Torah

From RationalWiki

The Torah (or, in Christian terminology, the Pentateuch) is the first five books of the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible^[1] and the traditional founding document of Judaism. Jewish students of the Torah understand it to be both the written Torah and the oral tradition associated with Torah. Parts of the Torah were likely written as early as 1200 BCE, however, scholars date the completion of the work to the 7th-4th century BCE. The five books are:

While traditionally ascribed to Moses, many modern Biblical scholars consider the Torah to be the edited work of at least five different writers with roots in both Israel and Judah:

Yahwist or J: rooted in Judahite tradition; refers to God as YHWH
Elohist or E: rooted in Israelite tradition; prefers the grammatically ambiguous "Elohim" as the name of God
Deuteronomist or D: believed to have come from the camp that led religious reforms under the Judahite king Josiah; later revised after Josiah's untimely death in Egypt
Priestly or P: Probably written under the auspices of the Kohanim, the priestly clan said to be descended from Moses' brother Aaron and those in charge of daily operations at the Jerusalem temple
The Redactor or R (possibly the Biblical figure Ezra): While responsible for little or no original content, the Redactor is thought to have been responsible for knitting related but separate Israelite and Judahite traditions, as well as varying schools of thought within Judah, into a single, more-or-less coherent whole.

While this model is not universally accepted, it has been one of the most important working hypotheses of Biblical scholarships over the last century-plus.