Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Christian M. M. Brady" <cbrady AT tulane.edu>]

Thanks Dave. I just wanted to add a note to say that Dave presented my point
much more succinctly than I did! ;-)

Cb

On 1/25/01 7:52 AM, "Dave Washburn" <dwashbur AT nyx.net> wrote:

> I haven't commented so far, but this caught my attention:
> 
>>> Liz, how can we, objectively and concretely demonstrate that redactors
>>> always add and never subtract? There are all sorts of problems with this
>>> (common) assertion, not the least of which is that not everyone can agree
>>> upon which portions of a given biblical text belong to which "layer" of
>>> redaction.
>>> 
>>> So, please elaborate/defend this assertion.
>> 
>> I don't have much to contribute to this discussion.
>> It's based on the assumption that texts are holy.
> 
> But did these redactors consider it holy?  Since we don't really
> know when the texts achieved this status, this doesn't seem like a
> very solid assumption to me.
> 
>> They get added to, commented upon, the comments,
>> the glosses, the additions get added to the text by the
>> next copiest. Stuff is lost through haplography,
>> but stuff is not usually considered omitted purposefully.
>> This is suggestive when you consider the relationship between
>> Kings and Chronicles. It's usually assumed that the Chronicler
>> deleted stuff in Kings. This to me doesn't seem likely. More
>> likely to me is Auld's hypothesis whereby each added to a common
>> source, the common source being that which is common among them.
> 
> It seems much more likely to me that the Chronicler would
> deliberately leave out things like the Bathsheba episode, and I tend
> to think the reasons are fairly obvious.  Nevertheless, the fact that
> one can make a case either for addition, deletion or reworking of a
> common source illustrates just how "iffy" this whole field of source
> criticism is.

Cb
cbrady @ tulane.edu
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