The History of the Bible - Section II

1.      The Old Testament

The Old Testament is central to three religions: Judahism, Christianity (Section III) and Rabbinic Judaism (Section IV). 

Judahism was the religion practiced in and around Jerusalem in the period from approximately 587 BCE (the destruction of the First Temple) and 70 CE (the destruction of the Second Temple).  It centers on the worship of the god Yahweh.  It is important to keep in mind that the worshippers of Yahweh in this period were as different from modern Jews as they are from modern Christians.  Despite the closeness of spelling, Judahism is different than Judaism. 

Who is Yahweh?  Yahweh actually comes from the Hebrew consonants YHWH.  (Please recall that the original Hebrew scriptures lacked vowels.)  As best we can determine, the proper vowels for its pronunciation makes it “Yahweh”.  In the Old Testament, Yahweh announces his name to Moses.   Yahweh means “I am who I am” in Hebrew.  As the scripture of the Old Testament became ever more reverent and holy, readers of the Bible ceased calling God by his name Yahweh.  Instead, when YHWH was encountered in the biblical text, it was read as “the Lord” (usually translated as Adonai, from the Greek).  Eventually, in a mistranslation, the vowels from Adonai were merged with the consonants of Yahweh leading to the pronunciation of Yahweh as Jehovah (Y in Hebrew is usually equivalent to J in English).  Thus, Yahweh=Jehovah.

The Jewish name for the Old Testament is the Tanakh.  This is a Hebrew acronym for the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings.  We will use the more familiar term Old Testament here.

We will now pick up the basic history of the period.  Refer to the chart for additional information.

Figure 4.1: Calendar of dates:

A group of people left or was expelled from Egypt, led by a man called Moses (an Egyptian name, by the way).  They made their way to the Sinai peninsula just east of Egypt, where they spent time before ultimately settling in the area we now call Israel (the Promised Land).  They considered the area as belonging to them under a covenant made with the local God of the land, who called himself Yahweh. 

(Worshippers of Yahweh are referred to as Yahwists until the destruction of the first temple in 587 BCE.  They are then called Judahists until the destruction of the second temple in 70 CE.  Thereafter, they are called Jews.)

The area was controlled by a series of powerful local leaders over a period of about two hundred years, until control was unified under a single king named David in 1005 BCE.  He was succeeded by a son, Solomon, who built a temple to Yahweh in Jerusalem in 960 BCE.  Jerusalem was at the center of a northern area called Israel, and a southern area called Judah (or Judea). 

Solomon and his successors ruled this united kingdom for a hundred years, until the two area fell under separate control.  For the next hundred or so years, Israel and Judah were separate nations that operated under the auspices of the god Yahweh.  In 722, Israel fell to the Babylonian Empire.

Judah continued as an independent nation until it too fell to Babylon in 587 BCE.  At that time, a significant number (perhaps 10,000 or more) citizens of Judah were exiled to Babylon along with their king.  Over the next 50 years, the Persian king Darius overthrew the Babylonians and freed the people of Judah to return to their homeland.  It is during this time that the Torah was assembled.

Reunited, the people were now free to rebuild their temple in Jerusalem and re-establish the religious practices that had been suppressed during the years of captivity and exile.  During the next few hundred years, the practice of Judahism – the worship of Yahweh, the God of Judah – continued to flourish as religious customs grew.

During this time, religious activity was centered on the temple in Jerusalem and a priestly group whom administered sacred rites.  However, the practices and beliefs varied from city to city within the region, slowly evolving.  Additional writings were originated, which eventually became sacred.   Eventually, the area was conquered again – this time by the Greeks (330 BCE).  Roman domination followed. 

The Old Testament was written during these periods, and describes the history before and during these times.  The key reference period in this history is the period of the exile to Babylon, from 587 to 538 BCE.  This period accounts for important writings, and serves as a dividing line for the pre-exilic period (before 587 BCE, especially before 722) and the post-exilic period (after 538 BCE, and especially after 520). 

The Torah was written during the exile (from 587 to 538 BCE) using writings that originated from antiquity and described the period up to the conquest and occupation of the Israel nation.  Shortly after, and still during the period of the exile, the books of the Major Prophets (including Judges, Joshua, Kings, and Samuel) were written describing the history up to the exile.

These writings formed what became scripture, but were the work of one or more men living an existence separated from the land of their God – probably in Babylon.  They hoped for a return to the old ways, and wished to preserve their memory.  Unlike other similar stories of old world conquest and assimilation, these people survived and eventually returned to their land.  They were free to once again pursue their religious vision, and their practices lived on and were documented.

There is no reason to believe the worship of Yahweh was much different than the worship of other deities in nearby areas.  What was different was that the history of Yahweh’s people survived from generation to generation through written scrolls documenting the interaction of Yahweh and his people.  This is what separates the God of Judah from all others.

We have come to believe that the religion of the Old Testament was advanced for the time because these worshippers of Yahweh (now called Judahists) believed in a single all-powerful god.  Unfortunately, this is far from true.  First, the Judahists did not necessarily believe in a single god; they worshipped a single god, one with whom they had a covenant.  Their agreement was to worship Yahweh and no other gods.  This does not mean that they did not believe that other gods existed.  Second, they did not believe that their god was omnipotent.  They did believe their god was fundamentally more important than other gods; something like “my god can beat up your god”.  Of course, as various kingdoms rose and fell, the god of that kingdom presumably gained and lost stature as well.  Third, the Judahists were not the only people who held these beliefs.  There were many areas that worshipped a single deity.  So again, the difference in the Judahist religion was that it was recorded in writing, and those writings were passed down so that they exist today.

One of the interesting questions of Biblical history: how does one properly determine when to emulate the heroes of the Bible, versus acting opposite to their behavior?  Many of the most important figures of the Bible are flawed.  For example, consider David, first king of the unified Israel.  He was famous for many deeds, including slaying Goliath, defeating the Philistines and establishing Jerusalem as the capital of the new nation.  Yet he was also guilty of committing horrendous acts.  He was responsible for sending Bathsheba’s first husband (Uriah) to his death so that he would be able to sleep with her (2 Samuel 11:1-17).  She later bore him a son, Solomon, who carried on the dynasty and built the First Temple.

Clearly, David lived a charmed life.  He had God’s blessings, and this is why he was able to achieve so much (according to the story).  So why are the flaws included in the story?  It is speculated that the imperfections in the story lines help make it more believable.  This is perhaps one of the evolutionary leaps contained in the Bible – that the people described have typically human qualities, emotions and actions.  In fact, it has been said that the stories themselves must be true; for who would make up a story that shows such imperfections?

Most people have heard of the 10 commandments.  Not as many people are familiar with the additional commandments in the Bible.  In all, there are 613 commandments in the Old Testament.  In the New Testament, there is an eleventh commandment: love your neighbor as yourself.  There is even the great commandment: love God with all your heart (??).

-The Great Commandment: Love God

2.      The Torah

In the Jewish Bible, the first five books are referred to as the Torah.  Torah is the Hebrew word for the “law” or “instruction”.  These books are (using their more familiar Greek names): Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.  Collectively, they are also known as the Books of Moses or to many Christians, the Pentateuch.  For our purposes, we will consistently use the term “Torah” to refer them.

The Puzzle

Both Jewish and Christian tradition long held that Moses himself wrote these books.  However, elements of the writing of the Torah had been puzzling.  Many scholars – Jewish and Christian – noticed minor inconsistencies in the information presented.  Some even questioned that Moses was the author of every word of the Torah, supposing that a subsequent editor or copyist might have added a few sentences. 

For those early scholars who took the time to analyze these inconsistencies and write about them, the result was usually ridicule (Isaac ibn Yashush, or “Isaac the blunderer”), banned books (Richard Simon had 1294 of 1300 copies of his book burned), excommunication and/or imprisonment (John Hampden, 1688, who recanted as a condition of his release).  So the atmosphere for independent scholarly criticism was not good.  In the last few hundred years, attitudes finally changed and scholarly analysis began in earnest.  Even noted philosophers such as Hobbes and Spinoza recognized and tackled the problem.

The puzzle originally began as follows: if Moses wrote the Torah, as was commonly believed, why did he include multiple versions of some of the stories?  And why weren’t the versions consistent as to the facts?  For example, there are multiple versions of the flood story.  One says the flood lasted 40 days (Genesis 7:17), the other says it lasted 150 days (Genesis 7:24).  How could both be true?

As analysis progressed, significant insight was gained.  It was learned that some of the stories were not only presented twice (called “doublets”), but sometimes a third time as well (“triplets”).  Surprisingly, the writing style and language differed significantly from section to section, usually in ways that could only be seen when reading the Hebrew version.

What difference does it make? (From Tanakh, JPS)

Consideration was eventually given to the idea that portions of the Torah were not written by Moses at all, and must have been added at a later date.  This was especially true of those sections of the story describing events that occurred after Moses died!  Examples included naming kings who lived after Moses (Genesis 36:31).  There is even an account of Moses’ death, something which one could hardly be expected to write about.

Valiant attempts were made to reconcile these discrepancies.  For example: Moses was a prophet, so he could see the future; the stories were allegorical, and do not have to add up exactly to make their point; etc.  Eventually: a) increased study led to finding more and more inconsistencies; b) patterns emerged in the inconsistencies that ultimately led to breakthroughs; and finally, c) an unexpected solution to the puzzle was postulated. 

After careful analysis of the doublets, it was determined that two nearly identical story lines were present.  The doublets amounted to parallel descriptions of events, and the parallel versions had been intermixed.  The versions could be identified by specific linguistic characteristics that amounted to a signature. 

And Moses wrote neither of the versions.

The full explanation of the logic of the problem and its solution is outside the scope of this article.  See reference 3, Who Wrote the Bible for a comprehensive understanding of the subject, and related issues.  Its author, Richard Elliott Friedman, credits such noted scholars as W. M. L. De Witte, Karl Graf, and Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) for their contributions to the solution.  We’ll skip to the chase...

The Documentary Hypothesis

The standard scholarly explanation of the development of the Torah is called the Documentary Hypothesis.  It goes as follows: the Torah was written by four different authors, known by their initials Y (Yahweh), E (Elohim), P (Priest) and D (Deuteronomy).  The initials are not for the names of the authors themselves, but rather for specific attributes of the authors.  The actual authors are unknown.  These authors did not know each other, and did not even live contemporaneously.  Their writings were integrated – by a process called redaction – circa 560 BCE.  (However, the Y and the E texts are much older than the process implies.  The Y and E texts themselves may be 300 years older, and may themselves have been passed down orally for centuries prior to that!) 

The Y and the E texts can most easily be understood as follows: The writer of the Y section always refers to God as Yahweh.  However, the writer of the E section always refers to God as Elohim (literally “Gods”).  In English Bibles, this distinction can be seen if you look carefully.  Elohim is translated as “God”.  Yahweh is translated as “Lord” or “Lord God”.  However, the distinction is maintained fully in Hebrew texts. 

The P source refers to God as Elohim too, so there are other factors that distinguish E from P.  Genesis primarily consists of text from P, J and E, and possibly some from an additional author.

The text tells the same basic story in Genesis, with repetition.  So accordingly, there are two creation stories (Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 2:4), two flood stories (see above), two stories of Abraham’s covenant, etc.

So the easiest way to picture how these stories came to be intertwined is as follows: someone cut and pasted portions of one scroll – the Y scroll – with portions cut and pasted from the other scroll – the E scroll.  Then a new scroll was copied from the hybrid, containing both the Y and E versions of the same stories.  Then the P scroll was added by someone interested in documenting procedures important to the priests of that time.  Finally the D scroll was added, which may have been written by the editor (called the redactor) himself.  The redactor may have been one person, or several.

We don’t know for a fact that there were four authors of the Torah.  We do know that there were at least four authors of this section of the Bible.  There are many scholars who speculate that there are more authors of this section of the Bible.  However, the Documentary Hypothesis itself sticks to four.

Why did the redactor mingle the E, J, P and D versions?  We will never know the true answer to this question.  It is a subject of substantial speculation.  The way the stories are split seems to defy any simple explanation.  For example, why not simply include one entire story and then include an entirely separate story, as is done in the Gospels?  The logic is not apparent.  Obvious consideration would be given to the thought of a compromise – that two popular versions served as sources so as not to offend anyone loyal to a specific version.

In 1943, Pope Pius XII threw in the towel and issued an encyclical (“Divino Afflante Spiritu”) allowing Catholics to openly study and debate the Documentary Hypothesis (and other aspects of Biblical authorship).  Within 25 years, the Catholic Church itself came to accept the Documentary Hypothesis as valid.  Catholic and Protestant Bibles now often describe it in their preface. 

What difference does it make?

The dating of events of the Torah is difficult.  There are really no stories from the Torah that tie to events documented outside the Bible.  For instance, there is no recorded history of the flood; the exile of Moses from Egypt; or when the Chosen people first occupied the land of Israel.  The name of the Pharaoh is not given, so this too is lacking in specificity.  The best we are able to do is count backward from the time of King David based on the stories of the Major Prophets, and this is really just a “guesstimate”.  So we guess that Moses lived around 1250 BCE.

If so, Moses lived about 400 years before the Y or E texts were written.  There were no written documents during this period.  Thus, the stories were passed down orally before they were converted to written form.  Written scrolls did not surface in the area of Israel until about 900 BCE.

We have to assume that there is a very good reason for the fact that the Torah lacks the detail and clarity otherwise present in the books that follow it.  The reason is that a) the events described did not actually occur as described; b) during the long oral history phase which preceded the written history phase, the details were lost; or c) during the written history phase of the Torah, the low-level detail was omitted or otherwise not preserved from copy to copy. 

Most scholars accept a combination of these reasons.  For instance, the flood described in Genesis should have left numerous remnants that would have been discovered by now if the story were true.  Therefore it is not true.  The reason that the Pharaoh’s name was not given in the Torah is that it had been lost over the many years the story was passed down orally.

So the above-described Documentary Hypothesis really only covers the creation of the Torah from its predecessor manuscripts, Y, E, P and D.  Since scholars want to accept that there was a “historical” Moses (i.e. that Moses is not a fictional character), the stories of the Torah must be very old indeed. 

To summarize:

1)     Some of the stories of the Torah are not believed to be literal history, including the creation story and the story of the flood (since both are contradicted by physical evidence).  In fact, the creation story and the flood story both have remarkable similarities to stories from even more ancient times in other civilizations.

2)     The story of Moses began about 1250 BCE, but is not independently corroborated or otherwise calibrated in time to known historical events (as are most other portions of the Bible, in some form or fashion).  For example, the records of the Egyptians do not mention any events such as pestilence, Passover, the parting of the Red Sea, etc.

3)     The stories of the Torah were transmitted orally for about 400 years, or about 20 generations.  It is not known if any stories changed, were embellished, or were shortened.  It seems reasonable that after 20 generations, considerable detail would be lacking.  It is also not known if the original stories were told in Hebrew, as it is possible that they were originally in another tongue.  (Egyptian?)

4)     Eventually the stories were written in Hebrew, and two versions were passed down over the next 200-300 years.  These versions evolved into the Y and E versions, which tell similar stories.  There are, however, historical inconsistencies between them, as well as variation in linguistic usage.  The Y version is associated with Judah (to the south), while the E version is associated with Israel (to the north).

5)     The Y and E texts are combined and edited into a single text, which becomes the Torah as we know it.  The P and D texts are added at the same time.  The result is a relatively unified document, which extended through the following books of the Old Testament (in the order of the Jewish Bible).

Whew!  Hopefully, puzzle solved.  Keep in mind that the steps 4 and 5 above are the ones we understand best.  The first 3 steps must be deduced from steps 4 and 5, and are necessarily “fuzzy”.

Understanding the process by which the Torah came into being is critical to understanding the Bible as a whole.  For the writing of the Torah set the “ground rules” for subsequent writers.  It is also the base religious document that affects what can later be said about Yahweh.  The Torah sets the stage for the Biblical scripture that follows.  You can modify the essential premise, but you cannot deny what came before and is older.  Anything coming from Moses carries more weight than something recently imagined.  An author can include material that is not completely self-consistent, because this can always be viewed allegorically.  Be respectful of traditions, and build upon them.

Figure 5.1: Calendar of dates:

What difference does it make? (From Tanakh, JPS)

Religious Ideas Introduced Around This Time Period

3.      The Prophets

After the Torah was written, the story line picks up with events following the death of Moses.  This includes the unification of the tribes of the Chosen People under David, and the creation of the temple in Jerusalem under Solomon.

It is likely that the next 4 books of the Old Testament (in the Jewish order) were written more or less contemporaneous with the Torah.  In other words, the editor of the Torah completed his phase I, and then worked on phase II.  Phase II would be Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings.  Since Samuel and Kings are split into 2 books each, these account for 6 more books in the Catholic and Protestant Bibles.  Ruth is placed in a different order in the Jewish Bible, and this is significant because Ruth was written later.

In this view, the 5 books of the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) plus the 4 following books (Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings) adds up to yield 9 books presenting a unified story.  This unified story is sometimes called the Enneateuch.  The idea is that at one point in time, a text existed that pulled together all the elements of the history and the practice of the religion of the land of Judah.  This represented a significant leap forward. 

Rightfully, then, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings should also be included as part of the previous chapter.  These were written and edited during the same time period as Deuteronomy.  However, Jewish tradition assigns significantly more weight to the five books of the Torah than it does to the following four.  Christian tradition also assigns more weight to the Torah because of its relationship to Moses, but not to the same degree as do Jews.

The Prophets are referred to as Nevi’im in the Jewish Bible.  This includes 21 (??) books.

One of the most confusing things about reading and studying the Prophets is the phenomenon called “time displacement”.  This is most pronounced with the Major Prophets.  These books were written around 620 BCE but not assembled and edited until 560 (3 generations later, during the exile).  But the stories they describe occurred as much as 600 years earlier.  If they represent any degree of historical accuracy, then they must have been passed down orally for 10 (Kings), 20 (Samuel), even 30 (Joshua) generations.  It is very difficult to assess the historical accuracy of these books, although their content is mostly historical (little new religious thought).

Figure 6.1: Calendar of dates:

Religious Ideas Introduced Around This Time Period

4.      The Writings

The priestly traditions

Figure 7.1: Calendar of dates:

The rebuilding of the Temple.

-Maccabees

-Daniel

-Kethuvim

-          The apocrypha (hidden)

Religious Ideas Introduced Around This Time Period