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Composition of the Pentateuch and the Church's perspectives of Scripture


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After doing some reading into the different perspectives on the Pentateuch, I have come to wonder how it is that we should see it or use it. Anyone who reads the five books of Moses would wonder to themselves why it is that they were written, why there are so many doublets, and why there are a lot of anachronisms in it. Scholars thus seem to believe that the Pentateuch is composed by different textual strata, authors, redactors, or sources in general. I have heard about the Documentary Hypothesis and it seems to make sense but it also brings with it a host of problems. The Fragmentary Hypothesis and Supplementary Hypothesis seem a little contrived to me as well. However, the Dual Origins hypothesis seems to make the most sense given what is known about the ancient Israelites.

My question is how are we to see these developments in the light of the Restoration? Because it seems to me that many leaders of the Church believe Moses is a literal person, that Adam and Eve were literal as well, and all sorts of other claims that seem problematic. Now don't misinterpret me, I am not saying that they are fools or that they are deceiving anyone. What are all your thoughts on this? Maybe I could change my mind about it.

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4 hours ago, standard4truth said:

After doing some reading into the different perspectives on the Pentateuch, I have come to wonder how it is that we should see it or use it.

I wonder about these things too. I am not familiar with the "Dual Origins hypothesis," though. Is that related to this?

In a recent article, "The Documentary Hypothesis and the Book of Mormon," BYU professor Avram Shannon asserts that "it is possible to accept some of the ideas and evidences of source-critical readings without calling into question either the historical Moses or the historicity of the Book of Mormon." This is true, but one needs to be quite selective.

Shannon allows that "the five books of Moses seem to include material that has come down to us through a sometimes complex process of redacting and editing." But it is also clear, as he points out, that "the Book of Mormon assumes the existence of Moses and especially of the covenant between Jehovah and Israel. That covenant is a central theme of the Book of Mormon." So the existence of a historical prophet named Moses and of a covenant made at Sinai appears to be a non-negotiable aspect of Restoration scripture (see also D&C 84, 110, 138, etc.).

Many (most?) critical scholars think that there is some historical memory behind the Moses story (mainly because his Egyptian name and marriage to a foreign woman are unlikely to have been invented by later tradition). Konrad Schmid, for example, writes that Moses "was in all probability a historical figure" and suggests that the biblical account of the Exodus "may well be based on a number of historical experiences that coalesced over time into a mythical origin story" (Konrad Schmid and Jens Schröter, The Making of the Bible [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021], 76).

Ronald Hendel has observed that "the past as people remember it is the meaningful past, the past as perceived and colored by subjective concepts, hopes, and fears. Memory is always selective, and is organized and embroidered according to the desires of the present . . . . The historically true and the symbolically true are interwoven in such a way that the past authorizes and encompasses the present. . . . A devasting epidemic in the late fourteenth century, interpreted as an act of divine punishment, may be distantly recalled in the story of the Egyptian plagues. A historical figure named Moses may have been transformed into the savior and mediator of all Israel, perhaps generalized from the memory of a smaller group" (Ronald Hendel, "The Exodus in Biblical Memory," Journal of Biblical Literature 120, no. 4 [2001]: 621).

Critical biblical scholarship does not completely rule out a historical Moses, and at least some Latter-day Saint interpreters do not insist on Moses' authorship of the Pentateuch, so one might be able to stake out a middle ground of sorts. For myself, I prefer to compartmentalize secular and religious approaches and hold them in tension. Proving contraries, doubting my doubts, and all that.

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In my studies of the Royal Cult, I believe that the books of Deuteronomy and Kings are anti-King/Messiah/Heavenly Mother/Royal Priests/non-Jerusalem Temples/prophecy/open canon/Gentile propaganda, but within them are important treasures and to throw it out is throwing the baby out with the bath water. The Deuteronomic histories are now the primary sources on the Kings. How are we to know why Jesus being descended of King David, a kingly Messiah, a royal Melchizedek Priest means without some reference to him. 

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22 hours ago, JustAnAustralian said:

Moses not being the sole direct author of the Pentateuch doesn't mean that Moses was not a real person, even if the accounts are highly dramatised.

The creation/garden accounts being temple dramas doesn't mean there wasn't actually a literal Adam and Eve (though it is unlikely those would have been their names).

 

So I guess a return question to you. Do you have issues with Jesus using parables to teach gospel principles?

Right, I understand where you are coming from. Honestly, when it comes to Jesus, there is no issue I have with Him using parables.

Forgive me, I am writing this in very little time so I will respond later with sources if it helps.

What seems a little strange is that a lot of the claims Joseph Smith made about antiquity and that the modern Church continues to perpetuate seem to miss the mark. I will write about this later. 

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I see quite a few but here are some of them. Granted, there are several formulations of the Documentary Hypothesis, but some that kind of seems that don't square with most of them:

  • It seems to have a poor explanation of chiasmus in the text that seem to go seamlessly between alleged sources. Scholars have debated this for a while. 
  • It doesn't explain why Deuteronomy is in the Pentateuch at all. It the purpose was to stitch sources together to produce a coherent narrative, why not fix the contradictions between D and the rest of the sources?
  • Some scholars posit that E has a lost origin story, but why not include it?
  • Some doublets are combined and others are not, something the hypothesis is not super well at resolving.
  • The assumption that doublets are the sign of two authors or sources is questionable. Other ancient records from other civilizations of around the same era used doublets as well and were composed by one author.
  • If the redactor's intention was to combine the sources into a coherent narrative, why would he leave so many poorly worded or somewhat confusing statements in the text?
  • If the redactor's intention wasn't to combine the sources into a coherent narrative, why combine them at all?

Concerns specifically for the LDS tradition:

  • The Book of Mormon says that the 5 books of Moses were present in the brass plates, but most scholars date D (and some date J, E, and even P) after the Exile.
  • The Book of Ether states that the Tower of Babel was a reason that the Jaredite peoples departure into the wilderness. If J and E were composed later than the Exile, then this is a huge problem.
  • Perhaps they had oral tradition. But why do the the early pre-exilic Hebrew prophets seem unaware of such traditions?

I do still find there to be many strengths to the hypothesis but there are still some problems that prevent me from fully accepting it. Again, I am not a scriptural literalist, but I find that too many of our theological axioms are contingent on the scriptures being literal.

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41 minutes ago, standard4truth said:

The Book of Ether states that the Tower of Babel was a reason that the Jaredite peoples departure into the wilderness. If J and E were composed later than the Exile, then this is a huge problem.

Why couldn’t J and E pull their material from a prior tradition of a “great tower”?  Or is this what you are referring to in your next bullet point?

If so, how much material do we have from pre-exilic Hebrew prophets?  Is there a good reason to assume we have the majority of their material?

Edited by Calm
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21 hours ago, Nevo said:

Critical biblical scholarship does not completely rule out a historical Moses, and at least some Latter-day Saint interpreters do not insist on Moses' authorship of the Pentateuch, so one might be able to stake out a middle ground of sorts. For myself, I prefer to compartmentalize secular and religious approaches and hold them in tension. Proving contraries, doubting my doubts, and all that.

It may not completely rule out his historicity for now, but it seems that the majority consensus among scholars ranges between believing Moses was a real man who was embellished with religious tradition to a completely fictitious person. Obviously, I don't think the majority determines the truth, as that would be an argmentum ad baculum. But that is still a long ways away from the Moses that is believed by the majority of LDS.

When it comes to the Book of Moses, there is an interesting detail. Towards the end of the first chapter, the Lord tells Moses not to show his writings of the fore-coming events to anyone, so obviously nothing about that part refers to the Pentateuch. It never would have showed up in the Bible anyway. 

 

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12 minutes ago, Calm said:

Why couldn’t J and E pull their material from a prior tradition of a “great tower”?  Or is this what you are referring to in your next bullet point?

If so, how much material do we have from pre-exilic Hebrew prophets?

Yeah, I should have kept them as just one point.

I would say that we have a decent amount from Isaiah and Jeremiah, with bits of Obadiah, Amos, Jonah, Nahum, Joel, Hosea, Habukkuk, Zephaniah, and Micah. Maybe not as much as books like the Book of Kings or Samuel, but a decent amount nonetheless.

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1 hour ago, standard4truth said:

Yeah, I should have kept them as just one point.

I would say that we have a decent amount from Isaiah and Jeremiah, with bits of Obadiah, Amos, Jonah, Nahum, Joel, Hosea, Habukkuk, Zephaniah, and Micah. Maybe not as much as books like the Book of Kings or Samuel, but a decent amount nonetheless.

Would you consider the reference to Moses' creation of the Nehushtan in 2 Kings 18:4 to represent a genuine pre-exilic tradition? If so, that associates Moses with at least one prominent tradition of the Exodus, and one which figures relatively prominently in the Book of Mormon at that. 

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4 hours ago, standard4truth said:
  • The Book of Mormon says that the 5 books of Moses were present in the brass plates, but most scholars date D (and some date J, E, and even P) after the Exile.

In my reading I haven't gotten the impression that most scholars date D after the Exile. I think the dominant view since de Wette has been that the first edition was associated with Josiah's reform in 2 Kings 22–23.

Konrad Schmid, in his The Old Testament: A Literary History (2012), singles out O. Kaiser, R.E. Clements, P. Sacchi, R. Kratz, E. Aurelius, K.L. Noll, and J. Pakkala as supporting an exilic or post-exilic origin for D. I'm sure there are others, but I don't think we're talking about dozens of scholars. Pakkala, in his article, "The Date of the Oldest Edition of Deuteronomy," describes the traditional 7th-century dating as "widely accepted" (ZAW 121 [2009]: 389). Schmid is one of those who argues for a 7th-century date (though not necessarily tied to Josiah's reform), locating the "basic content" of Deuteronomy in the late Assyrian period (The Old Testament: A Literary History, 101).

Here are a few (relatively) recent introductory texts:

  • "D . . . was written in the late eighth or seventh century BCE" (Michael D. Coogan, The Old Testament: A Very Short Introduction [New York: Oxford University Press, 2008], 16).
  • "Deuteronomy is a combination of an earlier, pre-exilic Deuteronomic lawbook and later, exilic additions to that lawbook. The Deuteronomic lawbook probably includes yet earlier northern materials, but these are impossible to identify precisely" (David M. Carr, Introduction to the Old Testament [Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010], 139).
  • "The parallels with the Assyrian vassal treaties constitute a powerful argument that the book of Deuteronomy was not formulated in the time of Moses but in the seventh century BCE" (John J. Collins, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018], 166).

There are lots of scholars who see D as a having a pre-exilic core.

Edited by Nevo
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One of the things that I find fascinating with this topic and its application to Mormonism is what was revealed in the Joseph Smith papers. The same kinds of issues that are argued for in the Documentary Hypothesis can be seen playing out in the D&C and its sources.

An interesting example is D&C 27. The original version was published in the Book of Commandments in 1833 (Chapter 28). By 1835, the text is expanded and Joseph Smith adds (among other things) this text:

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Behold this is wisdom in me: wherefore marvel not for the  hour cometh that I will drink of the fruit of the vine with you on the earth, and with Moroni, whom I have sent unto you to  reveal the book of Mormon, containing the fulness of my ever lasting gospel; to whom I have committed the keys of the record of the stick of Ephraim; and also with Elias, to whom I  have committed the keys of bringing to pass the restoration  of all things, or the restorer of all things spoken by the mouth of all the holy prophets since the world began, concerning the last days:...

And we become familiar with the idea of the Book of Mormon as the stick of Ephraim. But this doesn't come from a revelation, it comes from William Phelps. He is the first to bring up this idea, and he writes about it in his newspaper The Evening and Morning Star (Vol. 1 No. 8 ) where he writes:

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Ezek. also says: Moreover, thou son of man, take thee one stick, and write upon it, for Judah, and for the children of Israel his companions: then take another stick, and write upon it, for Joseph, the stick of Ephraim, and all the house of Israel his companions: and join them one to another into one stick; and they shall become one in thy hand. The bible for the stick of Judah, and the book of Mormon for the stick of Joseph, in the hand of Ephraim, is all that need be said, upon these words, for no man ever pretended to know, (till the book of Mormon came,) any thing about the tribe of Joseph, or his history, notwithstanding God had declared by the mouth of Hosea, That he had written the great things of his law to Ephraim; and they are counted a strange thing. The ancient and modern practice of reading sticks, wants but little elucidation. The common school-boy ought to know, that anciently, they wrote on parchment for common use, and rolled it round a stick; and, latterly, newspapers are put into a stick for public utility.

This idea of wrapping the text around a stick is completely foreign to the original text of Ezekiel. So where does Phelps get this idea? He tells us. He read this particular passage in his newly acquired volume Jahn's Biblical Archaeology, 1832 edition (p. 95-6):

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Books being written upon very flexible materials, were rolled round a stick ; and, if they were very long, round two, from the two extremities. The reader unrolled the book to the place which he wanted, [greek text omitted] and rolled it up again when he had read it, [greek text], Luke 4: 17—20; whence the name [hebrew text] a volume, or thing rolled up, Ps. 40:7. Is. 34:4. Ezek. 2:9. 2 K. 19:14. Ezra 6:2. The leaves thus rolled round the stick, which has been mentioned, and bound with a string, could be easily sealed, Is. 29: 11. Dan. 12:4. Rev. 5:1. 6:7. Those books, which were inscribed on tablets of wood, lead, brass, or ivory, were connected together by rings at the back, through which a rod was passed to carry them by.

You can guess what really excited Phelps about this passage, and where he takes it in other directions, but here, he jumps on the idea that the Book of Mormon could be the stick of Ephraim, and goes from there. His view is popular enough that by 1835, it is put into the Book of Mormon.

There are other sections of the D&C that have a complicated history including a range of sources. All of this occurs within a period of roughly 50 years (by 1880 much of the flexibility of the text has disappeared).

I bring this up because there is very little - in terms of either lower criticism or higher criticism of the text of the Old Testament that is particularly difficult for me to accept. The challenges with the Documentary Hypothesis and its relationship to the Book of Mormon are largely based not on the text or the textual issues, but on completely different implications that come up. For example, the fact that the Book of Mormon mentions five Books of Moses can be understood in different ways depending on your view of the translation process that produces the Book of Mormon. A tight view with the assumption of a word-for-word sort of translation understands this very differently than would a loose view with a much more idiomatic translation would. Usually, when I see someone discussing the LDS perspective, they tend to push all of this into specific molds which don't reflect the real range of views held by LDS believers. The Book of Mormon's use of the King James text is itself problematic in the context of a translation from Gold Plates.

Similarly, from the list provided:

15 hours ago, standard4truth said:
  • It seems to have a poor explanation of chiasmus in the text that seem to go seamlessly between alleged sources. Scholars have debated this for a while. 
  • It doesn't explain why Deuteronomy is in the Pentateuch at all. It the purpose was to stitch sources together to produce a coherent narrative, why not fix the contradictions between D and the rest of the sources?
  • Some scholars posit that E has a lost origin story, but why not include it?
  • Some doublets are combined and others are not, something the hypothesis is not super well at resolving.
  • The assumption that doublets are the sign of two authors or sources is questionable. Other ancient records from other civilizations of around the same era used doublets as well and were composed by one author.
  • If the redactor's intention was to combine the sources into a coherent narrative, why would he leave so many poorly worded or somewhat confusing statements in the text?
  • If the redactor's intention wasn't to combine the sources into a coherent narrative, why combine them at all?

These kinds of concerns aren't particularly current - scholars haven't really debated the issue of chiasmus versus the documentary hypothesis for decades now - and we have the problem that most who bring this up do so as a way of criticizing the theory - criticisms that haven't changed in 40 years, while those favoring the theory have continued to improve the process and discussion.

But this isn't really the whole problem. The documentary hypothesis was developed as a way of dealing with problems in the text. Those problems don't just go away when we decide the DH is bad. They are still there. How do we deal with them if not for the DH (or one of its mutations)? Most critics of the DH aren't looking to resolve the difficulties because they have no real interest in resolving them - they are merely trying to defend the status of the Biblical text as being different from any other piece of literature in history. To this end, the speculative questions in this list are not useful. They don't mean anything. After all, why do we have some doublets that are combined and not others? Who knows. What makes the DH so appealing to so many isn't that we have these pieces of evidence, but rather that the evidence converges. When we separate doublets, for example, we also (un)coincidentally also separate the text in ways that change the clustering of the name used for God. When we separate the doublets, we get consistent narrative that only very rarely has a break. When we separate the doublets we also produce texts that have a uniformity in their linguistic character. It is these convergences that have impressed so many of the likelihood of the DH.

For the Book of Mormon, we can argue that there are problems with the text. But we can also argue that the text displays a certain degree of agreement with the theory. Most of the uses of Deuteronomy, for example, in the Book of Mormon are connected to what is not termed the proto-Deuteronomic material. When I published on the allusion that the Book of Mormon makes between Nephi's killing of Laban and David's killing of Goliath, it was a fascinating discovery (after the fact) that the Book of Mormon relies only on one of the two narrative strands in Samuel. This is particularly interesting since in this case, we know that there was a historical version of the Samuel text that only contained one of those two strands because we have copies of this version of Samuel in the LXX. This is a similar sort of convergence. To really make sense of your concerns with the Documentary Hypothesis and the way that the DH impacts the Book of Mormon, it is really important to understand your own set assumptions that you bring to the text and the way that these assumption have to some extent pre-determined the way that you approach these issues. For example, I am confident that the Book of Mormon quotes a lot of Isaiah more or less exactly as it is found in the King James text. This suggests to me that the text of the Book of Mormon is more determined by the King James text than by any source text that may have been on the Gold Plates. If the text of the Book of Mormon is not a direct translation (whatever we mean by that) of the text on the Gold Plates, this makes it much more difficult to argue about how the Book of Mormon supports or doesn't support the Documentary Hypothesis.

 

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14 hours ago, OGHoosier said:

Would you consider the reference to Moses' creation of the Nehushtan in 2 Kings 18:4 to represent a genuine pre-exilic tradition? If so, that associates Moses with at least one prominent tradition of the Exodus, and one which figures relatively prominently in the Book of Mormon at that. 

You know, that is a good question. I suppose it could realistically represent a pre-exilic tradition, and I think some quantity of 2 Kings is pre-exilic. Whoever wrote Deuteronomy probably also contributed to if not authored Kings as well, and certainly they could have been reflecting pre-exilic oral traditions. For that reason I accept the Dual Origins Hypothesis because it seems to make sense of the view.

Note: I would like to say that I am not sure if J and E are really sources. After some more research it seems implausible to me that they could really be separated into different authors or sources. I think there is more evidence for there being at least 2 authors (D and P) and 3 tradition sources (the Exodus tradition, the Primeval tradition, and the Ancestor tradition).

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7 minutes ago, standard4truth said:

You know, that is a good question. I suppose it could realistically represent a pre-exilic tradition, and I think some quantity of 2 Kings is pre-exilic. Whoever wrote Deuteronomy probably also contributed to if not authored Kings as well, and certainly they could have been reflecting pre-exilic oral traditions. For that reason I accept the Dual Origins Hypothesis because it seems to make sense of the view.

Note: I would like to say that I am not sure if J and E are really sources. After some more research it seems implausible to me that they could really be separated into different authors or sources. I think there is more evidence for there being at least 2 authors (D and P) and 3 tradition sources (the Exodus tradition, the Primeval tradition, and the Ancestor tradition).

Ah, you've been reading your Van Seter.

Have you interacted with the work of Robert Rezetko?

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6 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

 

For the Book of Mormon, we can argue that there are problems with the text. But we can also argue that the text displays a certain degree of agreement with the theory. Most of the uses of Deuteronomy, for example, in the Book of Mormon are connected to what is not termed the proto-Deuteronomic material. When I published on the allusion that the Book of Mormon makes between Nephi's killing of Laban and David's killing of Goliath, it was a fascinating discovery (after the fact) that the Book of Mormon relies only on one of the two narrative strands in Samuel. This is particularly interesting since in this case, we know that there was a historical version of the Samuel text that only contained one of those two strands because we have copies of this version of Samuel in the LXX. This is a similar sort of convergence. To really make sense of your concerns with the Documentary Hypothesis and the way that the DH impacts the Book of Mormon, it is really important to understand your own set assumptions that you bring to the text and the way that these assumption have to some extent pre-determined the way that you approach these issues. For example, I am confident that the Book of Mormon quotes a lot of Isaiah more or less exactly as it is found in the King James text. This suggests to me that the text of the Book of Mormon is more determined by the King James text than by any source text that may have been on the Gold Plates. If the text of the Book of Mormon is not a direct translation (whatever we mean by that) of the text on the Gold Plates, this makes it much more difficult to argue about how the Book of Mormon supports or doesn't support the Documentary Hypothesis.

 

I agree with most of what you are writing. I would contend that the more mainstream view today is the Supplementary Hypothesis, and the Documentary hypothesis has fallen out of favor with scholars these days because of the issues I have mentioned above. I guess I could say that the SH is an updated version under the umbrella of the DH, but that is besides the point. I forgot to mention that most of them also see J and E as being one single source, but there are problems I see with that as well. At least that is the trend I have seen. 

One important piece of literature that challenges the DH is the Samaritan Pentateuch. For example, the SP replaces Elohim for Yahweh in Gen. 9:7, 28:4, 31:7, 9, & 16, and Exodus 6:2, all of which are said to be P and E texts. Yahweh in the SP is also switched for Elohim in Genesis 7:1, (and some) 20:18, and Exodus 3:4, virtually all of which are said to be J texts. (Not to mention we see other divine names and epithets used interchangeably between texts in Psalms, Samuel, and Chronicles.) 

I am sure that most would say that the DH becomes a powerful explanation as to the structure and theological views of the different voices in the pentateuch and that is where the main support for it comes from. However, I find that the DOH has a better explanation than the DH. More on that later.

Other than that, I would accept Blake Ostler's view of the Book of Mormon as I find it to be the most robust theory of its origin.

Some of that material that you mentioned is pretty interesting. I will read further into it. 

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5 hours ago, standard4truth said:

would contend that the more mainstream view today is the Supplementary Hypothesis, and the Documentary hypothesis has fallen out of favor with scholars these days because of the issues I have mentioned above. I guess I could say that the SH is an updated version under the umbrella of the DH, but that is besides the point. I forgot to mention that most of them also see J and E as being one single source, but there are problems I see with that as well. At least that is the trend I have seen. 

I think this is true among European scholars, but I'm not sure the Supplementary Hypothesis has entirely unseated the Documentary Hypothesis on this side of the pond or in Israel. 

5 hours ago, standard4truth said:

However, I find that the DOH has a better explanation than the DH. More on that later.

Could I ask for more detail on the Dual Origins Hypothesis? It's not a term I've heard of before, but I wonder if I've met the theory under a different name. 

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10 hours ago, standard4truth said:

I agree with most of what you are writing. I would contend that the more mainstream view today is the Supplementary Hypothesis, and the Documentary hypothesis has fallen out of favor with scholars these days because of the issues I have mentioned above. I guess I could say that the SH is an updated version under the umbrella of the DH, but that is besides the point. I forgot to mention that most of them also see J and E as being one single source, but there are problems I see with that as well. At least that is the trend I have seen. 

The thing is, though, that the exact form of the argument is less important than the idea that the text has a complex history and should be understood in that context. It doesn't matter that the original DH isn't considered authoritative - the mainstream view remains that the text has changed over time. We will always have disagreements over the exact history of those changes - as long as we don't have textual evidence of the different layers of production. To the extent that we can make the arguments predictive and falsifiable - that is our route to a better understanding of the text and its historical predecessors.

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4 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

The thing is, though, that the exact form of the argument is less important than the idea that the text has a complex history and should be understood in that context. It doesn't matter that the original DH isn't considered authoritative - the mainstream view remains that the text has changed over time. We will always have disagreements over the exact history of those changes - as long as we don't have textual evidence of the different layers of production. To the extent that we can make the arguments predictive and falsifiable - that is our route to a better understanding of the text and its historical predecessors.

Agreed.

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17 hours ago, OGHoosier said:

Ah, you've been reading your Van Seter.

Have you interacted with the work of Robert Rezetko?

Funny you mention Van Seter. I have never read his work! I saw his work cited on the FairLatterDaySaint website on the documentary hypothesis.

I haven't interacted with Rezetko's work yet. Any .pdf sources or anything I can read? I am having trouble finding places to read authentic scholarly articles about it because I don't have a ton of money to spend on books or journal sites.

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9 hours ago, OGHoosier said:

I think this is true among European scholars, but I'm not sure the Supplementary Hypothesis has entirely unseated the Documentary Hypothesis on this side of the pond or in Israel. 

Could I ask for more detail on the Dual Origins Hypothesis? It's not a term I've heard of before, but I wonder if I've met the theory under a different name. 

After reading some more about it, I think it is more descriptive today to say that most scholars disagree with one another on the dating of the sources, the sources themselves, and the order in which they came. Long story short, there is no single authoritative perspective of the hypothesis. What there is a consensus on is that there are multiple "voices" or "styles" in the Pentateuch that suggest a variety of sources, strata, traditions, and/or authors. It is a little vague to suggest the most American scholars agree with the DH when in reality some of them propose something that is a bit removed from the original DH. But I honestly don't care for the variation. 

Here is my description of the DOH. It is best articulated by the author and European scholar Konrad Schmid on a podcast. (He is the author of the book "Genesis and the Moses Story")

The theory states that Israel and Judah were originally two separate nations that came together under the reign of king Josiah. The theory posits that the northern Kingdom held a tradition of the Exodus as their primary origin story while the southern Kingdom held a tradition of the ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It suggests that a Southern Priestly author (P) during the occasion that the Northern refugees migrated to the Southern Kingdom combined some of the 3 Patriarch traditions with the Moses/Exodus tradition. Deuteronomy seems to have a dependency on the supposed Northern Kingdom tradition, so the theory posits that whoever the Deuteronomist source (D) was, that they originated in the North even though eventually the compilation of Deuteronomy was finished in the Southern Kingdom. It then suggests that a later redactor (R) took the works of D and P and combined those to form the Pentateuch as we know it, with his own modifications and changes where he thought they were necessary. Obviously some of it is pure conjecture, but I think for right now I find it has a much more potent explanation of what we see in the Pentateuch. When it comes to the historicity of the united monarchy of Israel I am undecided, but I think the theory can work in both scenarios.

Again, don't quote me on it but that was what I understood from the theory. Here is the link to the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dnb6x9w0-RY

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@standard4truth

Interesting, I had not encountered that theory. Not sold on it at the moment but we will see. 

Here's Rezetko's Academia.edu page: https://independent.academia.edu/RobertRezetko

He's a fun iconoclast in the field. Not a conservative by any means (see his forthcoming edited volume critiquing evangelical Bible scholarship), but he's got some opinions that might give ambitious critical scholars some cholic. 

His two major contentions are as follows:

1) What we call "Early" and "Late" Biblical Hebrew do not represent the chronological development of the Hebrew language. Rather, they represent different literary styles of Hebrew that co-existed throughout the biblical period. The best case for this is laid out in his 2-volume 2008 work Linguistic Dating of Biblical Texts, written with Ian Young and Martin Ehrensvard. The crux of it is...you can't date texts using the presence of EBH or LBH, pace Avi Hurvitz. 

And, as Ian Young points out in another paper...if you can, then Deutero-Isaiah is pre-exilic. One can make of that what one will. 

A whole collection of essays has been written critiquing this book, but as near as I can tell, the authors have not backed down, and they make pretty good points in my opinion.

2) Source and redactional criticism has gotten out over its skis. This is the general thrust of a 2016 compilation of essays entitled Empirical Models Challenging Biblical Criticism, ed. Robert Rezetko and Raymond Person.  It's a fascinating essay collection, the general gist of which is that source and redactional criticism need to be used with considerably greater modesty. The most interesting essay, in my opinion, was the last one, wherein Joseph A. Weaks uses the methods used to reconstruct Q from Matthew and Luke in an attempt to reconstruct Mark from Matthew and Luke...and the resulting replication of Mark turns out very poorly, with notable divergences from Mark as we actually possess it. 

Next up on my reading list is Joshua Berman's 2020 Ani Ma'aminBiblical Criticism, Historical Truth, and the Thirteen Principles of Faith. It promises an interesting case for dating portions of Deuteronomy to a 13th-century Moses, as well as a case for reading the Flood narrative as a unitary composition (big impact on DH if true), as well as a suggestion to read the Torah as a piece of common law as opposed to statutory law. 

Edited by OGHoosier
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13 hours ago, OGHoosier said:

 

1) What we call "Early" and "Late" Biblical Hebrew do not represent the chronological development of the Hebrew language. Rather, they represent different literary styles of Hebrew that co-existed throughout the biblical period. The best case for this is laid out in his 2-volume 2008 work Linguistic Dating of Biblical Texts, written with Ian Young and Martin Ehrensvard. The crux of it is...you can't date texts using the presence of EBH or LBH, pace Avi Hurvitz. 

2) Source and redactional criticism has gotten out over its skis. This is the general thrust of a 2016 compilation of essays entitled Empirical Models Challenging Biblical Criticism, ed. Robert Rezetko and Raymond Person.  It's a fascinating essay collection, the general gist of which is that source and redactional criticism need to be used with considerably greater modesty. The most interesting essay, in my opinion, was the last one, wherein Joseph A. Weaks uses the methods used to reconstruct Q from Matthew and Luke in an attempt to reconstruct Mark from Matthew and Luke...and the resulting replication of Mark turns out very poorly, with notable divergences from Mark as we actually possess it. 

That's some pretty cool stuff. I will definitely take a look at it. I have always thought about the Q source for the synoptic gospels. I am not totally convinced that it existed but I accept the possibility. I'll check out the site you sent

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3 minutes ago, standard4truth said:

I have always thought about the Q source for the synoptic gospels. I am not totally convinced that it existed but I accept the possibility. I'll check out the site you sent

Q is basically essential if you hold Markan priority, though these days Q is looking less like a sayings collection and more like a proto-Gospel. But that's exactly the point Weaks ends up making...the techniques which people are trying to use to reconstruct hypothesized sources just aren't that good. We can use these techniques to "reconstruct" a text we actually have and it gets a whole ton wrong, which doesn't bode well for our ability to be confident in our reconstructions of sources we don't have. So...if Q exists, who the heck knows what it looks like? And that same problem bleeds over into Old Testament source reconstructions, because at the end of the day both OT and NT scholars use primarily intuitionist models to say "this is reasonably what this looked like and how it developed" and those intuition-based models, when put to the test, don't actually deliver that well. 

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I dug up Weaks's dissertation from Brite Divinity School. His experiment shows that 63% of Mark by verse count (52% by word count) can be reconstructed from Matthew and Luke. Even if you take into account that Matthew and Luke were likely working from different versions of Mark, that's an important finding and should caution us against placing too much confidence in scholarly reconstructions of the text of Q. The Q manuscripts available to Matthew and Luke may have been longer, had different wording, etc.

As a pastor, Weaks is also concerned with reconstructed Q's potential implications for Christian faith and the authority of scripture:

Quote

When scholars work with a text of Q as a primary source, it “must be articulated with the appropriate degree of tentativeness.” When biblical scholars introduce a text of the Q source to the church, they must nuance the receptivity of its text in a way that honors its speculative nature, in contrast to advertising it as the church’s “lost gospel” which should alter the meaning of faith. Scholars should never allow their work, be it in historical Jesus studies or genre studies or other investigations, to adopt methodologies that rely upon a reconstructed Q source in the same way that they rely upon an extant gospel text.

— Joseph Allen Weaks, "Mark without Mark: Problematizing the Reliability of a Reconstructed Text of Q," (Ph.D diss., Texas Christian University, 2010), 344–345.

It should be noted, as Weaks himself recognizes, that many Q scholars are quite up-front about the tentative nature of their enterprise: "In large part, the leading source critics who work with reconstructing Q have a reasoned approach to the speculative nature of the resulting text" and "agree that the reconstructed text of the Q source is incomplete" (Weaks, 341–342). 

John Kloppenborg, one of the editors of the Critical Edition of Q (and my and halconero's former teacher), makes an important point about source-critical hypotheses generally:

Quote

Synoptic hypotheses are simplifications. Hypotheses usually aim at parsimony: simple explanations are more desirable than complex solutions for the reason that the more variables a hypothesis includes, the greater the number of equivalent hypotheses at the same level of complexity, and the more difficult it is to demonstrate the superiority of any one hypothesis. . . . Parsimony, however, is a virtue of explanatory logic; it is not a feature of historical or literary realities. Brief reflection on human experience should tell us that few events can be reduced to simple causes, and causal chains are rarely unilinear and uncomplicated by other influences.

The currently competing explanations of Synoptic data propose scenarios which are parsimonious in varying degrees, but which are also unlikely to represent precisely or fully the actual compositional processes of the gospels. It is extremely unlikely, for example, that Matthew and Luke used the same manuscripts of Mark and Q. The copies of Mark and Q which eventually found their way into the hands of the later evangelists would have been subject at a minimum to copyist's errors and had perhaps undergone more substantial changes. . . . Moreover, we are not even in a position to know the exact wording of any of the canonical gospels. Our earliest (fragmentary) manuscripts date from well over a century after their composition. Thus we cannot be sure that the patterns of agreements and disagreements upon which our understanding of Synoptic relationships is predicated are those of the autographs. Cross-fertilization ("harmonization") of manuscripts by the earliest copyists may have obscured the patterns that would allow a clearer resolution of the Synoptic Problem.

Some of the factors that went into the composition of a gospel might be accessible to the historian, but many fall outside her ken and calculation. History is rarely regular and predictable; freak events, accidents, chance encounters and the like are part of its fabric. Yet it is impossible to factor into our models the many imponderables that may have contributed to the composition of the gospels, for this would have the effect of destroying the explanatory power of the model. Even though the 2DH best accounts for the relationships among the gospels, it should not be confused with a description of "what happened." Hypotheses are heuristic models intended to aid comprehension and discovery; they do not replicate reality.

— John S. Kloppenborg Verbin, Excavating Q: The History and Setting of the Sayings Gospel (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 50–51, see also pp. 11–12, 165.

A good hypothesis has explanatory force, and the hypothetical Q source still offers that, even if questions remain about its social location, theology, precise wording, and extent.

Edited by Nevo
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