Dean Anderson

I am now half-way through Freidman's Who Wrote The Bible that I got yesterday.

(My wife was forced to prise the book out of my fingers so that I would leave it alone and come to bed...)

My initial thoughts are that the book is excellent, and that his arguments in favour of the J, E, P, D Documentary Hypothesis are very sound.

But I was wondering... (apart from the 'Moses wrote it all' one) what are the other hypotheses for the writing of the OT?

And what is the argument for them/against the DH?

Dean Anderson

Well, I finished the book - and I think it was excellent.

I would put it on a par with Hawking's A Brief History Of Time in its achievment of taking complex academic work and making it accessible to a lay audience.

I'd thoroughly recommend it to anyone.

spin

Try and get some evidence for any Hebrew literature being written before the exilic period. If it wasn't written before that time, then all the Hebrew literature was only ever in the hands of the Jerusalem temple as the only organisation able to support a scribal group -- one might add the temple in Samaria on Mt Gerizzim as an alternative source. Writing wasn't a freelance profession in those days. One had scribal schools and such schools needed a lot of finance to support them, because scribes did nothing which could support themselves directly: they produced nothing that could go directly into the market place in some form, so they had no direct wa of getting cash. They needed people to support them and the only entity available was the temple.

Such a situation should allow the collection of old, and even discordant, traditions, but it would also reflect the opportunity for perpetual "updating", expansion, clarification, reworking, even errors, either desired or not.

I wouldn't discount the notion of different sources for a lot of the pentateuchal material, nor would I discount the continual revision of texts. I would discount the sorts of datings usually given to the supposed source documents.


spin

rlogan

That raises an intersting question pertaining to the manner of oral history transmission prior to written transmission. When they "date" a piece, I would suppose that the origin is an oral history whereas it may not have been put to a scribe for some time...

Dean Anderson

Would we be able to tell that from the text?

If I have understood the DH argument correctly, it relies on stylistic differences to identify different authors - and then looks at the emphases and biases of each identified author to attempt to place them within a historical framework.

The 'J' author was biased towards Aaron, for example, whilst the 'E' author was biased against Aaron.

If these were oral histories/legends that were only written down at a later date - I would expect the scribe(s) to put their own spin on the tales rather than keep them as they are word-for-word. After all, oral traditions are very mutable and there probably is no 'canonical' version of each tale until it is written by someone.

In other words, I would expect that the evidence used to suggest a dating would indeed suggest a dating for the scribing of the tales rather than a dating for the original oral versions.

For example Genesis 2 had been around as an oral tradition since the Sumerians. However, the 'P' author who adds it to the Torah adds a very 'P'-style version of it.

Similarly, both the 'J' and 'E' authors were almost certainly working from the same oral tradition about the giving of the commandments to Moses - but wrote different versions with different emphases. The differences between their versions can give us tentative evidence of when and where they were scribed, but the oral tradition would have been much older - and much more varied and fluid, making it harder (or even impossible) to track back to its starting point.

Therefore I think the dating tells us more about when each piece was scribed than when the traditions started.

LP675

"his arguments in favour of the J, E, P, D Documentary Hypothesis are very sound."

I haven't read the book you are refering to, but I hope you understand just how speculative J,E,P,D theory is. I would go as far as to say it is merely wild speculation.

Gordon J Wenham for example has said "there is now widespread recognition of the hypothetical character of the results of modern criticism" (Specifically refering to Wellhausen’s basic J,E,P,D theory).

" Rendtorff (BZAW 147 [1976] 169) has observed: “We possess hardly any reliable criteria for the dating of pentateuchal literature. Every dating of the pentateuchal ‘sources’ rests on purely hypothetical assumptions, which ultimately only have any standing through the consensus of scholars."

(Wenham, Gordon J., Word Biblical Commentary, Volume 1: Genesis 1-15, (Dallas, Texas: Word Books, Publisher) 1998)

J,e,p,d theory does not add to our understanding of the pentatuch at all

spin

I may not be a big fan of the simplistic version or the alphabet soup version of the documentary hypothesis, but to make the bald statement that it "does not add to our understanding of the pentatuch at all" seems to say the least to be out of touch with the challenges of the literature. When we have parallels, near parallels, combined texts indicating different versions of the one story having been put together, there is clear evidence of a complex text tradition.

Take for example the two descent lines from Adam (Gen 4:17-24), one via Cain and the other via Seth (Gen 4:25-5:28). These apparently depend on the one source. One ends in the flood, the other in the knowledge that of the sons of Lamech, one became the ancestor of those who live in tents and have livestock while another became the ancestor of those who play the lyre and the pipe. (Their descendants were probably killed in the flood though, weren't they?)

Why in the combined story of the flood does one strand tell of the animals going in two by two while the other had to explain that clean animals went in in seven pairs? One writer had to explain where the clean animals that were sacrificed after the flood came from. The other didn't worry about sacrifices, which were after all the prerogative of a more organised temple.

There are very many parallels and similar stories in the pentateuchal material which is easiest understood as having been developed by different people, edited by different people and worked on at different times.


spin

Dean Anderson

That's strange...

...because Wenham here takes the JEPD Documentary Hypothesis as being the established and default view - and bases his essay on the assumption that it is essentially the correct view - he certainly doesn't think it is 'wild speculation'.

Anyway, so what are the alternative theories? and what is the evidence/argument against the DH? (as opposed to simply asserting that it is 'wild speculation' without giving any reason for such an assertion)

spin

Incidentally, I agree with this comment:

I happen to think that the texts generally developed much later than most believe. The Hebrew language didn't distinguish itself from its Canaanite relatives until after the Canaanite branch distinguished itself from Phoenician and there is still debate over what language the Gezer calendar, dated to the ninth century BCE, was written in, be it Phoenician or some form of Hebrew. Obviously, a clear distinction between Phoenician and Canaanite didn't as yet exist at that time. Even conservative linguists have difficulty pushing the emergence of Hebrew back very far. If the Hebrew language hadn't clearly developed in the 9th century, then when did Moses write? or did he write in some other language which was later translated into Hebrew??

Diachronic linguistics is quite a well used tool, which has shown the relationships within, and the development of, numerous language families around the world. Ancient Hebrew is just one of the language of the Semitic family and must take its place alongside the other languages such as Ugaritic, Phoenician, Edomite, Palmyrean, and Moabite, as well as more distant relatives such as Akkadian, Arabic, Ethiopian, etc. Late development of Hebrew must of course mean late development of Hebrew literature as well, mustn't it?


spin

spin

You may have noticed that I have proposed that we are dealing with a kind of continual development whose modifications represented the status quo at any given time in the history of the text's evolution. (One interesting question which needs to be pursued is when the Aaronic priesthood got control of the temple. It was obviously true after the fall of the Zadokite priests [circa 164 BCE], but was it true before them?) This evolution extends down to Pharisaic times: can you think of any group which could attack the priesthood as can be seen in a few biblical documents (think of the book of Malachi for example)?

Wellhausen is to pentateuchal philology what Freud is to psychology. They both got a lot wrong, but they each sure got an important ball rolling. If Wellhausen had got it right, then we wouldn't be suffering the proliferation of alphabet soup in scholarly circles regarding JEPD and the myriad of subcategories. In what subcategories do you place marginal notes which became included, or scribal errors, or clarifications, or even redactors' preferences?


spin