ayf@erc3ba.UUCP (A.Y.Feldblum) (10/30/85)
Gary Buchholz in article <1201@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP> raised the
following point (as I understand his article):
Given that both secular and nonsecular (??me) biblical
scholarship accept the validity of source criticism as applied to the
Pentateuch, can the Wellhausen Documentary Hypothesis be accepted by
Torah Judaism.
I'd like to comment and examine several of the points raised by
this issue. First, we must understand what secular biblical scholarship
is. As I understand it, it starts from the basic assumption that the
Bible is a document that was authored by man at some period in the past.
This document was copied and recopied by scribes, and what we call the
Bible is the result of that process. The document is then studied by
using principles of literary scholarship, and this is what constitutes
the part of secular biblical scholarship that Gary refers to. There are
two components to this field, usually referred to as "lower" and
"higher" criticism. Lower criticism focuses on "errors" that crept into
the document during the period of scribel copying. In other related
fields, this is determined by examining manuscripts with variant
readings, and having a broad base of documents with which to determine
the language and grammar. With the case of the Bible, there are
basically no manuscripts with variant readings, there was no
contemporary documents to use to compare language use and grammatical
structure. What the German school of biblical lower criticism did was,
to large extent, to simply put any word or grammatical structure that
did not fit their view of what was correct biblical Hebrew in the
category of "errors". Much of that work has now fallen into disrespect
as contemporary Semitic documents (esp. Ugaritic texts) have been
discovered, and those words or grammatical constructs turn out to be
valid Semitic usage. The second area is higher criticism, and the
Documentary Hypothesis is one result of that work. In higher criticism
one tries to study the literary makeup and development of the document.
Again, the lack of contemporary documents to base their work on, forced
them to assume principles and base their results on that. The
Documentary Hypothesis is the assumption that the different names used
for G-d mark different authors, and there was some final "Redactor" who
put it all together. As far as the date, they put it somewhere late in
the period of the split Kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Again, the
discovery of Near Eastern documents from the period the Torah is set in
strongly points to the documents being from that period ( I do not have
access to any of the papers, but many details in the stories found in
Bereshit indicate a detailed knowledge of the period). Thus the
"historical validity" of the Documentary Hypothesis is dubious at best.
Having let off some steam about the Documentary Hypothesis, let
us look at the larger question of Torah and "Scholarship". Literary
scholarship is a part of what we call the scientific method. One
important aspect of the scientific method is that it does not claim to
be able to determine the "truth" (I know I will be flamed for this, I've
argued this with Joe Abeles among others, feel free to add flames if you
want). Rather, it is a method of arriving at a self-consistent
description of it's subject matter, based on admittedly arbitrary
assumptions, that 1) completely describe the observables of it's subject
matter, and 2) correctly makes predictions about future observables.
Thus quantum mechanics may not be the correct description of the
physical laws. However, all observations of the physical laws are
consistent with quantum mechanics, and it has successfully predicted many
new phenomena. That it may not be "true" is totally irrelevant. Biblical
scholarship fails miserably at the above two criteria. It is forced to
ascribe corruption to its subject matter - the Bible, in order to
develop any framework, which has in turn been shown to be defective
every time some new Near Eastern document has been found.
If we look at the Torah view, on the other hand, we have a very
well defined approach that has no historical evidence against it. Rather
the problem with it from a scholarly point of view is that goes against
the arbitrary assumptions that were postulated for the foundation of the
inquiry. Torah says G-d exists and gave the Torah to Moses on Mt. Sinai
with more than 1.5 million witnesses. This tradition stretches back
three thousand years in oral form, and over two thousand years in
existing written form. There is as much, if not more, "historical"
evidence for this event, as there is for any event whose validity is
based on transmitted literary documents (which if you think about it,
include most events). The reason for claiming that the Torah is a fraud
and is not an accurate description of historical facts is simply that
the events reported contradict certain arbitrary assumptions that are
accepted as the basis for scholarly criticism.
To summerize, I find no scientific basis for the Documentary
Hypothesis, and more importantly I accept the tradition of the giving of
the Torah to Moses by G-d to be valid. In that context, I really don't
care if my Dvar Torah doesn't confirm to their views and I think that
the Torah and the Oral Tradition are firmly "on the ground".
Avi Feldblum
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