He adds that no Egyptologist would ever use divine names for source criticism — In short, the criterion of divine names, the historical and evidential starting point for the Documentary Hypothesis, is without foundation. It is based on misinterpretation, mistranslation, and lack of attention to extrabiblical sources.
The use of doublets and repetition as evidence for multiple documents in Genesis is perhaps of all the arguments the most persuasive for the modern student, while in fact being the most spurious and abused piece of evidence.
Thus it seems to the modern reader that Genesis —20 and —18 must be variants of a single tradition. How else could one explain the presence of two stories that seem so remarkably similar? Surely, the modern reader thinks, the variants e.
The assumption appears reasonable, but it is altogether a fallacy. It is an entirely modern reading of the text and ignores ancient rhetorical concepts. In an ancient text, there is no stronger indication that only a single document is present than parallel accounts. Doublets, that is, two separate stories that closely parallel one another, are the very stuff of ancient narrative.
They are what the discriminating audience sought in a story. Simple repetition, first of all, is common in ancient Near Eastern literature. In the Ugaritic Epic of Keret, for example, King Keret is in distress because his entire family has been killed in a series of disasters. In a dream, he receives instruction from El concerning what he should do. There he is to demand the daughter of Pabil, Hurriya, for his wife. Keret awakens and carries out the instructions.
This narrative technique is employed in the Bible as well. In an analogous manner, if two or more separate events were perceived to be similar to one another, ancient writers tend to give accounts of the events in parallel fashion.
In the course of doing this, the narrator might put all the accounts in the same form. As he tells his story, he will specially select material that fits the formal, parallel pattern. For this reason the author of the Book of Kings, in summarizing the reigns of each king of Israel and Judah, tends to employ a number of formulas. Employment of the technique of parallel accounts survived even into the Greco-Roman period, albeit in a less stylized format. The interest in parallel events and lives still continued, but in the earlier literature the technique is far more deliberate and formulaic and thus more obvious.
Simply put, the parallels between Genesis 12 and —18, when analyzed by ancient rather than modern literary standards, strongly indicate that the two accounts are from the same source. In light of the love for repetition and parallelism in Hebrew narrative and poetry, it is not surprising that Hebrew narrative is sometimes redundant even within a single story.
At times a summary statement is followed by a more detailed account. This is in fact the case in Genesis ff. Other ancient literature employs this technique as well. At other times, the redundant style is for dramatic effect, as in 1 Samuel — The flood narrative, according to the Documentary Hypothesis, is a classic example of two accounts having been conflated.
As evidence for the conflation, advocates of the hypothesis cite the redundancies and argue that a single author would not have repeated himself so much. Thus, for example, Genesis —22 is P but —5 is J. As the text reads, however, the two passages are not redundant but consecutive.
The P material is prior to the building of the ark and the J material is a speech of God after its completion but just prior to the beginning of the flood. The repetition heightens the dramatic anticipation of the deluge to follow.
Genesis —22 is such an example. The Documentary Hypothesis assigns verse 21 to P and verse 22 to J, but Andersen has shown that the two verses are chiastic fig. This text is in fact the fulfillment report of a similar chiasmus in — Andersen himself is not hesitant to point out the implications of this for documentary analysis. He concludes that when the text is left as it stands rather than arbitrarily divided into sources and doublets, the artistic unity and solemnity of the whole, from the standpoint of discourse grammar, gives the impression of having been formed as a single, unified narration Another significant issue that relates to the story of the flood is the matter of contradictions in the text, a problem to which we now turn.
Apparent contradictions in Genesis are often cited as markers of the different documents behind the text.
In the flood account, the two most frequently cited contradictions are in regard to the number of animals to be brought on board the ark says to bring one pair of every kind of animal, but says to bring seven pairs of clean animals and the flood chronology. With regard to the number of clean animals, the explanation is simply that it is a precise figure given immediately before the flood —2 instead of the general figure given before the ark was built Provision had to be made to ensure that there would be sufficient livestock after the flood.
The matter of chronology is more complex, and it involves the structure of the whole narrative. Many scholars have pointed out the difficulty of reconstructing a chronology of the flood from the figures given and have concluded that the confusion is the result of R P having conflated the two different chronologies of J and P without resolving the chronological inconsistencies.
But recent research has demonstrated the whole narrative to be far more coherent than was once recognized. Wenham has shown the whole flood story — to be chiastic in structure ; see fig. The mere presence of a chiasmus is not proof that there can be no sources behind it.
Indeed, as shall be argued subsequently, the genealogical material in particular appears to be from another source. Yet there comes a point at which a given source hypothesis is simply no longer reasonable. It stretches the imagination to suppose that the structure of the flood story is the result of a patchwork of two complete, contradictory documents. The chiastic structure not only renders the documentary approach unlikely, but also helps to resolve the issue of the chronology of the narrative.
In particular, Gordon J. Wenham points out, the chronological data have been reported somewhat artificially in order to maintain the narrative structure.
Thus the seven-day waiting period is reported twice —10 in order to balance the 14 days of waiting in Even so, the present chronology in the text is not the confusion it is sometimes implied to be. On the basis of his calculations, Wenham concludes that the only significant problem is fitting both the 40 days of and the days of into the five months between and This can be resolved if it is assumed that the 40 days are part of the , and not a separate period of time This alone should be sufficient to indicate the fruitlessness of the documentary position here, but evidence for the coherence of the flood narrative is more significant yet.
When compared form-critically to the other major ancient Near Eastern flood accounts especially the account in Gilgamesh, but also the Atrahasis, Ras Shamra, and Sumerian versions , the Genesis narrative is found to have a remarkably high number of formal parallels to those versions.
Wenham has isolated 17 features the Genesis and Gilgamesh accounts have in common, and these usually occur in the same sequence. There are, to be sure, significant theological differences between Genesis and the other versions, but formally they are of the same category.
Wenham points out that of the 17 common formal elements, J has only 12 and P has only ten. Wenham comments that:. Against Wenham and other scholars, J. Emerton attempts to resuscitate the traditional source division of the flood narrative ; For our purposes, there are three significant points in the case he makes. He notes, for example, that is parallel to and that echoes , but that neither is part of the chiasmus.
It is not a mathematical equation; there is no reason a section of a chiasmus cannot parallel a portion of the text not in the chiastic structure. Regarding and , which record the beginning and end of the rain, it is not reasonable to expect these to be coordinated in a chiasmus.
The chiasmus goes from the beginning to the end of the flood, but the rains obviously began at the beginning of the flood and ended well before the end of the flood.
In addition, the fundamental validity of the chiastic structure of the narrative is confirmed in two independent studies by Bernhard W. Anderson and Yehuda T. Radday He can only hypothesize to account for the lack of formal elements in the J and P narratives. He contends that we do not know how much of J the redactor failed to preserve and that P may have suppressed some material as theologically offensive.
It is curious that RP did not share this concern and suppress this detail from J. At any rate, between Wenham and Emerton, it is clear which scholar is working with ancient texts and which is working with his imagination.
Third , Emerton continues to urge that the chronology of the narrative is impossible. He writes,. According to vii 4, 12, it rained for 40 days There is a discrepancy between the days of rain and the 40 days of rain In fact, the text nowhere implies that the rain lasted days.
Otherwise, one narrator is a complete fool, since he believed that the water abated enough for the ark to ground on the very day the rain ceased after a day deluge! Emerton attempts to justify his interpretation with an ingressive translation of , that the water began to abate at the end of the days.
He asks,. Are we to suppose that days elapsed between viii 2 and the beginning of the process of decreasing in viii 3? The answer, of course, is no. But Emerton has only saddled the text with a translation contrary to context and then criticized it for not making sense.
The Genesis account is thus structurally unified and formally of a type of literature flood narrative that is far older than the alleged R P. It employs ancient narrative technique, as evidenced in its profound concern for narrative structure, but even so cannot be said to be chronologically confused.
It is difficult to see why the documentary approach should be considered to have any validity here. The notion that J and P have radically different styles is a result of artificially dividing the text. The criterion is itself quite artificial; as Whybray notes, we know nothing of the common speech of the people of ancient Israel, and we cannot be sure that the words cited as synonymous pairs are in fact synonymous. One may have been chosen over the other for the sake of a special nuance in a given circumstance, or indeed for the sake of variety — A recent development in this area is in computer-aided analysis of the text.
Because this is a new field, models for analysis are still in development. Nevertheless, among the more sophisticated and linguistically sensitive works in this field is the analysis of Genesis done by Radday and Haim Shore.
Their work, Genesis: An Authorship Study , is an exhaustive linguistic analysis which takes into account as many variables and factors as possible, and they are particularly interested in checking their results against the Documentary Hypothesis. They conclude,. All these reservations notwithstanding, and with all due respect to the illustrious Documentarians past and present, there is massive evidence that the pre-Biblical triplicity [i. Of all the arguments for the Documentary Hypothesis, this is the least significant because it is based on the assumption that the hypothesis is true rather than being an independent argument for the theory.
One has the sense that, even among scholars trained in the Documentary Hypothesis, an increasing number have difficulty taking analyses like those by Walter Brueggemann and Hans Walter Wolff seriously as presentations of the theological background of Genesis. Even scholars with both feet firmly planted in the critical tradition make little use of the classic documentary criteria in tradition-historical analyses of theological strata. Thomas L. Thompson notes that, under continued scholarly scrutiny, the Elohist has disappeared from view entirely and the Yahwist is fast fading from existence, even as P grows beyond all reasonable bounds.
The hypothesis has no value as a guide for continued research Whybray, too, in outlining especially the recent contributions by Rolf Rendtorff and H. The preceding arguments are the classic arguments given in defense of the Documentary Hypothesis.
I suspect, however, that many scholars continue to be converted to the hypothesis not because of the force of those arguments, the weaknesses of which are well known, but because of one or two specific test cases.
At the end of the first volume of his commentary on Genesis, Westermann reviews the classic arguments for the Documentary Hypothesis. He deals with language and style, the divine names, contradictions, doublets, and theological viewpoint. Although in contrast to the objections of scholars like Cassuto he generally supports the arguments, in every case he carefully qualifies the value of these criteria.
At several points, however, Westermann leans on specific texts as justification for continued adherence to the hypothesis.
He insists that Genesis and Exodus continue to have full force in regard to the question of the divine names , that the flood narrative must be a composite of two sources , and that Genesis 1—2 is a classic example of a doublet — The first two arguments here have already been discussed.
I want to make a single point here. It is possible that and Genesis ff. I suggest that although they represent different sources, the application of the wrong criteria to Genesis 1—2 has sent scholars off on a wild goose chase.
In short, there is no text in Genesis which is best explained by the Documentary Hypothesis. It appears that many scholars continue to support the hypothesis because of questions regarding the history of Israel.
In particular, the hypothesis seems to offer the best explanation of why the term Levite is used inconsistently in the Old Testament. Suffice it to say that the traditional solution offered in conjunction with the Documentary Hypothesis is historically anomalous. A far better solution can be obtained by reading the Pentateuch as a work that was substantially produced, as the text affirms, during the period of the Exodus.
The Documentary Hypothesis must be abandoned. Regardless of the theological presuppositions with which one approaches the text, and regardless of whether one wishes to affirm the tradition of Mosaic authorship or move in new directions, one must recognize the hypothesis to be methodologically unsound. In the last century, Homeric scholars thought they had discovered sources behind the Iliad and the Odyssey. The concept is comparable to the Documentary Hypothesis of the Pentateuch Wolf Walter Leaf and M.
Other scholars, such as Adolf Kirchhoff and P. Hennings similarly divided the Odyssey Sanford , xxx-xxxi. Such hypotheses are now antiquarian scholarly curiosities. One can only hope that the same fate awaits their sister theory, the Documentary Hypothesis. Anderson, Bernhard W. Journal of Biblical Literature — Brueggemann, Walter and Wolff, Hans Walter. Cassuto, Umberto. Emerton, J. Vetus Testamentum — Kitchen, Kenneth A.
Leaf, Walter and Bayfield, M. London: Macmillan, reprinted Radday, Yehuda T. John W. Welch Hildesheim, Germany: Gerstenberg. Rendtorff, Rolf. Thompson, Thomas L.
Wenham, Gordon J. Mark US English. Daniel British. Libby British. Mia British. Karen Australian. Hayley Australian. Natasha Australian. Veena Indian.
Priya Indian. Neerja Indian. Zira US English. Oliver British. Wendy British. Fred US English. Tessa South African. How to say documentary hypothesis in sign language? Numerology Chaldean Numerology The numerical value of documentary hypothesis in Chaldean Numerology is: 3 Pythagorean Numerology The numerical value of documentary hypothesis in Pythagorean Numerology is: 4.
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