Says Bleek, a strong advocate of the documentary theory:
As regards the union of different laws, and short collections of laws in our book of Leviticus, De Wette made out (Einleitung, first to fourth editions) that after Genesis and Exodus were composed, the various parts of Leviticus were added, generally by different compilers. This supposition, however, according to what has gone before, is quite inadmissible, and has been tacitly retracted even by De Wette himself in the fifth and sixth editions.This recoil of the great German critic from the extremes of daring and unfounded assumptions against the Mosaic origin of the Levitical laws is a sufficient answer to the flippant assertion of England’s arithmetical bishop:
Thus the whole of Leviticus appears to be of later origin, composed either during or after the captivity, some of the laws apparently by Ezekiel, and other portions probably by fellow-priests of the same age, who were anxious to establish a stricter ritual in Israel.
The last clause of this sentence suggests its answer. Puritan laws can be originated and enforced only in a Puritan age. The era of Moses was the Puritan age in the history of the Hebrews. The era of Ezekiel, by the admission of Colenso, was a degenerate age; and yet the prophet-priest and his associated forgers succeeded in interpolating into the fundamental constitution of their nation, out of their own fertile imaginations, the whole book of Leviticus! Of a declaration so absurd we cannot, with Horace, say, “Credat Judaeus,” for no true Jew, much less can any true Christian, so stultify himself as to give his assent to a statement so extraordinary. It involves a miracle greater than those believed by Jew or Christian. Rationalism always has been more credulous than orthodoxy.
— edited from Commentary on Leviticus.
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