than five hundred years. This chapter, therefore, may be regarded by many as an irrelevancy as regards a serious understanding of the meaning and purpose of the Pentateuch, though the questions with which it is concerned remain—and are likely to remain—a major item on the agenda of academic Old Testament study. The important question is not one of the sources available to the compiler but what the Pentateuch was intended to mean in its present form. Doubts about—and even denials of—Mosaic authorship