Seriously Julia, after two millenia of tradition supporting Mosaic authorship for the Pentateuch I can’t understand why anyone would quickly believe and stubbornly hold on to a new, divergent teaching. Why not spend a little time investigating the evidence and arguments supporting Mosaic authorship? If you do, you might realize what a literary masterpiece the book of Genesis is. Below are a couple passages from ‘Before Abraham Was’ by Kikawada and Quin. It might help you to understand that it is simply absurd to think that Genesis, let alone the Pentateuch, was written by multiple authors.
Chapter 5 page 83-84
*"Genesis 1-11 may have been produced from divergent traditions. No one can deny that possibility with absolute certainty. But we can ask for the evidence on which the postulation of such divergent traditions is based. Clearly we lack extra-biblical evidence that would justify this postulation. We lack the kind of evidence for Genesis 1-11 that Jeffrey Tigay had in abundance for his developmental analysis of the Gilgamesh Epic. Indeed, the extra-biblical evidence we surveyed in chapter 2 seems to support a unitary approach to Genesis 1-11. Therefore, the documentary approach to Genesis 1-11 must stand or fall on internal evidence, evidence from within the text itself.
But what did we find when we looked at this internal evidence in the last chapter? We found an author with such complete mastery over his materials (whatever their source) that it makes no literary sense to speak of him as an editor. The evidence commonly used to show that Genesis 1-11 is a literary patchwork does in our opinion when closely examined and put in its proper context–support the view that Genesis 1-11 is a literary masterpiece by an author of extraordinary skill and subtlety. So much so, that when we think we find this author napping we had better proceed very carefully. As with Homer or Shakespeare, when you think you have seen something wrong, there may well be something wrong with your own eyes. You are more likely to be wrong than either of them.
Nonetheless, there has been an important omission in our discussion of internal evidence. As yet, we have had nothing to say about the detailed arguments for a documentary interpretation of the Noah story. And if the analyst has here decisive evidence for divergent traditions and the editorial process, he would have ample grounds for persisting in his approach to Genesis 1-11. And so the Noah story is crucial once again. Just as all would have been lost earlier had Wellhausen and others not come up with the documentary interpretation of Noah, so now all will be lost if this interpretation does not stand up under closer scrutiny. This time, however, the documentary hypothesis does drown in the flood.
Indeed, to tell the truth, we are not going to attempt an original analysis of the Noah story. Over the past decade the Wellhausen interpretation of Noah has been systematically dismantled by younger scholars. There have been at least a half dozen important contributions here. Typical of these critiques is the one made in F. I. Andersen’s The Sentence in Biblical Hebrew.
Sentences used in the present chapter cut across passages generally assigned to ‘J’ and ‘P’ documents. This means that if the documentary hypothesis is valid, some editor has put together scraps of parallel versions of the same story with scissors and paste, and yet has achieved a result which from the point of view of discourse grammar, looks as if it has been made out of whole cloth.
What Andersen has done from his own grammatical specialty, others have done from theirs. Objections to a unitary reading of Noah have, one after another, been explained, and objections to a documentary reading–apparently unanswerable objections-- have been, one after another, raised."*
In addition, why not take a little time to read Jimmy Akin’s excellent article ‘Who Wrote the Books of Moses?’
