Would you like some help in understanding the Hebrew Bible?  I have two unofficial announcements to make (official ones are yet to come).  The first is that we are producing a third edition of my texbook:  The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction (Oxford University Press) which provides up-to-date scholarship on the entire Bible from Genesis to Revelation, book-by-book.

I say “we” because I’ve been fortunate to acquire a co-author to edit the portion on the Hebrew Bible, Joel Baden (PhD Harvard, 2007), Professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale University.

I love teaching Hebrew Bible (I’ve taught it at both Rutgers and UNC), but it’s obviously not my main area of expertise.  Joel is one of the top scholars in the world.   He has produced already an incredibly well-received course for us for Biblical Paths in Religion: “The Rise and Fall of Biblical Israel” (also available to anyone in the Biblical Studies Academy.

AND (second unofficial announcement), in the fall he will be doing a full semester-long course on Hebrew Bible, in the same venue.

To prime the pump and generate some interest in both projects, I’ve decided to take a week-break from my “New Testament in a Nutshell” thread and provide a bit of variety by returning to some posts from over thirteen years ago (!) on the Old Testament, produced just as I was writing my first edition of the book.  Here’s the first of the series, which came in response to a question that I oh-so-often get asked.

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QUESTION:

Do you have a suggestion for a book concerning the OT’s construction? I believe in the History of God (by K. Armstrong) she mentioned that there were about five distinct writers for the OT. Is this the scholarly view and do you have a book suggestion to delve deeper into it?

RESPONSE:

Right!  The Old Testament (for Christians; otherwise: the Jewish Scriptures, the Hebrew Bible; the Tanakh – these are all more or less synonyms.)

It’s been on my mind a lot lately.  Right now [this was in 2012], my current writing project is a college-level textbook on the entire Bible, Genesis to Revelation.  This seems to me to be way too much to cram into a semester, but as it turns out, something like half the colleges in the country teach biblical courses this way, rather than having Hebrew Bible in one semester and New Testament another.  And, in my judgment, the textbooks currently available for the course are not as good as they should be.  So my publisher, some years ago, urged me to write one myself.   I decided to make the attempt, and I’m in the midst of it right now.

To get ready for it, I brushed up on my Hebrew and started reading extensively in the field of Hebrew Bible.  I will be the first (middle, and last) to admit that I am not a Hebrew Bible scholar, the way most PhD’s in the field of Hebrew Bible are Hebrew Bible scholars.  I can read the ancient Hebrew (with a lexicon), and my secondary training at both the Masters and PhD levels was in Hebrew Bible (a nice complement, of course, to my NT degree).  And I have taught Hebrew Bible at the undergraduate level at both Rutgers and the University of North Carolina.  But Hebrew Bible scholars are an amazing crowd with depth, as a rule, far beyond where I go.  We can’t all do everything.

But, as I’ve said, Hebrew Bible is like a “second field” for me, and I think it is a terrific, powerful, and often moving collection of books.  I’ve enjoyed reading up on the scholarship, here nearly thirty years since I took my PhD seminars and exam in the field.  So, onto the question:

First, some bibliography.   There are a number of college-level textbooks for those interested in the field (one doesn’t have to be in college to read them!  Among other things they have the advantage of providing bibliography of suggested readings for those who want to go deeper).  My two favorites are John J. Collins, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Michael Coogan, The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures.

For those who want something other than a textbook, at a somewhat deeper level, two of the best recent books out there are Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, and James Kugel, How To Read the Bible.

But for someone who knows almost nothing about the field and wants a good, clear introduction to biblical criticism on the Torah (i.e. the Pentateuch – the first five books of the Hebrew Bible), the very best thing, in my opinion, is Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?

As to the multiple authors of the Hebrew Bible.   There are 39 books in the canon of the Old Testament (numbered differently for a variety of reasons in the Hebrew version, where the same books add up to 24), with a number of authors.  The reference the questioner mentioned in Armstrong’s book is almost certainly to the multiple authors of the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy).   Traditionally it was thought that these five books were written by Moses – so that they are even today sometimes called the Law of Moses (or the books of Moses).  But the books do not claim to have been written by Moses: they are anonymous – and Moses is talked *about* in these books; the author[s] never use the first person pronoun.

 

But scholars have long had highly compelling reasons for thinking that these books were not written in Moses’ day – during the thirteenth century BCE – or, in fact, by ONE person at all.   It is not that there was a different author for each of the books.  The situation is more complicated than that.   The five books we now have were edited together by someone who was utilizing earlier sources that (most of them, at least) provided material for more than one book.   The person who first popularized this view was a nineteenth century German scholar named Julius Wellhausen.  The view is called the “Documentary Hypothesis.”

According to this hypothesis, the first four books have three sources lying behind them, named J, E, and P.   The book of Deuteronomy is set apart, and is attributed to a source D.   The chronological sequence of these sources (we don’t know their real authors, of course) provide the other unofficial name for this hypothesis: JEDP.

There are lots and lots of reasons for thinking that this view is basically right.  There are internal contradictions between different parts of the Hebrew Bible (for example, there are two accounts of creation in Genesis 1 and 2; the first is from the P source, the second from the J source); different episodes use different names for the divinity (Yahweh – or in German, Jahweh – for the one source, and so that is why it is called J; Elohim, the Hebrew word for God, in another, hence the E source); different portions reveal different concerns (parts are completely devoted to Priestly concerns, hence P).

Wellhausen argued that these four sources all told traditions of ancient Israel, and – a highly significant aspect of his theory – since the sources were originally written at different times in the history of ancient Israel, they can tell us about what the concerns and conditions of the authors were, in their own day and time, more than they can tell us about what was really happening, say, in the days of Moses.  For these sources were in fact centuries removed from the events they narrate.  The older scholarship claimed that J was from the 10^th century (in the days of King Solomon); E from the 9^th century; D from the 7^th century; and P from the 6^th century BCE.

Today scholars rarely buy into Wellhausen’s hypothesis in toto.  But not because they think the whole shooting match (or in fact, even a single shot) goes back to Moses.  Instead, scholars have tended to make the picture even more complicated, murkier, more nuanced; and if they still think in terms of four major sources, they date them even later than Wellhausen (some scholars think that the sources did not start getting produced until the 6^th century.  That would be 700 years after Moses!  Assuming Moses was a real person – which many scholars, including me, do not assume at all).