daved@westford.ccur.com (508-392-2990) (11/17/90)
I'm arguing the plausibility of the Documentary Hypothesis (apropos of Genesis-- the Yavist, the Elohist, etc.) with a Biblical conservative (but not a fundamentalist (?) or a literalist). What is the best evidence for the hypothesis? 'Scholarly consensus' doesn't seem to get us anywhere. If anyone has some recent (1970 - ) citations, these would be indeed useful. Dave Davis QOTD: "We should consider it as one of the most astonishing errors of the present age that so many people listen to the words of pseudoprophets who, in place of the dogmas of religion offer scientific dogmas with medieval impatience but without historical justification." --Baron Lorand von Eotvos [There's a class of book called Introduction to [Old|New] Testament. They are typically used in first semester college OT and NT courses. I suggest finding a University or seminary bookstore and looking at what they use in the OT or NT course. (If a seminary, make sure it isn't a fundamentalist one, given what you are looking for.) That's probably more expeditious than giving you a specific book, which you'd probably have to order. A commentary on Genesis, such as Speiser's in the Anchor Bible (the one I happen to have at home) will of course also deal with this issue, but typically the Introductions will give more justification of methodology. --clh]
ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) (11/19/90)
In article <Nov.16.23.50.37.1990.25997@athos.rutgers.edu>, daved@westford.ccur.com (508-392-2990) writes: > I'm arguing the plausibility of the Documentary Hypothesis (apropos > of Genesis-- the Yavist, the Elohist, etc.) with a > Biblical conservative (but not a fundamentalist (?) or a literalist). > What is the best evidence for the hypothesis? 'Scholarly consensus' > doesn't seem to get us anywhere. > If anyone has some recent (1970 - ) citations, these would be indeed > useful. The curse of having changed countries is that most of my library is elsewhere. There is a recent book (mid-80's) which goes over this quite thoroughly, but alas it'll be Christmas before I can get to it. You might check the catalogue of InterVarsity Press, I think that's where I got it. It's an old book, but you should take a look at Green's "The Unity of the Book of Genesis". There are several levels at which one may consider a documentary hypothesis: H1) The Pentateuch is based in part on earlier documents. As far as I am aware, tradition has never claimed anything else. _This_ much is virtually certain. H2) Much of the text which was incorporated from earlier documents was not significantly altered. In one sense, this is likely. Based on analogy with the NT and Kings/Chronicles, one would expect a story like Noah's ark to be copied INTACT and more or less verbatim. So what we'd expect is a collection of stories due to earlier sources joined together by "scaffolding" provided by the redactor. On the face of it, that's exactly what we have in Genesis: the scaffolding being the genealogies, with "the generations of X" serving as "chapter headings". But that's _not_ the kind of copying which the Higher Critics have professed to detect. They claim to be able to detect multiple sources _within_ single stories. For example, the basis of the original method was the claim that one (set of) source(s) used YHWH for God and another (set of) source(s) used ELHM, hence "J" and "E". But in the story of Noah, *both* names are used, hence the story of Noah is distributed amongst at least two different sources, with the Redactor apparently cutting and pasting and weaving together two or more sources. This really seem rather implausible. We *KNOW* what happened when ancient authors produced an edition of the material in (say) Genesis, because several of the results survive. Specifically, I refer you to "The Antiquities of the Jews" by Flavious Josephus and to "The Book of Jubilees". Drastic paraphrase, wholesale interpolation of legendary material (yes, even in Josephus), and lots of filling in gaps (for example the Book of Jubilees tells us the name of Cain's wife). Basically, Wellhausen's approach requires that the redactor of the Pentateuch was willing to chop up his originals into separate phrases and interweave phrases from separate traditions (it is quite common to find half-verses attributed to different sources) yet was fanatically literal about the *words* in the scraps he was so carefree about chopping up and re-arranging. Such a redactor is surely a far greater miracle than the crossing of the sea (something very similar to _that_ happened this century in the Crimea). H3) The methods developed by Wellhausen's school and refined by later scholars are able to recover these documentary units. It is no longer fashionable to believe this about Homer. I don't see why anyone would believe it about the Pentateuch. Consider the case of Synoptic studies. In the case of the Synoptic Gospels, the parallels amount to literal identity in many cases. I don't think anyone these days would deny that the Synoptic Gospels are based on earlier sources and that it is possible to recover some of that source material. BUT, and it is a very big but, that's because we have three Gospels repeating much the same material. We "recover" sources by locating repeated text (not unlike looking for similar sequences in DNA). And do you know, even with the great advantage of having three "samples" from the sources, there is no agreement about how many sources there were? The Two-source and Four-source and others are still slugging it out. Again, in the Tanakh, there are large chunks that are all but identical in Kings and Chronicles, which books are quite explicitly based on earlier documents. I think it is relevant to note that the passages which are identified this way tend to be coherent units, entire "stories" if you will. It's the same with the synoptics; the "units" of parallelism range from "sayings" to "stories", and they've usually been arranged in "topical" rather than "chronological" order, but they tend to be coherent units rather than chopped up bits. An extremely important thing to remember is that the Wellhausen school were working before Statistics. By today's standards, most of the work done under the "Documentary" banner has to be regarded as prescientific. If you throw out everything that has not been cross-validated, what's left? H4) Higher Criticism has succeeded in identifying (parts of) sources. There is no agreement about how many "documents" there are. The old J, E, P and R have each been split into several, and there's JE, and so on. (It's rather odd that none of the Ps seems to know much about Temple practice, given that "P" stands for "Priest".) So this end of the spectrum has no plausibility at all. It's not clear to me that it would be all that interesting even if we _could_ identify which words had been interleaved from which sources. On any account, there was a redactor who was responsible for the general shape and contents of Genesis as we now have it, and the redactor evidently thought the whole thing fitted together and made sense. That's the point of what's called Redaction Criticism in NT studies: ok so there were sources, but what was the _redactor_ of this Gospel trying to do by including _this_ story _here_? An analysis of Genesis or anything else in the Pentateuch (or Hexateuch, or Enneateuch, depending on which critic you're reading) into sources would leave the questions "is it literally true" and "why did the redactor include _that_" untouched. Consider another point. Remember that the traditional account was that the "5 books of Moses" were edited by Moses. He didn't sit down with a typewriter and write the whole thing in a few days, like an Old Testament Earl Stanley Gardner. Any number of assistants (each with their own characteristic vocabulary and style) could have been involved in recording the events described in Exodus--Deuteronomy. As long as Moses checked and approved these records, and supervised the collation, the traditional account would remain valid. A "source" discerned on the grounds of vocabulary and style might be no more than one particular assistant. (Hey, Fred, you polish the Noah story. I'll do the introduction. And Jim, you pull together the stuff we've got on Joseph, will you?) The traditional account *demands* some post-editing; it's quite clear that Deuteronomy 34 must have been written after Moses' death, and Genesis is riddled with little editorial insertions like Genesis 23:2 "and she died in Kiriath-arba (which is Hebron) in Canaan. ..." which on any account _must_ have been done well after Moses death. So combine -- an unknown number of assistants with their own vocabularies and styles -- an unknown amount of post-editing and the plausiblity of some of the Higher Critical methods appears, um, low. -- I am not now and never have been a member of Mensa. -- Ariadne. [When I responded to the original query (which asked for a book that justified the critical approach), I was at Rutgers, so I didn't have access to my books. Having looked them over, I now suggest Speiser's commentary on Genesis in the Anchor Bible series. The introductory material in that book contains a pretty good discussion of the issues from the critical perspective. It avoids the absurdities of some the more extreme documentary analysis. (The worst example I've seen was in a draft I saw of a book by Noth, which identified authorship of alternate verses. Even if this sort of interweaving actually happened, I'm not convinced we have any methodology for identifying it reliably. Fortunately, more critics don't do things that way.) For the traditional perspective, I'm not as good a source of information, but a few years ago I saw a one-volume commentary on the Bible by Donald (?) Guthrie, published by Intervarsity Press. It came as close as anything I've seen to making the inerrantist position plausible. I believe I've seen announcements of a new edition recently. --clh]
ncramer@bbn.com (Nichael Cramer) (11/29/90)
daved@westford.ccur.com writes: > I'm arguing the plausibility of the Documentary Hypothesis (apropos > of Genesis-- the Yavist, the Elohist, etc.) with a > Biblical conservative (but not a fundamentalist (?) or a literalist). > If anyone has some recent (1970 - ) citations, these would be indeed > useful. Besides those suggested by the moderator, I'd like to suggest three more sources (in order of increasing complexity): 1] Richard Elliot Friedman: _Who Wrote the Bible_ (Summit Books, 1987). Friedman gives a good, very popular overview of the state of modern scholarly OT studies. Since the main focus of the book (about which more below[*]) deals with the component source of the (early) OT, it necessarily deals extensively with the Documentary Hypothesis. All in all, a very readable account. 2] _The Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible_: Supplementary Volume. ("Yahwist", "Elohist", "Priestly Writers", "Redaction Criticism OT") A standard reference work, the IDBS contains medium sized (~4pp), concise yet highly detailed articles describing the characteristics of each of the five actors of the DH as laid out in the standard model. And for those who want to really get their feet wet: ;) 3] Frank Moore Cross: _Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel_ (Harvard, 1973). As the subtitle suggests, this book deals primarily with the historical development of the Israelite religion and so only deals with the DH in passing. Nonetheless, it contains a great deal of detailed information from the entire field of the study of the sources of the OT, both literary (i.e. oral/textual) and otherwise. Now in answer to the question that keeps popping up, are these single, exhaustive sources that lay out the detailed verse-by-verse argumentation for the DH in the straightforward way that Dave's friend seems to be looking for? In short, no. Friedman's book and IDBS take the DH as given and Cross's book, while detailed in argument is less focused on the DH. On the other hand all three books (particularly Cross's) give extensive documentation in support of their arguments; much of it as pointers into the technical literature. In short, this may be the best that we can hope for; clearly such detailed argumentation exists, but whether it is localized in a single (accessible!) source remains to be seen. Ideally what we need is a detailed "critical" (in the technical sense) commentary on the books of Pentateuch. Our moderator has already discussed Speiser's translation in the Anchor Bible series. Does anyone know the Genesis volume of the Hermenea(sp?) series? (I've only recently discovered this series, but my initial impression has been quite favorable; this might be worth looking into.) Nichael [* NOTE]: A couple provisos concerning Friedman's book: First, a minor quibble: I think it has a dreadful title. It sounds like your standard drugstore paperback, dime-a-dozen bible book. Moreover, to be truly nit-picking, Friedman deals only with the early OT: specifically the Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic History. Oh well, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume the publisher foisted it on him. Secondly, like many "popular technical" books of this kind, WWtB contains two parts: 1] a careful, readable account of the current standard model and 2] a "punchline" that lays out the author's personal pet theory. In particular Friedman gives extensive arguments leading up to what appears to be at least a reasonable guess as to the identities of the Pentateuchal Redactor and the author of the Deuteronomistic History (it would probably be unfair to Friedman to say more at this point ;). I need to point out, however, that Friedman is very careful to make clear what is personal conjecture and what is the standard model. Provided one keeps this point in mind, this is a valuable book. And, again, the exposition of the standard model itself is clear and balanced. [I haven't seen the Hermeneia Genesis, but generally the series tends to be briefer, so I'd be surprised to find the rather extensive introduction that is present in Speiser. --clh]