Blue Cord

I got an e-mail from the American Family Association, a conservative political group masquerading as a Christian group concerned about the family.  This time, they are concerned that Keith Ellison will be taking his oath of office for Congress on the Koran instead of the Bible.  Here is their “Action Alert.”

They argue that this act will “undermine American civilization,” a view that is held by Dennis Prager as well.  Prager says,

It is an act of hubris that perfectly exemplifies multiculturalist activism — my culture trumps America’s culture. What Ellison and his Muslim and leftist supporters are saying is that it is of no consequence what America holds as its holiest book; all that matters is what any individual holds to be his holiest book.

What the AFA and Prager seem to misunderstand is the nature of an oath.  Taking an oath on the Bible does not mean that you are vowing to uphold the values of the Bible.  Instead, it means you are taking an oath in the name of the God whom you believe wrote the book on which you hand rests.  It also means that you expect that God to punish you if you break your oath.

This tradition is as old as diplomacy itself.  Take, for example, the Treaty of Kadesh, one of the earliest known treaties.  Egypt and the Hittites were a party to this treaty after realizing that neither was ever going to be able to get the upper hand over each other in Syria-Palestine.  We have copies of this treaty in both Hittite and Egyptian, which is remarkable.  And in these texts, the Egyptians swear to the treaty in the name of their gods and the Hittites take the oath in the name of their gods.  The Hittites did not believe in Egyptian gods (and vice-versa), so it would have made little sense for them to take the oath in the name of the other country’s gods.

The problem with Prager and the AFA are that they do not believe that God will punish someone for breaking an oath.  So to them, it is more an issue of symbolism.  This is why Prager, who is Jewish, has no problem stating that Jews have always and should continue to take the oath of office on both the OT and NT.  He apparently does not believe that it matters whether the person taking the oath believes in the book or not.  (This also allows him to score some cheap points with his readers by implying that some liberals think the NY Times or the works of Voltaire are more important than the Bible.)  In saying that Jews should continue to take the oath on the “whole Bible,” Prager shows that what is more important to him is the symbolic belief that the Bible represents America.

Prager ends by saying,

If Keith Ellison is allowed to [take his oath on the Koran], he will be doing more damage to the unity of America and to the value system that has formed this country than the terrorists of 9-11.

It is hard to believe that a reasonable person could make such a statement.  Apparently he would rather have 3,000 more people killed by extremists than allow a person to swear in the name of his own God that he will do his duty towards America.

After a brief overview of the book, the first essay in A Farewell to the Yahwist? is Thomas Romer’s “The Elusive Yahwist: A Short History of Research.”

Romer begins with a short overview of the development of the idea of the Yahwist. Although much of it is familiar, I was surprised to learn that Wellhausen did not consider the Yahwist to be a particularly solid source. He not only divided the material in J into three sources, but also preferred to speak about the Jehovist (J and E combined) instead. It is also interesting that when most scholars who are not source critical specialists talk about the Yahwist, it is mostly von Rad’s formulation that they have in mind.

He then moves on to talk about some of the perceived problems with J. The main one — and the one that is the focus of the current volume — is the gap between Genesis and Exodus. The fact that the supposed J material in Exodus seems to know so little about the Patriarchs led Rendtorff to question the whole idea of J.

Although J has not been abandoned by everyone, Romer notes that even some people who retain the idea have modified it greatly. H.H. Schmid called into question the idea of a Yahwist working during the Solomonic period. He has been followed in this by John van Seters, who places J in the exilic or postexilic period. The Yahwist has been dated into just about every century from the 10th to 5th centuries BCE in recent years. There is also great debate over whether J is a redactor, a school, or an author. A final problem he notes is that it has been hard for scholars to isolate both a central message and vocabulary for J, and he surveys the theories offered on each of these.

Since this essay is mostly a review of scholarship, there is not much to argue about, although one could question whether the uncertainty about the Yahwist is as wide-spread as he thinks. But I did want to use this initial review as a place to discuss what issues are at stake for my own scholarship.

As I have mentioned before, I think that P is composed some time during the preexilic period. D is also preexilic, with at least the law code formulated by the 8th century. Deuteronomy 4-11 and parts of 27-34 were added during the reign of Hezekiah when the book was combined with Joshua. If van Seters is correct, the J is exilic or postexilic and was written as a prelude to D. Finally, I think H (Knohl’s HS) is the one who combined these three sources and added a lot of his own material to give the Pentateuch the shape it has today.

If the ideas in A Farewell to the Yahwist? are correct (and I have not decided if they are), this would mean that the J material in Genesis and Exodus-Numbers would have to be assigned to two different authors. I have no problem with this, but it would mean that van Seters is right about Exodus-Numbers and wrong about Genesis. They could still both be assigned to the exilic or postexilic period, and it would only require a small change to my hypothesis. I am mainly focused on P and H and how they brought the Bible together. Additionally, some of the papers in the book suggest that P was the first one who combined the tradition of the Patriarchs with the traditions of Moses, the Exodus, and the Wilderness. That would not be a problem for my idea, and I think it might even help it.

One of the books I picked up at the SBL was A Farewell to the Yahwist: The Composition of the Pentateuch in Recent European Interpretation. It is part of the SBL Symposium Series. The papers in this volume come from the SBL’s Pentateuch seminar which has been meeting since the 1980s. Most of the papers have been presented in recent years, so I have heard several of them, but it is nice to have them finally published.

The question with which the book deals is whether the idea of J as an author or document is viable. It is basically an outgrowth of Rendtorff’s seminal paper entitled “The Yahwist as Theologian?” in JSOT 3 (1997) and his later book on the same topic. Many of the papers build on Rendtorff’s work, while three papers are critiques who respond to the other papers.

Over the next week or so I am going to be reading the papers in the book and engaging them here on the blog. As I do so, I will link to the papers to my initial post on the book. This will allow people to follow the discussion without having to scroll through previous posts trying to find the right ones.

Each year when I teach Ezekiel in Intro to Bible, I have the students attempt to draw the vision that Ezekiel sees in chapter 1. My students in the US always do a good job, but the students here in Lithuania produce some great art work. The picture below is the best of the bunch this year. I was done by Viktorija Trofimova, one of my Russian Orthodox students.

The blog carnival for November is up at Jim West’s blog.  Be sure to note the first post mentioned, which is Steve Cook’s series on the image of God in the Old Testament.  It was an excellent study.