UNTIL THE RISE of deistic philosophy in the eighteenth century, the Christian church had always taken at face value the claims of the Pentateuch to have been composed by the historic Moses of the fifteenth century B.C. A few Jewish scholars such as the pantheistic Spanish Jew, Benedict Spinoza (a name derived from espinoso: “spiny, thorny”), had suggested the possibility of later authorship of at least parts of the Torah, but these conjectures had been largely ignored by European scholarship, until