Documentary Hypothesvs. Supplementary Hypothesis

Transc: Documentary Hypothesis vs. Supplementary Hypothesis by Centre Place

Documentary Hypothesis vs. Supplementary Hypothesis

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(404) Documentary Hypothesis vs. Supplementary Hypothesis - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-FWJuSMibs

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(00:02) Our topic tonight: the documentary hypothesis versus the supplementary hypothesis. It sounds incredibly technical, but actually, this is a very exciting topic and it's one that is much requested. This is essentially looking at who wrote the first five books of the Hebrew Bible—who wrote the Torah, who wrote the Pentateuch. These are the two primary academic hypotheses for understanding the authorship of that text. We've previously done a couple of lectures on the documentary hypothesis, but this was many years in the past, even

(00:46) before the pandemic, when we were doing these live with a live audience here. So, there's some updates I want to give and some additional information than we had in those earlier lectures. Ancient tradition attributed the authorship of these books, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible—called either the Torah (the Law) in Judaism, or the Pentateuch in Christianity (the Five Books)—they were attributed, or the authorship was attributed, to the leading character of books number 2 through 5: Moses. So, although all five are organized

The Fallacy of Biblical Chronology

(01:32) in a kind of chronological order, the books are not a history, nor are they a chronicle. They don't have an annual dating system the way other chronicles would have, when you're saying, "this occurred in the year of our Lord," or whatever the dating system would be. In that sense, they are more like the epic poems at the heart of the ancient Greek culture: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and Hesiod's work, Works and Days. So, all the dates that you ever see in a Bible, if you have a Study Bible,

(02:17) those are fully hypothetical. Those are different ideas that scholars have about when Moses might have lived, when the story of Moses might have been set, when the story of Abraham might have been set, or when the Garden of Eden might have been set, if they hazard a guess. Famously, the most famous I guess in the West, or the Protestant West—I'm not sure, Christian West anyway—the most famous guy doing calculations for this is Bishop Ussher, writing in the 17th century, who read all the biblical texts,

(03:02) tried to add all the numbers up um in a way that I don't think makes a lot of sense but nevertheless became something that people really enjoyed doing and in his calculation he decided that the Exodus for example took place in the year 1491 BC and he went through and created dates for all of the biblical events uh he's certainly not the only one or the first one even to have tried this so medieval rabbis and also uh late an late antique Eastern Orthodox priests made their own calculations based on their own readings

(03:44) of the Bible as a history and adding up the dates in order to find a date for the creation for the very beginning of Genesis and then they created their own dating systems starting with that date the date which they theorize the world creation began so these systems are called ano Mundi which is to say the year of the world as opposed to anod domini the year of Our Lord so ad this is am and the Jewish version of ano Mundi dates the creation to our the Julian calendar anyways year 300 , 761 BC whereas the Byzantine version uh had

(04:37) a lot more had a longer calculus and so it dates actually the year of creation to 559 BC and so then their numbering system says this is now the year uh in the case of this gravestone that dates to 1903 or 1904 ad it has the year 5,664 ano Mundi so in other words in the year since the world was created 5,6 5,664 so the wide ranges of calculations for the universe creation they're all derived by the same source so the rabbis the byzantines bishop Usher they all kind of added up numbers that they found in the Bible to get very different

(05:28) calculations and I think that this kind of shows the Folly of trying to use the Bible this way um certainly you have to get through in the middle of it of the early chronology you have to get through Joshua and especially the Book of Judges and the Book of Judges each judge's uh rule is just followed by a period of I'm sorry of 40 years and that's very clearly a meant as a a poetic device it's essentially saying that the a generation passed so it's not can't be meant as an actual chronology that each one of these guys is set 40

(06:05) years apart rather it's just saying in 40 years past and now a new and then Israel forgot uh Yahweh and a new uh a new people came and tormented them as a result and then when they remembered Yahweh they cried out again then Yahweh raised up a judge and now Samson delivered them or something like that 40 years 40 years so it is not a um a source for making real chronologies their artificial chronologies um the text purpose is never meant to be a history book uh rather it has a very particular identity formation purpose and teaching moral and

(06:47) religious lessons and so U trying to use it for chronology is misuse and misreading of the text and and in any event the number of years just in the thousands uh that is still favored by Young Earth creat is not correct as we have a very um now robust scientific cosmological consensus that the universe is 13.

Lack of Historical Evidence for the Exodus

(07:15) 8 billion uh years old so while the pentat while the Torah contains no internal chronology and can't be particularly dated uh just internally the contemp temporary Egyptians were actually very significant record Keepers and they have a recorded chronology going all the way back before 3,000 before uh the Common Era so 5,000 years before a present and so dating of The Exodus has been very popularly um coordinated anyway in modern times with the reign of Ramy II Ramsey the Great which is during the uh 13th century before the Common Era so Ramsey

(08:07) is one of the greatest pharaohs of Egypt's 19th Dynasty during the New Kingdom Period and in the wonderful old movie The Ten Commandments Ramsey is uh portrayed by Yol brener in a very I don't know very memorable role certainly for me so in contrast to Moses for whom there is no record outside of the biblical mentions at least certainly not in when Moses contemporary to when Moses supposedly would have lived um we just have an amazing amount of historical information about Ramses II including even having his mummy and so I presume

(08:49) they''re probably also busily getting his DNA so that we can even have that um like I mentioned rames was one of the great pharaohs of this certainly the greatest pharaohs of this era and is the greatest Builder since the age of the pyramids which was hundreds of years in his past in addition to his building projects he's a warrior who fought both the Nubians to the South and the Hittites to the north so expanding Egyptian power and influence the Great temple at Abu simbel uh is one of the many structures ramsy's built and the different statues

(09:28) have his likeness his name in Greek is rendered so Ramses becomes aimus in Greek and that inspires the famous poem azim mandas by Shelly which talks about um how fleeting it is to even think that you can accomplish in life something so great that it will make you immortal because even um a king as great as Ramsey is as great as aim mandus uh is only remembered so much in other words at a certain point even all of his uh very memorable giant uh statues and the Deep um coues that bear his name no one can read those anymore the statues

(10:16) are covered in sand and people people forget about you and there's only one famous movie about you and it's a half a you know more than half a century old now that kind of a thing and the main character is Moses anyway not Ramsey so Ramses uh is also the pharaoh who fought the famous battle of cadesh and he fought that against the Hittites and that battle is especially important because we have records of it in both hittite and Egyptian sources one of the first times that happens where we have contemporary records of a

(10:53) contemporary event from uh two sides that's helpful for us because if we only had the Egyptian side well it turns out that Egyptian monuments always depict the Pharaoh as Victorious but getting the other side of the story from the Hittites along with kind of the archaeological evidence that shows it's not like Egypt conquered um cadesh and pushed the hittite frontier back rather there's a treaty that more or less calls it a draw it shows that it probably the two empires found that to become a Frontier between one

(11:33) another so amidst all of this wealth of information um archaeological and uh sourcewise that we have about ramsy um we have no trace of the story of The Exodus so while the movie The Ten Commandments includes an apologetic argument for why why that would be why is there no mention of Moses or The Exodus and Egyptian records um and so in the movie when pharaoh seti who is ramsy's uh father is banishing Moses he says let the name Moses be stricken from every pylon so the Egyptians do not want to have um this this shameful story

(12:19) recorded however despite that apologetic it's really insufficient to explain the total lack of mention if there had been a series of devastating plagues that destroyed uh Egypt's power and then an exodus of at least let's say a third to half of the population all of the slaves that had lived in the Delta if they had all left suddenly um Egyptian propagandists uh you know this is a negative argument because it's just saying an absence of evidence but nevertheless Egyptian propagandas try to put a a smiley face on terrible things

(12:57) that happened to them it's not it's very hard to have uh omitted something so incredibly important if it actually happened and just as importantly The Exodus is entirely anachronistic so the reason why Ramsey fought a battle against the Hittites at cadesh in Syria is that during the period of the New Kingdom Egypt had an Empire that included control over Canaan and so any flight of the Israelites from Egypt proper to Canaan would not be Liberation from Pharaoh because pharaoh ruled both Egypt and Canaan so it's certainly not set at

(13:39) the time of Ramses nevertheless when we have um we're confronted with these myths especially with ones that are so central people tend to really long for finding like the kernel of truth behind the myth U because we are so just obsessed with his historicity so Scholars agree that as it's written The Exodus is a myth like Atlantis or the anad or King Arthur um so there might have been a guy a historical figure named Arthur but he didn't do any of the things like exist in uh the Arthur Legends likewise uh no matter how much

(14:25) people want to look for a volcano that exploded in Thea or whatever maybe that was Atlantis that's not what Atlantis is described like in the myth that Plato wrote and the myth didn't exist before Plato Plato created it Aristotle Plato student said Plato is the one who made this up this is not a thing it doesn't come from anywhere there's no history to it it's made up it's made up uh and likewise um the anid as the foundation story for Rome that Romans are descended from Trojans is not uh historical so this do not stop people from wanting to

(15:01) search for kernels of truth behind myths so in some cases there are potentially actual kernels of Truth or kernels of historicity we might say not truth kernels of historicity behind myths so the ilot the Trojan War there was a Troy there was Wars and there is possibly a war that the Greeks maybe didn't fight against the Trojans over you know the stealing of Helen but there may have been an actual War where the Greeks and the Trojans were fighting against the Hittites who had been forgotten by the time Homer starts

(15:43) composing The Iliad so in that case we have identified there being such a thing people also would like to put um The Exodus and Moses um potentially at the time period when the hios conquer Egypt so four centuries before rames during Egypt's second intermediate period so the intermate periods are when Central Authority breaks down the country was invaded both North and South so the kingdom of kush invades from the south and an West Asiatic people known in Egyptian records as the hixus conquer Lower Egypt that is to say Northern

(16:28) Egypt uh the Delta and down and they set up their own Dynasty and rule for about a century so between 1650 BCE and 1550 BCE and so since the hios are Asiatic possibly Semitic people um maybe this is when The Exodus would happen but again this setting would require a total um Distortion or obliteration of The Exodus story as it's written because the Exodus story is not about the patriarch Joseph leading an army into Egypt Conquering the local people and setting himself up as Pharaoh only to have his descendant the Pharaoh

The Function of Origin Myths

(17:14) Moses routed and kicked back out by some native born Egyptian Dynasty like that's what the hios are so the story isn't like that at all the Exodus story is an origin story An Origin myth about a people leaving slavery and bondage and coming to their own promised land so part of any people's identity is an origin story and an origin story is not really important as history it's actually more important as explaining a people who we are telling us about our qualities what makes us who we are and so it makes use of a narrative a story

(17:58) which says where we came from so in general when any people are going to have an origin story they have two basic options which are one we were always here we're autoc cathic we were here since uh you know we we grew out of the rocks and so we as a people have been here other people have come and gone but we are from this land this land is ours that's one of the ways you can tell your origin story the other option is you can say we came from somewhere else so and so we talked about the anid that's one of the Roman origin

(18:34) stories which identifies anas as the earliest ancestor of the people who ultimately became the Romans and anas travels around uh the Mediterranean and on his route to um leum on his route to the place that will be where Rome is founded he meets for example Dao the legendary founder of Rome's great rival Carthage and so that also figures into their the importance of the Roman origin story according to the anad anas is a Trojan prince who has to flee from the city of Troy when it falls to the Greeks this is an event that

(19:18) takes place actually after The Iliad it's not written into the Iliad so while this um myth connects Rome into that broader myth Greek worldview of Homer we may ask ourselves say why are you picking yourself as being on the losing side the Trojans lose lose this war after all um do you want to say that Greeks can beat up on you well I'll say that the origin gives the Romans an ancient lineage and even in Flight in flight to Exile anas is able to represent values the Romans saw in themselves and so specifically fial piety and so anas is

(20:03) most frequently pictured carrying his aged father thrown over his back while his father holds on to the household Gods so in other words fial piety means I am he his his catchphrase is I am Pius anus suus anus and he therefore values his father his father values the traditional Gods the penate and then he's got in his other hand his young son ascanius so the patriarchal order is what's most important to Rome um anas's wife is trailing along after she actually doesn't make it and that is also saying something about how the

(20:45) Romans understood themselves and uh the importance to them I guess familiarly of women so modern academic disciplines including history Linguistics Arch ology genetics they all confirm that the Romans are not Trojan Exiles um which does not stop people today from pining to find a kernel behind that myth so people would still like it to be true somehow and they looked for we weird ways to connect it and I'm just going to say that this is a modern fetish that we have for historicity this fetish for historicity

(21:23) I think causes us to lose sight of the real purpose and value of An Origin myth it's not to tell real history it's to explain to people identity and the meaning behind their identity the Romans actually have a second um probably older and even more embarrassing origin myth this is the story of ramulus and Remis so twin brothers who were abandoned Raised by Wolves ultimately uh decide to found the city uh where they gather essentially brigands together men who are are uh free people but kind of Thieves and who don't have a

(22:12) lot of women around as a result of that and they end up attacking a neighboring tribe the sabines in order to steal and indeed rape all of their women so that the Romans can have women in order to uh get their City going and so so people this I mention this as an example that your origin myth is not always written with the um uh with sort of a a happy propaganda spin in mind so there's sometimes a criter Criterion of embarrassment that people have why would you make that up if they didn't do it well there is some

(22:52) description again of how the Romans wanted to be seen in terms of their Marshall prowess at the very early stages when these stories were being told about themselves and about their relationship to their neighbors um and so that doesn't always include like I say these um not embarrassing or uh highly Moral Stories that you might want to tell if you're making it up on morgin story so I mention that because sometimes that same Criterion of embarrassment is cited to argue in favor of some historical kernel Behind The

(23:27) Exodus myth if weren't historical why would the Bible's authors make this up you know why would you want to say our origin is as former slaves who got away from the Egyptians like I say in the Roman example origin stories don't necessarily have to be Rosy propaganda in order to make their point um as we've seen in many past lectures the stories of the Torah of the pent du were largely unknown and go unquoted in our earliest Israelite authors so the earliest components of Isaiah the historic Prophet uh is not telling stories about

(24:13) Adam and Eve has probably never heard that story um likewise um we've seen that the earliest that the text of the pentat there ear that it might have been put together and known in the format that we have it is during the Persian period when we have the story that Ezra The Scribe reads from the law for many days to the people and the people are astounded because they're very unfamiliar with this text this has not been a part of their life this has not been a part of their practice and it only becomes important

(24:54) we saw when did um a lecture recently when did the Torah become authoritative only becomes absolutely critical to the identity during the later hasmonean period so right before the time period uh of Jesus's own day so for judeans who had been living in Exile in Babylon under the Babylonians and who had now returned to Jerusalem in order to rebuild still um as a subject people of the Persians but on their own again in a way this origin story where a great prophet and lawgiver leads his people out of bondage in Egypt

(25:36) and back to a Promised Land would have very special residence so I don't think we have to um think very hard about why this story would be would resonate to the first audiences that heard it if it weren't actually having a historical kernel the text speak to the context of the authors when they're writing them it's always the case and so the texts of these books are all written Millennia after their uh time setting so if we are going to try to date these things like Bishop Usher did then you know again Eden is maybe 4,000 3 4 5,000

(26:25) years before uh the Common Era the flood 2500 years before Abraham 2,000 years before so now this is getting us into the time period when Egypt is having an actual history not a Mythic history and we can date the Egyptian old middle and new kingdoms and you can see the time period Then of the hios in between the Middle and New Kingdoms in that intermediate period and you can see also the time of Ramses in that New Kingdom Period before before the whole Bronze Age collapsed when all of Egypt's neighbors uh including the means

(27:05) including the Hittites collapse the Egyptians maintain themselves barely but lose Canaan to the Sea peoples this is when maybe the Philistines emerge and are there and then it's only then centuries later when we're getting to Historic Kings like Hezekiah Manasseh and J Josiah Kings of Judah after the fall of the northern kingdom the more important Kingdom falls to the Assyrians hilaya finding the Torah in the reign of King Josiah then almost right away there after the fall of Jerusalem the Babylonian captiv captivity the return

(27:47) of the Exiles in Ezra you can just see almost all those dots seem right next to each other when we contract the whole timeline in this way you know so that we can see uh these time periods when these mythic um stories are set so in other words there's no oral tradition that is maintaining this for thousands and thousands of years these are unknown stories until we're getting down to when the actual um uh historical time period is happening when we're getting to um the very end of the first temple period the Captivity and then the second temple

(28:23) period when the actual composition is taking place okay so some have argued that the name Moses is part of an Egyptian theophoric name like Rosa or TT mosa which means person born of raw the god raw born of tho uh in other words another Egyptian god and so mosa would be the end part of that where the name of God is omitted so it would be like yosa YW mosa something like that nevertheless even if there was a historic Moses the stories of the Torah are too late to preserve any historical details and in any event the

Denial of Mosaic Authorship

(29:06) texts are too late for him to have been the author so I know we're talking about the documentary hypothesis and the supplementary hypothesis but I want to start by just assuring everybody that there is no chance whatsoever for Mosaic authorship that is not one of the one of the options so if the five books of M Moses could not have been written by Moses and were not written by Moses who did write them a close reading actually reveals that there are multiple voices in the text indicating multiple authors and I keep saying the five books we

Identifying Multiple Voices

(29:44) might as well list them off here while I have the writing here so the five books are Genesis which means origin Exodus which means the way out Leviticus which means of the Levites the Levites are the Priestly tribe numbers which means numbers arithmo is the Greek of that and Deuteronomy which means Second Law and so then they also have the Hebrew names which are based on the U the first words of each of the Scrolls so even in Antiquity it was observed that Deuteronomy doesn't quite fit the same chronological scheme that

(30:26) the other four books so the other four books narrate a story from Creation in Genesis 1 to the Israelites arriving at the East Bank of the Jordan after wandering 40 years in the wilderness where they are given kind of final instructions at the end of book the book of numbers and they're ready to begin the conquest of Canaan in the later Book of Joshua and so that's already there at numbers and then there's another whole book Deuteronomy uh instead of going straight to Joshua so Deuteronomy then is set with Moses speaking to the people on the

(31:05) East Bank of the Jordan and he gives a big long discourse in which he goes back and talks again about all the wandering in the wilderness he gives another whole set of instructions which is where we get this um name for the text so Deuteronomy just means Second Law in Greek so a second law uh including a variant of the ten commandments so that's repeated again it's very similar to the version but not quite the same as the version given in the book of Exodus back in chapter 20 of the book of Exodus so back in 1943 Martin no a German biblical scholar

(31:47) coined the term the deuteronomic deuteronomistic histories in order to identify uh the books Joshua Judges 1st and 2 Samuel 1st and 2 Kings uh as one kind of composite set books that are from the same maybe school or editors and that share a similar style and Theological Outlook and he suggested that these um share a lot in common stylistically and theologically with Deuteronomy and also with the prophetic books of Jeremiah and so the Jeremiah is associated also with the deistic school we have a story within those

(32:41) deuteronomistic histories from the book of Kings where one of the last kings of Judah in the end towards the end of the first temple uh period Josiah who's been reigning since he was a very small child now at the age of 26 orders that the Jerusalem Temple has to be repaired and that leads to finding a discovery so we read in uh kings that the high priest hilaya said to shapan the secretary I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord and well when hkaya gave the book to shean he read it shean the secretary then informed the king the

(33:24) high priest hilag has given me a book shean then read it aloud to the king when the king heard the words of the book he tore his clothes so Josiah has this reaction because this book contains a bunch of Commandments that he and everybody have never previously heard so this is theoretically an ancient book but in fact it's probably a book that is been written right around this time so unlike um the stories in Genesis and exodus which as we saw a set centuries even Millennia before the texts they were composed this um first draft of the book

(34:05) of Kings may actually date from the reign of Josiah or soon thereafter and so this story of finding a book and then the religious reforms that Josiah has based on that are much more likely to have um some histor historicity some kind of historical background and so so as early as 1805 Scholars suggested that the book hkaya found is the core part of the book of Deuteronomy the deuteronomic law code which is understood as D1 or the oldest part of the present book as we have it then other sections of Deuteronomy were added by later authors

(34:52) or editors maybe during the Exile period to explain why the temple and the kingdom were destroyed those kinds of uh additional explanations but the earliest core part of the book Deuteronomy is perhaps dating to this reign of Josiah so Deuteronomy has its own format and speaks with its own terminology in voice while the other four books Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers while they're more easily read together as a unit internally they also include distinct voices that show clear signs of multiple authorship so one voice in particular in

(35:37) my opinion stands out as being more formal and officious and it tells long stories um that and especially long details about um let's say Priestly ceremonies and Priestly Garb and all this kind of thing that I find to be very boring I think that this this author tends to um kind of make the Bible you know the boring makes the boring ifies the Bible the way revend Lovejoy when he starts quoting long uh long repetitive nonsense this author is filled with this kind of thing so it's concerned with sacred rituals sacred implements and so forth

The Priestly Voice (P)

(36:17) so we can see this voice I think in numbers 20 toward the end of the wandering of the children of Israel in the wilderness when they come to a place is called maraba um now there was no water for the community I'm going to highlight a couple key words as I'm reading this so there's no water for the community and the people gathered in opposition to Moses and Aaron they quarreled with Moses and said if only we had died when our brothers fell dead before the Lord why did you bring the Lord's Community I should have Community there on bolded

(36:58) too Into the Wilderness that we and our livestock should die here why did you bring us up out of Egypt to this terrible place it has no grain or figs grape vines or pomegranates and there is no water to drink Moses and Aaron went from the assembly to the entrance to the tent of meeting so I want to highlight these words so Moses and Aaron Aaron is always paired here with Moses and we're talking about the community or the assembly a lot of times so they fell face down and the glory of the Lord appeared to them

(37:37) the Lord said to Moses take the staff and you and your brother Aaron gather the assembly together speak to that rock before their eyes and it will pour out its water you will bring water out of the rock for the community so that they and their livestock can drink so Moses took the staff from the Lord's presence just as he commanded him he and Aaron gathered the assembly together in front of the Rock and Moses said to them listen you rebels must we bring you water out of this rock then Moses raised his arm and struck the rock twice with

(38:19) his staff water gushed out and the community and their livestock stro drank but the Lord said to Moses and Aon on because you did not trust in me enough to honor me as holy in the sight of the Israelites you will not bring this community into the land I give them these were the Waters of maraba and maraba in Hebrew means quarreling and so these are the Waters of merbah where the Israelites quarreled with the Lord and where he was proved holy among them so as we're kind of reading all of this you can just see the number of

(39:00) times that the text emphasizes the role of Aaron alongside Moses you and your brother Aaron Moses and Aaron and then it also makes very frequent use of phrases like the tent of meeting as opposed to the Tabernacle or however it would otherwise be presented the assembly and this community so um this particular voice which we'll start to be calling P uses this word or word like congregation more than a hundred times and other voices don't use it at all this voice uses the phrase gathered to his people as a euphemism for death so

(39:51) uh Abraham lived x amount of years and he was gathered to his people that becomes a euphemism for death and it's used times in P texts and no other voice in the Torah uses it the P text also use the phrase be fruitful and multiply 12 times it's not used elsewhere it's a um Central kind of commandment and theme of the P author and the p is the only voice where it says that someone fell on his face when they are confronted with uh something shame F and that happens eight times in this voice so in this story you

(40:33) know at the very end you s heard Moses and Aaron are denied entrance into the promised land for a seemingly small infraction and they had to read it a couple times to even think of what they did that was different from what they were commanded so um they called the people Rebels and Moses strikes the stone twice with his staff instead of speaking to the Rock and calling it forth calling the water forth in the name of the Lord so interestingly this is not the only time though that we read about the Waters of maraba in the Torah in the pentet so

(41:12) this story that we just read from the PE voice is at the very end of the wandering but there's a similar story found at the beginning of the 40 years in the wilderness that's told in Exodus 17 so the story in Exodus 17 like I say occurs at more towards the beginning of the 40 Years of wandering in the wilderness so we read there the people quarreled with Moses and said give us water to drink Moses replied why do you quarrel with me why do you put the Lord to the test but the people were thirsty for water and they

(41:49) grumbled against Moses they said why did you bring us up out of Egypt to make us and our children our livestock die of thirst then Moses cried out to the Lord what am I to do with these people they are almost ready to Stone me the Lord answered Moses go out in front of the people take with you some of the Elders of Israel and take in your hand the staff which you struck the Nile and go and I will stand there before you by the rock I will stand there the Lord is saying uh by the Rock at Horeb strike The Rock and water will come out of it for the

(42:30) people to drink so just already as we're hearing this version of the maraba story you know there's no mention of Aaron instead of talking about going before the community or the assembly the author is talking about uh going before the Elders of Israel and you know it's sort of remarkable here that God is saying that God will actually stand there uh before him by The Rock so Moses did this in the sight of the Elders of Israel and he called the place Masa and merbah because the Israelites quarreled and because they tested the Lord saying

Doublets and Triplets

(43:09) is the Lord among us or not so this is a dublet we have essentially the same story duplicated in the pentat um it occurs on the one hand at the beginning and also at the end of the Wilderness Journey so the author of each version of this dublet tells the same story but uses different terminology and they also have different interests so as we kind of see one really likes Aaron and the other envisions God as some being able to be present by Iraq so when we see these kinds of seams in the text we identify uh stories where

(43:55) the same story is told twice as it's a doublet sometimes the same story is even told three times and that's a triplet so sort of famously as the triplets go in Genesis there's the she's my sister stories so in Genesis 12 um we read There was famine in the land and Abram went down to Egypt to reside there and it was when he was coming to Egypt he said to his wife Sarai here I know you're a beautiful woman and it will be when the Egyptians see you that they'll say this is his wife and they'll kill me to keep you

(44:34) alive say you're my sister so it will be good for me on your account and I'll stay alive Because Of You the Egyptian saw the woman that she was very beautiful and the women uh I'm sorry the woman was taken to the pharaoh's house and Yahweh plagued Pharaoh in his house big plagues over the matter of Sarah Abraham's wife and Pharaoh called Abram and said what is it you've done to me why didn't you tell me that she was your wife why did you say she's my sister so I took her for a wife myself so that's one variant of the

(45:12) story so in that variant so Abram and Sarah elsewhere are related they're half siblings because Sarai is um uh they each have they each share one parent anyway and so there is a an idea that is not really a lie but this is a way that um Abram is shown to be clever right um nevertheless we read in Genesis 20 um a different uh version of the story Abram traveled from there to the neb country and resided in gerar and Abraham said of Sarah his wife she's my sister and ailec king of gerar sent and took Sarah and God came to ailec in a night dream

(46:00) and said to him here you're dead over a woman you took for she's a man's wife and ailec had not come close to her and he said I did this in my heart's innocence and my hands cleanness and AMC called Abraham to him and said what have you done to us and how did I sin against you that you brought a big sin over me and my kingdom and Abraham said because I said there just isn't fear of God in this place and they'll kill me on account of my wife and also she is in fact my sister my father's daughter but not my mother's

(46:35) daughter and so she became a wife to me so they are that explains the the actual relationship but there's another version again of this story and it doesn't now involve Abram and Isaac I'm sorry Abram and Sarah but it's now instead it's Isaac uh and his wife Rebecca but it again involves aimc so there was a great am in the land and Isaac went to ailec King of the Philistines at gerar and Yahweh appeared to Isaac and said don't go down to Egypt and so Isaac lived at gerar and the people of the place asked about his wife and he said she's my

(47:13) sister because he was afraid to say my wife or else the people of the place will kill me for Rebecca because she's good-look and AMC King of the Philistines gazed through the window and looked out of a window and saw Isaac fondling his wife Rebecca and AMC called Isaac and said but here you said here she's your wife how could you say she's my sister what is it you've what is this you've done to us one of the people nearly could have Lain with your wife and you would have brought guilt on us so so it's clear that we've got more

(47:47) or less three versions of the same story we might have had this be just the modus operandi of Abraham every time he goes and visits somebody but then we see the story repeated again with the Next Generation so um it's simply such a good story that it continues to be told even though uh it ends up as a triplet within within Genesis so in the first case Abram uh and Sarai go to Egypt Pharaoh actually lies with Sarai and that causes God to curse Egypt in the second one it's Abraham and Sarah at gerar ailec takes Sarah to his bed but God prevents

(48:26) him from coming coming closer to her and nevertheless curses gar and then finally with Isaac and Rebecca at Gara AMC is worried that God would have cursed them had somebody accidentally taken Rebecca as a wife so um there's the one story that's the harshest but in any event in the triplets they become less uh the same same possib uh caution but less uh less Stark so two Creations the two creation stories at the beginning of Genesis are among the most famous examples of the pentes multiple voices so the first story uh is found in

Creation Stories

(49:08) Genesis 1:1 to Genesis 2:3 and this story has a cosmic God creating heavens and earth over a period of 7 days so it go get very rhythmic at the end of each period it says the evening and the morning where the first day day God saw that he created it was good the evening and the morning was second day and so forth the second creation story uh is found in Genesis 2:4 through 3: 24 and it has a much less Cosmic a lot more fleshy God who creates the Adam The Man by blowing into his nostrils and he creates Eve by reshaping one of the

(49:55) man's ribs uh and places them in the famous Eden story so in Genesis uh one the first creation story like I say we see a cosmic God overseeing creation it's a very famous quotation in the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth the Earth was formless and empty Darkness was over the surface of the deep the spirit of God was hovering over the waters and God said let there be light and there was light and God saw the light was good and he separated the light from Darkness God called the light day and the Darkness he called night and

(50:38) there was evening and there was morning the first day so the days go on we get to the fourth day and God said let there be lights in the Vault of the sky to separate the day from the night and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times and days and years and let the lights in the Vault of the sky uh be lights in the Vault of the sky to give their light on the earth and it was so and God made two great lights the greater light to govern the day and the Lesser light to govern the night he made also the stars and God set them in the

(51:17) Vault of the sky to give light on the earth to govern the day and the night to separate light from darkness and God saw that it was good and there was evening and there was morning the fourth day so this is a cosmic creator that is um creating a cosmos that is based on the Contemporary um Middle Eastern uh worldview with a a dome hemispheric Dome over a a flat Earth in which in the Dome of the sky all of the different stars and planets and uh the great light and the Lesser light the sun and the moon are all there and they're there so that

(51:55) we can Mark out the calendar and all those Cosmic things uh all of this story culminates when God said let us make Mankind in our image in our likeness so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky over the livestock and all the wild animals and over all the creatures that move along the ground so God created Mankind in his own image in the image of God created he them male and female he created them so after creating humankind male and female in God's image God rests on the seventh day

(52:36) and that becomes the basis for Sabbath observance in the version of The Ten Commandments that is found in the 20th chapter of Exodus but not the version uh that is found of the Ten Commandments that's found in Deuteronomy chap 5 which instead uh has Sabbath observance as a Comm Iration for The Exodus from Egypt so after that first creation story The the P1 as we'll start to call it we have a new creation story beginning in Genesis 2:4 the J story and so it starts with almost like a beginning of a story again

(53:17) this is the account of the heavens and earth when they were created it's starting over again when the Lord God made the earth and the heavens now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth and no plant had yet sprung up for the Lord God had not yet sent rain on the earth and there was no one to work the ground but streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground so we'd already had all these Plants and Things being created in the first chapter and now we're hearing again that there aren't any this is a

(53:48) new story likewise then God the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and the Man became a living being now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east in Eden and there he put the man that he had formed and the Lord God said it's not good for the man to be alone I will make a helper suitable to him now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky he brought them to the man to see what the man would name

(54:29) them and whatever the man called each living creature that was its name so the man gave names to all the livestock the birds in the sky and all the wild animals but for Adam no suitable helper was found so the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep and while he was sleeping he took one of the man's ribs and then closed up the place with flesh then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man and he brought her to the man so I think actually after we just read those two there is a very strong

(55:09) distinction between these two creation stories uh that portrayal of God uh the kind of thing that God is doing you know certainly the order of Creation in the first story the order is plants then animals then humans male and female together whereas in the Second Story the order is first man then plants then animals and then finally uh the woman so in addition to breathing into the nostrils and taking a rib God in the Eden story wanders around the garden looks for Adam and Eve doesn't immediately see where they are God makes

(55:46) garments for them he interacts with the man and the woman very directly in the same way that we saw God standing before Moses at the Rock at maraba in this voice or in a similar voice so the voice associated with the Eden story um can be identified in Snippets in the pentat all the way from Genesis through numbers just like the officious voice of the cosmic uh creation story is easily identified so these are we calling P and J so the author of The Eden story Jay loves to make puns loves irony loves humor and Scandal and has no

Summary of Sources (J, P, E, D)

(56:36) interest in all of these Priestly rituals or how many cubits to make a certain vessel or anything like that so there's at least two very recognizable voices that everybody uh can see in this text even even in Translation so that means thus far we've identified a minimum of three or four authors so we have the author of Deuteronomy we have the officious Cosmic author who cares a lot about Aaron and Priestly rituals P we've been calling the Priestly source and we have the author of the Eden story who envisions

(57:14) Yahweh as a more fleshy Hands-On kind of God than the cosmic god of the peace source and so we call this the J author or the Yahweh source and in addition to that we have another set you know which is other so sometimes we quote um poems or other components that are thought to be um older pre-biblical texts that have been inserted in by one of the authors so in other words it's an earlier book so that would be another author or another voice and sometimes uh a later editor is changing things like the later voice in Deuteronomy and so

(57:53) there are those other voices as well in addition to these major ones that we've identified so each of these as we mentioned have their own viewpoints and also their own unique terminology and so uh the J Source the yist is the one that uses to know in the biblical sense so a euphemism for sex so he knew his wife and they had she conceived and bear that occurs five times in the pentat all of them are in J sections the term sh for hell the place of the Dead uh not really hell but anyway the Underworld the the the

(58:32) resting place of the Dead occur six times in the J source and it's not mentioned in the other voices the word to suffer occurs seven times in the pentat all in J sections so there are unique terms that are there in the same way we identified a bunch of unique terms that are in the P Source only so in other words there is complete agreement that the five books Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers and Deuteronomy could not have been and were not written by Moses similarly though there's agreement that alongside other voices those

Textual Formation: Expansion vs. Combination

(59:10) pre-biblical texts and later editors there's at least three distinct voices that can be identified in the Torah as we now have it so really that's all agreed the question though remains how did we get them in the present form how did they take place in their present form so there's two basic possibilities for these multiple authorship texts and Antiquity to happen and they happen all the time um they're both very common so when we've done our lecture on the Book of Job we see that sometimes the way this works is there's an original core text

(59:50) that keeps getting expanded by subsequent authors who keep adding their own little parts to it and so if we we look at how the Book of Job probably got into its present form there was probably an original core book that was written took the form of a poem and it consisted of what is now chapters three all the way through chapters 31 which start and end with a monologue by job and then in the middle time have three cycles of job arguing with his three friends and so essentially they are questioning uh the problem of evil and they are trying to

(1:00:36) um job is trying to make the case and he successfully does make the case that even though he is blameless he has been made to suffer and so therefore the righteous do suffer and the wicked are um are allowed to get away with it the LI the wicked are allowed to prosper in this world despite what you might read in Prudential wisdom books like the U Book of Proverbs and Jo job's three friends each are suggesting that no you uh you must have done something wrong because that's what uh credential wisdom teaches us and so job says no that's not

(1:01:17) how it works I'm not I don't necessarily have an answer for you but what I can say is that um uh that God has you know denied me Justice and so it is a a powerful complaint and it was a disturbing book to people so next author got a hold of it and thought well wait a second I've got an answer to the problem of evil and so a second author you know dissatisfied with the original text pessimism has a fourth friend introduces a fourth friend that hadn't been around at all and this guy Alle who who gives an answer he says look gu

(1:01:54) job God's plans are too big God is too um we can't understand why God is doing those things it may seem like you are suffering for no good reason but God has a good reason you just don't know it um and the problem with that is that job has already um responded to that argument in the original poem but uh the person who wants that to be the solution still taxs this on uh to try to have an answer to the problem of evil do a great job of it and so a later author uh uses the same argument but creates a much more uh impressive U

(1:02:36) employment of that argument by adding one of the most famous speeches out of the Bible God uh speaking to job from the Whirlwind um we've said before this is probably tacked on after the ALU speeches because if these speeches were were there nobody would add in the ALU speech tees they're not they're not good enough if you already have the same argument being made by God in a much more successful way uh neither of which though really address uh what job has said he's already addressed that he's aware of this argument at some point or other someone

(1:03:13) tacked in a completely unrelated poem to wisdom so people who were sages uh would pen uh poems in Praise of wisdom and so this simply got inserted into the text and then finally a Pros prologue and a Pros epilogue were added to the text as a framing device to reframe it and so this is the um this is the text that kind of famously makes the whole um experience of job sort of a a wager between God and the Satan God and the accuser about you know whether um whether job is being is is righteous simply because God has blessed him or whether

(1:04:03) he would be righteous regardless and so that sort of changes the whole tone of the thing by adding by adding that so you can kind of see this is a text that expanded has multiple authors and it expanded in with discrete seams into a different text a larger text the way we have it now so expansion is one way to do it um another hypothetical expansion that is sort of like this may be how the Gospel of John was created so hypothetically or theoretically there might have been an older kernel a smaller text called the signs

(1:04:44) gospel which also might have been either just the signs gospel or the signs gospel in an early passion gospel that was telling the Easter Story uh which what might account for the overlap of passion details between the Gospel of John and the synoptic gospels which otherwise are not too similar to each other but share these sort of passion details so it may not be the case it may be or may not be the hypothetical idea of it here though is that if it is the case that there was this Source it wasn't simply that the

(1:05:18) the next author takes that and puts it in the middle and then adds something to the beginning and the end instead um they have taken that and just taken a snippet of it and then wrote written their own expansion and then taken the next snippet and written their own expansion and so it makes it appear like the original text has been spliced up and deposited within the newly expanded text you know in fact what happens is is you're writing some of text yourself then you quote a couple lines from this original Source then you

(1:05:51) write more of your own then you quote another couple lines and so on so that's how an expansion can happen where the original text is distributed in little pieces throughout a text and then after that major um writer the most significant writer of the Gospel of John has done that and written the bulk of the text then what we can say is there is for sure a a second John author um neither of these guys are named John but there's another uh editor who takes the first major author of John's work adds a new ending to it and also seems

(1:06:29) to have made some I would say hack edits throughout so I'm not as a big fan of John 2 who is a much less sophisticated thinker than than John 1 but in any event this would be a way where you can see that there this text is expanded where there was one text then another text then another text it's expanded but it's not easily dis discernable seems that the texts are distributed throughout the whole right but alternatively there is another way that this can happen you could actually start with discret text texts that are

(1:07:06) completely distinct from one another so and then and then bring those together so for example the author of The Gospel of Matthew uh when he is going to write his uh book he most likely is not simply expanding an earlier book He's not just simply taking taking the gospel of Mark and writing his own expansion to it he's taking multiple pre-existing sources so Mark the Lost sayings Source the Lost sayings gospel q and then really his own methan materials which may have been a a text that existed only within the methan

(1:07:46) community that has a bunch of Parables that don't otherwise uh exist in any other sources and takes those three and combines three books that were not meant to be um that didn't know each other and combines them together into one story so another words it's not just the expansion where you take a core text you know it you add to it you take that and then add to it you take that and then add to it that kind of expansion this is a composite right a combination of different texts that are distinct um so all three of these

(1:08:22) sources are intermixed and combined in order to create the composite Gospel of Matthew which again takes Snippets from each one so he'll take something from Mark and then he'll take something from q and he'll take some meth and stuff he'll write some of his own little edits and then he'll go back and forth taking Source materials and so as a result it makes it look like the texts have been spliced and recombined together you know you're writing and you're just Consulting each one as you go so although the pre previous

(1:08:56) scholarly consensus concerning the creation of the pentat has broken down so for a better part of a century people really thought the documentary hypothesis was how this would have been created um Scholars still largely accept that there's going to be one of two possibly large broad paths the two that I just described so either there was a initial Source text that has been expanded and then expanded and that's the supplementary hypothesis or there were distinct sources that got combined together by a redactor or editor or a series of

(1:09:37) redactors or editors and so the documentary hypothesis those are the two broad ways to describe how do we get to a set of books that have distinct voices within them that are discernable so like I said we did a couple previous lectures on the documentary hypothesis and they've been both of them very popular so they each have 3 or 400,000 views um but we gave them a while ago and I haven't um I've I've actually read a lot more about the supplementary hypothesis and since that time and so I wanted to make this additional case we

(1:10:13) got asked about this a couple weeks ago too in the questions so as we're looking at the different voices in the Torah it is not like The Book of Job where we have these very simple seams it is more like what we're going to see with the Gospel of John or the gospel of Matthew where the voices are continuously interspersed so whether the Torah the pentat is a combination of books that were originally distinct like in Matthew or whether there was a single original source that has undergone repeated expansion like John the voices are very complicated and

(1:10:55) inter it's not just that they are simple seams like in job that would make it easier to work with so sometimes in the composite text the way we have it in the pentat two voices covering the same material the same general material like the creation stories they're placed back to back and we just read those so the creation story that exists from the Priestly Source you know comes first and then we have it start all over again and we have the creation story from the uh J Source from The yahwa Source other times

(1:11:31) like that that maraba story where Moses strikes the rock or the she's my sister stories there are doublets or triplets that are simply repeated at different points in the co composite so they're not all back to back but they just placed at different parts of the narrative as if it's a different story entirely so it's like the Israelites go to maraba twice and have almost exactly the same thing happened however um in many other places the different voices are directly interspliced within the same telling of the same story and this happens for

(1:12:08) example in the story of Noah's Ark so I want to look at that little in a little more detail so rather than existing one right after the other like or making it so that there's two floods um the two voices that are telling Noah stories are interspliced or interspersed so and these are again the J and P versions so in the J story we read or in the J voice we read the Lord saw this is in Genesis 6 the Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of the

(1:12:48) human heart was only Evil all the time the Lord regretted that he had made human beings on Earth and his heart was deeply troubled so the Lord said I will wipe from the face of the Earth the human race I have created and with them the animals the birds and the creatures that move along the ground for I regret that I have made them but Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord so having had that set up then the next few verses later we have another setup now the Earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence God God saw how

(1:13:26) corrupt the Earth had become for all the people on the Earth had corrupted their ways God said to Noah I'm going to put an end to all people for the Earth is filled with violence because of them I am surely going to destroy both them and the Earth so make for yourself an ark of Cypress Wood make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out this is how you are to build it the arc is to be 300 cubits long 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits High make a roof for it leaving below the roof and opening one cubit High all

(1:13:57) around and there's a lot of other details so the P sorus likes to tell you how many cubits everything's going to be you know and a lot and all of these kinds of detailed instructions that God gives like for Solomon's Temple and other things so you were to bring into the ark two of all living creatures male and female to keep them alive with you to of every kind of bird to of every kind of animal to of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive so in the Priestly version of this God orders just two of

(1:14:33) every creature but a few verses later God in the J story gives a different set of orders and numbers for animals to be preserved then the Lord said I'm sorry the Lord said to Noah go into the ark you and your whole family because I have found you righteous in this generation take with you seven pairs of every kind of clean animal a male and its mate and one pair of every kind of unclean animal a male and its mate and also seven pairs of every kind of bird male and female to keep their various kinds alive through the Earth so so the

(1:15:15) regular unclean animals are just a pair but in this case now when we're having clean animals in other words the kind that can be either eaten or used for animal sacrifices especially now Mo I'm sorry um Noah is to bring seven pairs so like gu like I say Noah needs seven pairs of clean animals in the J story in order to offer sacrifices so at the very end of the Noah's Ark story maybe remember uh the ark it makes it back to dry land Mount Ararat and Noah offers a sacrifice of a couple of these animals that have

(1:15:56) been saved you may Wonder well if you only brought two of every kind what happens when you who you sacrifice you sacrifice in the Unicorn or something that's why we don't have those but but in fact because in the J story the story that includes the sacrifices he's brought seven pairs the reason why the Priestly author only had God ordered two pairs is that the Priestly author who considers himself to be a descendant of Aaron and that's why all the Moses stories he's always talking about Moses and Aaron Aaron is the first high priest in the

(1:16:32) Priestly account Aaron is the first um person who was authorized to have to uh perform sacrifices according to the law of Moses and only Aaron's descendants can ever offer sacrifices so Noah does not offer a sacrifice uh in the Priestly account because Noah is not a priest because he's not a descendant of Aaron and so Abraham none of these U preonic figures are allowed to sacrifice in the Priestly story so it's showing the different um um editorial interests of each of these authors so in P um going back to that

(1:17:19) same Cosmic creation God opens the gates of the Heavenly firmament over which the Cosmic waters are established in the Genesis 1 P creation story and that causes the flood to destroy the whole earth so we read in the 600th year of Noah's life on the 17th day of the 2 month on that day all of the Springs of the great deep burst forth and the floodgates of the heavens were opened and the rain fell on the earth 40 days and 40 nights by contrast Jay as is usual has a much more personal fleshy God who personally shuts the ark's door

(1:17:58) himself so we read Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons wives entered the Ark to escape the Waters of the flood then the Lord shut him in for 40 days the flood kept coming on the earth and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the Earth the waters Rose and increased greatly on the earth and the Ark floated on the surface of the water then as it concludes in the peace story Noah sends out a raven that does not come back while in the J story Noah sends repeatedly out doves and eventually one comes back with an

(1:18:35) olive leaf that is giving the symbol um we now use it as a symbol of peace the dove in an olive leaf but it's the symbol that land is possible again that the waters have receded so in short in stories like Noah J and P are completely intertwined and so again we have to ask how how did they end up this way so there's an option maybe J was written first and then a p author was just writing that reading a little bit of J then writing their part and so on or it's possible that they are two completely different texts that a

(1:19:11) redactor has put together so the easiest possible explanation is the supplementary hypothesis so this um recognizes is I think as everybody kind of recognizes that the oldest section is Deuteronomy the oldest section of Deuteronomy is the original component of the Torah and so this is that um that book that we said was found uh by the priest hilaya in the time of Josiah so at the very end of the first temple period So to that core text the Jay author the yahwist author then adds all of the J narratives so all of those kind

The Supplementary Hypothesis

(1:20:01) of you know the fleshy idea of God and all of those kind of um ironic and sometimes scandalous stories with all the puns and that happens uh and then finally then I'm sorry the the Priestly author adds the bulk of the Rex of the text and that results in the pentet as we have it so this is the least number of steps necessary it's much more simple expansion uh story like we talked about with uh the hypothetical Gospel of John or how job was expanded uh as opposed to um the way Matthew is composing a gospel using

(1:20:39) distinct books that are not that don't know each other or are not written one after the other so like I say most versions of if we look at each of those voices most versions of both the supplementary and documentary hypothesis es have largely a similar view about D1 anyway the the book that is found by helaya in Josiah's day so the law code of Deuteronomy so D Deuteronomy is a Priestly law code that is really focused on monolatry but it doesn't emphasize um Aaron it's not about the zadokite priesthood line it's not about

(1:21:21) the Priestly family that controls the temple in Jerusalem it has Priestly interests but it's a different Priestly line and so it may be linked with priests like Jeremiah who we also have mentioned is connected to the deuteronomic school so Jeremiah is a priest who is also very active at this time uh at the very end of the first temple period And so maybe his school is where this D source is coming from so maybe that's the origin of this according it is the origin according to the supplementary hypothesis so um if there's multiple ways that you can

(1:22:03) have you can create a supplementary hypothesis but most of the scholars who favor a supplementary hypothesis then propose that the J author expanded on the D text writing during the Babylonian exile so after the first and before the second temple period this period of the ex Exile the writer of Jay seems to be a courtly author so certainly lacks all the interests of priests we mention you know they like puns they like satirical stories stories that are you a little bit scandalous stories that um are more we might think entertaining

(1:22:46) and so they're possibly writing for the um davidic princes the exiled royal family of Judah and all of the other Noble Exiles in Babylon so people that are at the court of the king of Babylon and so we'll just note that um in the supplementary hypothesis there is not a separate elist or esur we haven't talked about that yet but I will essentially um they understand the J source as being J plus e there's just the one source that is expanding and clude all the things that that other Scholars have identified as e so in the

(1:23:30) Exile perhaps that's when um Jay expands on the deuteronomic core finally then after the Exile in the Persian period when priests like Ezra and Priests who do consider themselves to be descendants from Aaron uh the zadokites the Sadducees uh when they go back to Jerusalem to rebuild uh the idea is that that J I'm sorry that D plus J text that core was then expanded pretty massively by the Priestly author who has all of those um interests of the priests including especially promoting Aaron so when that's happening that also

(1:24:19) that round could have been when other let's say old Snippets of texts out of the arch could also have been put in there like um you know like the song of Moses or something that's an older text that makes its way into it uh that's not one of the major one of the major um voices so like I say what are the advantages so Simplicity is really the clear advantage of the supplementary hypothesis so we're really only having you know a a root Source that's expanded a couple times in order to get us to the pentat it doesn't require uh an additional

(1:24:58) voice the hypothetical e or Alois voice um and that has always been a problem with the documentary hypothesis because e and J are kind of similar and they're difficult to differentiate and so in this Theory they are not different they are the same they're and so it is you know aam razor we sliced off one more thing than we need to explain things um it is also much simpler to explain a process of expansion like we see with job or with the Gospel of John rather than positing the complex amalgam where you take distinct sources that have to

(1:25:37) be combined by redactors but again like I say that's not impossible to imagine because it does seem that gospels like Matthew and Luke are created that way and other other ancient texts as well so um if you like arams Raaz this is why this one is is for you it's the simpler it's certainly by far the simpler one and it requires less hypothetical uh ideas and steps um but in contrast to the way maybe uh physical and hard Sciences work what actually turns out is that humans are very very complicated and that is often true with history so a lot of

(1:26:19) times the simplest explanation of why something might have happened in history may not be the case because there might have been a a weird long complicated set of things that led to it and so the documentary hypothesis is clearly much more complicated than uh than a supplementary hypothesis so why do I think that there are still cases to be made um so the additional complexity has I think some additional argumentative benefit so um for example J and E or if they're if J is just one J tends to really denigrate Aaron so for example when

Evaluating the Hypotheses

(1:27:07) Moses goes away to receive the Ten Commandments and the people all Rebel into rry and immediately fall into idolatry Aaron just you know steps right up and creates the golden calf Idol for them um this would have been just completely uh just something that the the people in the the Priestly the high priest would not have want that you know you don't want to have a story about um your ancestor your great ancestor this hero that you've done uh all of this work of trying to have every time Moses mentioned you WR Moses and Aaron are

(1:27:41) doing these things before the tent of meeting and the congregation of the people and now you have this story where Aaron is the ultimate apostate this is not something that you want so like I say p is focused on idolizing Aaron and I think for me it's fairly difficult to believe that if that text existed there with Aaron having that heresy it's difficult to imagine that the P author simply leaves that there and simply expands the text without Crossing that part out at least and and replacing it and so I think that the the I think that the um

(1:28:23) supplementary hypothesis is the idea that the Priestly author is simply supplementing the the text that went before um underestimates the incredible hostility that the Priestly author has to the Jay author um and so I think the Priestly author's goal rather than supplement is to replace so we already have an example of this in my view in the Temple period where we took that that deistic history that the books of Joshua Judges Samuel and Kings um and a scribe using those as his Source attempts to rewrite them by

(1:29:11) fixing them theologically by eliminating and changing very embarrassing stories in order to create the very sanitized version that exists in first and 2 Chronicles and I think that the goal of the chronicler was to get rid of the others in other words this was not widely circulated as a text and often this often works if you in Antiquity if you have a bigger text you can make a a streamlined easier to circulate cleaner version and yours will supplant and get rid of the older version so I think the chronicler was ultimately trying to

(1:29:49) eliminate the deistic histories and I think that the P author was prefer to replace uh the J text rather than simply add to it um and so if it's simply supplementing they're trying to add to it and I think in this particular case with the chronicler it's simply just ironic to the chronicler's um agenda that that ultimately they all get put together in the Bible and Chronicles just comes right after Kings and you have this contradictory uh apologetic cleaned up version of the better stories an older stories right next to

(1:30:27) them so um there's also an argument I think for The elist Voice or saying that there is an elist voice so it has been difficult yes to delineate this for Scholars um because both seem to be pretty old and have a lot of similarities there are still some indications that a separate vo is there so for example when uh the Israelites go to the Mountain of God the P Source always calls that mountain cyani while the D Source calls it Mount Horeb similarly the Priestly Source calls Moses father-in-law Ruel while the Deuteronomy Source calls

(1:31:13) him Jethro so if there's no e if J um and E are the same then what we'll find out is the J and E use both both of those names indiscriminately so sometimes it will call uh the mountain cyani and other times it'll call it Horeb sometimes it'll call the father-in-law Jethro and other times Ruel rul um however if it is a separate voice then that would solve the inconsistency so if there's J that is distinct from E then J in this particular case anyway shares the terminology found in the Priestly Source calling the name Nam using the names

(1:31:55) cyani and re Ruel whereas e and D are aligned in always saying Mount Horeb and and Jethro for Moses father-in-law and there's similar terminology issues like that so e also seems to have a distinct P perspective so when you separate out e stories e seems especially interested in uh in this period you know when we think of the division between the larger and more important Northern Kingdom of Israel and the smaller less important Kingdom of Judah e is especially interested in the heroes and places of the northern kingdom so in one of the E

(1:32:39) stories in Genesis Israel um uh Jacob acquires the territory of sheim the northern Capital by purchasing it whereas in the Yahweh story it is G gotten by uh by violence and it's uh it's more or less desecrated uh in the es Source the ident the north is identified as the burial place for Joseph one of the um the patriarch who is uh in charge of the who is the father of Ephraim and manasse the two Central Northern tribes um the eSource focuses on Joseph a lot as a hero he is also critical of the House of David the davidic Kings the southern

(1:33:28) royal family um in addition to following uh spending a lot of time with Jacob and especially Joseph he also elevates the ephraimite hero Joshua so lots of Northern focus by contrast the Jay author has interests in the southern Kingdom in Judah its places and heroes so there's an emphasis of Abraham living in heod which is the original capital of Judah before um David establishes Jerusalem as the capital likewise in J the scouts that Moses sends out only report on locations in Judah and the sole Scout named is Caleb who's a

(1:34:09) judahite as opposed to Joshua who is uh you know a northern hero and only Jay has long stories about the biblical patriarch Judah the brother of Joseph so there does seem to to be reasons to assert that there's may be a distinction between a j and an E Source finally um I still find the original case for why we even call these sources J and E to be pretty compelling which is um you know in that same way that I was talking about how the Priestly author who is so interested in error and and being a priest that

(1:34:51) that he has to not have um Adam not have Noah not have Abraham or any of the Patriarchs ever offer a sacrifice because the first person that can offer sacrifice is Aaron and after that it is only allowed for Aaron and his descendants in that same way the reason we call um the J Source J is for Jehovah because in e n p God does not reveal the N God's name until till Moses is standing before the burning bush and Moses one of the things that Moses says is if I'm going to go to Egypt they're going to ask what is your

(1:35:32) name and and so then for the very first time God reveals God's name Yahweh I am that I am to Moses at the burning bush and so that's when uh before it they've always used euphemism like L for God or the Lord uh not the name I'm sorry not the Lord but l so in other words the word euphemism God as opposed to uh Yahweh and then afterwards p and E start using the name of Yahweh which has now been revealed by contrast right from the very beginning like we saw in the Eden Story the yahwist author simply refers to uh

(1:36:11) God as Yahweh so is not caring about Moses is not caring about that big reveal and so you know if there's no e if if J and E are the same author then the J author is simply using the name of God you know indiscriminately without that that whole idea that a reveal happens uh at the burning bush doesn't make any sense and we just discard it and so and it can be discarded you know again I think aam's Razer takes it away in that but I think it is a still a compelling case and one of the uh reasons why I think that there's a lot

(1:36:48) of sense to the documentary hypothesis even if there's more complexity um you know that said uh sometimes people who are arguing against the documentary hypothesis go back to the very first um Scholars who formulated it over a century ago who who speculated that the J source and the E Source were really ancient in other words that they may have been written uh before the fall of the northern kingdom to the Assyrians um and so that's not necessary for this um for this hypothesis and indeed I would say that that's not the case um I would

(1:37:32) rather think that the um the J Source the E Source and the original deuteronomist Source are all written at the very end maybe of the first temple period where the J sorus is a CER in the U Jerusalem uh who is telling again these sort of Sly uh stories for entertaining the Nobles and the Juda Kings the eSource is doing something similar at the court but is actually an exile from the northern kingdom so someone who has been part of the Kingdom of Israel or whose ancestors were and who is now at the Juda Court sharing their

(1:38:20) stories and then the priests from the dur deuteronomic School are producing that core law code of Deuteronomy at that time and so um to some extent or other um you know J and E are combined together to tell one story by a reject redactor uh according to the documentary hypothesis and that is maybe maybe the people are aware of the deuteronomic source or not maybe those two are aware of each other but the Priestly author is aware of those but rather than trying to supplement them is attempting to replace them by writing a counter J Torah and

(1:39:06) but creates a distinct and a distinctly hostile text to J and then all of these texts are floating around uh in the second temple period in the Persian period and they have started to become thought of as being important an Source text for identity and so the final redactor tries to delete as little of it as possible tries to include as many of the stories together as possible even though in some cases we get repetitive doublets even though um uh you have to splice and put together stories right next to each other like

(1:39:44) the no the Noah story uh where the details therefore don't match and they do generally speaking a pretty pretty amazing job but this is why you can have voices that I think pretty much hate each other right next to each other in almost the same kind of you know paragraph by paragraph it's completely possible to do that I when you're supplementing but I just feel like the Temptation would be to start striking out the stuff you especially don't like if you were the Priestly author so so this is why my um uh why I'm still leaning towards uh

(1:40:21) the documentary hypothesis but hopefully I've all also been fair in spelling out um a supplementary hypothesis which U like I said is certainly the um the easier or simpler model less less hypothetically requires less hypotheticals and is more uh in keeping with aam's razor than this more complicated diagram so uh with that we will go ahead and conclude

Table 1: Previous Lectures or Episodes

Table 2: Religious Studies Terms

Table 3: Individuals Named

Table 4: Bible Passages

Table 5: Non-English Words

Table 6: Books Mentioned

Table 7: Linguistics Terms

Table 8: Scientific Terms

Table 9: Graphics Referenced

Table 10: Biblical Cities

Table 11: Archaeological Sites

Table 12: Chronology