Who Authored Genesis? A Critique of the Documentary Hypothesis

Introduction:

Antony Campbell and Mark O’Brien begin their 1993 publication, Sources of the Pentateuch, by saying “Until recently, the source hypothesis enjoyed the status of classical ‘certainty’ in most of modem biblical scholarship…Its assumptions became accepted as a framework within which study of the Pentateuch proceeded.” (See The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), by Thomas Kuhn for a discussion on how paradigms take over and dominate a field until enough “anomalies” build up to challenge it.)

The ESV Study Bible gives a brief overview of the composition of the Pentateuch and the history of this discussion:

For more than 2,000 years, readers of the Pentateuch assumed that Moses was its author (cf. Mark 7:10). This was a natural conclusion to draw from its contents, for most of the laws are said to have been given to Moses by God (e.g., Lev. 1:1), and indeed some passages are explicitly said to have been written down by Moses (see Deut. 31:9, 24). The account of his death could have been recorded by someone else, though some held it was a prophetic account by Moses himself (Deuteronomy 34).

But in the late eighteenth century, critical scholars began challenging the assumption of Mosaic authorship. They argued that several authors were responsible for writing the Pentateuch. These authors supposedly wrote many centuries after Moses, and were separated from each other in time and location. Complicated theories were developed to explain how the Pentateuch grew as different authors' accounts were spliced and adjusted by a series of editors. According to these critical scholars, it was likely that the Pentateuch reached its final form in the fifth century b.c., nearly a millennium after Moses.

In the late twentieth century this type of critical theory was strongly attacked, not just by conservative scholars but also by those brought up on such theories. They argue that the theories are too complicated, self-contradictory, and ultimately unprovable. It is much more rewarding and less speculative to focus interpretative effort on the final form of the text. So there is a strong move to abandon the compositional theories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for simpler hypotheses. Thus some critical scholars would see the Pentateuch being an essentially fifth-century B.C. creation. Others suggest earlier dates. But none of these suggestions can really be proven.

The Pentateuch does undoubtedly claim to be divine in origin, mediated through Moses. Thus Moses should be looked to as the original human author. Indeed, as stated above, the Pentateuch looks like a life of Moses, with an introduction. But this need not mean that he wrote every word of the present Pentateuch. It seems likely that the spelling and the grammar of the Pentateuch were revised to keep it intelligible for later readers. Also, a number of features in the text look like clarifications for a later age. But this is quite different from supposing that the Pentateuch was essentially composed in a later age. Rather, it should be seen as originating in Moses' time but undergoing some slight revision in later eras so later readers could understand its message and apply it to their own situations.

1. Documentary Hypothesis Explained:

Much of the documentary hypothesis is founded on the point that Moses could not have written about his own death in Deuteronomy 34. If Moses did not write this passage, then who wrote it? What about the rest of the books commonly attributed to Moses?

Answering this question has been the major task of pentateuchal scholars for the last 100 years. The documentary hypothesis represents the consensus of higher critical scholars by the middle of the past century. Don Closson explains:

Religious studies courses at most universities teach that the Pentateuch is a composite work consisting of four literary strands. The four strands have been assigned the letters J, E, D, and P; each representing a different document or source that was woven into the fabric of the Bible. This set of assumptions has gone by a number of names including the documentary theory and the Graf-Wellhausen theory. According to this view, the letter "J" stands for the Yahwist ("J" from the German Jahweh) narrative, coming from the period of the early Jewish monarchy, about 950 B.C. "E" stands for the Elohist narrative from the region of the Northern Kingdom dating from about 750 B.C. "D" is best represented by the book of Deuteronomy and is said to have originated in the Southern Kingdom about 650 B.C. or later. And finally, "P" is the priestly document that comes from the period after the fall of Israel in 587 B.C. According to the theory, the Pentateuch reached its current form around the time of Ezra or about 400 B.C.

Many scholars tie the “D” sections to the finding of the Book of the Law in 2 Kings 22 during Josiah’s reforms. In other words, nothing was “found;” rather, it was rewritten, or possibly written for the first time, to encourage reform.

Historical and Philosophical Context:

John Bright explains why this theory came about:

The Documentary Hypothesis represented an attempt to account for the variations of style, differences of viewpoint, reduplications of narrative, and the like, to be found in the Hexateuch—phenomena which had been observed as far back as the 17^th century…after generations of scholarly debate, it was becoming the accepted opinion that four major documents could be discerned running through the first six books of the Bible.”

This hypothesis came about at a time when “the prevailing intellectual climate, in which philosophies of an evolutionary bias—whether Hegelianism or Positivism or whatnot—were the mode.”

Hegel argued for a form of intellectual evolution that was a major influence on Darwin and his theory of evolution. Hegel was best known for his dialectic which “usually presented in a three-fold manner, was stated by Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus as comprising three dialectical stages of development: a thesis, giving rise to its reaction, an antithesis, which contradicts or negates the thesis, and the tension between the two being resolved by means of a synthesis.”

It is important to understand this as one of the main philosophical ideas in Germany in 1800’s. It provided a foundation for Darwin’s theory, but it also provided a foundation for all other evolutionary theories, including the evolution of biblical text.

John Currid comments on Hegel’s influence to the development of the documentary hypothesis in the introduction of his Genesis commentary:

Hegel’s application to religion is found in his book Philosophy of Religion. He believed that religions advance or develop from natural religion to moral religion to spiritual religion; from the primitive to the more elaborate. His view is an evolutionary, unilinear approach to religion, and to all of life for that matter…Even preceding those world-shattering studies, a student, and later colleague, of Hegel named Wilhelm Vatke had taken Hegel’s’ work and applied it to Old Testament study. His book is called Biblische Theologie, and it was written in 1835. R. L. Smith comments on this event by saying, ‘… the application of Hegelian philosophy to the study of the Old Testament led to Wellhausen’s establishment of the modem documentary hypothesis of the Pentateuch and eventually to the death of Old Testament theology.’

A common example of this influence is seen in how some higher critical scholars believed that early Judaism was polytheistic and a later redactor came in and cleaned up the earlier passages to make them monotheistic.

Summary of the Argument

Martin Noth represents today’s consensus position. Campbell and O’Brien explain:

In 1948 the German original of Martin Noth’s History of Pentateuchal Tradition was published. This work attracted widespread interest for its tradition-historical analysis of what were regarded as the foundational traditions of Israel’s faith. Noth’s analysis was a development and revision of Gerhard von Rad’s earlier study, The Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch. Both were, in turn, a development of the form-critical analysis of the Pentateuch developed by Hermann Gunkel and Hugo Gressmann.

The tasks undertaken by von Rad and Noth were to trace the development of Israelite tradition from these originally independent units to the later written sources and to outline the criteria that guided this development. According to von Rad (in a position that has since been abandoned), it was the ancient “historical credo” in Deut 6:20-25 and 26:5-9 and Josh 24:2-13 that provided the basic expression of Israel’s faith and guided its subsequent development” (emphasis mine).

Many have noted the difficulties associated with these arguments and some scholars who held them had recanted.

Noth, however, did not give up and explains how the themes of the “historical credo” served as redactors for the text:

These themes were elaborated by the originally independent stories, songs, and other literary forms that the form-critical work of Gunkel and Gressmann had recovered…Noth insisted that the elaboration of Israel’s foundational traditions did not cease with the production of the written sources. Each source underwent a certain amount of reworking and expansion as the tradition from which it emerged continued to develop. Within this process, which may be likened to one of supplementation, the particular source exercised a controlling influence, and its essential shape was retained.

Umberto Cassuto, a Jewish scholar, summarizes the argument presented in these works:

The arguments in favour of the differentiation of various documents in the Book of Genesis, which constitute, as we have explained, the pillars supporting the entire structure of the documentary theory, are five, to wit:

a) the use of different names for the Deity;

b) variations of language and style;

c) contradictions and divergences of view;

d) duplications and repetitions;

e) signs of composite structure in the sections.

2. Documentary Hypothesis Criticized

The major criticism of the documentary hypothesis is that it is ignorant of ancient Near Eastern culture. John Bright explains: “When the founders of Biblical criticism did their work, very little, if anything, was known at first hand of the ancient Orient. The great antiquity of its civilization was not even guessed, the nature of its various cultures and regions scarcely understood at all.” Bright’s criticism is best seen in the work of Cassuto, who strongly criticized the documentary hypothesis in a series of lectures collected in the book Documentary Hypothesis,

which attack the pillars of this thesis in great detail. Cassuto is not only a Hebrew Bible scholar and native Hebrew speaker, but he grew up and lives right on top the ancient Israelites in Israel.

Cassuto probes the nature and value of the five major pillars of the documentary hypothesis and concludes with a five summary statements:

(1) We started with the first pillar, the variations in the use of the Divine Names, and a detailed study of the subject showed us that these changes depended on the primary signification of the Names and on the rules governing their use in life and literature, rules that applied to the entire body of Biblical literature and even to post-Biblical Hebrew writings, and are rooted in the literary traditions common to the peoples of the ancient East (emphasis mine).

Currid adds:

In recent decades, the use of divine names for the purpose of source criticism has come under a scathing attack. It is clear that it is not a reliable criterion in ancient Near-Eastern studies for determining different sources. In regard to Egyptian literature, Redford has carried out a detailed study of divine names and he concludes that ‘... in the main the genre of literature to which a piece belongs controls the choice and use of divine names and epithets’. The same is certainly true for Hebrew literature. For example, the book of Deuteronomy almost exclusively uses the name Yahweh, and the reason is that the material deals primarily with the covenant relationship between the Deity and the people. Genesis 1, on the other hand, only employs the name Elohim because there God is pictured as powerfully creating the universe ex nihilo (emphasis mine).

In regards to the second pillar, inequalities of language and style, Cassuto argues: (2) “these linguistic disparities, in so far as they really existed, could be explained with the utmost simplicity by reference to the general rules of the language, its grammatical structure, its lexical usages, and its literary conventions — general rules that applied equally to every Hebrew writer and every Hebrew book.”

When he discussed the third pillar, differences in the subject matter of various sections, Cassuto said: (3) “they were not of a kind that could not be found in a homogeneous work. On the contrary, such incongruities were inevitable in a multifaceted book like the one before us, which contains materials of varied origin and character, and consequently presents its themes from different viewpoints.”

Cassuto summarizes his lecture on duplication and repetitions, the fourth pillar, by saying: (4) “underlying both of them was a specific intention, which was reflected not only in the final redaction of the sections but was evident even in their original composition.”

Currid adds:

The method of defining different authors based on duplicate stories is also a questionable practice. It ignores ancient rhetorical practice in which doublets are the very essence of ancient narrative. Structural redundancy can be for dramatic effect (see 1 Sam. 3:4-10). It can also be for emphasis (for example. Gen. 24:12-27,34-38), Repetition can have a didactic purpose. The story of Judges 19 and the degradation of the Levite’s concubine has many similarities of structure and content to the story of Lot in Sodom (Gen. 19). In Judges 19, however, it is not the Sodomites who are acting wickedly, but Benjamites. The parallels are there in order to underscore the point that the Benjamites have become like Sodomites!

The last pillar, composite sections, (i.e. “signs of internal synthesis, the combination of materials derived from different strata and linked together by the particular editor of that document”) was handled by studying one passage in detail: (5) “We realized that this hypothesis relied on evidence that in truth did not point to a composite text; on the contrary, exact study revealed unmistakable and conclusive indications of a close connection between the parts of the section that were considered to belong to different sources.”

Currid also responds to the founding argument of higher criticism that questions whether Moses was able to author a passage discussing his own death:

One needs to be careful not to deny the prophetic character of the man Moses (Deut. 18:18), in which capacity he could have predicted and written about his own death by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit…[The book of Joshua] demonstrates that Joshua not only derived his authority from the man Moses, but from his writings (Josh. 1:7-8). Moses is mentioned in fourteen other Old Testament books, and usually in reference to his writings (see Judg. 3:1-4)…Jesus accepted the authority and validity of the Pentateuch in his teaching and ministry, and he equated it with the writings of Moses. For example, when he quotes the Decalogue he at times prefaces it with the words: ‘Moses said…’ (Mark 7:10). When the Sadducees question Jesus about the resurrection, he answers by quoting Exodus 3:6, which he says is found ‘in the book of Moses’ (Mark 12:26). Jesus also claims that ‘Moses has given you circumcision’, a statement that refers to his writing down the event recorded in Genesis 17:10-14. Some authors argue that in these instances Jesus was merely accommodating himself to the prevailing beliefs and teachings of his day. But how does such a view fit with the holiness and truthfulness of the Son of God? And, indeed, Jesus does not appear to have been a conformist to his day — his teachings and deeds are quite radical. Why, then, would he conform to such teachings?

3. Documentary Hypothesis and Genesis 1-3

Currid explains the major criticism regarding Mosaic authorship of both Genesis 1 and 2: “Genesis 1 uses Elohim when speaking of God, and Genesis 2 employs the name Yahweh. This difference is to be understood as a major indication that we are seeing two separate authors at work. Indeed, how could the name Yahweh even be used if it wasn’t revealed to Moses until Exodus 3?” As he previously mentioned this can best be explained by the nature of the two passages and is common in the ancient Near East “the genre of literature to which a piece belongs controls the choice and use of divine names and epithets.” He goes on to say that “Genesis 1…employs the name Elohim because there God is pictured as powerfully creating the universe ex nihilo.”

Conclusions:

The documentary hypothesis is based in a naturalistic evolutionary worldview that fails to understand prophecy (or believe that it is even possible), divine revelation and Jesus’ divinity and knowledge. This hypothesis argues that Moses could not have been able to predict his own death in Deuteronomy 34, but it fails to apply Moses word’s concerning his prophetic office:

The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers—it is to him you shall listen— just as you desired of the Lord your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly, when you said, ‘Let me not hear again the voice of the Lord my God or see this great fire any more, lest I die.’ And the Lord said to me, ‘They are right in what they have spoken. I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him” (Deut 18:15-18).

Moses is claiming to be a prophet like Jesus; surely he would have been able to predict his own death like the one he is a type of.

Secondly, the documentary hypothesis argues that Jesus was a product of his time and did not really know (or condescended to the people) that Moses was not the author of the Pentateuch. This is an unacceptable conclusion for any Christian. These Bible scholars are willing to give up Christ’s divinity and knowledge in order to satisfy their own theory. They claim that Jesus was a product of his time and did not know who actually wrote these books or was meeting people where they are and not unnecessarily challenged them. That does not seem like the Jesus who challenged the misunderstandings of the religious leaders at every turn. Rather, it appears that the proponents of the documentary hypothesis are the ones who are a product of their time. They transfer the latest metaphysics (materialism) and philosophy (Hegel) to their criticism of the Bible.

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Notes:

1 Antony Campbell and Mark O’Brien, Sources of the Pentateuch: Texas, Introductions, Annotations (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), (xi).
2 “Introduction to the Pentateuch” (pages 35-37 in ESV Study Bible; Wheaton: Crossway, 2008).
3 Don Closson, “Did Moses Write the Pentateuch?” http://www.swartzentrover.com/cotor/bible/bible/OT/Law/Did%20Moses%20Write%20the%20Pentateuch.htm
4 Don Closson, “Did Moses Write the Pentateuch?”
5 John Bright “Modern Study of Old Testament Literature” (pages 13-31 in The Bible and the Ancient Near East; Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1961), p14-15.
6 Bright, Modern Study, p. 15.
7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic
8 John Currid, Genesis (A Study Commentary; Malta: Evangelical Press, 2003), p. 26.
9 Campbell and O’Brien, Sources, p. 7. (Gunkel did work in Genesis on documentary hypothesis and need to be examined in more detail)
10 Campbell and O’Brien, Sources, p. 7-8.
11 Campbell and O’Brien, Sources, p. 8.
12 U. Cassuto, Documentary Hypothesis (trans. Israel Abrahams; Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University, 1961).
13 Bright, Modern Study, p. 16.
14 U. Cassuto, Documentary Hypothesis (trans. Israel Abrahams; Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University, 1961).
15 Cassuto, Documentary Hypothesis, p. 98-99.
16 Currid, Genesis, p. 29-30.
17 Cassuto, Documentary Hypothesis, p. 99.
18 Cassuto, Documentary Hypothesis, p. 99.
19 Cassuto, Documentary Hypothesis, p. 99.
20 Currid, Genesis, p. 30.
21 Cassuto, Documentary Hypothesis, p. 99-100.
22 Currid, Genesis, p. 32-33.
23 Currid, Genesis, p. 28.
24 Currid, Genesis, p. 29.