The dates are largely, if not altogether, dependent on the assumption that Hebrew literature is not older than the age of David. A few poems like the Song of Deborah may have been handed down orally from an earlier period, but readers and writers, it is assumed, there were none. The use of writing for literary purposes was coeval with the rise of the monarchy. The oldest inscription in the letters of the Phœnician alphabet yet discovered is only of the ninth century B.C., and the alphabet would have been employed for monumental purposes long before it was applied to the manufacture of books. As Wolf’s theory of the origin and late date of the Homeric Poems avowedly rested on the belief that the literary use of writing in Greece was of late date, so too the theory of the analysts of the Hexateuch rests tacitly on the belief that the Israelites of the age of Moses and the Judges were wholly illiterate. Moses did not write the Pentateuch because he could not have done so. The huge edifice of modern Pentateuchal criticism is thus based on a theory and an assumption. The theory is that of ‘the literary analysis’ of the Hexateuch, the assumption that a knowledge of writing in Israel was of comparatively late date. The theory, however, is philological, not historical. The analysis is philological rather than literary, and depends entirely on the occurrence and use of certain words and phrases. Lists have been drawn up of the words and phrases held to be peculiar to the different writers between whom the Hexateuch is divided, and the portion of the Hexateuch to be assigned to each is determined accordingly. That it is sometimes necessary to cut a verse in two, somewhat to the injury of the sense, matters but little; the necessities of the theory require the sacrifice, and the analyst looks no further. Great things grow out of little, and the mathematical minuteness with which the Hexateuch is apportioned among its numerous authors, and the long lists of words and idioms by which the apportionment is supported, all have their origin in Astruc’s separation of the book of Genesis into two documents, in one of which the name of Yahveh is used, while in the other it is replaced by Elohim.[128]