Who Wrote the Bible? The Documentary Hypothesis, Transcript

Transcript: Who Wrote the Bible? The Documentary Hypothesis

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(00:00) the scrolls that were found in Egypt have an entire library of Gnostic texts that had been entirely lost until they were found in the middle of 20th century anyway so that's what that'll be about next week and I think it'll be quite interesting but tonight we are talking about though the Orthodox by the Bibles of the jury you know not only were the Ducks but anyway the Hebrew Bible and we're looking at the first five books then of the Hebrew Bible or of the Christian Old Testaments the books that are called either the Torah or the Pentateuch and that sometimes called the books of the five books of Moses yeah

(00:43) could we bring the lights down a little bit there you go it's better all right well very good okay just start with some questions how I'm speaking a Bible how many of each type of animal was on Noah's Ark two is what chain says are you ever gonna say - okay go ahead Rudy has a quest Rudy has a different answer considered demora well more more necessary or important items so you're saying so really says there are seven of some animals and two of other animals everybody else is kind of good with the to answer or what okay

(01:33) all right here's let's read about it yeah so male and female right so you want to have a boy and a girl one I can home for the purposes of them being able to survive as a species so here is how it goes if we read Genesis so the first book of the Hebrew Bible chapter 7 verses 1 and 2 and Yahweh said to Noah this is often the said of translators the Lord we usually say that instead of instead of saying out the four letters that are God's name it's in the English Bible at sometimes translated Jehovah so anyway you always said to Noah come you

(02:12) and all your household into an Ark for I've seen you as virtuous in front of me this generation of all the clean animals take seven pairs man and his woman and of all the animals that are unclean to man and his woman right and so that's sort of what Rudy said although that means 14 so 14 of some and two of others right and so and and the differentiation here is between clean and unclean and what's a clean animal versus an unclean animal or just anybody that you can eat clean means you can eat unclean like two-county mores yeah so

(02:53) what are the so what are the what makes one unclean anymore carnivore here according to the Bible certain animals are kosher and others not kosher so like a non kosher Evon you have a more elaborate what would have one of the definitions of cleanliness is is an animal that has a cloven hoof and chews the cud if it doesn't chew the cud it's unclean all right so here's a little quick and easy chart so like like Yvonne is saying you can't really see this but just because it's not really that important but if you take of the third type of here animals of the land does it have a hoof

(03:39) that split no then it's gonna be unclean is its hoof split yes then the next question is does it chew the cud no then it's unclean you know does it chew the cud yes then it's clean so essentially you know cattle therefore are clean pigs are unclean like why it's like you say carnivores so the anyway are unclean but something of the of the air you know Birds you know essentially a lot of the birds are good things like bats are not good you know shellfish are bad of the waters you know that sort of thing right

(04:11) so he can't eat scorpions you can eat locusts so clean and unclean so you get fourteen of the clean ones and two of the unclean ones so why does no one need seven pairs of the clean animals there's so much yummier because he's gonna sacrifice them right and so if you remember from the story if we go to Genesis 822 21 and after the flood when they all get off the ark Noah built an altar to Yahweh and he took some of each of the clean animals and of each of the clean Birds and he offered sacrifices on the altar so essentially because you can kind of see here in this kind of a romantic picture or you know from I

(05:07) think from the Renaissance or whenever it is romantic here if they had if the if he had just immediately had a sacrifice so you do sacrifice there's only two cows it would have been trouble if you know he wouldn't then it would have been like what happened to the unicorns and the dinosaurs right so they don't have survived there would be no cows anyway so and so he of sacrifices some of the clean ones and Yahweh smelled the pleasant smell and you always said to his heart actually just say that the type of Yahweh said to his

(05:34) heart I won't curse the ground on account of humankind again so he's not going to kill everybody off in a flood anymore according to this because of the in this case it's because of the sacrifice okay so if there were 14 of many of these animals why do we always just show them two by two in all of your greeting cards and your Playmobil toy and everything like that it's easier it would be a lot of toys if you had to do the other right but actually because when we read also now in Genesis now 619 and then a little bit in lesson seven and all living flesh

(06:14) is God talking to Noah again and of all living of all the living of all flesh you shall bring two of each to the ark to keep alive with you they shall be male and female of all the animals that were pure and of all the animals that were not pure and of all the birds and of everyone that creeps on the ground they came by twos to Noah to the ark as God had commanded know so in this first it says all of the clean animals only came by twos all of the clean birds only came by twos so in this verse it quite it quite is spelling out what our little Playmobil is like as opposed to the other verse and so in

(06:56) fact actually these two different readings that we have from Genesis here side by side actually directly contradict each other because on the one hand we said God commands the clean animals 14 and 14 come and on the other one it's two and it's very said clearly he says only to come of the clean ones so you yeah yeah I just wanted to point out that the wording of the second one it's almost as if it's a reaction to the first one because it's specifying of the pure and the not pure like yeah it's protesting too much it's almost as if

(07:36) it's almost as if the author of the pink one had read the blue one and didn't like what it was saying didn't like the message and so when they were rewriting this their own version of it maybe they have maybe rewritten it so it has a different so it's specifically reacting like it's Mike thinks that's the speculation we don't know okay so we'll just say here anyway that although a lot of times people's habit and method with reading the Bible is to always simply conflate it and assume that that it doesn't contradict itself and that there is some reason why okay we can just explain this away or something like that

(08:14) I'm just going to assert that it actually does contradict itself and that's the way the text is and it's not just here it's throughout the whole text and we'll also get a point then and highlight here you know I mentioned here that we had in the blue text its Canaan God and so it's using God's name Yahweh Jehovah and so the deity is called by that proper name whereas on the pink one what we have here is it always as saying God and in fact it's the Hebrew word for God Elohim which is actually plural for God so it's a generic but God but it's actually God's or whatever it would be

(08:52) the plural yeah so does that indicate two different authors two different this is the this is gonna be the the case that we're making tonight so whether or not it is we're gonna see if you believe the case that's how so that the proposal of the documentary hypothesis which as of the middle of the twentieth century was the scholarly consensus is that there is multiple authorship and that in this case there are two different authors of these two different verses and that this explains why they contradict each other

(09:28) if that consensus is no longer anywhere near it's not a consensus anymore but there is still the new consensus and there's no new consensus the new theories that are different from that documentary hypothesis nevertheless also all rely on the idea that there's more than one author so it would be just be it just wouldn't be that there's gonna be the way that we're talking about it tonight but it would definitely still everybody agrees multiple authors okay so those two so we'll look at that this thing about how God is being named as

(09:59) important okay so if that pink one which we're gonna start calling P just for convenience here if the pink one has only two of every clean animal then didn't know why then when he's operating the sacrifice when he have killed off all the cattle and all the birds that you know that her clean birds right by making that sacrifice so how is how does it deal with that how does that pink version deal with it and the answer is the version of Noah's sacrifice and the pink version is that that that there's enough story of that at all so the pink text doesn't talk about Noah sacrificing anything and in fact neither Noah nor

(10:38) anybody else so Abraham doesn't offer a sacrifice of Isaac or even try to in the pink in the pink text in any where the pink that scholars identify is that and there's no in fact any sacrifice offered by anybody until Aaron who is the brother of Moses in the pink story until Aaron is commanded by God to be able to begin doing sacrifices as part of that and only then Aaron and his descendants are the only people as far as the pink sir source is concerned who were ever allowed to sacrifice and so the pink writer does not want to have a story of Moses I'm sorry of Noah bringing extra

(11:22) animals to sacrifice since Noah's not authorised to sacrifice only Aaron in this descendants okay so that'll be important so let's look at a couple other of these variants that are that are fairly well known so you probably have heard the idea that there are two separate creation stories at the beginning of Genesis and indeed there's more creation stories throughout the Bible but right at the beginning in the Pentateuch they're side by side are two different creation stories the one that we're initially quite familiar with is

(11:53) in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth God said let there be light and there was like God saw the light that it was good all of that kind of thing and then it takes place in the course of seven days and God creates everything on six days on the seventh day God rests so that's quite a familiar story that's Genesis 1 through overlapping to the beginning of of Genesis 2 and so on the sixth day after God creates all of the creeping animals and everything like that then we get to this part where it says and God said let

(12:24) us make a human in our own image according to our likeness and let them dominate the fish of the sea and the birds of the skies and the domestic animals of all the earth and the creeping things that creep on the earth and God created the human in his image he created it in the image of God he created them male and female and so there's a essentially a sense of in the course of this universal creation humanity has created male and female in God's image on the sixth day then when you get to chapter 2 of Genesis we have instead we have in the day the Yahweh

(13:04) made earth and skies Yahweh fashioned demands so not on the sixth day or anything like that just in the day of creation Yahweh fashioned a man from the dust from the ground of man dust from the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life and the man became a living being and Yahweh caused a slumber to descend on the man and he slept and he took one of his ribs and closed flesh in its place and Yahweh built that rib that he had taken from the man into a woman and brought her to the man and so this is this other version of essentially the

(13:42) creation of man which is the same word as Adam Adam isn't you know now become a name but it just means man right and so so the man and then the woman who is later named Eve in the story right so not quite the same kind of creation story as in the in the first much more fleshy so God is taking dust to make people and blowing into the nostrils and that kind of a thing doing things that the cosmic God it doesn't isn't physically doing that kind of thing in the first chapter of Genesis okay that's two creation stories now let's go and

(14:21) ask a couple more questions so how many Commandments did Moses bring down from the mountain right so you'd say two tablets two tablets dissed by tradition but and this is from the Mel Brooks movie where initially 15 he drops a tablet it shatters you know I brought you 15 10 10 commandments so Ten Commandments right okay what mountain was Moses on Sinai right so let's read the Bible to find out God's Mountain Exodus 3-1 Moses had been shepherding the flock of Jethro his father-in-law priest of Midian and he drove the flock

(15:07) to the far side of the wilderness and he came to the mountain of God to Horeb so the mountains name is Horeb so why do we all think it was cyanide oh because of a different part of the Bible so in Genesis I'm sorry in Exodus 19 we read and Mount Sinai was all smoke because Yahweh came down on it in fire and the smoke went up like the smoke of a great furnace and the whole mountain trembled greatly so in some parts we hear the name of the the mountain is Horeb or the mountain is Horeb and in other places the name at Sinai and some

(15:45) types of Tory and whether or not those are the same mountain generally speaking people conflate them together but in fact it could be because there are two different authors in this case the blue author and now a yellow author that we started to see okay what's Moses his father-in-law's name Jethro right we just read that here's Moses father-in-law in Exodus 2 however and a priest of Midian had seven daughters and they came and drew water and filled troughs to water their father's flock and the Shepherd's came and drove them

(16:22) away and Moses got up and saved them and watered their flock and they came to rayel their father so now the in fact and and then Moses was content to live with the man rayel and he gave a sapore his daughter to Moses and she gave birth to a son and called his name Gershom so now we have that the name is in fact not Jethro but Ray well okay this is an easier one maybe we'll see but of the ten commandments can we miss them all up you can you can list them out and all and I'll sit yeah go ahead thou shalt not steal not steal should I do all the not just shalt not commit

(17:04) murder thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife have it wife respect I mother and father respect mother and father that's for the first two are I I am the Lord your God the second one is no other gods before me i'ma Lord my God and how they over their gods before me depending on the counting for some some summer it's up so if people count differently so Lutheran's Catholics Orthodox and Jews count that differently so in the version that I am counting that's only one anyway it's but anyway you get bits Ovilus I'm the Lord your God no other gods before me did you mention no should not commit adultery adultery okay and we already said that

(17:52) one to respect the Sabbath and keep it holy keep the Sabbath day holy we got to seven and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself no that's Jesus yeah go ahead say God's name in vain yeah yeah don't take the babe of the Lord in vain yeah that we already had don't have any gods before me did we say lie yet did we say though shalt not kill he said we tell it that first right we said adultery I know I mean I can think of at least one that we've missed so far that's lie very false witness live graven images graven images we've done really good I think we might have gotten them all I don't know let's say

(18:45) so we'll see we'll see okay we got at least nine unless anybody maybe we got ten anyhow we're counting okay this is we did a pretty good job so it was funny there's this congressman former congressman now from Georgia who had sponsored a bill in the United States to make it so that the 10 commandments had to be displayed very prominently in the US Capitol despite the fact that the US has a separation of church and state and so putting the ten commandments and the government building is therefore as trying to establish a

(19:18) state religion and you know that kind of thing so anyway he nevertheless tried to do that Constitution be damned and so he was being interviewed by Stephen Colbert and Colbert asked him why don't you list the Ten Commandments since it's so important to you the ten commandments and he says don't murder don't lie don't steal um I can't name them all so even though it's quite important to him to anyway you didn't Lee got three we did better than that right okay so we'll read here Exodus 34 to see what the Ten Commandments are so Moses got up early in the morning and went to Mount Sinai as Yahweh commanded him and

(19:57) he took in his hands two tablets of stone and Yahweh passed in front of him and called say Yahweh writes on to the tablets these Ten Commandments you shall not bow to another God because Yahweh his name is jealous he is a jealous God you shall not make molten God's for yourself so we got both of those you shall observe the festival of unleavened bread the firstborn of every womb is mine six days you shall work and on the seventh day you shall cease we got that one you shall make a festival weeks of the first views of fruits of the wheat harvests and the festival of gathering you shall not offer the blood of my

(20:37) sacrifice on leavened bread the sacrifice of the of Passover shall not remain until the morning you shall bring the first fruits of your land to the house of Yahweh your God you shall not cook a kid in its mother's milk so we did pretty bad right we didn't get almost any of those oh yeah according to this off the the blue authors 10 commandments but as we see this is about the tablets we're hearing about the tablets this is what God has writes on the tablets and this is what God says as he's making a covenant in this particular chapter in chapter 34 go

(21:16) ahead and number four says the first part of everyone his mind means you shall kill every yeah so this is this question so this fourth one here is the first the first fourth of every wound is mine and then that goes dot that dot that goes on but you have to redeem it and so what it means is that in the old days the understanding was that in you know Canaanite paganism that you would sacrifice the firstborn child even you know to to God but actually a particular God but what has happened now in the Ten Commandments here that dot that dot actually is but you but what you have to

(21:56) do is redeem it so therefore you bring it you bring a ram and sacrifice the ram in place of the of the of the child right so do not do human sacrifice but essentially the old that's the beginning of that commandment though yes so an old set of these Ten Commandments okay so there's actually the Ten Commandments actually are three times listed in the Torah and it's in this j1 the blue one that is they're so unfamiliar and so different there's only the overlap of three or four of them as we saw on the rest are we much more

(22:32) about festivals and way much more about how you're doing sacrifice and this kind of thing right and so the other ones the ones that are in in the E and D is we're gonna start to call them are are the ones that we knew right so have no other gods before my face don't make statues of any form so as opposed to graven images there's no statues at all in this one do not bring the name of for a falsehood don't take the Lord's name in vain remember the Sabbath day to make it holy and this is the only difference between the E and the D so in the e 1 it says in honor of God's creation of the world in 6 days and in D

(23:10) it says in honor of God freeing you from slavery in Egypt so there's a different reason to have a Sabbath day in E and E and then we have again in J all these other kinds of festivals and how you do sacrifices these ones and the ones that are more familiar honor your father and your mother do not murder do not commit adultery and all the way down to the cook and cook a kid in its mother's milk that we have in the in the j1 but don't steal don't testify against your neighbor as a lying witness don't bear false witness in other words don't covet your neighbor's house don't cover anything your neighbor has which is do

(23:46) not cook a kid does it refer to a calf like a calf yeah yeah yeah this is not kid does not mean here this like a baby I'm sorry this is yeah this is not a human kid this is like a goat yeah don't take a little goat you know coats little goats are called kids right and so we now have started using that up to refer that word slang wise to yeah so thank you for that clarification no well don't don't do human kids either you know that's also on the list of don'ts but anyway specifically goats but yeah also cows so no cheeseburgers is the idea in

(24:19) terms of kosher right okay so that's different Ten Commandments so we're starting to see here that there's parallel texts that actually have different readings depending on what we're now kind of starting to identify as different sources you have a question about we aware of the Ten Commandment or the tenth commandment says we usually know them so so II here is Exodus - I'm sorry 22 through 17 judy is Deuteronomy 5 to 6 through 18 and so those are the ways we normally understand them and they're both the same except for the justification for the Sabbath day

(25:10) and so they so essentially the d-- author is repeating what the e author wrote and just changing that one thing thank you okay so I want to look a little bit and as a composite now that we've kind of seen these alternate readings I want to look a little bit at the five books so we've called these the five books they're called the Torah or the law the Pentateuch which is the Greek way of saying it the which means five Scrolls we sometimes call these the five books of Moses attributed to Moses so they are Genesis it's again that's the Greek name which means origin

(25:46) acnes are all the Greek names Exodus which means going out Leviticus which means of the Levites numbers I guess that's an English name not the Great Danes and just translate it directly and then Deuteronomy means which means second law and so those are the five books as we have them now obviously we call these often the five books of Moses but we wouldn't make the point that mosaic authorship is simply traditional it's not it's not that the text claims that so it doesn't begin in Genesis i'm moses having had a vision you know of

(26:20) all of the past going back to to you Adam and therefore like leaving this testimony of my my vision of everything that's gone before or something like that and and then therefore starts writing that actually does happen in anyway a rewritten version of the text that's called the the Joseph Smith translation that exists in Mormonism but it is not the way it begins in the actual text so the text calls also Moses the most humble man on earth and so if he is the author that part is ironic you know and the text also narrates Moses

(27:02) his death and then it continues on a little ways after Moses died and so at the minimum is if he actually had been writing it all the way up till that time as tradition has it has to have had somebody else write it for him the part where he died or you know and then thereafter or at least departs whatever happens to him and then one of the things that we can say is that in Genesis there is a long list a king list of the kings of Edom which is a a one of these hill kingdoms that's a neighbor of the kingdom of Judah of the Kingdom of Israel Edom is the kingdom just to the south in what's now they kind of the

(27:41) negative desert region and that kind of thing of Israel and Palestine and Jordan and that kind of thing and those King list gives hundreds of years it gets tens hundreds of years past when Moses would have been alive and so obviously it's not that source isn't simply not something that Moses put in there anyway so even if we're gonna talk about Moses writing it we have to kind of think of okay well when would Moses have been around and so although the story is actually in Torah are not dated forever after people have

(28:15) actually at least in the last couple thousand years people have been trying to you know come up with dates for them and the most famous guy who essentially calculated all the dates was this guy in the is it you see that long ago anyway in the 17th century then Bishop Ussher and so Bishop Ussher calculated that the first day of creation began and when it says God said let there be light and all that kind of thing it began October 23rd 4004 BC that's a BCE you know like kinda Thursday or something or whatever it is I know probably I guess on this on a Sunday so anyway because it has to be a

(28:54) Sunday so anyway Bishop Ussher then dated the moment of exodus so Moses is part so we're try to figure when Moses was so the exodus from Egypt is 1491 before the Common Era BC and that's a thousand years then before the Torah as we have it took its place so based on things like that EDA might King list that I'm talking about so so there's a huge long time period between when Moses anyway would have lived and when the books are being composed or at least especially in their final form and so just to kind of look at that kind of a this is kind of an

(29:32) approximated constructed not a timeline that is in the text this is a artificially created one the people read into the text of when this is so if the creation is in 4,000 ish time period it's like Eden Adam and Eve then the 2500 ish is the flood 2100 to let's say 1900 is Abraham as we see and then Moses they're around you know 15 to 1400 and so on we can see then going contemporary stuff that's happening is Egypt which actually does have a historical record so the old middle and new kingdoms of Egypt and then we have that moment that

(30:12) we talk about a lot here the Bronze Age collapse when lots of the civilizations like the ancient Mycenaeans the ancient Hittites all of these kind of empires of the Bronze Age collapse except for Egypt doesn't and then after that is the rise of when we get to these more historic kingdoms that where we can actually start to date of the Israel and Judah especially so initially we have sort of the more legendary figures David Solomon then we have one of the first major actual historic figures Omri who is a king of the Northern Kingdom he is

(30:54) confirmed by a Syrian or Babylonian texts you know there was other Middle Eastern texts then we have here the collapse the conquest of the northern kingdom by the Assyrians and 7:29 so that's a historical event that's quite confirmed and so that's you know when we think about the lost ten tribes so the ten northern tribes that I guess their Kingdom is destroyed then we have the main Golden Age of the kingdom of Judah that southern kingdom that whose capital is Jerusalem the reform of Hezekiah and then later Josiah that are sort of like

(31:32) the basis for biblical Anala tree and what ultimately becomes monotheism they have this moment when Hill kaya who's the scribe the priest I mean go finds what they say is a Torah that nobody had seen before by the Ark of the Covenant which most scholars conclude is the book of Deuteronomy that nobody had seen before so now this is where we're starting to see that Pentateuch that Torah that we're talking about the five books of Moses start to be historical and start to be created they're read after so then there's the fall of Jerusalem there is the Babylonian captivity when the people the nobles

(32:14) from Jerusalem are taken to Babylon then they go back in the Persian period 5:37 and then there's this time period when Ezra who was the leader of the returnees opens up the scrolls and reads the law for kind of the first time and so that's when most people believe we have the Torah in it's kind of present form is kind of maybe in that time period 444 and so to get you could imagine between here and then let's say Moses you know is over a thousand years without it necessarily having been written right so the written versions

(32:53) come much much later and so although it is quite possible in an oral tradition to pass you can actually have a thing go on for a thousand years the text here is not orally transmitted text so we're not dealing with an epic poem that people repeat and create archaic language like we have with the Avesta and things like that instead we have a written text that is composed in the time period over here with all the circles that's talking about time period back here with the Diamonds that of course then people

(33:28) don't actually know too much about based on the fact that everything has changed so much so that's just to give some kind of context of the background yes pretty one thing I was wondering about it is we have so little knowledge about the early history uh how could they have have estimated the time from the creation of Eden and 1500 years yeah yeah good question so how do how do people do that this is a modern thing that people do like Bishop Ussher and what they do in the Bible is that a there's a whole bunch of things that happen in the Bible where it'll say and and so-and-so reigned for forty years

(34:11) you know like David reigned for forty years and then he passed away and then his son Solomon reigned for forty years and he passed away and so people went through and they and they did would do that same thing with judges it's often 40 years and so people went through all those 40 years 40 years 40 years and added it all up in order to try to estimate about what that would be but what we can say despite the fact that people who are literally reading it and lead eight reading that thing in quite a literal

(34:39) way these texts are not they're not meant to be precise in any way when you're saying forty years this is a symbolic time where we're talking about a generation the fact that there's so many things that happen in a forty year increment is not because of actual history it's because that's just a literary convention and so adding it all up only creates a false impression so all of these diamonds where I put him I clearly was trying to say ish on every one of those things so 4,000 ish that is a completely artificial contrived a sense of the Bible that the Bible itself

(35:15) does not convey so the Bible is not trying to tell us that it was 4000 BC okay so how can we given that we have these five books in their present format we don't have any earlier versions we have versions almost dating to that time period when Ezra is reading it in that kind of finished form because of the Dead Sea Scrolls so because of that we are able to say the text has been transmitted quite faithfully there is a whole bunch of variations in the manuscript tradition and everything like that and yet it's really quite good you know what's happened and we can look at

(35:52) that Dead Sea scroll and compare all the different variants as scribes have copied it for all of these thousands of years since then we can't how do we get to then that earlier time period before Ezra to try to understand that and the way scholars have done that is through the academic discipline of literary criticism and this isn't to say that they're criticizing the book but rather that they're treating the book critically so that they can understand you know where it's coming from what what is the original text looking like and what is the historical

(36:28) context in which the different authors of the text created the text or composed the text so that it's generally speaking traditionally it's called there's two is divided into two different kinds lower and higher criticism lower criticism is is textual criticism and so they're seeking and textual criticism to get back to what is the closest way that we can get to the original reading of the text so all of these texts we think of publishing as being quite precise now because of printing presses and frankly now you know saving everything in

(37:05) digital copies and everything like that throughout almost all of time every book had to have been copied and recopied every time you are manually copying something you want to introduce errors no matter even if you have a very good system for avoiding errors like for example the rabbis and scribes do nevertheless there do become variations and there are vast variations in our thousands of manuscripts of the biblical tradition that have survived so what we trying to do is to get in in textual criticism we're trying to get back to what the closest understanding of the

(37:40) original source is reconstructing it as as error-free as possible we can never get back to it but as close as we can and then higher criticism is historical criticism and that's essentially by reading the text we try to understand what is the we've read the language of it we can kind of see the dative how archaic that language is and we just read the concepts of it we can see what essentially the intent of the author is what the audience is and we try to understand then that context so that we can understand the meaning and intent within that historical context instead

(38:17) of the way we tend to read things which is we read the story as if it's a modern-day story and it applies directly to us or something like that and so therefore we read it quite crazily out of context so that's how criticism works okay so one of the things that centuries now of literary criticism has unearthed is this ancient practice of using what sometimes literary critics call read actors which is a fancier way of saying editors and so often in the as somebody was making a copy so if you can imagine

(38:55) the amount of work that it isn't necessary to even just have a second copy of a book it's quite a big investment because you have to you know recopy it every single one of those pages is either a piece of papyrus that has to be built together or it's a sheep you know because the vellum or parchment is made from a holding like a sheepskin right and so it's a very amazing ly expensive undertaking that just takes forever if you're doing you know doing it right and all that kind of thing so when you're doing that it's not as huge of an investment proportionately to as

(39:28) you are writing you know recopying a text to write a whole new text or to edit it and expand it as you're going and in fact one of the things that will happen is that if you have an old text one of the things that might happen is it's been in the possession of scribes all this time scribes will make little scribble notes they'll make glosses you know where they'll write something something's unclear and they'll write an explanation and the line above the thing so the note the old manuscripts will have all these kind of notes on it then that might be a really important note they might be important glosses that are

(40:02) all the way through the text well then the next guy who makes a copy may just copy all the glosses with it and when you do that it may not be clear what's a gloss and what was the original text so one of the things that happens with redaction is that texts get expanded especially but they can also get edited or shrunk too so we've seen that a bunch that kind of thing in a bunch of our difference at different lectures we've had before so we've talked for example in recent lectures about New Testament authors both the Gospels of Matthew and

(40:36) Luke how both of those writers anonymous authors who wrote those two Gospels had access to it seems the Gospel of Mark and a lost gospel that scholars call cue and they took those materials in order to craft it edit it changed them in order to craft their own text and so because we have mark and we have Matthew and Luke we don't have Q unfortunately we're able to kind of see the editorial ideas that the author of Matthew and the author of Luke has because we can see that Luke's deleted some 70% of mark and changed a bunch of

(41:13) things and and you can kind of see what Luke's editorial interests are and you can also see the variations between how Matthew and Luke used Q we don't have Q but we can see that the two different ways that exist in Matthew and Luke and so as a result of that we can have this window into what the original was like and also the editorial interests of the particular redactor we've talked before about how we had a lecture a little while ago about the signs gospel embedded in the Gospel of John and what

(41:46) we don't have in that case is any comparative ways of doing it so we so it's much harder to tease that out the science gulps we'll out of the Gospel of John and to actually prove that that there is this layers of redaction that gets us to that gospel because we don't have any of the other key texts to compare right and I've said before if we lost if we didn't have mark mark almost didn't survive just like QED didn't survive and if we didn't have Matthew if Luke had been the only gospel for example that had survived Luke is such a good editor and is so good at writing

(42:19) Greek that we wouldn't have any knowledge that any idea that the seams are seamless you wouldn't know that those two texts have been absorbed into Luke's manuscript that's less true so we're in a similar situation here with the Pentateuch with the Torah with the five books of Moses we have no other text where we can say oh my goodness here is a section of this text a strand of it just that blue text I was showing you before that's a separate book that hasn't survived but what has survived is these strange things where we have contradictions that are in the text

(42:55) and indeed we have very strong voices that recur so the one voice just really seems to have used all the same kind of language let's say and again and again and again but it's interlaced and interwoven with these other voices and so the theory here with the documentary hypothesis is that even though we don't have that any of the text separate by having them all pieced together and seeing the seams it we can we can divide them and read them as independent books okay so one of the examples where we do have this that's in the Old Testament is

(43:37) in what's called the Deuteronomic history which is to say the books of Joshua judges first and second Samuel 1st and 2nd Kings and so those books and then we have a set of books called 1st and 2nd chronicles and well what is very apparent from studying Chronicles is that the chronicler although the chronicler continuously is saying that that he is quoting from some lost book the book of Jasher all these other different books that are you know the books of the kings of Israel the books of the kings of Judah although he's

(44:13) constantly citing these kind of lost or otherwise unknown books what is very clear is actually the source that he's actually copying from is the Deuteronomic history so he is actually editing and changing joshua judges samuel samuel king's kings and in fact sanitizing it and so all of the kind of horrible things that happen if you think of all the bad things that david did and solomon did and all these kind of things those get very well cleaned up in chronicles and so the chroniclers goal is essentially wasn't essentially to

(44:49) write a much cleaner version that was not so embarrassing as the Deuteronomic history of the older history and so an example of that here is in the book of samuel there's this period point where again the anger of the lord was kindled against Israel and he the Lord 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 throughout all the tribes of Israel from Dan to Beersheba and take a census of the people so that I may know how many

(45:27) there are so census is an antiquity are always evil and the reason why is because once you've taken a census you know you can the king knows how much taxes you owe you know and so everybody knows that no good can ever come of a census because it means you're gonna have to pay taxes so when the chronicler gets to that same section of the history that is recorded here in Samuel or chronicler writes Satan stood up against Israel and incited David to count the people of Israel so David said to Joab at the commanders of the army go number Israel from Barre Sheba to dad and bring

(46:01) me your report so I may know their number so so rather than have God you know being ordering the census and as a kind of a thing a plague that God is having against Israel here for David it's now put into Satan's domain as Satan is you know we given the blame for this census so you can kind of see and there's plenty of things all the way through David just doesn't do any of the bad stuff you know that he doesn't anyway Samuel in kings and chronicles okay there are all kinds of other visible seams in the text of the

(46:42) Pentateuch of these five books of the Torah so one of the things that we have are doublets and even triplets so we'll see you have the exact same story told in one part and then it'll happen again we're in some cases it'll happen three times we've already seen with the Ten Commandments they recur three times and one of the cases quite different texts of the Ten Commandments we've all seen how like some of the other stories that are occurring differently but here's another couple examples one of them is the scene where they're at the rock at

(47:19) Meribah and Moses strikes the rock and water comes out of it and this happens twice in the text so the first time it happens right at the beginning of the Exodus so in the book of Exodus in Exodus chapter 17 verses 2 through 7 and when we read there and the people complained at Moses and said why is it that you have brought us up from Egypt to kill me and my children in my cattle with first and Yahweh said to Moses here I'll be standing in front of you there at the rock at Horeb and you'll strike the rock

(47:56) and the water will come out and the people will drink and Moses did so before the eyes of Israel's elders and he called the places name masa and murabba because of the quarrel of the children of Israel because of their testing Yahweh saying is Yahweh among us or not okay so rocket me Rabat and water came out of the rock okay but then at the end of the Exodus after they'd been wandering around for another thirty years or so we read this story numbers - I'm sorry numbers 21 through 13 and Moses and Aaron assembled the community opposite the rock and Moses lifted his

(48:38) hand and struck the rock with his staff twice and much water came out and Yahweh said to Moses and Aaron because you did not trust me therefore you shall not bring this community to the land that I have given them they are the waters of Meribah over which the children of Israel quarreled with Yahweh and he was made holy among them so essentially as we have it this is a same kind of event that happens more or less twice we're the same kind of thing happens although what probably is happening here is that this is the same story that's being told

(49:11) by two different voices is what we're making the argument and so one of the things that that is very consistent with for example this pink and we've talked about the pink author here before is the author always says and Aaron so every time Moses is doing something good Aaron is almost always along they're along for the ride and also so you know God is talking to Moses and Aaron and another thing that happens is is that they're they're always talking about assembling the congregation of the people or the community the people and that also never

(49:44) happens on the other story where it's only Yahweh talking to Moses right and indeed and this story Aaron makes a golden calf when Moses is up on the on the mountain in the pink there's not does not happen Aaron does not do anything bad like that okay there's another one here we've talked about a couple times in past lectures so I'm not gonna read it all the way but there is the story that's the she's my sister story and so and this happens three times in the text so essentially there's a famine Abraham and Sarah go to Egypt to escape the famine

(50:22) Sarah is of course the most beautiful baby ever and and so err Abraham says you don't tell them I'm the husband otherwise you'll kill they'll kill me you know say so say instead that you're my sister and then well then I'll be okay you know they're not gonna kill me because they want to get at you right and so the first time that happens is it Genesis 12 10 through 20 so Abram and Sarai are in Egypt and in that story that pharaoh actually lies with Sarah and then in a biblical sense and then Egypt is cursed a Yahweh curses Egypt as a result of that sin right and

(51:04) then Pharaoh's all mad because you said it was you said she was your sister what's going on here why why am I in trouble you know okay the next time that happens in Genesis Genesis 21 through 17 now Abraham Abraham and Sarah are at JRR which is to say not in Egypt this is among the Philistines I believe so and so a bimolecular of Gerar takes Sarah to his bed but God prevents him from coming close to her and nevertheless God curses Gera for even trying and the guy again says wait a second what did you do now you

(51:42) said you said you know she was your sister and in this case he says well you know she is my sister because they're half half siblings even though they got married - so they're married but also according to this story here the yellow author anyway that they are brother and sister half siblings anyway and then in and then in Genesis 26 suddenly now it's not Abraham and Sarah it's Isaac and Rebecca who are not half siblings who actually art sisters they again go to Gera and again the king is Abimelech and

(52:14) Yahweh would have cursed him had somebody accidentally taken Rebecca to wife but nobody even got as close as to the bed in this particular instance of the story and again now it's reading retold with even different characters so it's Isaac and Rebecca who aren't actually sisters so the pun doesn't really even work but the same thing happens at the end of the story you know use in a witch again I've been Malik says you said you know she was my sister so anyway we have a triplet and in fact in this case it's recurring twice the blue author is

(52:45) telling it twice yellow author - okay so how do we get it figure this kind of thing out so now I've shown you enough hopefully contradictions and different voices and doublets and triplets that we can try to try to make a sense of who all of these different colors that I've been outlining are so we have five books of the Torah as we've already called them Genesis Exodus Leviticus numbers and Deuteronomy according to the documentary hypothesis that we're presenting tonight there are four major sources than of those five books which

(53:22) we call J E D and P and then in addition to those major sources there are what are called redactors who we talked about so editors who were putting them together and specifically there's an early redactor who combined the J and E books and then there's the last redactor presumably around the time of Ezra that is putting the whole thing together and so that's maybe bringing in even the left little the last stuff the stuff that occurs after the Israelites return from Babylon beveling the Exile so they're called J II D and and we'll talk about why in the future

(54:03) but anyway let me show what some of these characteristics are so we talked about before about this idea of Mount Sinai versus Mount Horeb and so when we're looking at the J and P text it's called Sinai and when we're looking at the E and D texts it's called Horeb yeah so I'll say what their yah West you know which is to say job j4 Jehovah P is priestly Eve or l OA store Elohim and then D for deuteronomist and so we'll we'll get together why those are called that but that's what the four names are so in this particular case for the holy

(54:42) mountain there's 34 mentions of it the different voices use only their own name for it and like I say so J and P call it Sinai 20 times and Horeb is E&D 14 times or mountain about okay they use their own different language so I mentioned before here about you know Pharoah knowing Sarah in the biblical sense right and so this phrase to know in the biblical sense occurs five times in the Pentateuch and it's all in J so there's no the other authors do not use that euphemism the term Sheol identifying a place for the dead essentially the shadow realm it's not really hell but

(55:33) this idea of where your spirits are resting in the place of shades your shades are resting for all time that occurs six times in J and is not anytime in any of the other voices the word to suffer occurs seven times of the Pentateuch all in J sections and so there's plenty of these where essentially there seems to be a voice that scholars have picked out and called J that consistently has different characteristics including including different words that other other voices aren't even using are euphemisms P by

(56:09) contrast the priestly one the pre source I mentioned before uses that word congregation yeah Joe has a question the word to suffer do we know what you know what that is in Hebrew the one that I do not know if I don't write it down because I'm not I'm not a Hebrew expert and so I'm sorry I'll have to look it up for you the word that is anyway the Hebrew for congregation in this case P uses that a hundred times so I mean when I was showing before Moses and Abraham became before the congregation of the people all of that

(56:47) kind of thing that just happens just constantly in this particular voice which is the clearest and easiest to pick out I mean after after even just like a lecture of this you can probably turn to anytime you open any of the five books and you read a little bit and you start to say this is P you really get at the P source seems very clear all the time so constantly saying things like congregation the P uses the phrase gathered to his people as a euphemism for death 11 times none of the other voices use that so gathered to his

(57:16) people as opposed to you know his resting with his father's in Sheol instead we have this he uses the phrase be fruitful and multiply 12 times so none of the other voices are making that commandment and P is the only voice that say that someone fell on his face so when they're ashamed is looking like that in person falls on his face that euphemism occurs in P eight times but none of the other voices make that kind of euphemism yes it's a common so different people fall on their face because they're anyway there so it's a

(57:59) it's a they shamed right and so they're they're in that kind of a position where they're experiencing shame and so that's a dramatic gesture to show that but it's as a euphemism for that or as a you know physical demonstration that phrasing of it occurs only in P okay the translation here in English of that phrasing so another place and this is where we're getting the names then of these e you know je and P there is a unique terminology as we saw going all the way back when we were looking at that Noah story those two Noah stories how in the one we were saying that God is always

(58:38) named so Yahweh so the name of God that occurred in that J source of the Noah story where it was always Yahweh who was breathing in the nostrils and everything like that so the name kind of fleshy God Yahweh in the in the Noah story of the J source closes the ark up with his hands it closes the window of the Ark in the peace story God does never anthropomorphised at all so God is not the P story is where we have God excreting humankind in God's image male and female so in other words God is beyond gender in that in the P idea so

(59:20) in this case yeah so his hands so anywhere where there's like a hand of God or God is walking through the garden or God is blowing into the nostrils of the dust this is like the Jay story so that kind of thing is happening in Jay so essentially then and also by the way it's E and P through the whole bunch of the early portion of the Pentateuch anyway all the way up through the middle of through through early Exodus certainly all through Genesis II and P only are using L and Elohim to call God and never use Yahweh so the name Yahweh

(1:00:02) and Elohim are quite common in the book in the text and so when it's saying Yahweh or Jehovah in the way it's translated we'll say the Lord right so wherever it says the Lord Adonai and in Hebrew so wherever it says that that's where it's saying Yahweh cuz even a lot of cases you're not supposed to say Jehovah or Yahweh right and so and so then when it's saying God then it's saying Elohim that's what the that's what the text is right and so Yahweh then J voice names God with the proper name Yahweh from the very beginning whereas a and P called God L or Elohim

(1:00:38) until God's name Yahweh is revealed to Moses on Horeb syenite so essentially at certain point in the burning bush Moses says if I'm gonna go to Pharaoh and I'm gonna ask you know and there and I'm gonna ask to let the people go they're gonna say well in the name of God or whatever you say well what is his name you know and so and so that's when God then says to Moses I am that I am and which is a pun on Yahweh and so and so that's when the name is revealed and so never before in the II or P source until that in pivotal moment is the name known

(1:01:16) to anybody and that's when it's told where as in J everybody's known Yahweh's name the whole time so that's where that kind of that kind of secret reveal ends up getting messed up when the text gets put together as the redactor so okay so let's look at then at what the different text perspectives are as we kind of are seeing then these difference between them so Jays perspective Jay is very interested in the southern kingdom so we talked about so here on the the map so in this period of time that's immediately before the Assyrians destroy the northern kingdom the kingdom of

(1:01:58) israel and and leave only the southern kingdom thus kingdom of Judah and then the Babylonians destroyed that kingdom of Judah before that there is essentially this northern kingdom that's the more important and bigger Kingdom Israel whose capital is Samaria and so ultimately the descendants of the remnants of the people there are the Samaritans right and that's why it's called anyway Samaria and then the southern kingdom of Judah who is where we get the word Jew and their capital Jerusalem and then things like I

(1:02:32) mentioned before Edom right and then also the Philistines the Phoenicians other related people Moabites so essentially then that southern Jay is very interested in that southern kingdom Judah it talks about Judah itself it's places it's heroes in Jay Abraham lives in Hebron so Hebron is this older capital of Judah and so it's become it associates Abraham with Judah in je the scouts that Moses sent to scout out the land they only report locations in Judah and then the sole Scout that's named is Caleb who is a judah-ite row and also then

(1:03:20) only Jay has long stories about Judah who is essentially the namesake the patriarch who is from who that Kingdom is named or actually vice versa the kingdom is Judah and so they have a eponymous ancestor hero that is created that they tell stories about but only again in Jay there's no stories about Judah in the other sources okay so that's Jay and then we're saying here some a source that is highly interested in the southern kingdom but specifically is writing from a courtly perspective so which is to say what the nobles care about as opposed to what the priests

(1:04:04) care about and so there's all of these stories about killing and adultery and all this kind of thing that is less what priests are concerned about priests are more concerned about sacrifice and all this kind of thing and how you do rituals properly okay to ease perspective so by contrast with the Jay this esource the LOA source the J source is the yahwist source we it's called Jay because of Jehovah right and so as opposed to it's called yahwist even though it's Jay right anyway so yeah Jay source is the yahweh source the e source is the LOA source of the source that always says elohim and doesn't doesn't

(1:04:43) reveal the name yahweh until Moses II is especially interested then in the heroes and places of the northern kingdom so in II Jacob or Israel acquires the territory of Shechem the northern capital by purchase and not by violence as in Jay and the site is also then ident if I'd as the burial place of the patriarch Joseph so so Joseph is a northern hero so Joseph two tribes sons are the four I am and Manasseh and they are the tribal the main tribes the main two tribes of the Northern Kingdom the place Shechem here is the earlier northern capital and

(1:05:31) in the je story it's acquired in a very bad way essentially the tribes of Israel have a daughter the twelve sons of Israel have a daughter who the guy from Shakya rapes and then they trick that all the people of Shechem by saying okay well we'll get it we'll get over it you can just take her as a wife but you have to all get circumcised because that's our whole custom and so then all the men of Shechem get circumcised and so then when they're all you know on their backs and in pain and they can't fight or anything like that then the then the two

(1:06:07) sons of Israel going to kiss kill em all and so then that's how they get check them so that's actually you know in other words they make the story it brings you know disparages then the northern capital as opposed to a more honorable way of purchasing it where the patriarch Israel or Jacob purchases it yeah oh you're from Sikkim wonderful how interesting [Laughter] Wow so cool okay so II then is critical of the house of David so the southern kingdoms royal family as opposed to the northern kingdoms family right so the kings of the southern kingdom here in Jerusalem and Hebron are David and the

(1:06:55) Davidic kings anyway so there he is quite critical of them and then he elevates the III Oh might here Oh Joshua so specifically we'd heard before about how the spies you know I mentioned how in the Jay this was the only spy that they mention is Caleb who's a Judah eight and he goes around and he sees different parts of Judah in the east ori the the spies are our Joshua and Caleb and so Joshua who is the II northern hero of the northern people so does seem to be there for that northern maybe priests or court people

(1:07:37) are probably the source of the e-text and they probably have either brought the traditions or it's in fact exiles from the court who after the northern kingdom is destroyed compose those texts or bring those stories or write them down and Jerusalem when they have essentially their kingdom has been destroyed and they are at the court in the south okay peez perspective I mentioned the peas by far and away the easiest one to identify it after after you kind of understand the characteristics of how this author works it's the priestly author the priestly author is very concerned with the rites

(1:08:15) and rituals of the aramid priesthood and the air and the priests of the jerusalem temple and indeed the whole reason why you start reading Genesis it's very easy to read anybody can read Genesis and it's fun and it's a good book and then you get into Exodus and it's things are going really good and then it starts to get really boring and then it gets Leviticus and numbers and you're like oh my goodness this is so boring you have guess you've gotten into this giant slog where it's all all priestly author and so instead of any story happening it's just how do you

(1:08:50) sacrifice this or that all these different law things all of this things about anyway rules and laws and all this kind of thing and so it becomes quite boring and then people usually unless you are liturgical II obliged to read the whole Torah every year you know people often you know get tired of it at that point and so it's the peop authors fault and so no one then as we mentioned not Noah not Abraham offers a sacrifice prior to Aaron and also almost every time that we Moses is doing anything the P author

(1:09:25) will say Moses and Aaron do this Moses and Aaron go before Pharaoh it's an error and staff not Moses and staff that does all the magic tricks and things like that Aaron does not make the golden calf as in II so in other words Aaron is not denigrated as the person who you know essentially forsakes Yahweh and and essentially introduced reintroduces paganism the way that happens in the e story and animals do not talk in the piece Taurus so God is much more cosmic God is not fleshy or embodied or anthropomorphic MP and

(1:10:04) there's no things like fables there's two places in the Jay stories in the Jay text where animals talk essentially where fables have made their way into the the narrative I mean can people remember those Balaam's ass is the one talking animals so essentially this priest of prophet of Moab is riding along on his donkey the donkey has a vision it can see an angel with a sword in front of him and so he stops and so the Balaam starts beating the donkey because he wants to go forward and so and then the donkey's mouth opens and he says why are you beating me I'm your donkey you know I mean I mean I and

(1:10:44) there's an angel in front that's gonna kill it that's kind of thing and so anyway the donkey talks in that particular story what about what's the other animal it talks the snake the serpent right in the Garden of Eden so yeah so it's just an animal it's a fable not it's not meant to be the devil in Jack yes urgent home is it why do you always try to protect because of the yeah why are they trying to protect Aaron and so the idea of it here is based on I mean we you know we what are the things we're doing with this literary criticism is since we

(1:11:27) don't have like an author who says I wrote this part or anything like that we have to kind of read into the text to decide based on the the author's biases who the author is and it almost certainly is in this case like you say a person who a priest of the Jerusalem Temple who considers himself to be a descendant of Aaron now whether or not you know whether or not they actually are Aaron AIDS or whatever that's their eponymous that's their ancestor that they as they historically or heritage wise understand and they

(1:11:58) hate these stories where Aaron is demeaned and Moses is elevated and so instead they tell stories where Moses as demeaned and Aaron is the most important one and they tell stories where they're brothers they're the other the other authors don't consider Aaron and Moses to be brothers and so this is essentially the pea authors and the pea author almost certainly then is a priest from the at least a priestly family associated with the like you say the this family that's called the SATA kites Aaron aids those people who are descendants of Duke who is the Aaron did priests at the time of David so there's

(1:12:38) a de kites and then in Greek SATA kite is it's sad you see and so these again those are those temple priests that are still in charge you know as of Jesus's time right so so anyway that's peas perspective and then finally D we haven't spent a bunch of different time in D we saw a D in that one list of the Ten Commandments and D is the deuteronomist and essentially the idea of it is that D the Duke book of Deuteronomy the fifth of these books is all by itself a completely separate text that doesn't have je or P in it but it is written by

(1:13:19) a different author and so D then is the voice of the Book of Deuteronomy and like I said this is believed have been found by ho kiya the priest during the reign of King Josiah at least as that's narrated that story is narrated in the book of second Kings and then D this D book shares its theology and agenda with the Deuteronomic historian which is to say the editor or a redactor that put together all of those other books that we call the Deuteronomic history so joshua through kings and overlaps with the contemporary prophet jeremiah maybe

(1:13:57) so Jeremiah is also one of these authors who has a lot of quoting from J and E and also Deuteronomy so may well you know anyway be some part of a related school and so anyway we're not particularly sure but that's that part of it is one of the theories anyway with with the deep perspective so one of the ways then for the d historian is that they might have had it be that they had that je text then d and then and then the Deuteronomic history and that might have been what they wanted the Bible to be right but when somebody got ahold of

(1:14:36) that who was an Aaron in priests he would have read that and seen Aaron making a golden calf he would have seen Aaron denigrated and Moses elevated in all these kind of different ways and so maybe then the pea author which may be the last one to have been written that part of the Torah is written in part as a response as Mike was theorizing with the P and the J versions of the Noah story so that brings us to the megachurch which I loved always show and we've this is why we had this lecture so I put this up once just

(1:15:11) in a previous lecture a couple months ago and somebody said okay I know you've lectured on documentary hypothesis but before but I forgotten what this is and could we please have a lecture on this kind of explain it but essentially here the idea is the earliest - are these J and E so J a a source that includes fables like the talking animals that includes God Yahweh who has always talked about and by name and is also more personable God and and the anthropomorphic God who's walking in the garden with people who was physically closing up the Ark that kind

(1:15:47) of thing and all of the kind of stories that lion eyes the southern kingdoms heroes and also tell all sorts of courtly intrigue and scandals and adultery and all that kind of thing so maybe a courtly text from the kingdom of Judah the Jerusalem court II by contrast as we saw is interested in the northern kingdom and so maybe is written by northern exiles who have come down to the kingdom of Judah after their kingdom was destroyed and are preserving than the the legends and the the heroism of their ancestors in Israel the northern

(1:16:30) kingdom and then at some point or other there was an early rejecter who took that Jay narrative and the e narrative and brought it together according to the documentary hypothesis and made one text and so essentially in so doing through presumably threw away a bunch of the e-text and anywhere where there's overlap and in some cases interlace them and these two are by far and away the hardest to tease out because of that and indeed one of the reasons why there is less scholarly consensus about the existence of this hypothesis so that this can be shown is because many many

(1:17:13) scholars are just not convinced that you can show that there was a an e and where E is different from Jack so that's part of the issue ok so that became then there is a rejecter in the traditional theory here and the traditional hypothesis that created then je this combined text P then read that and did not like that and wrote a completely different texe that overlaps a lot of the same stories but tells them the opposite way but then also just includes this interminable amount of rituals and priestly stuff that bore everybody and

(1:17:46) so anyway that's P meanwhile simultaneously je is much beloved by the deuteronomist Deuteronomy we can possibly identify two different variations in essentially one that's written right before the fall of the southern kingdom and right after there's a whole bunch of very embarrassing prophecies in the Bible which is that things like the scepter shall never fall from the from the hand of the Davidic King so essentially the the King of Jerusalem who's a descendant of the house of David shall rule in in

(1:18:20) Jerusalem forever and that will never the scepter won't ever fall and then within a generation after that got written into a Bible than the felt right and so then a lot of the Bible has been trying to figure out how do we how do we recover from this essentially failed prophecy and so there's a second version of Deuteronomy that tries to kind of you know written after the fact to kind of figure out well why did that happen this thing that we didn't expect to happen and so that also then is where the Deuteronomic history is coming from and

(1:18:50) then the Deuteronomy as we have it and then at some point or rather than after the exiles return from Babylon there is a final redactor who has je who has P and has Deuteronomy and brings them all together to form the Torah that we have the Pentateuch as it now exists in part because this guy doesn't have anywhere near the it's been centuries the northern kingdoms totally destroyed the southern kingdom got destroyed they've come back they don't have all of the all of the vicious partisan thing that was

(1:19:26) happening when P and JE were fighting with each other now they're just all old holy books and so R is able to just say you know the redactor who's putting it all together just puts it side by side and interlaces it because they're all holy books and they want to be read together as opposed to you know worrying about being on one side of the other nobody cares anymore because the the priests who were denigrating Aaron that their line is died out they're gone so that partisan battle is over so now we just are putting that inheritance together it's urgent

(1:19:58) it looks like the most important guy is the purple or yes the doctor is it we have an eye for that so it's possibly Ezra so yeah this is why we're yeah and my second question is um all the stories from the Bible Oh Indian Sumerian I'm locked in Noah and other stories where did they integrate it when right yeah so the question so the question yeah so the question is on the one hand in some sense are is the most important because our decided what got in and what didn't there we don't know what got left on the editing room floor right and so and so there that and

(1:20:42) that is possibly happening likes we've talked about at the time of Ezra we have anyway biblical narrative about Ezra reading the law for the first time and having that then be part of then the new tradition the new religious tradition of second temple Judaism talking about the different festivals that you're reading that you need to observe and all those sorts of things and having Torah reading become now a central part of the religion which it had never been before that has not been what had happened until until Israel so whether Azra

(1:21:14) himself or as a major official or you know he could have as a major Persian official had the you know had had let's say patronized a bunch of scribes to put this together and create that we don't know I mean but it's as good a guess as anybody can make and so we don't and certainly Ezra is even traditionally essentially thought of as a second lawgiver traditionally and so so Ezra does get a lot of traditional credit for it and may well have been also the person who was that final redactor regarding then other borrowing right so you mean Aaron was noting that for

(1:21:51) example we had that flood story there's a much older flood story that exists in Sumerian and Mesopotamian mythology and so did that get entered into the text when the children of Israel are in Babylon and they're being exposed to all of that Mesopotamian mythology it could be so the way that we have the way the way I have been presenting the documentary hypothesis here the idea is that wouldn't be that it would actually have been earlier so that that would have just been transmitted as part of the general lore of the ancient Middle East

(1:22:31) but it isn't clear exactly when any of these any of these texts would have been written right so different I tend to focus I tend to get a believe that they're a little older and I tend to think that most of the composition is happening right before the destruction of Jerusalem but lots of colors place it after the Exile and so if that's the case then the different components are later and so then that when they would have been influenced directly by the Babylonians because of living in Babylon at that time so let's go back a couple bit to where we were just to to talk

(1:23:11) about it you know so let just isn't concluding about each of these voices that J the yahwist gets his name as we said because of Jehovah it appears then probably composed in Judah or at least people who have that those interests the same thing Aloha same then derived from Elohim as we said it's that northern Northern Kingdom interests P that priestly source it's possibly dated in the Exile this is it's possibly shortly after others say maybe right before the Exile so it's hard to know exactly when it would be and then Deuteronomy we kind

(1:23:53) of have that sense of when that would be based on the story of finding the law in in Kings and second Kings okay you know so just to so we started with that chronology that Bishop Ussher put together that is pushing the sort of traditional narratives that are we find in the Bible trying to date them based on modern readings of doing math and getting you know deciding it but when we look at the kind of actual historical time period we zero it in much more closely to this period of time and we mentioned after that Bronze Age collapse so before we had that whole timeline it was just over here we're looking at so

(1:24:43) after that Bronze Age collapse after this possibly legendary United Kingdom of Israel under David - this period where armory starts to exist as a major figure in a Northern Kingdom that is as known in the historical texts of their neighbors so that the I'm red house is known by the Assyrians for example to the point when the Assyria destroys the northern kingdom this is maybe the composition time period that anybody's looking at at the earliest so the earliest components of the Bible that we have are composed in that kind of zone and then to like I say Deuteronomy as

(1:25:24) its first found - it's later edited after that fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians that period of the Babylonian captivity this period when some of the composition maybe of pea either here or here is being edited it's essentially in this kind of zone to the point here when it all kind of comes together so as opposed to way back here it's much more likely to be right in here since that's the time period that the text is much most most familiar with so that's the big gladdened about the Hebrew used over that whole time period that they could read and write and

(1:26:09) understand it yeah the question is yeah how much how is a you know if we're gonna try to date these if yeah how different are the other languages so there is some variation in the language between the different voices and the idea is that possibly J in a year the older or a little bit more archaic but essentially it's it's that's one of their were suggestions that I'm making that it's maybe all kind of composed in the same general zone if we were to go back here we simply don't have any we don't have any nothing sort of preserved so we we're not aware of

(1:26:46) what it would have been like earlier and we know that actually later when they come back the spoken language fairly quickly becomes Aramaic right and so they start speaking the the lingua franca of the of the Babylonian Empire and later the Persian Empire so Aramaic is a related language as a language related to Hebrew and indeed when we see when we now think of as like the Hebrew alphabet and so we it's not an alphabet this Ebru constant continental language so it doesn't have all the vowels but anyway the the consonant cherry language of Hebrew that is not ancient Hebrew at

(1:27:27) all the ancient Hebrew that they these texts would have originally been composed with had a different alphabets or different continental language that is related to that but that one that we now have that is now written in is Aramaic so it's the era as we call it the Hebrew alphabet but anyway it's the but it's actually the Aramaic one and so and so then that's one of the reasons why then Aramaic is it's actually studied by both Aramaic and Hebrew is studied in rabbinic school because you because Hebrew remained as a liturgical language because it's the language of

(1:28:05) liturgical means Scripture language right so it continues to be read because the scriptures were written in it but the spoken language becomes Aramaic which is what the Syrians are speaking with the Babylonians and all the people are speaking and that's then what the rabbi's write in when they're writing Talmud and everything like that and so that's why anyway in Hebrew school you you know rabbinic school you learn both so that you can study both what the rabbi's say and you study what the Hebrew Bible says and indeed the last books of the Hebrew Bible like Daniel

(1:28:38) the very last book to be written and make it in is written partly in Aramaic and partly in Hebrew and so that there is variation therefore so Daniel is a later kind of Hebrew but it's that answers the question we're speaking that God incorporated into the so even though Persia even though Persia is in charge so Ezra by the way when Ezra comes back all this time period so after the fall right and so after the Exile when they go back and they rebuild Jerusalem when they rebuilt the temple Ezra everybody Ezra is a Persian official the kingdom is not independent

(1:29:24) it's a it's a province of Persia but but so the independent kingdom is killed over here with by the by the Babylonians but the Persians speak a very different language so Persian is an indo-european language like German and English and Celtic and and Sanskrit right so all of those kind of languages whereas Hebrew you know is a Semitic language like Arabic and Aramaic and that kind of thing and so because the Persians conquered this vast empire that the Babylonians and the Assyrians had they used Aramaic or Syrian as their as their imperial

(1:30:08) language in the same way that when the Romans took over the eastern Mediterranean because they'd already had all these Greek empires Greek was the official language of the Eastern Roman Empire even though the Romans spoke Latin right and so in that same way Aramaic was an official language of the Persian empires administration even though the Persians use Persian in their area right yes oh yeah and number D yep yes if as you say there's multiple authors and different versions in the first five books of the Old Testament is there

(1:30:48) evidence throughout the rest of the old and new Testament for similar differing versions and and a related question many Christian groups believe in the literal truth of the Bible as the Word of God yes so how do they rationalize that in light of what you're arguing that there's differing versions yes so so the answer is yes that as you go through the rest of the Bible you can do the same kind of literary criticism and find underlying texts and so we've had a lecture before on for example the book of Job the book of Job is fairly in its present

(1:31:40) form is kind of in the middle of the Second Temple period or later Second Temple period and yet it has very obvious seams and component text where lots of different things have been added and there's internal contradictions within the text and it's kind of a big hodgepodge and mess in the current current form and so there are a bunch of things like that we can do that with proverbs so the book of Proverbs has a bunch of different little books that have been kind of welded together that are unrelated to each other they then in turn are other books that have been combined together and the fronts and

(1:32:09) backs have been put onto it and that kind of a thing so pretty much you can do that with most all of the ancient books there's a bunch of things like look a little book like Ruth is probably just a composition of one author in the Second Temple period and so like some books are quite coherent like that but a lot of them are books that have been added to and grown and to get to the present way that we have them regarding how do you how do Christians you know rationalize this how do people understand it different Christians have different ways that they look at scripture and so in my denomination we

(1:32:49) are not literalist and so we understand understanding of Scripture is that scripture is human response to the divine and so inspiration exists people write in their own language in order to respond to it but they hire do so within their own time place and context and so the idea would be that some there's initial prophets than there are later redactor prophets who ultimately give us the scripture that we have and there are multiple voices and scripture meet you know as a his words in many languages and many prophets many voices that actually are in dialogue with each other in the same way that lets say a

(1:33:29) philosophical dialogue is in is it's not just all one position rather it contradicts each other because we have to discern for ourselves essentially where we fit into that kind of conversation that would be how we take it in terms of a lot of let's say evangelicals who are scriptural literalists and authoritarians they largely have rejected scholarship and so and so unfortunately you know this is something that this is a direction that now over centuries literary criticism as an academic discipline was more or less created by early modern Germans in order

(1:34:08) to study the Bible you know and and so we have had many of these results for four centuries you know three centuries or something like that but at a certain point there is in the early 20th century there's a break or a division between mainline Christianity and what became called fundamentalism Christian fundamentalism and the idea of it was that mainline Christianity continued to be informed by scholarship whereas the fundamentalist preferred to do literal readings that unfortunately can't be squared without rejection rejecting scholarship might do

(1:34:48) in those pictures you showed us at the beginning of Moses holding the tablets yes lending what was that an actual language that was on the tablets because it wasn't Hebrew or Aramaic or is that something Hollywood made happen so the Mel Brooks won they might have done that they might have known I mean I feel like actually in the Ten Commandments - they've got the thing right now I think that actually in the sessile B DeMille movie that they actually are aware of that archaic Hebrew language that is the different like I say continental

(1:35:21) language that is again based on Phoenicians but is its own original thing that then got superseded when the people came back and started speaking Aramaic and started using the Aramaic alphabet to write Hebrew and so I think it's actually archaic Hebrew and so they think that they might have even gotten it right in the Mel Brooks movie which is kind I mean why not you know that anyway but possibly based on the fact that they had already they did a lot of research for the Ten Commandments and how they did that yeah so just I just

(1:35:53) wanted to clarify so is the Hebrew of today the alphabet that we have today is is that not the ancient Hebrew right so that's not the ancient archaic Hebrew of before the destruction of Jerusalem of Jerusalem it is based on the Aramaic alphabet that they were that the Persians used as an official language so this is Aramaic alphabet what we have today yes okay yeah I keep saying alphabet but it's just the consonants or consonant or whatever the name of that is I have another question about the the day - or was the three different

(1:36:28) versions of the Noah story yeah which were worth the authors of those so before that you mentioned the two that we had when we're reading the Noah's story are J and P and and so the J story so the very earliest and the very latest may be and so the J story is the one where you know you have the 7:14 clean and unclean because of the sacrifice that's again the one where God uses hand to close up the the Ark it's way more it it's way more earthy story again whereas in the in the P story where we have again is more

(1:37:11) cosmic more theologically sophisticated view we have the sense that's the P the priestly author's worldview is the same as the the Babylonian worldview the middle ancient Middle Eastern worldview essentially the world is is you know you know is flat it has four corners it has a hemisphere called a firmament of the sky the stars that we see at night that is that is placed over that and above that is water so there's waters above the firmament and then there's a you know you dips down and there's the land underneath and then there's water underneath that too and so

(1:37:52) this cosmic idea of of the universe you know of having that particular worldview that is obviously out of date that's not how the world actually worked but that's how they understood it as terms of the science of the time the so God opens the firmament of the heavens up and the water that's surrounding the universe pours down into and that causes that cosmic flood in in the pea story so it's much more epic you know in in peas telling and the interesting thing about it is that the redactor interlaces in

(1:38:31) like this so it's not like they're told one after the other it'll talk that's why there's contradictions within the story you know whether they're using a raven and a dove and this kind of thing in that but then they it but it's in anyway it's interlaced yes as you thought the different versions I was trying to to find out what the Quranic version which is correspond to e or J more it sounds like a mix because well Noah I mean there were two players only yeah and then there was no sacrifice yeah I'm Abraham sacrificed but Moses did oh no I did not sacrifice but Abraham

(1:39:19) sacrificed yes so Aaron was Moses brother yes and but obviously he did say he did build the golden calf yeah so it sounds like a mix of all well it had gotten mixed up by the fifth century BCE and that would have had had been what both the Christians had access to you know so in other words it was well known text by by as of anyway the 4th century and so as a result like you say the the no II and J and P were not independently circulating as far as we know past the time of Ezra so if obviously if something were to happen where we were able to I mean the there would be there's be no bigger potential literary

(1:40:07) find of anything in the universe than if we were to get a hold of in Egypt somewhere or the Dead Sea or anywhere would it be a J scroll right and so if there was an actual whatever 2700 year old or whatever would be scroll of just J it would totally overturn you know and they would it would say everybody was right with this documentary hypothesis you know because we would know because we'd have independently circulating but it didn't circulate so one of the goals of all of these books so we don't have these earlier versions of job that I talked about we only have the composite

(1:40:41) as it now is we we do have the earlier versions of the Deuteronomic history and we have chronicles so we can compare what the chronicler did in that case we do have you know Jew you know Mark and Luke right but in this case we don't have J so it wouldn't have been open to anybody in the Middle East to have been reading it all alone I've on just right behind you Oh what is the origin of fundamentalism is it some kind of reaction to uncertainty and relativism what is their psychological dimension to it yeah we'll have to have

(1:41:20) a whole lecture on the origin of methyl is emits a in Christianity it's a was a twentieth-century phenomenon and I think that it's yeah it's a reaction I mean I would call it reactionary as opposed to a lot of times fundamentalists are considered to be conservative in that they're conserving the way things were in the past but actually what they're I would argue that what they're doing is reacting against new ways things have been starting to read and they are writing they're telling their own new reading based on a

(1:41:51) reaction to how other people are saying it so so they'll a fundamentalist Christian will listen to me and be you know very angry as I mean here's one of these progressive Christians who's saying that that Moses's is not a historical figure that Noah's Ark is not a historical event and that kind of a thing and they would react against me saying that and to double down and say that all the reason why the Grand Canyon exists is because of the flood the reason why there are fossils is because of the flooded with this kind of a thing right and so that's not something that people in the Middle Ages said they

(1:42:26) didn't know about the Grand Canyon or fossils necessarily those kind of things but it's a modern reactionary reading that people have based on essentially not liking what progressives say you mention the name Jehovah at least twice yes and may I comment and where that originates sure that's not supported by either the Hebrew or the Greek right but it originates in trying to figure out what was the exact name Java revealed to Moses on either Mount Horeb or Sinai yes ancient ancient Semitic languages were

(1:43:09) not vocalized there were no vowels right so Moses only reveals something to to to people and what was written down was whether four letters yad hey wow had right well what were we know that the ancient Semitic vowels are quite invariable but by the time people are thinking of how to pronounce Java they went to a Greek source so there's they knew there was the tetragrammaton which is the four letters so they took the title the honorific of Yahweh which in Greek is I don't I yeah and the vowels are ah oh ah yeah but

(1:43:58) those between the four somatic languages and you get yup Jehovah yes why why it's Jehovah is that I guess from in German higher criticism the yahwist is spelled J a W is D which is the equivalent of Y and yes Wow exactly yeah so exactly so it's a if this is you know so so for the for jehovah's witnesses for whom were Jehovah is quite important this is we can say about that is we know that that the we don't know how the Tetragrammaton you know the four letters I've been writing it on here yhw H but anyway in using the English letters for the Roman

(1:44:41) letters for those four Hebrew letters we don't know how it was pronounced I've been saying Yahweh this whole time it's written it's rendered as Yvonne says in the King James as Jehovah and so that's why the Jobos witnesses because of the prominence and importance of that translation English use that word Jehovah but as Evan says the what happened is is that in Hebrew they don't write vowels but what and they and in Hebrew and in rabbinic Judaism you don't say the name of God I keep saying it this would be blasphemy you're not let you know supposed to be doing that in if

(1:45:19) I was a rabbi and but what they did say is every time they get to it as you say they say ah deny and so so he said you say that's why it's in English King James it aloft humiliated be translated as the Lord instead of you know so you don't ever say Yahweh but when you get to those letters Yahweh you say Adonai well in the Middle Ages the Hebrew developed little dots and that they used in order to indicate what the vowels are and the and the rabbis and scribes in the Middle Ages put another dot so that

(1:45:49) people would know what how to say it and when they got to Yahweh they put in the dots for Adonai and so when the King James guys read the the the medieval Hebrew and it said Yahweh and had those dots for Adonai they used as Yvonne says they used the Jehovah the Adonai vowels and the Jehovah that Miss are the Yahweh consonants and created Jehovah what we can say based on understanding how that accident happened that the one way that this is really not pronounced is Jehovah so anyway so that's so like we can say about that so okay so let's just

(1:46:31) conclude real quick we already have been talking about it I just want to just you know quickly say that although I have presented here the documentary hypothesis as we've been talking about it it had been quite a consensus up in the middle of 20th century pretty well scholars are all agreed that there's no one person that authored the Torah in its present form however the previous consensus that the documentary hypothesis is the way it came about has broken down and there it's still I would say possibly the majority but anyway

(1:47:02) anyways it's certainly a lot of scholars are still in favor of it but there's a couple other different ways that people are looking at it and these are essentially the fragmentary hypothesis and the supplementary hypothesis so the fragmentary hypothesis is that rather than imagining that there is an interlacing of j ii p that are constantly being taken by our redactor and merged together that there are simply bazillion little fragments and you can't actually identify a p voice but instead there's just a bunch of fragments that a redactor has all sewn together and I don't know for me I'm not

(1:47:36) as convinced by that cuz I really find that the P has a very strong voice that I can i den but anyway that's the that's the idea of it and there's a lot of people who find that and the other one is what's the supplementary hypothesis this one is way more how I was describing what happened to job which is to say there might be a nucleus of a little book in there and that multiple react redactors and redactors have actually edited and added and added and added and so rather than having let's say identifying separate

(1:48:03) texts that have been woven together there might have been a kernel of one text around which somebody has written another book around which somebody has written another book and around which somebody's written another book regardless it's not written by any one person it is some kind of an evolving process and so there are some kind of different ways that we can understand these different seems and contradictions and things like that but this one is the one that I still am interested in and kind of fold and I talk and I kind of go back to but I want to just point out to everybody that this is not law by any

(1:48:35) means it's a hypothesis and there's alternate hypotheses so that's the documentary hypothesis [Applause] who is the major scholar in this documentary it's guy from the early 20th century like fellow Heusen well if I'm trying to forget his anyway I'm not remembering that most from do you know the name Groff bellhousing alright guys thank you very much and we thank everybody for joining us online and we will take discussion over snacks appreciate it Oh before you all go let me take a picture because of attendance because

(1:49:26) Leandra is not here to take attendance one sec this is just for numbers purposes thank you it's also