The Pentateuch and the Documentary Hypothesis
Images: (1) http://www.layevangelism.com/bastxbk/illustrations/docuhypoth.htm
(2)http://www.city-data.com/forum/religion-spirituality/2057712-good-graphic-documentary-hypothesis.html
Until about two hundred year ago, the consensus among scholars was that the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, was completely written by Moses. Indeed, this was the general lay consensus during my youth. However, there is now almost complete agreement among scholars that the Torah or Pentateuch did not take its present and final form until after the Exile of the Jews in Babylon and before the return of Ezra: that is to say some time between about 600 BCE and 450 BCE. The Torah or Law was probably promulgated by Ezra soon after he came to Jerusalem from Babylon and was quickly deemed authoritative and sacred. Now, modern scholars are convinced that in the Pentateuch there is very little that goes back to Moses. An exception is noted by Canon Barnes and referred to below. It is now regarded as the result of a series of religious reformations, its whole framework being constructed by a school of Priestly writers in Babylon during the Exile[1]. By way of example, under the final system described in the Book of Leviticus, all religious worship was concentrated at Jerusalem. There were no local altars or shrines where sacrifice could be offered to God. However, the prophets before the Captivity knew nothing of this, and before the Exile the Law of Leviticus was not merely disregarded; it was unknown.
Furthermore, over many years observers had noticed that there were many internal inconsistencies in the text, and frequently, the same story was told twice in different language. An understanding of the manner in which the final form of the Pentateuch was reached was ultimately arrived at after an elaborate study of the literary styles of the various writers and groups of writers whose work has survived by paying attention to the use of critical words, such as those for “God”, by investigating the development of religious ritual and thought, and by minute antiquarian research. As Canon Barnes has pertinently pointed out, a language changes as the centuries go by. “We cannot write like Swift or Addison, nor could they write like Shakespeare, nor Shakespeare like Chaucer”[2].
When the text of the Pentateuch was studied, it was noted that one of the two stories would refer to the deity by the divine name, Yahweh (Jehovah) and the other would refer to the deity simply as “God”. This other also portrayed Yahweh more impersonally than in the first as speaking through dreams, prophets, and angels rather than personal appearances. This narrative also begins not with a depiction of Yahweh’s creation of humankind, but with the divine address to Abraham, the ancestor of Israel. The conclusion was reached that there were once two different old source documents, which had been dissected and then rearranged to form one continuous story comprising the Five Books of Moses.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century further analysis of the text revealed that there were not in fact two but four separate source documents. A third source was separately identified, with linguistic traces common to the first and second, but couched in formal, dry, legalistic language unlike the eloquence of the first two, and then it was realised that the fifth of the five books, Deuteronomy, was strikingly different in language to the other four and none of the three other source documents continued through into the text.
For working purposes, each of the four sources was identified by alphabetic symbols. The document associated with the divine name Yahweh (Jehovah) was called J. The document that was identified by referring to the deity as “God” (in Hebrew, Elohim) was called E. In some instances, these are also described as Judaean and Ephraimite to signify that they belong to south and north Israel[3]. Dates can be arbitrary, but Canon Barnes says that J probably flourished about the middle of the ninth century BCE and E somewhat less than a century later. “Of all Hebrew historians, J is the most gifted and the most brilliant”, he said. “He excels in the power of delineating life and character. In ease and grace his narratives are unsurpassed. He writes without effort, and without conscious art”. To him we owe the story of Eden and the Fall, of Abraham’s pleading for Sodom, of the wooing of Rebekah[4]. E does not write as brilliantly as J, says Canon Barnes. He has not the same felicity of expression or poetic vigour. To him is owed the story of Joseph in Egypt. But the story of the selling of Joseph with its many inconsistencies is the result of a “somewhat artless combination” of narratives of J and E, which differed in that each assigned the blame for the transaction to ancestors of each other[5].
The third document, by far the largest, included most of the legal sections and concentrated a good deal on matters having to do with priests, so it was called P. P will be considered in more detail. And the source that was found only in the book of Deuteronomy was called D. A fifth source was later identified as being the work of the Redactors, or editors, so this source was described as R and included the work of DH, the Deuteronomic Historian, a school which retrospectively interpreted the Exile as a punishment from God because the people worshipped idols. In other words, each source was identified by a divine name or sectional interest, and each represented a different strand of tradition.
During the nineteenth century, two German scholars, Karl Heinrich Graf and Wilhelm Vatke, concluded that the great majority of the laws and much of the narrative of the Pentateuch were not part of life in the days of Moses, much less written by him, nor even in the days of the kings and prophets of Israel. However, many traditional scholars found the conclusion that biblical Israel as a nation was effectively ungoverned by law for its first six centuries as untenable.
Building on Graf and Vatke’s work, Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) came to the conclusion that the Torah was originally four distinct narratives, each complete in itself, each dealing with the same incidents and characters, but with distinctive "messages". The four were then combined twice by different redactors (editors) who tried to keep as much of the original documents as possible. Wellhausen then ordered these sources chronologically as J-E-D-P, setting them in the context of the evolving religious history of Israel, which he saw as one of ever-increasing priestly power. A common way of identifying each of these strands is by means of a hand[6]:
[1] E.W.Barnes, Sc D, FBS, Canon of Westminster, “The Story of the Bible”, in The Outline of Literature, Volume 1, John Drinkwater, Ed, 76, originally published by The Knickerbocker Press, 1923.
[2] Ibid, 77.
[3] Ibid 78.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid 78.
[6] Hand illustration and graphic below reproduced courtesy of Dr Susanne Glover, being source material in her WEA Hebrew Bible in crisis course.
Wellhausen took the view that each of the documents of the first three sources reflected different stages in the development of the Jewish faith, and that the Torah itself was derived from originally independent, parallel and complete narratives which were subsequently combined into the current form by a series of redactors. So, the stories and laws that appeared in J and E reflected the nature/fertility stage of religion; the stories and laws of Deuteronomy (D) reflected the spiritual/ethical stage, and P the priestly/legal stage, composed by “conscientious, prosaic annalists” - priests living in Babylonia during the Exile who supplied the whole framework of the Pentateuch and gave it its final form.
The priestly writers describe with relish the different ceremonial institutions of the Hebrews. They take a consistent pleasure in chronological and other statistical data. Whenever we come across a passage beginning “These are the generations of …” we may safely assume that it is the handiwork of P[1]. P includes many lists (especially genealogies), dates, numbers and laws. Portrayals of God viewed as distant and unmerciful are ascribed to P. P partly duplicates J and E, but alters details to stress the importance of the priesthood. It consists of about a fifth of Genesis (including its famous first chapter), substantial portions of Exodus and Numbers, and almost all of Leviticus. It has an “unmistakable”[2] dry and legalistic style.
When we say that these works were “composed” or “written”, this does not mean all at the one time. There were numerous tales and anecdotes from the different (originally oral) traditions of each kingdom to be picked over by each redactor and then incorporated into each text using something like a modern day scissors and paste technique, and then blended into what to all intents and purposes appears to be a coherent whole. Sometime fairly early on, J and E were combined into one narrative containing two versions of the many tales each had to tell, leading to the many confusions, contradictions and inconsistencies commented upon by earlier commentators including Hobbes (1588-1679) and Spinoza (1632-1677).
The reality is that the Pentateuch could not have been written by any one person is evidenced by the use of “doublets” – the same story told twice, sometimes contradicting each other in details, but nevertheless retained by the redactor to preserve the separate traditions from which they sprang and to avoid excising anything. There are, for example, two creation stories. Genesis 1 envisages a creation by divine fiat: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth (Genesis 1:1-2:4a), which seems to suggest that God created the universe out of nothing. This is a post-Exilic construction. But Genesis 2:4b-25 contains a different account – of God as the potter creating humankind out of the dust of the ground. He created Adam and then woman. The source here is J, the earliest version, the difference being discernible in the language. There are also two flood stories (the number of animals taken in is different (Gen 6: 19f, 7:2f)[3] and two accounts of how Hagar was driven out from Abraham’s household[4].
And two editions of Deuteronomy, no less!
In 1973, the American biblical scholar Frank Moore Cross developed the then stunning but now generally accepted thesis that there were two editions of Deuteronomy. The first comprised only the present day Chapters 12 to 26 - the Deuteronomic core, its Law Code. The second then contains an identifiable introduction (Chapters 1 to 11) and a conclusion (part of the last few chapters). Chapters 12 to 26 conclude with the reign of Judah’s King Josiah (641-609 BCE), and Cross’s hypothesis is that the original edition of the Deuteronomistic History was the work of someone who lived at the time of Josiah (640-609 BCE) (he called it DTR1), and the second the work of someone living after the Southern Kingdom fell in 587 BCE (DTR2). A second edition was necessary because it did not make sense to leave the History of Judah on such a high note depicting Josiah as the epitome of everything a good monarch should be and heaping lavish praise on all his achievements when such tragic events had occurred thereafter without mentioning what had occurred in the interim, so the redactor simply incorporated the core text within the framework of his later additions, in the process adding two short chapters describing Judah’s last four kings, noting in the manner of DTR1 that each “did what was bad in the eyes of Yahweh”.
The document “discovered” in the Temple during Josiah’s reign, which will be examined in more detail shortly, was in fact DTR1, and it is hypothesised that it was not really such an old document after all (though it may have been based on more ancient texts) and was written by someone who admired Josiah’s reforms and achievements during his reign. Richard Elliott Friedman reasoned that DTR1 had to be written before Josiah died in 609 BCE and DTR2 after the Babylonian destruction and the exile in 587 – a difference of only 22 years[5]. His conclusion was that both DTR1 and DTR2 were written under the same hand, more likely than not by one of the Shiloh priests in the Temple in Jerusalem[6]. Friedman names that person as a scribe, Baruch, working under the supervision of Jeremiah. In other words, Deuteronomy as we know it is a post-Exilic rewrite of the original, with various passages reworked in order to “predict” the forthcoming disaster if the people did not obey Yahweh’s laws. Viewed in this way, it provides an explanation for the nation’s misfortunes. The Deuteronomist, D, also included themes such as the selection of Israel as a chosen people, the gift of the land and the laws of land tenure. The 10 commandments are also heavily indebted to D.
According to Martin Noth (1962) the Deuteronomist wrote in the middle of the 6th century BC with the purpose of addressing contemporaries in the Babylonian exile to show them that “their sufferings were fully deserved consequences of centuries of decline in Israel’s loyalty to Yahweh.” Loyalty to Yahweh was measured in terms of obedience to the Deuteronomic law. Since Israel and Judah had failed to follow that law, their histories had ended in complete destruction in accordance with the divine judgment envisaged by Deuteronomy. “But it shall come to pass, if you will not listen to the voice of Yahweh your God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command you this day that all these curses shall come on you, and overtake you.”
Drawing on stylistic similarities, Friedman also attributes the next 6 books of the Bible[7] to the same redactor working from ancient texts, giving each an introduction and conclusion to endow them with some context and incorporate them into a coherent chronological narrative. These texts cover themes such as the story of Joshua, Jericho and the conquest (Joshua), the stories of Deborah, Gideon and Samson (Judges), and so on. The person who wrote these texts, or perhaps his school of priestly scribes, is commonly referred to as the Deuteronomistic Historian.
[1] Canon Barnes, op cit, 78-79.
[2] Ibid, 79.
[3] According to Canon Barnes (at op cit 78), the Flood story is the result of combining a story from J with material from a number of P scholars.
[4] Tobin 121.
[5] Other scholars noted at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_hypothesis have suggested that D was written c 650-621 BCE in Jerusalem during a period of religious reform prior to the Babylonian exile (587-539 BCE).
[6] This view in its generally has been attributed to Spinoza, who attributes D to someone working in the Temple during Josiah’s reign in 621 BCE.
[7] Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings.