8. So – who did write the Old Testament?
As we have seen, the Old Testament begins with the five books of the Torah, and continues with the eight books of the Histories. These have justly been called the core Bible. Together they set out the mission of Israel, to be the chosen people of God; and they tell the story of how the Israelites won the Promised Land – and then lost it.
Amazingly, we know, with a high level of probability, who wrote these books – and much more important, we know why they wrote them.
The first arises from the political divisions between the northern and southern kingdoms. Who is boss? And whose culture heroes, and priestly families, will take precedence? The Bible recounts that the northern kingdom (Israel) and the southern (Judah) were united by David under one leadership and at one capital (Jerusalem) around 1000 BC (2 Samuel 5). David’s son Solomon kept the two together, but with difficulty, and in the face of great resentment from the northern kingdom, who felt – with some justice – that the kingdom of Judah was taking much more than it gave. The relative status of Israel and Judah, and of the mythical ancestors (the twelve tribes of Israel) who validated that status, was much disputed.
The second is about sacrifice – and where it should be carried out. Like many peoples around the world, the ancient Israelites treated meat-eating as sacred: animals could not be killed for food without performing a ceremony. There was no disagreement about this, nor about the principle that a priest should be involved to consecrate the animal and ensure that the butchery was carried out to strict religious principles. Disagreement centred on where that ceremony should be carried out – and hence, on where farmers could kill and eat their animals. Could it be at local centres – the so-called ‘high places’ – where the local group of Levites (the priestly clan) could officiate? Or must it be at a major religious centre, such as Shiloh in the north, or Hebron or Jerusalem in the south? This question of centralisation versus decentralisation came to be of enormous importance.
The third is about the status of Moses. Priesthood in ancient Israel was inherited and limited to the tribe of Levi. Although Moses (along with Abraham) was the great hero of the whole Hebrew people, there was a constant rivalry within the priesthood between the descendants of Moses (concentrated in the north) and the descendants of Aaron in the south, presiding over Judah from their sacred centre at Jerusalem. Both Moses and Aaron were too securely established as giant symbolic figures to be directly attacked: but a subversive power struggle between the descendants of Moses and the descendants of Aaron lies behind many otherwise inexplicable stories in Genesis and Exodus.
The fourth is spiritual: what is the nature of God, and how does man relate to God? Does God have human feelings and thoughts? Change his mind? Listen as well as speak? Learn from humans? Or does he speak from a great distance without the possibility that we can ever understand or fathom his greatness?
The fifth is about how the Israelites should relate to the peoples around them. Is intermarriage allowed, or not? There are absolutely radical differences between the Biblical writers on this point.
As we have seen, the core of the Old Testament lies in its story – God’s mission for the Israelites, and their failure to carry it through. This has long been viewed as a single coherent unity: a unity of story, a unity of theme, and above all a unity of message. Behind this, of course, is the long-standing view of the divine origins and inspiration of the Bible.
The evidence does not support the view of a single unified text. Bible scholarship is an enormous field – dwarfing, for example, the shelves of books written on Shakespeare – so I shall be very selective, but I shall try to show that the first five books of the Bible represent, not one theology, but several: and not one unfolding story, but an entertaining and often intemperate set of arguments between different political and religious factions.
One of the most curious and exciting features of the OT is the fact that we know more about the people who wrote the Pentateuch than we know about the writers of the four Gospels. We can identify with some confidence the five authors who gathered, collated, and committed to paper – or rather to the rolls of papyrus that did duty in the ancient world for written documents – the stories that inform so much both of the religion and of the imagination of the modern world. These stories are now interwoven to form the continuous narrative of the Bible, which was for almost 2,000 years believed to be a unity not only in its form but in its composition. But they were originally entirely separate.a
Who were the people who wrote them?
We owe to J the stories – or the adaptation of these stories from existing myths and legends of the Near East – of the Garden of Eden; Cain and Abel; the Tower of Babel; Potiphar’s wife and her attempt to seduce Joseph; Moses and the bulrushes. The J author loved stories. But we also owe to J a particular concept of God: a god who is curious about humans (Genesis 2:19), who changes his mind (6:6), and who prefers mercy to justice (8:21–22).
We have said ‘he’, but the J author, uniquely among our authors, may have been a woman (the others were all members of the priesthood, which was restricted to men). Why do we say this? Not just because of his, or her, interest in character and narrative, but especially because of the story of Judah and Tamar (Genesis 38) in which a woman takes the initiative, breaks rules, and forces a man to admit that he is in the wrong.
Our second writer is from a similar period (9th or 8th century BC) – but from Israel, the northern kingdom. Scholars refer to him as E because his work consistently refers to God as ‘El’ or ‘Elohim’, in contrast to the usage of the J author. He seems to have been a Levite priest from Shiloh. We will have more to say about him later.
The third author, ‘P’ – the Priestly source – is closely associated with King Hezekiah, who ruled the southern kingdom of Judah from 715–687 BC, immediately after the fall of the northern kingdom in 722. Hezekiah introduced and carried through a policy of religious centralisation – notably of sacrifice – and of purification, and the P author greatly admired this.
We have already met the P author in our account of the Genesis Creation story above: firm, authoritative, unyielding. We meet him again after the Flood story: ‘the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth’ (Genesis 9:2). The watchword of the P author is implacable justice, administered through the hierarchy of the priesthood. There are no talking animals, no angels, no dreams: instead there is a huge body of instruction for the priests about how to carry out sacrifice, burn incense, and conduct oneself appropriately. The emphasis shifts from Moses the prophet (the northern hero), to the southern hero Aaron the high priest. In J, E, and D (see below) the words ‘grace’, ‘mercy’, and ‘repentance’ occur about 70 times. In the whole of P they are not mentioned once.
Our fourth author, the so-called ‘D’ or Deuteronomist, is also closely associated with a king – King Josiah, who ruled from 641 BC till 609 – and with a law code, Deuteronomy. The key theme of the Deuteronomist is the concept of the covenant, the bargain or contract between God and his chosen people. The special contribution of the Deuteronomist is to stress the cycle of infidelity–defeat–repentance–forgiveness that runs through the history of the kings of Israel and Judah, and their peoples, in their relationship with God.
The author of Deuteronomy was a priest from the northern city of Shiloh – and he is almost certainly the prophet Jeremiah, author of the book of the same name.
We will come on to the fifth author in a moment. But let us look at the relationship between the four writers mentioned so far.
J and E were parallel accounts: J from the south, E from the north. Not surprisingly, they had political as well as theological differences and points to make. The J author needed to justify the primacy of the tribe of Judah that ruled the southern kingdom of that name. Judah was traditionally the youngest of the four sons of Jacob with territory in the south. How could the J author justify Judah, a youngest son, taking precedence over his three elder brothers to become the ancestor of the ruling tribe? He made it clear in Genesis 49 that Judah’s three elder brothers had all behaved inappropriately (in the case of Reuben, through sleeping with his father’s concubine, a major error of judgement) and that Judah had received the birthright from his father. E makes no mention of this story.
What does E say about the same topic – the way Jacob bestows his birthright among his children? He makes no mention of Judah – why indeed should he? But he recounts in Genesis 48 how Jacob bestows special favour on his grandson Ephraim. Why Ephraim? Because Ephraim was another name for E’s home, the northern kingdom of Israel.
Needless to say, the Ephraim narrative does not appear in J.
The same pattern recurs with reference to the disputed city of Shechem, owned by the north but claimed by the south. Both writers mention the acquisition of Shechem from its Hivite inhabitants. The northern E writer says they paid its inhabitants a generous fee (Genesis 33:18–20). The southern J (Genesis 34) says they massacred them!
P, the Priestly author, working from an Aaronid perspective, wrote the largest part of the five books long attributed to Moses. What do we know about the relationship between the 7th-century P and the 8th/9th-century JE stories? We know that P was aware of J and E; that he based his story on the same episodes; and that he consistently retold those episodes so as to emphasise the role of Aaron and his descendants, to the extent of introducing the idea that Moses and Aaron were actual rather than metaphorical brothers, and omitting from his accounts all reference to sacrifice unless carried out by the Aaronid priesthood.
Why is he doing this? Why does P recreate as complete and separate units, not just the Creation and the Flood stories, but no fewer than 23 other parallel accounts of incidents in JE?
Because he wants to write a complete, self-sufficient text that will replace the JE Torah of Moses – with a Priestly Torah of Aaron.
What about our fourth writer, the Deuteronomist, whose work spans the period 622–587 BC? Did he know about the work of J, E, or P? He certainly did: he refers to incidents and ideas from each of these writers on a number of occasions. And did he have a view on them? Indeed he did. The Book of Deuteronomy is presented as Moses’ farewell speech before his death. It restores Moses to pole position as the Hebrew culture hero – and makes virtually no mention at all of Aaron and the Aaronid priesthood, thus completely reversing the thrust of P a century earlier. He even refers to the P text in highly unflattering terms: ‘the false pen of the scribes has made it [the Torah] into a lie’ (Jeremiah 8:8, New Revised Standard Version).
So what can we deduce from the four compilers of the early part of the Bible? Of course all four agree on the sacred and political mission of the people of Israel, and on some kind of special relationship between God and his chosen people. But within this we find a high level of disagreement; a growing level of politicisation and sectarian infighting alongside their theological differences; and – in proportion as the kingdom becomes less powerful and independent – a tendency to move away from mercy and forgiveness, in the direction of justice and retribution.
So, what happens to this heap of conflicting and mutually contradictory scrolls? Will it be possible to rescue something from the wreckage? It is time to bring in our fifth writer, known to scholars as ‘R’ (for redactor, or editor).
Imagine you are standing in what looks like the book warehouse of a charity shop – perhaps Oxfam. Around you is all the jumble of books and magazines that find their way to second-hand shops; poetry and prose, history and fiction, Mills & Boon and Churchill’s History of the Second World War, Shakespeare and Biggles, back numbers of The Watchtower, old royal biographies, railway timetables for lines that no longer exist. Some of the copies have pages or whole sections missing; none of the sets is complete.
Now stretch your mind a little more. Imagine that the charity shop exists in a parallel universe. Britain did not win the Second World War. Germany did. London was bombed flat, St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey were destroyed, the royal family were executed and the Church of England despoiled and dismantled. A Quisling government runs the country under the watchful eye of Berlin. (Or, if you wish, Moscow.)
You thought your job was just to sort and price these volumes. But you’re wrong. Your task is to use these materials, and only these materials, to write a history of England. The people who gave these books – precious books, in the present state of things – will want to see evidence that they are used: you can select and edit them, but you must make some reference to every one. And because there are no printing presses available to you for this task, you will have to write it – and have it copied – by hand, with all that that implies by way of errors, omissions, and duplications.
How will the finished work be judged? The scholar will ask, ‘Is it complete?’ The historian will ask, ‘Is it true?’ The preacher will ask, ‘Is it good?’ The literary critic will ask, ‘Is it beautiful?’ And the resistance fighter, dedicated to restoring the freedom and greatness of his (or her) country and fulfilling its mighty destiny, will ask, ‘Does it support the struggle?’ You must satisfy all of these.
That is the challenge that faces you. And that is what faced the person who pulled all the previous scrolls, all the earlier writings, into a single unity. Israel and Judah, the old kingdoms, no longer had any independent existence; Jerusalem had been sacked in 587 BC and its Temple destroyed; the leaders and opinion-formers had either been led away into captivity in Babylon or had fled to Egypt; the literary tradition was in pieces, the practice of the religion was fragmented, and those returning from Babylon in 538 BC found themselves scorned and rejected by their co-religionists still living in the ruins of the old city.
Somewhere around 460 BC, a Hebrew scribe at the court of Babylon brought to completion an extraordinary feat. He took the work of J, E, P, and D – texts that had been set up in many cases as mutually exclusive and antagonistic alternatives – and combined them into one continuous narrative. He took the P Creation story and the J Creation story and made them into Chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis, his opening book; he took the P Flood story and the J Flood story and wove them together so that the joins remained undetected for 2,000 years; he set a Priestly text at the start of each of the five books of the Torah; he inserted brief linking verses between the different materials to make the stories run smoothly on. And he did this, as far as we can tell, without taking out a single word.
Why did he do this? Why, if a unified version was needed, did he not just edit out the bits he didn’t like? The answer is that he couldn’t – the stories and the teachings were too well known. The Diaspora (scattering) of the Babylonian exile and the flight into Egypt had carried the earlier scrolls – the first ‘biblia’ – all round the pagan Near East, and as with the internet in our time, no censorship on earth could suppress them. So as he couldn’t beat them, the Redactor – in every sense of the word – joined them.
There is relatively little of R’s own writings in the Bible – most of his work consisted of discreet, sensitive, and highly flexible reordering. The structure he created, the apparent unity that resulted from it, and the skill with which he wrote, have created an extraordinary work that has held together for over 2,000 years. But the shape of the work, though unobtrusive, shows his intention and his values very clearly. He rearranged the material so that every one of the five books of Moses began with a Priestly text, showing beyond dispute that he came from the Aaronid priesthood.
Do we know who he was? Almost certainly we do.
Around 458 BC, a great Jewish scholar and scribe left Babylon, where a substantial Jewish community had been founded in the exile period and still lived on, to make the arduous four-month journey across the desert to the newly rebuilt city of Jerusalem. He brought with him a substantial returning group of exiles and carried rich gifts for the Jerusalem community from the Babylonian emperor Artaxerxes I. He described himself as ‘a ready [skilled] scribe in the law of Moses’ and as a direct descendant of Aaron (Ezra 7:5–6), and he came with ‘the law of God’ in his hand (Ezra 7:14). On his arrival, standing in the square before the Water Gate, he read a scroll to the assembled people of Jerusalem ‘from the [early] morning until midday’ (Nehemiah 8:3), and ‘the people wept, when they heard the words of the law’ (Nehemiah 8:9).
What was the book that moved them so powerfully? It was the Pentateuch, the ‘five books of Moses’, newly assembled from all the sources we have been considering above. Who was the reader? The reader was Ezra, author of the book of that name in the Bible. And we can make a very confident guess that he was also the Redactor – the man who, more than anyone else, was responsible for the shape and structure of the first five books of the Bible as we have them now.
The tradition that Ezra ‘wrote’ this part of the Bible goes back to the Fourth Book of Ezra, which dates from about 100 AD but is not included in the Protestant Bible. And Jerome in the 4th century AD writes of Ezra as ‘the renewer of the Pentateuch’. Ezra himself hints, but does not say, that he is the Redactor. But he is very explicit about another of his actions. By his own account (Ezra 9 and 10) he persuaded the Jews of Jerusalem to dissolve all the marriages they had contracted with non-Jews, and to put aside not only the wives, but also the children, involved in these unions. He believed in racial purity; and he practised ethnic cleansing.
Before making our final comments on the OT we should look at two elements that we have not considered. The first is the ‘begats’. Anyone who sets out to read the OT from end to end will find much of it numbingly repetitive and dull. The dullest parts of it, for the modern reader at least, are the interminable genealogies (the ‘begats’), and the minutely detailed instructions, some for lay people and some for priests, about ritual and worship (the Holiness Code). Both are heavily represented in the Pentateuch. It is scarcely possible to make these interesting except perhaps to an orthodox Jew, but anyone wanting to understand the Bible must ask themselves why these mattered so much to the people of that time.
Traditional societies, whether in the ancient Near East or in our own time, place great store on genealogy and ancestry. In Britain access to the throne and to some seats in the House of Lords is by descent, and we have a strong tradition of respecting families whose connection with a particular piece of land goes back a long way: noble families indeed bear geographic titles – the Duke of Westminster, the Countess of Athlone – and newly ennobled commoners take a place name as a point of reference (Baroness Wheeler of Southwark, Lord Prescott of Kingston upon Hull). The world of the Old Testament Israelites up till 587 BC was a hereditary monarchy like ours with a similar emphasis on the ‘birthright’ of the firstborn, but this emphasis on ancestry was strengthened by two factors that we do not share with it. First, as we have seen, the priesthood was also hereditary, so that priestly families could trace – or claim to trace – their paternity right back to Moses or Aaron. And second, perhaps even more importantly, was the connection between land and family through the system of tribes. That system had in practice ceased to operate by the time the OT was written down, but it continued to exercise a powerful influence nonetheless. The twelve children of Jacob formed, mythically at least, the original twelve tribes of Israel; most had ceased to have any geographical identity by the time of the Bible, but all had had land allocated to them by Jacob, and two (the southern Judah and the northern Ephraim) still kept that association and that entitlement.
That linkage is set out and defined in Genesis 48 and 49, but it becomes very real in Joshua 13:22 – supposedly recounting the events of around 1200–1300 BC, but probably dating from the 6th century BC – when the newly conquered Promised Land is specifically parcelled out, region by region, to eleven of the twelve tribes (the exception being the Levites, who as priests gain their portion through their share of the sacrifice).
The second element that modern readers find hard going are the ritual prohibitions that occur in substantial chunks in the Pentateuch – notably in Exodus 20–23 (the so-called Covenant Code), Leviticus (the Holiness Code, which takes up all 27 chapters), and Deuteronomy 5–26. The most famous of these are of course the Ten Commandments, which are repeated at least three times. However, they occur alongside a number of other prohibitions that seem less familiar to us. These include:
What these strange rules have in common is a focus on keeping separate. They prevent things being mixed that should be kept apart. Camels, rock-badgers, and pigs are in some way anomalous (pigs, for example, have split hoofs but don’t chew the cud); eels live in water but don’t have scales like fish; a man’s sisters and daughters are his relatives, not his sexual partners; mixing oxen and donkeys, or wool and linen, or meat and milk, or sexually ambiguous people with people of normal gender, brings together things that are different and should be kept apart.
The particular resonance of these laws for the Hebrews is that as things got worse for them politically – these laws date from the late 7th century BC, after the fall of the northern kingdom, and during the fundamentalist reign of Josiah – they came increasingly to see themselves as a people set apart (Deuteronomy 7:6). Their political troubles are seen as the result of falling down on their mission, and so there is heightened emphasis on not ‘mixing themselves’ with the peoples around them. ‘I am the Lord your God, which have separated you from other people. Ye shall therefore put difference between clean beasts and unclean … And ye shall be holy unto me: for I the Lord am holy, and have severed you from other people, that ye should be mine.’ (Leviticus 20:24–26, italics added) They are under orders, as God’s chosen people and exemplars, to live exemplary lives: to keep themselves pure for God.
This is not about puritanism (which rejects pleasure); it is about perfectionism (which rejects impurity). Sacrifices are expected to be perfect animals without blemish (Leviticus 22:21) because they are offered to God, and the standards for priests are even higher than the standards for the laity, because priests are called upon to set an example to their own people. As the external threats increased, the Israelites became ever more focused on the separateness, and the need for perfection, of their religion, their nation, and their God; hence the appalled reaction of Ezra in 458 BC when he found that the Jews in Jerusalem were ‘mixing themselves’ with non-Jews.
Buried among these late 7th-century laws, with no special emphasis, are the rules about sex with animals (death to both parties) and sex between man and man (same punishment) – Leviticus 20:13–16. The context is identical: like eels, pigs, and ‘insects that go on all fours’, sex between humans and animals, or between man and man, is anomalous, and therefore unholy.b
Footnotes
a. It is frustrating to discover that this knowledge has been around so long: it was possible to buy a Bible printed in different colours to show the different authors, the so-called Polychrome Bible, as long ago as 1893.
b. Like everyone who writes about the Old Testament, I am hugely indebted to Mary Douglas and to Sir Edmund Leach for these insights into Jewish ritual prohibitions – a view that is now an anthropological commonplace but was revolutionary in its time.