The Divine Legation of Moses
book by William Warburton
The Divine Legation of Moses is the best-known work of William Warburton, an English theologian of the 18th century who became bishop of Gloucester. As its full title makes clear, it is a conservative defence of orthodox Christian belief against deism, by means of an apparent paradox: the afterlife is not mentioned in terms in the Pentateuch (i.e. Torah – see Jewish eschatology), making Mosaic Judaism distinctive among ancient religions; from which, Warburton argues, it is seen that Moses received a divine revelation.
The Divine Legation was published in two parts and nine books from 1738 by Warburton, who left it unfinished. It is a learned and discursive work, and excited extensive controversy in Warburton's lifetime, which the author pursued with acrimony. One side-issue, the history of writing, was treated by Warburton in a manner that proved influential.
A modern opinion, from J. G. A. Pocock, is that the book is a "strange and flawed work of undisciplined genius".
Reception timeline
1738 First part published.
1738 Warburton publishes a Vindication to an anonymous attack (by William Webster).
1741 Second part published.
“The Divine Legation of Moses” enters the record as book by William Warburton. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Divine, Legation and Moses can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“The Divine Legation of Moses” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Divine, Legation and Moses provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 14, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7730424. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1738 and 1741.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Divine Legation of Moses” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.