Documentary Hypothosis

Friedman’s website includes the page: Thoughts about the Documentary Hypothesis (From the Introduction to Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism, Jeffrey Tigay, Editor). Extracts are as follows.

Tigay discusses why it is called the Documentary Hypothesis in his introduction, referring to its hypothetical methodology (p. 2).  Really, it is long past time for us to stop referring to it as a hypothesis.  The state of the evidence is such that it is now—at the very least—a theory, and a well established one at that.  To my mind, in the absence of any proper refutation of its strongest evidence, it is fact.

Much of the criticism of the Documentary Hypothesis comes from people who are not actively involved in the research.  So the argument that there are no ancient Near Eastern literary parallels was easy for them.  They could just say there are no parallels—without having to produce anything. [this comes from a significant paragraph about 3/4ths of the way in.]

Friedman’s article refutes the critics of the Documentary Hypothesis by citing their objections and then showing why they are baseless.

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The H Source in Leviticus

The extract below is from Elizabeth Hayes, Christine. Introduction to the Bible (The Open Yale Courses Series) (pp. 148-149). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

The special emphasis on holiness in chapters 17–26, as well as variations from the preceding sixteen chapters, has led scholars to the conclusion that chapters 17–26 are from a different priestly school, which they designate as H. The relative dates of P and H are much debated, but increasingly the consensus is that H is later than, and a redactor or editor of, P. (Thus, somewhat confusingly, P can refer to the entirety of the priestly writings that constitute the priestly source, or it can refer to that part of the priestly writings that is not H.)

For more about H go to the post on this website for a ChatCHPT response.

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Following is a portion of the response from ChatGPT in response to “tell me about documentary hypothesis of the Torah”

OpenAI. (2024). ChatGPT [Large language model]. https://chatgpt.com

Key Components of the Documentary Hypothesis

1. Multiple Sources: The hypothesis posits that the Torah is derived from at least four distinct sources, each with its own unique characteristics, theological perspectives, and historical contexts. These sources are typically identified as:
   • J (Yahwist): This source uses the name Yahweh (translated as “LORD” in many English Bibles) for God and has a more anthropomorphic view [having a human form or human attributes] of God. It is thought to be the earliest source, originating in the southern kingdom of Judah around the 10th century BCE.
   • E (Elohist): This source refers to God as Elohim and is believed to have originated in the northern kingdom of Israel (Ephraim) around the 9th century BCE. The Elohist source tends to emphasize prophecy and dreams.
   • D (Deuteronomist): This source is mainly associated with the book of Deuteronomy and reflects the religious reforms of King Josiah in the 7th century BCE. It focuses on the covenant between God and Israel, emphasizing moral and ethical conduct.
   • P (Priestly): This source has a more formal and structured style, emphasizing rituals, genealogies, and laws. It is thought to have been written during or after the Babylonian exile (6th century BCE).
2. Redaction: The various sources were later combined and edited by redactors (editors), who wove the different texts into a single narrative. This process likely took place over several centuries, reflecting the evolving beliefs and practices of the Israelite community.
3. Contradictions and Variations: Proponents of the Documentary Hypothesis point to inconsistencies, duplicate stories, and varying styles within the Torah as evidence of its composite nature. For example, the two creation accounts in Genesis (Genesis 1 and Genesis 2-3) are cited as examples of different sources.
4. Historical Context: The Documentary Hypothesis also considers the historical and cultural contexts in which these texts were written. The development of Israelite identity, religious practices, and political realities are seen as significant factors influencing the writing and compilation of the Torah.

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Extracts from LiteratureandHistory.com’s Episode 18 here. Bullet formatting is mine.

• The passages of the Pentateuch, particularly in Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers, that refer to God alternately as Elohim and Yahweh, are believed to be the first two separate sources of the Bible. They are known as the “E” source, for Elohim, and the “J” source, for the word “Jahwe” – German for Yahweh.
• The God of the “J” source, again, Yahweh, is a very personified God. He makes clothes for mankind (Gen 3:21) and walks in Eden (Gen 3.8). The J source envisions God as a physical being, capable of close contact and companionship with the heroes of the Pentateuch. The “J” source tells the story of an anthropomorphic deity whose intimate, often physical contact with mankind is part of the experience of the first generations of the Kingdom of Israel. When the J source tells the creation story – this is Genesis 2.7, the creation of man is a physical act of shaping and animation. “[T]he LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Gen 2.7). This God – again, Yahweh, the god of the J source – this God has hands, and breath. He isn’t a formless, faraway being, or an impersonal mystic force, but instead a powerful humanoid deity who does things with a physical body.
• The God of the E source, Elohim, is a distant, usually unseen God. Elohim communicates through dreams, visions, and intermediaries. His act of creation isn’t shaping with hands or blowing into nostrils or using ribs to create women – it is instantaneous. Genesis 1:27 reads, “God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27). In the E version of the creation story, humans are made in all in an instant. There are no hands, no dust, no mess of ribs or who was created first to help whom – it’s just poof, and men and women exist.
• So those are the first two sources of the Pentateuch, explained mainly with just one doublet episode – once again the J source, which writes of anthropomorphic Yahweh, and the E source, which writes of otherworldly Elohim.

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Also from Chat GPT:

Other scholars propose alternative models, such as the Fragmentary Hypothesis (suggesting the Torah was formed from many smaller, unrelated traditions and stories), and the Supplementary Hypothesis (arguing that the Torah developed gradually through successive additions and expansions rather than through the merging of large, independent documents).

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The italicized text below are extracts from the very good book Who Wrote the Bible by Richard Elliott Friedman we own in the Kindle version. Simon & Schuster.

The discovery that there were four separate, internally consistent documents came to be known as the Documentary Hypothesis. The process was also called “Higher Criticism.” What had begun as an idea by three men of the eighteenth century came to dominate investigations of the Bible by the end of the nineteenth century. Pg. 60

The Discovery of the Sources – Pg. 52

• The first of the three persons who made this discovery was a German minister, Henning Bernhard Witter, in 1711. His book made very little impact and was in fact forgotten until it was rediscovered two centuries later, in 1924.
• The second person to see it was Jean Astruc, a French professor of medicine and court physician to Louis XV. He published his findings at the age of seventy, anonymously in Brussels and secretly in Paris in 1753. His book, too, made very little impression on anyone.
• The third person was Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, a known and respected scholar in Germany and the son of a pastor. He called the group of biblical stories that referred to the deity as God “E,” because the Hebrew word for God is El or Elohim. He called the group of stories that referred to the deity as Yahweh “J” (which in German is pronounced like English Y). [During his Professorship in Jena 1775–1788?]

Probably the most remarkable difference of all between the two is their different ways of picturing God. It is not just that they call the deity by different names. J pictures a deity who can regret things that he has done (Gen 6:6-7), which raises interesting theological questions, such as whether an all-powerful, all-knowing being would ever regret past actions. It pictures a deity who can be “grieved to his heart” (Gen 6:6), who personally closes the ark (Gen 7:16) and smells Noah’s sacrifice (Gen 8:21). This anthropomorphic quality of J is virtually entirely lacking in P. There God is regarded more as a transcendent controller of the universe. Pg. 59

First, the author of J came from Judah and the author of E came from Israel. A number of biblical scholars before me have suggested this, but what is new here is that I mean to present a stronger collection of evidence for this than has been made known before, I mean to be more specific about who the two writers were, and I mean to show more specifically how the biblical stories actually related to these two men and to the events of their world. Pg. 61

Both J and E have versions of the story of Joseph. In both, Joseph’s brothers are jealous of him and plan to kill him, but one of the brothers saves him. In E it is Reuben, the oldest, who saves him. But in J it is Judah who saves him. Pg. 65

In E, Moses’ faithful assistant is Joshua. Joshua leads the people in battle against the Amalekites; he serves as watchman inside the Tent of Meeting whenever Moses is not meeting with the deity there; he is the only Israelite who is not involved in the golden calf incident; and he seeks to prevent the misuse of prophecy.30 In J, on the other hand, Joshua plays no role. Why the special treatment of Joshua in E but not in J? Joshua was a northern hero. He is identified as coming from the tribe of Ephraim, Jeroboam’s tribe; Joshua’s tomb is in the territory of Ephraim, and, according to the last chapter of the book of Joshua, Joshua’s work culminates in a covenant ceremony at Shechem (SHEE-kehm). Pg. 66

Why did the writer [of E] picture Moses as smashing the tablets of the Ten Commandments? Possibly because this raised doubts about Judah’s central religious shrine. The Temple in Judah housed the ark that was supposed to contain the two tablets of the Ten Commandments. According to the E story of the golden calf, Moses smashes the tablets. That means that according to the E source the ark down south in the Temple in Jerusalem either contains unauthentic tablets or no tablets at all. The author of E, in fashioning the golden calf story, attacked both the Israelite and the Judean religious establishments. Both had excluded his group. Pg. 73

The Golden Calf Stories

Freidman, on pages 74 and 75, says that the Author of E supports the political establishment of Israel but not the religious who are in Beth-El; i.e. not Shilo where the Levites are that fell out of favor with King Jeroboam. His paragraphs below explain how a Shilo/Levite writer could be the author of E.

The golden calf story is not the only instance in which the author of E may have been criticizing both the northern and southern religious establishments. In the J version of the commandments that God gives to Moses on Mount Sinai, there is a prohibition against making statues (idols). The wording of the J commandment is: You shall not make for yourself molten gods. The J command here forbids only molten statues. The golden calves of Jeroboam in the north were molten. Pg. 74

Meanwhile, the E source’s formulation of this prohibition reads: You shall not make with me gods of silver and gods of gold. You shall not make them for yourselves. Perhaps this command refers only to actual statues of gods, but if it casts doubt on the throne-platform icons as well then it casts doubt on both the molten golden calves and the plated golden cherubs. Pg. 75

The name of God.

These investigators suggest that the group that was in Egypt and then in Sinai worshiped the God Yahweh. Then they arrived in Israel, where they met Israelite tribes who worshiped the God El. Instead of fighting over whose God was the true God, the two groups accepted the belief that Yahweh and El were the same God. The Levites became the official priests of the united religion, perhaps by force or perhaps by influence. Or perhaps that was their compensation for not having any territory. Instead of land, they received, as priests, 10 percent of the sacrificed animals and produce. This hypothesis, too, fits with the idea that the author of E was an Israelite Levite. His story of the revelation of the name Yahweh to Moses would reflect this history: the God that the tribes worshiped in the land was El. They had traditions about the God El and their ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Pg. 82

Likewise with the author of J, the more we read his stories the more we can see their unity and their relationship to his world. We can understand, for example, why he did not develop the distinction between the names of God before and after Moses. For him, something extremely important had happened before Moses. This writer was concerned with the ruling family of Judah, David’s family. He therefore emphasized the significance of God’s covenant with the patriarchs. It was tied to the city of Hebron, David’s first capital. It promised inheritance of the land from river to river. In other words, it promised what was realized under King David. For this purpose, the revelation to Abraham was itself a turning point in history. It was not to be regarded as inferior to the revelation to Moses or to the people at Sinai. To depict the Sinai revelation as the first covenant sealed with the name of God would be to diminish the importance of the covenant between God and the patriarchs. J therefore uses the name Yahweh throughout. Pgs. 83-84.

The Order the Books Were Written

Two nineteenth-century figures stand out. They approached the problem in very different ways, but they arrived at complementary findings. One of them, Karl Heinrich Graf, worked on deducing from references in the various biblical texts which of the texts logically must have preceded or followed others. The other investigator, Wilhelm Vatke, sought to trace the history of the development of ancient Israelite religion by examining texts for clues as to whether they reflected early or late stages of the religion. pages 24-25.

Graf concluded that the J and E documents were the oldest versions of the biblical stories, for they (and other early biblical writings) were unaware of matters that were treated in other documents. D was later than J and E, for it showed acquaintance with developments in a later period of history. And P, the priestly version of the story, was the latest of all, for it referred to a variety of matters that were unknown in all of the earlier portions of the Bible such as the books of the prophets. Vatke meanwhile concluded that J and E reflected a very early stage in the development of the Israelite religion when it was essentially a nature/fertility religion. He concluded that D reflected a middle stage of religious development when the faith of Israel was a spiritual/ethical religion; in short, the age of the great Israelite prophets. And he regarded the P document as reflecting the latest stage of Israelite religion, the stage of priestly religion, based on priests, sacrifices, ritual, and law. From page 25 of Who Wrote the Bible? Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

Why were the books combined?

The most important point is that both J and E were written before the Assyrians destroyed Israel. At that time, the Assyrians carried out a deportation of the Israelite population. Also, there would of course have been many Israelites who fled south to Judah as refugees. The City of David archeological excavations in Jerusalem confirm that the population of Jerusalem grew substantially in this period. The likely historical scenario is that the E text came to Judah in this flow of people and events. Levites fleeing the Assyrians would hardly leave their valuable documents behind. The assimilation of recently arrived Israelites into the Judean population after 722 B.C. need not have presented insurmountable difficulties in itself. The Israelites and the Judeans were kin. They spoke the same language: Hebrew. They worshiped the same God: Yahweh. They shared ancestral traditions of the patriarchs and historical traditions of exodus and wilderness. But what were they to do with two documents, each purporting to recount sacred national traditions, but emphasizing different persons and events—and occasionally contradicting each other? The solution, apparently, was to combine them. From Page 87.

In short, the editing of the two works into one was as much tied to the political and social realities of its day as the writing of the two had been in their days. The uniting of the two works reflected the uniting (better: the reuniting) of the two communities after two hundred years of division. Pg 88

P was produced after 722 and before 609 B.C. How much more specific can we get? Can we say in which king’s reign it was? I think we can. The evidence points to Josiah’s great-grandfather, King Hezekiah. P emphasizes centralization of religion: one center, one altar, one Tabernacle, one place of sacrifice. Who was the king who began centralization? King Hezekiah. Both the books of Kings and Chronicles attest that there was no effective centralization before him. P is a work of the Aaronid priesthood. They are the priests in authority at the central altar—not Moses, not Korah, not any other Levites. Only those who are descended from Aaron can be priests. All other Levites are second-level clergy. Pg. 210

But, despite Hezekiah’s interest in centralization, Hezekiah left Solomon’s altars alone. What happened to those altars? Josiah defiled them.14 Josiah, the darling of the Shiloh priests, destroyed the altars of Solomon. Hezekiah, the darling of the Aaronid priests, destroyed Nehushtan. The ties between the two most favored kings and the two great priesthood documents, D and P, are fascinating. There were two kings who established religious centralization, and there were two works that articulated centralization. The laws and stories of P reflect the interests, the actions, the politics, and the spirit of the age of Hezekiah the way that D reflects the age of Josiah. Pg. 210.

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