Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Archives - Page 11 of 14 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Did Moses Write the Pentateuch? The JEDP Hypothesis.

I have been discussing the sources of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), sometimes also called the Torah or the Law of Moses. So far I have explained the kinds of literary problems that led scholars to realize that these books were not the writing of a single author, but represented a combination of earlier written accounts. The traditional “documentary hypothesis,” as it is called, was most famously formulated by the nineteenth-century German scholar, Julius Wellhausen, who, along with some of his predecessors, called the sources J E D and P. This was the standard view of the matter back when I was doing my PhD in biblical studies way back when. Here is how the hypothesis worked, in nuce. (Again, this is taken from my textbook on the Bible). ************************************************************* The J source was the first source to be written. From it comes a number of the stories in Genesis and Exodus, including, for example the second creation account and the story of Adam [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:42-04:00July 2nd, 2016|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum|

Other Literary Tensions in the Pentateuch

I have started a brief thread on the Pentateuch and why scholars think that it was not written by a single author – Moses or anyone else – but is composed of several sources later patched together. In my previous post I started giving the reasons for thinking so, the literary tensions found in the opening chapters of Genesis. I continue here with this theme. Again, this is taken from my book The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction ******************************************************************* The literary inconsistencies of Genesis are not unique to these two chapters. On the contrary, there are such problems scattered throughout the book. You can see this for yourself simply by reading the text very carefully. Read, for example, the story of the flood in Genesis 6-9, and you will find comparable differences. One of the most glaring is this: according to Gen. 6:19 God told Noah to take two animals “of every kind” with him into the ark; but according to Gen. 7:2 God told him to take seven pairs of all “clean animals” [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:42-04:00July 1st, 2016|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Biblical Anachronisms: The Philistines and Beersheba

In my post a couple of days ago I stated the fact, that I took to be a fact, that the historical Moses (if there was one) (which I doubt) could not have written parts of the Pentateuch (I don’t think he wrote any of the parts) (OK, since, among other things, I don’t think he existed) because of the mention of the people the “Philistines” and the city of Beersheba, neither of which existed in the thirteenth century BCE, when he must have lived, if he lived. A reader asked me what the evidence for that is. I include the question below. It’s a great question. I used to know the answer! Off the top of my head, I couldn’t remember what that was, apart from a vague recollection of archaeological reports. Moreover, at the time I was on the road away from my books (visiting my 89-year-old mother in Kansas!). So not being able to look it up, I did the next best thing, which turns out not to have been the second [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:42-04:00June 30th, 2016|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reader’s Questions|

Literary Tensions in the Creation Account of Genesis

In yesterday’s post I began to explain why scholars have thought that the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), were not written by Moses, but later, and that they represent not a single work by a single author, but a compilation of sources, each of them written at different times. The evidence for this view is quite overwhelming, and in the context of my textbook on the Bible, as in the context here, I didn’t really think it appropriate or useful to dig deeply into all the nuances and ins and outs. Instead, I gave some of the prominent data. Here is how I started to do that. ************************************************************* The internal tensions in the Pentateuch came to be seen as particularly significant. Nowhere were these tensions more evident than in the opening accounts of the very first book, in the creation stories of Genesis chapters 1 and 2. Scholars came to recognize that what is said in Genesis 1 cannot be easily (or at all) reconciled with [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:42-04:00June 28th, 2016|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Who Wrote the Pentateuch? Early Questions of Authorship.

On to something different! I want to move to a new blog topic for a while. I’ve been talking about my new book – still being written! – about the Christianization of the empire – for a while, and it’s obviously the topic near and dear to me just now. But variety is the spice of life. Several readers have responded to me about my response to the question of the sources behind the Pentateuch – the first five books of the Hebrew Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, also called, collectively, the “Torah” or the “Law” of Moses). I thought it might be refreshing to say a few more things about these books and the question of who actually wrote them. I had discussed some of this on the blog three years ago, when I was writing my textbook The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction. Here I will lift a few sections from the book dealing with this fascinating and important topic. The question: Who wrote the Pentateuch? Historically, it was always [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:42-04:00June 27th, 2016|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, History of Biblical Scholarship|

The Name of Saul/Paul and the Sources of the Pentateuch: Weekly Mailbag June 26, 2016

Why did Saul change his name to Paul? And what were the sources lying being the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible? Good questions! I’ll deal with them here in the Weekly Reader’s Mailbag QUESTION: What is the meaning of “Paul” that Saul of Tarsus was moved to change to that name upon his conversion? RESPONSE: Ah, right – my students ask me this a lot in my New Testament class. When we all grew up in Sunday School we learned that when Saul of Tarsus converted, he changed his name to Paul, so that Saul was his Jewish name and Paul his Christian name. As it turns out, that’s not quite right. Paul himself never gives any indication that he had another name, Saul. But he is called Saul in the book of Acts. Until he converts. After that he is usually called Paul. But not always! See, e.g., Acts 11:30 and 13:2 (there are other instances). There the Christian Paul is called Saul. What gives with that? Did [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:42-04:00June 26th, 2016|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Paul, Jesus, and the Messiah

My current thread on the blog is less like a thread and more like a tapestry. Ultimately it is all related to the book I’m now working on, The Triumph of Christianity, which is interested in the question of how the Christian movement that started with just a couple of dozen people after Jesus’ death (i.e., those who almost right away, soon thereafter, came to believe he had been raised from the dead) came to be a prominent religion by the early fourth century and the official religion of the Roman state by the end of the fourth century. Good questions! I just hope I can give some good answers! Scholars have long worked on the problem, of course, and there are many parts to the overall picture. Which is why this thread is a tapestry. At present (on the blog) I am wrestling with the importance of the apostle Paul, and am ruminating on his significance for the early Christian movement. And the first thing that I noted about him is that before he [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:24-04:00June 7th, 2016|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Historical Jesus, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

What Is Repentance in the Bible? Is there Repentance in the Bible?

Many of you responded to my colleague David Lambert’s provocative post a couple of days ago on whether the idea of “repentance” could be found in the Bible. He has replied to your comments, but has wanted to provide a follow up post. It keeps getting more interesting. This is an intriguing reflection on “repentance” in the Bible, one that totally turns on its head what many of us have always thought. See what you think. - David Lambert is the author of How Repentance Became Biblical. ********************************************************************* “The Meaning(s) of Repentance in the Bible” A lot of the comments that I received on my first post (https://ehrmanblog.org/is-repentance-a-biblical-idea-interview-with-david-lambertb/) had to do with the definition of “repentance” that I’m using in my new study, How Repentance Became Biblical: Judaism, Christianity, and the Interpretation of Scripture. Just to review my main claim, I contend, after careful examination, that there are a lot of biblical passages and practices that we’ve understood in connection with repentance that don’t really have much to do with the concept. I claim [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:02-04:00January 22nd, 2016|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Is Repentance a Biblical Idea? Interview with David Lambert

My colleague David Lambert, who teaches Hebrew Bible in my department, has recently published and interesting and important book with Oxford University Press, on the question of when the idea of “repentance” entered into the biblical tradition. His answer is quite novel and surprising. I have asked David to post some of his views on the blog. The following is an initial foray into that, by way of an interview that he has done. If you have questions or comments about the interview, please make them! David is on the blog now and will respond, either in replies or by following up with new posts. Here is the interview. - David Lambert is the author of How Repentance Became Biblical. *************************************************************************** Many people assume that repentance is and always has been a substantial part of the Bible, but that has not always been the case. In the following interview between Luke Drake, a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and David Lambert, an assistant professor of Religious Studies at [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:02-04:00January 19th, 2016|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum|

The Rise of Apocalypticism

Now, with all the background out of the way, I am able to explain where the apocalyptic worldview came from. I am maintaining that it emerged out of the classical view of the Hebrew prophets, as historical circumstances forced thinkers in Israel to re-evaluate what the prophets had said. Here is the simple version of the story, as I lay it out in my textbook on the Bible ********************************************************************** The Prophetic Perspective We have seen that the classical prophets of the Hebrew Bible differed from one another in a number of ways, in the historical contexts that they addressed, in their manner of addressing them, and in the specifics of their messages. But there are certain common features that tie all the prophets together, especially with respect to their understanding of God, his reaction to Israel’s failure to do his will, and the coming disasters that will occur as a result. If you were to ask a prophet like Amos, Isaiah, or Jeremiah why it is the people of God suffer, they would have a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:01-04:00January 18th, 2016|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum|

Background to Apocalypticism: The Maccabean Revolt

OK, I’m back to my discussion of where Jewish apocalypticism came from. So far I have laid out the understandings of the Jewish prophets, focusing on Amos (from the 8th century BCE). Now I need to explain why the “prophetic” views came to change. To make sense of the change I have to sketch a set of historical events that the people of Israel had to live through. Some people find these kinds of historical sketches fascinating; others find them dull as dirt. But in either event, you really have to know what happened among ancient Jews in order to make sense of what their theological beliefs were, since these beliefs were molded by and informed by nothing so much as the historical context out of which they emerged. And so here is a very brief sketch of the history of Judea over the four hundred years from approximately 540 BCE, when the Persians were in control, up to 63 BCE, when the Romans came in and took over. I’ve taken the sketch from my [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:01-04:00January 15th, 2016|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Are the Prophecies Being Fulfilled?

The Christians knew growing up had a very different understanding of “prophecy” in the Bible from the view adopted by professional biblical scholars. (I have been thinking about this because of my posts on Amos.) My sense is that most evangelical and fundamentalist Christians (certainly the latter) continue to have this non-academic view. It is that the prophets of the Bible – Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Amos, Zechariah, and so on (there are seventeen prophets in the English Bible) – were principally interested in what was going to be happening in our day. At the time when I became familiar with this view, that meant that prophets were interested in what would happen in the 1970s and 1980s. Today, of course, it would mean that they were principally interested in what would happen in the 2010s. That in itself should give us pause. Do you mean they were *not* mainly interested in the 1970s and 80s? The same can be said, obviously – far more so! – for Christian understandings of the book of Revelation, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:01-04:00January 13th, 2016|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Amos as a Representative Prophet

I have been discussing the book of Amos, possibly the oldest of the “classical” prophets of the Hebrew Bible, parts of which were probably written in the 8th century, making it, arguably, the oldest book of the Bible. I have wanted to discuss Amos a bit because his views became the more or less standard perspective of the prophets, and many centuries later it was out of such views that Jewish apocalypticism emerged, the view held by many Jews in the days of Jesus, including, I have argued, Jesus himself. And so, in one sense, to understand apocalypticism, you have to know where it came from. Here is the final section on Amos in my textbook The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction. Especially important for what I want to say about apocalypticism is the overview I provide at the end. ****************************************************************** The Judean Redaction of Amos It is impossible, at the end of the day, to know whether Amos himself wrote down these prophecies that bear his name, or if they were penned [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:01-04:00January 12th, 2016|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum|

The Prophet Amos

In my previous post I started to give some of the background to the rise of Jewish apocalypticism by talking about the views of the classical Hebrew prophets, focusing, by way of illustration, on arguably the earliest, Amos. Here I continue that discussion: ************************************************************* The Message of Amos The book of Amos begins by addressing nations outside of Israel, indicating that because of their multiple sins, God would enter into judgment with them (chs. 1-2). This is an important beginning: it shows that God is not simply the God of Judah and Israel, he is the God of all nations, and holds all people accountable for their actions. And it shows that national suffering comes not only when one nation mistreats another, but also when God intervenes and rains his judgment down upon them. And so Amos starts by attacking the capital of Syria, Damascus: Thus says the LORD: For three transgressions of Damascus, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment; because they have threshed Gilead with threshing sledges of iron. So [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:01-04:00January 12th, 2016|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum|

The Prophetic Background of Jewish Apocalyptic Thought

Several members of the blog have asked me to go into greater detail to explain where Jewish apocalypticism came from. I’m happy to do so: it’s an important topic for understanding Jesus, Paul, and other early Christians. As is true for all religious and political ideologies, the historical background to the rise of apocalyptic thinking is complicated. To make sense of it, I have to say something about a very different perspective which provided the matrix out of which apocalyptic thought was eventually born and grew: the perspective of the “classical prophets” of the Israelite tradition. I will spend a couple of posts explaining what the prophets of the Hebrew Bible had to say, focusing on arguably the earliest, Amos (who in many key ways is typical) before explaining how these views came to be transformed and radically altered centuries later into the apocalyptic views held by so many Jews in the days of Jesus. In these posts I will simply reproduce material on the prophets as found in my recent textbook, The Bible: A [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:01-04:00January 10th, 2016|Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reader’s Questions|

The Jewish Messiah

In my previous post I began to discuss the understanding of Jesus as the Son of God, the Messiah, in the Gospel of Mark (this is a thread within a thread within a thread – but it doesn’t matter. Each of these posts makes sense on their own). I am trying to show that Mark portrayed Jesus as the Son of God (meaning: the one who was in a particularly close relationship with God who was chosen by God to mediate his will on earth) and the messiah. But he was the Son of God/Messiah whom no one understood. Even his disciples. What though would it mean for first century Jews to think of someone as the messiah? Some serious background is necessary. As I pointed out in my previous post, the word Messiah is a Hebrew term (the Greek equivalent is “Christ”) which meant “anointed one.” Why would you call someone the anointed one? In Jewish circles the term goes back to a kind of royal ideology (i.e., understandings of the kingship) from centuries [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:13-04:00November 4th, 2015|Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

The Dead Sea Scrolls

In my previous several posts I discussed the discovery and contents of the Nag Hammadi Library. A lot of people on the blog know about all that, since it is a major topic of discussion among scholars of early Christianity. But the reality is that among the general populace, no one really knows about it. People may have heard about the “Gnostic Gospels,” but they don’t realize that there is such a *thing* as the Nag Hammadi Library (or, obviously, why it is called that). On the other hand, everyone has heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls, even if they have no clue what the scrolls are, what they contain, and how they were found. The Dead Sea Scrolls are by virtual consensus the most significant manuscript discovery of the twentieth century. And they are decidedly *not* to be confused with the Nag Hammadi Library! Here is what I say about the scrolls in my New Testament textbook. (These paragraphs actually say more about the Essenes that produced the scrolls than the scrolls themselves.) [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:45-04:00June 23rd, 2015|Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum|

Is “Jehovah” in the Bible?

QUESTION: How firmly grounded in reality is the claim of Jehovah’s Witnesses that the ‘divine name’ (Jehovah) belongs in the New Testament? RESPONSE So this is an interesting question, with several possible ramifications. At first I should explain that the divine name “Jehovah” doesn’t belong in *either* Testament, old or new, in the opinion of most critical scholars, outside the ranks of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. That’s because Jehovah was not the divine name. So here’s the deal. In the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) God is given a number of different designations. Sometimes he is called God (the Hebrew word is El, or more commonly – by far – the plural form of that word, ELOHIM); or The Almighty (SHADDAI), or God Almighty (EL SHADDAI), or Lord (ADONAI), or – well, or lots of other things. But sometimes the God of Israel is actually given his personal name. Like everyone else, he has a name. And his name was יהוה (in English letters, that looks like YHWH). Written Hebrew, as you probably know... THE [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:39-04:00March 10th, 2015|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reader’s Questions|

A Better Kind of Fundamentalist

In today’s post I’d like to go back to that intriguing little article by Louis Markos in the journal First Things, which he entitled “Errant Ehrman.” If you’ll recall from my post last week, Markos starts the article by indicating that he felt “great pity” for me because I was the wrong kind of fundamentalist back when I was a conservative Christian. My problem, he indicates, is that I applied modern standards to decide whether the Bible was inerrant. Here are his words: He [Ehrman] was taught, rightly, that there are no contradictions in the Bible, but he was trained, quite falsely, to interpret the non-contradictory nature of the Bible in modern, scientific, post-Enlightenment terms. That is to say, he was encouraged to test the truth of the Bible against a verification system that has only existed for some 250 years….. And so, as I pointed out last time, the right kind of true believer is obviously one who does not “test the truth of the Bible” by modern standards using modern criteria, but only [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:12-04:00November 10th, 2014|Bart's Critics, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Abraham and Jesus?

QUESTION: THIS QUESTION FROM A MEMBER OF THE BLOG QUOTES SOMETHING I SAID IN MY PREVIOUS POST AND THEN ASKS A QUESTION ABOUT IT: “As I’ve intimated, my own view is that these patriarchal narratives are not historical accounts of people who actually lived and did the things ascribed to them. I see them as highly legendary, narratives told by the people of Israel – after they became the people of Israel (say in the 11th or 10th centuries) — about their “early days.” Stories circulated for years and years in different parts of the land, among different tribes of people who were later said to have all been part of Israel. These stories were then combined and put into the sources, which later were composed into one big narrative (say in the 6th c BCE). I do not see them as historical records, but more as something like “founding legends” that help explain to the people who they are in light of their (imagined) past.” If that’s the case then why can’t the same [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:14-04:00February 9th, 2014|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

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