P and D
Levite, High Priest, Priest from The Story of the Bible.
THE DOCUMENTARY HYPOTHESIS. MEET THE COHENS. THE THEOLOGY OF P. THE DEUTERONOMIC CORE. DEUTERONOMY AND WISDOM. WHO’S A PRIEST?
The Documentary Hypothesis was one of the early results of modern biblical scholarship. If anything, its sting has only grown sharper with the years.
Certainly one of the most disturbing aspects of modern biblical scholarship has been the Documentary Hypothesis—the belief that the Pentateuch, rather than being a single, unified text dictated by God to Moses, is actually a collage made up of four or five (or more) different documents, put together rather clumsily by the book’s final editor or editors.
In principle, the idea that the Pentateuch might have come from different hands ought not to have been too troubling in itself. After all, if, according to the Bible, a prophet is simply a conduit for God’s words, what difference did it make if there had been one conduit for the Pentateuch or four? Wine from the same spigot can be poured into four different bottles, after all. And who could say that J, E, P, and D (the four authorial sources identified by Wellhausen and others) were not prophets of equal standing with Moses? Indeed, perhaps behind these anonymous initials were real figures known to us from elsewhere in the Bible—say, Micah, Hosea, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah—who, for reasons unknown, had decided (or had been ordered) to present their texts as if transmitted through Moses?42
But the Documentary Hypothesis was much more than a theory of who wrote what. Underlying it was a whole picture of how Israel’s religion had developed. Wellhausen and others had thought that Israel at first had polytheistic, or animistic, beliefs, close to nature and the natural world; with time, their beliefs had evolved into a devotion to a single God, YHWH, and from there Israel eventually soared into the “ethical monotheism” preached by its great prophets. Its religion had then further morphed into a thing of laws and priestly ceremonies—a definite downturn, from Wellhausen’s point of view.
The different sources of the Pentateuch were fitted to this developmental picture. J and E, it was thought, represented a relatively early period—they belonged to the time shortly after David and Solomon’s great kingdom had split in two (and some of their material was arguably far earlier than that). J had been an inhabitant of the southern kingdom, Judah, while E lived in the northern kingdom, Israel. At some later point, it was argued, the writings of J and E had been combined into a single text, JE, but this text remained faithful to the worldview of its two underlying components. Thus, the ideas found in either J or E (or JE) would be significantly different from those found in the later sources, D and P. The God described in J and E, for example, was very much the God of Old, human-sized and possessed of human traits. In the Bible’s most ancient texts, this God was principally a divine warrior fighting Israel’s enemies (and its enemies’ gods), a wise counselor and a champion of justice, and in general the deity associated with one particular people, Israel. He was worshiped in different temples and sacred spots that dotted Israel’s land. People often offered sacrifices to Him spontaneously, as the spirit moved. His festivals were altogether focused on the cycles of nature and the gratitude people felt for God’s bounty: the springtime barley harvest and (somewhat later) the wheat harvest, then the fall ingathering of crops.
Wellhausen and other scholars found D and P to be quite different from J and E. Thus, D (the Deuteronomic source) was thought to have been composed in the seventh century BCE,1 at a time when the old, spontaneous, close-to-nature side of Israel’s religion was beginning to harden into doctrines and laws, as well as to become more theoretical. The difference between D and the earlier authors was evident not only in D’s different literary style and vocabulary, but also in what this author had to say. D, according to scholars, insisted on an absolute separation between Israel’s devotion to its own God and the practices of Israel’s neighbors or predecessors. Worshiping any other deity was, in the book of Deuteronomy, the gravest of sins, and it commanded that every effort be made to root out any vestige of Canaanite religion from Israel’s midst. The God of Deuteronomy was also more abstract and distant than that of J and E: He did not even really “dwell” on earth—His abode was heaven, and His temple (there was now to be only one) was merely the place where He “caused His name to dwell.”2 When the Israelites encountered God at Mount Sinai, Moses later reminds them, “You heard the sound of words but saw no form; there was only a voice” (Deut. 4:12). D was also a champion of strict morality. J’s and E’s Abraham and Jacob might have sometimes lied and cheated, but D would have none of that. Indeed, Deuteronomy’s laws showed an overriding concern for the welfare of the powerless, “the stranger, the widow, and the orphan.”
Then came P, so named because this is the first letter of the word “priest” in German (and other languages); P, Wellhausen believed, belonged to the period after the exile of the Jews to Babylon in the sixth century BCE. When the Jews were allowed to return to their homeland in 539 BCE after more than half a century in Babylon, they suddenly found themselves living in markedly changed circumstances (no king of their own; no national sovereignty; a politically powerful priesthood). It was these changes, Wellhausen felt, that caused P to strike a decidedly different note from that of his predecessors. D had been at least half in the real world, but P was almost utterly divorced from it; the outside world must have seemed, in national and historical terms, a depressing place. So he dwelt in a reality of priestly ceremony and cultic abstractions: sin and guilt, products of the exile, loomed large in his mind. P also believed in pinning everything down in rules and laws; spontaneity was gone, Wellhausen felt.3 It was P who wrote the tedious priestly rules and procedures found in the books of Leviticus and Numbers, and he also changed or edited significant other portions of what was now the Pentateuch, modifying them to suit his own priestly concerns and particular cast of mind.4 It was this Pentateuch that then gradually became the central focus of Judaism, and the study of its laws and institutions eventually turned into a form of religious devotion. The great religion of Israel was on its way down, Wellhausen thought.
This view of things, as we will see, has been substantially modified by subsequent scholars. Nevertheless, the basic, underlying idea of multiple authorship for the Pentateuch has survived these modifications; virtually all modern scholars hold by it5—and so it still sticks in the throat of many traditionally religious people. The reason is that accepting the Documentary Hypothesis in any form means retreating substantially from the most basic idea of Scripture itself, that the Bible represents words given by God to man. If God had something to say to different writers in different periods, He ought nonetheless to be basically the same God and say basically the same things: however many “bottles” there were, they ought still to contain the same wine. Then why should He say to one prophet that He is essentially a divine humanoid while saying to another that He is an abstract, distant deity who dwells in heaven?6 Why should God imply, in telling the prophets J or E (or whoever) what to write about Abraham or Jacob, that sometimes it is all right to lie, and yet say specifically in dictating His legislation to a later, priestly writer, “You shall not deal deceitfully or falsely with one another” (Lev. 19:11)? Indeed, why should the laws that God gives to two different prophets contradict each other, saying to one that the Passover sacrifice must be a sheep or a goat (Exod. 12:5) and that it cannot be boiled (Exod. 12:8), while saying to another that the Passover sacrifice can also be a cow or a steer (Deut. 16:2) and is indeed to be boiled (Deut. 16:7)? Should a servant woman’s release be exactly the same as a male’s (Deut. 15:12), or completely different (Exod. 21:7)? So long as people could hold that the Torah had been given to Moses on Mount Sinai, ingenious answers could be (and were) found for such apparent contradictions. This was part of the great achievement of the ancient interpreters: they were able to solve all such problems, so that the Bible never failed to conform to the Four Assumptions (in this case, Assumption 3, that of perfect harmony between the Bible’s various parts). The Documentary Hypothesis made all such ingenious answers unnecessary: the contradictions, it said, are real, and they arose from the combination of originally different sources. But in so saying modern scholarship also undermined the basic idea of Scripture.
As his thoughts developed on these matters, Wellhausen himself became increasingly agitated. Finally, he resolved to quit his job preparing future ministers at a Protestant theological faculty. In his letter of resignation he explained:
I became a theologian because I was interested in the scientific study of the Bible. It has only gradually dawned on me that a professor of theology also has the practical task of preparing his students to serve in the Evangelical Church, and that I was not performing this practical task, but rather, in spite of all restraint on my part, I was actually incapacitating my listeners for their position.7
It may have helped Wellhausen’s conscience to get a different job, but it scarcely did anything for the rest of the faculty back at his seminary; they still had to train future ministers. And now they were stuck with his ideas about J, E, D, and P. What could they do?
This is a question that, more than a century later, still haunts Christians and Jews. Many simply hide from it; others, as we shall see, seek some apologetic route around the problem. Still others, while mentioning its existence, simply reject it on principle: the Documentary Hypothesis must be wrong; therefore it is. The chief rabbi of the British Empire wrote on the first page of his Torah commentary (published in 1936): “My conviction that the criticism of the Pentateuch associated with the name of Wellhausen is a perversion of history and a desecration of religion is unshaken; likewise, my refusal to eliminate the Divine either from history or from human life.”8 Brave words! But are they a sufficient answer to the doubts raised by modern biblical scholarship? As I have already mentioned, a fuller discussion of this issue has been left for the last chapter. For now, however, it will be important to cover some of the subsequent developments and modifications of Wellhausen’s Documentary Hypothesis, specifically those aspects of it having to do with P and D. In some ways, more recent scholarship has only made matters worse.
Meet the Cohens
A wag once observed that P is the only hypothetical author of the Documentary Hypothesis whose last name we know for sure—Cohen. (This common Jewish last name is actually the Hebrew word for “priest.”) The problem, a modern scholar might add, is that no one knows P’s first name. And why is that a problem? Because it is certainly possible that two texts, both demonstrating an interest in things priestly, could have been written by two completely different Cohens living in different times and having radically different views. This, in fact, turned out to be what most modern scholars have concluded about the various parts of Leviticus (and more than Leviticus).
The priestly parts of the Pentateuch comprise, according to most scholars, a hefty percentage of the total.9 Traces of P have long been identified here and there in the books of Genesis and Exodus: thus, the account of creation in Genesis 1 is, as we have seen, attributed by scholars to P, and P is also said to be the author of a version of the flood story that was combined with (but somewhat contradicted) J’s. Priestly fingerprints were found as well in parts of the stories of Abraham (like his covenant of circumcision in Genesis 17) and here and there in the narratives of Jacob and Moses and the exodus and the lawgiving at Sinai. But the greatest stretch of uninterrupted priestly authorship was found to begin with the section about building the desert tabernacle in the latter part of Exodus, and then to carry through to include all of Leviticus as well as a good chunk of the next book, Numbers—a not insubstantial part of the entire Pentateuch.10
Were all these parts authored by the same person? In assigning Leviticus and other parts of the Pentateuch to P, scholars did not base themselves solely on the fact that many of the passages involved subjects of interest to priests, but on certain characteristic traits of language and style. The priestly writer, scholars found, liked giving detailed descriptions of things and did not shy away from repetitions. Thus, it seemed plausible that the priestly pen that had written the formulaically repetitive account of the building of the tabernacle was also responsible for the creation narrative in Genesis 1, not only because of that chapter’s priestly vocabulary and priestly concern with the sabbath, but because of the six occurrences of “And it was evening and it was morning” and the other formulaic repetitions (“And God saw that it was good”)11 in that chapter. This same author seemed likewise to be responsible for the verbatim repetition—twelve times!—of the details of the princely sacrifices in Numbers 7. After all, such repetitions were also found to characterize the heartland of P, the sacrificial instructions in Leviticus 1–7.
Priestly passages also demonstrated certain linguistic tics, scholars found: these passages liked to refer to the people of Israel as a “congregation” (‘edah); they called a tribe a ma
eh, whose leader was its “chief” (na
i); people’s hearts sometimes “lifted them up” (naa’ libbam ’otam) to do things voluntarily; and when people “fell on their faces” in priestly texts, it was in shock or in prayer, and not as a sign of obeisance in front of a king or an angel.12 To “spill blood” was a priestly way of saying to murder; the sabbath was a favorite topic of priestly writings, a time when no professional work (mel’ekhet ‘abodah) was done. In general, scholars found that God’s earthly presence in priestly passages was spoken of as His “glory” (kabod).13 Priestly writings were also found to have a very noticeable interest in numbers and chronology—they liked to give the dimensions of things (Noah’s ark, the tabernacle) and to say exactly when something occurred and how long it lasted; they also liked giving people’s exact ages at the time of an event. Priestly passages were also said to structure larger units according to certain architectonic patterns.14 Since many of these elements were found in the great priestly composition that extended from the tabernacle construction to the end of Leviticus, scholars felt some reinforcement when they found one or more of them in the passages outside of this block that, for other reasons, had been attributed to a priestly writer. Indeed, it seemed reasonable to attribute passages with a concentration of these linguistic tics and other traits to a single individual priest. After all, linguistic tics and literary style tend to be highly personal; their presence in a wide variety of texts seemed to suggest that these texts were not just “of priestly authorship” but were written by the very same man.
To this generalization there was one glaring exception. Even before Wellhausen’s Prolegomena, scholars had noted that the complex of laws from Leviticus 17 to 26 (the Holiness Code discussed in the previous chapter) seemed to be different from the surrounding priestly texts. It too had its linguistic tics, but they were different; perhaps the most prominent of them was the frequent assertion “I am the LORD” following a law. That did not occur elsewhere. The whole stress on a person’s holiness, which gave this unit its name, was also a distinguishing characteristic. The nature of the laws in this section was also found to be somewhat unique: despite the exclusive focus on priests and their doings that characterized the preceding chapters, some of the laws here were addressed to “the whole congregation of Israel” and had to do, as we have seen, with relations between ordinary people. Even in talking about the tabernacle and its sacrifices, this code’s attention seemed less exclusively focused on the priesthood per se and to leave more room for nonpriestly Israelites. All this suggested to scholars another priestly source besides P, and they called it “H” (for “holiness”). Scholars had initially concluded that H was earlier than P, which suited Wellhausen’s developmental scheme just fine. There had been J and E, then D, then a slight dip down into H, who, while priestly, still had some contact with the natural world and real, nonpriestly Israelites; and then finally P.
Whence P and H?
Over the last few decades, however, ideas about the dating of P and H have changed. To begin with, many scholars, including a prominent group of researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (starting in the 1930s with Yehezkel Kaufmann),15 have argued forcefully for an early date for P.16 Among their points: ample evidence of priests and priesthoods exists in other parts of the ancient Near East from a very early period; indeed, some of the technical terms and concepts of these other nations are precisely paralleled in Israelite priestly texts.17 There is no reason to think that the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah would not have had a developed priesthood from an early time—the Bible certainly says they did—and the rules of sacrifices and other procedures detailed in Leviticus 1–16 therefore might arguably go back to practices rooted in very early times (though certainly changes might have been introduced later). In keeping with this, the technical terms used by P have been shown on linguistic grounds to antedate the similar technical vocabulary of the priest Ezekiel, who lived at the start of the Babylonian exile.18 That would put P clearly in the pre-exilic period, these scholars said. Indeed, it has been argued that a number of P’s linguistic tics cited earlier (‘edah, maeh, ’elef, and nai) fell out of use after the ninth century;19 if so, the formulations found in P would have to go back more than two centuries before the Babylonian exile. (On the other hand, critics of this approach say, that does not mean that P itself goes back that far—liturgical formulae often contain lexical elements that have otherwise disappeared from the language or changed their meaning.)43
Scholars have recently argued that Wellhausen’s idea of a postexilic P does not work for other reasons as well. Ezekiel and Jeremiah, who prophesied just before the Babylonian exile, seem to show a detailed awareness of some of the laws in P; again, this would suggest a pre-exilic date for P. (Moreover, quite apart from actual texts, the whole Wellhausian notion of a concern for the priesthood as an exilic and postexilic degeneration simply cannot be reconciled with the evident importance of the priesthood far earlier—not just in Ezekiel and Jeremiah, but in the eighth-century prophets as well.) Intermarriage was apparently a hot issue in postexilic times (see Ezra 9), but P did not apparently have any objection in principle to the Israelites taking unmarried Midianite females for themselves (Num. 31:18). Intermarriage must not have been such an important subject in his own time.20 In addition to these arguments is another that has been much debated of late: D may have known P and based some of his laws on laws that existed earlier in P.21 If so, this would suggest that P—or at least some priestly code of procedures—did not come after D, as Wellhausen had thought.22 The last word has certainly not been written on this subject, but in general a number of contemporary scholars now seem to hold that the priestly rules and regulations of Leviticus are indeed quite ancient.23 They say that P was not written after—and in the shadow of—D, as Wellhausen claimed; rather, both these authors lived well before the Babylonian exile. They differed not so much in time as in viewpoint.
And what of H? As noted, H had always been assumed to be earlier than P. But most modern scholars now accept the idea that the two Cohens, P and H, are actually representatives of two opposing schools of priests, who differed on some of the most basic issues of religious belief. These two schools, and the texts that they produced, seem to go back to roughly the same period, and although it is impossible to assign them precise dates, both of them apparently wrote most of what they wrote well before the Babylonian exile took place, the P school coming first and then H a bit later.24 And H (that is, some member of the H school) apparently had the final word, since it was a member of the H school who seems to have edited their combined texts.25
The H school, as Israel Knohl, Jacob Milgrom, and others have argued, was quite different in outlook from that of P. H sought to “interweave and blend the priestly elements of belief and ritual with popular traditions and customs,” while P “maintained a basic separation between priestly and popular cultic spheres.”26 For example, H cared about, and related to, the stories and other traditions that scholars connect with the sources J and E; P cared much less for this popular material.27 Perhaps more strikingly: for the H school, holiness itself “includes all areas of life and applies to the entire community of Israel and the land that they inhabit.”28 H was thus a priestly-popular movement with a concern for social issues and social reform; P was a priesthood-only school whose idea of holiness ended at the outer gates of the temple precincts.
These recent conclusions about the ideas and dating of P and H have only intensified the distress caused by the Documentary Hypothesis. True, most scholars had long ago accepted that there were four documentary sources, indeed, five. But now, if the argument for a pre-exilic dating of both P and H is accepted, the disagreements found in the sources of the Pentateuch do not fit very well into the evolutionary scheme proposed by Wellhausen. In particular, evolution will not explain the great differences between P, H, and D if they all belong to roughly the same time period. Instead, one would have to conclude that these rough contemporaries simply held widely differing views on some very basic issues: it is their opinions, not God’s word as revealed to His prophets over many centuries, that the Bible contains. With regard to P in particular, perhaps the most basic issue of all is that of God’s very nature. P’s understanding of God, scholars have recently argued, utterly contradicts that of other biblical writers, including his fellow priest H.29
In the view of many scholars, P seems to have been possessed of the most chilling conception of the deity. It was already noticed that the God of Genesis 2–3 had a more “hands-on” approach to creating the world than the God of chapter 1, attributed by scholars to P. In chapter 1, God simply speaks and things happen—suddenly there is light, suddenly there is a firmament, and so forth. One would not be wrong to characterize this God as somewhat more impersonal. But even this depiction is more personal than the God revealed in later portions of the priestly text, according to scholars. Recent analysis has in fact highlighted the difference between the way God is depicted in the priestly parts of Genesis and the way He is depicted after that. In P’s part of Leviticus, for example, God does not even speak in the first person, “I will do this” or “I have ordered that”—not even to Moses. It is as if P seeks to deny that God can even be thought of as a personlike Being, one who can say “I.” So too, P’s God does not personally punish people; punishment just somehow falls on wrongdoers and they are “cut off” (in the passive voice) or otherwise disciplined (P doesn’t say how). Nor does He personally forgive; instead, “it is forgiven” to the sinner who makes good his infraction. P’s version of the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai is consistent with this picture; Moses enters the cloud and hears a voice, but the people outside hear nothing at all. All this seems to correspond to something profound in P’s theology.
Perhaps the most striking thing to scholars about the God of P is that people do not pray to Him. The book of Psalms is full of prayers and songs of praise to God, many of them quite ancient, and scholars have established that the majority of these psalms were composed to be recited in God’s “house,” the temple where He was deemed to be present. But a reader of the words of P would never guess that that was so. P describes in great detail the offering of sacrifices in the temple, but he never says a word about prayers or songs being recited there. In fact, in P people never pray; what good would it do? P’s God is an almost utterly impersonal force. So, too, the ancient festive hymns praising Him are never mentioned in P either; they existed, but, as far as P was concerned, such hymns were an embarrassing bit of human weakness that had no practical effect.30 Even sacrifices in P are not connected with bringing well-being, or victory in time of war, or with satisfying human needs.31 They are just part of the autonomous life of the temple.
In our own, modern society, such a vision of God might actually appear comforting to some. After all, without quite putting the thought into words, we live in a world that is based on ruling out a role for the divine in daily life. That would suit P just fine—keep supporting the temple, he would say, and we’ll keep offering the sacrifices. Meanwhile, political upheavals, natural catastrophes, the suffering of the righteous—these are not problems for P’s theology: God is enthroned in splendid isolation. He has no interest in your prayers or thank-yous, so save your breath.
Whatever one may think of it, this modern understanding of P’s religion stands in jarring contrast to that of the rest of the Pentateuch. And so, as scholars have found themselves obliged to modify Wellhausen’s original conclusions and push their own research further, they have only succeeded in widening the gap between P’s views and those of the other sources, while at the same time foreshortening the chronological distance between them. The main consequence, already mentioned, is that it has become more and more difficult to claim that God changed his message from D to H to P in order to suit Israel’s slowly evolving religious consciousness. The sources seem now to be grouped too closely together to support this evolutionary view.
The Ways of D
What of that other writer identified by scholars, D? The book of Deuteronomy takes the form of a series of three long discourses pronounced by Moses as he looked out across the Jordan River onto the land of Canaan in the last days of his life. He begins by reviewing the history of the Israelites’ wanderings in the wilderness for the previous forty years, and then turns to various laws that Israelites are to keep after they are settled in Canaan. The very first of these (Deut. 12:1–32) focus on the centralization of sacrifices. People will not be able to go to some local altar, Moses says, in order to offer up their sheep or goats. All such local altars and “high places” (which would probably strike onlookers today as large barbecue pits)32 are to be destroyed—they belonged, Moses says, to the Canaanites. Instead, sacrificial animals will be offered at only one central shrine as soon as it is established:
You shall seek the place that the LORD your God will choose out of all your tribes as His habitation, to put His name there. You shall go there, bringing there your burnt offerings and your sacrifices, your tithes and your donations, your votive gifts, your freewill offerings, and the firstlings of your herds and flocks. And you shall eat there in the presence of the LORD your God, you and your households together, rejoicing in all the undertakings in which the LORD your God has blessed you.
Did that mean that the only place where one could eat a fine meal of lamb or beef was at this future central shrine? For many people, this would have meant a long trek from wherever they lived—a definite hardship. But in the next breath Deuteronomy provided a solution:
Yet whenever you desire you may slaughter and eat meat within any of your towns, according to the blessing that the LORD your God has given you; the impure and the pure may eat of it, as they would of gazelle or deer. The blood, however, you must not eat; you shall pour it out on the ground like water.
A person was, according to Deuteronomy, authorized to kill and eat animals in his own backyard, outside of the central shrine: “secular slaughter” within one’s own city gates was altogether permitted for sacrificial animals like sheep and cattle just as it was for game animals like gazelles or deer. In fact, one did not even need to be in a state of ritual purity in order to eat such meat: the only provision was that blood not be eaten but poured out onto the ground.
The nineteenth-century German scholar W. M. L. de Wette was the first to use this law as a way of dating Deuteronomy’s composition. De Wette argued that no real evidence of this central sanctuary or “secular slaughter” can be found in the Bible before the time of King Josiah, late in the seventh century BCE (just before the Babylonian exile). On the contrary, de Wette noted, not only the book of Genesis but books like Judges, Samuel, and Kings (which describe a period long after Moses) unhesitatingly and without criticism report on various biblical figures offering up sacrifices wherever they liked. As Wellhausen went on to observe: “In the early days, worship arose out of the midst of ordinary life, and was in most intimate and manifold connection with it. A sacrifice was a meal, a fact showing how remote was the idea of antithesis between spiritual earnestness and secular pleasure.”33 The prophet Elijah thus builds (or, rather, rebuilds) an improvised altar on Mount Carmel for the purpose of sacrificing (1 Kings 18:31–32); that was in the ninth century BCE, long after the time of Moses and even David. It was only when King Josiah was shown an ancient “book of the law” found in the Jerusalem temple that he realized that nobody had been obeying this important provision about a central sanctuary:
The high priest Hilkiah said to Shaphan the secretary, “I have found a book of the law in the house of the LORD.” When Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan, he read it. Then Shaphan the secretary came to the king [Josiah], and reported to the king . . . “The priest Hilkiah has given me this book.” Shaphan then read it aloud to the king. When the king heard the words of the book of the law, he tore his clothes [as a sign of grief]. Then the king commanded [his servants], saying, “Go, entreat the LORD on my behalf, on behalf of the people and of all Judah, concerning the words of this book that has been found. For great must be the LORD’s anger against us, since our ancestors did not heed the things in this book or act in accordance with what is written here.”
Josiah, frightened at the prospect of having violated God’s will in such an important matter, set out to change things at once, destroying the local altars and “high places” and limiting all sacrifices to the Jerusalem temple. This momentous move is known as “Josiah’s reform.”
De Wette theorized that the “book of the law” that Josiah was shown was none other than the book of Deuteronomy. Someone—the shadowy author known as D—had, for his own reasons, written up his own Mosaic history and his own collection of laws and then passed them off as an ancient text. Some of these laws (like the centralization of sacrifices) were entirely D’s own idea. Who D was remained a mystery, but he might well have been the very man who “discovered” this book in the temple, Hilkiah (2 Kings 22:8). In any event, D’s book won immediate acceptance; not only were his laws put into effect, but the book itself was incorporated into Israel’s library of ancient Scripture, eventually becoming the fifth and last book of the Pentateuch.
Modern scholars have accepted de Wette’s basic identification of D as a separate source—like P, it too has a distinctive style, and they found that D also frequently contradicts what is said in other parts of the Pentateuch. But, for various reasons, they have backed off from some of de Wette’s other conclusions. To begin with, scholars do not think that all of Deuteronomy is of one piece. For example, the book begins with an introductory paragraph (Deut. 1:1–5), after which Moses reviews recent events (Deut. 1:6–4:40). But then comes a second introductory paragraph (Deut. 4:44–5:1), almost as if the preceding four chapters did not exist. This, scholars believe, reflects what actually happened: the first introduction and the material that follows it are, it seems, a later addition, the work of a later author, in fact, two authors.34 As for the law code at the heart of Deuteronomy (chapters 12–28), it was, scholars believe, originally an independent collection of laws. This code is introduced by a review of the Ten Commandments (chapter 5) and some further exhortations of the people (chapters 6–11). As for the code itself, it is a great body of “statutes and ordinances” (Deut. 12:1), some of which parallel the laws given in Exodus–Numbers, while others are altogether new. Following this legal code come other items, such as Moses’ farewell song (Deuteronomy 32) and his blessing of the tribes (Deuteronomy 33), both of which, scholars say, are of different, arguably quite ancient, provenance, but which an editor must have tacked on to round out the book.
To this day no modern scholar has put forward a compelling case for the identity or affiliation of the original D. De Wette had supposed that Deuteronomy was composed ad hoc to provide the legal basis for Josiah’s reform—that it was, in other words, a pious fraud. Modern scholars find this unlikely. To begin with, Deuteronomy does not match Josiah’s reform in all details.35 What is more, Josiah was not the first person to think of centralizing worship in Jerusalem: his grandfather Hezekiah had apparently undertaken a similar, but less successful, program (see 2 Kings 18:4; 22) at the end of the eighth century. Ideas don’t just spring up out of nowhere. If Deuteronomy ordained that the provincial sacrificial sites (the “high places”) be torn down and that worship be centralized in one place, it seems to scholars that the roots of Deuteronomy may go back at least to the time of Hezekiah, perhaps earlier. They note that the prophet Hosea, speaking at the start of the eighth century, had already had some sharp words to say about the multiplication of altars in the north (Hos. 8:11; 10:1–2, 8). Whoever D was, scholars say, he may well have lived some time before Josiah, perhaps even before Hezekiah.
And what would D’s profession have been? Scholars think it unlikely that he was a priest. After all, D’s laws hardly served the interests of priests; some of their provisions appear even to have harmed the priesthood. (Centralizing worship in one sanctuary would certainly have thrown quite a few priests out of work.) On the other hand, no other plausible affiliation has been proposed for D. He seems unlikely to have been an agent of the king—the king’s powers are limited by D’s code (Deut. 17:15–20), and his very role is presented as a concession to Israel’s desire to be like its neighbors (Deut. 17:14). Nor have scholars been able to connect the laws of Deuteronomy with any one place or time period. True, Deuteronomy does single out a particular locale in the northern kingdom of Israel for a covenant ceremony (Deut. 11:26–32; 27): it is to take place at two mountains outside the northern city of Shechem. This, scholars say, is something that a southern author would hardly have come up with. Moreover, the great stress in Deuteronomy on the person of Moses and his central role is, scholars say, more characteristic of northern than southern writers. Thus, even though the law code ended up being discovered in the Jerusalem temple (in the south), most think it probably originated in the north. Perhaps it was then brought south by priests fleeing the Assyrian conquerors of the northern kingdom in 723 BCE. This time period might also suit the laws in another way as well. The one hundred years between 740 and 640 BCE were a time when Assyria dominated the whole region, introducing its own culture, including its gods and temple architecture and forms of worship.36 Deuteronomy’s vehement struggle against worshiping “other gods” might have been launched, scholars say, in the face of large-scale defections to the Assyrian gods or the syncretistic adoption of some of their practices.
Yet scholars have also noted that the laws of Deuteronomy seem in some ways not to fit in such a time frame. Many of these laws seem to presuppose a decentralized population of farmers—people dwelling in villages and towns rather than a place of major urban agglomerations. There are, for example, laws about how to plant a vineyard (22:9) or plow a field (22:10); there are laws about runaway oxen or sheep or donkeys (22:1–3). But there are no laws governing business contracts, or the activities of various sorts of artisans, or relations between landlords and tenants, or other typically urban concerns. Similarly, the only financial dealings that are spoken of are not investments (these do appear elsewhere in the Bible)37 but short-term, interest-free loans to farmers to tide them over until the harvest (23:20; 24:10)—essentially a form of charity. In short, the odor of fresh-mown hay wafts through Deuteronomy’s laws.
Many of the laws also seem to bespeak a rough-and-tumble society, in which the long arm of the law is not particularly long. A wayfarer gets killed on his way from one town to the next (21:1); a woman gets raped outside her village (22:25); an accidental killer’s only hope is to make his way to a special “city of refuge” before the victim’s family finds him (19:1–13). This does not seem to be a particularly settled, orderly society. Men are mustered to go to war, but there does not seem to be any standing army. The monarchy is mentioned only once, and there is no hint of a great royal bureaucracy or life at the king’s court; logically, such things ought to play a central role in a legal code originally composed in a monarchy. For these reasons, some scholars suppose that a fair number of Deuteronomy’s laws existed as a kind of rural common law far back in Israel’s history; in any case, the code as is seems for the most part better suited to life in Israel before the time of Assyrian domination.
Is there some way to fit these contradictory data together? Perhaps, some scholars say, even the legal code of Deuteronomy is not of one piece. Its roots may go back to the ninth century or even earlier; it may then have been recast in the face of Assyrian cultural pressure, with new laws added to stress the gravity of worshiping other gods. This revised law code might then have been brought south to Jerusalem after the northern kingdom fell; bruited about a bit during the reign of Hezekiah,44 the laws could then have gone underground during the reign of his son Manasseh, who is said to have rebuilt the shrines that Hezekiah destroyed and in other ways to have embraced foreign worship (2 Kings 21:2–7). During this time, D’s text might indeed have been hidden by priests in Jerusalem; the laws were then “discovered” (accidentally or on purpose) and put into effect during the reign of Josiah.
Deuteronomy and Wisdom
If D’s identity still remains mysterious for modern scholars, one aspect of his intellectual makeup has been highlighted by recent research: he appears to be closely connected to the world of wisdom. Wisdom was an international pursuit in the ancient Near East, carried on by sages in different countries. Indeed, wisdom was something like scientific research nowadays, and like scientists, wisdom writers had their own characteristic vocabulary and themes. The word “wise” itself was almost a code word (and certainly more specific than “wise” sounds in English); like “scientist,” “wise” meant someone who pursued a certain way of knowledge.
Many of these wisdom elements have been found to be present in Deuteronomy.38 Thus, God’s commandments, statutes, and ordinances, as well as “this book of law [or Torah],” are spoken of in Deuteronomy in much the same way that wisdom is spoken of in the biblical book of Proverbs and other wisdom texts: people are urged to “cling” to the Torah, to “guard” it, to “bind it as a sign,” and so forth.39 Those who administer the laws—judges and other officials—ought themselves to be “wise” (16:19), and the country’s leaders should likewise be “individuals who are wise, discerning, and reputable” (1:13). Similarly important is the central wisdom theme of reward and punishment and, therefore, the connection of Israel’s survival and material prosperity to its adherence to God’s laws. All these elements seem to whisper: “wisdom.” Indeed, at one point Deuteronomy suggests that its laws are themselves the equivalent of collections of wise sayings elsewhere:
You must observe them diligently, for this will show your wisdom and discernment to the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people!”
This wisdom perspective has also left its mark on Deuteronomy’s view of history, scholars say. History is not—as it was in the etiological narratives of J and E—a way of understanding how present reality came to be what it is (that is, explaining why Beer Sheba is so named, or why Israel does not practice child sacrifice, or why there are prophets in Israel). Instead, history is the repository of eternal truths, lessons that never grow old. For that reason, Deuteronomy constantly urges its readers to remember: “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt” (5:15; 15:15, etc.); “Remember what the LORD your God did to Pharaoh” (7:18); “Remember the long journey on which the LORD your God has led you these forty years” (8:2); “Remember—do not forget!—how you provoked the LORD your God to wrath in the wilderness” (9:7); “Remember what Amalek did to you” (25:17), “Remember what the LORD your God did to Miriam” (28:9).
Perhaps its wisdom connection is responsible for what scholars see as another of Deuteronomy’s outstanding traits, its broad, one might even say internationalist, perspective. Wisdom was an international pursuit, and sages trained in Egypt or Mesopotamia did not differ markedly in education or orientation from those in Israel. These sages were themselves aware of this fact, and they generally presented their wisdom in non-nationalistic, universal terms. (There is not a single allusion to Israel’s history or land or leadership in any of the biblical wisdom books of Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes—not one!) Such a global outlook may have left its mark on D, scholars say, if this author had been educated in the ways of wisdom. Deuteronomy may preach vehemently against the worship of other gods, but this fact in itself attests to its awareness that those other gods are indeed being worshiped elsewhere. Unlike P, Deuteronomy mentions other nations—Egypt, Edom, Ammon, and Moab. It seeks to explain why the great and powerful God chose tiny Israel as His own (7:7) and why He did not impose His worship on other peoples (4:19–20). In all these respects, scholars say, Deuteronomy seems to be observing Israel as part of a much larger environment. Indeed, the very abstract quality of God in Deuteronomy—He lives in heaven and merely causes His name to dwell in his earthly temple; He controls all of reality and has no true heavenly rival—seems to be part and parcel of this same outlook.
Deuteronomy also shares with wisdom writings certain other favorite themes. For example, one should never “add to or subtract from” God’s words (this injunction is found only in Deut. 4:2; 13:1; and in Prov. 30:5–6). Boundary marks are not to be moved (Deut. 19:14; 27:17); this very specific sort of offense is also mentioned as well in Prov. 22:28; 23:10, as well as in ancient Egyptian wisdom texts. (It is also found in Hos. 5:10, significant because of the other resemblances found between Hosea and Deuteronomy.) Using false weights and measures is another wisdom theme (Prov. 11:1; 20:10, 23) also present in Deuteronomy (25:13–16).
One contemporary student of Deuteronomy’s wisdom connection, Moshe Weinfeld, has stressed how different D’s views are from those expressed in P.40 True, P’s God was impersonal, a great force or incorporeal kabod—but as far as P was concerned, God was nonetheless right there, present in His temple. The holiest object of the temple, the ark, was the place where, God tells Moses, “I will meet with you, and from which . . . I will deliver to you all My commandments to the Israelites” (Exod. 25:22). For P, scholars observe, this divine presentness was the only reality that counted, and his priestly gaze never contemplated anything beyond the temple precincts and their immediate environs; even the rest of the land of Israel existed only insofar as it supplied tithes and produce and pilgrims to the temple. As for other nations, they did not play any significant role in P’s thinking. For D, Weinfeld and others have argued, things were quite the reverse. The temple was not God’s dwelling: nowhere does Deuteronomy (or any of the subsequent biblical writings of D’s school) ever speak of God dwelling in the temple or of people building a “house” for God; at best, the temple was some sort of symbolic presence for God’s “name.”41 The holy ark has no cover or cherubim on whose extended wings the deity might appear; it is really only a storage chest for keeping the Ten Commandments—hence D’s name for it, the “Ark of the LORD’s Covenant” (Deut. 31:9).42 By the same token, the temple sacrifices are never called (as they are in P) God’s “food,” whose burning on the altar makes a “pleasing odor” before God. In fact, Deuteronomy has almost nothing to say about the sacrifices per se. It does, however, mention that, in the case of sacrifices that can be eaten by the person bringing the offering, the meat is to be shared with “foreigners, orphans, and widows” (16:11, 14). This, according to Weinfeld, is their real importance for D: they are an instrument of public charity. Thus P and D are, to a certain extent, opposites: if P is altogether priestly, D is in some respects close to “secular.” Of course, D believes in God and in God’s historic intervention in the affairs of men. But this seems to be more of a doctrine in D than a lived reality. Social justice is of great concern to D, but, significantly, it is first up to human beings, those charged with creating “justice and righteousness,” to bring it about.43
It should be recalled here that a major tenet of D’s religion is the centralization of sacrificial worship at a single locale (Deut. 12:1–32). This law says a great deal about D’s whole theology—but perhaps “centralization” glosses over the main effect of this new provision. What it meant in practice was that that “central” locale, wherever it was to be, would in fact always be far away from most of the country’s villages and towns—a day’s journey or more.44 As a result, sacrificial worship would necessarily be rather remote from most people’s daily lives. What then was to bind them to their God? In its stead, Deuteronomy offers . . . all those laws. Deuteronomy urges that people “cling” to them, “bind” them, “guard” them, and so forth, and it endlessly asserts that by so doing they will “serve” and “love” God with their whole hearts. In short, keeping these divinely given laws was a kind of surrogate for the now-remote service of God through sacrifices in the temple. (Indeed, Deuteronomy uses the phrase that was commonly associated with sacrifices, “to serve [‘abod] God,” to refer instead to the keeping of God’s laws [Deut. 10:12; 11:13, and many more].) By the same token, the temple’s remoteness was really of no great consequence to D precisely because, as we have seen, God really did not dwell there anyway; He was in heaven.
Who’s a Priest?
Another subject on which P and D disagree is more down-to-earth: the priesthood. When P speaks about priests, scholars note, he calls them “the priests, Aaron’s sons.” This is because, as far as P was concerned, the only legitimate priests were descended from the priestly line of Aaron. P does speak of another group of hereditary temple officials, the Levites. But the Levites had a different status: although they were from the same tribe as Aaron’s sons, the tribe of Levi, they were not part of Aaron’s line, so, in P’s view, they could not offer sacrifices or perform the other crucial jobs assigned to priests. In fact, their main job was to serve Aaron’s descendants as helpers:
Then the LORD spoke to Moses, saying: “Bring the tribe of Levi near, and put them in attendance before Aaron the priest, so that they may assist him. They shall perform duties for him and for the whole congregation in front of the tent of meeting, doing service at the tabernacle; they shall be in charge of all the furnishings of the tent of meeting, and attend to the duties for the Israelites as they do service at the tabernacle. You shall give the Levites to Aaron and his descendants; they are altogether given to him from among the Israelites. But you shall make a register of Aaron and his descendants; it is they who shall attend to the priesthood, and any outsider who comes near shall be put to death.”
D, on the other hand, never talks about Aaron’s descendants as special. His phrase is “the Levitical priests.” Many modern scholars have interpreted this to mean that D believed that any Levite was ipso facto a proper priest and could offer sacrifices and perform other priestly tasks. This may indeed have been the case for some time in Israel, scholars say. When Moses blesses the tribe of Levi at the end of his life, he says:
Let them teach to Jacob Your ordinances, and to Israel Your laws;
may they place incense before You, and whole burnt offerings on Your altar.
Placing incense and whole burnt offerings before God were the priestly functions par excellence. This text, which many scholars claim had been inherited from a far earlier era, may thus indicate that all Levites had been considered fit priests from a very early time.
The question “Who’s a priest?” was not limited to this apparent disagreement between P and D. A still more restrictive view of the priesthood appears in the closing chapters of Ezekiel; there, only the descendants of Zadok (himself said to be a descendant of Aaron) can function fully as priests; other descendants of Aaron are in a different category (as are Levites as well). Such disagreements were rarely just armchair disputes in biblical times; they must have been bitterly fought. Indeed, modern scholars believe that some of the best-known narratives of the Pentateuch center precisely on the ongoing claims of different groups to the priesthood.
One of these narratives has already been discussed, the story of the Golden Calf. Scholars have long connected the actual origin of the story with an incident recounted much later in the Bible. After David and his son Solomon had united the twelve tribes of Israel and ruled over this mighty empire for a time, a split occurred: a certain Jeroboam led the northern component of this empire to secede and form an independent kingdom of their own. Naturally, Jeroboam believed that his citizens ought not to continue to frequent the great temple established by Solomon in the southern capital of Jerusalem. Instead, the Bible recounts, he created two new shrines within his own territory:
So the king [Jeroboam] took counsel, and made two golden calves. He said to the people, “You have gone up to Jerusalem long enough. These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.” He set one in Bethel, and the other he put in Dan.
Aaron is said to have uttered precisely the same sentence when he built his Golden Calf, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt” (Exod. 32:8). Clearly, scholars say, this incident in Exodus was actually a later writer’s projection of Jeroboam’s sin back to the time of Moses and Aaron.
But why, these scholars ask, was such a tale created? Some argue that it was not aimed at Jeroboam so much as at the Aaronid priesthood, using Jeroboam’s famous sin as a way of getting at the descendants of Aaron.45 After all, if the purpose were simply to criticize the actions of Jeroboam by creating a shameful precedent for them centuries earlier, there would have been no need to assign Aaron such a central role in the incident: let the Golden Calf be manufactured by the crazed mob against Aaron’s wishes, or by some easily recognized prototype of Jeroboam, say, the mad metallurgist Beroboam. Instead, it is Aaron who is front and center, altogether eager to cooperate with the mob’s evil desires. Once the Golden Calf is built, Aaron even has the effrontery to proclaim, “Tomorrow will be a festival to the LORD” (Exod. 32:5), and the next day, stirred by this prospect, the people get up to “sport” (perhaps a euphemism for sexual license). Later on, reproved by Moses, Aaron merely sputters; the only explanation he can come up with: “I said to them, ‘Whoever has gold, strip it off’; then they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!” (Exod. 32:24). Surely, scholars say, none of this is attributable to chance: the Aaronids are being pilloried here by someone, perhaps a non-Aaronid Levite with a bone to pick. Behind this narrative may thus stand another aspect of the P-versus-D dispute.
In any event, the disagreement between P and D about who is a priest is yet one more bit of sorrow brought on by the Documentary Hypothesis. J, E, P, H, and D disagree, scholars say, about so many ideas—not just who is a priest, but who God is and how He is to be served. And they disagree as well about dozens of practical issues, including individual laws and their precise wording. They have sharply contrasting views on the giving of the Torah—not only on the name of the mountain (Sinai or Horeb), but on what the people saw or did not see, heard or did not hear.46 This, therefore, is the central question raised by the Documentary Hypothesis today: can any of this be thought to be Scripture, when so much of it reflects human disputes between different writers and their schools? Where is the word of God in a book that contradicts itself on so many different, and fundamental, items?