When Was the Book of Leviticus Written?

With the exception of Jerome and later Ibn Ezra (12th century) and Andreas Carlstadt (Luther’s rival), few challenged the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch before the 19th century (for examples, see G. Herbert Livingstone, The Pentateuch in its Cultural Environment [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1974], 220–21). Arguments for the documentary hypothesis and its atomistic and evolutionary approach to texts that arose in the 19th century are not justified in an impartial reading of the books. As Allen Ross has observed,

Whatever one thinks about the formation of the Pentateuch, it is clear that Leviticus cannot be isolated from its present setting in the Pentateuch. Its teachings assume the reality of the sanctuary with all of its furnishings (recorded in Ex 25–31) and the existence of that sanctuary assumes the reality of the covenant itself. That covenant was made with promises to the fathers. . . . All the legal and cultic instructions that follow form the content of the covenant, providing the details for the worship and service of the covenant people (Holiness to the Lord: A Guide to the Exposition of Leviticus [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2002], 19).

The content of Leviticus with the rituals and purity rites fits with what is known of other cultures in the same period. Julius Wellhausen advocated that the language in Leviticus is later than that of Exodus. But linguistic analysis and intertextual studies have raised doubts as to the validity of this theory (A. Hurvitz, “Linguistic Criteria for Dating Problematic Biblical Texts,” Hebrew Abstracts 14 [1973], 74–79, and Mark Rooker, Biblical Hebrew in Transition: The Language of the Book of Ezekiel [New York: Continuum, 1990], 54–64). In sum, there are compelling reasons to consider Moses as the author of Leviticus as well as the entire Pentateuch, and therefore to date the composition 1440–1420 BC (see the introduction to Genesis for a discussion of the Documentary Hypothesis).