R. Judah he-Hasid or R. Moshe Zaltman: who proposed that Torah verses were written after the time of Moses?

Abstract

In the year 1975, I.S. Lange published an anthology of commentaries entitled Commentaries on the Torah of R. Judah he-Hasid . In three of the commentaries included in this collection, the exegete suggests that the Torah includes post-Mosaic interpolations. In an additional passage, the commentator maintains that David removed psalms from the Torah and incorporated them into the book of Psalms. Some Orthodox rabbis found these comments to be heretical and rejected the possibility that they were written by R. Judah he-Hasid. In response to this criticism, Lange published a censored edition of the book, without the controversial sections. These four passages have been subject to considerable academic inquiry. On the basis of these commentaries, it is commonly maintained that R. Judah he-Hasid had idiosyncratic views about the composition of the Hebrew Bible. In this article, I argue that the controversial notes were not written by R. Judah he-Hasid but rather by his son, R. Moshe Zaltman.