Bttt for the 04.22.2004 Awake! article...
Who has written the Pentateuch:The Watchtower and the Documentary's theory
by chasson 17 Replies latest watchtower bible
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Midget-Sasquatch
If I'm not mistaken, one will find the material in the english April 8th 2004 edition of Awake pg.8-9.
I don't have a scanner so I typed it all in below ---- Its not fun being a channel for the WT
Who Wrote the "Books of Moses"?
Traditionally, Moses has been credited with being the author of the first five books of the Bible, called the Pentateuch. Moses may have drawn some of his information from earlier historical sources. Many critics believe, though, that Moses did not write the Pentateuch at all. "It is thus clearer than the sun at noonday that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses", asserted the 17th-century philosopher Spinoza. In the latter half of the 19th century, the German scholar Julius Wellhausen popularized the "documentary" theory - that the books of Moses are an amalgam of the works of several authors or teams of authors.
Wellhausen said that one author consistently used the personal name of God, Jehovah, and is thus called J. Another, dubbed E, called God "Elohim". Another, P, supposedly wrote the priestly code in Leviticus, and yet another, called D, wrote Deuteronomy. Though some scholars have embraced this theory for decades, the book The Pentateuch, by Joseph Blenkinsopp, calls Wellhausen's hypothesis a theory "in crisis".
The book Introduction to the Bible, by John Laux explains: "The Documentary Theory is built up on assertions which are either arbitrary or absolutely false....If the extreme Doumentary Theory were true, the Isrealites would have been the victims of a clumsy deception when they permitted the heavy burden of the Law to be imposed upon them. It would have been the greatest hoax ever perpetrated in the history of the world."
Another argument is that stylistic differences in the Pentateuch are evidence of multiple authors. However, K.A. Kitchen notes in his book Ancient Orient and Old Testament: "Stylistic differences are meaningless, and reflect the differences in detailed subject-matter." Similar style variations can also be found "in ancient texts whose literary unity is beyond doubt."
The argument that the use of different names and titles for God is evidence of multiple authorship is particularly weak. In just one small portion of the book of Genesis, God is called "the Most High God", "Producer of heaven and earth", "Sovereign Lord Jehovah", "God of sight", "God Almighty", "God", "the true God", and "the Judge of all the earth." ( Genesis 14:18,19; 15:2; 16:13; 17:1,3,18; 18:25 ) Did different authors write each of these Bible texts? Or what about Genesis 28:13, where the terms "Elohim" (God) and "Jehovah" are used together? Did two authors collaborate to write that one verse?
The weakness of this line of reasoning becomes particularly evident when applied to a contemporary piece of writing. In one recent book about World War II, the chancellor of Germany is termed "Fuhrer", "Adolf Hitler", and simply "Hitler" in the course of just a few pages. Would anyone claim that this is evidence of three different authors?
Nevertheless, variations on Wellhausen's theories continue to proliferate. Among them is the theory propounded by two scholars regarding the so-called J author. They not only deny that it was Moses but also proclaim that "J was a woman".
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Leolaia
Is that the whole article or is there more?
The argumentation in that article is pretty poor. For example, note the following passage:
The weakness of this line of reasoning becomes particularly evident when applied to a contemporary piece of writing. In one recent book about World War II, the chancellor of Germany is termed "Fuhrer", "Adolf Hitler", and simply "Hitler" in the course of just a few pages. Would anyone claim that this is evidence of three different authors?
This analogy misses the whole point of the documentary hypothesis. It doesn't divide a text into putative "sources" simply on the basis of this one criterion. Instead it notes that the usage of certain other stylistic and linguistic features correlate with presence of one divine name or the other in the text. Since no other criteria is mentioned in the "Hitler" example that would correlate with the term of address, the analogy is obviously off-base. And this doesn't even address the issue of doublets and how one version of a story would incorporate the features typical of a "J" style and how another version of the same story would use features typical of "P" or "E". While it is easy to critique the deterministic specifications of the contents of J, E, and P which carve up the text and force ambiguous passages into one category or another, the Society hasn't addressed the heart of the matter -- the simple empirical observation that linguistic and stylistic features tend to correlate in consistent ways across the Pentateuchal text, including doublets.
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Narkissos
Thank you so much Midget-Sasquatch.
What Chasson points out (from the link in the first post), in effect, could be summed up this way: the answer (classical documentary theory) may be wrong, but this does not suppress the question.
Now the question does not arise from the use of several divine names in the Pentateuch. Not even from the obvious impossibility of a writing of the complete Pentateuch by Moses (see Farkel's threads and many others). It is an obvious question for the many contradictions of content within the Pentateuch.
Chasson quotes an example from Jean-Louis Ska: read Exodus 21:2-11, Deuteronomy 15:12-18 and Leviticus 25:39-46, and ask yourself:
What is the valid law about slavery? Is the slave to be set free after 6 years (Deuteronomy, Exodus) or at the Jubilar year (Leviticus)? After 6 years, is only the male slave to be set free (Exode) or the female servant too (Deuteronomy)? Is it lawful to buy a Hebrew slave (Exodus, Deuteronomy), or is it forbidden (Leviticus)?
Chasson notes that Joseph Blenkinsopp, the only contemporary scholar quoted by the Awake! article, actually believes (as many today) in two main strata in the Pentateuch, one Deuteronomistic and the other Priestly, which were blended into one Torah at the Persian empire's demand. Who would guess that from the Awake quotation?
He reveals that John Laux' Introduction to the Bible is a Catholic textbook published in 1932, more than 20 years before Catholic scholars were allowed to get into historico-critical analysis of the Bible.
He notes that Kenneth Kitchen is a well-known British conservative scholar who published the quoted work in 1966, referring to difference of literary genre and style in Egyptian texts. As Chasson notes, this is a strawman argument, as the differences of genre and style are not the problem, but at best clues to the solution (if any).
He points out that the "scholars" who hold that "J was a woman" are none other than Harold Bloom, in his 1990 best-seller The Book of J (the Awake! writer seems to have mistaken the translator of the book as another "scholar"). Now Bloom is no Bible scholar, he's a lecturer in human sciences at Yale.
As Chasson concludes:
When you don't like a theory, just caricature it: the caricature will be easier to criticize.
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LittleToe
I've been following this thread with interest, but had nothing to contribute till now.
Thanks to MS for the typing. I'd just like to highlight some of the WTS methods of argumentation, for the sake of those lurkers who haven't worked it out yet:*******
Who Wrote the "Books of Moses"?
Traditionally, Moses has been credited with being the author of the first five books of the Bible, called the Pentateuch. Moses may have drawn some of his information from earlier historical sources. Many critics believe, though, that Moses did not write the Pentateuch at all. "It is thus clearer than the sun at noonday that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses", asserted the 17th-century philosopher Spinoza. In the latter half of the 19th century, the German scholar Julius Wellhausen popularized the "documentary" theory - that the books of Moses are an amalgam of the works of several authors or teams of authors.
Wellhausen said that one author consistently used the personal name of God, Jehovah, and is thus called J. Another, dubbed E, called God "Elohim". Another, P, supposedly wrote the priestly code in Leviticus, and yet another, called D, wrote Deuteronomy. Though some scholars have embraced this theory for decades, the book The Pentateuch, by Joseph Blenkinsopp, calls Wellhausen's hypothesis a theory "in crisis".
The book Introduction to the Bible, by John Laux explains: "The Documentary Theory is built up on assertions which are either arbitrary or absolutely false....If the extreme Doumentary Theory were true, the Isrealites would have been the victims of a clumsy deception when they permitted the heavy burden of the Law to be imposed upon them. It would have been the greatest hoax ever perpetrated in the history of the world."
Another argument is that stylistic differences in the Pentateuch are evidence of multiple authors. However, K.A. Kitchen notes in his book Ancient Orient and Old Testament: "Stylistic differences are meaningless, and reflect the differences in detailed subject-matter." Similar style variations can also be found "in ancient texts whose literary unity is beyond doubt."
The argument that the use of different names and titles for God is evidence of multiple authorship is particularly weak. In just one small portion of the book of Genesis, God is called "the Most High God", "Producer of heaven and earth", "Sovereign Lord Jehovah", "God of sight", "God Almighty", "God", "the true God", and "the Judge of all the earth." ( Genesis 14:18,19; 15:2; 16:13; 17:1,3,18; 18:25 ) Did different authors write each of these Bible texts? Or what about Genesis 28:13, where the terms "Elohim" (God) and "Jehovah" are used together? Did two authors collaborate to write that one verse?
The weakness of this line of reasoning becomes particularly evident when applied to a contemporary piece of writing. In one recent book about World War II, the chancellor of Germany is termed "Fuhrer", "Adolf Hitler", and simply "Hitler" in the course of just a few pages. Would anyone claim that this is evidence of three different authors?
Nevertheless, variations on Wellhausen's theories continue to proliferate. Among them is the theory propounded by two scholars regarding the so-called J author. They not only deny that it was Moses but also proclaim that "J was a woman".
*****
There's the usual use of partial quoting, making an author appear to be agreeing with the WTS, when in actual fact he's just being reasonable in his criticisms and makes point which are far different from WTS beliefs.
(black = statements to encourage smug-mode, "I feel safe" factor)
(red = statements to encourage "I can look down my nose at this misguided nonesense" factor)
(blue = setting up a false choice, usually of two extremes, to stunt reasoning ability - or hyperbole)
(I've also underlined some trigger words, that are heard so often that they are likely to produce a knee-jerk reaction) -
LittleToe
Oops...
Double post. -
Narkissos
Ross:
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Midget-Sasquatch
And thanks to all of you, Leo, Nark, and Ross for your critiques of the article.