G. I. Davies
A. What is the Pentateuch? 1. The name
‘Pentateuch’ means literally ‘the work comprising five scrolls’, from Greek
pente and teukhos, which can mean ‘scroll’. It has been used since at least
early Christian times for the first five books of the OT, Genesis to
Deuteronomy. The Jewish name for these books was usually and still is ‘the
law’: Hebrew toˆraˆ, Greek nomos or nomothesia (the latter is literally
‘legislation’), and it is this name which appears in the NT: e.g. Lk 24:11,
‘What is written in the law, the prophets and the psalms’, where we meet the
threefold subdivision of the Hebrew canon that continues to be used, with the
substitution of ‘writings’ for ‘psalms’ as the third section. Cf. also the
Greek Prologue to Sirach (c.132 BCE).
2. But there is
a much deeper way of asking, and answering, the question, ‘What is the
Pentateuch?’, one which goes beyond merely defining its external limits to
enquire into its nature. In other words, what sort of a thing is this section
of the Bible? This question can only really be answered after a full
examination of the text, and one justification for the kind of detailed
critical analysis which has been popular in modern OT scholarship is that it
enables us to give a well-judged (if complicated!) answer to that question. It
is a question of considerable theological importance, as can be seen from an
introductory look at a few answers that have been given to it, some of which
will be examined more fully later on.
2.1. Four of
the five books in the Pentateuch deal with the time of Moses, and one recent
suggestion has been that we should think of the Pentateuch as a biography of
Moses with an introduction, that is, Genesis. This attempts to answer the
question in terms of the literary genre of the Pentateuch.
2.2. Its main weakness, however, is that it
puts Moses as an individual too much in the centre of the picture, important as
he undoubtedly is as the leader of his people Israel. We might do better to
call the Pentateuch the story of Israel in the time of Moses, with an
introduction (Genesis) which sets it in the light of universal creation and history.
2.3. To many,
however, this would not be theological enough to do justice to the strongly
religious element that pervades the story from beginning to end. Gerhard von
Rad suggested that the Pentateuch (or to be more precise, the Hexateuch, that
is the Pentateuch plus the sixth book of the Bible, Joshua—see below) was an
amplified creed, more specifically an amplified historical creed, as will be
seen in more detail later. The implication is then that the Pentateuch is a
product and an expression of faith—it is preceded as it were by an implicit ‘I
believe in God who . . . ’, it is a confessional document, as one might put it.
Of course the adjective ‘historical’ before ‘creed’ raises some problems, for
example whether the story which the Pentateuch as a whole tells is real
history, a question whose answer has important theological implications which
critics of von Rad were quick to point out. But there are also problems of a
simpler kind which relate specifically to its accuracy as a description of Genesis
1–11. Von Rad was, for much of his scholarly career, fascinated by the
historical focus of so much of Israel’s faith, and he tended to overlook or
play down its teaching about God the Creator. This may well have been due to an
understandable wish on his part not to allow a foothold in the OT for crude
Nazi ideas about racial supremacy grounded in the order of creation which were
current at the time he wrote his earliest works on the Hexateuch. It is,
nevertheless, necessary to emphasize that the beginning of Genesis is not about
history in the ordinary sense of that word, or indeed in any sense, and the
idea that the Pentateuch is a ‘historical’ creed is in danger of losing sight
of the important theological statements about creation in those chapters.
2.4. A
different way of representing the theological character of the Pentateuch is of
course the traditional Jewish expression: the law. This is as characteristic of
Judaism as von Rad’s emphasis on faith is characteristic of his Lutheranism. If
it seems at first sight to focus too much on the second half of the Pentateuch,
where the laws are concentrated, and to give insufficient attention to the
‘story’ character of the earlier books, it is worth saying that this problem
has not escaped the notice of Jewish commentators, and a very early one, Philo
of Alexandria, in the first century CE, had what he thought was a perfectly
satisfactory answer to it. It is that while written law is indeed mainly found
in the later books of the Pentateuch, the personalities who appear in Genesis,
for example, constitute a kind of ‘living law’, since through their example,
and in some less obvious ways, it was God’s intention to regulate human
behaviour, just as he does later by the written law. Another way of making the
description ‘law’ more widely applicable involves going back to the Hebrew term
toˆraˆ. Although commonly translated ‘law’, its original meaning is something
like ‘instruction’, and it could be used of other kinds of instruction as well
as law in the strict sense. For example, the word toˆraˆ is found in Proverbs,
where the context shows that the reference is to the kind of teaching contained
there, not to the law as such. If we use toˆraˆ as a description for the
Pentateuch in this more general sense of ‘teaching’ or ‘instruction’, it can
easily embrace the non-legal parts of these books as well as the legal ones. On
the other hand, while toˆraˆ understood in this wider way does preserve an
important truth about the Pentateuch (especially if it is thought of as ‘The
Teaching’, with a capital T), it is in danger of being too vague a description
to identify its distinctive character within the OT. 2.5. Another theological
definition, which has the merit of combining the advantages of the last two, is
to call the Pentateuch a covenant book, a document which presents the terms of
God’s relationship to his people, in the form of his promises to them and the
laws which he requires them to obey. The support of the apostle Paul can
probably be claimed for this description, for when he speaks of ‘the old
covenant’ in 2 Cor 3:14 it is very likely that he means specifically the
Pentateuch. He is clearly thinking of a written document, because he refers to
the ‘reading’ of the old covenant, and the substitution of the expression
‘whenever Moses is read’ in the following verse points firmly to the Pentateuch
(for ‘Moses’ as shorthand for ‘the books of Moses’ see Lk 24:27). A somewhat
earlier Jewish reference to the Pentateuch as ‘the book of the covenant’ occurs
in 1 Macc 1:57. Despite the antiquity and authority of this description, it
scarcely does justice to the narrative element in the Pentateuch, especially in
Genesis. 2.6. A description which combines the literary and the theological
aspects has been proposed by David Clines: he regards the Pentateuch as the
story of the partial fulfilment of the promise to the patriarchs. This has the
great advantage of highlighting the important theological theme of promise in
Genesis, and of showing how Genesis is linked to the later books theologically,
and not just by the continuation of the story. But of course it says nothing
about Gen 1–11, and one may wonder whether it takes enough account of the vast
amount of legislative material in Leviticus and Deuteronomy especially. 2.7.
One might legitimately wonder whether there can be any brief answer to the
question which is not open to some objection or another! If nothing else these
quite different descriptions, and the comments on them, should have shown that
the Pentateuch is a many-sided piece of literature and one which has features
which appeal to a variety of religious and other points of view. The final
description that I will mention is that the Pentateuch is an incomplete work, a
torso, because the story which it tells only reaches its climax in the book of
Joshua, with the Israelites’ entry into the land of Canaan. For von Rad, as we
saw, the real literary unit is the ‘Hexateuch’, ‘the six books’, and he had
many predecessors who also took this view. It was especially popular among the
sourcecritics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who
believed (as some still do) that the sources out of which the Pentateuch was
composed were also used by the editor or editors who composed Joshua. It is
less popular today, because Joshua is generally treated as part of the long
historical work which extends to the end of 2 Kings, the Deuteronomistic
History. In fact since Deuteronomy formed the introduction to that work and,
even when taken alone, its connection with the first four books of the Bible
can seem very weak, some scholars therefore speak of ‘the Tetrateuch’, that is
the four books from Genesis to Numbers, as the primary literary unit at the
beginning of the Bible. From this point of view the Pentateuch would be not so much
a torso as a hybrid, the combination of one literary work with the first
section of another. If nothing else this view serves to underline the
differences in character, concerns, and origin of Deuteronomy, as compared with
the earlier books. Yet those differences should not be exaggerated, and it can
be argued that Deuteronomy belongs as much with the Tetrateuch as with the
books that follow it, and when we come to look at the theology of the
Pentateuch in more detail that will become clearer. B. The Documentary
Hypothesis. 1. To make further progress with our question, ‘What is the
Pentateuch?’, we need to dig deeper and consider more closely how it came to
exist and what kinds of material it is made up of. A useful way into such study
is to review, critically where necessary, the main directions which
Pentateuchal scholarship has taken over the past century and a half (see also
Clements 1997: ch. 2). 2. The year 1862 was auspicious for the development of
Pentateuchal study in England and Germany. It was in that year that Julius
Wellhausen went, at the age of 18, as a new student to the German university of
Go¨ttingen to study theology. That same year a young British student, T. K.
Cheyne, was also in Go¨ttingen, and he was to play an important part in bringing
Wellhausen’s later ideas to prominence in Britain—he became a professor at
Oxford. The year 1862 was also when a series of books by John Colenso, a
Cambridge mathematician, began to be published, and so brought critical OT
scholarship very much into the public eye in Britain only shortly after the
publication of Charles Darwin’s Origins of Species and the collection called
Essays and Reviews. And yet by 1862 the critical study of the Pentateuch was
already some 150 years old.
3. There is no
need to amplify this statement here—the details are in most Introductions to
the OT—except to say that particularly since about 1800 strenuous efforts had
been made, chiefly in Germany, to discover the process by which the Pentateuch
had reached its present form, and that at the beginning of the 1860s the
leading scholars held to what was known as the Supplementary Hypothesis
(Erga¨nzungshypothese). According to this, the original core of the Pentateuch
was a document known as the Book of Origins (Das Buch der Urspru¨nge), which
was put together by a priest or Levite in about the time of King Solomon. A
distinguishing mark of this book was that in Genesis and the beginning of
Exodus (up to ch. 6) it avoided using the name YHWH for God, and employed other
words, especially ʾˇelo¯hıˆm, which means ‘God’, instead. This core, it was
held, was expanded in the eighth century BCE, the time of the first great
classical prophets, by the addition of stories and other matter in which the
name YHWH was freely used from the very beginning. Later still, in the time of
Jeremiah (7th cent.), the work was further supplemented by the addition of the
major part of Deuteronomy and shorter sections with a similar spirit elsewhere,
and so the Pentateuch reached its present form, before the Babylonian Exile.
Wellhausen’s teacher at Go¨ttingen, Heinrich Ewald, had played an important
part in the development of this theory and still held to it in its essential
points in 1862, though not with the rigidity of some of its other adherents.
4. But changes
were in the air. An important challenge to this theory had already been made by
the publication in 1853 of a book by Hermann Hupfeld. Its main theses were: (1)
that the socalled ‘original core’ contained some passages which were of later
origin than the rest and represented a first stage of expansion of the core;
and (2) that both these later passages and the passages which the Supplementary
Hypothesis itself had distinguished from the core were not fragments picked up
from all over the place but had been parts of large preexisting narrative
compositions which the compilers of the Pentateuch had drawn on as sources. 5.
Hupfeld thus did two things. He refined the analysis of the Pentateuch into its
component parts, which were now seen to be not three but four in number, and he
replaced the idea of the expansion of an original core with a truly documentary
theory of Pentateuchal origins. His four originally independent
source-documents correspond closely in extent to those of later theories, three
parallel narrative sources and the law-code of Deuteronomy (with some other
passages related to it). His oldest narrative corresponds closely to what is
now called the Priestly Work (P), the remainder of the Book of Origins is the
later Elohist (E), and the source which uses the name YHWH is the Yahwist (J).
Hupfeld did not depart from the dominant view at the time about the relative
ages of the materials in these sources, and his position can be represented in
terms of the modern symbols for them as P-E-J-D (for a fuller account of the
sources as later understood see sections C.7 and G). Hupfeld’s new ideas did
not succeed in displacing the dominant Supplementary Hypothesis, at any rate
not immediately. But some time before 1860 Ewald had recognized the existence
of a second Elohist and the character of J and E as continuous sources—which
places him very close to Hupfeld. A. Knobel, though less wellknown, had reached
similar conclusions independently of Hupfeld about the same time, and over a
larger range of texts. His work is ignored in most modern accounts of the
history of Pentateuchal criticism (though not by Wellhausen) and deserves
greater recognition. These scholars brought the analysis of the Pentateuch to a
state which received only relatively minor modification at the hands of those
such as Wellhausen, whose work was to become the classical account of
Pentateuchal origins and indeed remained so until very recently. Hupfeld’s
contribution at least was fully recognized: Wellhausen, for example, wrote in his
own work on the composition of the Hexateuch: ‘I make Hupfeld in every respect
my starting-point.’ Where he and subsequent scholarship departed from Hupfeld
was in the chronological order in which the sources were to be placed. 6. Two
changes were in fact made. One, the placing of the YHWH-source—what we now call
J—before the second Elo-him-source— what we now call E—did not make a
fundamental difference to the time at which either source was thought to have
been written, and we shall not spend long on it. Once Hupfeld had made the
separation between E and P it was really inevitable, as it was the supposed
antiquity of the P texts which had led to the idea that the Book of Origins was
the earliest source. When E was detached from this, it could easily be seen
that in certain respects it had a more sophisticated approach to religion than
the rather primitive J, and so it was natural to date it a little later.
7. The second
change in order was much more decisive, in fact it was quite revolutionary.
According to both the Supplementary Hypothesis and Hupfeld’s theory, the oldest
part of the Pentateuch was a Book of Origins that began with the account of
creation in Gen 1 and included most of the priestly laws in Exodus, Leviticus,
and Numbers. Doubts about the antiquity of these texts had already been
expressed in the 1830s, but detailed critical arguments only began to appear in
the early 1860s. One can see this in the work of the Dutch scholar Abraham
Kuenen (1828–91), whose Introduction to the OT began to be published in 1861.
Kuenen, who accepted Hupfeld’s division of the Book of Origins into earlier and
later layers, also held that the priestly laws in the supposedly earlier layer
were not in fact all ancient but had developed over a long period of time, some
of them being later in date than Deuteronomy. An even more radical conclusion
had been reached by a German schoolteacher, Karl Heinrich Graf, who on 7
October 1862 wrote to his former OT professor, one Eduard Reuss, ‘I am
completely convinced of the fact that the whole middle part of the Pentateuch
[apparently Exodus 25 to the end of Numbers] is post-exilic in origin,’ i.e. it
all belongs to the final, not the first, stage of the growth of the Pentateuch,
after the writing of Deuteronomy. Wellhausen himself, looking back on his early
student days, also in the early 1860s, wrote that he had been puzzled at the
lack of reference to the allegedly very old priestly laws in the early
historical books such as Samuel and Kings and in the prophets, though he had no
idea at the time why this was. It was not until 1865 that these very new ideas
came out into the open, when Graf published his views in book form. But while
he maintained that all the legal parts of the Book of Origins were post-exilic
in origin, he still held to the traditional early date for its narratives. In
response to the appearance of Graf’s book Kuenen now argued that the Book of
Origins could not be divided up in this way, because the narratives were
intimately related to the laws; so, if (as Graf had so powerfully demonstrated)
the laws were late in origin, the narratives associated with them in the
‘earlier’ part of the Book of Origins must be late too. Graf’s letter to Kuenen
accepting the validity of this point survives—it is dated 12 Nov. 1866—and
subsequently Graf put this change of mind into print in an article in which he
responded to various criticisms of his book, though the article only came out
in 1869 after Graf’s death. In this way the order (as represented by the modern
symbols) P-E-J-D of Hupfeld was transformed into the J-E-D-P that became
standard. 8. It is clear that Abraham Kuenen played a very important part in
the development of this revised theory, although it (like Knobel’s
contribution) is often overlooked. What is interesting is that Kuenen gave a
great deal of the credit for the contribution which he himself was able to make
to John Colenso’s series of volumes entitled The Pentateuch and The Book of
Joshua Critically Examined. These books were one reason why an attempt was made
to depose Colenso from the see of Natal, which he held, an attempt which was
only the beginning of a long wrangle in the Anglican Church in South Africa.
Much of what Colenso wrote merely echoed what was already being done in
Germany, but in the first volume of the study he presented what seemed to him
to be a devastating attack on the genuineness of the narratives of the Book of
Origins and particularly the large numbers which they give for the participants
in the Exodus (e.g. Ex 12:37), the very thing which had seemed to others a
guarantee of the accuracy and antiquity of the source; on the contrary, argued
Colenso, it was quite impossible that the numbers could represent real
historical facts: they must be fictional. This argument so impressed Kuenen that
he found no difficulty at all in regarding those narratives, as well as the
priestly laws which Graf had examined, as a late and artificial composition. 9.
It is evident from all this that the classical documentary theory of
Pentateuchal origins owes little or nothing, as far as its origin is concerned,
to Wellhausen: this was mainly the work of Hupfeld, Graf, and Kuenen,
themselves of course building on much earlier work. To call it ‘the Wellhausen
theory’, as is often done, is a misnomer, though a revealing one. What the new
theory still needed, and what Wellhausen was to provide, was a presentation of
it which would convince the many scholars who still held either to the
Supplementary Hypothesis or to Hupfeld’s version of the documentary theory. The
work in which Wellhausen did this so successfully was originally called History
of Israel. Volume I (Geschichte Israels I)—when no further volumes appeared
this was changed to Prolegomena to the History of Israel (Prolegomena zur
Geschichte Israels)—and it was published in 1878. It is still worth reading and
its thorough attention to detail, its treatment of evidence from all parts of
the OT, and the force and vigour of its arguments still make a strong
impression on the reader.
10. Two
criticisms are often made of it. The first is that it embodies a Hegelian view
of history which has been imposed upon the data of the OT (so e.g. W. F.
Albright and R. K. Harrison). This is not justified as a criticism of
Wellhausen’s method of working, whatever similarities may be traced between
some of his conclusions and those of Hegel-inspired history-writing. It is a
complicated issue but essentially it seems that what Wellhausen did was to
approach the Pentateuch as a secular ancient historian would approach his
primary sources in an effort to discover their character and closeness to the
events described: his presuppositions and methods are those of a historian
rather than those of a philosopher, and not significantly different from those
with which more recent historians have worked. Where he does refer to Hegel
once it seems to be an implied criticism. The other criticism is that
Wellhausen presented his theory in isolation from knowledge of the ancient Near
East, which makes it of no more than antiquarian interest: so Harrison again
and especially K. A. Kitchen. Wellhausen did not of course have the benefit of
knowing many of the archaeological discoveries of subsequent years, and what he
did know he did not regard as of primary importance for interpreting the OT
(unlike Gunkel: see below). But the main structure of his source-critical
arguments has seemed to most subsequent scholars to be unaffected by these
discoveries, rightly in my opinion. Where they have departed from them it has
been because they sensed weaknesses in his treatment of the OT evidence, and
not because of fresh evidence from the ancient Near East.
11. This brief
historical introduction to the origins of the so-called Graf–Wellhausen theory
about the sources of the Pentateuch should have removed some misconceptions
about it, and in particular it has shown that far from being the product of one
man’s mind it was arrived at through a process of research and discussion which
lasted over several decades and involved a number of different scholars in
several countries. But it also begins to open up a topic of quite central
importance at the present time when some very searching questions are
introduction to the pentateuch 20 once again being asked about the validity of
what, for brevity, we may continue to call Wellhausen’s theory.
C. The Logic of
Source-Criticism. It is in fact possible to distinguish, logically at least and
to some extent chronologically as well, four stages in the argument which led
to the formulation of Wellhausen’s account of the origins of the Pentateuch,
and if we define them appropriately we shall find that they are quite generally
applicable to all attempts to analyse the Pentateuch into its constituent
parts, and indeed to all attempts at discovering what sources were used in
biblical and other writings. 1. The first step was the acceptance that an
enquiry into the sources of the Pentateuch was permissible at all, i.e. that it
was not ruled out by the tradition which regarded Moses as the author of the
whole Pentateuch. This tradition goes back to the NT and contemporary writings,
though it is probably not implied by anything in the OT text itself. Clearly if
this tradition is not open to question, there is little room for Pentateuchal
criticism of any kind: one could only enquire into the sources that Moses may
have used for the writing of Genesis, which is exactly what one early work of
criticism, published in 1753, purported to uncover (Jean Astruc’s Conjectures
sur les me´moires originaux dont il paroit que Moyse s’est servi pour composer
le livre de la Gene`se). The reasons for questioning the tradition of Mosaic
authorship of the Pentateuch are broadly of two kinds: (1) the relatively late
date of the first appearance of this tradition (not at any rate before the
Babylonian exile); (2) various data in the Pentateuch itself which seem to be
inconsistent with it: an obvious one is the account of Moses’ death (Deut 34).
2. The second step was the analysis of the text, the demonstration of its lack
of unity in detail. In the eighteenth century, well before the formulation of
the Wellhausen theory, theories had been developed to account for what seemed
to be signs of composite authorship, or the use of sources. Some passages, such
as the Flood Story, appeared to arise from the combination of two originally
separate accounts of the same event. In other cases it seemed unlikely or even
impossible that two separate passages could have belonged to the same
continuous account, the two creation stories for example. In the history of
Pentateuchal criticism the distinction between this, analytical, stage of the
enterprise and the next stage, synthesis or the attribution of passages or
parts of passages to a particular source or layer of the Pentateuch, has not
always been carefully observed. Indeed a clear distinction is perhaps not to be
found before the handbook of Wolfgang Richter (Exegese als
Literaturwissenschaft, 1971). But the two operations can and should be regarded
as separate. To put it in a quite general formula: if ABCD represents a section
of the Pentateuch, the assertion that A is of separate origin from B and that C
is of separate origin from D is one thing; but the question of whether A
belongs to the same source as C or D or neither, for example, is another question,
and different answers to it will produce different theories about the larger
sources of the Pentateuch.
So on what
basis is it argued that the Pentateuch is of composite origin? Four main kinds
of criteria have commonly been used: 1. repeated accounts of the same action or
story. 2. the occurrence of statements (or commands) that are incompatible or
inconsistent with each other. 3. vocabulary and style—the use of different
words for the same thing, including e.g. different names for God; and variations
of style. 4. the appearance of different viewpoints on matters of religion in
particular, but also on other matters. Two observations on these criteria
should be made at this stage: their use will be clarified by an example later
on. 1. The argument for disunity is strongest when several of these criteria
occur together—so for example in the analysis of Gen 1–3. 2. In recent years it
has been generally realized that criteria 3 and 4 are of far less value for
analysis, at least when they occur alone, than 1 and 2. Variations in relation
to 3 and 4 may perfectly well occur within a single account (so Noth 1972 and
Westermann 1984). In fact it is much more at the next, constructive, stage that
such factors enter in, by suggesting which of the various fragments into which
the Pentateuch has been analysed have a common origin, i.e. belong to the same
source or layer.
3. The third
step is the development of hypotheses about the major constituent parts of the
Pentateuch and their interrelation. Various models are possible, of which the
idea that a number of independent source-documents 21 introduction to the
pentateuch have been combined is only the best-known because it is the pattern
exemplified by the classical Documentary Hypothesis of Graf, Kuenen, and Wellhausen.
Other ‘models’ are possible, however, and indeed have been tried, such as that
the Pentateuch is simply a conglomeration of small units put together by an
editor (the Fragmentary Hypothesis) or that an original core was amplified by
the addition of fresh material, either material that had previously existed
independently as small units or new material that was composed for the first
time for the purpose of modifying the existing core (a Supplementary Hypothesis
such as that which was dominant in the middle of the 19th cent.). It is also
possible, and in fact common today, to have a combined theory which exhibits
features of all three models.
With all of
these models (except the Fragmentary theory) there is the problem of
attribution, deciding what material belongs to the same source or stage of
supplementation. Sometimes this can be determined by what we may call narrative
continuity: i.e. an episode in the story presupposes that an earlier part of
the story has been told in a particular way. For example, Gen 9:6, ‘Whoever
sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person’s blood be shed; for
in his own image God made humankind,’ clearly presupposes the account of the
creation of human beings in Gen 1:26–7 (note the reference to ‘in his own image’),
rather than that in Gen 2:7, and so they presumably belong to the same source
or layer. Fortunately the character of the Pentateuch is such that this kind of
argument can quite often be used. Where it cannot, one must have recourse to
such factors as agreement over criteria such as 3 and 4 at c.2 above to argue
that sections of the Pentateuch have a common source. 4. The fourth step is
that of arranging the sources (or supplements) in chronological order and
dating them. It is in this area that Graf, Kuenen, and Wellhausen made a real
innovation. In relation to c. 1, 2, and 3 they did little more than refine the
results of their predecessors, especially Hupfeld: but on this point they made
a radical change from him, in arguing that the Book of Origins/First Elohist
(P) was the latest, not the earliest of the four sources, and in dating it to
the post-exilic period. How are such conclusions reached, in general terms?
Along two main lines, which must still be taken into consideration in any
discussion of the matter: 4.1. The relative age of the sources can be
considered in various ways: Does one source or layer take for granted the prior
existence of another one? Is one source obviously more primitive in its way of
presenting events, or its legal requirements, than another? Numerous examples
of both these kinds of arguments can be found in Wellhausen’s Prolegomena
(1885). They can be cogent, but it must be pointed out that the argument from
primitiveness to antiquity and from sophistication to lateness is a dangerous
one, because it too quickly assumes that the religion of Israel developed in a
single line with no setbacks or decline throughout its history or divergent
patterns of religion coexisting at the same time. In practice the classical
theory has relied much more heavily on arguments of a second kind.
4.2. The actual
or absolute dates of the sources can be fixed by reference to evidence outside
the Pentateuch. Such arguments can themselves be subdivided according to
whether reference is being made to fixed points in the events of Israel’s
political and religious history (such as the Babylonian exile) as we know them
from the historical books of the OT, or to doctrines (such as the demand for
the centralization of worship in Jerusalem) whose first formulation we can date
by reference to these same historical books and the writings of the prophets,
for example. Even here it is fair to say that the strength of the arguments
used varies, and where a link can be established with something like the Exile,
it can still be difficult to deduce a very precise date for the source in
question. But for all that, it has seemed possible to define in broad terms the
time when the various sourcedocuments were put into their definitive form. I
emphasize that last phrase because when scholars assign a date to a source they
are not saying that this is when it was suddenly created out of nothing. They
recognize that much of the material in the sources is older than the sources
themselves, it comes from earlier tradition. What they are looking for when
they date a source is the latest element within it, because that will show when
it reached its definitive form. D. An Example of a Source-Critical Argument:
The Analysis of the Flood Story (Gen 6–9) into its sources. 1. Now we shall
move back from theory to practice, and look at some of the detailed claims made
by the classical theory associated with Wellhausen and the arguments that were
used to support them. Historically, Pentateuchal source-criticism seems to have
begun with the observation that Genesis opens with not one but two different
accounts of creation (so already H. B. Witter in 1711): 1:1–2:3 (or 2:4a) and
2:4 (or 2:4b)–25). The second repeats a number of events already described in
the first, but not in exactly the same order, and with some notable differences
in presentation. The difference that was to be put to most productive use in
subsequent scholarship was, of course, the difference over the divine names:
the fact that whereas the first account refers to God only by the word ‘God’
(ʾˇelo¯hıˆm); the second used the compound phrase ‘the Lord God’ ¼ YHWH
ʾˇelo¯hıˆm, combining with the word ‘God’ the proper name by which Israel knew
her God, YHWH. 2. According to the word used to refer to God, the second
account of creation was referred to as ‘Yahwistic’ and given the symbol J. J
was used (after the German form, jahwistisch) because the abbreviations were
worked out in Germany and the ‘y’ sound is represented by ‘j’ in German. The
first account could be and was for a time called Elohistic (E), although this
description of it was given up after Hupfeld’s discovery that there were two
major source-documents which avoided the name YHWH in Genesis. This source is
known today as the Priestly Code, or Priestly Work (abbreviated as P), because
of the prominent place given to priesthood and ritual in its later parts,
particularly in the books from Exodus to Numbers. The early history of mankind,
prior to the Flood, is also described twice, once in the form of a series of
stories (chs. 3–4, 6:1–4), and once in the form of a genealogy (ch. 5). The
first of these connects directly with ch. 3, while the second has various
similarities to ch. 1, so they were attributed to J and P respectively. 3. In
the Flood story (6:5–9:17) things are not so tidy. Does it belong to J or P?
Uses of the name YHWH do occur, but only in restricted parts of the story
(6:5–8; 7:1–5, 16; 8:20–2): elsewhere the word ‘God’ (ʾˇelo¯hıˆm) is employed.
Thus the story is hardly typical of P, which avoids YHWH, but yet it is not
typical of J either, which uses YHWH much more consistently. What is one to
make of this situation? Should one attribute the Flood story to a third source
occupying an intermediate position with regard to the divine names between P
and J? Or has either J or P changed its practice at this point? 4. Careful
attention to the details of the story suggests that neither of these solutions
is correct. We may note that there are a surprising number of repetitions or
overlaps of details in it. Thus (1) vv. 5–7 describe how YHWH saw the evil
which men did on the earth and declared that he would therefore destroy the
human race. When, after three verses referring specifically to Noah, we come to
vv. 11–13 we find another reference, this time to God seeing the corruption of
‘all flesh’ and saying that he will therefore destroy it. (2) The paragraph
then continues with instructions to Noah about how the ark is to be built (vv.
14–16), how Noah and his family are to enter it (vv. 17–18) and how he is to
take a pair of every kind of living creature with him (vv. 19–21). And this, we
are told, is exactly what Noah did, ‘he did all that God commanded him’ (v.
22). It therefore comes as something of a surprise when, in 7:1–4, we find YHWH
telling Noah again to enter the ark with his family and the animals, and it
again being said (v. 5) that Noah did as he was told. (3) By the time we get to
the actual entry into the ark we are more prepared for repetitions, and we are
not disappointed: 7:7–9 make explicit that Noah, his family, and the animals
entered the ark, apparently with plenty of time to spare, as it was another 7
days before the flood started (v. 10). Then the rain began (vv. 11–12), and
then we are told again that Noah, his family, and the animals all went into the
ark, cutting it a bit fine this time we may suppose! It is a strange way to
tell a story, and there are further curiosities to follow which we must forgo
because of shortage of space, as we must do also with some details of the
explanation which seems to be required to do justice to them.
5. But let us
consider again the first two cases of repetition, in a slightly different way.
We have in the paragraph 6:11–22 a speech of God to Noah with introduction and
conclusion, a passage which makes perfectly coherent sense. But before it are
two verses which parallel vv. 11–13, and after it are five verses which
parallel vv. 17–22. And the striking thing is that whereas 6:11–22 use the word
God (vv. 11, 12, 13, 22), the parallel passages placed before and after it use
YHWH (6:5, 6, 7; 7:1, 5). That is, we seem to have here two versions of a part
of the Flood story, one of them, like the creation account in Gen 2, using the
name YHWH, the other, like the creation account in Gen 1, avoiding it and using
ʾˇelo¯hıˆm instead. But instead of being placed one after the other, as with
the creation accounts, the two versions of the Flood story have been
interwoven, with sections from one alternating with sections of the other. This
interpretation of the situation is strengthened by two additional factors: 23
introduction to the pentateuch 1. tensions or contradictions within the story
which seem likely to be due to the combination of two different versions of it;
e.g. the number of pairs of animals taken into the ark (one pair according to
6:19–20; seven pairs of clean animals, i.e. those that could be eaten, and of
birds, but only one pair of the unclean animals according to 7:2–3). 2. the
fact that when the whole story is analysed, one is left with two substantially
complete accounts of the Flood, one showing affinities (including the name
YHWH) with the second creation account and the other showing affinities with
the first. One or two details remain unclear but the majority of scholars are
agreed on something very like the following analysis: (a) 6:5–8; 7:1–5, 7–10,
12, 16b–17, 22–3; 8:2b–3a, 6–12, 13b, 20–2 (¼ J); (b) 6:9–22; 7:6, 11, 13–16a,
18–21, 24; 8:1–2a, 3b–5, 13a, 14–19; 9:1–17 (¼ P). A more detailed presentation
of the argument can be found in the commentaries on Genesis by S. R. Driver
(1904: 85–6) and J. Skinner (1910: 147–50); cf. Habel (1971: 14–15). 6. This
brief but important example will give an idea of how the analysis of the
Pentateuch proceeds in the classical documentary hypothesis. It is work of this
kind which lies behind the lists of passages belonging to J, E, D, and P in the
standard introductions to the OT. There are, it should be said, some passages
where scholars have not been unanimous about the recognition of the sources,
and here caution is necessary. The following sketch will give a general idea of
what has been thought to belong to each of the four sources: Genesis: Chs. 1–11
are formed from J (2:4b– 4:26; 6:1–4; part of the Flood Story (see above);
9:18–27; parts of 10; 11:1–9) and P (1:1–2:4a; most of 5; the rest of the Flood
Story; 9:28–9; the rest of 10; most of 11:10–32); most of chs. 12–50 come from
J (including 12–13; 18; most of 19 and 24), E (including most of 20–2 and
40–2), and P (17; 23; 28:1–9; 35:9–13; and most of the genealogies). Exodus:
Chs. 1–24 are again made up of extracts from J, E, and P. The only passages of
any length which are clearly from E are 1:15–21 and 3:9–15. P is the source of
6:2–7:13; 12:1–20, 40–51, and various shorter passages. Traditionally the
Decalogue (20:1–17) and the Book of the Covenant (20:22–23:33) were ascribed to
E, but it is now widely doubted if they appeared in any of the main sources.
Chs. 32–4 are usually thought to have been based on J and E (32 E; 34 J; 33
parts from both), but they may be all J except for some late editorial
additions. Chs. 25–31 and 35–40 are all from P. Leviticus: The whole book,
together with Num 1:1–10:28, is from P, though it is clear that already
existing collections of laws have been incorporated in Lev 1–7 and Lev 17–26
(the latter section being known as the Holiness Code ¼ H). Numbers: The rest of
the book, from 10:29, is again a mixture of J, E, and P. E is most clearly
present in the story of Balaam (ch. 23 and some verses in 22). P provided the
sections of chs. 16–18 that deal with the revolt of Korah and the vindication
of the Aaronite priesthood, most of 25:6–36:13, and some other passages; again
older documents (including the wilderness itinerary in ch. 33) have been worked
in. Deuteronomy: from the D source, with the exception of a few passages,
mostly at the end. But an original core in 4:45–29:1 from pre-exilic times can
be distinguished from a framework placed around it in the Babylonian Exile (so
esp. chs. 4 and 29–30).
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