hezekiah jones

My understanding is that its substance is pretty much a foregone conclusion, if not each and every detail of the various threads of authorship, unless I am vastly mistaken.

Can anyone recommend some recent summaries, including criticisms? I'm mostly interested in the Book of Genesis.

The few resources I've looked at in any degree of detail are E.A. Speiser's Genesis, which is about 40 years old, a bit of Wellhausen, which is obviously ancient, and a couple of internet sites. The only opposition I've ever come across originated from fundies that insist the entire Pentateuch was written by Moses in his own hand.

Thanks in advance.

P.S. I have easy access to two first-class university libraries, one of which is run by Jesuits, both of which contain extensive theology collections.

CX

Can we presume you've read Friedman's book?

hezekiah jones

Originally posted by CX
Can we presume you've read Friedman's book?

Yes! I have that, and forgot to mention it (duh). Thanks for the reminder.

Is it fairly representative of the general scholarly consensus? Because it certainly is representative of my understanding that it's a "foregone conclusion."

Okay, I'm going to acknowledge my abject stupidity here and recommend to myself Friedman's selected bibliography. Best bet, yes?

Apikorus

Friedman (WWTB) is a great read, but he is rather conservative in his dating of P. Speiser's ABC contains a nice introduction to the Documentary Hypothesis. The commentary itself is quite out of date, largely because Speiser, who was an Assyriologist, was overly enamored of Mesopotamian parallels which later were shown to be overdrawn. In fact, Ronald Hendel from UC Berkeley has been commissioned to redo the ABC of Genesis; expect to see this in about a decade at the earliest.

I'd recommend Joseph Blenkinsopp's The Pentateuch: An Introduction to the First Five Books of the Bible as a more up to date treatment of the source-critical issues. Blenkinsopp pays serious attention to minimalists like Thompson and quasi-minimalists like van Seters.

Alexander Rofe's Introduction to the Composition of the Pentateuch is quite good, and a quick read as well. It contains a chapter addressing challenges to the Documentary Hypothesis, but alas Rofe totally ignores the minimalists - inexcusable, in my opinion, in a book first published in 1999.

hezekiah jones

Excellent, thanks Apikorus. I was hoping you'd swing by.

godfry n. glad

I'll second that. Thanks, Apikorus.

godfry

Apikorus

I would also recommend various relevant articles in the Anchor Bible Dictionary. See the entries on Torah, Yahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomy, and Priestly Author.

The introductions to the various Anchor Bible Commentaries on the Pentateuch contain a wealth of information, but I would not recommend them for novices. Propp has promised a full discussion of the Documentary Hypothesis in an appendix to volume II of Exodus, but that is perhaps five to ten years in the offing. Milgrom's massive three-volume set on Leviticus contains a great amount of material on P, as does Levine's two-volume commentary on Numbers. As it turns out, Milgrom follows Kaufmann and holds in a preexilic P, while Levine (somewhat anomalously among Jewish scholars) adopts the more standard position of Wellhausen, that P is postexilic.

Weinfeld, who is aged and ill, will probably never finish with Deuteronomy, but his Deut 1-11 is excellent.

hezekiah jones

I picked up Blenkinsopp: looks superb. Unfortunately Rofe had left the building, leaving only an Italian translation.

But I also got:

Ernest Nicholson, The Pentateuch in the Twentieth Century: The Legacy of Julius Wellhausen, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998

and

R.J. Thompson, Moses and the Law in a Century of Criticism Since Graf, E.J. Brill, Leiden, 1970.

The latter is way deeper than I need for my little project, but there's a nifty discussion on whether Graf/Wellhausen were influenced by "Darwinian" thinking, which suits my purposes to a tee.

Given the enormous amount of research contained in some of these works, I guess it's not surprising it's taking Doubleday 50 years to update the Anchor Bible Genesis. If there is a long-term plan in the works to replace the entire corpus, by the time it's complete, people will be worshipping Elvis Presley as the Messiah and Darth Vader as Satan, as someone else remarked somewhere.

But at least there won't be an "Historical Elvis" Yahoo! newsgroup, since artifacts testifying to His existence, in the form of Saviour Dandruff Shampoo, for example, will have been unearthed at the gift shop dig site across the street from Graceland.

Celsus

Excellent book indeed, but it's not really an introduction (despite its title) because you'd need to know what the Documentary Hypothesis is first, or at least being familiar with the DH is an enormous help.

Joel

Arken

Would someone please provide a brief summary of this hypothesis?