ASTRUC, JEAN. – French physician, b. on 19 March 1684 at Montpellier, where he took his doctorate and distinguished himself in combating the plague; d. in 1766 in Paris.
Having converted from Calvinism, in 1730 he was appointed physician to King Luigi XV, and the following year obtained the chair of medicine and pharmacy at the Collège Royal in Paris.
His principal work is De morbis venereis libri novem (Paris, 1740). But more than in the medical field, he gained renown through his philosophical and theological studies (including two writings on L'immortalité de l'âme, ibid., 1755).
He is famous in biblical studies for the anonymously published work Conjectures sur les mémoires dont il paroît que Moyse s'est servi pour composer le livre de la Genèse (Brussels, 1753). The first among modern critics, A. disputed the Mosaic authenticity of Genesi (he did not concern himself with the other books of the Pentateuch), maintaining that Moses made use of earlier documents, of which the two more important were Elohistico and Jehovistico, so called from their use of the divine names Elōhim and Jehovah, together with other lesser ones; Moses would have arranged them in columns, but a later copyist would have unified and confused everything. A.’s documentary theory was to develop in Germany from J. G. Eichhorn (d. 1827) to J. Wellhausen (v. PENTATEUCO).