DCHindley wrote:I would agree that the Pentateuch contains a great many signs that point to use of previous sources, and have always liked JEDP as an analysis of these sources, but have not been as happy with the attempts to put dates to these sources and redactions. That latter process seems to include a good deal of eisegesis.
I agree that the original absolute chronology that Wellhausen proposed is now utterly untenable. But there have been many, many developments in textual criticism and chronology since then, which have refined, revised, even unpicked the documentary hypothesis. It may be appropriate here to repeat most of what I posted on Neil Gregory's Vridar blog a few days ago (edited for grammar):
One of the problems I have ... is that Russel Gmirkin presents it as a contest between Wellhausen’s Documentary Hypothesis 1878 and his own position 2006, as if there has been little or no relevant scholarly developments, or alternatives worth engaging with, in between.
He does mention some different post-Wellhausen chronological schemes, sort of , but he doesn’t seriously discuss any of the supplementary and fragmentary theories of the compostion of the Pentateuch (or Tetrateuch) that have developed in the second half of the 20th Century – Rentdorf, Van Seters, Kratz. For example, there are significant issues raised by, say, Van Seters, who downdates J to the Exilic period. But that could have a crucial impact in Chapter 5, where Gmirkin pits his own theory of the writers of Genesis deriving Mesopotamian myths from Berossus as against the Wellhausen’s chronology, which demands that those myths entered South Syria in the 1400s BCE and were transmitted orally for centuries – which is indeed highly implausible. But Van Seter’s argument broadly speaking now puts both the Yahwist & P within a strongly Mesopotamian orbit and offers a quite different scenario that Gmirkin doesn’t remotely address (This is not to say that I necessarily agree with Van Seters, I should add.) This raises the possibility that there are other theoretical constructs which might prove to be more robust rivals to Gmirkin’s theories than Wellhausen’s 19th Century option.
While he certainly rejects Wellhausen’s chronology, Gmirkin doesn’t reject the division of sources as such (at least in principle); he flattens out the chronology entirely, seeing the sources as contemporary alternative narratives – presumably written separately but then brought together by an overall editor. But will Wellhausen’s theory really survive this flattening? Isn’t there a relationship between sources that necessitates a (relative) chronology? Does a certain polemical or revisionist attitudes of one source towards another not demand a more extended chronology than this theory allows?
Gmirkin seems to come at the issue primarily from the viewpoint of the classical texts – Hecataeus, Berossus, Manetho etc – scrutinising them with great care and sensitivity (eg Chapter 3 on Hecataeus and Theophanes of Mytilene is beautifully and elegantly argued – it’s where the book is at its best)… but I don’t think he is anywhere near as careful with the Biblical text, which too often is simply alluded to in broad bullet-point summaries; problems and inconsistent elements are ignored (e.g. – why is the Babylonian Nimrod a son of Cush in Gen 10:8? Is it significant that the MT of Exodus 1:11 mention two “store-cities” Pithom and Ra’amses, but the LXX has three “secure cities”, Pithom, Ra’amses and On (Heliopolis)?)
Even the traditional J source in Genesis 2-11 has many, many narrative fractures: why does the Tree of Life only appear at the very end of the Garden of Eden narrative (Gen 3:22-24)? Why does Cain the wandering outcast suddenly become Cain the respectable city builder (Gen 4:11-17)? Would the writer of Gen 4:19-22 declare that Jabal, Jubal and Tubal-Cain as the fathers of, respectively, nomads, musicians and smiths if he was planning to describe the Deluge (within a single generation, if we discount P's Sethite genealogy and go directly from Cainite Lamech to Noah)? Gmirkin doesn't take any of this detailed primary evidence (in a textual, not historical sense) into account.