Paul Clark

By Paul Clark

But in the 17^th century, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza and others questioned the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, and this would eventually lead to a revolution in ideas about the authorship of these books.

DOUBLETS

As far back as the Middle Ages, Christian and Jewish scholars had noted that a lot of key stories in the Pentateuch are told more than once, sometimes with quite significant differences between the two versions. The most obvious example is the two creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2, but there are many others. Richard Elliott Friedman lists 22 stories that are told twice, five told three times and five four times.[i]

It was assumed that there was a theological or didactic explanation for this unusual aspect of biblical narration. But in the mid-18^th century, Jean Astruc, physician to the king of France, noticed that these doublets, as they are called, often used different words for God. Some used Yahweh and others used Elohim (the LORD God and God and in English translations). Astruc worked out that if you separated the Yahweh passages and the Elohim passages, each strand made sense on its own.

MULTIPLE SOURCES

From this, he concluded that Moses must have drawn on two different sources. Subsequently, scholars identified more source texts and concluded that Moses cannot have written the Pentateuch at all.[ii] Instead, these sources existed as separate documents written centuries after Moses is supposed to have lived. They were eventually woven together to form the books we have today.

In the 1870s, German theologian Julius Wellhausen synthesised these ideas in what became known as the Documentary Hypothesis.

WELLHAUSEN’S FOUR TEXTS

The J text, written by “the Yahwist” (Jahvist in German). This refers to God as Yahweh and features widely in Genesis, Exodus and Numbers. It reflects the concerns of a faction within the ruling elite in the southern Israelite kingdom of Judah.

The E text, written by “the Elohist”. This calls God Elohim until he reveals his name in the burning bush. We find E in Genesis and Exodus, but it makes brief guest appearances elsewhere. Its focus is on the northern kingdom of Israel.

The D Text, written by “the Deuteronomist”. This is most of Deuteronomy. It has the same distinctive style as the historical books that run from Joshua to 2 Kings (with the exception of Ruth).[iii] Scholars believe all these books have the same author(s) and refer to them as the Deuteronomistic History.

The P Text, written by “the Priestly Writer”. This is the largest text in the Pentateuch and has an easily recognisable style. A lot of really boring passages are P, because it concerns itself with the minutiae of law and matters concerned with priests. You can find P in Genesis, Exodus and Numbers, but it comes into his own in Leviticus.

Wellhausen believed that J and E were edited together to form a new document he called JE, and much later, this was combined with D and P to give us the Bible we have today.

PARADIGM LOST

If Wellhausen’s hypothesis was the dominant paradigm for much of the 20^th century, in recent decades, this consensus has broken down. Critics of the Documentary Hypothesis argue that it is too neat and doesn’t take proper account of the messiness of the composition of the Pentateuch. This is because papyrus and parchment only remain legible for a few decades, which means texts had to be laboriously re-copied again and again. [iv]

As a result, “…none of these texts have reached us in their ‘original’ form. Instead, all were subject to creative and repeated revision, addition, emendation and editing across a number of generations, reflecting the shifting ideological interests of their curators…”[v]

Though there is general agreement that P and the Deuteronomistic History can be considered discrete texts or families of texts, many scholars don’t think the same about J and E, which they see as fragments that don’t have enough in common to be lumped together. In their eyes, rather than J, E and P, it is better to speak of “not P” and P.[vi]

(I will continue to use the terms J and E as shorthand, not in order to express an opinion about this controversy.)

WHAT KIND OF GOD?

There is one enormous difference between the P text on the one hand and J, E and D on the other. That is their depiction of God.

The God depicted in most of P is transcendent, all-powerful, all-knowing and universal. He cannot be seen or touched and operates in a realm beyond the senses. He is stable and unchanging, not given to passions or regrets. He is just, rather than either vengeful or merciful, and he is recognisable as the monotheistic God of Judaism and Christianity.[vii]

In J, E and D, however, God has a face and a body.[viii] He walks around the Garden of Eden searching for Adam and Eve. He wrestles with Jacob, gets angry, thirsts for revenge, regrets his actions, shows compassion and mercy, and in one extraordinary scene (Exodus 32:7–14), Moses has to persuade him not to make a fool of himself when he loses his temper. In short, he behaves like a polytheistic god.

Why?

Perhaps the obvious answer is because that is what the authors of J, E and D believed him to be.

THE GREAT GOD EL

Archaeologists can guess which gods a community worshipped by the names they gave people and places. With the Israelites, the clue is in the name they gave themselves: IsraEL. They worshipped the same gods as the rest of Canaan, a pantheon headed by the god El.[ix]

YAHWEH

The god Yahweh probably didn’t arrive among the Israelites until around 1000 BCE, possibly brought by a tribe that migrated north. He was a god of storms and war, and he was now incorporated into the pantheons of several nations in the region.[x]

Yahweh eventually became a royal or national god of the Israelites.[xi] The Bible describes the process in the Song of Moses, a very ancient poem inserted into Deuteronomy, “When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of man, he set the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of Israel. For the LORD’s portion is his people; Jacob is the allotment of his inheritance.”[xii]

Unfortunately, this translation comes from the Masoretic Text and obscures as much as it reveals. Many scholars believe the Septuagint is closer to the wording of the original: “When El gave the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of man, he set the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the gods. For Yahweh’s portion is his people; Jacob is the allotment of his inheritance.”

It wasn’t a case of God selecting the Israelites as his chosen people. It was El, the king of the gods, who allocated the Israelites to Yahweh.[xiii]

YAHWEH-ONLY

Over time, Yahweh began to acquire the attributes of El and other gods. There was nothing unusual about this: the same thing happened to national gods in other countries. But among the Israelites, a new tendency emerged, prophets and priests who believed that, because the Israelites had a covenant with Yahweh, they should worship only him, to the exclusion of all other gods. These Yahweh-only ideologues didn’t deny the existence of other gods; they merely demanded that Israelites stop worshipping them.

THE J AND E TEXTS

The E text(s) may have been written by Yahweh-only priests from Shilo in Israel, not long before that kingdom was destroyed by the Assyrians in 722 BCE.[xiv] The J text promoted the outlook of a Yahweh-only faction among the ruling elite in Judah.[xv]

THE DEUTERONOMISTIC HISTORY

Under King Josiah (640-609 BCE), the Yahweh-only faction gained control of Judah. Most scholars believe that the first version of Deuteronomy dates from this period,[xvi] but after Judah’s destruction at the hands of the Babylonians in 587 BCE, the Deuteronomist(s)[xvii] revised his/their work to create a didactic history of the Israelites, a blistering attack on those who had angered Yahweh by worshipping other gods, thereby bringing disaster on Israel and Judah.

THE MONOTHEISTIC REVOLUTION

This view of Yahweh was completely novel. He was such a powerful god that he could use the Assyrians and Babylonians to punish the Israelites. Recent scholarship suggests that this was the gateway to a massive revolution in Israelite theology: the development of monotheism, the view that Yahweh was the only god: God with a capital G, all-powerful and all-knowing.[xviii]

THE P TEXT

This monotheism was reflected in Isaiah 40-55, which was probably written at the end of the Babylonian Exile (587-538 BCE),[xix] and in the Priestly Writer’s text, most of which probably dates from the years after the Exile when the Jews rebuilt their Jerusalem Temple.[xx] The majority of scholars agree that the P text had more than one layer of composition, but there is disagreement about whether the earliest layers were written before, during or after the Exile.[xxi] What is not in doubt, however, is that P was written by priests associated with the Jerusalem Temple. Many scholars believe it wasn’t written to compliment the J, E and D texts but to replace them.[xxii]

 THE IRONY

How ironic then that somebody, known to scholars as the Redactor(s) wove J, E, P and D together to create the Pentateuch we have today. Who and when remain matters of debate. Some believe Ezra, a figure closely associated with the post-Exilic return, was the Redactor. Others think there were multiple layers of redaction, beginning around 150 years after the return and culminating as late as the Hellenistic period (after 332 BCE).[xxiii]

Why is perhaps an easier question to answer. The authorities in Jerusalem and Samaria[xxiv] wanted unity. They wanted to unite the different strands of opinion and give them a text that could bring them all together.

THE OLD TESTAMENT

What is beyond dispute is that the redaction created a text of astonishing richness and complexity. The survival of Judaism and the growth of Christianity are not just accidents of history. They owe much to the brilliant artistry of those who wrote and edited their foundational text. Meanwhile, with nobody to copy them again as they faded, the separate J, E, P and D texts disappeared from history until their scholarly rediscovery more than two thousand years later.

However, the Old Testament’s polytheistic legacy remains, including multiple passages in which God carries out or orders mass murder on a scale that amounts to genocide. For thousands of years, the best Jewish and Christian thinkers have wrestled with these passages, trying to get past the appalling surface meaning of the text to find a deeper, spiritual meaning. But, unfortunately, the very worst Jews and Christians have taken these texts literally, celebrated them and even seen them as a guide to action.[xxv]

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Click here for Part 1 of this post, which focused on the methods historical-critical scholars use to investigate the authorship of biblical texts.

Click here for Part 3, which looks at the New Testament.

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[i] Friedman, Richard Elliott: Who Wrote the Bible? Jonathan Cape, London 1988, pp. 22, 246-255.

[ii] Friedman: Who Wrote the Bible?, pp. 17-24.

[iii] Barton, John: A History of the Bible, pp. 40-3.

[iv] Römer, Thomas: The Invention of God, Harvard University Press, 2015, p. 8.

[v] Stavrakopoulu, Francesca: God An Anatomy (Kindle Edition), Picador, 2021, p. 28.

[vi] Barton: op cit, p. 51.

[vii] Friedman: Who Wrote the Bible?, pp. 59-60, 196-7; Römer: The Invention of God, pp. 225-7.

[viii] This is the theme of Stravrakopoulu: God An Anatomy.

[ix] Stravrakopoulu: op cit, Loc 567; Römer: The Invention of God, pp. 72-4, 78.

[x] Römer: op cit, pp. 71-85, 87.

[xi] Römer: op cit, pp. 85, 88-9.

[xii] Deuteronomy 32:8 (NIV translation).

[xiii] Stravrakopoulu: God An Anatomy, Loc 530-550; Stark, Thom, The Human Faces of God, What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (And Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It (Kindle Edition), WIPF & Stock, 2011, Loc 2406-2500.

[xiv] Friedman: Who Wrote the Bible?, pp. 70-4.

[xv] Finkelstein, Israel and Silberman, Neil Asher: The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of its Sacred Texts. Touchstone, New York 2002, p. 12.

[xvi] Finkelstein, and Silberman: op cit, pp. 13, 280. For a slightly different emphasis, see Römer: The Invention of God, pp. 202-3.

[xvii]Friedman identifies the Deuteronomist as Jeremiah (Who Wrote the Bible?, pp. 70-4).

[xviii] Römer, T: The Invention of God, pp. 216-218; Hayes, Christine, Introduction to the Bible (Kindle Edition), Yale University Press 2012, Loc 476; Stark: The Human Faces of God, Loc 2784.

[xix] Römer: The Invention of God, pp. 219-21.

[xx] Finkelstein, and Silberman: The Bible Unearthed, p. 310.

[xxi] Friedman (Who Wrote the Bible, p. 210) has it before; For Finkelstein & Silberman (The Bible Unearthed, p. 310) and Thomas Romer (The Invention of God, pp. 214, 225-6), it is mostly during or after.

[xxii] [xxii]Friedman: Who Wrote the Bible?, pp. 190-2, 215-6.

[xxiii] Contrast Finkelstein, and Silberman: The Bible Unearthed, p. 12, Römer, T: The Invention of God, pp. 8, 238 and Friedman: Who Wrote the Bible?, pp. 218-9, 232-3.

[xxiv] Römer, T: The Invention of God, pp. 8, 237.

[xxv] For an intelligent discussion of these passages by a Christian thinker, see Stark, The Human Faces of God, Chapter 6.