part0006

P eople study the Bible for a variety of reasons. Some seek moral or spiritual guidance from its repository of wisdom. Many read it for some of the most beautiful stories and poetry in all literature. Still others read it as a historical account of our cultural roots. Many look to it for insight into the life and times of people in ancient civilizations.

For many millions of people, though, the Bible is the inerrant word of God, whose commandments must be reverently obeyed and whose teachings should be our primary guide to social organization. For those, however, who study the Bible in a serious scholarly manner for the purpose of determining who wrote it, when it was written, what is factually true, and how it came to take on its present form, the work is a complex collection of puzzles, many of which still remain to be solved.

A significant area of study concerns the development of the first five books of the Bible—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, collectively referred to as the Pentateuch (a Greek word meaning “five scrolls”) or the Torah (a Hebrew word meaning “teachings”). Collectively, they tell the story of Israel’s history from the beginning of Creation to the wanderings in the desert after the Exodus from Egypt. They are important because they tell about how the relationship between God and Israel developed. The early focus is on the establishment of a covenant between God and the early patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph; the later focus is on the relationship between God and Moses. The history in these five books ends with the death of Moses as Israel remains poised to cross over into the Promised Land.

Although these five books contain no claim that they were written by Moses, from the time they had passed into the hands of readers over two thousand years ago until about the middle of the nineteenth century, it had been almost universally accepted by religious scholars that he was the sole author. For this reason, we still identify these volumes as the “ Five Books of Moses.”

Over the course of several centuries, despite aggressive opposition by the churches, a handful of scholars pointed out a number of logical inconsistencies in the idea of Mosaic authorship for these works. For example, Deuteronomy 34:6 says, “And he buried him [Moses] in a valley in the land of Moab, over against Beth-peor: but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.”

This passage not only describes the burial of Moses but also says that the location of his grave is unknown unto this day, indicating that the passage was written well after the death of Moses and couldn’t have been written by him.

Beginning in the eighteenth century, several scholars began to pay increasing attention to the problem of “doublets,” two contradictory stories about the same event. Even a casual reader could see that there were many such instances: two different accounts of Creation, two different claims about how many animals were brought onto Noah’s ark, two different explanations for why Jacob changed his name to Israel, two different occurrences in which Moses draws water from a rock at Meribah, and so on.

As these doublets came under scrutiny, the scholars noticed some unusual features. Most importantly, in many of these doublets, one set of stories always used the Hebrew word Jahweh for the name of the Hebrew God while the other used Elohim. Then, when they sorted out the stories according to which name was used, they discovered that stories that used one particular name for God had different themes and literary styles from those stories that used the other name.

This division of style, theme, and name led to the idea that there were at least two separate literary strands combined into a single document, at least one of which must have been written by someone other than and later than Moses.

This line of research led to an even more astounding discovery. By the early nineteenth century, analysis of historical time frames, story sequences, literary styles, and religious themes showed that there were at least four separate source documents integrated into the Five Books of Moses, each with its own underlying point of view and each written at a different time. And, of course, there had to be at least one editor after the fact who combined the sources into a single narrative.

During the nineteenth century, proponents of this view, the most influential of whom was Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918), set out to explore the layers and sequences of these four sources, and by the end of the century they had established a general framework for the study of the Pentateuch. This multiple-source thesis is known as the Documentary Hypothesis and there is hardly a serious biblical scholar today who doesn’t accept some variation of this proposal.

In its broadest terms, the Documentary Hypothesis holds that there are four major source documents in the first five books and that these sources went through evolutionary stages before becoming a single narrative. These four sources have been nicknamed J, E, P , and D. When we talk of the author of any of these sources, we should keep in mind that each source may have been a collaboration over time by sequential writers or schools of writers. The following descriptions should be taken only as an introductory guide to the four sources. It would take a lengthy volume to do full justice to all the distinguishing characteristics and issues associated with each of them.

J refers to the source using the Hebrew name “Jahweh” for God. It is also known as the Yahwist source after the German pronunciation of Jahweh. The J source originally presented a comprehensive history of Israel that began with stories about Creation, Adam and Eve, and the flood, and continued down through the patriarchal period, the Exodus from Egypt and the wanderings in the desert. Some scholars believe that J’s history originally continued into the time of Kings David and Solomon and that several portions of J appear not only in the Pentateuch but in other historical books of the Bible, including Joshua, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 Kings.

The deity in J exhibits many anthropomorphic characteristics, physically interacting with humanity and showing emotion and reaction to events. J has little interest in precise dates or chronology. It also focuses on events and locations of importance to the kingdom of Judah under King David and his successors. In it, the covenant between God and the House of Israel winds up in the hands of Judah, the fourth oldest son of Jacob and founder of the tribe of Judah, to which David belonged. J also focuses more on the patriarchs than on Moses.

J may have originated as early as the time of King David (c. early-tenth century B.C.) but since many of its themes reflect the conflict between Judah and Israel after Solomon’s death, its origin was more likely sometime after the split between Judah and Israel (late-tenth century B.C.) and before the Assyrian conquest and destruction of Israel in 722 B.C.

In the early stages of research into the documentary origins of the Bible, the Elohist source known as E revolved around those stories that used Elohim as the name of God. Further analysis showed that E actually consisted of at least two separate source documents, each of which used Elohim for the name of God but which had very different viewpoints. This second source embedded within E concerned itself primarily with priestly concerns and rituals, and precise dating, numbers, and measurements. Because of its focus, it was called the P or Priestly source.

While the deity in E exhibits anthropomorphic characteristics similar to J, the deity in P is amorphous, distant, and aloof. Where the anthropomorphic deity carries on discussions with humans, the P deity engages in no such interaction.

E is generally accepted as older than P but perhaps younger than J. It most likely dates to before the Assyrian conquest. The Elohist writer focuses on events and themes centered on the kingdom of Israel, and counters historical claims made by J. In E, for example, the covenant between God and Israel flows from Jacob to Joseph to Ephraim, whose territory served as the capital of Israel after the split between the two Hebrew kingdoms. E strongly promotes Moses as the national hero and focuses more on his deeds than on events in the earlier patriarchal period. E is less concerned with religious orthodoxy than either J or P. The E history begins in the patriarchal period after the flood and has nothing to say about Creation.

Many of the doublets in E and J reflect the political and religious propaganda wars between Israel and Judah after those two nations split apart. Judah believed in a strong centralized authority ruling out of the capital in Jerusalem, with the king functioning as a powerful authoritarian monarch. E, comprising a coalition of several states (theoretically encompassing ten tribes), favored a highly decentralized political and religious system. The E author was probably a Levite priest descended from Moses. He most likely came from the cult center at Shiloh, which allied itself with Israel when it split off from Judah.

The P source, in addition to its very different view of deity, distinguishes itself by its close association with the Aaronite wing of the priesthood. The Bible portrays Aaron and Moses as brothers from the tribe of Levi, and one of the conflicts in the Bible concerns whether just the Aaronites or all branches of Levi should perform the main priestly functions in the temple. P tends to promote Aaron at the expense of Moses and argues that only the Aaronite wing of the Levites should perform the main priestly functions in the temple. This suggests that the priestly author belonged to a Levite sect operating in Jerusalem, with intimate knowledge of all the Jerusalem temple rituals and features.

With the fall of Israel in 722 B.C., many of its citizens fled south, bringing new political and religious pressures into Judah. The refugee priests brought the E viewpoint with them, one that promoted Moses as the hero and all Levites as equal. This challenged the authority of the Aaronite branch of Levi, and P may have originated in an effort to reinforce their authority by appealing to historical traditions. P probably dates to a time after the Assyrian conquest but before the Babylonian conquest of Judah in 587 B.C.

D takes its name from the Book of Deuteronomy, which contains virtually no traces of the other three sources, nor does any of D appear in the other four books of the Pentateuch. It reflects the reformist views of King Josiah in the late-seventh century B.C. and begins with the story of Moses. Josiah, if the biblical text can be trusted, initiated major orthodox religious reforms, reinstating a highly centralized religious and political government. 2 Kings claims that the Law of Moses had been lost and that Josiah’s aides accidentally found it in some remote part of the temple. Upon reading the newly discovered documents, Josiah was shocked to learn that the kingdom had fallen from the path of righteousness. In reaction, he instituted a series of reforms intended to bring the kingdom in line with the newly discovered laws. This lost book of laws would be the Book of Deuteronomy and if it was written at the time of Josiah, it can be dated to about 622 B.C.

Source analysis shows that Deuteronomy belongs to a larger collection of works that include the biblical books of Joshua, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings, which presents a history of the Hebrews from the time of Moses to the Babylonian captivity. This larger historical collection of biblical books is known as the “Deuteronomistic history” and relates the history of Israel from the time of Moses (c. 1300 B.C.) to the time of King Josiah (c. 622 B.C.).

The overriding theme of Deuteronomy and its related histories is obedience to God. The people and the kings are always judged in regard to how they follow the laws laid down in the D source. Inevitably, all Israelite kings fail the test while only a handful of Judahite kings, including David and Josiah, are judged as good.

The Documentary Hypothesis is only one important way to look at the origins of the Bible. Its focus is internal, concerned only with the text. It examines literary style, themes, language, and editorial overlays to break down the Bible into source documents. Such techniques also have demonstrated that many other books of the Bible, in addition to the Pentateuch, combine multiple sources, albeit different ones from those in the first five books.

Another important question is: what outside ideas influenced the authors of J, E, P, and D? When J or P talk about the Creation or the flood, for example, are the ideas unique to the biblical authors or do the authors rely on other ideas from the surrounding cultures? Despite the source differences in the histories of the Patriarchs and the Exodus, do the basic stories depict accurate historical incidents or are they tales and legends that have been adapted for propagandistic or other purposes? After all, ancient Israel lived within the confluence of three major cultural streams—Egyptian, Canaanite, and Mesopotamian—all of which had older and substantial literary and historical traditions.

Biblical history claims a long sojourn in Egypt during Israel’s formative stages. The Bible constantly chastises Israel for succumbing to Canaanite influences. Prior to the Bible taking its final form, Israel’s educated elite lived in forced exile in Babylon and, a century later, under a more benevolent Persian rule when the Persians defeated Babylon and freed the Hebrew leaders. Any attempt by learned Hebrew scribes to construct their own history of the world, from Creation down to the time of the writing of any source document, would have to take into account what their neighbors have said about the same times and places, because the stories of the neighbors were well known and widely circulated. They were the stories that most educated people of those times believed.

On December 3, 1872, this question moved into the forefront of biblical studies. On that date, an Assyriologist named George Smith read a paper in London to the Society of Biblical Archaeology. He had been rooting through a cache of thousands of tablets and fragments from a seventh century B.C. Assyrian library belonging to King Ashurbanipal. On what would become known as Tablet XI of the Gilgamesh epic, written in Akkadian, an ancient Semitic language older than Hebrew, he found a flood story that had remarkable parallels to the biblical flood account.

Although it was polytheistic where the Bible was monotheistic, it told the same basic tale. The gods had become angry at humanity and determined to wipe out the human race with a flood. One of the deities warned a human friend by the name of Utnapishtim to secretly build an ark and prepare for the fateful day. When the rains started up, Utnapishtim brought onto the boat his family, a variety of animals, and a number of artisans. When the rains stopped and the flood subsided, Utnapishtim released three birds, spaced out over time, to determine if it was safe to come off the ark. Eventually, the boat landed on top of a mountain. As in the Bible, after the flood, the gods regretted their actions against humanity.

The structure of the Assyrian story closely follows the broad outline of the biblical story, but the release of the three birds over time, something which also occurs in the biblical account of Noah, is such an unusually detailed coincidence that one can’t help but conclude that the two stories shared a common source.

However, the two stories also have many differences. The duration of the flood is shorter in the Assyrian story, the ark’s dimensions differ, the number of people and animals brought on the boat are significantly inconsistent, the boats do not land on the same mountain, the heroes have different names, and the god who sends the flood is not the same god who tells Utnapishtim to build an ark. Most importantly, though, the biblical text doesn’t borrow any of the narrative passages of the Assyrian.

So, on the one hand we have a similarity of structure that seems to be beyond coincidence and on the other we have a wide variation in story details that seem so far apart that they appear to be from different sources altogether. Nevertheless, the discovery touched off a frenzy of Assyriological studies directed at biblical comparisons. Over time, other versions of the same flood story were found in other Mesopotamian texts from other societies, some predating the biblical version. And, in one more remarkable coincidence, a fourth century B.C. king list, which was a corruption of an earlier Sumerian (early Mesopotamian) king list dating to about 2000 B.C., placed the worldwide flood in the reign of the tenth king to rule over humanity, while the biblical flood had occurred in the tenth generation after Creation.

Do the Mesopotamian flood stories, written down before the biblical account, corroborate the biblical claim that there was a worldwide flood or do they show that biblical authors borrowed and adapted pre-existing myths and legends for their own purposes? This is a question that has to be raised over and over with other portions of the Bible as we continue to discover other ancient literature with parallel stories.

While many people believe that the Bible was divinely inspired, several biblical authors cite specific reference works that they relied upon in composing their work and many also quote passages from other books of the Bible. In effect, these references would be the equivalent of footnotes. Unfortunately, we have not yet found copies of the non-biblical books cited, so we are unable to evaluate the quality of the research or the reliability of the sources. A partial list of sources cited by biblical authors include:

The Bible has two references to the Book of Jasher, one in Joshua and the other in 2 Samuel. The first describes an incident in which Joshua commanded the sun and the moon to stand still. The second, which introduces a lament by David on the death of King Saul, says that David taught the children of Judah how to use the bow. More than three hundred years separate the two events.

This tells us that the Book of Jasher was written no earlier than the time of King David, yet it includes a description of an event attributed to Joshua more than three hundred years earlier. Where did the author of Jasher get the information? Did that writer have reliable sources or did he just collect tales and legends from an earlier period? Was it a historical work or just a collection of poems? Since we have yet to find a copy of this work, we can’t even be sure that Joshua and David actually appeared in the original text; the author(s) of the two references to Jasher may have replaced the original characters with the two biblical heroes.

The story of David appears primarily in 1 and 2 Samuel, with some additional material in 1 Chronicles, much of which is repetitive and some of which adds to the Davidic history. The 1 Chronicles author, however, cites three sources for the acts of David: the books of Samuel the Seer, Nathan the Prophet, and Gad the Seer.

Samuel the Seer is certainly the Samuel for whom the Book of Samuel is named, and Nathan the Prophet most likely is the Nathan from King David’s court who tripped up David for lying about having Bathsheba’s husband murdered to cover up David’s affair with her. And Gad the Seer should be the same Gad the Seer that advised King David on a variety of matters.

Together, these three references suggest that what has become the current Book of Samuel was an amalgam of several earlier books, three of which are cited here and which survived until the time of the Chronicles author, probably fourth century B.C. or later.

The first source mentioned is the book of Samuel the Seer. In Samuel, the title character appears to be based on two separate individuals. One is Samuel the Judge, who carries on the tradition of judging Israel and providing military and religious guidance. This Samuel is against the institution of monarchy. The other Samuel is a prophet or seer, who supports the monarchy and serves to validate the royal authority of David of Judah against Saul of Benjamin. The two images of this one individual are inconsistent.

The reference to the book of Samuel the Seer may be to the entire corpus of Samuel as it has come down to us or it may refer to a source work that inspired that portion of Samuel that supports the monarchy. That the author of Chronicles cites two other sources about David suggests the latter.

Nathan the Prophet is an important character in the story of David and plays a key role in bringing Solomon to the throne as David’s successor. While Samuel contains much information about Nathan, we have yet to recover a book called Nathan the Prophet. The likelihood is that whoever wrote the Book of Samuel relied in part on Nathan the Prophet and that source continued to circulate even after Samuel appeared.

Finally, we have another missing book. Since we don’t have a copy of Gad the Seer, we can’t gauge how it influenced the biblical history. Nevertheless, it was important enough to be cited by the author of Chronicles.

This collection of works shows that several accounts about King David circulated and later authors picked through the texts to support their own points of view. That the Book of Samuel came to be canonized while Nathan the Prophet or Gad the Seer did not is more an accident of history than the result of divine inspiration.

The split between Israel and Judah on Solomon’s death is one of the most important political events in all of biblical history and the propaganda wars between both sides deeply affected how the history of the Hebrew people came to be written. As we saw in the discussion of the Documentary Hypothesis, much of the source material for the Pentateuch reflected the viewpoints of the various political and religious factions affected by the division.

As with David, there appears to have been several histories about King Solomon and the events leading up to the civil war following his death. The author of 1 Kings, for example, cites the Book of the Acts of Solomon. The author of 2 Chronicles, perhaps the same person as the author of 1 Chronicles, also cites multiple sources for the history of Solomon’s reign and the split that followed. Again mentioned is the Book of Nathan the Prophet, along with such works as the Prophesy of Ahijah the Shilohnite, the Visions of Iddo the Seer, and the Book of Shemiah the Prophet.

As with the other non-biblical books cited, none of these references have yet been found, but Ahijah, the prophet from Shiloh, does appear in 1 Kings to make a prophecy. In it, he encouraged Jeroboam to lead Israel away from Judah. Because of this prophecy, Solomon sought to kill Jeroboam but he fled to Egypt a step ahead of his assassins. On Solomon’s death, Jeroboam returned to Israel to successfully lead the secession movement, splitting Israel from Judah.

The preservation of such works as the Prophesy of Ahijah the Shilohnite long after the disappearance of the kingdom of Israel shows how difficult it was for the kingdom of Judah to suppress the negative history of its own rule and why such strong opposition to the kingdom of Judah survived in the biblical history.

In addition to these various books about specific individuals, such as Nathan, Gad, Ahijah, and Iddo, some biblical writers also relied on official records of the monarchies. The citation to such works as the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel and the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah suggest the existence of royal annals, a form of Near Eastern record in which court officials documented events in the reigns of kings on a year-by-year basis.

These biblical “footnotes” show the variety of materials upon which biblical writers relied and how they went about editing the materials for their own purposes. To this collection of specific citations in the Bible, other source materials can be added, such as the myths and legends preserved by other peoples of the Near East, which were widely circulated and with which the Hebrew scribes would have been intimately familiar.

In considering how these extra-biblical materials affected biblical writers, we should note that the ancient peoples did not think of these myths and legends as falsehoods or untrue. They believed the stories preserved historical truths, and whether or not one believed in one god or another as the responsible agent, one could still believe that the underlying act occurred.

Legends about how locations acquired their place names provide numerous illustrations of how false histories came into existence, and the Bible has many such stories. One of the most typical involved the invention of an ancestor who had the same name as the territory and was therefore made the founding father of the people who lived there. Another common motif was to find an interesting characteristic at a particular site, say an amusing rock formation or a rare water hole, and create a story about how the feature came to be. These tales would be repeated from generation to generation until the entertaining story came to be an article of historical truth.