Did Moses write all five books of the Torah according to modern scholarship?

While traditional Jewish and Christian views have historically attributed the authorship of the Torah—also known as the Pentateuch—to Moses, modern critical scholarship does not support the view that he wrote all five books.12

The traditional belief in Mosaic authorship faces several challenges. The texts themselves are written in the third person, and some passages describe events from a much later period than those they narrate. Notably, the final verses of Deuteronomy describe the death of Moses, a detail that even early scholars recognized as problematic for the claim of his authorship.1

Modern scholarship generally views the Pentateuch as a complex work resulting from centuries of oral and written transmission, involving the weaving together of various documentary sources, traditions, and layers of accretions. While scholars employ diverse methods—including literary, historical, and archaeological criticism—to understand the composition of these texts, there is a broad consensus that the books were not authored by a single individual.23