More Compare and Contrast
Kevin Edgecomb has kindly overlooked the fact that I misspelled his name in my previous post and has responded to my response to his post. Chris Heard has already critiqued Edgecomb’s theory on Second Isaiah, so I wanted to responde to his statements about source criticism.
Edgecomb has a lot in his post that is merely naming without explaining. For instance, he refers to the Documentary Hypothesis at various points as “foolish, egregious, stupid, ill-founded, and scandalous.” Since these are not arguments so much as statements of opinion, I won’t — indeed can’t — address these. What I want to deal with are his substantive critiques.
Edgecomb asserts that the Documentary Hypothesis separates the sources in the Pentateuch on the basis of the usage of names for God, and he says that this is too simplistic and approach. I agree that such an approach would be too simplistic, but no one has ever done this. The differing usage of the divine names was one thing that suggested the presence of different sources in the Pentateuch, but these was never the only argument for sources. Multiple, corroborating pieces of evidence have been used to divide the sources. Among these are the theology of the text, its social location, its geographical setting, and the character of the text. Such arguments are hardly simplistic, which is why “so many noble trees,” to use Edgecomb’s phrase, have had to die to explore this topic.
Edgecomb refers to the Tigay study I referenced in my last post, and says that Tigay’s study of Gilgamesh shows that the Documentary Hypothesis is not true. He says that although we have multiple versions of Gilgamesh, none show the kind of development that the Documentary Hypothesis proposes for the biblical text. But Tigay’s work shows that it does. If you look at the varous versions of Gilgamesh from different centuries, you can see that the story continues to develop. Sucessive authors have added to the story, while still relying on earlies versions of the text. Now, this could better be called a Supplementary Hypothesis (which I think explains the text of the Pentateuch better than the Documentary Hypothesis), but we still see development similar to that proposed for the Torah.
Edgecomb goes on to say,
That is, with the Hebrew Bible we can now deal only with essentially textual critical issues, having no access to the literary development of the Pentateuch, and to an extent the wider Hebrew Bible as a whole.
Edgecomb does not offer much of an argument for this statement, other than his contention that comparative evidence from Mesopotamia does not show evidence of similar processes in other literature. But it is hard to see how he can make this statement. He would have to explain how it is that our divisions of the texts manage to produce such coherent document? How can Knohl deliniate a division between H and P that shows some texts have one theology while other texts have another?1 That would be an amazing coincidence if it was not due to different hands at work on the text. And outside of source criticism, form and tradition criticism are able to say a lot about the preliterary stage of the text. To dismiss such a large amount of scholarship on perceived lack of parallels in other ANE texts seems highly problematic.
Edgecomb ends his post by noting that biblical scholarly of having become “more a footnote mill . . . than a locus of original work.” It is hard can see how he can make this claim. The amount of original work being done in source criticism alone since the 1970s is astounding. With the end of any consensus concerning the Documentary Hypothesis, numerous scholars have done a great deal of ground-breaking work in this field.2 I am not sure what works Edgecomb has been reading, but his statement about “complications and obfuscations of elaborate, nitpickingly fussy textual dismemberment represented by the Documentary Hypothesis and other critical darlings share another common factor: a lack of elegance” sounds like a critique of source criticism as it was practiced in the early 20th century, not the way it is being practiced today. We have long since moved past the attempts to divide J into J1, J2, J3, and so on.
On May 2nd, 2006 at 7:35 am
[…] Kevin Wilson at Blue Cord rightly takes me to task for my rhetoric, which, of course, is rhetoric and isn’t intended to be addressed, but is my way of keeping such tediously boring drivel as this interesting for my readers. What can I say? I like English and slinging it about like playing airplane with a kid. I even say, “Whee!” in real life. […]
On May 2nd, 2006 at 9:41 am
Hey Kevin, I tend to agree that while the classical documentary hypothesis leaves much to be desired, that doesn’t mean the composition of the Pentaeuch was not a complex process (perhaps even a combination of supplementary, fragmentary, and documentary!). I have enjoyed your posts on different pentateuchal books such as Carr.
On May 2nd, 2006 at 5:06 pm
Finding distinctive theologies is a very weak indicator of a source, in my opinion. Simply look at works that are generally regarded as more or less single compositions and you’ll see that they too exhibit discrete theological opinions, which are often even contradictory (e.g. Chronicles or some of the minor prophets, or Paul’s letters). This is simply a function of the way humans think. We are inherently complex creatures. Reducing biblical texts to make them theologically consistent is very problematic.