this family and ever concerned with its welfare; according to the second author, he was completely dedicated to teaching and to training his students in scientific work, and he always appears before his students in a manner that constantly reminds them of the distance between himself and them; the third source presents him as a man who has no direct contact whatsoever with social and family life, who is always shut up in his laboratory, among his books and instruments, and has no interest apart from scientific research. Notwithstanding the entire analysis of this scholar, we know that he is mistaken, for according to our premise there was only one author, and his whole work is a homogeneous composition. Nor does the book depict three separate persons, but three different aspects of one individual, aspects that can be found together in a single personality, since they are not mutually exclusive.

The same position obtains with regard to the Torah. It comes to

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