Editing Jean Astruc (section)

==Life and career==
The son of a [[Protestant]] minister who had converted to [[Catholicism]], but who returned to Protestantism before his death.<ref name="Major Bib">{{cite book|last=Rogerson|first=John W.|title=Dictionary of major biblical interpreters|year=2007|publisher=IVP Academic|location=Downers Grove, Ill.|isbn=978-0-8308-2927-9|edition=2nd|editor=McKim, Donald K.|chapter=Astruc, Jean}}</ref> Astruc was educated at [[Montpellier]], one of the great schools of medicine in early modern Europe. His dissertation and first publication, submitted when he was only 19, is on decomposition, and contains many references to recent research on the lungs by [[Thomas Willis]] and [[Robert Boyle]]. After teaching medicine at Montpellier he became a member of the medical faculty at the [[University of Paris]]. His numerous medical writings, or materials for the history of medical education at Montpellier, are now forgotten, but the work published by him anonymously in 1753 has secured for him a permanent reputation. This book, brought out anonymously in 1753, was entitled ''Conjectures sur les memoires originaux dont il paroit que Moyse s'est servi pour composer le livre de la Genese. Avec des remarques qui appuient ou qui éclaircissent ces conjectures'' ("Conjectures on the original documents that Moses appears to have used in composing the Book of Genesis. With remarks that support or throw light upon these conjectures"). The title cautiously gives the place of publication as [[Brussels]], safely beyond the reach of French authorities.

The safeguard was required since Astruc's Languedoc homeland was in the frame of the [[Counter-Reformation]], and the Protestant "[[Camisards]]" being deported or sent to the galleys was still a very recent memory. In Astruc's own times the writers of the ''[[Encyclopédie]]'' were working under great pressure and in secret, the [[Catholic Church]] not offering a tolerant atmosphere for [[biblical criticism]].

That was somewhat ironic, for Astruc saw himself as fundamentally a supporter of orthodoxy; his unorthodoxy lay not in denying [[Mosaic authorship]] of Genesis but in his defence of it. In the previous century scholars such as [[Thomas Hobbes]],<ref>Astruc, ''Conjectures sur les memoires originaux dont il paroit que Moyse s'est servi pour composer le livre de la Genese'', p. 454, and the "Table des Matieres" (Table of Matters), p. 509.</ref> [[Isaac La Peyrère]],<ref>Astruc, ''Conjectures sur les memoires...'', Isaac (de) la Peyrère, p. 454, and "Table des Matieres" (Table of Matters) p. 520.</ref> and [[Baruch Spinoza]]<ref>Astruc, ''Conjectures sur les memoires...'', p. 439, pp. 452–454, and "Table des Matieres" (Table of Matters), p. 524.</ref>  had drawn up long lists of inconsistencies and contradictions and anachronisms in the [[Torah]] and used them to argue that Moses could not have been the author of the entire five books. Astruc was outraged by this "sickness of the last century" and was determined to use modern 18th century scholarship to refute that of the 17th century.<ref>Astruc, ''Conjectures sur les memoires...'', p. 454 refers to "...la maladie du dernier siecle".</ref>

Using methods already well established in the study of the Classics for sifting and assessing differing manuscripts,<ref>One of the textual studies he mentions as a basis of his own method is that of [[Richard Simon (priest)|Richard Simon]]; ''cf.'' Astruc, ''Conjectures sur les mémoires...'', p. 7, pp. 476–477, and "Table of Matters". p. 524; see also Richard H. Popkin, ''Isaac de la Peyrère (1596–1676): His Life, Work, and Influence'', Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1987, p. 74.</ref> he drew up parallel columns and assigned verses to each of them according to what he had noted as the defining features of the text of Genesis: whether a verse used the term "[[YHWH]]" (Yahweh) or the term "[[Elohim]]" (God) referring to God and whether it had a doublet (another telling of the same incident, as the two accounts of the creation of man and the two accounts of Sarah being taken by a foreign king). Astruc found four documents in Genesis, which he arranged in four columns, declaring that it was how Moses had originally written his book, in the image of the four Gospels of the New Testament, and a later writer had combined them into a single work, creating the repetitions and inconsistencies which Hobbes, Spinoza and others had noted.<ref>Gordon Wenham, "Exploring the Old Testament: Volume 1: The Pentateuch" (2003), p. 162-63</ref>

Astruc's work was taken up by a succession of German scholars, the intellectual climate in Germany then being more conducive to scholarly freedom. Those hands formed the foundation of modern critical exegesis of the Old and New Testaments.

Astruc was also the author of ''Elements of Midwifery ... With ... an answer to a casuistical letter, on the conduct of Adam and Eve, at the birth of their first child ...'' (1766).<ref>{{Cite web|title=Explore the British Library Search - jean astruc l'art d'accoucher|url=http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do;jsessionid=73129E640E635F7430E6CF1C1066C9DB?fn=search&ct=search&initialSearch=true&mode=Basic&tab=local_tab&indx=1&dum=true&srt=rank&vid=BLVU1&frbg=&tb=t&vl(freeText0)=jean+astruc+l'art+d'accoucher&scp.scps=scope:(BLCONTENT)&vl(2084770704UI0)=any&vl(2084770704UI0)=title&vl(2084770704UI0)=any|access-date=2020-12-11|website=explore.bl.uk|language=en}}</ref><ref>''L'Art d'Accoucher réduit a ses principes....''[https://www.jarndyce.co.uk/online_catalogues/236.pdf Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers, London. Retrieved 1 June 2019.] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190601212327/https://www.jarndyce.co.uk/online_catalogues/236.pdf |date=1 June 2019 }}</ref>