Biblical Authorship

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Nobody really has any clear idea who wrote Biblical texts or exactly when they were written and redacted.  The Documentary Hypothesis of the Torah, as well as other critical hypotheses of the New Testament and other scriptures of the world like the Hindu Vedas and the Confucian Analects the the Daoist Dao De Jing, are all based on conjecture and hypotheses which are continually debated.  It just depends how reasonable the conjectures are.  The DH, or thories revolving around New Testament authorship, for instance, are not only based on historical conjecture about when the texts came into being or who did the writing, but about the diction used in a text, a text's literary style, common themes that appear in parts of texts and not in others, ect.  

So, for instance, when different sections of the  Torah always use consistent place-names along with consistent names for God together as opposed to other sections, or when one section makes reference to a specific narrative for an event while another section gives an alternative narrative for the same event, it's not unreasonable to conjecture that the sections were written by different authors.   Or, when for instance the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament Gospel of John are written in poetically beautiful, philosophically sophisticated and grammatically immaculate Greek and the corresponding manuscripts of the Book of Revelation are written in choppy and uneven prose that looks like it was written by a school-child, contining as it does a frequent number of grammatical errors, it's not unreasonable to suppose there were different authors, copying and transmission errors, ect. ect.  The exact same kinds of arguments go on, as mentioned, with regard to scriptures of author religious traditions.  I have read textual analyses of the Confucian Analects for instance that look closely at the Chinese diction and topical inconsistancies and hypothesize that no two of the aphorisms that make up the entire text were written by the same author.  

The authorship theories are of course conjectural, and they get revised all the time.  What is really at stake in these theories, what has been at stake rom the beginning for religious believers of all different traditions, is the idea that the texts may have not been revealed directly by a divine being and transmitted through scribes who made no errors.  Nobody gets offended when a textual scholar analyzes the Homeric epics using these same kinds of techniques because very few people (but there are still some!) worship Zeus and Apollo, but some (hardly all) Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists ect. are offended to have their religious scriptures analyzed like "mere" historical narratives written by fallible authors and transmitted by redactors who make mistakes or add their own "editorials" to the texts, because that can (though it doesn't have to) put too much at stake.

For my part, I have no idea who wrote the Torah or when.  I think it's reasonable to think that the five books were the result of a massive collaborative effort that spanned centuries.  Were the authors inspired by God?  That's a question of faith.

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The Documentary Hypothesis, as I understand it, is based on a lot more than just name usage, although name-usage is one tip about authorship.  According to the ways it is described in in old textbook of mine, Lawrence Boadt's Reading the Old Testament, the hypothesis revolves around general ways that stories are told, how God is described, what diction is used not just for God but lots of things like place-names, ect.  According to the hypothesis, J only uses YHWH (a proper name, and not a generic term, for God), contains narratives of God talking directly and intimately with people, tells intimate stories about leaders, is focused on the concerns of the kingdom of Judah, always uses the term Sinai and always refers to natives as Canaanites, while E always uses only "elohim," describes God as majestic and far often, often has God speaking to people in dreams, stesses prophecy, stresses concerns of northern kingdom of Israel, always uses the term "Horeb" and describes natives as Amorites, and P at times uses compound names for God (YHWH-Elohim) and writes a lot of lists and details about ritual schemes.  So, some examples of these different themes other than the two Genesis creation stories are the three different stories of how the patriarch les about his wife being his sister in Gen. 12, 20 and 26 or the two stories about how Abraham sends Hagar to the desert in Gen. 16 and 21 or the two stories of Moses' commission in Exodus 3 and 6.

The Documentary Hypothesis, as I said, is only one hypothesis among many before and since, and of course it's conjectural, but it's meant to explain a very wide array of literary phenomena in Biblical texts, not just different name-usages.

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This is about as convincing as going through the posts of jmfcst, separating the distinct themes, and dealing out those distinct themes to a group of imaginary authors, thus claiming convincing evidence of multiple authors.

Your posts don't exhibit as much literary diversity as books of the Bible do.

Ok, this has officially descended into utter stupidity. 

Your kindness and civility are, as always, appreicated. 

How in the world is it not conceivable that in those lawless times, a man with a beautiful wife would be killed by lawless men because the lawless men wanted the man’s beautiful wife?  And how is it not conceivable that Abraham would tell a lie (that Sarah, his wife, was only his sister) in order to protect his own life, and once the lie worked in one country (Gen 12), Abraham repeated the lie in another country (Gen 20)?  And how is it not conceivable that Isaac would take after his father Abraham and repeat the same lie (Gen 26)?

How in the world does Abraham and his son conducting the same simple scam multiple times mean that there must be multiple authors?! 

Seems pretty clear to me that a man traveling with a beautiful wife in those days would face the same danger in a lot of different towns, so you simply claim she is not your wife, and in order to answer “If she is not your wife, then why are you traveling with her?”, you simply claim that she is your sister.  It is also clear to me that there would be no need to come up with a different scam for each instance. 

Well, your argument here is based on "conceivability" and what "seems pretty clear" to you.  So you, like the supporters of the Documentary Hypothesis, are appealing to subjective standards of plausibility.  Interpretation involves conjecture, no matter who is doing it.

Anyway, I'm puzzled why a multiple authorship hypothesis is so threatening.  For someone who has faith in the divine authorship or inspiration of Biblical texts, what difference does it make whether God inspired one author or several, or whether God inspired one author to tell a story in several different ways or multiple authors to tell a story in different ways?  It seems to me that if one believes a text is divinely inspired, it doesn't really matter how many transcribers were involved, since the issue of inspiration is a matter of faith in the first place anyway.

Look, I'm not particularly committed to the Documentary Hypothesis.  Like I said, I don't know who wrote the Bible, how many people were involved or exactly when.  Actually, in my own work, I translate texts from Sanskrit and Chinese and work with other scholars who do too.  When we look at very ancient texts that have been copied and transmitted for hundreds of years, like Biblical texts were, and we notice different diction used that seems, based on other texts of similar time periods, to come from different centuries, when we see the same or similar narratives told in completely different literary styles in the same work, and so on, we often conjecture that different authors wrote or edited different parts of texts, we disagree with each other, and lots of conjectures are bandied about regarding authorship.  If you were given one long English text, and you saw in it a Biblical story first narrated in Shakespearean English, then again in prose and diction comperable to Mark Twain, then again in language that looks like it was drafted by a modern-day lawyer, one of the first possibilities that goes through you're mind is multiple authorship.  That's often exactly what reading ancient texts is like.  No one really knows who authored most ancient texts, scholars come up with hypotheses, and they are called hypotheses for a reason, because they are contestable guesses based on debatable evidence.  In my experience, any scholar claiming to know the ancient world very intimately and precisely is like someone taking a pen light and shining it into outer space and claiming one knows the universe to every last astronomical detail.  Interpretation is always conjectural, and one rarely goes wrong exercising some intellectual humility.

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Nice.

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There are several reasons scholars suspect multiple authorship of a story in Genesis 12, 20 and 26.  You find the sequence of stories entirely credible, and that's one possible view of them.  But other scholars have some basic questions about the sequence of events as told, and they go something like this:

Firstly, why would Abraham pull the same scheme in Genesis 20 on king Abimelech that he did to Pharaoh in Genesis 12 when the scheme didn't work the first time and endangered the family and the covenant?  In the Gen. 12 story, Abraham gets Sarah to tell Pharaoh she is his sister, and since Pharaoh finds her beautiful, Pharaoh takes Sarah into his palace.  God, very displeased, sends plagues on Pharaoh and his family because he doesn't want Sarah there.  Pharaoh figures it out and then has Abraham and his family escorted back to the Negreb, where Abraham had fled to Egypt from in the first place because there was a famine.  So, Abraham's scheme in Genesis 12 put the covenant in danger and failed.

So then, we are to believe that, after the scandalous events that close Genesis 19, Abraham goes to Negreb, and tells Abimelech the same thing, that Sarah is her sister.  God warns off Abimelech in a dream, but makes all the women of his family barren until he returns Sarah to Abraham.  Abimelech does so, returns Sarah, gives Abraham gifts and settlement privileges in order to heal his own family.  God prevents disaster again, but only after Abraham has supposedly pulled the same very unwise scheme twice.

Then, in Genesis 26, another famine strikes the land, as in the first story, so Isaac flees the and goes again to Negreb, to the same king in the second story, Abimelech, and spreads the story that Rebekah is his sister.  The king catches Isaac in the lie and scolds him for threatening the whole land with God's punishment had any of his subjects taken Rebekah for themselves. 

So, I guess scholars who read these stories together find the sequence of events improbable as told.  First Abraham puts his wife in another man's court and endangers both the land and the covenant, the king throws him out and back into a terriory from which they were fleeing famine in the first place.  A little while later, Abraham supposedly does the same thing despite the almost disastrous consequences, and God's displeasure, the first time he tried it, and he is again caught.  One generation later, Abraham's son pulls the same scheme after a famine with the same king on whom Abraham pulled the second scheme.  So, what are we to assume if all these events happened as told, ask some readers?  First of all, Abraham must be an extraordinarily reckless, foolish fellow for continually putting his own and his family's welfare in danger, not to mention the welfare of the covenant and the continual risking of God's displeasure.  And supposedly, Abraham and Isaac must not have spoken that much, at least not enough for Abraham to have warned Isaac: "hey, don't tell these kings that Rebekah is your sister; I got caught doing that twice and it caused me a lot of headaches and God got pretty angry about the whole thing.  And especially don't do it with Abimelech, because I already tried it on him."  And what of this king Abimelech; he must be rather slow given the fact that he is taken in by the same lie all the time and it always puts the welfare of his family and land in jepordy.  Why doesn't Abimelech ever say to himself: "Gee, I'd better be suspicious about the patriarchs of this tribe telling us that their beautiful women are sisters."  This all seems rather incredibly unlikely to some readers, so they look at the three stories, notice some very similar cycles and details but different ways of telling the story, and they suspect that a basic narrative is getting rehashed. 

So, it doesn't seem unlikely to you.  Good for you.  But the reasons some scholars come up with such interpretations are not because they want to attack God (many of them are believers), and it's not because they are "stupid," but they are puzzled by some things that they read in a text and they try to figure out how to explain it.

Anyway, I'll end my participation in this discussion at this point, and you can have your territory back and go right on being nasty to people, inspiring example of Christian love that you unfailingly are.

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jmfcst,

You seem to think that, because Abraham was initially rewarded by Pharaoh and Abimelech for this lie, and that he was allowed to leave Egypt with his posessions and got money from Abimelech in the second story, that the scheme worked and Abraham got a good deal.  I think this interpetation confuses sequence for consequence.  You also seem to believe that Isaac's lie about Rebekah to Abimelech leads to his success.  In this case, no such consequence is suggested by the story.  You also overlook the fact that, in each story, not only are the patriarchs' lies revealed, but in the first two, it's God himself who puts an end to the lie.  Let's look at each of the stories. 

Abraham did not profit in Genesis 12 after Pharaoh found out he had been lying about his wife being his sister.  Pharaoh did give Abraham considerable livestock when he took Sarah into his court, but God's plagues reveal to Pharaoh that Abraham lied to him.  When Pharaoh found out, he had Abraham escorted out of Egypt.  Abraham is allowed to keep what he got before the lie is discovered, but he is also kicked out of the country and driven back to a land from which he had originally fled famine.  That doesn't sound like a reward for his behavior.  It sounds like a divorce settlement, where someone is told; "yeah, go ahead and take that tv I bought you, just get the hell out of here."  At the beginning of chapter 13, it says that Abraham was rich with "livestock, silver and gold" (13:2), but in the story about Pharaoh, we are told that Pharaoh gave Abraham livestock plus men and women-slaves, and no mention is made of silver and gold (12:16).  It seems then that not all of Abraham's wealth after returning from Egypt was due to the gifts he was given by Pharaoh upon the taking of Sarah, so we can't really automatically infer that all Abraham's good fortunes were due to this scheme.  The major result of the scheme in fact was that he got kicked out of a country he wanted to be in so he could escape famine.

In Genesis 20, Abimelech gave Abraham livestock and 10,000 shekels, but not as a reward for deceiving him, but presumably to acquire Abraham's assistance in bringing the curse off of his house after God has revealed to Abimelech that Abraham had lied to him.  The scheme does not work because Abraham plotted it all out that way; in fact, Abraham is given money not because the scheme worked, but because it didn't!  God himself came to Abimelech in a dream and told him the truth in order to prevent what would have been a grave sin, so it's not as if God is condoning the scheme!  Abraham is only compensated because God threated Abimelech with punishment for almost taking another man's wife; Abimelech is protecting himself by buying off God's punishment, he is not rewarding Abraham for putting his life and court in danger.  We are not given the impression that God is recommending or advocating Abraham's behavior, and I will return to this in a second.

In Genesis 26, Abimelech does not reward Isaac for having deceived his countrymen, he in fact scolds Isaac and warns the ciitzens to stay away from Isaac's wife.  So, once again, Isaac has been caught in the lie, and in this case, Abimelech does not give him anything.  Isaac does stay in the land and reaps great harvests the following year, but no indication at all is given that this good fortune has any causal connection with Abimelech's having been deceived; the good harvests are not Isaac's reward for the scheme, they are merely God fulfilling his covenent with the descendents of Abraham.  In fact, Abimelech asks Isaac to leave Gerar in 26:16 because Isaac has become more powerful than he.  If Isaac was Abimelech's beneficiary as a result of the deception incident, how could that happen?
 
One other common element from these stories is God's displeasure.  God is angry at Pharaoh for taking Sarah into his court, and he is angry with Abimelech for the same reason; he sends plagues to Pharaoh and threatens to kill Abimelech and his whole family.  If God wanted to enrich Abraham even further by means of this scheme, why didn't he let Sarah stay in Pharaoh's court even longer instead of slamming Pharaoh's land with disease and putting an end to the scheme?  If God's intention was to fulfill his covenent through these deception schemes, why didn't God just have Abimelech hand over the throne to Abraham or Isaac, while he was at it (he was after all being threatened with death in  the first story and dreaded grievous punishment in the second)?  Are we supposed to think that God not only condones but enables extortion schemes that involve placing your wife, by lying about her identity, in another man's court as long as you can get some cash out of it? 

I understand the Hebrew Bible to be teaching the lesson that God has made a covenent with Abraham, and when God makes a covenent, God fulfils that covenent out of "hessed," faithful love for those he has chosen, even when his chosen are not faithful to him.  This happens over and over again in the Bible.  But these stories don't give any indication that Abraham is rewarded because he schemed in this way and therefore it was a good sceme to perpetuate and pass on; they do give overt indication that God is not happy with this behavior and what it might have led to.  God blesses Abraham and his decendants because God made a promise, not because these schemes were anything God approved of.     

 

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To get back then to the theme of this thread about Biblical authorship, everything above about the failure of each of the schemes as originally planned is precisely why some scholars suspect that this scheme being repeated three times, twice by the same patriarch and once by his son, is implausible. The stories all show that 1. the patriarchs are caught lying when the kings or people they lie to take or contemplate taking their wives, and in two of these cases, it's God who reveals the lie; 2. the patriarchs are in two of the stories punished in greater or lesser ways (exiled or scolded) and in one is bought off by a king who fears God will wipe him out if he doesn't; yes, the patriarchs come away in two of the stories with more cash and booty than they started with, but these are not evidence that the scheme was a great idea and 3. the lies lead to behavior that incurs God's displeasure in the first two stories.  So, the whole notion that the patriarchs would keep repeating these schemes despite the facts that their lies are exposed every time and the potentially grave outcomes of the schemes, emphasized in each version by the kings who were lied to and by God himself, are narrowly avoided seems pretty unlikely on the face of it.

Like I said before, I didn't get into this discussion for the purpose of defending the documentary hypothesis as it has been articulated.  As I've said, more than once, I don't know who wrote the Bible or when.  If God is the ultimate inspiration behind the Bible, which is a matter of faith, then it doesn't ultimately matter how many people wrote it.  All I'm saying is that it's not unreasonable to hypothesize that even individual books of the Bible are compilations by many authors that were working with lots of different traditional oral narratives and weaved them together into what we now have as the present form of the books.  I don't think that hypothesis, in and of itself, does any danger to faith.

I think that dead horses should be buried decently, but may jesters never die!

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First, jmfcst, since you apparently think that my interpretation is a function of my lack of faith, here are commentaries on the first story in Gen 12 by Christian believers, both classical and modern, who do not regard Abraham's behavior as laudible at all in their interpretations on this story.

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom01.xviii.i.html#xviii.i-p0.1

http://www.studylight.org/com/mhc-com/view.cgi?book=ge&chapter=012

http://www.studylight.org/com/acc/view.cgi?book=ge&chapter=012

http://www.biblestudytools.net/Commentaries/JamiesonFaussetBrown/jfb.cgi?book=ge&chapter=12

Or, how about Jewish interpretations of the story in Genesis 12?

http://urj.org/PrintItem/index.cfm?id=3125&type=Articles

One should look further into how the traditional Mishnah and Talmud
relate the significance of these stories.  The book is after all in the
Hebrew Bible.

Secondly, I never said that scholars were always noble and disinterested readers.  I said above that they do a lot of guesswork.  I also said that the DH was not necessarily the right interpretation.  The question was why some scholars favor multiple authorship hypotheses, and that's how this whole discussion arose. 

Finally, if you want to find a hack and an ass, have a look in the nearest mirror, dude.  I'm not the one bursting into adolescent temper tantrums and hurling insults at people or acting like he is the only authority on earth about Biblical literature.  You represent yourself to me and all the readers in this forum as the grand authority on Christianity.  But I don't think you are a Christian at heart at all, so I won't insult the many sincere Christians whom I respect by including you in their company.  You are nothing but a rude, boorish punk who imagines that the Bible gives him the self-righteous privilege of condeming people who don't believe exactly as you do, and what's more, you take pride in all this, behavior that only proves how incredibly insecure you are in both your "faith" and your person.  But these are your problems, not mine.  These are the last words I am going to say to you; I have much better things to do with my time then talk with you.  Go chase yourself.

 

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Dear Supersoulty,

Thank you very much for your post and your encouragement.  I appreciate your advice and will follow it.

I apologize to the forum for my immediately preceding post.  I didn't mean to lose it like that and was trying to advoid it, but I just got exasperated by the constant insults.  The strategy you suggest is the one I will take from now on.

Thanks again.