Eran Viezel

According to the well-known talmudic passage enumerating the authors of the books of the Hebrew Bible, Joshua wrote “eight verses in the Torah” (BT Bav. Bat. 14a). In the accompanying discussion, these eight verses are identified as the final verses of the Torah, and a debate ensues regarding whether they were written by Moses or Joshua. This controversy left a deep impression on Jewish literature over the ages, and hundreds of scholars and commentators engaged with it, offering answers to the question of the authorship of the eight final verses of the Torah,and these can be assigned to four major periods. Until the middle of the thirteenth century, the verses were usually ascribed to Joshua. Beginning in the thirteenth century, the dogmatic view that Moses wrote the final verses, word-by-word as dictated by God, became entrenched. From the early modern period attempts were made to resolve the controversy harmonistically. Finally, from the Enlightenment on wards, along with the dogmatic and harmonistic approaches, we also find the view that not only did Moses not write the final verses of the Torah, he did not write the entire Torah at all. These changes regarding the authorship of the Torah’s final verses resulted from a number of polemical debates and reflect fascinating intellectual developments.