Genesis. This is the fact which explains those repetitions of laws, and
those singular breaks in the history, to which I called your attention
in the last chapter. There is, as I believe, a large element of purely
Mosaic legislation in these books; many of these laws were written
either by the hand of Moses or under his eye; and the rest are so
conformed to the spirit which he impressed upon the Hebrew jurisprudence
that they may be fairly called Mosaic; but many of them, on the other
hand, were written long after his day, and the whole Pentateuch did not
reach its present form until after the exile, in the days of Ezra and
Nehemiah.

The upholders of the traditional theory--that Moses wrote the
Pentateuch, just as Blackstone wrote his Commentaries--are wont to make
much account of the disagreements of those critics who have undertaken
to analyze it into its component parts. "These critics," they say, "are
all at loggerheads; they do not agree with one another; none of them
even agrees with himself very long; most of them have several times
revised their theories, and there seems to be neither certainty nor
coherency in their speculations." But this is not quite true. With
respect to some subordinate questions they are not agreed, and probably
never will be; but with respect to the fact that these books are
composite in their origin they are perfectly agreed, and they are also
remarkably unanimous in their judgments as to where the lines of
cleavage run between these component parts. The consensus of critical
opinion now is that there are at least four great documents which have
been combined in the Pentateuch; and the critics agree in the main
features of the analysis, though they do not all call these separated
parts by the same names, nor do they all think alike concerning the
relative antiquity of these portions. Some think that one of these
documents is the oldest, and some give that distinction to another; nor