Hypothesis: Documentary

Joel Baden, The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012)

Today we’ll wrap up talking about those particular sorts of biblical contradictions generated when two texts have been combined into one by weaving the original sources together, sentence by sentence. We’ll do it by talking about a book by one of my old professors, Joel Baden. I’m going to pull rank and call him Joel, as he’s an all-around great guy.

It took me eleven years and three tries to finish this book, but that’s entirely a reflection on me, not on Joel’s work. This book is as lucid as something so scholarly can be. The “Documentary Hypothesis” refers to the idea that the first five books of the Bible, the Torah, were originally four independent texts that at some point in Israelite history were combined into one. These sources were continuous, and therefore obviously quite lengthy. This idea was one of the first things I encountered in my pre-grad school study of the Bible, courtesy of Richard Elliot Friedman. But then my passion became Hellenistic Judaism (300 BCE to 70 CE), and the Documentary Hypothesis referred to a time perhaps a few centuries earlier (say, 700-400 BCE). I just wasn’t grounded in the conversation, and so wasn’t able to get into this book.

I got into it big this time. I’d always wanted to write about contradictions in the Bible, and this forum finally presented an opportunity. Once I started on that, I knew it was only a matter of time before I would finally be able to read Joel’s book.

Okay, here’s the conversation Joel is part of here. He’s defending a modern version of the Documentary Hypothesis, the idea that four large continuous sources underlie the Torah as we have it. Old nineteenth-century versions depended entirely on style—lists of words and phrases that were “typical” of one source or another. Joel’s method aims to be entirely based on narrative: detecting places where the final biblical text as we have it shows the signs of tension that we found in the Noah story, the story of Joseph being sold into slavery, and the rebels in the wilderness. By sorting those out, and then connecting them by cross-references in the text to larger chunks of the original sources that are told by only one of those sources, he is able to argue for four coherent sources. So he thinks the basic sources are more or less the same as the earlier scholars, but he arrives at them in a different way.

Here is the idea of more modern scholars Joel is writing against, working from what’s called a tradition-critical method. The tradition method posits that we need first to identify the oldest version of each story—for example, the Flood story. To do that, you strip out everything that is not absolutely essential to the plot, reducing to its most basic sequence of events. That is the original version of the story. Everything else has been added in layers by later editors whose method was to preserve what had gone before them, but to put their own political and theological spin on it. So in the case of the flood story, there aren’t two authors and one editor, but one author and potentially more than a dozen editors, some of whom contributed only a word or two. On Wednesday. Around tea-time.

I kid, but there are some major problems with the tradition method. Determining the ideology of a full biblical story isn’t easy; determining the ideology of a couple of words is almost surely ascribing ourselves too much intelligence. The base version of the story generated by the tradition method isn’t always coherent. But even when it is, there’s a more basic problem: the assumption that people in the past were less complicated than we are, and that they could only comprehend brief, unconnected narratives. Joel never uses this word, but I will. This presumption is frankly racist, and completely unsupported by anthropological literature. So-called “primitive” people are as capable of generating and enjoying long narratives as we are. So the whole effort is misguided.

That’s not to say I don’t have some quibbles for Joel. The most important one is that I think there is more of the original sources that the editor left out than Joel does. Recall how there is no instruction to build the Ark in one of the sources of the Flood story; there is no account of how Joseph came to be with his brothers in one story, which then ends precipitately on Reuben’s anguished cry; and how there seems to be a fourth rebel, On, in the rebellion story, who is otherwise unknown.

The biggest example is that the same source as the blue stories, in the Joseph and Dathan and Abiram stories, lacks anything like a beginning. (The blue story in the Flood account is a different source. Sorry for the confusion.) Its account of the Exodus and the Wilderness is nice and coherent, but what we have begins suddenly with Abraham in the middle of a story. Joel posits that perhaps the original copy of this document deteriorated so that the beginning was lost. He posits this to rescue his argument that the editor who put the four sources together kept essentially everything they had.

I think this is unlikely on archaeological and narrative grounds. While we know from the Dead Sea Scrolls that the outside of a scroll deteriorates faster than the inside, we also know that they also tend to deteriorate from the bottom up, regardless of inside or outside. So if the scroll with this version of the patriarchs’ stories was in bad enough shape to lose its beginning, it would have lost large amounts of its middle and end as well. Anyhow, a deteriorating scroll with essential tales would have been recopied onto a fresh scroll long before that happened.

On narrative grounds, as I said above, I think there is actually quite a bit missing from the combined stories. I think the editor kept everything that they could, but in the face of contradictions they could not ignore or massage—like, for instance, two divergent divine instructions for the dimensions of the Ark, or two different plans for what to say to Jacob about Joseph—they did the only thing they thought they could do, and left out material.

I don’t think they left out much, though. The way they jam together Korah and Dathan and Abiram, which are more different stories than the Flood and Joseph-slavery stories are, says to me that the editor was determined to keep all they could. This accounts for the fact that the rebellion story is the only one of the three stories from the Torah we considered that betrays an editor’s hand. And what seems to be missing from these stories seems much less than what was kept (except perhaps in On’s case).

What does that say about the missing beginning of the Reuben/Dathan and Abiram source? I think it’s likely something in there contradicted the other two sources which are combined in Genesis (the fourth source is entirely found in the book of Deuteronomy), in such a way that it had to be left out. It may not be possible to reconstruct it from what’s left of that source, but it’s important to know that deletion was an option, just one the editor used as a last resort.

It was a tough balancing act: significant tensions and a few outright small contradictions were acceptable, but some contradictions asked too much. It’s a testament to the editor’s work that these things are so hard to notice, and only appear if you look very closely.

These are the sorts of contradictions I feel we need to live with in the Bible. The issue is what habit of reading we have when we read it. If it’s partly made of multiple and incommensurable sources, that says something about its deeper meaning. A book of instruction or history with contradictions in it is incoherent. But are there other kinds of books—poetry? myth?—that can contain contradictions without exploding?

Of course, to answer that, we’d need to know what poems and myths are. But that’s a subject for another day.