The other day I posted some reflections upon the sort of questions that one must ask in seeking to date the Pentateuchal texts. In this post, I want to follow up on a question I've been asked when this issue has come up in conversation before: "Do you tend to date the Pentateuch earlier than most scholars?" This is a very reasonable question, as it's no secret that in my forthcoming book Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament I argue for a "lower chronology," which in concrete terms is to say that I date the gospels, Acts, several of the epistles, and Revelation approximately twenty to thirty or so years earlier than do the majority of New Testament scholars. As such, it is altogether reasonable to ask whether I also tend to date the Pentateuch earlier than would most Hebrew Bible/Old Testament scholars.
The short and most honest answer is that I honestly don't know if I do. That's because it is hard to know where one dates a set of documents before one carefully works through the relevant evidence. In principle there is no reason that we couldn't be living in a world where the Pentateuch was written relatively late and the New Testament relatively early. This however also brings us back to the reality that the Pentateuch probably results from a more extended period of composition than does any book of the New Testament. This forces us to think through much more carefully what we mean when we talk about the date of a text's composition. A hypothetical scenario can help us make sense of this. Let's imagine that J, E, D, and P—the classical sources for the Pentateuch according to the Documentary Hypothesis—were all "complete" prior to the exile (whatever it means to say that a non-extant hypothetical source text was completed). But let us also imagine that these pre-exilic materials were not brought together into something resembling what we know as the Pentateuch until the Second Temple period. In such a scenario, it's would be somewhat inaccurate to say without qualification that the Pentateuchal texts are pre-exilic; at the same time, it would also be inaccurate to say without qualification that they are products of the Second Temple. We would probably in this scenario have to say that they are Second Temple texts which preserve pre-exilic material. But even that is less precise than a chronologist would prefer. A chronologist would much more fully want to specify when within the pre-exilic period the various source texts are best situated, and when in the Second Temple period the compilation into our Pentateuch took place.
This is again to say, as I intimated the other day, that it is probably more difficult to date the five books that make up the Pentateuch than the twenty-seven that make up the New Testament. In fairness, this could seem this way to me only because I'm so much more familiar with the work of establishing the dates of the New Testament, but I don't think so. I think that the greater antiquity of the Pentateuch, the greater range of possible dates of composition, and the greater likelihood of very extended processes of composition conspire to make the task significantly more difficult. And we really do I think have to be very alert to the possibility that the Pentateuch as a unit is relatively late, even while it might contain material that is relatively early.
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