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There are doubts if the Pentateuch code really goes back to the days of Moses, but certainly someone "learned in the wisdom of the Egyptians" drew it up.
The garden “eastward in Eden” of the Pentateuch, the land of Tulan or Tlapallan in Aztec myth, the islands of the Hesperides, the rose garden of Feridun, and a score of other legends attest with what strong yearning man seeks in the past the picture of that perfect felicity which the present never yields. Nor can he be persuaded that the golden age has gone, no more to return.
In its original form it provided a short running exegesis, verse by verse, to the whole of the first three books of the Pentateuch, and was contained in twelve parts. IV. A popular and missionizing presentation of the Jewish system in the form of a "Life of Moses," and three appended tractates on the virtues "Courage," "Humanity," and "Repentance."
It is possible that those who still accept the traditional authorship of the Pentateuch may be inclined to see in this correspondence of Hebrew and Sumerian ideas a confirmation of their own hypothesis. But it should be pointed out at once that this is not an inevitable deduction from the evidence.
"I have no money, and they must do their English lessons. Else, perhaps, their clothes will be stopped. Besides, I teach them myself every Shabbos afternoon and Sunday. Solomon translates into Yiddish the whole Pentateuch with Rashi." "Yes, he may know Térah" said Malka, not to be baffled. "But he'll never know Gemorah or Mishnayis."
Those plains, once decked with verdure, and lovely in the sun and breeze, are covered with the bones of a slaughtered world. How can the Christian dare to justify such awful cruelty? The God of the Pentateuch is not a beneficent universal father, but an almighty fiend. This story of Noah's Flood is believed still because people never examine what is taught them as the word of God.
This layman was "Astruc, doctor and professor of medicine in the Royal College at Paris, and court physician to Louis XIV." The quotation is from the article "Pentateuch" in Smith's "Dictionary of the Bible," which, of course, lies on the table of the least instructed clergyman.
Whether I really read consecutively in my black-bound volume I can no longer be sure, but it became a companion whose society I valued, and at worst it was a thousand times more congenial to me than Jukes' 'On the Pentateuch' or than a perfectly excruciating work ambiguously styled 'The Javelin of Phineas', which lay smouldering in a dull red cover on the drawing-room table.
It was upon the same hill, according to the reading in their version of the Pentateuch, that the Almighty commanded the children of Israel to set up great stones covered with plaster, on which to inscribe the body of their law; to erect an altar; to offer peace-offerings; and to rejoice before the Lord their God.
There were strings of people daily in Berlin with documents to be legalised, and on a little shelf in the Chancery reposed an Authorized Version of the Bible, a German Bible, a Vulgate version of the Gospels in Latin, and a Pentateuch in Hebrew, for the purpose of administering the oath, according to the religion professed by the individual.
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