In a previous post, I mentioned Brevard Childs’ understanding of Mosaic authorship as a claim that “functioned as a norm by which to test the tradition’s authority.” Then we saw James Kugel’s long answer to the question: was the Pentateuch written by Moses?

To many people that accept some version of the Documentary Hypothesis or who believe that, regardless of how the Pentateuch came to be, it wasn’t written by Moses, this may be a moot question – a question that only the religious-minded would ask. The link between Childs and Kugel, to use but one example, is that these are men who read the Bible critically but are also part of a community whose tradition is at odds with their critical reading.

The fact that both Jewish and Christian traditions have strongly held to Mosaic authorship raises the question of why it is so important that Moses be the author of Torah.

Christopher Seitz explores questions of inspiration and unity of the book of Isaiah and sees the discussion of Mosaic authorship as a helpful way to understand Isaiah in its canonical shape. He does that by showing how Jon Levenson handles the issue (Levenson, “The Eighth Principle of Judaism and the Literary Simultaneity of Scripture,” The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism [Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993] 62-81) and then relates his conclusions to why tradition has held that Isaiah was the sole author of the book (Seitz, “Isaiah and the Search for the New Paradigm: Authorship and Inspiration,” Word Without End [Michigan: Eerdmans, 1998] 113-29).

Seitz says that Levenson’s discussion encompasses at least three factors for the claim of Mosaic Authorship:

(1) The claim to divine authority
(2) The decisions of the community in acknowledging that authority
(3) Unity within the Torah
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I am working my way through Brevard Childs’ Introduction to the OT as Scripture (Fortress Press, 1979). The more I read it, the more I like his approach. Now I want to see how his methodology is going to play out in practice.

His canonical approach does raise some issues, and I was pleasantly surprised that every time I had a question, he either answered it or at least gave me enough to think about. One of the questions I had was about textual criticism since I wanted to know when we would start to talk about a “canon” of the OT when things seemed to be so fluid in the first century. Not only that, why should I even limit myself to the first century? What is the role of the canonical shape of scriptures throughout its entire history?

Childs proposes that we start with the Masoretic text not because it is the best, but because it is a vehicle for both “recovering and for understanding the canonical text of the Old Testament” (97). He is not just interested in the text but also in the community which shaped it. I am still not sure how this is going to work out because I am still wondering how you go about understanding the community of faith (which community?) in order to understand the canonical text. What makes sense to me at this point is that, somehow, we need to take into consideration how the community used Scriptures. Trying to understand the history of the text is fine as far as it goes, but how did the people of God appropriate it? This seems to be a much better vehicle for how we may read the text today.
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