ASTRUC, JEAN. - French physician, b. 19 March 1684 at Montpellier, where he took his doctorate and distinguished himself in combating the plague, d. 1766 at Paris.
Having converted from Calvinism, in 1730 he was appointed physician to King Louis 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 fame for his philosophical and theological studies (two writings, among others, on *L'immortalité de l'âme*, ibid. 1755).
He is renowned in biblical studies for the work (published anonymously) *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. contests the Mosaic authorship of *Genesis* (he does not deal with the other books of the Pentateuch), asserting that Moses made use of extremely ancient documents, two of which were more important, the *Elohistic* and the *Jehovistic*, so named from the use of the divine names *Elohim* and Jehovah, and others minor; Moses would have arranged them in columns, but a later copyist would have unified and confused everything. A.'s documentary theory would later evolve in Germany from J. G. Eichhorn (d. 1827) to J. Wellhausen (v. PENTATEUCH).