Here are a couple links that have researched the issue in depth:
http://www.tektonics.org/TK-J.html#jedp Scroll down to “JEDP Theory”
This one is more in-depth:
question for Leolaia - when were the oral traditions that comprise the pentateuch committed to written form
by quietlyleaving 21 Replies latest watchtower bible
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quietlyleaving
thanks guys.
What I need to do is go back back over some of the old discussions on JWN/JWD regarding the subject because I realize that there have been loads.
One thing I would question is the idea that there is a truth waiting to be discovered. I wonder if it is that we want to make a truth for ourselves instead that drives us to see a unifying truth in the bible as whole. If this is the case (that we want ot make a unifying truth for ourselves) then isn't it possible to see that the bible has many truths? This is what I see Jesus saying
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behemot
There's no such a thing as a "unified truth" in the Bible, since its parts were written over time for different purposes and with different (religious, political, ideological) agendas.
To have an idea of their diversity just look at Genesis, whose different sources (J, E, D, P according to the "documentary hypothesis") don't even agree on the most important theological idea: the nature of God (see E. S. Gerstenberger, Theologies in the Old Testament, Minneapolis, Fortress Press 2002).
For instance, J, E and D describe a very personal Yahweh: he walks on earth, takes visible forms, debates with men. In J's creation and flood account, God walks in the garden, makes garments for men, is afraid that they may eat the fruit of the tree of life, personally closes the ark's door, smells Noah's sacrifice and is worried about men's potential after they build Babel's tower. Instead, P's God is more "cosmic" and transcendent. In P's accounts of creation and flood, Yahweh is always detached, commanding and controlling men from on high. For instance, in the mount Sinai account, Yahweh himself descends in the fire and talks face to face with Moses according to J (Exodus 19:18), but not according to P. According to sources J and E, Yahweh is seen by Moses (Exodus chp. 33, 34), while in P is impossible to see him.
In source J, Abraham can discuss with Yahweh about Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18:23-33) and also Moses can discuss with God the fate of the people (Numbers 14:13-20). Also in source E, Moses argues about the people's destiny in the story of the golden cow (Exodus 32:11-13) and debates with Yahweh "face to face, just as a man would speak to his fellow" (Exodus 33:11). He can even dare holding against God his unfairness:
Then Moses said to Jehovah: “Why have you caused evil to your servant, and why have I not found favor in your eyes, in placing the load of all this people upon me? (...) So if this is the way you are doing to me, please kill me off altogether, if I have found favor in your eyes, and let me not look upon my calamity.”
In source D Moses can plead Yahweh, though without success, to let him get to the Promise Land (Deuteronomy 3:23-28). In source P, Yahweh and men never talk to each other with such nearness and intimacy: God is closed in his distant transcendence, whence he impart commands and orders that his will be made (Genesis 1:3,9; 6:22; Exodus 7:6; 39:32) and the only way to get in touch with him is the sacrificial rite, whose only authorized ministers are the aaronite priests, performing in the institutional cultual site.
Source P's God is a legalist, distant judge, with a strict ethic of retribution, rewarding obedience and punishing transgression, subordinating forgiveness to strict observance of precise rules and procedures and in his vocabulary words as "mercy" and "repentance" are unknown. On the other hand, sources J and E stress God's mercy and the idea that sin can be forgiven through repentance (Exodus 34:6, 7). In sources J, E and D Yahweh himself often repents of his intentions to destroy his people (Exodus 32:7-14; Numbers 14:13-20), in source P, instead, Yahweh decides the people's fate, without appeal (Numers 14:26-39).
The God that emerges from the different sources differs also in the way he views the various characters of the stories: while the Yahweh of J and E seems to prefer Moses to Aaron, the Yahweh describe by P prefers Aaron to Moses (see R. E. Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?, pp. 168-174).
The final combination by the Redactor(s) of the J, E, D and P sources (each of whom apparently considered non orthodox the theology of the other sources) caused the surfacing of a "hybrid" Yahweh, that J, E, D and P themselves would have considered unreal. By melting the sources, the redactor(s) ended up combining different and often incompatible concepts of Yahweh, obtaining a new, and psychologically more complex, God, a God who could at the same time be metaphysical and distant but also "human" and personal, just and yet merciful, irate and compassionate, strict and yet inclined to forgiveness. This outcome was not planned by J, E, D and P, but was somehow "accidental" and unforeseen, although artistically "dramatic" and theologically fertile, in that it multiplies the range of possible interpretations.
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quietlyleaving
thanks behemot
Something I want to check is whether or not the J, P etc sources are still seen as reliable and as making such clearly disparate separations of God as in the past. Some scholars are distancing themselves from this. Have you heard anything about this? But I think it is still true that the bible presents opposites of God's personality.
I have tried to search Leo's posts but have had disappointing results with the search engine on this forum. Leo did say she was thinking of starting a blog - this will be very useful I think, but of course I won't hold her to it as I know it will take a huge chunk of time! BTW is Leo on holiday?
I have a question for you Mad Dawg. I browsed through your site, but not in detail yet unfortunately. One thing I was struck by, and have pondered myself, is this: When we use the reasoning that Jesus mentioned Noah's day for example, it means that Jesus was verifying that the flood happened. I'm not disputing this but was led to another question - What is the difference between truth and reality or between what is true and verifiable and what is real. Thoughts?
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quietlyleaving
okay behemot I've reread your post above and realise that somehow I got your post mixed up with mad Dawg's site sorry, I was on my hubby's computer as I am between computers at the moment. its only when i come to my daughters that I can spend a little time reading properly and spouting less!
what i ought to have made clear is that the J & E sections of the Torah are no longer considered to date from the 10th century BC/earlier and many think that the writing of the torah took place between the 7th and 4th century BC, and in fact they (the J & E sources) do suggest quite disparate representations of God.
Okay now that I've got that done I'll go back to sleep!
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Leolaia
Yeah, this is a really complex issue you brought up and there are lots of different ideas and theories in the published literature on the composition of the Pentateuch. The 19th-century classical analysis of four independent discrete pre-exilic and exilic sources (JEPD) combined by a post-exilic redactor (among other sources) has given way to other trends in analysis. One is to question whether the "sources" were written sources or oral traditions, another is whether the sources had independent existence prior to the redaction (i.e. was the compositional process more like that of the Diatessaron where four pre-existing sources were edited together, or was it more like 1 Enoch or Isaiah where you have a rolling corpus of material being interpolated and embedded into an ever-expanding work?). One important trend has been to question whether "E" was ever an independent source or just an interpolation into "J". The other more recent trend is to redate the various strata of material, usually in the direction of later rather than earlier dates. "J" and "E" are not dated so early anymore, and many prefer dates several centuries later (my thinking for "J" is more like the 8th-to-7th centuries BC). Another trend is to move the date of "P" earlier from exilic to the late exilic period, and to move "D" from the Josianic moment to the post-exilic period. If the Pentateuch was a rolling corpus, then it may not have reached its final form until quite late (although components within it may be much earlier). The "minimalist" sector of biblical studies has moved the date of the Pentateuch all the way into the Hellenistic era; one recent book regards the LXX as the original, written in response to Manetho and Berossus. This view imo is far too extreme; it has implicit attractiveness in terms of parallels in genre but the linguistic facts just don't cohere well at all with the dating (without special pleading about "archaizing" styles for the Hebrew).
What I wrote last year was with respect to the other extreme view, that the Pentateuch was written in the Late Bronze Age by Moses (whenever one dates the exodus). The Society puts Moses as early as the 16th-15th centuries BC. The linguistic facts show clearly that the work could not date as early as this because we know from sources from that period (Ugaritic sources, Palestinian Canaanite in the Ras Shamra tablets, the Proto-Siniatic inscriptions, etc.) that the sound and grammatical changes that produced the kind of Hebrew found in the Pentateuch had not happened yet. And with this independent source of information, we can see that certain poetic texts in the OT (such as Exodus 15, Judges 5, etc.) belong to an earlier stage of the Hebrew language than what is found in the prose (and yet not as archaic as the kind of NW Semitic spoken in the LBA). This is not just a matter of the prose being updated or something lke that; for example, we can see that the author of the prose surrounding the Song of the Sea in Exodus 15 misunderstood the tense/aspect in the poem (owing to the linguistic changes that occurred after the composition of the Song of the Sea), which allowed him (?) to place the poem on the lips of Moses prior to the conquest of Canaan (i.e. in view of the narrative of the conquest), when in fact the poem refers to these events as already lying in the past. The language found in the Pentateuch also is quite different from what is found in post-exilic Hebrew (with its Aramaisms, Persian influences, and ties to Qumranic and Mishnaic Hebrew), and the recent linguistic studies by Frank Polak I find persuasive as linking the Hebrew in much of what is considered "J" or "JE" with the kind of "classical" Hebrew found in 1-2 Samuel and Judges, with "P" belonging to a later more intermediate stage between classical and post-exilic Hebrew, such as what is found in works dating to the late 7th century and through the 6th century BC. In particular, the Hebrew and style in "D" is very, very similar to Jeremiah (such that I suspect that Jeremiah is probably dependent on "D") while "P" is very close to Ezekiel, while some of its turns of phrase is also close to what is found in Deutero-Isaiah, both works belonging to the exilic era. So I am a bit of a traditionalist in terms of Pentateuchal source analysis, thinking of the archaic poetic parts as probably dating to the 11th-9th centuries BC (later tho than the more conversative dating to the 13th-11th centuries BC), "J" and "JE" dating to the 8th-6th centuries BC (with it being difficult to distinguish between the oral and written stages), "D" dating to the late 7th or early 6th century BC, and "P" dating to the exilic period, with secondary redactions to "J" possibly occurring in the exilic period as well (particularly in the primeval narrative, where there is strong influence from Babylonian sources). If the Pentateuch was a rolling corpus, which is quite likely, then the question of which came first and what was interpolated later. I prefer the primacy of "J", into which "E" was interpolated, and then this work was interpolated with "P" which I doubt ever existed as an independent work (and portions of "JE" were deleted or replaced when "P" was inserted). But there were likely insertions and redactions all the way into the Hellenistic era (and with the MT, all the way to the standardization of the text in Late Antiquity), as was common in any work of the era. The ages associated with the primeval genealogy of "P" in the MT, for instance, is demonstrably secondary to that found in either the LXX and the SP, and those diverged in the Persian or Hellenistic eras.
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quietlyleaving
thank you very much Leo you are a star
am copying this to word so I can read at my leisure and will come back later
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quietlyleaving
Hi Leo
"What I wrote last year was with respect to the other extreme view, that the Pentateuch was written in the Late Bronze Age by Moses (whenever one dates the exodus). "
(boxes don't seem to work for me anymore).
Leo would you please direct me to a link of the above discussion if you can remember where it was.
thanks
ql
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quietlyleaving
thanks Leo - just what I was looking for. I do have a vague memory of reading the thread 7 months ago. So this rang a bell when I read in my course books that when the traditional oral stories began to be written down people then tried to make sense of them and they underwent changes. A sort of interal critique began to manifest itself in the stories. So ancient writings (particulary those that want to be seen as whole but are by different authors) do have these tensions running through them. I think this is part of the beauty of the Bible and if we engage with this aspect it can be very rewarding and faith building too.