Comments on Three Jews, Four Opinions: The Documentary Hypothesis - Characteristics of Ea...

Bruce, I have long been looking forward to this s...

2010-11-10T15:02:18.787-08:00

Bruce,

I have long been looking forward to this series. I think it's a great thing that you're undertaking, and I consider it a service.

I just want to clarify something which I'm certain you imply in your post and didn't elaborate on due to its simplicity.

Theoretically speaking, any one of these "proofs" by itself has no value. For example, taking the case of Sinai/Chorev. One can claim that the four sources were divided so that they would fit the Sinai/Chorev dichotomy. Meaning, one could start out by saying: any verse that has Sinai is J or P, any with chorev is E or D. That would obviously prove nothing.
Now this is ridiculous because the four sources explain many differences amongst them, be they divergent words, style, linguistics etc. etc. So the proof lies in the cumulative divisions between the sources that the DH answers. This is something that Friedman emphasizes in "Who Wrote the Bible."

I took care to point this out despite the self-evidence, because I've run into those who don't understand the immense qualitative difference between one piece of such evidence and the cumulative effect of many instances.

Sometimes, but that is not interesting. Some words...

2010-04-08T03:07:10.966-07:00

Sometimes, but that is not interesting. Some words go together (e.g., priest, sacrifice, altar, etc.) But differentiating between the sources gets its mileage from words that have no obvious connection but are used in the same source. See the into to RE Friedman's book "The Bible with Sources Revealed" for a long list of examples.

Sometimes, but that is not interesting. Some word...

2010-04-07T22:29:51.042-07:00

Is the appearance of the word in a source explaine...

2010-04-07T22:07:07.195-07:00

Is the appearance of the word in a source explained by related words?

I preferred the look of the old comment system, ho...

2010-04-07T21:33:56.908-07:00

I preferred the look of the old comment system, however I love the fact we have threaded commenting now.

It's hard to explain in a nutshell. But the b...

2010-02-19T16:59:34.032-08:00

It's hard to explain in a nutshell. But the basic idea is that the Torah contains lots of odd things: repeated stories, contradictions, changes in grammatical forms, differences in perspectives. This is not news, and for a long time Jewish and other scholars provided commentaries deriving lessons from these sorts of things.

However, in the 19th century, scholars noted that the Torah can be divided into 4 primary sources, each of which is internally consistent is a variety of ways (content, themes, language, perspective, assumed knowledge) and is inconsistent with other documents in a variety of other ways. Each source fits into a particular historical era. So the DH postulates that the Torah was originally 4 separate documents that were later edited (or redacted) into a single document.

The fit is not perfect, but it is quite good. And some of the details are controversial. Exploring these issues, along with traditional explanations, is one of the projects of this blog.

One more detailed but still fairly simple explanation of the DH is found in the introduction to Richard Friedman's book "The Bible With Sources Revealed".

Another good explanation, although older and partially outdated, is in some 19th century works like Abraham Kuenen's "A Historico-critical inquiry into the origin and composition of the Hexateuch" and S.R. Driver's Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament, both available on googlebooks.

PLEASE, WHAT, EXACTLY, ARE THE ARGUMENTS IN FAVOR ...

2010-02-19T16:45:26.320-08:00

PLEASE, WHAT, EXACTLY, ARE THE ARGUMENTS IN FAVOR OF THE DOCUMENTARY HYPOTHESIS, IN A NUT SHELL?