Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Jonathan Bailey <jonathan.bailey AT gmx.de>]

The title is misleading, as I am not putting forth evidence of the Wellhausen 
division of
things, but I do see multiple authors in Genesis, and would like to put a few 
of them on
the list.

First, though, one must be clear about the term "author". A 
redacteur/translator is
really not too far from being an author who works from several sources, and 
perhaps
would merit further clarification on this list, perhaps by those who have 
been more
successful at articulating detailed statements than I. :-)   I intend to put 
some things
on the floor that suggest multiple "authors", though I am not intending to 
abandon the
view that Genesis is a unified composition with one author, Moses, who made 
use of
a variety of sources.

One piece of evidence for multiple sources in Genesis is the spooky "toldot" 
phrase, in
some cases accompanied by words such as sefer (Gen 5:1) which seem to go to
extra effort to make the preceding or following segment that it heads appear 
to be a
separate piece of writing. The toldot phrases do topologically divide the 
book. Each
toldot phrase enclosed text is a story unto itself.

Evidence number two are doublets. A professor of mine, Baruch Halpern, made 
the
statement that "without doublets, documentary hypothesis falls apart". Now I 
am not
talking about supposed doublets here where the doubled story is a thematically
independant work (I would not, for example call Gen 1 and Gen 2 a doublet of 
the
same thing), but rather instances where the repeated text does not build a 
literary
unit. Take the nephilim passages at the beginning of Gen 6. That is one of 
the best
doublets I have found. Anyway, I would like to see how one accounts for 
doublets
without mentioning compiling of varied source materials. Most of the answers 
that I
have found are rather theological, and claim that the doublets reveal hidden 
spiritual
pearls for the reader. Now I do admit that i have found a few such pearls in 
doublets
during my lifetime, but I cannot convince myself of the idea that Moses (or 
whoever
wrote/redacted) Genesis was saying (in every instance): "Let me write this in 
a wierd
way, twice, so I can hide a few spiritual gems in there." Now I might buy the 
idea that
God, using Moses' (or whoever's) redactional efforts, stuck the pearls in the 
text (if
there is indeed a hidden mystery there in the first place), but I think that 
the concious
concern on Moses' (or whoever's) mind was more along the lines of trying to 
figure
out how to accurately preserve source materials.

So these evidences take me a long way toward thinking that a single 
author/redacteur
made use of source material to such a conservative degree that the original 
source
material still has visible traces in the present text.

Now I do not mean to defend the historical documentary hypothesis, but I 
think that
the book of Genesis presents evidence that documents were involved. I would 
be hard
pressed to say that Genesis came from a single author, but would be more
comfortable with the term single redacteur/translator. Now this statement 
doesn't
hurt the evangelical position, in my opinion, because it allows our present 
text to show
traces of source material that is substantially OLDER than it's redacteur, 
who most
fundamentalists/evangelicals would name Moses.

Anyway, those are my comments. There is evidence for A documentary hypothesis,
though not necessarily the one Wellhausen sold to us.




Jonathan Bailey
Hochschule für Jüdische Studien
Heidelberg