The Bible Says That!? - Who Wrote The Torah? Pt. 3

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Recap

Last week, we talked about more of the basics of the Source Documentary Hypothesis. Specifically, we discussed the first three large blocks of evidence supporting this theory: The “Linguistic” block; the “Terminology” block; the “Consistent Content” block. Today we’re going to look at another two blocks of evidence that support this theory: The Continuity of Texts Block, and the Connections to other texts block, Once again, all of this material is taken from The Bible With Sources Revealed by Richard Elliott Friedman as well as my own class notes.

Continuity of Texts (The Narrative Flow)

To summarize this evidence block, here are a few points to note: If you were to take each of the 4 sources and separate them out from one another, you could take their independent stories and still maintain a clean, clear, and sensible flowing text without any sort of major break. For roughly 90% of the texts from Genesis – Deuteronomy, this is the case. And most of the remaining 10% are slight gaps or minor details we will get into soon.

Now yes, there are instances where the details are different. Yes there are instances where there are gaps. I’m not going to try and hide or brush those aside. However, the high degree of narrative continuity is staggering when you consider all of the other factors and data points we’ve discussed last week.

Counter argument: Some may say ‘Well hey, what is stopping a scholar from just arbitrarily assigning this text to J and this text to E and trying to make the biblical text fit their own theory. What’s to stop them from bending the evidence to fit their own hypothesis?” This is a great point!

However, for someone to make this work, this is what they would have to overcome, explain away, bend, etc., for that to work:

First, they would have to make sure that the narrative flow of each story runs smoothly without any major breaks.

Second, they would have to make sure that each of the literary doublets (Stories that repeat themselves throughout the Torah) are properly and consistently assigned to the correct source. (We’ll look at an example here in a minute).

Third, the scholar would have to make sure that each of their “arbitrary” divisions remained consistent with each of the defining characteristics of the 4 sources. They would have to account for all of the linguistic traits we talked about last week (Age of the text, Classical vs later Hebrew, The names of God, Linguistical traits, Consistent terminology [ex. mountain of God, “to lie with,” “to know,” “Sheol,” “Be fruitful and multiply”, etc.]; Which sacred objects belonged to which source; Thematic differences of miracles, ritual, The role of priests, and numbers/other names)

The scholar would have to overcome ALL of that in order for that to work. I don’t care how clever a scholar thinks they are, there are simply too many things to account for to keep this consistent for over 90% of the biblical text.

Let’s go over an example of what this looks like. Check out the handout for today to follow along with what we’re talking about.

Click "Download" below to see today's handout. We will be using this handout for the remainder of today's conversation!