In the eighth chapter of the book of Nehemiah, that great servant of God
affirms his faith in the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, which was
also the faith of all the people of his time. In the first verse in this
chapter he informs us that "all the people gathered themselves together,
as one man, into the street that is before the water gate, and they
spake unto Ezra the scribe to bring _the book of the law of Moses_,
which the Lord had commanded to Israel." Ezra was not to make a book and
call it the book of Moses, as some of the critics teach, but to "bring
the book of the law of Moses," a book in their possession already made,
and with which they were already familiar--"_The Book of the Law of
Moses_."

"The Book of the Law of Moses" was the Jewish title given to the
Pentateuch at that time, and is so recognized again and again. Nehemiah
viii. 14 affirms again: "They found written in the law, which the Lord
had commanded by Moses, that the children of Israel should dwell in
booths in the feast of the seventh month." Nehemiah quotes this "command
of the Lord by Moses" from Lev. xxiii. 39-42, which was a fraud on the
part of Nehemiah, if Moses was not the author of the book. Again he says
in the thirteenth chapter of Nehemiah and first verse: "On that day they
read in the book of Moses, in the audience of the people"; but it was
not the book of Moses if he had not written it, but the book of another
one of the "unknown" so frequently found (?) in Scripture by our
critics.

The book of Moses in which this last reference from Nehemiah is written
is the command that the "Ammonite and the Moabite should not come into
the congregation of God for ever," and is recorded in Deut. xxiii. 3, 4.