Dean Anderson

Whilst this is true, it is also somewhat misleading. That is an alternate position, but it is probably not the alternate position that the people referred to in the OP are talking about.

In my experience, the sort of people who assert that the DH is dying or dead are usually Literalists who also assert that "the majority of scholars" have demonstrated Mosaic authorship - and that only "liberals and atheists with an agenda" deny Mosaic authorship.

Steven Avery

Or simply that the DH has never been relevant to real scholarship, a chimera upon conjecture upon journal-prestige upon unbelief. A theory lacking any hard evidence whatosever.

And your view above sounds very straw-man. It would be unusual for a literalist to claim such a claimed "demonstration" (as opposed to an affirmative argument). eg. you'd probably have a hard time finding that in Glenn Miller, or even Holding, or William Craig or whomever.

Shalom,
Steven

Chris Weimer

Have you not read anything in the past 100 years? DH is the core of Torah-studies in real scholarship and many books and hundreds more journal articles in respectable journals all give plenty of evidence for it's existence.

Read. :down:

Anat

Israeli state highschools teach multiple authorship without commiting to a particular set of authors - ie students are supposed to be aware of textual variations, insertions, the possibility of multiple agendas, but other than teaching that the laws in Deuteronomy should be viewed in light of a campaign to concentrate worship in one place there is no mention of the 4 sources of DH. I have no idea what is taught in state religious schools.

John Kesler

In The Bible with Sources Revealed, page 52, Friedman has this note about Genesis 14:

Steven Avery

vanity of vanities..

Ecclesiastes 12:12
And further, by these, my son, be admonished:
of making many books there is no end;
and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

Hundreds of journal articles can easily be written on a scholarship theory of no real evidence and no substance. In fact, that is the question of this thread.

Shalom,
Steven

Apikorus

Steven's position is not unlike that of a child who plugs his ears and screams "I can't hear you!" The fact is that virtually every bible scholar on the planet, save for Evangelical Christians and Orthodox Jews (who are fettered by confessional stance), believes that the Torah is a redacted and conflate text, with multiple sources. The term "Documentary Hypothesis," by the way, means something more. It means that the four traditionally identified sources J, E, P, and D once served as independent documents, rather than being accretions, the latter position being known as a/the "Supplementary Hypothesis". (This is why, for example, there are sometimes doublets and triplets of the same story.) 30 years ago it was hotly debated whether P was a documentary source, for example, or whether it is best understood as a supplement to J/E. By and large, most scholars today admit that it is difficult to isolate E (a notable exception being WH Propp in his recent Anchor Bible Commentary to Exodus 1-18), and would speak of three identifiable strands: J/E, P, and D. Of course, there may have been Deuteronomic additions in the Tetrateuch, etc. -- for the most part the general contours are accepted.

The most serious challenge to the Documentary Hypothesis today comes not from the fundamentalist camp, whose agenda is recognized by real scholars for what it is, but rather from the minimalists who attempt to downdate the entire Pentateuch. John van Seters, for example, argues for a post-exilic Yahwist (see here).

A somewhat demanding but very balanced discussion of the issues is provided by Blenkinsopp in The Pentateuch: An Introduction to the First Five Books of the Bible.

For a good read on P vs. non-P and transmission history issues in Genesis, see D. M. Carr, Reading the Fractures of Genesis

Jeffrey Tigay's book (alas, out of print) contains an excellent set of articles on text criticism as applied to the Hebrew Bible, specifically addressing the issue of conflation of disparate sources: Empirical Models of Biblical Criticism.

Regarding the Hebrew Bible as a whole, Marc Brettler's new book is outstanding: How to Read the Bible. This is IMHO the best broad discussion of how the historical-critical method illuminates the Hebrew Bible.

Dean Anderson

Okay, Praxeus, who do you think wrote the Torah, and when did they write it?

Loomis

Thanks.

That’s kind of lame. Don’t cha think?


Consider someone like richard2. He googles Documentary Hypothesis and reads this definition:

How should richard2 reconsile that with this?

I’m not attacking you (John Kesler). I’m attacking Friedman.

Do you see my point?

His enthusiasm for the DH is not supported by his own comments. Nevertheless he is considered the ‘poster child’ of DH scholars.

Someone ain’t payin’ attention.

rob117

Neither Friedman or any other DH scholar ever claimed that J,E,P, and D were the only sources of the Pentateuch, just that they're the four major ones. Genesis 14 has been recognized as an independent document for about a century; the Deuteronomist is believed to have used many sources in his compilation (Deuteronomy-Kings), including parts of J,E, and P, as well as temple records, royal annals, and minor tales and poems; the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15) is recognized as an early source that was incorporated by the Jahwist into his narrative; there is a section in P called the "Holiness Code" that was originally independent, but then incorporated by the author of P; some laws in P are also thought to have been interpolated in the exilic and postexilic periods to the original pre-exilic document (not just by the Redactor, but also by other editors before him working only with P); etc. I think you're misinterpreting how rigid the hypothesis is supposed to be.