Abraham Ibn Ezra’s Account of the Composition of the Torah: A Medieval Precedent for Biblical Criticism?

Critical biblical scholarship emerged in the early modern period, yet scholars frequently search for precursors to it among medieval commentators – and many mention Abraham Ibn Ezra in this context. In several places Ibn Ezra claims that there are verses in the Torah that were added to it after the time of Moses, and some major thinkers and scholars in the early modern period were influenced by these remarks. However, this belief of Ibn Ezra's is not based on the considerations that led the founders of critical biblical scholarship to their conclusion that Moses did not write the Torah. His positions on the question of the Torah's authorship are an example of the fact that similarity in conclusions and even in interpretive methodology should not obscure the different interpretive and attitudinal points of departure that distinguish traditional biblical interpretation from critical biblical scholarship.