From the early decades of the nineteenth century, a new and increasingly professional ‘critical’ approach, the work mainly of German scholars, dismissed the Old Testament as a historical record and classified large parts of it as religious myth. The first five books of the Bible, or Pentateuch, were now presented as orally transmitted legend from various Hebrew tribes which reached written form only after the Exile, in the second half of the first millennium BC. These legends, the argument ran, were carefully edited, conflated and adapted to provide historical justification and divine sanction
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