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Richard Elliott Friedman
Publisher: Harper Collins
"In the eleventh century, Isaac ibn Yashush, a Jewish court physician of a ruler in Muslim Spain, pointed out that a list of Edomite kings that appears in Genesis 36 named kings who lived long after Moses was dead. Ibn Yashush suggested that the list was written by someone who lived after Moses. The response to his conclusion was that he was called "Isaac the blunderer.'" And so, Richard Friedman reports, the first seeds of the higher criticism were sown, casting doubt on the divine authorship of the Bible and setting in motion the process of textual analysis that underlies our modern perception of its complex fusion of voices. Not to be staid by epithets, excommunication, or even threats of death, the evidence of human authorship was slowly amassed over the next nine hundred years by both Christian and Jewish scholars and philosophers asking such questions as: How is one to explain Moses's use of terms he would not have known in his day, descriptions of places he had never seen, the use of the third person to describe himself, the account of his own death? Why are biblical events often cited more than once, each instance utilizing dramatically different and sometimes contradictory language? And, most tellingly, why is God sometimes referred to as Yahweh (Jehovah) and other times as Elohim?
The formal study of these questions culminated in the work of Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918), who synthesized the earlier investigations of Thomas Hobbes, Benedict Spinoza, J. G. Eichhorn, Karl Graf, and others into the Documentary Hypothesis, the assertion that the Bible was written not by one author but by four. Identified by the initials J (for Jehovah), E (Elohim), P (Priestly), and D (Deuteronomy), the four authors are believed to have lived at different times and in different places several hundred years after the events they describe. But the greater task of these and subsequent theorists has been to discover "why four different versions of the story were written, what their relationship to each other was, whether any of the authors were aware of the existence of the others' texts, when in history each was produced, how they were preserved and combined, and a host of other questions," among them, who was the editor responsible for combining these separate narratives into one apparently seamless text, and what can we learn about the evolution of Judaism from them?
Who Wrote the Bible? not only synthesizes and makes accessible this long history of biblical scholarship, but also offers several hypotheses of its own. Friedman, professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego, has devoted most of his professional life to the pursuit of the authorship question and how it affects our understanding of the Bible (extending the fundamental insights arrived at in Who Wrote the Bible? to two subsequent studies, The Hidden Face of God and, most recently, The Hidden Book in the Bible (reviewed on page 91 of this edition).
Simply and lucidly, Friedman presents the evidence for both the 19th-century claims of multiple authorship and his own refinements of that view, among them that the book of Deuteronomy was not the work of a committee but rather of a single author, possibly Jeremiah or his scribe Baruch; that the redactor who combined these four strains into one was Ezra the priest; that the J author might have been a woman (a theory later developed by Harold Bloom in his Book of J); and that certain aspects of earlier texts were altered to conform with later beliefs. Like his 19th-century predecessors, Friedman believes that the splitting of the Kingdom of Israel into two realms after the death of Solomon accounts for the J and E texts, E belonging to the northern kingdom, where the use of the tetragrammaton, YHVH, was considered sacrilege; J to the south, which observed no such prohibition. Ingeniously, the redactor combined these seemingly disparate strains into a single unified whole sacred to all, including parallel versions back-to-back in some instances, as in the creation story, and weaving the two voices into one in other cases, as in the flood narrative. So skillfully was this knitting accomplished, Friedman asserts, that its artistry was not fully appreciated for 2,500 years."For those of us who read the Bible as literature, this new knowledge should bring a new acquaintance with the individuals who wrote it, a new path to evaluating their artistry, and a new admiration for the book's final beauty and complexity. For those of us who read it in search of history, this enterprise continually opens new channels to uncovering what was happening in various historical moments, and new sensitivity to how individuals in biblical society responded to those moments. For those who hold the Bible as sacred, it can mean new possibilities of interpretation; and it can mean a new awe before the great chain of events, persons, and centuries that came together so intricately to produce an incomparable book of teachings. And for all of us who live in this civilization that the Bible played so central a part in shaping, it can be a channel to put us more in touch with people and forces that affected our world."
(Reprinted from Reform Judaism Magazine with permission.)
Softcover
ISBN:0060630353 |
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