Who Wrote Genesis?, Transcript

Who Wrote Genesis? - YouTube

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(00:02) our topic tonight is who wrote Genesis and so is the what's the answer does everybody know we don't know okay Moses maybe okay so there's a couple there's a divided opinion either we don't know or or Moses all right the book of Genesis is probably I don't know it's always been ever since I was a kid my favorite book in the Bible because so much goes on during it so it has all of these very famous stories the creation story the story of Adam and Eve Cain and Abel Noah's Ark the Tower of Babel all the stories with Abraham so the

(00:44) sacrifice of his son Isaac the fact that any way that the Sodom and Gomorrah story the same thing Isaac and Rebecca Isaac and Esau Jacob Nisa Jacob and Leah and Rachel his wives and then Joseph and the coat of many colors so it's actually a very action-packed little book of the Bible with lots of different stories so we'll look at a lot of s today tonight the first book of the Hebrew Bible which is the Old Testament for the Christian perspective the word we have Genesis is the Greek word from the in the tradition the the Greek

(01:25) translation of the Hebrew Bible has been very influential especially in Christianity so that's a two again and so this is where that title comes from for us in English in Hebrew the beginning of it is from the beginning of the the first few words so in the beginning part of the it's the first anyway of the five books that are attributed to Moses which again in Greek are called the Pentateuch or five books here or the Torah which is to say the teaching or the law however even though there is that traditional attribution

(02:00) Moses is not actually internally identified as the author so in some cases when a book is supposedly by a particular figure it'll say like for example in the book of Tobit hope it'll say i Tobit do write this record this kind of a thing and so under those circumstances Tobit is meant to be the author very explicitly by the book in this case the attribution is simply traditional it doesn't say I Moses so there is a part in in like you say and so then and then Moses ends up dying and so then the book continues as well and

(02:43) so that it's obviously also not that portion of it then isn't from him but so then traditionally there's an idea that what had been written earlier is by Moses we also mentioned that the book doesn't actually include dates so although people have come up with dates for it so it's at least the dates there are internal chronologies but they're not actually explicit for example writing how many years this is BC especially although Christians might think so so these books then the five books are Genesis Exodus Leviticus numbers and

(03:17) Deuteronomy and as we say we have a traditional mosaic authorship one of the other issues in addition is yeah so for me too Moses is traditionally Charlton Heston because there was an as a kid we would always watch the Ten Commandments right and so that was our tradition growing up we only had we were one of the first families to have a VCR but we only had eight tapes you know so you could only watch so many things and so we had the Ten Commandments on tape and so what skills we would wake up every morning on Christmas morning and we the

(03:52) the rule was the family tradition is you can only open presents at 6:00 a.m. so my way even though the committee kids have all woken up at 2:00 a.m. and so now what can you do well for our movie and so four hours later you know we were able to then open presents so we would traditionally watch the Ten Commandments every Christmas morning before 6:00 a.m.

(04:13) so the text also in addition to other things one of the things in the within the five books the text calls Moses the most humble man that did ever walk the earth and so if Moses is the author that's at least an ironic comment and as we mentioned there's at the end like we say it says that Moses has given a copy to the different leaders and it also narrates Moses is death but one of the other components in the book of Genesis is there is a list of the a king list for the kings of Edom and the kings of Edom then go on centuries and

(04:48) centuries after when Moses death would have been so in any event the the chronology or components of it clearly aren't written by Moses if Moses was a historical figure so the chronology of Genesis I mentioned then there's not a there aren't dates however there have been lots of famous people who have tried to fish beginning like so Bishop Ussher is not the beginning but he's most famous for the most famous for trying to do the math and decide when the events in Genesis took place these chronologies in general

(05:23) why the way people do that is that they go through the whole Bible and they add everything up and and in general what you're doing then is adding up magic numbers because the Bible will often say that a person has reigned for forty years because forty years is generation and so then you'll add up 40 plus 40 plus 40 plus 40 and so it'll often be exactly like that and you try to add all those numbers up until you get to Genesis where there is a whole Jeni ology that'll talk about people living a thousand years and this sort of thing

(05:51) Elizabeth we need we get the mic we don't have your mic turned on him sir did it work no I think it's I just wasn't on there sorry try talking oh I said that someone years ago who was studying the Bible told me that 40 simply meant many yeah as we might say a hundred and one meaning a lot yeah so this is meaning that the text is we've mentioned before when we're talking about this the text is written down before the invention of history and so that's a little complicated for us to fathom how that works but essentially if

(06:45) history has written is invented later with Radha distant acidities and the idea of it is to try to get at what the most likely events of the past were the goal that's a goal that those later historians have that is not a goal of what anybody who's writing down any of these texts have so they're telling stories for their own various purposes especially theological purposes but they are not with that later intent this invention that happens later when people come up with the idea of history I think this is my microphone is making that

(07:24) echo so give you that yeah so one of these famous guys Bishop Ussher in the seventh in the sixteenth century decided that he could date by adding up all those numbers forty four forty plus forty he got to the creation of the first day of creation beginning on October 23rd 4004 BC and so then he dates the story of Abraham who's one of the major figures in Genesis to the 1900s BC which is to say some thirteen hundred years before the earliest components of the text will have been written down and so as a result of that

(08:03) that is a whole long time for it to be in oral tradition and so therefore is unlikely to be oral tradition so we're not probably talking about actual historical figures there so if we're gonna show this kind of on an approximated timeline essentially counting down this is like they were always there just couldn't wait till they were getting to the Year Zero right so everybody was counting down from 4000 BC to 1:1 BC right we're starting a gypped has a relatively good chronology because of the long-standing traditions of the Egyptian

(08:45) pharaohs and the King lists and everything like that and so the Old Kingdom the Middle Kingdom the New Kingdom those we can pretty well date so this is actually kind of history and then we have the moments when the Bible itself starts to become historical and an externally verifiable way and so kind of here before shortly before the fall of Jerusalem in 586 to the Babylonians and so these kind of last kind of periods of the northern and southern kingdoms of Israel and Judah - then when Ezra leads reads the law and

(09:24) so we kind of have the Bible in or the Torah in the component that we know it and so then before that the sort of literary ideas of the Bible that we sort of get chronology from based on like things like Bishop Ussher doing his math people like David and Solomon Samuel Moses and then trying to get back to maybe when we're placing Abraham the flood Eden you know these are I'm writing ish right because it's not really dated and so it's just kind of like how people have tried to make it so we mentioned here Ezra and so Ezra is

(10:06) very important in the overall biblical chronology because when the exiles come back from Babylon so when the Jewish exiles come back and they rebuilt they refined Jerusalem they rebuild the temple so they create the second temple period there is a moment when the priest Ezra who has been a important court official in the Persian Empire and has the essentially the authorization from the the Shah of Persia whose Empire now Judah is part of a little province of has the authorization to rebuild the temple and to re-establish the Jewish

(10:47) religion there in Jerusalem Ezra then gathers all the people together and reads from the law or reads from the Torah to Judeans and this is probably the first time that people have experienced reading in a worship setting essentially the Pentateuch in maybe its present form so we can't entirely know that but very soon after as we in the next few hundred years as there are now fragments from things like the Dead Sea Scrolls we have very old manuscripts of this text and so it's going back books like Genesis are going

(11:27) back probably to about this time in their present form but what happens before then we don't necessarily have the historical record for so what we can say is that then after Ezra's time Jews and Christians when then it later our Christians frequently allude to characters and stories from Genesis so for example the Apostle Paul who's the very first Christian writer whose works we have he frequently alludes to Adam and he also talks about Abraham and Moses in other words other early figures but Adam is clearly important to for

(12:08) example Christian theology where that Christians have come to understand that there is a fall or something in Adam and then there's an atonement in Christ right and so then so Adam is already an important figure by that time that they're very well aware of however if we go to the earliest authors that whose texts survived in the Bible like the original Isaiah there's multiple Isaiah's in the Book of Isaiah but if we go to the oldest part of the Book of Isaiah this author is apparently unfamiliar with Genesis stories like

(12:45) Adam and Eve so although Isaiah is very familiar with David and talks about David a lot because he's interested in this ancestor of the royal house of Judah there is no mention in Isaiah for example of Adam and Eve Cain and Abel Noah these earliest stories that exist in are these stories that exist in Genesis and so although this is negative evidence because just because somebody doesn't mention something doesn't mean that it's not possible the possible that he does know about it or had read but because none of the early prophets

(13:23) ever mention any of these early these stories the possibility exists or the argument is that these stories aren't known yet so in other words the earliest prophets are writing before anybody has written or composed the earliest Genesis stories well he wrote so rich so Shakespeare wrote a play called King John so he does mention the Plantagenet kings but so one of it so can I remind you that we need to use a microphone when you're gonna make a comment because otherwise people can't hear you all night so yeah but the point of it if

(14:14) your point is simply that negative evidence isn't the same as positive evidence so omission doesn't mean that it that that's proof that it doesn't exist that they didn't have access to the text I'm just saying he was trying to praise the the present King and his ancestors and he probably left out any purposeful reference to anything else just just because you know just like Shakespeare they they wanted to show favor with the current rulers yeah so there isn't there's definitely an agenda for why you would want to be talking

(14:48) about let's say like you say the ancestor of the present kings the my argument here is that Paul isn't talking about anybody you know in the present and and Adam and Eve is a theologically important idea and so he mentions that in addition to mentioning Abraham and Moses but the earlier prophets don't see any point in mentioning these Genesis stories so if they're aware of them they don't have any theological significance or it's also possible that they're simply not aware of these stories because they haven't been circulated yet

(15:23) so it's just something that sometimes I think we never think about we never look at what are the earliest writers and prophets in the Old Testament know about Genesis we just assume you start reading at the of the book and that's the oldest part of the book but it may well be that that isn't the oldest part of the book that's what I'm saying okay so that's this is now we had that wider time line this is now bringing that into a more narrow focus into the kind of time period of when the Bible itself is becoming

(15:58) composed and so we had this again this Egyptian background we talked a lot about everyone so about this Bronze Age collapse that happens before the rise of most of the classical civilizations that we're aware of including what's known as the United Monarchy period at least biblically where David and Saul and Solomon are around and then the Northern Kingdom of Israel the southern kingdom of Judah Assyria destroys the northern kingdom the southern kingdom gets destroyed by the Babylonians and so it's in this time

(16:37) period that we have that those earliest prophets whose texts are preserved and then it's I would suggest we're gonna suggest anyway that it's in this kind of time period here that probably the earliest texts we have that make up Genesis are coming to us and then I put these guys on here when I mentioned that Herodotus and Thucydides are inventing history that happens later here okay so since we don't have for these stories in addition to not having references in the earliest prophets to the stories we also don't have let's say a bunch of

(17:18) archaeology or external sources where any of these characters are named there are parallel stories or even potentially source stories we've done before with the epic of gilgamesh where we've seen that there's a flood narrative that goes much further back than the Bible in the Mesopotamian myths going back to Sumer and the Babylonians the Acadians but the names the particular names that we have Genesis stories don't have external evidence for until we get to see down to again we get down to David as a historical a historically known name and

(18:00) so what we have to do is in our toolkit then instead of archeology or history is we have to use literary criticism and so that's when we look at the text itself for the clues that the text can tell us about who the author was when it was being composed and what the purpose of the text is so who's the audience and so that's what literary criticism is about and so this is kind of what we have when we're trying to unravel and figure out what's going on with the Bible in the earliest text of the Bible and so just

(18:32) ending with was mentioned before the rise of literary criticism this is going back to the Middle Ages one of the one of my favorite times so a guy in the 12th century Geoffrey of Monmouth announced that he'd been given a very ancient book which he had been translated into Latin and called the history of the kings of Britain so this book that Geoffrey of Monmouth's said he translated is a best-seller and it's quickly accepted as history the book is the origin of the stories of Arthur and Merlin and so I mentioned

(19:09) here so this this mosaic floor is from southern Italy in the Year 1166 so just thirty years after the after the book is published and already it says Rex artists here right so it's already depicting and on somebody's cathedral floor it's such an important figure that you have King Arthur on the on the floor of the cathedral just thirty years later somebody who they've nobody's ever heard of before Geoffrey of Monmouth and so although there you will find on the History Channel or any number of other places where people will say in search

(19:42) of you know the trying to find the true King Arthur or the true history of King Arthur the actual origin of the King Arthur story is in fact Geoffrey of Monmouth there isn't an underlying history that goes back further than that there might have been a guy named Arthur it has nothing to do with the stories of King are and so when letter literary criticism emerged one of the texts that they looked at was Geoffrey of Monmouth's book and the critics pointed out that there are just an amazing number of anachronisms in this book it's actually

(20:16) kind of crazy how King Arthur a certain point crosses and he goes to Italy and he meets Julius Caesar and all this kind of thing that happens in the original book and so the timing that the I don't know exactly which Caesar he meets but anyway it's it's very anachronistic and there's all kinds of crazy things that are going on because Geoffrey of Monmouth is a medieval guy who doesn't have a real sense of history and so as he is creating something he's introducing lots of anachronism yeah Ian McKellen so yeah he's here is in a

(20:48) performance of King Lear and King Lear is one of the many works of literature that has been inspired by Geoffrey of Monmouth's story and so the origin of the story is Geoffrey of Monmouth but then it has continued to be at British national epic and it has inspired people so although it's dependent on some actual sources so he for example Geoffrey of Monmouth had probably read the Venerable Bede and a couple of sources Geoffrey himself rather than ancient book he translated is the source and this nevertheless remains a rich

(21:18) national epic and is the source of Shakespeare and other kinds of things stories on long these lines the goal that Geoffrey of Monmouth actually has is probably a very good goal which is he is attempting to he has some British or Welsh background he has some Norman background in his in his lineage and what he's attempting to do here is fuse together a British national epic that includes and actually makes the Welsh have a good prominent place that it can weld together the angles the Saxons the wealth and the Normans now you know and

(21:52) that they can all be proud of this very chivalric figure because King Arthur was actually very well versed in 12th century chivalry because of many anachronism right and so anyway and so that's kind of what you know how that how that come from yes so an anachronism is like when in Shakespeare in Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar Shakespeare is about to you know I'm sorry Caesar is is realizing there's all of these ill omens on the Ides of March that are in a foreshadowing his his his assassination right and so the clock

(22:31) strikes 12:00 oh yeah there's no clocks in ancient Rome but Caesar but Shakespeare doesn't know that because people are not as aware of all these inventions that have happened in the Middle Ages so the clock is a medieval invention like the heavy plow like the windmill all these things they assume the Romans were such brilliant people that all that the Romans must have had all those things how would how would those have been invented in the Dark Ages but in fact the clock doesn't strike any any number any you know in in actual Caesar times

(23:04) right in in in Rome ancient Rome so that's an anachronism Shakespeare has created as incorrectly put something from his own time back into the chronology of the ancient time right okay so that's kind of one of the things that you can do with literary criticism and anachronism is the easiest tool in terms of spotting when a text was actually written because in general people are really bad it's you can't help it you you just assume that all the things that you have all around you have always been that way and you wouldn't

(23:36) forget what things were like when you were a kid and so you end up putting things anachronistically even when you tell your own life story you will introduce details based on when you're writing them now so in terms of how the criticism works from regards to the to the Bible literary criticism it's generally grouped into lower criticism and higher criticism lower criticism is also called textual criticism and the the goal of that is to identify and remove transcription errors from the manuscripts tradition of texts so

(24:08) essentially with a text that like the Bible when or Genesis at in the Bible we have the advantage of there being thousands of manuscripts that have made their way from at least the Middle Ages but in some cases antiquity and in the case of the finds and right from things like the Dead Sea Scrolls they go all the way back into real ancient antiquity and so we are able to have a rich manuscript tradition that we can then check so each manuscript has a difference every one of them has been hand copied each one of

(24:44) them is differ from another what you can tell over time using textual criticism or lower criticism is hey these two are have these similarities they're from the same tree and this one over here is from this tree and it's related to this one and then so you can make a whole family tree for all of these texts and the goal of the family tree then is to get closer and closer to whatever the original text would have been like all the original texts are lost we don't have any original texts of any man the ancient

(25:13) manuscript it's always a copy and so one of the things that can be is that it can sometimes happen that a much later text can still nevertheless be much better than a really ancient one because at any time in ancient times somebody could have just made a really bad copy and so even though it's twelve hundred years older you might have a very bad copy and so this is something that happened for the King James Bible so the King James scholars who translated the King James Bible from they wanted to go back and do

(25:49) it from Hebrew they didn't want to just go to they the Vulgate Latin and then translate Hebrew texts from Latin into English that wouldn't make any sense to them they needed the original Hebrew to go from but what the problem was is that they use Erasmus's what's called the Textus Receptus which is a Greek text that he got from a byzantine monastery that was I'm sorry Hebrew text from that was much later this is also true for the Greek the Byzantine one is late and so as a result they're translating from from bad original Hebrew and bad

(26:24) original Greek and in fact the Vulgate of saint jerome the latin one was actually a better had a better preserved the original meaning that what ends up happening in the King James which is why the King James Bible has so many strange readings and errors in it it's because they're using anyway it's from the right language but it's a later copy or not as good a copy that they're working from so that's one of the things that you'd want to do in in textual critisism find the original text as closely as possible and then hire

(26:52) criticism or historical criticism then is asking these further questions what's the origin of this text what was the texts original meaning to and its original context and who is the what's the situation of the author and who are they writing to who's the audience so in that we're trying to find all those things for Genesis tonight well mentioned in in doing this kind of unraveling we've talked about a lot of text before and we end up finding they're kind of the same let's say ancient tricks we're at ancient baguette

(27:29) tricks again and again and again which is in part because every one of these texts is hand written as a result it's sometimes just as easy for a scribe as they're making another copy anyway to then take another book that's kind of on the same topic and put that in there too or as they're writing along they might have their own notes or comments that they want to put on it and so they add lines and sometimes they might want to just write it another book on the same topic and so they may well write something and then they take parts of

(28:01) the existing book and then they write something and so they are actually creating as they're making a copy they're creating these and expanded work and you aren't even aware that they are just pulling from an older text because they don't say so so they'll just be writing along and then they'll take something from the old text and so in those cases what ends up happening is they create seams because they're writing in their own let's say contemporary language and then there's an older version or an older language

(28:28) manuscript that is getting stuck into it you want ask something Robert like my growth going now I'm thinking of Woody Allen one of his co-writers was in trial and promoting her apart but when you would come in with an original idea and you have a bunch of script writers he would bring in and they would sit around he said well here was the main team and I need an actor to do this so that actor scriptwriter would expand this part and throw the helia to them next so what you're talking about is somebody's got one idea he's talking to

(29:11) his buddies so their previous statement who is this written for it's written for people that can write and the common man can't write yes so there's a collection of script writers writing for other script writers making up a fancier play and adding in so it's highly entertaining but how much truths and fantasy in fiction are going on here right so that so they like again since the what's being written isn't being written by historians so none of it is it's not it's in part being written to be read by only those people that are

(29:53) literate however one of the one of the ways that a text is experienced by a broader audience at the time is that the text would be read aloud and people who aren't literate would then experience it by by listening and in fact it was only Lander there's another comment it was only in the Middle Ages again really that people started being able to read silently that was an invention so in antiquity people never read by you know like we always read and we just read quietly right to ourselves that was something that the people people thought

(30:32) that was a really neat trick when they would see anybody doing that they're like how does he do what is he doing how can he read without talking his lips aren't even moving you know and so and so that wasn't how think text were experienced so texts were yeah okay tell us that story so texts were experienced by the scribe reading it aloud and so when when I'm talking about then like you're saying this is a complicated little thing that we're gonna try to pry out because therefore the audience isn't anyone audience

(30:59) rather each individual writer is thinking of an audience and then when that next person adds on to it let's say that person is no longer thinking of the audience of the original person but they now are themselves creating speaking to a new audience and so as a result of that the audience is a changing target depending on each writer okay so examples that we've seen of this kind of bag of tricks in the New Testament when we've talked about some of these texts are for example the Gospels that are called Matthew and Luke so the authors

(31:35) of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke both of them had access to the gospel what's me now called Mark the gospel that anyway it's not written by Mark but anyway a gospel that is attributed to Mark and they both had another gospel that's lost called the sayings gospel which we scholars have reconstructed and called cube and so both of them absorbed mark and Q and neither of them had each other's texts and so they both were essentially doing this independently and both intended for mark and Q to go away and with Q they won because Q is gone

(32:11) but essentially the way we wouldn't know it if we didn't have we have mark we have Matthew and Luke and so we can dissect what's happened if we only had Luke and we didn't have Matthew and Mark and we certainly don't have Q we could never tell it at all because Luke is an amazing writer who is able to change all the tenses and do all this kind of things so that the text is there the source text is there but the seams are invisible so Luke does a really good job other authors aren't as good at that and so anyway and what an example of one

(32:40) that isn't as good is there's another book in the New Testament called second Peter which is not written by Peter although it's attributed to Peter and we know that because second Peter is an expansion of another New Testament book called Jude and so essentially the letter of Jude is rewritten and expanded and repackaged as a letter from Peter and so that's just an example we have just within the Canon itself at the Christian canon likewise we have a chi Malheur circumstance in the Old Testament with canonical books with

(33:14) between the what's called the Deuteronomic history so the books from Joshua to Kings and those are all probably from the same school if not maybe the same writer or compiler and we have a later much later book which is a chronicle 2 chronicles we call Chronicles anyway but who took all of those books and really attempts to sanitize the whole thing makes all of the messiness go away all of the things all the rotten things that David does in terms of killing Uriah the Hittite or having adultery or all solomon's foreign

(33:54) wives and all that sort of thing all of that gets edited out and the whole thing becomes a much happier story in the book of Chronicles and the Book of Chronicles although it's it's side-by-side so we can see what the chronicler was doing and we can see all the edits the chronicler made the chronicler never would have intended for his book to be right next to these other books he was hoping these books would all go the way of the dodo and the only book you would have would have been the Chronicles and so an example of the sanitization of the

(34:24) Deuteronomic history as it's then repurposed in chronicles as in the sort of famous section where King David decides he's going to have a census and so the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel and he incited David against them saying go count the people of Israel and Judah so the king said to Joab and the commanders of the army who are with him go through all the tribes of Israel from Dan to Beersheba and take a census of the people that I may know how many there are so they have a big census it makes its God who was mad at

(34:57) the people who made David go make the census David because it does the census that makes God really mad and so he causes a plague and kills all the people and so that's kind of every so the chronicler reads that he's like wait a second how does that work out in terms of anything for free will or anything like that God is doing evil stuff and punishing us for him making us do evil stuff or whatever and so in chronicles that gets fixed so Satan stood up against Israel and he and saying he incited David to count the

(35:28) people of Israel so David said did you up in the commanders of the army go number Israel from Barre Sheba to Dan and bring you reports that I may know their number so essentially the chronicler is reading this and corrects it to that and so also in so doing introduces an anachronism because now the chronicler has introduced the idea of a kind of cosmic Satan or devil or figure of evil which didn't exist at the time that the book of Samuel is written and indeed hardly exists at all in the Old Testament but is now being becoming

(36:03) more prominent in second temple Judaism at the time of the chronicler okay okay so I mentioned that Luke for example is very good or the author of Luke is very good at making all the seams go away so you couldn't tell what the source texts were that isn't as much true in Genesis so in Genesis we have a whole bunch of things where it seemed like quite obvious seams and some of those include doublets and triplets which is to say places where you have the same story told twice only a little bit different or the same story told three times and

(36:45) so an example of this is the she's my sister story which everybody in the ancient court of Judah must have thought was the funniest story ever because they told it three times at the book of Genesis and so at the beginning in Genesis 12 verses 10 through 20 we read and there was a famine in the land and Abram went down to Egypt to reside there and it was when he was close to coming to Egypt and he said to Sarai his wife here I know you're a beautiful woman and it will be when the Egyptians see you that they'll say this is his wife and

(37:23) they'll kill me and keep you alive say you're my sister so what we good for me on your account and I'll stay alive because of you so good good play on Abram I don't see how that necessarily makes a difference because the Egyptians allowed sibling marriages like so so it's not necessarily the story is not necessarily written again by anthropologists who know a lot about Egyptians but it is written as a court story probably in the Kingdom of Judah and so this is something that would reflect their their cultural values but maybe be kind of

(38:12) ignorant of what the Egyptians would do so that's what that's essentially the plan but like you say it's not gonna be in real life ancient Egypt it's not gonna be a good plan okay the Egyptians saw the woman that she was very beautiful and the woman was taken to Pharaoh's house and Yahweh plagued Pharaoh and his house big plagues over the matter of Sarai Abrams wife so in this story Sarah I you know gets taken to Pharaoh's house and you know we don't exactly hear what happens but we can assume what happens as a result of that

(38:44) and so Yahweh plagues Pharaoh in his house big plagues and Pharaoh called to Abram saying what is this you've done to me why didn't you tell me that she was your wife why did you say she's my sister so I took her for a wife myself and so that's one version of the story in Genesis 12 okay now in Genesis 20 we have another version of this story so Abraham traveled from there to the Negev country and resided in Gera and Abraham said of Sarah his wife she's my sister and Abimelech king of Gerar sent and took Sarah and God came to Abimelech in

(39:25) the night in a night dream and said to him here you're dead over a woman you took for she's a man's wife and Abimelech had not come close to her and he said I did this in my heart's innocence and in my hands clean this and Abimelech called Abraham and said to him what have you done to us and how did I sin against you that you brought a big sin over me in my kingdom and Abraham said because I said there just isn't fear of God in this place and they'll kill me on account of my wife and also she is in fact my sister my

(39:57) father's daughter but not my mother's daughter and she became a wife to me and so and so we can kind of get in here now more of what the what the actual kind of punch line is because elsewhere in this in this account Abraham Abram is you know obviously related or a half half-brother to his wife and so then he's able to use this essentially she's my sister as a trick in order to you know have the same idea of not getting killed because as what his wife is so beautiful as these visiting foreigners you know in this

(40:33) case to the story has improved or whatever in as much as Sarah is not you know she's not you know the King doesn't actually sleep with her right so they so God stops it before any hanky-panky happens this is a retranslate John okay the question is what who is that what is the translation this is a translation from Richard Elliot Friedman who is written a book called the Bible with the sources revealed and so it's specifically a version of the Pentateuch that is talking about the documentary hypothesis and so that's where and it's

(41:13) so I like it because it's hewing close to the kind of the vernacular language of the of the Hebrew and so a lot of times we have it as a very formalized thing where we're saying thou shalt and this and that and so it seems very formal and Shakespearean whereas this is way more slang and slangy okay so that's two versions of that story here it is again so Genesis 26 and there was a famine in the land and Isaac went to Abimelech so the same guy Abimelech we just had king of the Philistines at Gera and Yahweh appeared to Isaac and said don't go down

(41:49) to Egypt and so Isaac lived again and the people the place asked about his wife and he said she's my sister because he was afraid to say my wife or else the people of the place will kill me for Rebecca because she's good-looking so now it's Rebecca who's good-looking and it's now Isaac who's saying she's my sister but it's still a been electing this version so Abimelech king of the Philistines gazed through the window and he looked out a window and he saw Isaac fondling his wife Rebecca and Abimelech called Isaac and said but here she's your wife

(42:20) how could you say she's my sister what is this thing I'm said what is this you've done to us one of the people nearly could have lain with your wife and you would have brought this guilt on us so in this case the story also is one more step removed from anything happening in terms of the Israelite woman sleeping with the pagan King but we also can note that it's also one more step to remove from making any sense so Abram really is the half-sister you know half-brother of Sarah but Rebecca is now another step down so he's

(42:59) Isaac is Abraham's son and Rebecca is you know what we're much more distant cousin and so in this case they're still telling this she's my sister story cuz it's such a great story apparently but it no longer applies to in this case of this particular couple and and that kind of thing does happen and we're you know a story is so good that you tell it even though it no longer makes sense about the figure who is actually being told so we have this triplet here Abram and Sarah in Egypt fara actually lives with Sarah and the Egypt Yahweh curses Egypt

(43:34) then we have Abram and Sarah at Gera Abimelech take Sarah to his bed but God prevents them from coming him come from kind of closer nevertheless curses Gera and finally Isaac and Rebekah at Gera so Ben Melick is worried that yahwah would have cursed them had something accidentally happened so so it's also the story is getting less and less salacious okay so as we unroll this scroll of Genesis for these kind of seems close analysis of the text reveals that there our narrative seems between voices of multiple authors and so I'm gonna make

(44:10) the case for the documentary hypothesis here so the author's employ different stages of Biblical Hebrew as we'll see so some of them are writing at an earlier kind of Hebrew than the others and the authors use very different terms and themes and they have different interests and they use different objects that they talk about so like we had with mark and Q with in Matthew and Luke's Gospel the voices in Genesis recur and so multiple texts are divided and interspersed so it's not like there's just like one chunk to chunk to recheck

(44:46) sometimes a book will be just composed together out of component pieces in this case all of the component pieces like in in in the Matthew and Luke Q and Mark are totally sliced up and interspersed within the entire gospel and that's what's happened here with Genesis as well so the first one here we'll call J and E because the voices are different they can be separated and then this sources are reconstructed the main voices that are in Genesis are J called J E and P and these are for the yahwist source the l OA source and the priestly

(45:24) source that's why they're called those things there's another source D which it does not appear in Genesis but anyway it's part of the documentary hypothesis essentially the de source is the voice that's in the book of Deuteronomy so of the five books of Moses the D source is mostly over in Deuteronomy so when each when separated then each of these texts also has its own coherence so if we take this narrative that's going like this and then this and inocent on this if you read it all together the text makes

(45:56) sense largely and so as opposed there's a couple there's a couple seams or gaps especially in E but in general you can read that's especially P and J if you put them together you can just read them as their own text all by themselves with and once you've separated them out from the rest so each one of these uses I guess a different language different terms different characters and different ways that approaches stuff so for example one of the things that's always kind of confusing when you know we go back to the movie The Ten Commandments

(46:31) and Moses is up on the mountain and the mountain we usually think of as being called Mount Sinai and yet lots of times in the Bible in Genesis I'm not in Genesis this is now we're in Exodus but anyway in the in this kind of in the five books of Moses lots of times it's called Mount Horeb and we wonder why is it called Mount Horeb well it turns out that 34 times that it's mentioned the different voices only use their own name for it so as we slice this apart and we look at the name of the mountain in J&P it'll say Mount Sinai and that's 20

(47:08) different times and E and D will call it Mount Horeb or the Mount of God and that's 14 times in their text they never use each other's term for the mountain and phrase that we maybe know so to know someone in the biblical sense like all of these like Pharaoh Needle you know I guess got to know Sarah but Abimelech didn't get to know Sarah so to know in the biblical sense in other words is a euphemism for sex occurs five times in the Pentateuch and these are all in J sections so the other authors don't use that phrase likewise the term

(47:43) Sheol for hell it's an identifying place for the dead so it's not really hell but anyway the after the underworld it occurs six times in J and then it's not otherwise mentioned than the other texts J also has a word for to suffer which J the J author uses seven times and again doesn't occur anywhere else in any of the texts it's just some of the examples if we're gonna go to P P is a very very distinct author so the priestly author a priestly author is really interested in law and ritual and all the different ways how many qubits

(48:19) are necessary to make particular basins and things like that for all of the different holy things and the hue is that sorry P is the reason why everybody stops reading the Pentateuch by the time you get to Leviticus and numbers because it starts to become almost all P if he won't shut up about all this stuff and so it becomes very very boring so anyway this is the kind of thing that P likes P for example uses the word congregation more than a hundred times none of the other voices ever talk about the congregation

(48:49) and what will always happen in a P text it'll say things like and Moses and Abraham assembled the people before the congregate the congregation of the people before the tent of meeting or something like that and so they are very it's very interested in this word congregation and it's very interested in Aaron P is also uses phrases like gathered to his people as a euphemism for death so Abraham is gathered to his people that's used eleven times by the priestly author and no other voice uses that phrase P also uses the phrase be

(49:20) fruitful and multiply so that's a phrase that we're familiar with from the Bible twelve times P uses that and no other voice says that and P is also the only voice that says that someone fell on their face when they're afraid or in fearing or in shame and that happens eight times again only in P and none of the other sources the most famous difference in in the usage and in fact how these sources get their names are in the terminology they use for God and so the J source almost always uses the name of God the Tetragrammaton here

(50:01) the Yahweh is what I've been saying Jehovah is how it is rendered in the King James Bible J boys names God Yahweh right from the start and so Yahweh is walking around in the Garden of Eden in the J narrative of Eden meanwhile E and P E is called the LOA source because E is using the word Elohim or God you know it's a plural word but anyway it means God in general for God as opposed to ever using the name and that changes only when when the e source and the P source get to the big reveal and so the big reveal for them is

(50:43) when Moses is on that holy mountain whether it's cyan die or Horeb and is before the burning bush and Moses asked God you know what is your name if I gonna go before Pharaoh and the people and ask them to let the people go they're gonna ask me what's your God's name you know and so that's when God reveals the name I am the name Yahweh to Moses and so never before that for the piata or the II author is the name mentioned so the name isn't revealed until until you get to that moment and so it would be spoiled but of course since the J source is

(51:23) actually completely interspersed and already put there the name has been revealed many many many times before you get to that moment so that literary surprise has been totally spoiled you know by a lot of for not foreshadowing but anyway people have given spoilers the J source has been using spoilers so so EMP that for call God L or Elohim until God's name is revealed to Moses so each of these different authors also has very different perspectives Jay is especially interested in the southern kingdom so we talked about how when the texts here are

(52:05) being composed there's essentially two kingdoms at least until the northern kingdom is destroyed by the Assyrians so the northern kingdom is called the Kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom is the kingdom of Judah so Jay is interested in Judah and Judas places and Judas heroes so in Jay for example Abraham stories Abraham living in Hebron and Hebron had been the traditional capital of Judah before Jerusalem in Jay when Moses sent scouts to go and explore the promised land and spy out all the and see all the

(52:43) Giants and things like that that are living in the land of milk and honey the only places in the J source do they report on you as they go around to Hebron and all these other places that are in the southern kingdom they don't mention any northern kingdom territories and the Scout that they mentioned Caleb who is a Judaic so in other words a southern hero and likewise only Jay has long stories about Israel or jacob's son Judah Judah the patriarchs of the long story of Judah and Tamar this is coming from the Jay story as opposed to

(53:17) any of the other voices and so Jay is interested in all of these sort of Judah aiight stuff ie by contrast is especially interested in the heroes and places of the Northern Kingdom so in II Jacob the patriarch was also called Israel is called Israel anyway Andy at this point acquires the territory of Shechem which is the capital of the northern kingdom by purchase and not by violence as in Jay so in the Jay story there's a a scandalous thing where they essentially the Levi and who else is it that does it Reuben goes around and they they

(53:59) essentially trick the men of Shechem into getting circumcised in order to make up for the fact that these guys had raped their daughter I'm sorry their sister Dina and so they circumcise them all and while they're all in pain then they kill them all and so that's how they acquire this territory very in a kind of a violent and dastardly way and so it's actually marring the reputation of Shechem the northern capital by contrast here this is a it's a the land is said to be purchased very fairly and is important

(54:32) because of anyway it's something that Israel acquired early on and in the e source then Shechem is also identified as the burial place for the patriarch Joseph who also then is the northern hero because Joseph is the father of Ephraim and Manasseh who are the two chief tribes of the Northern Kingdom as opposed to Judith it was the tribe of the southern kingdom he is also critical of the house of David so the southern royal family and he elevates the if RMIT's hero Joshua and so I just mentioned that tryam is the main tribe of the northern

(55:12) kingdom so all of these things kind of identify eat the e source of the LOA source as interested in and enter the northern kingdom meanwhile P who I've mentioned as being long-winded and very priestly and bureaucratic and things like that so in other words interested in all these sort of ritual stuff P is very concerned with those rites and rituals of specifically the Aaron ed priests of the Jerusalem Temple and so the P writer considers himself to be a descendant of Aaron and also believes that only the descendants of Aaron those

(55:52) attic Heights this ultimately in the in the New Testament the Sadducees but essentially the Aaron ed priests are the only true priests this is not true in the in the II story where as far as the II author is concerned all Levites are priests and there's no difference between a Levite and and Aaron it at all as far as the as far as the author is concerned the PR is is very insistent that Aaron is is equally important to Moses and all through the Pentateuch that ye the piata will write Moses and Aaron did this Moses and Aaron and all

(56:29) this kind of so another critical thing is that the pea author is very very concerned that the only person that can ever the only place that you can have legitimate sacrifice to Yahweh is at the Temple in Jerusalem and the only person that can do it is Aaron and his descendants and so as a result of that no one in the pea source until Aaron offers a sacrifice and so we maybe you think of like very famous stories in Genesis let's say of Abraham going to sacrifice Isaac of Noah for example offering a sacrifice after

(57:11) after the flood and then the rainbow comes not in be nobody is allowed to make a sacrifice until Aaron and so and it's also in in this text and the priestly texts that Aaron's staff for example performs the miracles not Moses's or these writings are texts interspersed and intertwined yes and if so then how do you differentiate which which are author or wrote which write so so the question is yeah how do we differentiate how are we pulling them all out and so this is something that over the course of last century as different scholars have

(57:50) developed the documentary hypothesis they have argued back and forth and like extensive lysate journal articles and they'll say this section bears all the marks of the p author and things like that and so essentially it's a scholarly reconstruction we have no it's an internal argument based on textual criticism and it's entirely a scholarly reconstruction that we can't we can't say for sure because we've never found let's say just P all by P self and so therefore we therefore all of these reconstructions are based on the fact

(58:24) that let's say this section sounds just like this section which sounds just like this section and so in some ways though that's based on internal evidence that you know also also has to all hold together and so people many people who argue against the documentary hypothesis say well we don't have any positive proof we don't have one manuscript of just J if we were to get one manuscript of just J it would make the whole thing work for sure and it would be conclusive but the problem with it is since we don't have that and so the argument that

(58:55) people then therefore make the problem with that is is that they can't Sat it it's the easiest way or best way to satisfactorily explain all of the things that we find in these different sources so how do we explain these voices as they have these different interests and these different consistencies and so the documentary hypothesis is the simplest explanation for why they should behave this way the text yeah which authors text is the oldest the the oldest are J and E so we'll get to possibly J possibly e it's hard to say they're both

(59:31) at the oldest type of the oldest kind of Hebrew or J and E P is the next stage of Hebrew in Biblical Hebrew and the D is even a later stage than P and what scholars have kind of shown is that P consciously follows the J and E text and so the idea possibly is that the J&E were circulating themselves they got combined together initially as a combined source that combined source really pissed some Aaron did priest off really bad because it's doing things like saying that Aaron created the golden calf it's saying all kinds of

(1:00:14) rotten things about Aaron and it's saying that all of these that Noah and Abraham and everybody offered sacrifices and it's not just Aaron and all that kind of thing and so it's possible then that the priestly authors wrote in response to the J&E and then finally that these sources its own thing the camps later so we'll get to that right to get to that right now actually so Aaron in the pea source does not make the golden calf that's not the kind that's not the kind of thing that the p1 source includes and another thing that

(1:00:51) is true for the P source is that the P source is also embarrassed by the more earthy elements that are found in J and II like for example there are two talking animals in the J stories so there's the snake in the Garden of Eden and so a snake talking in general is understood to be a fable you know and that's not even generally speaking a myth usually it's mostly a fables and the same thing happens in the story in the J narrative the story of Balaam SAS and so essentially Balaam who was a Moabitess prophet or a sorcerer is

(1:01:27) riding along on his donkey and the donkey stops in the middle of the road and the donkey won't go forward anymore and and Balaam is like stupid donkey you know why are you and so the certain point the the Lord opens the donkey's mouth and the donkey talks to him and says why are you beating me I'm you're not you're loyal donkeys like why won't you go that way well it's cuz the donkey can see that there's an angel with a firing the firing the path and and and so they would have all died if they hadn't gone forward and so the donkey is

(1:01:56) like you know don't don't beat your donkey you know I mean and we know I know what I'm doing or something like that kind of thing and so anyway so these talking animals those don't exist in the P story and the PE source also has a much more cosmic conception of God and so the priestly author is the author who gives us the the initial Genesis creation story so God is the Spirit of God is above the waters and chaos and all of this kind of things and it's not the the J creation story where God has air and blows into the dust and or all

(1:02:33) the other kind of things where God has a hands and is doing things those kind of things don't happen at the P text okay and then finally didi doesn't really affect Genesis but we'll just mention Saudi is the primary voice of the book of Deuteronomy so this book is believed to have been found by Hal kaya the priest during the reign of King Josiah so that's a story that actually exists in the second book of Kings and so how kiya goes in to the and and to the arc and finds in the holy of the Holies where a book of the law has has just

(1:03:09) been found they didn't seen it before they never gone in there and looked now they find it and whoa and it makes everybody they're like oh they can't even believe that they haven't been doing all of the different commandments that the book of Deuteronomy has been telling them to do and so this becomes the impetus for what's called the the Deuteronomic reform where the reforms of king josiah so this is right at the end of the kingdom of judah and so they get a hold of then deuteronomy probably and deuteronomy then the book of deuteronomy

(1:03:38) shares the same essentially theology and agenda as the Deuteronomic historian which again is that author who has compiled all those books from joshua to second kings and so probably the way that was initially meant to be read is the book of deuteronomy followed by all of those other books and that has been one component chunk anyway those themes then people have noted also very much overlap in in theme and style and voice with the contemporary Prophet Jeremiah who was around at that time and so they may all be together in in a kind

(1:04:16) of a Deuteronomic school okay now we have a map finally so we can actually put this together right so essentially here as we're in the land we have the southern kingdom that I've been mentioning so Judah Capital original is Hebron but later Jerusalem by the time that the Bible is being composed and the same thing then the northern kingdom sometimes you know the capital is Sumeria but also check him depending on and this is also includes Shiloh is in here too and so essentially then even the colors here are wrong on the map but

(1:04:57) anyway from other colors I've been using them Jay is probably coming from the court of Judah because it's mostly let's say courtly narratives as opposed to narratives that are which is to say witty we try to tell to a like a royal court so the different nobles and warriors and things like that might be listening to the kinds of stories that the Jay author is telling so like all these she's my sister kind of stories as opposed to the P author who is also from Judah but is clearly reflecting the interests of the priestly caste the

(1:05:31) arenít caste of Jerusalem II possibly then this is reflecting the Northern Kingdom possibly reflecting the interests of this broader class of Levite priests and specifically it talks an awful lot about the priests at this holy site of Shiloh which is where the last judge Samuel is from and so the Ark is up there with in Shiloh prior to its transfer it's in Jerusalem according to the biblical narrative anyway and so it's possible that that's the community that he comes from but that's kind of a tentative identification and then finally

(1:06:11) Deuteronomy is associated with the Josiah the Court of Josiah so again the southern kingdom this reform that Josiah enacted so there's the big chart I love this side so essentially the idea then of how this would all work is that there's a tech these two texts and it's not clear which would be the oldest maybe the exiles from the Northern Kingdom come down after the destruction of the Northern Kingdom exiles from after the Assyrians destroy it they bring their etext to the court of Judah Court of Judah also has its own

(1:06:52) version of these kind of stories or stories that can be told side by side the yahwist and Ella with sources at some point or rather a redactor that just means editor combines those two texts together into a combined Texas called je and so then that text is free-floating all by itself we mentioned then that the priestly author maybe gets a hold of je and hates it something awful and so writes a counter story where Aaron is Aaron's reputation is resuscitated and all the other kinds of blasphemies and things like that as far

(1:07:30) as the priestly author is concerned are omitted and meanwhile also in the court of Josiah there's the Deuteronomic writer who is on the one hand a editor that is compiling all of the Deuteronomic history but also finds this new text of the law the second law Deuteronomy and so between that and it possibly one or two edits depending on if Deuteronomy is written a little bit before and a little bit after the fall of Jerusalem so that Deuteronomy initially has this optimistic idea that the sceptre shall never fall from the house of David and

(1:08:11) then later has to has to reevaluate and understand why did the sceptre fall from the house of David so essentially there's a redaction before and after that catastrophe and so that's all then brought together by the final redactor or editor who's perhaps writing at the time of Ezra that we mentioned or it maybe is Ezra who brings them all of these texts together and tries to more or less keep them all intact by simply slicing them up into the little tiny pieces and then making that spaghetti all together into

(1:08:46) one Pentateuch that all clear okay so let's read just a couple of excerpts of these different texts so this is one of those triplets so J E and P all have different stories of Hagar and Ishmael and we'll start to when we start to read each one of these wills get like a sense I think of how the different authors have or the different sources have different voices so Sarai said to Abram my injury is on you I place my mate in your bosom and she saw that she had become pregnant and I was lowered in her eyes let Yahweh judge between me and you

(1:09:26) and Sarah I degraded Hagar and she fled from her so this is the story that Abram has been promised Abram and Sarah had been promised to he's been promised to be the father of many nations Sarah is already very old she hasn't had any children at a certain point she has her maid the Egyptian go into Abram and and now though she regrets that and so one of the things we can see here is already this so this is the J source and so she's talking about Yahweh and she's using the name Yahweh here before before Moses has gotten that name out of God

(1:10:01) so that's J E Abram made a big feast the day that Isaac was weaned and Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian whom she had born to Abraham fooling around and she said to Abraham Abraham tried this made out and her son because the son of this maid will not inherit with my son Isaac that's just a point they were Abram and Sarai before the angel came to them and told them they were going to have yes after that they were Abraham and Sarah right so they believe Sarah means quarrelsome why the hell would anybody name a child quarrelsome and Sarah means

(1:10:52) I think Sarah means princess okay so one of the reasons is that when we're talking about these characters they're literary characters and so they're often named for think for their characteristics and so so yeah so the names are the names like you say are changed in this case what's ended up happening is even though these are all taken from Genesis and this one is much later than this one in this in that way the tech way it emerges in the text now nevertheless even though the Hagar and Ishmael had already been thrown out

(1:11:31) there's thrown out again right because the story recurs and so finally then there's also peas version and so Sarah Abraham's wife took Hagar the Egyptian her maid at the end of 10 years of Abraham's living in the land of Canaan and gave her to Abram her husband as a wife to him and Abram was 80 and six years old when Hagar gave birth to Ishmael for Abram and so and then it goes on to then peas version of the Abrahamic covenant and so this one in this one in Peet the pea version there is in fact no kicking out of Ishmael or

(1:12:03) in instead and also no one know it no a sense that there's anything wrong and this is simply a wife husband wife situation as far as the pea authors concerned okay here's another one of these so this is E and P talking about another one of these name changes so the name changed like you say before was Abram in Abraham Sarah and Sarah now this is Jacob getting his name changed to Israel so Jacob was left by himself and a man wrestled with him until the dawn's rising and he saw that he was not able to not able against him and he

(1:12:35) touched the inside of his thigh and the inside of Jacob's thigh was dislocated and he said let me go because the dawn has risen and he said I won't let you go until you bless me and he said to him what is your name and he said Jacob this is confusing because you want to know who is right hehehe but part of the issue is that we don't get to know this guy's name yet in in E right and so and he said your name won't be Jacob anymore but Israel because you've struggled with God and with people and you were able and Jacob asked and he said tell me your

(1:13:11) name and he said why is it that you asked me my name and he blessed him there so he won't tell him the name so even though there's so this is still before Moses gets ahold of the name right in the e source and Jacob called the places named penny L because I've seen God face to face and my life has been delivered and the Sun rose on him as he passed Penuel and he was faltering on his thigh and I'm kind of this the children of Israel to this day do not eat the tendon of the vein that is on the inside of the thigh because he

(1:13:40) touched the inside of Jacob's thigh the tendon of the vein so essentially that's also becomes a story that explains a custom okay so we'll just look at the other version of that so that's the Ebers and this is the pea version of that story God appeared to Jacob and blessed him and God said to him your name is Jacob your name will not be called Jacob anymore but rather Israel will be your name and he called his name Israel and God said to him I am El Shaddai be fruitful and multiply we mentioned how that phrase only gets in

(1:14:14) the pea source right and so essentially when somebody encounters God and the peace or so that's what God tells you to do a nation and a community of nations will come out from your hips and the land I gave to Abraham and to Isaac I'll give to you and I'll give the land to your seed after you and God went up from him in that place where he had spoken to him and Jacob set up a pillar in the place he had spoken to him a stone pillar and he poured a libation on it and he spilled oil on it but he does not offer any sacrifices because you can't

(1:14:43) have a sacrifice if you're not a if you're not Aaron and Jacob called the name of the place where God had spoken to him there beth-el so I said the Lord that's right so in other words not the same as penny well right but in any event there's two the same story told by the two different authors in different ways okay so here's a one that will take this like I think the last one we're gonna do at kind of on longer form because this is one that I think we might notice some of these seams because some of these things are

(1:15:18) confusing when we hear the the Noah's Ark story and it becomes clear when you see the two different stories side by side and when they're uninjured twined so this is the J version and the P version so Yahweh saw that human bad was multiplied in the earth and every inclination of their hearts thoughts was only bad all day and now we regretted that he had made humankind in the earth and he was grieved to his heart and Yahweh said I'll wipe out the whole human I'm sorry I'll wipe out the human whom I've created from the face of the

(1:15:51) earth from human to animal to creeping thing and to the bird of the skies because I regret that I made them but Noah found favor in Yahweh's eyes so again we have the Jehovah name right and that's in there and also a much more let's say anthropomorphic God who is expressing a bunch of anguish and regret and things like that more so than will happen in P usually so here we have it the opposite in the P story Noah was a virtuous man he was unblemished in his generations Noah walked with God and Noah had fathered

(1:16:26) three sons Shem ham and Japheth and the earth was corrupted before God and God saw the earth and here it was corrupted because all the fonts are all flesh had corrupted its way on the earth and God said to Noah the end of all flesh has come before me because the earth is filled with violence because of them and here I'm destroying them with the earth okay next so going back to the J side here you always said to Noah come you and all your household into an ark for I've seen you as virtuous in front of me this generation of all the pure animals

(1:16:59) take seven pairs man and his woman and of all the animals that are not pure to man and his woman so he's ordered here bring seven of all the clean animals and two to seven pairs fourteen of all the clean animals and two of all the unclean so here's the other one make yourself an ark of gopher wood make rooms with the I can pitch it outside and inside with pitch and this is how you shall make it 300 cubits the length of the arc 50 cubits its width 30 cubits its height the pea author is pretty obsessed with cubits so almost all I think there's

(1:17:34) like fifty six cubits mentioned in the dimensions in the Pentateuch of which 53 of them are coming from the pea source who likes to talk about like dimensions and things like that so of all the living of all flesh you will so bring two of each to the ark and keep them alive I'm sorry keep alive with you it shall be male and female of all animals that are pure and of all animals that are not pure they came by twos to Noah so why should the PIO third only need two of every kind whereas the J author wants seven of the clean 14 of the clean

(1:18:07) animals right the J author needs the animals for sacrifice the P author Noah does not need any clean animals for sacrifice because it is impossible for Noah to sacrifices Noah's not a lot of sacrifice because only Aaron can sacrifice and so that's why there's the contradictory accounts and we sometimes wonder the people will ask like on a quiz show how many of each of the animals are on the ark and people will say to you buy two or whatever that's actually completely correct in the one version of the story but interlaced with

(1:18:37) it is the contradictory thing here was essentially clean and unclean there's seven of each here it says clean and unclean - only by twos right okay and Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons wives came with him to the ark and from from before the waters of the flood and Yahweh closed it for him so again this is the kind of thing where the yahwist author you know actually has an understanding of God as actually closing ark and doing things like that it's not happening in the pea source and the flood was on the earth forty days and

(1:19:10) the waters multiplied and raised the ark and it was lifted from the earth this is the way this Pete often tends to write in the six hundredth year of Noah's life in the second month in the seventeenth day of the month and on this day so in other words one thing to kind of make it out of list off something that's more chronological right so that's not it's not an external chronology but it's based on Noah's life here on this day all the Fountains of the great deep were split open and the apertures of the skies were

(1:19:38) opened so this is going back to the pea authors creation story when the creation we have that idea of the earth was void and they the waters but there are above the heavens and the waters are below so essentially the cosmology of the pea author here is like Mesopotamian cosmology with the Babylonians and everybody else understood which is the earth is flat has four corners there's Sheol underneath there's sky above there's a firmament which is to say like a hemisphere a dome that is keeping the waters above from opening up

(1:20:14) and coming out on you and then there's waters below the Sheol you know and that's where the waters of KS all are and so essentially what's happened here that's in the description that the P author describes in the seven days of creation account which is part from the P story in that same way now in the flood that same cosmic opening happens where all the waters from the cosmos flood into the created earth the apertures the skies are open and there was rain in the earth 40 days and 40 nights okay going back to the Jake version at

(1:20:45) the end of the 40 days no opened a window of the ark that he had made and he let a dove go from him to see whether the waters had eased from the face of the earth and the Dove did not find a resting place for its foot and it came back to the ark and he waited another seven days and he again to let the Dove go from the ark and the Dove came back to him at evening time and there was an olive leaf torn in its mouth so that's that dove as a sign of peace story so in other words there is now place meanwhile there was a much more long cosmic flood

(1:21:17) where it's just hundreds and hundreds of days and it goes on and on so I've condensed it here God passed wind over the earth and the water decreased and the Fountains of the deep were closed and the apertures of the skies were shut so all of those cosmic things the ark rested in the seventh month in the seventeenth day of the month on a mountains of Ararat and he Noah led a raven go and it went back and forth until the water dried from the earth and it was in the six hundred and first year in the first month in the first of the

(1:21:46) month the water drive from the earth so again you can kind of see here a very different author or oil style that's sort of consistent over in the pea authors account Noah then built an altar to Yahweh and he took some each of the pure animals and of each of the pure Birds and he offered sacrifices on the altar and Yahweh smelled the pleasant smell and Yahweh said in his heart I won't curse the ground on account of humankind again because the inclination of the human heart is bad from their youth and I won't strike all living

(1:22:18) things again as I have done so that's the response so he took from these clean animals that he had the fourteen of you offered a sacrifice and this is God's response doesn't happen at all in the P version all living things all the creeping animals all the birds that creep all the creep on the earth went out from the ark by their families God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth which is what the P author has God say to everybody and I shall establish my covenant with you there

(1:22:51) will not be a flood again to destroy the earth I put my rainbow in the clouds this cosmic sign and it will be a covenant sign between me and the earth so you can see anyway then sort of how over time once you start to kind of get the hang of it even in translation there are just so many kind of themes and components and words and things like that especially the pea author has that makes the pea authors text especially standout but where you can start to kind of see you know these internal texts from the documentary hypothesis so this

(1:23:26) is the idea then so who who wrote all of these component texts then of Genesis the J author we don't as somebody who again will be unknown somebody writing probably in the Court of Judah who has this sort of interests of what secular courtiers might be wanting to hear stories of so for example a princess of the Judean Court who is writing stories about strong women like Sarah and Tamar and Rebecca who gets to trick Isaac Isaac it's just a doddering old guy who gets tricked by Rebecca and that kind of thing happens

(1:24:04) again and again and again in the J source the e source so possibly these northern Exile priests Levites who are really upset that the Aaron in priests who control the Temple in Jerusalem are trying to say that they don't have any right to be priests or to offer sacrifice because the only legitimate priest who can offer sacrifice are the descendants of Aaron and so they are showing what's their example all sorts of examples about how biblical Patriarchs and other priests who are not Aaron aides are offering sacrifices in

(1:24:38) the high places they are also for example denigrating perhaps the the the site that all of the kind of cultic site in Jerusalem so for example in the esource when Moses comes out and he sees Aaron who has made this Idol and so Aaron is just merging Aaron's reputation what as Moses do with the tablets of the Ten Commandments he smashes him and so the II author is sort of saying so maybe there really aren't any Ten Commandments in the temple and the Holy of Holies in Jerusalem because that those tablets actually got smashed so we don't know

(1:25:17) who what kind of fakes maybe that they have in Jerusalem because they don't get to make new ones in the heat in the East or in some story piece Ori then they arenít priests who do not like all of these negative hence I Aaron's stories these ideas that Levites and the other people are having that are let's say threatening to the Aaron aid control over the centralized religious worship that's happening at the Temple in Jerusalem and they're essentially also allies the Deuteronomic folks who are in charge of the Deuteronomic reform which

(1:25:57) is concentrating that same connection between King and a Davidic King and the Sadducees or as attic high priest so brings us back to this kind of charge that's the end we can step on this chart [Applause] there's no questions right everybody got that yeah yeah we get yep if this was foot bothered before quarterbacks all calling signals well so you know in that way this is one of the things that we were talking about is part one of the one of the ways that we try to dissect and figure out which who these authors

(1:26:52) are is by they're trying to think of them or imagining their intended audience right and so when you are each one of them is they're talking about their own individual interests they are writing to an audience that where they're trying to further probably the things that they're important to them and they are also trying to counter stories that they consider to be you know deaf aiming and probably not true I mentioned that for example the Prophet Jeremiah who's a guy who was alive at the time of Josiah but then also still

(1:27:30) alive at the fall of Jerusalem and had to go into exile into Egypt and so he is at the same time that Deuteronomy and the genomic historian is active Josiah quotes very liberally from J and E but when does not directly quote from P so he probably it's not that he necessarily doesn't have P because one of the things that he does is he negatively quotes from P so he mocks what the peace or says and one of the things that one of his complaints in Jeremiah's very renowned for complaining you know is one of his lamenting and that kind of thing

(1:28:12) right and so one of Jeremiah's complaints is they have written a Torah of lies and so it is completely possible that he's saying is that these guys over here you know have the the priestly Torah are not are not in line with how Jeremiah then understands the Deuteronomic story which is wedded then to je intro for Jeremiah another question but we go somebody's gonna have to do this so as one of the receivers so okay but I mean so it does seem like it's a little like it's often competing and it's arguing with itself and yet how

(1:29:16) did it work out them that it could all just be put together side by side by side in the end with for Ezra and that my argument ultimately is is that these particular interests that these different groups had after the destruction of Jerusalem and after the exile they sort of cease to matter and so in at a certain point even though the books were maybe meant to displace each other or replace each other at a certain point they're all circulating they're all viewed as ancient and reverence and so the ultimate redactor whether it was

(1:29:49) Azra or whoever assembled the different texts and put them side by side they don't have these same worries or competing interests they don't care really about what the Peace of Shiloh are all gone they're the the Davidic King is gone you know at a certain point none of these none of these conflicts matter anymore and so instead they want to maintain all of these holy texts that are defining their identity and so they're able to piece them all together and what ends up happening is that the text becomes much more powerful than it

(1:30:21) would have been you know all each individually side by side because there ends up being very composite characters not in Genesis but in Exodus the the pea authors kind of denigrate Moses because they're trying to elevate Aaron and they say that Aaron is Moses's brothers so they add those kind of ideas and so Moses ends up being quite a mixed figure because he's quite lionized especially by the e source for whom Moses is a major hero and then he also has all kinds of negative qualities like being slow of speech and slow of

(1:30:56) tongue and all these other kinds of things so he's a mixed character that that does bad and good and so therefore he's much more rounded than if somebody were simply writing a hey geography geography yeah there are things that I didn't realize were there we all know about the animals going in - bye - bye - yeah elephants and kangaroos yz7 this is new to me I think we're looking at the folk process where in folk songs probably somebody wrote it a long time ago and it got handed down from mouth to mouth and what is remembered is what is

(1:31:40) memorable right and so we remember the animals - bye - remember we remember the Dove right but not so much the red not so much the Raven right and so on and so forth and maybe that is how all these contradictions get ignored right yeah well we all make the we all smooth the story out in our minds and we remember the details that make sense I mean we have the same thing as we mentioned a couple times in the in the Christian Gospels where Matthew and Luke tell completely contradictory Christmas stories which everybody is able to make

(1:32:16) together in a in one United Christmas scene that they can then put on the outside of their lawn or something like that even though that those are not from the you know the wise men are not sitting there next to barn animals and everything like that in the in any story they just they're you know like you say in a composite that people have made in their own tradition I believe in in Deuteronomy there is quite detailed instructions on conducting sacrifices and how to do how to sprinkle the blood and and the it's all the Israelites were commanded

(1:32:53) to do this 2x Peter since so was this was this something that that P was not supporting that right so so the difference is so you're right there's no there are lot this is there are priestly concerns that exist outside of the priestly writer right and so the Deuteronomy the deuteronomist is also a priest but is expressing probably this larger priestly identity of being a Levite as opposed to being an heir in it and so one of the things that happens in Deuteronomy this is one of the examples of where we talked about there may be

(1:33:36) being a version of it that occurs before the fall of Jerusalem and then maybe an addition certainly happens in the Deuteronomic history after the fall because the history itself goes on after the fall of the king of jerusalem is that there is a section in Deuteronomy that allows for sacrifice and worship to not have to take place in front of the tabernacle or the temple and so for the possibly for the exiles like Jeremiah who go to Egypt and who build a temple in Egypt they were maybe looking to this for authorization for doing that kind of

(1:34:15) thing but like you say it's a pre there's priestly concerns also in Deuteronomy but it's not probably the Aaron ed priests of the priestly source so I just have to say I live in the middle of the Bible Belt southward and I you know I regularly see the bumper stickers that say things to the effect of you know the Bible says it I believe it end of story yeah but I just find it so much more fascinating and in a way compelling the version of this that you have described that that really kind of begins in the Hebrew Scriptures and then

(1:34:58) extends we kind of get a similar kind of heritage from the newer Testament where well I guess I just want to say I'm just fascinated by the idea that that the authoritative text of these traditions would be speaking in so many competing voices yeah and so as opposed to kind of that version that is as if you know in a fundamentalist narrative where there's one singular voice from God and that settles it right what does it mean for a people to have an authority that is in dialogue with itself to me the latter is

(1:35:42) much more interesting than I agree with you that it's it's very much more interesting and that's been the inheritance on the Jewish side you know of judeo-christianity which is to say this continual study and interaction with the text you know has been there there in the rabbinic tradition the rabbi's argue with God you know in and and God you know it has to end up conceding that in the the he's not allowed to act anymore because the rabbi's you know the rabbis have all ruled and that's he doesn't anyway what

(1:36:21) God says doesn't matter anymore you know and so in that same exact way the problem with that that very simple dictum like you saying in the Bible Belt where people are saying the Bible says that I believe it and that's the end of the story or whatever is that the Bible does can you know as we've seen in in just a couple of examples that I have you have here the Bible contains numerous contradictions because the Bible has many competing voices that are all expressing different ideas and devotion and they're all attempting to

(1:36:52) be very there they all expressing their understanding of you know the true relationship with the divine but they don't agree with each other and so there's all sorts of different contradictions that emerge but as a result of that that makes the whole conversation richer and something that we can participate in so in that same exact way there's all kinds of these kind of things so there's at the same time that Ezra and Nehemiah who were here at this time of the redactor at the same time as they're telling are making commandments that the

(1:37:27) the returning exiles the Jew died men cannot intermarry with Moabite women and that they in fact have to cast off their their existing families and destroy their families in order to continue to be included in the congregation of Israel at the same time somebody's writing the Book of Ruth which is telling the story of the most righteous person before God the Moabite woman Ruth who ultimately then becomes the ancestor you know of David according to s res law that Ezra is letting down David would not be allowed into the congregation of

(1:38:05) Israel because his this he is a descendant from a Moabite within four generations and you can't within seven generations or whatever according to the role so those are just obvious contradictions that happen and we have all kinds of them in the in the Christian Bible Belt sense there's a whole bunch of people who are dominionists who take one verse out of Timothy and say women have to cover their heads and they have to submit to their husbands and they can't talk in church and yet we have the competing voice of Luke who has as the very first

(1:38:35) as the very first person to acknowledge Jesus as the Christ is the prophetess in the temple who's not only preaching but she prophesized in the temple and speaks and so it's women do speak in in the Christian tradition and so the author of Luke is competing with the author of Timothy and they're it's not it's a contradiction she yeah I just had a question as to if there's any information on Samaritan sources and maybe what their perspective might have been yes so so the question is about the Samaritans so the Samaritans have their

(1:39:11) own Torah but it which is goes back but it I do not believe that it goes back before this moment so in other words they it would be neat if the Samaritans had let's say e and they had some kind of independent transmission line of e that had gotten built rather what looks like happens to me what I'm gonna my my take on where the where the Samaritans are at is that when Ezra comes back and Ezra unveils this Pentateuch this ends up being kind of an amazing thing that they affect he effectively clobbers all the neighbors

(1:39:53) over the head with because they've got the legitimating law and source and everything like that so then the people in the neighboring province of Samaria who consider themselves to be a true descendant of Israel but they're in competition then with the you tight the people in Jerusalem at a certain point they get a hold of the text and they maybe make some edits to it in order to have their own version of it so they can and they've maintained that that would still be a twenty four hundred year old text or something like that or

(1:40:25) independent tradition but it won't be independent before I think the combination by the final redactor so I don't think it goes back to an independent witness of the divided sources yeah right you would think that they would be possible for them to have it and it would be really neat I haven't seen anything to indicate that it is that there's that there's it that it's not dependent on the the let's say the text as of when the exiles come back so if it turns out if we have a more accessible published version of it that

(1:41:14) additional scholarship is done on it it would be amazing if we found that out but from what I understand more likely is that this you it's not that the text wouldn't have existed but it's that this has now been used to legitimize the movement in a brand-new way and so this is kind of a new thing that happened among the Exile community the fact that they took these texts and had them and that was how they maintained their identity even in Babylon and things like that and then came back with them it's something that the Samaritans

(1:41:48) reacted to maybe even a couple centuries later so they maybe don't have anything left over after that as many centuries they haven't maintained the texts to do it with that's what I that's what I'm given to understand that's my best answer for now this is a bit like watching Trump arguing with himself you know alternative facts fake news and watching the anchors and the comedians in the journalists trying to make sense of it all and you know narrative to it and I can actually do that I mean it is it is very complicated so this has become you

(1:42:38) can see that this maids for a very complicated mess and so the idea of parsimony you know if we go back to William of Occam you don't want to multiply persons so you don't want to put on here let's say an extra ten squares that we don't necessarily need although there actually are more I don't have on the diagram for you but anyway you still like seeing like the book of generations and things like that little little texts that are getting assembled into it by the redactor that aren't part of the major voices aren't

(1:43:10) put on this chart but anyway you don't want to do anything this is essentially the least complicated explanation to get at how the text could possibly be the way there and so it does seem like that's really complicated you know and so it's certainly more complicated than we have for Matthew and Luke which is a pretty simple the to source hypothesis is you know with mark and Q it's pretty easy this is much more complicated which is why it isn't universally accepted the problem is there isn't a competing argument

(1:43:44) that that anybody has set forward that that you can explain as easily as this and so that's the that's the main issue and so when when there is another one and somebody makes it I'll be like I'll be very interested to hear that but in general people just say this is too complicated and it's a mess and maybe it isn't like that it's a it's a hypothesis but anyway they don't have a better explanation within this hypothesis is there any talk of sloppiness due to urgency to get text due to there no be no temple to come and

(1:44:21) worship at so as it was destroyed was there this need to get text out Oh for like the when the in the in terms of the final read actor when they're putting it all together yeah it I don't think so because the the final redactor here isn't so much so the final redactor apparently considers all of the source text to be pretty sacred and so the amount of imitations and things that their final redactor does are amazingly minimal so and this is the one of the reasons why we can take the pieces apart as I mentioned Luke who we know anyway

(1:45:05) the author of Luke Luke writes right at the beginning of Luke lots of people have tried to write these Gospels and boy have a boy do they suck you know these are really terrible you know Luke it does not like what Mark and Hugh have done and so therefore I put my pen to this and I'm gonna write it the way it should be written and so then Luke goes from having condemned Luke's own sources to really fixing them and so write in much improving like all of the Greek and all of you know mark will tend to misquote this a to again Luke will look

(1:45:36) up the the source and actually put the right verse in you know and so all these different ways that we wouldn't know if we didn't have mark you know and if we didn't have Matthew to compare and find Q we would just wouldn't see it the redactor by contrast changes just the changes are almost like little tiny little things and so it'll be things like fixing in the sources as they're recombining them maybe fixing abram and sarai names so that before and after the name change maybe that's been edited in the book in

(1:46:08) the one source or not or there may be a couple of places it's actually maybe here at this level where we're missing some e because the the je redactor cut some of the e stories out because they they combined with the je stories but really this redactor doesn't care if we have a triplet you know we just had that in some ways that Abraham and Pharaoh Abraham and Abimelech Isaac and Abimelech story is really in some ways are embarrassing right because here we have the same exact story that didn't happen three you know that same exact

(1:46:44) way three different times the same people overlapping in a weird way it's because the redactor doesn't like to get rid of anything and so in general we have like variants and triplets and doublets all through it you mentioned earlier that the P author his style appears in later in Joshua and King's stuff like that usually the deuteronomist the P author is especially prevalent in Leviticus and numbers the deuteronomist the same ideas and texts and themes that are in the deuteronomist is also in Deuteronomy is

(1:47:35) also part of the Deuteronomic history which is the essentially the editor who puts together Joshua judges Samuel Samuel Kings Kings so you know you're not saying that the person who wrote down the history of the Kings is the same person who wrote down the people arts and out dinner on the D part that's the D part sorry deeply sorry there's too many moving parts it's not last last little comment is that there is a tradition that there's a there's a case told of a rabbinical court convened and they found the man guilty and God came down and

(1:48:12) said no he's not guilty and I said too and the court said to God you have given us the power to judge in this thing you have no more saying it we are the ones who get to judge not you he not you've given though the law and to the people and the people this side now yeah exactly so yeah so so this is a like I was saying that this is something that has been maintained in the rabbinic tradition so in the Jewish side of judeo-christianity where there's the sense that it's up to scholars now or us or the people to we have the text we now

(1:48:48) can read it and understand it and make sense of it and and including the contradictions and it's no longer for God to intervene and tell us this or that and so that's kind of a different sense of Scripture than has been prevalent and let's say the Bible Belt in Christianity alright well thank you guys and I'm gonna say thank you to everybody who joined us online and once again if you would like us to continue to be able to stream we'd love we appreciate your contributions you can go to Center place dot CA spelled the Canadian way

(1:49:21) and we'll see you next week for we'll see you next week for pre-socratic philosophy thanks [Applause]