Jean Astruc

Physician and biblical scholar, medical consultant to Louis XV, born in Sauve, S France. He taught medicine at Montpellier and Paris. He is famous for a work he wrote on the book of Genesis which was to serve as the basis for subsequent theories of Biblical criticism.

Jean Astruc (Sauves, Auvergne, March 19, 1684 - Paris, May 5, 1766) was a famous professor of medicine at Montpellier and Paris, who wrote the first great treatise on syphilis and venereal diseases, and also, with a small anonymously published book, played a fundamental part in the origins of critical textual analysis of works of scripture. Astruc was the first to convincingly suggest using the techniques of textual analysis that were commonplace in studying the secular classics— that Genesis was composed based on several sources or manuscript traditions, an approach that was still cautiously being called the documentary hypothesis in the late 19th century.

He was the son of a Protestant minister who had converted to Catholicism (but the House of Astruc was of medieval Jewish origin). Astruc was educated at Montpellier, one of the great schools of medicine in early modern Europe. His numerous medical writings, or materials for the history of medical education at Montpellier, are now forgotten, but the work published by him anonymously in 1753 has secured for him a permanent reputation. Avec des remarques qui appuient ou qui éclaircissent ces conjectures ("Conjectures on the original documents that Moses appears to have used in composing the Book of Genesis. The forcible "re-Catholicization" of Astruc's Languedoc homeland was a very recent memory, when the Protestant "Camisards" were being deported or sent to the galleys. Astruc himself did not intend to deny Moses' authorship of Genesis, but his work opened the modern era of critical Biblical inquiry.