Doubtless it rests wholly on the traditions of the Jews. Such was the
tradition preserved among them in the time of our Lord. They believed
that Moses wrote every word of these books; that God dictated the
syllables to him and that he recorded them. But the traditions of the
Jews are not, in other matters, highly regarded by Christians. Our Lord
himself speaks more than once in stern censure of these traditions by
which, as he charges, their moral sense was blunted and the law of God
was made of none effect. Many of these old tales of theirs were
extremely childish. One tradition ascribes, as we have seen, to Moses
the authorship of the whole Pentateuch; another declares that when,
during an invasion of the Chaldeans, all the books of the Scripture were
destroyed by fire, Ezra wrote them all out from memory, in an incredibly
short space of time; another tradition relates how the same Ezra one day
heard a divine voice bidding him retire into the field with five swift
amanuenses,--"how he then received a full cup, full as it were of water,
but the color of it was like fire, ... and when he had drank of it, his
heart uttered understanding and wisdom grew in his breast, for his
spirit strengthened his memory, ... and his mouth was opened and shut no
more and for forty days and nights he dictated without stopping till two
hundred and four books were written down." [Footnote: 2 Esdras xiv. See,
also, Stanley's _Jewish Church_, iii, 151.] These fables had wide
currency among the Jews; they were believed by Irenaeus, Tertullian,
Augustine, and others of the great fathers of the Christian Church; but
they are not credited in these days. It is evident that Jewish tradition
is not always to be trusted. We shall need some better reason than this
for believing that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch.

I do not know where else we can go for information except to the books
themselves. A careful examination of them may throw some light upon the
question of their origin. A great multitude of scholars have been before