spin

I already have. We are not dealing with documentary sources -- you know JEDP -- being woven together (though obviously there are signs of these as well), but with continually updated texts. The last bit I can see added to the pentateuch is the story of Melchizedek, missing from Qumran Genesis texts, though they are very fragmentary. The book of Deuteronomy has the older form of the decalogue, so was D written before the first two? How the hell would they know? But then, when was Deut 28:68 written with its ships taking Jews back to Egypt to become servants? When were ships used to move slaves to Egypt? Wasn't that during the Greek period? Accretions are what we see in the texts, not necessarily discrete documentary sources.

Add to the problem of discrete whole sources, we come to the assumptions about dating and provenance. Did Judah exist as a power in southern Palestine before Hezekiah? (Remember Lachish was a much bigger city than Jerusalem and size indicated power.) If there was no sizable state centred on Jerusalem then there wasn't a literature being developed. (Check out Ben Sira 39 to understand the rarety of scribes and what is necessary to support them. Scribes are not productive in a rural or pastoral community and therefore are of no use. One needs a court with enough resources to pay for their services.)

So when did this literature start to be developed? The alphabet soup works on some wonderfully unsupported assumptions about dating and provenance.

Clearly the Jerusalemite religion was first polytheistic (we go back to discussions about YHWH and his Asherah, and biblical accounts of sacrifices in the valley of Hinnom), so where is it in the pentateuch? We have nice henotheistic and in parts montheistic religion.

I'm well aware of the doublets (and a lot of their interweaving) and the use of divine names. (In fact there's an intersting triplet involving a patriarch and his wife with the latter being palmed off as a sister to an interested king.) We have an interesting range of complexity, but then who changed some of the appearances of YHWH into adonai? They are still YHWH in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Obviously it was after that time. Scribes interact with the texts they copy. Wrong spellings become canonical. Marginalia get incorporated. Whole lines can be omitted -- there are a few examples in the scrolls, where the lines have been inserted above the next one. Improvements can be made to a text, so that the scribe understands better what is being said.

There are differences between the various priestly instructions that suggest an evolution of cultic practices, does someone want to get into calling this evolution P1, P2, P3 etc.?

The scrolls feature different flavours of biblical texts, that which led to the Massoretic Text, that which led to the LXX and that which led to the Samaritan Text, plus variants. What is the point of these nice discrete sourcs as the be-all and end-all of text analysis of the Pentateuch?


spin

Apikorus

The Melchizedek pericope in Gen 14 is generally assigned to an unknown non-JEDP source. It is true that none of the Qumran Genesis fragments contain Gen 14, but this is hardly suspicious since many other chapters are missing as well (I think there's none of Gen 9 - 17 at Qumran, if I'm not mistaken). Furthermore, the Melchizedek story does appear in col. XXII of the Qumran text known as the Genesis Apocryphon (1QapGen).

The fact that Melchizedek does not appear in Jubilees is curious, and more significant than his absence from the fragmentary Qumran canonical Genesis texts. But the pericope does appear in both the LXX as well as the Samaritan Pentateuch. As a priest-king, Melchizedek's role resonates with that of the Hasmonean dynasts, so one might posit he's a retrojection of the Hasmoneans. But if so, what is 1QapGen doing in the Qumran library, since the Qumranians despised the Hasmoneans? (Maccabees is unattested at Qumran.)

To claim that canonical Genesis is taken from the Genesis Apocryphon is even more problematic, since the latter diverges in many ways from canonical Genesis.

spin

Glad you should mention the first text which does mention the episode. The Genesis Apocryphon is naturally a better place for the episode as the text is well acquainted with the divine reference "El Elyon" ['L `LYWN], which only appears in the Hebrew bible five times, four in this passage (and is thus extremely rare in the Hebrew bible). The G.A. however, uses El Elyon almost exclusively, so you can see that the Melchizedek passage is well-suited to this particular text.

This last point is the mindless stupidity of the prevailing errors of Qumran studies, and naturally Alexander Jannaeus is mentioned favourably in 4Q448 as King Jonathan. Jonathan is the name he used on the Hebrew side of all his coins and he is the only king to have this name. In fact, the Dead Sea Scrolls are in no way despising of the Hasmoneans. We just have more a priori commitments to erroneous assumptions. (As I have said, the historical scholarship on the scrolls is all highly questionable.)

You are perceptive of the priest-king relationship indicated by Melki-zedek (melek is "king", and zedek, strongly reminiscent of Zadok, is "just" as was the Zadokite high priest, eg Shimeon the Just). Furthermore, the Hasmoneans are called priests of the Most High God in the "Assumption of Moses":

And further, Josephus, AJ 16.6.2, calls Hyrcanus II "the high priest of the Almighty God", Josephus's Greek theos hupsistos being the direct equivalent of El Elyon.

Hopefully, you can see the connection between El Elyon and the Hasmoneans, given the specific references in non-biblical literature. It should be added that El Elyon is quite a popular divine reference in the second and first centuries BCE, from not long before the Hasmoneans down to their end.

I would argue that the Genesis Apocryphon is more related to Jubilees than it is to Genesis and that the two are related to Genesis through a common ancestor. (Long ago I took a synoptic look between all these sources -- along with Josephus and Pseudo-Philo -- at the places of overlap in these texts.)

I don't think that there need be problems of the relocation of the Melkizedek story from G.A. to Genesis. Just think of how the last chapter of 1 Esdras ended up in Nehemiah.

If you see this stuff posted around the internet, it came from me.


spin

Apikorus

spin, your points about El Elyon in 1QapGen are noted (and interesting), but how do you deal with the appearance of Melchizedek in the Samaritan Pentateuch? My recollection is that the latter is dated to ca. 200 BCE.

spin

The scrolls have Samaritan text type material. It was still in the fold at that time. The writers of the pesharim were well aware of different flavours of their source texts, so I would assume that the different flavours of pentateuch were just as well-known. This would mean that scribal intervention in one text type should also mean the same in other text types. This is by no means a solid response, but adequate for the moment. I'll have to think about it a bit more though.


spin

mike_decock

[Mod Mode]

This an interesting tangent to the OP which I think deserves it's own thread. Carry on.

-Mike...

Doctor X

Actually, as shown on the other thread, it quotes the P version.

This seems to be going on to scrolls which is not really relevant. Spin you can say you have an alternative to the Documentary Hypothesis and state that is it continuous rewriting, but that does not fit the facts--the text of P, for example, is one style. As Friedman puts it, first year colleges students start recognizing it.

To defend your position, you should prove where Friedman and others are wrong.

--J.D.

spin

That's rather assumption laden. As you cited, the "P" version contains the creation version of the sabbath rule, whereas all the Deuteronomy version could offer was the exodus. Now if the first creation was already incorporated into the sabbath rule and gives a clear explanation of the rule, why omit it and put something less explanatory?

It is the one style? What exactly does that mean other than they used "biblical" Hebrew in a relatively consistent way? If more, what exactly and how do you know?

Hey, Friedman isn't here to defend himself. You're quoting authorities and they don't mean much when you're up front on your own. Do you job.


spin

Doctor X

Not at all. If you review my posting of the versions, D quotes P pretty much throughout but changes the reason for the sabbath. Elsewhere D changes many other details from P for political reasons. In other passages D actually "reverses" the P creation.

Same manner in writing, just as you use contractions and I almost never use contractions.

Man would not make much progress if every individual reinvented the wheel. Friedman has done quite a wonderful job of summarizing the Documentary Hypothesis. You are free to read his rather slim book and go from there. It would answer some of your questions such as "style," and why D changes the reason for the sabbath in P for example. I suppose I could spend the next couple of years learning biblical Hebrew, the development of biblical Hebrew, translate the texts, attend seminars, finish the Ph.D., re-reasearch 200 hundred years of scholarship, beome a fully tenured professor, and then answer your questions.

Frankly, I have better things to do . . . such as watch South Park.

For what it is worth, I discussed the issue with a mentor. According to him, the controversial thing about Friedman's summary is his dating. He comes up with arguments to date much of the texts as pre-exilic whereas as many other scholars would consider them post-exilic. However, this does not change "who" wrote what so much as "when."

--J.D.

spin

Sorry, Doctor X, if I can't get from you solid examples of what you are talking about, I can't get very far with what you say.

I have tried to give examples of items which show different times for different passages in the pentateuch, things that span down to perhaps 100 BCE for the Genesis Melkizedek passage, which should bring in to question the JEPD source document model with its myriad of necessary refinements.

I know enough people in the scholarly world who believe that Deuteronomy was mainly the earliest of the materials in the pentateuch. It's a position I would argue. Just consider the simplicity of its cultic information as against the volumes of complex priestly data (the which shows a long development) in the P sections. Note that Aaron is almost non-existent in Deut -- and see how he is used! That is a good indicator of Deut being before all the priestly stuff.

With a little bit of time I would debate you on the matter. Although I have none of my data here, I could get some of it together.

Your understanding of the Exodus version of the decalogue coming before the Deut version is more than unconvincing. You would have one believe that Deut copies P but changes the overtly obvious reason (to anyone who's read Gen 1) for the establishment of the sabbath rule. Not good in my eye.


spin