December 23, 2010

  • Evidence for Documentary Hypothesis Sucks

    Intro:

    So for research purposes on my review of atheist, Paul Tobin's chapter 6 in "The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails" (TCD) on the "Bible and Modern Scholarship" I've needed to investigate more rigorously the documentary hypothesis (DH) since Tobin neglects to defend it in confrontation with his Christian critics.  Basically the idea is that the Old Testament, especially the first five books traditionally attributed to Moses (for the most part), are actually the work of at least 4 different later sources.  This is justified for a number of reasons, especially but not limited to various contradictions in the stories.  Tobin provides some in TCD that aren't exactly smoking guns and so I've gone looking for better examples.  And the prognosis on that front so far has not been good. 

    Tobin cites three books at Christian reviewer, Steve Hays to demonstrate his views represent the consensus, but those books (or the two I can look into via the internet) are much more summaries of conclusions rather than arguments for positions.  The wiki page on the DH has some references I've been looking into and one such reference gives two example pieces of evidence for the DH.  Both suck on the face of it.   

    Example 1:

    In section "C. Evidence for Composite Character," from The Anchor Bible Dictionary's notes on the Documentary Hypothesis, John Barton says:

    In narrative texts it may be impossible to extract a coherent sequence of events.  For example, in Gen 12:1, Abram is told to leave Haran after the death of his father, Terah.  According to 11:26, Abram was born when Terah was 70; according to 11:32 Terah died at the age of 205; hence Abram must have been 135 when he was called to leave Ur. But 12:4 says that he was only 75 when he left Haran. The difficulty is explained if the story in Genesis 12 is drawn from a different source from the genealogical information in Genesis 11. [emphasis mine]

    Impossible?  Only if you are making crap up.  It doesn't say in 12:1 (or any of the verses referenced) that Terah had to die before Abram left, so I don't see why Abram couldn't have left when Terrah was 145.  Mission Impossible?  Hardly.  Perhaps it is some kind of cultural taboo to ever leave your parents' household before they die and so that is just assumed into context?  Is there some Hebrew death phrase or play on words in 12:1 that doesn't show up in English translations?  Barton doesn't bother to tell us and that's pretty lame. 

    Example 2:

    The other bit of "evidence" presented is found in these verses:  1 Samuel 9:15-16; 10:1, vs. these verses:  1 Samuel 8:1-22; 10:17-19.  Basically the first point to the people being rebellious against Yahweh and getting a king out of it and the second set points out how Yahweh decrees it to happen.  There's no contradiction theologically since everything good and bad happens on Yahweh's watch and he uses it all towards his own ends.  Other stories portray Yahweh both hardening Pharoah's heart in confrontation with Moses and Pharoah hardening his own heart and not letting the Hebrew slaves go free in Exodus.  Theologically Yahweh is causing things and yet still placing blame on the human agent in use.  It's all part of the plan.  Even if the two sections in 1 Samuel were two accounts woven together the "weaver" could have been fully aware of the "contradiction" and thought nothing of it.  I doubt Christian apologists are impressed.

    Outro:
     
    This is not inspiring a lot of confidence in critical scholarship.  They phone all this in?  Or am I missing something?

    I'll keep digging into other examples until I find the best ones (assuming they exist).  If anyone wants to point me in the right direction of the best defense of the DH on the internet, please do so.  It would be especially nice if it were presented in light of conservative criticism of it. 

    Ben

Comments (13)

  • I actually studied this in my Jewish Bible course. The evidence is a lot more compelling when you compare the original Hebrew. If you read the story of Noah's Ark with a mindset on looking for two stories that were latter somewhat shoddily interwoven, it becomes pretty apparent. Here you can read the two accounts separated.

  • @GodlessLiberal -  Thanks.  I'm just hoping you don't have to be an expert in the language to really nail some of this stuff.

    The next item on my agenda is to evaluate what J. P. Holding references: 

    "...parallel toledot structure, that the author of Genesis is repeating himself (although we do have examples of dual creation accounts -- the former told generally, the latter told more specifically -- in Sumerian and Babylonian literature..." 

    He provides no references and doesn't discuss the supposed common literary convention of doubling up your stories all over the place.  Sounds dubious, but I was wondering if you'd ever heard anything like it?

    Ben

  • @WAR_ON_ERROR - Yes, basically compare Genesis 1-2:4 vs 2:4 and on. The two obvious examples you can see in English is that one of the accounts uses "we" instead of "I" when God refers to himself, and one uses the word God and the other Lord (Yahweh vs. Elohim in Hebrew).

    I don't speak Hebrew at all, but Brettler's "How to Read the Bible" was a wonderful resource. And if you just want to see which parts scholars generally agree are written by which of the four authors, Friedman has "Bible with Sources Revealed." (Don't waste actual money on the latter, though.)

  • @GodlessLiberal - They should make a companion text entitled "Bible with Spoilers Removed", where they take out all the premature references to the big plot twist at the end.

  • I think the point in example 1 was to demonstrate the discontinuity between chapters 11 and 12: if the father died at the end of 11 making Abram 135 years old, then 12 cannot be in any chronological order if it says he is only 70. Thus, the two chapters were written from different sources.

  • @bryangoodrich - Ooooohhh...yeah, that might be it.  Seems kinda lame though, like no one ever backtracks and elaborates.  If that's a standard ancient convention as Holding claims, then it's a non-issue.  But Holding doesn't prove it.

  • @WAR_ON_ERROR - I don't think he is saying anything regarding the possibilities on what could have happened or how the text was edited. He is only advancing the thesis he puts forth: it may be impossible to extract a coherent sequence of events from narrative texts.

    Certainly Genesis is a narrative text, and I think the assumption we might extract from this is that narration has a temporal component. Of course, that is not necessarily the case, but without further information the thesis appears to be maintained. There is no viable means for us to identify a coherent sequence of events. Gen 11 is narrated before Gen 12, but the former has Abram twice the age of the latter. As a sequence of events, this is not coherent. Therefore, either the narration is incoherent as a sequence of events or as is concluded, "the story in Genesis 12 is drawn from a different source from the genealogical information in Genesis 11." We might add that, as a narrative text, there is no way we can tell how the sequence of events unfold without making assumptions or trying to decipher it from clues within the text, but such a program is not an extraction from the texts; it becomes theorizing about the texts and its meaning (hermenutics). 

  • I would add that he is not saying that the story in Genesis 12 cannot be drawn from the same source from the genealogical information in Genesis 11, but the provided disjunction actually has compound disjuncts. He is saying, either (A) They are from the same source and the story is an incoherent narration [in temporal order], or (B) They are from different sources and the story can be maintained as a coherent narration [that is still out of temporal order]. Since the temporal order is irrelevant to the thesis--but is still an aspect assumed about coherent narration--we can simply drop it from the argument. Now, the conclusion may seem weird, because it is technically still incoherent; it is still out of temporal order. The point of the thesis is only that in (A) we cannot make any sense (i.e., "extract a coherent sequence of events") of the narrative text, whereas in (B) we can make sense of the text. The unstated caveat is as I pointed out above: we will require additional theorizing by recognizing (B), because to make it a coherent sequence of events will require us to unravel the sequence by some means that goes beyond the narration.

    Stated plainly, we take a narration to be, prima facie, in order (e.g., Gen 1, Gen 2, ..., Gen 11, and then Gen 12). In fact, we might say it is not narrated if it is out of order. In this case, (A) and (B) are not entirely correct. It would be rather (A) It is a narrative text that is impossible to extract the sequence of events or (B) It is not a narrative text and the sequence of events is elusive, as demonstrated by the fact Gen 12 must draw on genealogical information other than did Gen 11. For the most part, I think this is a sound argument. There are exceptions to the rule, however. This would require us to expand the definition of a narrative text to include those exceptions which are narrations that go out of order. But we might also recognize that when a narrative backtracks, it will state as much. If it does not, and appears incoherent, we might then say "if it is a narration, it is poorly presented." In any case, the conclusion still stands because we cannot extract the coherent (if out of order) sequence of events. Thus, the general assumption that coherence coincides with order is not entirely correct, especially in these exceptional cases. In those cases, if we maintain the narrative aspect, then we need to revise the notion of coherence accordingly. In doing so, as I just did, coherence coincides with the capability to extract the out of order sequence of events from the narration. A poorly narrated text in terms of its order is then incoherent. This saves the argument and I think it is rightly stated.

  • Ben:

    Be careful to note the assumptions that a proponent of the DH brings to the text. It appears that Barton assumes that the events of Genesis 11-12 are told in strict chronological order. However, if we just look at the text on its own terms we see there is no reason to make this assumption.

    The case for the DH looks good if you merely look at a summary of the argument. I'm not sure how many biblical scholars truly dig into the text and look over each little piece of evidence. Therefore, it is possible that a number of biblical scholars accept the DH because it looks plausible after a quick survey of the argument, not because they are experts on the subject.

    Also know that proponents of the DH disagree among themselves. Some scholars doubt that we can detect the E source while others do not. One scholar may assign a passage to P while another will assign the passage to J.

    Finally, I ask you to consider two important points. First, all these sources are hypothetical. None of them are extant if they ever existed at all. One has to be skeptical of our ability to reconstruct ancient-and-no-longer-extant literary sources. Note how we can't even have certainty when it comes to the Synoptic Problem despite the fact that we have three extant sources to work with. Second, whoever compiled the Torah into its final form thought it made a good deal of sense. If one is going to say that Genesis 1 contradicts Genesis 2 then he has to explain why the redactor put two contradictory stories right next to each other. It seems that the proponent of the DH is saying that a single author could not have written the Torah but a single redactor could put it together.

  • GodlessLiberal:

    If you read the story of Noah's Ark with a mindset on looking for two stories that were latter somewhat shoddily interwoven, it becomes pretty apparent.

    But one can also find unity if he looks for it.  In Gen 7:1 J assumes that the ark is already constructed but the construction of the ark was narrated by P (Gen 6:9-22).

    Proponents of the DH allege that J (7:2-3) and P (6:19-20) contradict each other over the number of animals Noah is supposed to bring on the ark.  "The contradiction disappears, however, if we read senayim in 6:19-20 as a collective for "pairs"; one cannot form a plural of a word that is dual. Thus Gen. 6:19-20 is the general statement. Noah is to bring aboard pairs of animals. Specifically the animal population is to consist of seven pairs of clean and one pair of unclean" (Kenneth A. Matthews, Genesis 1-11:26, p. 379).

    There is a chiastic structure from 6:9 to 9:19:

    (A) Transitional introduction (6:9-10)
    (B) Violence in God's creation (6:11-12)
    (C) First divine address: resolution to destroy (6:13-22)
    (D) Second divine address: command to enter the ark (7:1-10)
    (E) Beginning of the flood (7:11-16)
    (F) The rising flood waters (7:17-24)
    (G) God's remembrance of Noah (8:1a)
    (F*) The receding flood waters (8:1b-5)
    (E*) The drying of the earth (8:6-14)
    (D*) Third divine address: command to leave the ark (8:15-19)
    (C*) God's resolution to preserve order (8:20-22)
    (B*) Fourth divine address: covenant blessing and peace (9:1-17)
    (A*) Transitional conclusion (9:18-19)

    One can also see a chiasmus when looking at the time spans mentioned:

    (A) 7 days of waiting for flood (7:4)
    (B) 7 days of waiting for flood (7:10)
    (C) 40 days of flood (7:17a)
    (D) 150 days of water triumphing (7:24)
    (D*) 150 days of water waning (8:3)
    (C*) 40 days' wait (8:6)
    (B*) 7 days' wait (8:10)
    (A*) 7 days' wait (8:12)

    Finally, note that the two forms of time reckoning integrate well with each other:

    Two kinds of time reckoning are used in the Flood narrative. That based on precise dates informs us that the Flood lasted exactly twelve months and eleven days, including the first and last days. That based on intervals of days is not a complete system in itself; it does not tell us how many days elapsed after the ark rested on Ararat before the mountain tops became visible or how many days elapsed after the dove finally failed to return for the earth to be fully dried out. The two modes of calculation are meant to be integrated.

    If we now make a calculation taking into account the day formulas, the same result is achieved, provided a month is reckoned as exactly thirty days. This we may conclude since 7:11 and 8:4 state precisely that five months elapsed between the onset of the rains and the grounding of the ark, while 7:24 and 8:3 specify that period to be one hundred and fifty days.

    The following computation thus emerges: To the 150 days just mentioned must be added 74 days between the seventeenth of the seventh month (8:4) and the first day of the tenth month, when the mountain tops first became visible (8:5), another 40 days before the release of the raven (8:6-7), and a further 21 days for the three forays of the dove (8:10-12). This makes a total so far of 285 days, bringing us to the second day of the twelfth month.

    On New Year’s day, 29 days later, the waters on the earth had begun to dry up (8:13), and it took another 57 days for the ground to be completely dried out by the twenty-seventh day of the second month (8:14). The addition of 29 and 57 to the 285 gives a grand total of 371 days. Taking 30 days to a month, this figure yields twelve months and eleven days, identical with the conclusion based solely upon the date system.

    Of course, a calendar of the type presupposed here is eccentric, but in the ancient Egyptian calendar the year was, in fact, divided into twelve months of thirty days each, yielding 360 days exactly, with five extra days intercalated at the end of the year. In Babylon, too, in addition to the true lunar calendar, there was a schematic calendar composed of twelve months of thirty days. (Nahum Sarna, JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis, p. 376)

  • GodlessLiberal:

    Yes, basically compare Genesis 1-2:4 vs 2:4 and on. The two obvious examples you can see in English is that one of the accounts uses "we" instead of "I" when God refers to himself, and one uses the word God and the other Lord (Yahweh vs. Elohim in Hebrew).

    Did you look closely at the book you recommended (The Bible With Sources Revealed)?  The pronoun "I" is used of God in 1:29. In Gen 2-3 the word Elohim is used 20 times by my count.  Friedman explains this anomaly (the use of the term YHWH God) by suggesting the redactor inserted Elohim into the narrative to soften the transition from the P account to the J account.  One can always try to force the data to fit the theory.

  • bryangoodrich, I'm not sure I fully follow your last comment but I will state that a narrative out of chronological order is not the same thing as an incoherent narrative.  The transition from ch. 11 to ch. 12 makes sense. Gen 11:27-32 gives a brief account of where Abram came from. Terah is introduced in 11:24 and mentioned eight times in 11:24-32.  After that, he is not mentioned again in Genesis.  One can plausibly suggest that, since Terah is not a factor in the rest of Genesis, the author mentions Terah's death in v. 32 in order to close his account of Terah.  The alternative would be to insert a verse about Terah's death somewhere in the middle of the story of Abraham and then continue on with the story of Abraham.  This would maintain chronological order but create an abrupt little diversion from the Abraham story.

    A similar pattern is found in the accounts of Ishmael and Esau. Ishmael's genealogy and death are narrated in 25:12-18.  Yet in 28:19 we are told that Esau went to Ishmael to marry one of his daughters.  The author appears to assume his reader can follow along.

    You seem to think that if the author backtracks he will make this explicit.  I don't see why he can't assume his readers are intelligent enough to figure it out on their own when he backtracks.

  • @Jayman777 - Oh I feel you.  A little pissed off about it, too.

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