A Foundational Puzzle: Who Wrote the Torah?

The Book of Psalms is traditionally attributed to King David, but the Sages note that David did not write all 150 of the Psalms. Rather, he “wrote by means of 10 elders,” editing together their poems into a single collection. These elders include Abraham, Melchizedek, and even Adam himself. While the Talmud does not say which poems can be attributed to which author, this idea assumes that human beings back to the time of Adam spoke and wrote Hebrew—a theory that seems to contradict the Bible's own story of the Tower of Babel. Still, the notion that Hebrew is the original language of humanity does reflect the Torah's way of narrating the history of creation, as a line leading directly to Abraham and his covenant with God.