Blue Cord

“Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends!” — Karn Evil 9

Yes, once again the carnival is in town. This time, however, the town in question is Klaipeda, Lithuania. Let’s head down to the midway and see what delights came our way in the biblioblogosphere during the month of April.

Our first act brings us the best entry of the month,¹ Tyler F. Williams’s post on the King David Seal uncovered in the excavations of Jerusalem. A master work of humor and Photoshop legerdemain, the post apparently even fooled some people. P.T. Barnum was right . . .

In a sideshow, we have some archaeology and Ugaritica to entertain you. Several different people have blogged about Larry Stager’s statement on unprovenanced artifacts, including PaleoJudaica’s Jim Davila and Duane Smith at Abnormal Interests. And for those of you who can’t get enough historical toponyms (you know who you are), Duane also has an entry on Ashdod in the Ugaritic texts.

In the center ring, we have some Old Testament bloggings. Jim West has an interview with Giovanni Garbini. It is in Italian, but he promises to have a translation soon. ² On Abnormal Interest, guest blogger Loren Fisher has an interesting piece on the conquests of David and Sinuhe.³ And while we are talking about David and Goliath, Chris Heard at Higgaion gives us a review of Azzan Yadin’s understanding of that story.

Next up, please direct your attention to the New Testament. Clifford Kvidahl at Theological Musings has a piece on NT textual criticism, while Prove All Things regales us with a discussion of Greek pronunciation systems. If you are interested in the gospels, the Busybody⁴ tries to get out of paying his taxes with a series that examines Jesus’ teachings on rendering to Caesar. On Christian Origins, Peter Kirby asks whether the gospels had any historical intent. And to round out our three ring circus, Andras Kostenberger at Biblical Foundations examines the phrase “saved by childbearing” in 1 Timothy 2:15, with a response from Ben Witherington.

In the area of early Christian literature, Rick Brannan of Ricoblog fame has a piece on the Didache. And if we place the quotation marks around the word “Christian,” we can include in this category Phil Harland’s take on the Gospel of Judas.⁵

As a final bit of entertainment, we have some blogs that are uncategorical — or at least I couldn’t figure out where to place them. Lingamish brings us a post on when and if “they” is grammatically correct, Aman Yala blogs about homosexuality and the Bible, and Stingray discusses God’s love for us. And if centrist Canadian politics is your fetish, be sure to wander over to Centrerion for a post about the Bible and freedom.

As for me, my contribution to this carnival is a proposal I submitted to the biblioblogging community about the need for a good on-line Bible dictionary. I would love to get some feedback on this. I think it could be a useful teaching tool for all of us. Also, please let me know if you would like to contribute to this project.

Well, the cotton candy is sold out, the elephants have been put to bed, and the barkers have ripped off their last mark. And so we bid farewell to the carnival. But don’t worry, it will be back next month, when your host will be Benjamin Myers on Faith and Theology. Keep a look out for his call for submission.

1. As chosen by me, your friendly master of ceremonies. [back]
2. Jim, let me know if you have that translation up. [back]
3. For those unfamiliar with Sinuhe, it is an Egyptian text from the Middle Kingdom that tells the story of a man who flees from Egypt and lives in Canaan for a while. [back]
4. A.k.a., Loren Rosson III. [back]
5. Please note that “Christian” is placed in quotes to indicate that the Gospel of Judas is not quite Christian literature. It is not intended to question the faith of Phil Harland, whom I have never met but I assume is a wonderful guy. [back]

I want to respond at length to Edgecomb’s¹ criticism, as well as that raised by Ken and Joe. But first I think I need to clarify my own position on the Documentary Hypothesis.

I do not accept the Documentary Hypothesis as the best explaination for the development of the Pentateuch. But the problems I have with it are not the same as Edgecomb’s. Here are what I see as the main difficulties:

• J is not a document as much as it is a supplement. H.H. Schmid and John van Seters have demonstrated that it was written after D and draws from it. It never existed seperately.
• There is almost no evidence for E.
• P needs to be divided into at least two sources and a redactor. The pre-exilic P (earlier than Wellhausen thought) is several documents, all steming from the priestly circles in Jerusalem. H is a later set of documents (exilic or post-exilic) from the same circles but showing differences in terminology and theology. These were combined and edited into the JD document by the H redactor (I think; I am still researching this).

My approach could better be called a supplemental theory, since texts keep getting added to the basic work. But it also has source elements, since P and H were sources at one point. It is a hybrid between documentary and supplementary theories, since I don’t think either one adequately accounts for the formation of the Pentateuch.

If I had already moved my archives here from Karamat, I could just link to those posts. But this will have to do for now, since grading demands my attention. When I critique Edgecomb’s critique of the Documentary Hypothesis, it should not be taken as an argument in favor of that hypothesis. I am, however, arguing in favor of source criticism, which he seems to reject completely.

1. I hate to refer to people by their last name, but calling him “The Other Kevin” makes me sound like the original and him the copy. He is certainly welcome to refer to me as Wilson, although he may also call me by my secret identity: the Exegete (mild-mannered professor by day - caped crime fighter by night). [back]

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.

1. Israel Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995). [back]
2. One thinks immediately of Rolf Rendtorff, Erhard Blum, and John van Seters, among others. [back]