High School, the Documentary Hypothesis, and Me

I started R.N. Whybray's Making of the Pentateuch. As I read this book, I was reminded of my first encounter with the Documentary Hypothesis.

I was a junior in high school, taking a class on Biblical Literature. Our teacher told us to look at Genesis 1-2, and to see if we think that there are contradictions between the two chapters---if there were two different creation accounts. At the time, I didn't know about the Documentary Hypothesis, but I did realize that there were apparent contradictions between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. Maybe I learned that through my own Bible reading. I read the Bible a lot when I was a teen---and even before then---and so I knew that, in Genesis 1, God made man and woman last, after the animals and the plants, whereas, in Genesis 2, God made man before the plants and the animals. But I was a fundamentalist then, and so I figured that there were no real contradictions in the Bible. Like all contradictions, this one could be explained. And, when I looked at the NIV, I saw that Genesis 2:19 said that God "had made" the animals and the birds---had made, as in, before he made Adam! I didn't know Hebrew back then, and so I was unaware that Genesis 2:19 was a vav-consecutive, which often means that the event came after the event in the previous line (meaning that the animals and birds were made after Adam). I knew about biblical contradictions, but I thought that they could be harmonized.

The next day, in Bible literature class, we looked at Genesis 1-2. At the time, I figured that I knew everything that there was to know about the Bible. (Nowadays, my knowledge of the Bible looks a lot smaller to me, compared to all of the information and ideas that are out there!) And so I was a little surprised to hear my teacher say that some believed there were two sources: that P (the priest) wrote Genesis 1, and that J (the Yahwist) wrote Genesis 2. I never heard that before!

We had to do a final class project, and so I got permission to write a paper about the Documentary Hypothesis. I spent a lot of time on this paper, which turned out to be pretty lengthy. Essentially, I critiqued the Hypothesis, and then wrote in my final line that scholars who take apart the Holy Bible will one day face the judgment of God (or something like that). I got an "A" on it, and my teacher asked me for a copy, which she could keep for herself. When my brother had her years later for a class, she told him that she really enjoyed my paper on the Documentary Hypothesis. And I'm not surprised by this. Although she herself was fair to different viewpoints in class, she was a good conservative Baptist. Plus, my paper made good points (though, as I will show, it also had plenty of inadequate points).

For my paper, I used whatever sources I could find. There was the conservative International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, which, if I'm not mistaken, defined the Documentary Hypothesis, saying when many scholars believed that J, E, D, and P were written, and who the authors of the sources were. Then, there was this old commentary on the Pentateuch in my local public library, which was rather conservative. I may have also consulted encyclopedias. There was the Adam Clarke commentary. There was a volume of Josh McDowell's Evidence that Demands a Verdict. Several of my colleagues---even those on the right---will sneer at that, but this edition was actually quite good. No, it didn't prove the divine inspiration of the Bible, as if anything can. But it was a compendium of respected scholarship that critiqued the Documentary Hypothesis. Umberto Cassuto was quoted a lot in it, for example. And, finally, I borrowed from the Indiana State University library (or my Mom borrowed it for me, since she was a student there at the time) a modern commentary on the Book of Genesis, which I believe was by Michael Maher. Maher believed in the Documentary Hypothesis.

I don't have the paper in front of me, and so I'm going by memory when I describe the points that I made. I remember that I said that different names for God did not mean different sources, for the literature of other countries in the ancient Near East used different names for gods in the same story; moreover, I learned that ancient Near Eastern literature could also contain a general account of an event, followed by a more descriptive account of that same event---which I (and my conservative sources) thought was what was going on in Genesis 1-2. I pointed out that the alleged sources could not stand on their own. One of my conservative sources, for example, pointed out that Genesis 2 was not a complete story about creation, for it didn't mention the creation of the stars, the sun, the moon, and the seas; Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 needed each other, in short. And I myself noticed something: in "J's" version of the flood story, the ark just appears out of nowhere! God never tells Noah to build it! Therefore, the J story couldn't stand on its own as a source, I thought, and so the entire flood story was written by one author, whom I took to be Moses (and, if my memory serves me correctly, Josh MacDowell included arguments for Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch).

What about the repetitions and the contradictions in the Pentateuch? I believe that I went with my conservative sources on the repetition issue: the repetitions are for dramatic effect, or to emphasize a point. As far as contradictions were concerned, I figured that they could be reconciled, and there were sources that essentially did that for me. I vaguely recall Adam Clarke saying, for example, that when God tells Moses in Exodus 6:3 that he was known to the patriarchs as El Shaddai, but not as YHWH, God did not mean that the patriarchs were unaware of the name of YHWH! After all, they use it in the Book of Genesis! For Adam Clarke, God meant there that the patriarchs did not know the full implications and significance of the name of YHWH!

In my opinion, the best part of my paper was when I looked at what Maher was identifying as J, E, and P. Keeping in mind that the division of sources was based in part on the different names for God, I noticed there were times when J used "El" or "Elohim," and when E and P used "YHWH." If these sources could use multiple names for God, I asked, why couldn't Moses as author of the entire Pentateuch? In some cases, my examples were pretty bad. For example, if J used the name "Israel," I counted that as J using the name "El" for God---when I doubt that J was that hung up on God's name in those instances. But I also supplied some good examples of sources using different divine names.

I also recall arguing that all of the stories in Genesis needed each other. I vaguely recall writing that, according to Maher, one source described how Jacob got the name of Israel, whereas, later in the Book of Genesis, another source calls Jacob "Israel." I wondered: Don't the two stories need each other? Don't we need to know how Jacob came to be called "Israel," so that we're not stumped by him being called "Israel" later in the story? I concluded that, indeed, these alleged multiple sources needed each other, and so there most likely were not multiple sources. In my eyes, there was only one author of the Pentateuch: Moses!

In retrospect, I can identify a number of problems with my high school paper. Granted, I didn't know about scholarly alternatives to the Documentary Hypothesis (i.e., the Supplementary Hypothesis), or other formulations of it (i.e., that of Van Seters), but, come to think of it, I didn't learn that stuff until my Jewish Theological Seminary days anyway. That was when I researched for a presentation on the Documentary Hypothesis, as well as heard from my colleagues about all the trouble it was in. At DePauw and Harvard, we got the standard Documentary Hypothesis---though I know that Jon Levenson took some swipes at it! But the impression I had was that the Documentary Hypothesis dominated critical scholarship. It was only later in my education that I learned otherwise (though I did hear about the literary approach as an undergraduate).

One problem I can identify with my high school paper was that I uncritically swallowed the conservative harmonizations of biblical contradictions. In my mind, if a harmonization could work, then it did work---it was the solution that made the contradiction go away! Nowadays, a lot of harmonizations strike me as mental gymnastics.

Second, I didn't take the time to learn how Wellhausen arrived at the conclusions that he did. In a sense, I cut right to the chase by looking at how a scholar divided the sources---to see if the division held any water---and there's something to be said for that. But I should have tried to understand the perspective of adherents to the Documentary Hypothesis, before I tried to knock it down (which would have been my agenda whatever I found, for I was out to defend the Bible!). There were legitimate reasons that Mosaic authorship was challenged, and it wasn't because the challengers were resisting God!

Third, I didn't realize that adherents to the Documentary Hypothesis had answers to some of my objections. For example, I said that J's flood story was incomplete, but a higher critic could respond that the redactor of the Pentateuch did not preserve the sources in their entirety, but only kept what he thought was needed. I believed that the sources needed one another, but a believer in the Documentary Hypothesis could say that a redactor merged the diverse sources together into a fairly continuous story, or say that there were common traditions that the authors of the sources knew about, and so a source that called Jacob "Israel" could have heard the story of how he got that name from some place other than the other source. Or some say he could have learned it from the other source, or that he just knew that Jacob was called "Israel," but he didn't know why.

The part about each source using different divine names is still a good point, in my opinion, and this is a point that Whybray identifies and develops (of course, he didn't get it from me, for he wrote this book years before I wrote my paper!). He also makes the point about the literary value of doublets and repetition, and he talks about possible literary reasons that there are duplicate stories in the Pentateuch (i.e., the Hagar story is repeated around two stories about the question of who Abraham's true heir is to be). In some cases, Whybray notes, a single "source" can have doublets---as when J tells a "wife/sister" story for both Abraham and Isaac---so how can we say that doublets indicate different sources---as if a single source can't repeat a similar story? Moreover, attempts to divide the sources on the basis of style fall flat, for the criteria is not consistently applied: J is cited for its brevity when the topic is Genesis 12:10-20, and yet J wrote a long story, Genesis 24, the story of Rebecca. Abraham's bargaining with the Hittites for the purchase of the cave at Machpelah has been attributed to P because it relates to legal matters, and yet we see deals and bargaining in stories attributed to J---Genesis 18:22-33 and 24. A single source can contradict itself---Exodus 9:16 and 9:19 contradict each other on whether or not the cattle died in a plague, and yet both are attributed to J, so why assume that contradictions must mean different sources?

Although Whybray says on more than one occasion that the ancients may not have shared our high regard for consistency, my impression is that he does not believe that an author deliberately contradicted himself. He just doesn't think that contradictions mean the existence of multiple full-blown literary documents, each telling a story in its own way. He wonders why different accounts couldn't have come together at an oral stage. Or maybe traditions got attached to a story---and the traditions weren't part of a full-blown alternative written source.

So Whybray is not really a harmonizer. He also doesn't believe that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. He dates the Pentateuch to the sixth century B.C.E., and he prefers an exilic setting---a time when Israel would reflect on sin and its consequences, the divine promises, and how to believe in God amidst disappointment (page 96).

But I appreciated reading in Whybray's book some of the same points that I made in a paper as a high school student. Now, I can look back at that paper and not see it as totally bad!