together in an artless way by various editors and compilers. The
framework is Mosaic, but the details of the work were added by reverent
disciples of Moses, the last of whom must have lived and written many
hundred years after Moses' day.

Some of the evidences of composite structure which lie upon the very
face of the narrative will now come under our notice. It is plain that
the whole of this literature could not have been written by any one man
without some kind of assistance. All the books, except the first, are
indeed a record of events which occurred mainly during the lifetime of
Moses, and of most of which he might have had personal knowledge. But
the story of Genesis goes back to a remote antiquity. The last event
related in that book occurred four hundred years before Moses was born;
it was as distant from him as the discovery of America by Columbus is
from us; and other portions of the narrative, such as the story of the
Flood and the Creation, stretch back into the shadows of the age which
precedes history. Neither Moses nor any one living in his day could have
given us these reports from his own knowledge. Whoever wrote this must
have obtained his materials in one of three ways.

1. They might have been given to him by direct revelation from God.

2. He might have gathered them up from oral tradition, from stories,
folk-lore, transmitted from mouth to mouth, and so preserved from
generation to generation.

3. He might have found them in written documents existing at the time of
his writing.

The first of these conjectures embodies the rabbinical theory. The later