To be completely accurate about the fundamentalist view... the Torah existed before the earth was created and then God dictated it to Moses, or at least he came down the mountain with it.
Thomas Hobbes was the first person to deny in print that that we are reading Moses when we read the Five Books, followed by Spinoza and later a trio of german scholars broke though to the realization of there being different "sources" intermeshed in the Torah. From a literary perspective, a number of writers are identified, E the Elohist, J the Yahist, P for Priestly, D for the Redactor -- who put the Torah together, presumably in the time of Ezra.
What you might find of interest, Z, is Harold Bloom's view that J was a woman living at or nearby the court of Solomon's successor, King Rehoboan of Judah, under whom his father's kingdom fell apart soon after the death of Solomon in 922 BCE. Bloom describes her as an immensely sophisticated, highly placed member of the Solomonic elite, "enlightened and ironic." Bloom says his primary surmise is that J wrote for her contemporaries as a woman, absent of piety in any normative sense. He credits her with the Torah's "talking animals, lustful Elohim, deceitful Patriarchs, ambitious women anxious to break into the Blessing, murderous founders of the tribes of Israel, a drunken Noah, a raging Yahweh out of control even by himself, inheritances suborned by imposture." I'll stop rambling now and call it a day... |
