Pentateuchal criticism

Pentateuchal criticism (or Pentateuchal studies) is the academic study of the origins and composition of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the bible. Originating in the 18th century, its most famous product is the documentary hypothesis, but the field is currently in ferment, with many alternative theories under consideration.

Background: the "problem of the Pentateuch"

The Pentateuch ("five scrolls") is the Greek name for what is known in Hebrew as the Torah, ("law" or "instruction"), the first five books of the bible - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The two terms are interchangeable.

The "problem of the Pentateuch" is the question of how it came to be written. Until the 18th century no-one seriously questioned the tradition that Moses was the author of the Torah, or, more accurately, God's instrument for transmitting it to man: for scholars such as Jerome, Rashi and Aquinas, the aim of study was to expound the bible's meaning, not to examine its origins. But for a host of reasons [Mosaic authorship eventually came to be seen as inadequate, and during the 19th century more and more scholars (most of them German, and all of them men of faith), came to examine the text of the Pentateuch to reconstruct the human, rather than divine, process of its composition.

By the mid-19th century, the dominant belief was that the Torah was made up of four originally separate documents. Each of these, it was believed, had told the same story, but with variations; and the four could be reconstructed from the study of the inconsistencies in the present Pentateuch resulting from their combination into a single narrative. This idea reached its final form with the work of Julius Wellhausen in the 1870s, and Wellhausen's thesis came to be known as "the" documentary hypothesis - although in fact it was only the last in a series of hypotheses within the documentary model.

Wellhausen's hypothesis became the dominant explanation of the "Pentateuchal problem" (i.e., how the Pentateuch came to be written) for almost a hundred years, largely because it offered the most coherent and persuasive case available. The work of 20th century scholars such as Hermann Gunkel and Martin Noth developed Wellhausen's hypothesis, but did not seem to fundamentally challenge it. But in the mid-1970s three seminal works by Thomas Thompson, John Van Seters, and R.N. Whybray, destroyed the near-consensus which the documentary hypothesis had enjoyed for over a hundred years. Today, the field of Pentateuchal studies is in ferment, with no new paradigm or scholarly consensus emerging to displace the old theories, yet those theories themselves no longer enjoying the near-universal acceptance they once enjoyed.
Gordon Wenham, [http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/article_pentateuch_wenham.html "Pentateuchal Studies Today",] "Themelios" 22.1 (October 1996).]

History

Criticism of the Mosaic authorship tradition had been appearing since the first few centuries of the Christian era, with figures such as the great Jewish scholar Ibn Ezra pointing out that Moses could not, for example, have written of his own death, or have composed a list of the kings of Edom when these kings lived long after Moses himself. But the work of Jean Astruc was qualitatively different from earlier criticism in that it made use of a formal methodology for the study of the text, namely form criticism. Astruc's contribution was not entirely original - form criticism was already in use for the study of Classical texts such as the Iliad - but his breakthrough was to adapt it to the study of the Pentateuch, thus giving scholars a formal framework for their investigation of the text and its origins.

Astruc had little impact in his own lifetime, and the creation of Pentateuchal criticism as a formal academic discipline belongs to Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, a German scholar active in the early decades of the 19th century. A century of subsequent study reached its climax with Julius Wellhausen, who drew the strands together in his description of the documentary hypothesis. Twentieth century scholars such as Hermann Gunkel and Martin Noth elaborated on Wellhausen's hypothesis without questioning its foundations (i.e., the existence of four identifiable documents making up the Torah); they did, however, add new critical approaches to the scholarly toolkit, notably form criticism and tradition history.

In the mid-1970s three important books appeared, written by Thomas Thompson, John Van Seters and R.N. Whybray. Individually, they questioned the assumptions underlying each of the major critical methodologies - source criticism, form criticism, and tradition history. Collectively, they threw the entire field of Pentateuchal criticism into ferment, opening it up once again to the position it had been at in the days of Eichhorn. Today, as a result, scholars active in Pentateuchal criticism tend to mix any of the three possible models of composition: documentary, supplemetary, and fragmentary.

Methodologies

Source criticism tries to recover the "sources" of the various narrative strands in a document known or suspected to consist of more than one such source. A notable example from outside the field of biblical studies is the medieval French Roman de la rose: the original author died with his text incomplete and it was finished by another writer with rather different interests; modern critics disentangle the two authors' works through the methodology of source criticism. Form criticism is an attempt to get beyond the text itself, which is all that source criticism studies, by identifying the literary genre (the "form") of a particular passage and, on that basis, reconstructing the purpose and community for which it was written (its "sitz in leben": the goal of form criticism, as practised by Hermann Gunkel and his followers, was to reconstruct the oral history which they were sure lay behind the written text of the Pentateuch.Tradition history takes this one step further by attempting to reconstruct the history through which the individual traditions identified by form criticism were combined into larger and larger units until the ultimate document was created.

The results of critical methodologies are never certain - literary criticism is not an exact science. Nevertheless, they do provide useful insights into the possible or probable composition history of texts. An example is the story of the "sons of God" and the "daughters of men" in Genesis 6:1-4. Verse 1 says that humankind multiplied and had daughters; verse 2 says that the "sons of God" then took women "from all they chose"; verse 3 introduces God, who says that the "days of man" will be limited to 120 years; and verse 4 says that "the nephilim were on the earth in those days, and after as well, when the sons of God came to the daughters of mankind and they gave birth by them, they were the heroes of old, men of renown." The four verse do not seem closely related - there is no reason given why God should limit the "days of man" because his sons have taken women from the "daughters of men," nor is there any explicit connection between verse 4 and the preceding verses. The accepted explanation among Pentateuchal critics is that verses 1 and 2 belong together, that verse 3 was introduced separately, and verse 4 is made up of a number of separate scroibal notes which eventually got incorporated into the main text.

The three models: documentary, supplementary and fragmentary

There are three possible ways in which the Pentateuch, or any complex text of its type, could reach its final form: through the combination of originally separate documents, through a series of supplements (additions and revisions) to one original document, or through the combination of a number of fragments, none large enough to constitute a complete document.

Hypotheses can, and do, draw on more than one model, and there can be more than one hypothesis for any model. Wellhausen's documentary hypothesis, for example, with its four documents, can be compared to Richard Elliot Friedman's hypothesis, equally within the 4-document model, but with a very different suggestion for the order of the documents; and both can be compared with Jean Astruc's hypothesis, also documentary, but with only two documents. Categorisation can be both difficult and unprofitable: Gordon Wenham, for example, calls John Van Seters' approach a "modified documentary hypothesis," but Van Seters himself calls it supplementary.

One point of real contention between competing models is the issue of the redactor, or editor. For the documentary model, the redactor is crucial: it was he (or they) who combined the originally separate documents. Fragmentary models also depend on an editor, to unite the original fragments. But for those who follow a supplementary model, such as Van Seters, the key figure is the author, who creates, rather than merely collates, his material.

Current developments (post-1970)

In the 1970s a number of books appeared which had a profound impact on Pentateuchal criticism. The most important included John Van Seters' "Abraham in History and Tradition" (1975), Hans Heinrich Schmid's "Der sogenannte Jahwist" ("The So-called Jahwist", 1976), Rolf Rendtorff's "Der uberlieferungsgeschichtliche Problem des Pentateuch" ("The Problem of the Process of Transmission in the Pentateuch", 1977), Thomas L. Thompson's "The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives", and R.N. Whybray's "The Making of the Pentateuch: A Methodological Study" (1987). Collectively, they questioned the assumptions, and thus the conclusions, which had so far formed the discipline, pointing out that source criticism was based on assumptions drawn from modern Western literature which could not necessarily be applied to ancient Near Eastern texts, and that the assumptions of genre and "sitz im leben" underlying form criticism and tradition history were ultimately arbitrary and untestable. The result was to through the field open again to the full range of possible interpretations which had existed before the documentary hypothesis attained its dominance in the mid-19th century: " [T] he study of the Pentateuch is in ferment... [but] no new paradigm or scholarly consensus has emerged to displace the old theories".

See also

* Documentary hypothesis

* Biblical criticism

Notes

External links

* Collins, John J. " [http://books.google.com.kh/books?id=9kxLOH5XaAMC&printsec=frontcover&hl=en&sig=qL2V2AVZTEmk5stGTVZg0Io1zKc&vq=%22The+Pentateuch+in+the+Twentieth+Century%22&source=gbs_book_citations_r&cad=2_1#PPP1,M1 "The Bible After Babel:] Historical Criticism in a Postmodern Age", 2005.

* Mayes, A.D.H. [http://books.google.com/books?id=CVfH2AOAgrsC&pg=PA73&dq=pentateuchal+criticism&lr=&ei=Z0dRSP25GZTIsQOOg-RN&sig=zKU3QdYsz54SoVlYz_G-g623fmQ#PPA73,M1 "Historiography in the Old Testament".] In John Barton (ed.), "The Biblical World", 2002.

* Nicholson, Ernest. " [http://books.google.com.kh/books?hl=km&id=ZscbVSpEFNkC&dq=nicholson+pentateuch+in+twentieth+century&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=1RJ07C1lJY&sig=MUr749Pj6ZNN5IgjHdsHGmzs3TM The Pentateuch in the Twentieth Century:] The Legacy of Julius Wellhausen", 1998.

* Seters, John van. [http://books.google.com.kh/books?id=T-Vi9eK_vS0C&pg=PA58&lpg=PA58&dq=pentateuchal+studies&source=web&ots=YFcv_ZWkOK&sig=ZHcmK7qIw0isZ4_0aI-liFOtk8Y&hl=km#PPP1,M1 "The Pentateuch: A Social-Science Commentary",] 2002.

* Vervenne, Marc. [http://books.google.com/books?id=Q1jJsLesojYC&pg=PA37&dq=pentateuchal+criticism&lr=&ei=n0BRSLDkDKHytAPFy_hO&sig=nrmLQXkewB4_6_0_3YCyo-2AGUE#PPA41,M1 "Genesis 1,1-2,4:] The Compositional Texture of the Priestly Overture to the Pentateuch". In A. Wenin (ed.), "Studies in the Book of Genesis". Papers presented at the 48th Colloquium Biblicum Lovaniense, July 28-30, 1999.

* Wenham, Gordon. [http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/article_pentateuch_wenham.html "Pentateuchal Studies Today".] "Themelios" 22 (1996).