BIBLICAL CRITICISM 2 - An Introduction

BIBLICAL CRITICISM - AN INTRODUCTION

What is Biblical Criticism? One one foot, the theory that the five books of the Torah are a compilation of four documents – J, E, P, and D. The diverse documents can most easily be distinguished on the basis of the various Divine names found in Scripture; proponents of this approach attribute each different name to a different document. That G-d is described by different names is already noticed by the sages – who ascribe different properties to each names. As Umberto Cassuto pointed out in his work The Documentary Hypothesis, pp.57-58 (how cool a first name is that for a Bible commentator ;) )

Permit me to illustrate my argument with a story. Let us imagine that a certain author writes a biography of his father, who was a notable savant, an academician. We shall assume that in this book the writer gives us a multi-faceted picture of his father, describing his private life at home, his relations with his students at college and his scientific work…. Doubtless when the author proceeds to write his work, in the passages describing his father's life within the family circle, he refers to him as "Father"… In the sections that portray him in the circle of his students at the university, he uses the designation by which he was generally known in that circle, "the professor."… Let us now picture to ourselves that centuries or millennia later a scholar will declare: Since I observe that the hero of the work is called in some places "Father" and in others "the professor," it follows that we have here fragments culled from different writers, and the dissimilarity between the narrative and scientific sections corroborates this.

However, Biblical Criticism’s claims go far beyond the differing names of G-d. The also speak of repetitions and redundancies, stylistic changes, and contradictions between different sources. The classic example is the contradictions between Genesis 1 or 2 (when was man created, first or last; differing names of G-d; were man and woman created together or apart; etc.), but this is just the tip of an iceberg. In response, Biblical Criticism posits that these differences can be attributed to pre-existing original sources. Later, there was a process of editing and redaction that created the document in front of us.

This idea, that pre-existing texts were used for the creation of the Scripture, is forcefully attacked and rejected by those who point out that none of these documents have ever been found, and indeed, no early records allude to them. At http://www.hirhurim.blogspot.com/ - R. Student brings the following quote from Kenneth A. Kitchen’s On the Reliability of the Old Testament, p. 492-493:
With the evolutionary [of religion] ladder gone, what happens to the biblical literature? Where do J, E, D, P, now belong, if the old order is only a chimera? Or, in fact, do they belong at all?Here we will be concise, open, and fairly staccato. First, the basic fact is that there is no objective, independent evidence for any of these four compositions (or for any variant of them) anywhere outside the pages of our existing Hebrew Bible... They exist only in the minds of their modern creators... This very simple fact needs to be stressed. Our resourceful Biblicists are not sitting on some secret store of papyri or parchments that contain any such works. The Dead Sea Scrolls show no sign of them whatever... Modern guesswork, as we all know, is often extraordinarily and breathtakingly clever and ingenious - one can only reverently take one's hat off to it all, in respectful amazement, sometimes. But... it does not constitute fact, and cannot substitute for it... The standards of proof among biblical scholars fall massively and woefully short of the high standards that professional Orientalists and archaeologists are long accustomed to, and have a right to demand. Some manuscripts, please!...
Second, time and time again the modes of analysis (and their criteria, variant vocabulary, "styles," etc.) have been demonstrated to be defective. And not just by "conservatives" either. Suffice it to refer to the very careful and conscientious study by (e.g.) the late R. N. Whybray (no conservative), The Making of the Pentateuch. On the internal data, it is a damning indictment of these methods. He offers a largely unitary Pentateuch, but of a relatively late date...
Third, people sometimes talk glibly about the "literary strata" in the biblical writings, as if they were somewhat parallel to the strata in an archaeological mound. Yes, it sounds very appropriate, but which way do your strata run? In an archaeological site, the successive strata (by and large) lie in succession roughly horizontally, one above the other... But the "strata" supposed in J, E, D, or P, H are of an entirely different kind. Here, to distinguish passages of J, E, P (say) in Genesis, vertical cuts have been made, all the way through the book... No archaeologist worth his salt would dream of accepting as "strata" a set of vertical sections cut separately, over a mound.

Is this true? Kitchen’s point that no independent evidence of separate manuscripts exists, is fundamentally correct. However, as Jewish tradition acknowledges, and the archeological evidence shows, that a difference transmission process occurred. Also important, Kitchen still doesn’t answer the questions raised by the contradictions and difficulties that still exist in the texts. Examination of how Jewish tradition understood the process of text transmission and the meaning of those contradictions will (IY”H) be the subject of future blogs.