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  • From: Jonathan Bailey <jonathan.bailey AT gmx.de>
  • To: Biblical Hebrew list <b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: JEPD Evidence
  • Date: Fri, 17 Dec 1999 17:19:43 +0100


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




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