CX

What is the currency of the so-called "Documentary Hypothesis" in reference to the authorship of the pentateuch (and the rest of the Xian Old Testament). I just picked up Friedman's book (As well as Elaine Pagel's new one on GThom) and I'm wondering if he is moderate in his treatment or more radically liberal.

Apikorus

Friedman's book is a great read - an excellent example of how to make Hebrew Bible scholarship exciting and accessible to a general audience.

Regarding the Documentary Hypothesis, as I've said before it has weathered many storms and has bent but never broken. Source criticism a la Wellhausen was fairly cut and dried; each passage in the tetrateuch was identified as J or E or P based on various clearly articulated criteria (e.g. the name of the deity). You can find a table in the back of Friedman, for example, identifying the source of each passage.

Today's scholars apply a more nuanced methodology. One of the better examples of modern analysis is D. M. Carr's Reading the Fractures of Genesis ($45 from Amazon, $19.50 from Eisenbrauns!). The prevailing view today (I welcome comments/criticisms from DrJim) is that one can generally separate P (= Priestly strand) and non-P, but it is exceedingly difficult to resolve sources beyond this first level. (For decades, scholars wrote papers in which they identified more and more redactional strata, resulting in a torrent of sigla: J1, J2, E1, E2, Rje, P1, P2, P3, D1, D2, Rh, etc. What's amazing is that they actually believed in their ability to resolve sources at that level.)

Friedman himself must be judged as a conservative, in that he largely subscribes to traditional JEPD source criticism. He's even more conservative in his assignment (a la Yehezkel Kaufmann) of P to the 7th c. BCE. (Most scholars, following Wellhausen, assign P a postexilic provenance.) Friedman's most radical suggestion (see The Hidden Book in the Bible) is that one can identify and extract an extended J narrative running all the way from Genesis 2 through 1 Kings 2.

As for the rest of the HB outside the Torah, there are probably dozens of authors. There are some large chunks, such as the Deuteronomistic History, which have been associated with a particular author/redactor or "school." This began with the work of Noth in the 1930's; for a recent (and somewhat controversial) study see Campbell and O'Brien, Unfolding the Deuteronomistic History.

So much of the Hebrew Bible is unique. It isn't like the NT where you have this dominant Pauline or pseudo-Pauline corpus, the gospels, and a few remaining stragglers. The NT has a strong, clearly identifiable overarching message: the divinity and salvific quality of Jesus Christ. The Hebrew Bible, on the other hand, is vast and has no central theme. Motifs such as YHWH's love of the Patriarchs, Israel's election, the exodus, etc. which figure crucially in the Pentateuch are completely absent from books like Proverbs and Qohelet. God himself is never mentioned in Ester. It's a very different cup of tea.

lpetrich

So it's something like someone's collection of their favorite books?

Also, "Qohelet" is the original Hebrew form of the name of the Book of Ecclesiastes. The book names that many of us are familiar with are those in the Hellenistic Greek translation, the Septuagint, and these differ from the original Hebrew names. Some of them, like "Numbers" and "Lamentations", were translated further, of course.

DrJim

There are some interesting debates about the early development of the Hebrew canon, some of which develop around your question about 'someone's favourite books'.

A new challenge to the old ideas about the canon has been raised by Philip R. Davies . He thinks a lot of critics have studied the canon 'backwards', reading into teh origins of the corpus notions that are best explained as the result of the selections, editing, and so forth that resulted in the finished whole.

Davies really emphasizes that texts that now are called HEbrew Bible were the products of the scribal elite of Persian and Hellenistic Jerusalem and became the preferred literature of them for religious, ideological and even educational reasons. Therefore, they were copied and recopied as that society's 'classics'. It was only later that these 'classics' became thought of as 'scripture'.

I forget a lot of details of his argument, its been a while since I read him. He lays out a number of his ideas in 'Scribes and Scrolls', I think by Westminster John Knox press. Far more cheap and cheerful, is his paper of a few years back (available for free):

PR Davies, "Loose Canons": Journal of Hebrew Scriptures. This is a peer reveiwed online journal from Canada. Do a Google on the journal title, you should find it no problem. It is pretty easy to navigate, and they have lots of book reviews too.

Remember, Davies is pretty controversial, although I think he makes a lot of sense. He is accused of hyper-criticism and getting muddled in some details sometimes: yet in this topic, your suggestion nicely coincides with his views, so you might want to have a serious look at the paper. Try to find some online book reveiws if you take up his his books, however. He's pretty polemical, and its only fair to hear both sides.

Toto

Loose Canons