Blue Cord

Alan Hauser has an essay in this month’s SBL Forum entitled “Sources of the Pentateuch: So Many Theories, So Little Consensus”. Because the topic is right up my alley, I wanted to comment on some of the things he has to say.

Hauser begins by noting the fact that the consensus of the Documentary Hypothesis has collapsed. Because of this, he wants to draw attention to two methodological problems: the question of whether it is possible to delineate the sources and whether such reconstructed can be placed within a historical framework. He places these questions within the framework of a question from David Cline’s article from the August 2006 SBL Forum: “Is such a theory [of sources] useful? Should I be interested in it? How important is it to have a theory of Pentateuchal origins?” I was looking forward to an answer to this question, but unfortunately Hauser never quite provides one.¹

For the first problem, Hauser points to the fact that repetition has often been seen as a sign of multiple sources in a story. If the same thing is said twice, it must be because two stories have been woven together. He rightly questions whether such repetition is evidence of sources or whether it might be attributed to Hebrew style. He points to poetry, where parallelism is not only present but is indeed a sine qua non of Hebrew poetry.

On one level, Hauser is correct, but I think he is partly criticizing scholars for something they no longer do. It may be that professors who teach intro classes may still talk about repetition as a sign of sources, but no one who is doing current active work on the sources is doing it in the heavy handed way that Hauser suggests. Scholars recognize that repetition is sometimes merely a way of bringing out a particular aspect of the text or an element of style left over from the oral stage.

On the other hand, there are places where repetition and differing details cannot be ascribed to style. Even given cultural differences, I find it hard to imagine an Israelite author sitting down and writing the flood story as it now stands, flipping back and forth between the number of animals, the number of days, etc. I can see an editor doing this, if he is working with two texts that are already written and have already obtained a semi-canonical status, so that he must preserve the differences even as he blends the stories.

The second problem he notes is the historical framework. For Wellhausen, source criticism was something that was seen as the first step towards writing history. We now recognize, however, that history and source criticism are two fields that feed into each other. As I have pointed out before, source critical results have implications for history and vice versa. The two must move forward together, at least within the scope of an individual scholars work.

Hauser is critical of this circularity. He states:

Proposed pentateuchal [sic] sources feed into the reconstruction of ancient Israelite history, which, in turn, feeds back into the study of the sources. Such reconstructions are essentially incestuous, and the opportunity for circular thinking is boundless. The key question concerns just how much reliable data we can derive from this circular process. This can be like trying to nail Jello to the wall.

While I agree that it is circular, I don’t see that as a bad thing. All writing of history is a circle that moves between the sources and the proposed reconstruction of the events. When historians of America use sources from the Revolutionary War to write a history of that period, they have to determine the date of the sources and their provenance. Knowing that a particular letter from a wife of a soldier was written before or after a particular battle has an impact on how we judge the information in the letter. If the historian initially decides that it was written before the battle, but later finds that the battle was fought on a different date, he or she must reassess the dating of the letter and the information it contains.

For historians of ancient Israel, the problems are more acute than for American historians and the data is less plentiful, but the issues are the same. The trick with the circularity is to make the circle as wide as possible. When done correctly, the circle transforms into a spiral which moves both our source critical and historical models upwards together.

As Hauser points out, we are now in a period when both historical and source critical consensi have collapsed. Given that there is no longer a core of propositions that biblical scholars accept, Hauser asks how much we can learn from source critical theories.

The answer is that while we cannot rely on older theories, we can set about the work of building new theories built on what we hope is a more solid foundation. Wellhausen’s theory was built on both historical and philosophical foundations. I have critiqued Wellhausen’s philosophical basis, and Hauser points out the historical problems. And part of the problem of the post-modern period is that we don’t quite have a new philosophical basis — or at least not one that commands general acceptance. But none of these are reasons to abandon source critical inquiry. We may have to tear down part of the spiral we have built up, but the only way we are going to move forward is by struggling to establish a new foundation and beginning to build the spiral anew.

We are in a transition period is Pentateuchal study. The old consensus has collapsed and the new has yet to arise. Such periods are uncomfortable, but they are also invigorating. I agree with Hauser that now is the time for a “thoroughgoing reassessment of the foundation on which source critical studies have been based.”

Hausen then moves on to other methodological issues. Among these is the question of why scholarship should brush aside the final form of the text in favor of theoretical reconstructions. He asks:

If there were a resounding consensus among scholars about the content and scope of these proposed sources, as well as the socio-historical context in which each was produced, one might be less inclined to pay attention to the challenge Childs and others have raised. However, an encompassing consensus on these points is precisely what has been lacking. . . . I am unwilling to make decisions about the nature of the Old Testament on the basis of continually morphing theories and constructs.

I have two responses to this.  The first is that I think Hauser is missing the distinction between the historical and theological character of the text.  The theological character of the text is not affected by source criticism; the historical character is.  We do not determine the authority or usefulness of the Pentateuch by tracing its author or its original historical setting.  The authority is defined by its canonical status within faith communities. Nothing source criticism says will change that.

Second, I don’t think scholars are as inclined today to ignore the final form of the text, thanks in large part to the work of Childs.  Historians may be more concerned with reconstructed earlier stages, but this is not the case in general.  And apart from a canonical approach, a number of critical methods have arisen that pay little or no attention to anything but the final form.  Among these are feminist readings, liberation readings, literary criticism, and reader response theory.  We are past the point where the earliest form of the text is given privileged status.

One final comment on Hauser’s statement above.  He states that he is unwilling to made decisions based on “continually morphing theories and constructs.”  Unfortunately, however, that is the nature of human knowledge.  We may kid ourselves otherwise, but even science works that way.  Our understanding of the world is always based on theory.  The rate at which theories are formulated and abandoned may change over time (and currently they are changing fairly quickly), but the fact that they do change is one of the few constants.

I have focused more here on places where I disagree with what Hauser says, but overall I found his article very useful.  Methodological problems abound in source criticism, and Hauser has done a good job of outlining some of them.

1. I explored the issue of whether source criticism is useful in my post “Source Criticism and Theology”. [back]