With the development of modern philosophy and modern science, however, that prevailing view changed irrevocably, as previously unquestioned dogmas were challenged from a variety of perspectives. In the study of the Old Testament, the first issue addressed was the authorship of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible.
Moses and the Torah
According to early Jewish tradition, God had revealed the entire contents of the Torah to Moses, who wrote it down. The ultimate authority therefore was divine, and Moses was the supreme human authority. That tradition was also accepted by the writers of the New Testament, many of whom were Jewish themselves; when they quoted the Torah, they attributed it to Moses, as, according to them, Jesus did as well.
But did Moses really write the Torah? A few medieval scholars pointed out problems with this belief, such as the account at the end of Deuteronomy of Moses’s death and burial. Moses, some proposed, could not have written that part of the Torah. But other scholars argued either that Moses, as a prophet, had had those events revealed to him, or that Moses’s divinely designated successor Joshua had written those last few verses.
Not until the seventeenth century, with the beginning of modern philosophy, was the dominant view seriously questioned. Such thinkers as Thomas Hobbes, Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza, and Richard Simon began what the latter called “critical” scholarship. By critical Simon did not necessarily mean negative (although there are frequently negative aspects of biblical criticism), but rather without preconceptions derived from dogma.
Such freedom from presuppositions enabled thinkers to approach the Torah, and the Bible in general, as they would ordinary books and to consider issues such as style and consistency that inform our understanding of authorship.
One inconsistency that they noticed was the different names and titles used for God in the book of Genesis. According to Genesis 4:26, God had been called by the name Yahweh since the time of Adam, and it was as Yahweh that such people as Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob knew him. So, for example, when God speaks to Abraham he often refers to himself as Yahweh, and Abraham does the same. But according to Exodus 6:3, when Yahweh reveals his name to Moses, he says: “I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob …, but by my name ‘Yahweh’ I did not make myself known to them.” Clearly there is a contradiction here: either Abraham knew Yahweh by that name, or he did not.
The name of the God of Israel
Throughout the Old Testament, God is referred to by many names and titles. By far the most frequent, occurring nearly seven thousand times, is the sacred personal name of God, written in Hebrew with the consonants yhwh. Before the end of the biblical period this name came to be considered so holy that it was rarely spoken aloud, and so a word for “lord” (in Hebrew, adonay) was frequently used in its place. In translations of the Bible since antiquity this pious substitution has generally been followed; in modern English translations its presence is signaled by the use of small capitals: LORD is used whenever the text reads yhwh. Because yhwh was not pronounced, we are unsure exactly how it was vocalized, but the scholarly convention “Yahweh” is most likely correct.
Another issue concerned passages describing the same events, but with differing details. There are two accounts of the creation of the world and of humans at the beginning of the book of Genesis, two accounts of the Flood, several versions of the Ten Commandments, and so forth. Did God make animals before humans, as in Genesis 1:24–26, or did he first make a human, and then animals, as in Genesis 2:7, 19? Did God tell Noah to bring a pair of each species of animal into the ark, as in Genesis 6:19, or seven pairs of clean animals and only one pair of the unclean, as in Genesis 7:3? Did God give the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai, as in Exodus 19:20, or on Mount Horeb, as in Deuteronomy 5:2? Such inconsistencies are hardly characteristic of great writers, whether divine or human.
There were other clear indications that Moses himself had not written the first five books of the Bible. When these books speak of him, it is always in the third person: the text tells what happened to Moses and is not Moses’s own account of what he experienced. The text also frequently refers to times long after Moses, which would be anachronistic if Moses were the author. One example is the beginning of the book of Deuteronomy: “These are the words that Moses spoke to all Israel on the other side of the Jordan.” Since Moses died east of the Jordan River valley, the narrative introduction must have been written not by Moses himself but by someone living west of the Jordan, after Moses’s time.
The Documentary Hypothesis
From the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries, these and other issues led scholars to conclude that the Torah, or as it is often called, the Pentateuch (from a Greek word meaning “five books”), is a composite. Beginning with the observation of different names and titles for God in the book of Genesis, scholars were able to isolate several distinct sources in the Pentateuch, each with its own characteristic vocabulary and themes. In its most fully developed form, this source analysis is called the Documentary Hypothesis, and it is the earliest important conclusion of modern critical scholarship.
The Documentary Hypothesis is, first of all, a hypothesis, a theoretical explanation of data. The data that it explains are the inconsistencies, the repetitions, the anachronisms, and other details that suggest not one but several different authors. In its classic formulation, these are explained by the existence of hypothetical documents or sources, written at different times by different authors and combined only at a relatively late date. In scholarly jargon, the identification and analysis of these sources in the text of the Pentateuch is often called literary criticism, an unfortunate term since it has little connection with the way most literature is interpreted; rather, it is source criticism. Although scholars have differed about how many sources there are, where they are found, and when they should be dated, in its most widely accepted form the Documentary Hypothesis states that behind the present text of the first five books of the Bible lie four earlier sources, commonly identified by letter. The earliest is the source called J (from the German spelling of the divine name, Jahveh, because many of the scholars who developed the hypothesis were Germans). In J, which was composed in the early first millennium BCE, God is called Yahweh from the beginning of the narrative (starting in Gen. 2:4), and he is a deity who often interacts personally and directly with humans. The next source is E, from a Hebrew word for “God,” Elohim. It is a fragmentary source, dated slightly later than J. In E, God is called Elohim throughout Genesis, and his interactions with humans are less direct, often in dreams or through prophets or messengers rather than in person. The next source in chronological order is D, so called because it is almost entirely restricted to the book of Deuteronomy; it was written in the late eighth or seventh century BCE. The last of the four sources is P, for Priestly; compiled sometime in the mid-first millennium BCE, it focuses on matters of ritual and religious observance. In P, as in E, God is called Elohim throughout Genesis and until the revelation of the name Yahweh to Moses in Exodus 6. As the last of the sources, P is also the final editor of the Pentateuch, and thus the first chapter of the Torah, Genesis 1, and much of the last, Deuteronomy 34, are both from P.
Perceived as an attack on the doctrine that Moses had written the Torah, and implicitly on the authority of the Bible itself, the Documentary Hypothesis was repeatedly challenged, and many of its early proponents were condemned or forced to leave their teaching positions. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, it was widely accepted among Protestant scholars, although Jewish and Roman Catholic scholars did not join the consensus until the mid-twentieth century, and many conservative Jews and Christians still reject it.
By the late twentieth century the consensus appeared to be breaking up, as many scholars questioned the dates for the sources, the very existence of some of them, and even the usefulness of source criticism for understanding the text as it now stands. Nevertheless, the Documentary Hypothesis is still a necessary starting point for i
nterpreters, although most scholars would now agree that it alone does not fully explain the many processes that led to the final shape of the Pentateuch. Beginning in the early twentieth century additional methods of analysis were developed. One, known as form criticism, examines the smaller units that had been incorporated into the sources: identifying and understanding them makes it possible to think about the prehistory of the sources themselves. With the rise of disciplines such as anthropology and sociology, other methods also came to be used. Such development of interpretive strategies or methodologies has continued to the present, with a bewildering variety of criticisms and other “-isms” being used by biblical scholars: form criticism, redaction criticism, literary criticism (in the ordinary sense of that term), canonical criticism, structuralism, postmodernism, feminism, postcolonialism, and so forth.
2. A silver amulet, now unrolled, found in a burial cave on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Written in the early sixth century BCE in ancient Hebrew, it contains a version of the Priestly Blessing found in Numbers 6:24–26: “May Yahweh bless and may he keep you; may Yahweh make his face shine upon you; and may he give you peace.” It is the oldest surviving copy of a text occurring in the Bible.
The Documentary Hypothesis: an example
For the most part, the four sources occur in blocks of material that are juxtaposed. Occasionally, however, they are interwoven, as in the account of the plagues in Egypt (Exod. 7–11), and in the story of the Flood (Gen. 6–9), as the following excerpt from the latter illustrates. In this passage, according to the Documentary Hypothesis, there are only two sources, J (plain text), which uses “the LORD” (yhwh), and P (in italics), which uses “God” (elohim), and which have many other differences of detail.
Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters came on the earth. And Noah with his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives went into the ark to escape the waters of the flood. Of clean animals, and of animals that are not clean, and of birds, and of everything that creeps on the ground, two and two, male and female, went into the ark with Noah, as God had commanded Noah. And after seven days the waters of the flood came on the earth. In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened. The rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights. On the very same day Noah with his sons, Shem and Ham and Japheth, and Noah’s wife and the three wives of his sons entered the ark, they and every wild animal of every kind, and all domestic animals of every kind, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, and every bird of every kind—every bird, every winged creature. They went into the ark with Noah, two and two of all flesh in which there was the breath of life. And those that entered, male and female of all flesh, went in as God had commanded him; and the LORD shut him in. (Gen. 7:6–16)
Moses, authorship, and books
Let us return to the first question addressed by critical scholars: did Moses write the Torah? One could interpret the Bible as stating this. Several times in the books of Joshua and Kings “the book of the torah of Moses” or simply “the torah of Moses” is mentioned. But it is unlikely that this torah (“teaching” or “law”) means the entire first five books of the Bible, since according to Joshua 8:32, Joshua was able to write it on stones. Nevertheless, that same verse also says that Moses himself had written that torah, and there are other references to Moses as a writer. For example, Exodus 24:4 states that “Moses wrote down all the words of the LORD,” but in its context this must refer to the words that the LORD had spoken in Exodus 20–23, not the entire Pentateuch. Likewise, repeated references toward the end of Deuteronomy to the “book of the torah” that Moses wrote refer to the book of Deuteronomy itself, rather than to the preceding four books. The earliest mention of the “torah of Moses” (the “teaching” of Moses) that could mean the first five books of the Bible as such is in Ezra 7:6, which is set in the mid-fifth century BCE, long after the time when Moses might have lived.
Why then was Moses considered the human author of the first and most important part of the Old Testament? First, because he was the principal human character of the last four of the five books of the Torah. Second, throughout the ancient world it was commonplace to attribute one’s own words to a distinguished authority from the past; examples of ancient notables who were given credit for words or compositions that they never said or wrote include David, Solomon, Socrates, and Jesus. In the period after the return from Babylon in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, when the Jewish community was struggling with issues of belief and practice, the authority of Moses gave a special status to the first five books: they were the torah, the teaching of Moses himself.
There is another issue, having to do with ancient understanding of a book. In contrast to what we might have thought until recently, in antiquity a book was not necessarily a single product of a single author but was often more like a hypertext, which several, even many, writers might expand, edit, and otherwise modify. In this process, which went on for many generations, a variety of perspectives—or as the Documentary Hypothesis proposes for the Pentateuch, a variety of sources or traditions—were preserved. For its final editors, as for those of the entire Bible, preserving different sources was more important than superficial consistency of detail. Even before the Torah became sacred scripture, then, its constituent parts had already achieved something like canonical status. In the end, this process was endowed with the authority of Moses, the individual remembered as closer to God than anyone else in Israel’s history.
Other challenges
The rise of modern philosophy, of critical thinking without presuppositions, or as Immanuel Kant put it in the late eighteenth century, awakening from dogmatic slumber, led to other important intellectual developments. Among these was the rise of modern science. A near contemporary of the seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza, one of the first to challenge the doctrine that Moses was the human author of the first five books of the Bible, was Galileo Galilei, who along with Johannes Kepler adopted and elaborated the understanding of the solar system earlier proposed by Copernicus. The earth, Galileo and Kepler proved by scientific observation, orbited around the sun, not vice versa. This contradicted the view of the biblical writers and further challenged biblical accuracy, as would discoveries in geology and evolutionary biology in the nineteenth century. These scientific developments coincided with the formation of the Documentary Hypothesis, and for many believers both threatened the traditional authority of the Bible.
There was yet another source of information directly relevant to the Bible. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, early archaeologists of the Near East were discovering tens of thousands of texts, often written on clay tablets, from ancient Mesopotamia, which corresponds roughly to modern Iraq. Egyptian writing had been deciphered at the beginning of the century, and now the several scripts of the Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and other ancient Near Eastern peoples were also becoming available and were rapidly deciphered and read. These ancient texts were often directly pertinent to the Bible. Many contained myths, such as that of a great flood, which was parallel to the story of Noah in Genesis 6–9 in great detail. There were historical texts as well, mentioning many individuals and events previously known only from the Bible and providing independent confirmation of some details of biblical history—but by no means all of them.
Chapter 3
The Old Testament and history
The first dozen or so books of the Old Testament, depending on how one counts them and on the canon used, have a continuous narrative framework. They begin with creation and early human history in the opening chapters of Genesis. The rest of that book recounts the lives of four generations of Israel’s ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jacob’s twelve sons, the forefathers of the twelve tribes of Israel; by the end of Genesis Jacob and his extended family have migrated to Egypt. The four following books, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, an
d Deuteronomy, span a narrower period. They relate how under Moses’s leadership the Israelites escaped from Egypt and journeyed to the eastern border of the Promised Land, where Moses died. Then we have a continuous history of the Israelites in the Promised Land: how they captured it under Joshua, in the book that bears his name; an account of their early days there, in the book of Judges; how they established a united monarchy under the first kings, Saul, David, and Solomon, in the books of Samuel and the first eleven chapters of 1 Kings. The rest of the books of Kings trace the history of the two kingdoms that separated after the death of Solomon: the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah. The Northern Kingdom comes to an end with its conquest by the Assyrians, and a little more than a century later the Babylonians conquer the Southern Kingdom.
Until the Enlightenment, this narrative framework was considered historical in the sense that it was accepted as an accurate, even inspired, account of what had taken place over thousands of years in the biblical writers’ chronology. What the Bible said was true, in every detail.
The Old Testament_A Very Short Introduction Page 3