_{Handout 65}

Conservative Replies to Wellhausen & “J-E-D-P”

• Q: What is the easiest way to prove a critical scholar wrong?

  A: Wait 20 years, and let another critical scholar do it.

A. Recap:

Again, Julius Wellhausen did not originate the idea that the Pentateuch was compiled & edited together from four originally separate sources, nor was he the first to suggest that the order in which they were composed was J-E-D-P. So what was his contribution?

Wellhausen’s main ‘contribution’ was:

• Wellhausen worked up a reconstructed history of Israel, and then linked the sources JEDP to that reconstructed history.

• In particular, that reconstructed history of Israel described the evolution of Israel’s religion. The four sources come from and reflect the stages of the evolution of Israel’s religion.

In previous handouts we saw that in Wellhausen’s assessment there were five main stages to the evolution of Israel’s religion. The four sources JEDP come from the 3rd, 4th and 5th stages, as follows:

Stage 1

The early period, in which Israel had an essentially pagan conception of Yahweh as Israel's God. Blessing is based on pleasing Yahweh (in much the same way as other pagan nations might please their gods). This stage is before the monarchy.

Stage 2

The stage of the early prophets (esp. Amos & Hosea), "ethical monotheism." Yahweh is now seen as the God of the entire world, and is very concerned with righteousness. Blessing is based on righteous behavior. This stage is late in the monarchy or early in the divided kingdom.

Stage 3

The initial stage in which Israel envisions itself as being in a covenant with Yahweh. "J" and then "E" both come from this stage. Blessing is based on faithfulness to the covenant. This stage is during the divided kingdom. "J" and "E" were so thoroughly edited together that it is hard to separate them for sure. So Wellhausen often speaks of the "JE stratum."

Stage 4

The stage of Deuteronomy. The covenant with Yahweh is now viewed as the dominant theological conception, and now this covenant was understood to contain the threat of a curse of great destruction for violating the covenant = for being faithful to Yahweh. The covenantal dynamic is no longer no longer _being blessed or not being blessed_, rather, it is _being blessed or being cursed_. "D" comes from this stage. This stage is during Judah alone.

Stage 5

The covenant becomes encrusted with required rituals and hundreds of laws. Now Israel has the full "Law of Moses." The "P" source comes from this stage, and also, the priestly redactors combined "P" with the previously existing "JE" and "D", and edited all of it together to produce the Pentateuch as it has come down to us. The final redaction of the Pentateuch is a priestly redaction, which makes it look like all those laws go back to Moses. For Wellhausen, the resulting Pentateuch is not the foundation of the Old Testament, it is the foundation of Pharisaic, legalistic Judaism. And according to Wellhausen, spiritually and morally, it was a step backwards. This last stage falls in the late exilic and the post-exilic period.

A related claim of Wellhausen’s was that, unlike the bewildering, senseless Pentateuch, the four documents which he identified did each make sense. That is to say –

• Each one was coherent (they made sense, and told a reasonably complete story); and,
• Each one was consistent (in terms of its terminology & its theological perspective).

Wellhausen’s formulation became the standard (sometimes called the “classical”) expression of the Documentary Hypothesis. Wellhausen’s ideas are still commonly taught in colleges and universities.

B. The Difference in Worldviews between Conservatives and Critical Scholars:

It is no surprise that conservatives were not persuaded by Wellhausen’s lengthy arguments, or by the so-called “assured results” of biblical criticism. To begin with, conservatives reject the rationalistic assumptions which are the starting point for the critical approach to the Bible. For example, critical scholars insist that Moses could not have written Lev 26 or Deut 28, because those two chapters seem to know about the exile & return. But critical scholars do so because they reject the possibility of genuinely predictive prophecy, because that would be a miracle, and their rationalistic worldview does not allow for miracles. // But ours does. So this is a self-imposed problem for them; it is not a problem for us.

In truth, many conservatives wonder why thorough-going critical scholars continue to study the Bible at all. For thorough-going critical scholars, the Bible is not from God, and does not contain any revelation from God. While it may perhaps offer some insights about life, from their viewpoint, the Bible can hardly be called authoritative. So a fair question from conservatives to thorough-going critical scholars is this: Why bother? Acts 26:24

Wellhausen’s views may be critiqued for several other specific reasons, not just due to the difference in underlying worldviews. And it is not only conservatives who have critiqued his views.

C. Critical Scholars who have Critiqued Wellhausen’s Views:

Many critical scholars have differed with Wellhausen’s views at one point or another. We could list several, but we will mention two recent well-regarded critical scholars who have differed with Wellhausen’s views vigorously:

R. N. Whybray

(1923-1998; main teaching position: Prof of Hebrew and OT Studies at the University of Hull [near Yorkshire, England], 1965-1982).

In The Making of the Pentateuch (1987), Whybray examined the evidence for the documentary hypothesis, and concluded that it was not compelling. His alternative proposal was that the Pentateuch was essentially the work of a single author who drew upon multiple sources and disregarded, or was ignorant of, modern notions of literary consistency and smoothness of style and language.

Here is the heart of Whybray’s critique of the documentary hypothesis: (mostly in my words)

• Source criticism points to the existence of repetitions (“doublets”), stylistic differences, alleged inconsistencies, and alternate names for God, as evidence that the Pentateuch was compiled from different sources. But Whybray points out that this argument makes sense only on the two-fold assumption that:

  1. The writers of the original sources would not have allowed such repetitions and inconsistencies, but that:
  2. The editors of the final compiled work did allow them / did not remove them or smooth them out.

• Whybray asks: If the writers / editors of the final document did not mind such features, why should we assume that the writers of the earlier documents would have been any different? Conversely, if the writers of the initial documents truly wrote smooth, consistent & coherent documents, why should we assume that the final compilers of the Pentateuch would not have done the same thing?

• To quote Whybray:

  “Thus the [documentary] hypothesis can only be maintained on the assumption that, while consistency was the hallmark of the various documents, inconsistency was the hallmark of the redactors” (Making of the Pentateuch, p. 19).

Along with several other scholars, Whybray points out that there are a number of credible reasons why a writer might change which name of God he uses at one point or another, or, might use some manner of repetition. Such features do not demand that we assume there are different authors. Whybray’s book remained the most complete critique of the documentary hypothesis by a mainstream biblical scholar for at least a decade after its publication.

John Van Seters

(b. 1935; main teaching position: Prof of Biblical Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1977–2000).

• Van Seters vigorously critiqued the idea of “editors/redactors,” which was a major assumption of source criticism of the Bible, and esp. of the Pentateuch. Source criticism assumes that many books of the Old Testament were not written by authors in the modern sense of the word, but were compiled and edited together from originally separate courses by one or more redactors.

• Van Seters specifically challenged the notion of ancient redactors in his work, The Edited Bible:

  The Curious History of the “Editor” in Biblical Criticism (2006). In it, he seeks to completely demolish the notion of “ancient editors,” a notion which Van Seters argues was unknown before it was introduced into biblical studies by rationalists in the late 18th century. Based on his lengthy study of authorship and the use of editors to finalize written works, Van Seters concluded that the use of scholarly editors who were responsible for the reproduction of classical texts (such as Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Julius Caesar, etc.), and for biblical texts, only arose in the 16th century. In terms of historical testimony, there is no evidence for that practice before the sixteenth century. So Van Seters concluded that it was illegitimate to try to explain the nature of the books of the Old Testament by appealing to the work of multiple alleged ancient redactors. Such a notion, he argues, has no basis in fact or in actual history.

Make no mistake, neither Whybray nor Van Seters advocates a return to seeing Moses as the primary author of the Pentateuch. Their own suggestions place the composition of the Pentateuch in the exilic or post-exilic periods. But for our purposes, they are recent examples of critical scholars who vigorously disagree with aspects of the arguments put forth by Wellhausen. Their critiques of Wellhausen and the standard assumptions of source criticism have made significant headway among current critical scholars.

D. Specific Conservative Replies to Wellhausen & JEDP:

1. According to modern anthropologists, there is no evidence that any religion has ever “evolved” from paganism to monotheism. Regions sometimes are converted from one religion to another (as much of the Roman empire was converted from paganism to Christianity, and as much of the Middle East was converted from paganism to Islam). But religions do not evolve. The supposed “evolution” of Israel’s religion is a major assumption of Wellhausen’s. Scholars have abandoned this assumption.

2. Ironically, Wellhausen’s “evolution” scheme for Israel’s religion does not actually agree with a fundamental assumption of Darwin that, as things evolve, they improve, they evolve “up.” [This idea of movement upward is also found in Hegel’s ‘dialectic’ of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, which was articulated only a few decades before source criticism hit full stride. Georg W. F. Hegel, 1770-1831].

   For Darwin and Hegel, the direction of evolutionary movement should be upward; and so if religions evolve, they too should evolve “up.” But according to Wellhausen, the high point of Israel’s moral and intellectual development was the mature JE stratum (Prolegomena to the Hist. of Israel, trans. 1957, p. 467). Wellhausen sees the final source (“P”) and the final priestly redaction of the Pentateuch as a definite step down: it was encrusted with legalism & ritual, was lifeless, and dead (Prolegomena to the Hist. of Israel, trans. 1957, pp. 421–425). So Wellhausen’s view of the evolution of Israel’s religion does not actually align with the evolutionary assumptions of Darwin and Hegel.

   Before reading replies #3a & #3b below, it is helpful to recall:

   Wellhausen claimed that, unlike the bewildering, incoherent Pentateuch, his four source documents (JEDP) were both consistent and coherent. That is, each of the four source documents used consistent vocabulary and had a consistent theology. And each of them also made sense; they told a complete & coherent story; they were a complete account.

   Perhaps(?) Wellhausen assumed that source-critical investigations of the Pentateuch would end at that point, given that he had found the answers. But they did not. Other critical scholars continued to try to identify other sources, or to identify sub-sources within the four main sources. But this led to problems of its own, namely: (see next page)

3. 1. The Problem of “Alphabet Soup.”

      Once one starts dividing up the documents to get complete consistency, where do you stop?

      Says who? Some scholars have suggested nearly two dozen source documents for the Pentateuch.

      We listed several of them in H/O #63. Joseph Blenkinsopp calls this the problem of “alphabet soup.”

      Joseph Blenkinsopp, The Pentateuch (1992, Doubleday, p. 14).

      The problem is this: Who is the authority within critical scholarship who can say to the other critical scholars, “You may divide this far, but no further”? [Job 38:11a]

   2. The Related Problem of “Consistency” ←vs.→ “Coherence”

      If we keep dividing up the source documents until each little document is completely consistent (it uses the same sort of vocabulary & expressions; it has a consistent theological perspective, etc.), we wind up with a document that is no longer long enough to be self-standing, to be coherent.

      So the more consistency each new proposed sub-source had, the less coherence they had.

      Thus Wellhausen’s claim that the four documents J, E, D, & P were both consistent and coherent proved to be unstable. No one is the final arbiter of how far the alleged sources of the Pentateuch can be sub-divided before we must stop.

4. Some of the criteria which Wellhausen & co. used for dividing documents (such as “doublets,” different divine names for God, etc.), are entirely capable of other explanations.

   Doublets are now recognized to be a common feature of epic & narrative style in other writings in the ancient near east (“ANE”). They do not have to indicate multiple authorship.

   And the name of God employed by a biblical writer can easily result from the theological point the writer is making at that point in the text. They do not have to indicate different authors.

   E.g.: Ecclesiastes only uses "God,"; it never uses "the Lord" (not once!), because Ecclesiastes is not addressing the issue of _Yahweh as Israel's covenant God_, but the issue of life on earth, in general, no matter what people or nation a person is from.

5. Their claim that “the Pentateuch does not make sense” is a problem of their own creation. To be fair, critical scholars are sort of correct when they say that “the Pentateuch does not fit into any recognized category of literature.” But note their implicit assumption: The Pentateuch should fit into a recognized category of literature, because–as all critical scholars know–the Pentateuch is not truly revelation from God, but is a human creation. And all human literary creations will fit into a recognized category of human literature.

   Conservatives agree that the Pentateuch does not fit into any recognized category of literature, precisely because the Pentateuch is unique. It is the only written account that recounts the actions of God from creation until Israel is ready to cross the Jordan river and enter the promised land. Conservatives will argue that → the Pentateuch does make sense the way it presents itself, namely: as the record of what God did from creation, then through Abraham, and through the young nation of Israel, to eventually bring blessing to all nations of the earth.

6. The problem of the “disappearing Moses.”

   Critical scholars have convinced themselves that none of the Pentateuch was actually written by Moses. Perhaps some vague oral traditions might trace back to him, but nothing that was written. In particular, none of the written laws come from Moses. In their view, Moses had very little to do with it.

   • Question: If Moses had so very little to do with it, if none of the written laws actually go back to him, then why do all four sources want to anchor their laws and their divine pronouncements in the person of Moses?

   If Moses was truly as inconsequential to the Pentateuch as critical scholars have concluded he was, why do all four documents point to him as the great prophet of God? It makes no sense that they would all essentially either invent a Moses who never really existed, or would take some modest oral account / traditions about him, and aggrandize them to the point where this Moses was the great leader of Israel, and then base the authority of the laws in the Pentateuch on such a miniscule Moses.

7. It is true that JJ-SS-KK do not refer to the law & the sacrifices as often as do the post-exilic historical books (Chronicles, Ezra, & Nehemiah). And it is also true that in JJ-SS-KK Israel often behaves as if they do not care about or know about God’s laws, or about their covenant with Yahweh. And from those observations, Wellhausen goes on to conclude that → The law did not exist at that time = the law was written after the end of 2 Kings.

   But Wellhausen’s assertion that JJ-SS-KK do not seem to know much about the law misses the fact that the Sinai covenant provides the backdrop for the theology of these books (the “moral of the story”).

   Also, does he note that they build a temple for the ark of the covenant?

8. We grant that the term “covenant” is not used often in the early prophets (esp. Amos & Hosea). But Wellhausen overlooks that fact that the concepts of the Sinai covenant pervade these prophets, and are the sensible backdrop into which the prophets speak.

9. When the books which he says do not know about the law happen to mention the law and/or the covenant, he dismisses such references as “later additions by a redactor.” ← This is what is known in the academic world as “special pleading.”

10. Finally, if Wellhausen is right, then the Pentateuch it is neither truthful nor trustworthy. The inescapable problem with the documentary hypothesis is that the patient dies on the operating table.

The Final Dilemma Faced by Critical Scholars Re the Pentateuch:

If we can ‘improve’ the Pentateuch by cutting it apart and gluing it back together, if the critical scholars are right, then we have no word from God. If, on the other hand, the Pentateuch, as it stands, is from God, then we should not mess with it.