ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) (12/13/90)
I wanted to follow up a follow up to one of my postings, but I left it a bit late, we ran out of I-nodes, and the article I wanted to follow up disappeared. Ah well. I had said "when you remove what hasn't been cross-validated, what's left?" and the other poster said "the data". Just so. But J,E,P,D,R are not data. They aren't even conclusions. They are presuppositions. The data are the texts and the results of archaeology. There's a pretty good book "Introducing The Old Testament" by John Drane. UK: ISBN 0 7459 1349 0, price 7.95 pounds sterling OZ: ISBN 0 86760 896 X, price 19.95 Australian dollars. My guess is that it would be around US$12. Drane is not a naive "it's the book of X so it must have been written by X" type. He points out, for example (as I had intended to do in my own voice before I bought the book), that nothing in the Bible actually says that Moses wrote the texts we now have. (Just as nothing in the Bible says that the four Gospels were written by people with the names we have attached to them, or that the Matthew who wrote a Gospel was the apostle.) There's a reference in the Torah to Moses writing things down in "The Book of the Covenant", but in the context that book cannot possibly be any of the 5 books as they now stand, though it could have been a source for Exodus 20:22--23:33. Drane is quite prepared to accept Deuteronomy as a later addition, forming part of the "Deuteronomic history". In his "Introducing the New Testament", Drane points out that 1 Peter and 2 Peter don't seem to be by the same person, and that 2 Peter took a long time to be accepted. In short, Drane is not a knee-jerk conservative. Quoting from pp52--53: Readers of the Old Testament have often supposed that the high moral ideals recorded in the book of Exodus and elsewhere are too sophisticated to have originated in the primitive age of Moses. The great German Old Testament scholar of the nineteenth century, Julius Wellhausen, argued that the whole idea of the covenant as it is portrayed here was a reading-back into Israelite history of the circumstances and beliefs of a much later age---the age of the great prophets. Some still approach the Old Testament with this assumption, but it has been seriously challenged in a number of ways, especially through the findings of archeology. Wellhausen was studying the Old Testament at a time when archaeology scarcely existed as a scientific enterprise ... Drane discusses the DH on pp166--170. To quote part: Criticisms of this sort [pp 166--168] have not prevented Old Testament scholars from continuing to refine and articulate more fully the theory that Wellhausen put forward. Even today some are still arguing about the dates of the various so-called source documents. But their conclusions vary widely, with even the J source being variously dated in periods as far apart as the ninth century and the post-exilic age! Others have argued that there was no such thing as an E source, while others have argued that the four-source theory is inadequate, and that the Pentateuch in fact contains many more sources than that. Some have further claimed to be able to trace J, E, and P not only in the Pentateuch, but also in Joshua, Judges, Samula, and even Kings. Must of this debate has been engendered by the surprising fact that the so-called sources are not actually consistent in their use of the different names for God, even though this was supposed to be their characteristic feature! Considering that scholars have been trying to define the nature and contents of these source documents for a century now, it is not unreasonable to expect them to have come to some sort of conclusion on the matter. The fact that they have so strikingly failed to do so raises serious questions about their very existence. ... There are those who would like to think that the imminent collapse of the scholarly orthodoxy justifies a return to the belief in a Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. But that does not necessarily follow at all. For one thing, the Bible itself gives us no reason to link his name with all these books. Only a few scattered references in the books themselves connect Moses with their writing, and they all relate to specific parts of the narrative, rather than to the Pentateuch as a whole. ... Writing was widely used in the earliest period of Israel's history, and many scholars today would confidently link Moses with significant features of the Pentateuch, such as the Tend Commandments. So there is no reason why this leader of the ancient tribes could not have had some connection with the traditional stories and customs of his people. This is essentially the "sceptical" position I was trying to defend. On the subject of trying to infer a relationship between texts and the interests of authors, I would like to sound a cautionary note. I've only recently started reading Popper. From time to time I've been startled to encounter arguments which I first met in C.S.Lewis, in essentially the same form. (For example, Popper's argument that if physical determinism is true, then it is not rational to believe that it is true.) I don't know whether Lewis read Popper, but the essays of Lewis and of Popper in question were written at about the same time, and they were responding to the same philosophers. Now, the central organising beliefs and aims of the two men were very different, but if I were writing a polemic against New Age beliefs, say, I could quote either of them, and without access to the original sources, you would not be able to tell which of them I was quoting. On the subject of Noah, the poster who said that a scissors-and-paste job was "just what we should expect" told a very strange story, about someone from the North who wanted HIS version of the Flood, and someone from the South who wanted HIS version of the Flood, and although it was their own native language that the version we now have was written in, and although that language had (on the assumption of a late redaction) been a written language for nearly a thousand years, each of these two insistent gentlemen was quite unable to perceive that his story was contradicted by fragments from the other, contradictions which are so obvious to people who do not have Hebrew as their native language. Surely this is a greater miracle than the parting of the Sea of Reeds! (A similar thing to _that_ happened early this century in the Crimea.) What's more, the redactor chose to do a scissors-and-paste job (thus *forcing* the two insistent gentlemen to notice the "discrepancies" between their sacred stories and what the redactor actually penned) when he had allegedly been able to get away with putting two "discrepant" versions of a story some distance apart in other cases. Some people, for example, believe that with Abrahama/Sarah/the Pharaoh, Abraham/Sarah/ the Abimelech, Isaac/Rebecca/the Abimelech we have three copies of a story. No, I'm afraid the scissors-and-paste job is too much to swallow. I'm going to be away for a while, but if the poster I have in mind could re-post his list of alleged discrepancies in February, I'd like to do a proper job of responding. (The "two" (or two pairs) / "seven" (or seven pairs) business is particularly non-problematic: if I say "I have two overhead projector pens of each colour available in our stationery cabinet", that doesn't contradict "I have 7 black ones"; and what were Noah and family supposed to eat, sacrifice, and build up their herds with?) Concerning styles, I would point out that the New Testament, composed by several people during a period of about 50 years, has *widely* varying styles of Greek in it. You really don't have to know much Greek to notice that. Why should a set of books composed around the time of the Conquest of Canaan, during a period of say 100 years, from sources written down during a period of 40 years (and in the case of the Genesis stories, probably predating that, and likely translated out of other languages), be expected to have a narrower stylistic range than the New Testament? The idea that the Pentateuch (or, if you believe that Deuteronomy was a late collation, the Tetrateuch) was put together during the time of the kingdom to serve religio-political ends is rather hard to swallow. The two main words for "Temple", <bayit> and <heykal>, are common elsewhere in the Tanach, but I can't find them anywhere in the Pentateuch. If one of the sources was a priest, isn't this _surprising_? There isn't anything that says "when you build Me a house in the city" or anything like that, it's all about the Tent of Meeting. There are references to "the place that the Lord shall choose", but to quote Drane: Deuteronomy does not in itself support the centralisation of worship in Jerusalem, and it actually has many close links with the dynamic view of kingshow that had been followed more self-consciously in the northern kingdom of Israel. For this reason, many scholars believe that the 'one sanctuary' mentioned in Deuteronomy was not Jerusalem, but the place where the ark of the convenant had been kept during the earliest period of Israel's settlement in the land. So "the place" reads most naturally as "the place to put the Ark". Some of the ritual regulations require things to be taken "outside the camp <mahaneh>". A city <`iyr> is not a camp. What were the priests of the Temple in Jerusalem to do when the regulations said they were to take things "outside the camp"? P forgot to tell them! (I don't know how the Jews solved that one. Perhaps they appealed to the Oral Law.) How about the choirs, <shir> or <todah>, mentioned in 2 Sam., 1&2 Chr., Ezra, and Nehemiah? There's no trace of them in the Torah. (Where <todah> appears in the Torah the context forces the reading "thank offering", you don't eat choirs. They're treif.) From the frequency of reference to them elsewhere, they were an important part of Temple worship. But P doesn't know about them! Nor about the Nethinim. Strange. Why is Jerusalem never referred to by that name, still less mentioned as the site of the Temple? For all Deuteronomy 12 says to the contrary, the divinely approved site could have been Shiloh. Ezra belonged to a category of people called "scribes" <sopherim>. (The NIV sometimes translates this "secretaries".) If Ezra could claim such authority, these people must have been important. How come the Torah makes no mention of them? Could P really have forgotten to justify the existence of his own class? How did R fail to notice this? On the J,E,P,R scheme, we have to believe either that P didn't _know_ much about the Temple, or that he forgot to _say_ anything about some of the most visible practices, or that R deliberately refrained from copying any of the material pertaining to actual Temple worship, though he did include long chunks about the Tent of Meeting. This is a _very_ strange way to behave, _if_ the Torah was redacted late. Then of course there is the strange case of the 3rd-person pronoun. Conservatives (a label which permits a great economy of thought, perhaps too great) might like to read the chapter "The Pentateuch" in Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, Gleason L. Archer, Jr Zondervan, ISBN 0-310-43570-6 (it was US$ 18.95 when I bought my copy) I don't agree with everything he says, but let's face it, he's _much_ more likely to be right than I am. -- The Marxists have merely _interpreted_ Marxism in various ways; the point, however, is to _change_ it. -- R. Hochhuth.