The "Good Book"…

As I write this, I have three books in front of me. Each of them is a Bible. There is a Revised Standard Version (Protestant canon only) of 1,065 pages, a New American Bible of 1,512 pages and a Jerusalem Bible, with introductions and extensive footnotes, of 2.052 pages.

Despite differences in layout, differences in translation and some differences in content, they are all recognisably the same book — the "Good Book", to borrow a hackneyed phrase.

But this perspective — thinking, speaking and writing of the Bible as though it were one book — is a completely modern one. In fact, it's only in comparatively modern times that we even have had the technical ability to package the Bible as a book, bound into a single volume with front cover, back cover, consecutive page numbering, gilt edges and a handy ribbon to mark your place.

The bible is not a book. It is a small library, made up of many different books — books written by different people, at different times, in different styles and for different purposes. So trying to read it as one book, a single narrative and commentary written with one authorial voice and directed at one audience, is a fundamental mistake.

A small library…

To try to make some kind of sense of this, Jewish and Christian scripture scholars have identified different groups of books in the Bible according to the purpose for which they were written, or the literary form that they take. Generally speaking, the books of the bible are grouped as follows:

Old Testament Torah/The Law The Histories The Prophets The Writings New Testament The Gospels The Epistles The Apocalypse

But identifying these groups is only the beginning. It tells us something about what the various books of the Bible are for, and what they deal with. As interesting or more interesting is the question of where they came from.

Two answers to the question:
"Where did these books come from?"…

This is actually a very big topic. For a start, in relation to each book there are often two answers; the "traditional" answer, and the "scholarly" answer. (I don't mean to suggest that the traditional answer does not have scholarship behind it. But what I term the "scholarly" answer tends to look to the text of the work itself more than the "traditional" answer does.) Sometimes the traditional answer and the scholarly answer are the same; sometimes not.

To see what this means, let's look at the books of the Torah.

The Torah, also known to Jews as "The Law" and to Christians as "The Pentateuch", is the first five books of the bible — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. It covers the history of the Jews from the creation up to the Exodus from Egypt, gives a description of the Jewish people at the time of the Exodus, and sets out the Mosaic law, regulating the behaviour expected of Jews under their covenant with God.

The traditional view…

The traditional view is that Moses wrote the Torah. There is no claim to this effect in the text itself, but it is a long-standing Jewish belief.

If that's correct, the Torah dates from around 1250 BC, the approximate time of the Exodus from Egypt (assuming the Exodus is a historical event, which is a whole other debate that I intend to avoid here).

Some traditionalists hold that the Torah was dictated by God to Moses, word for word, letter for letter. Others consider that Moses composed the Torah under the influence of divine inspiration.

There are some internal objections to the idea that Moses wrote the Torah. For instance, the historical section of the work describes the death of Moses. How can this be, if he wrote it? The text also describes Moses as "the most humble man who ever lived". How likely is it that the most humble man who ever lived would write that about himself?

But there are answers to these objections. For those in the "literal dictation" camp, there is no problem. What is to stop God dictating, and Moses transcribing, these things? Others suggest that Moses wrote the bulk of the Torah, but that parts of it were edited or completed after his death by someone else. (The someone else is usually identified as Moses' brother Aaron.)

The scholarly view…

The "scholarly" view generally rejects the idea of direct authorship by Moses.

The starting point for the scholars is the text of the document itself. It contains a great many repetitions — stories repeated with different characters or different emphasis. There are, famously, two creation stories (Gen 1 and Gen 2), but there are lots of other examples:

• three stories of a patriarch, traveling among pagans, pretending his wife is his sister.
• Two stories of Moses striking a rock to produce water.
• Two versions of the Ten Commandments with slightly different wording.

Indeed, practically the whole of the book of Deuteronomy is a repetition; it covers material that has already been covered in the previous books.

Sometimes there are apparently trivial differences between versions of the same story:

• At one point, Noah takes two of each animal; at another point, he takes two of some, seven of others.
• Is Joseph sold into slavery to Ishmaelites, or to Midianites? Take your pick.
• The Mountain of Revelation is sometimes called Sinai, sometimes Horeb. These are both real mountains.
• Moses' father-in-law is sometimes Yitro, and sometimes Ruel.
• And so on.

Scholars noted that in most of the duplicated stories, one set described God using the Hebrew word Elohim (usually translated "God") while the other set tended to use Y-H-W-H (sometimes rendered into English as "Jehovah"). From this came the theory there were two different authors, referred to as E and J, telling the same stories in different ways, whose works were combined to form a single text.

Traditionalists offer answers to these points. They suggest that the E-word for God is used when God's justice predominates; the J-name is used when God's mercy is predominant. Replicated stories are complementary, offering different interpretations and insights. For example, one of the creation stories emphasises the physical universe, the other the pre-eminence of humanity.

Undeterred the scholars have gone on to analyse grammar, vocabulary, writing style and so forth, and argue for two further authors — P (the Priestly author) who wrote most of Leviticus and also the genealogies appearing in the other books, and D (the Deuteronomist), who wrote the book of Deuteronomy.

The result is that the scholars now offer quite a complex account of how the Torah was written, with four different texts by four different authors (or possibly "schools" of authors). These four texts were later combined by an editor, called the Redactor. He sometimes put the different authors' stories one after the other (like the creation stories) and sometimes interwove them (like the two stories of the Flood). The Redactor also added bridging language between sections like "Now it came to pass, after these things . . .".

It must be stressed that this is a hypothesis. No copy of any of the supposed four preceding texts has survived. Nevertheless it is a hypothesis that enjoys wide acceptance among scripture scholars.

But when did this happen? When were the four texts produced, and when and by whom were they edited together? And, most interestingly of all, why? If we can live with four gospels, surely the Jews could have lived with E, J, P and D as four separate texts?

We don't really know the answer to these questions; there are various theories. But the questions are worth exploring, because they show not only that scripture emerges from, and is shaped by, the collective memory and insights of the Jewish people, but that it is firmly rooted in their real historical experience. So, next week we'll take a look at that question.

ARTICLE NAVIGATION: PART I | PART II | PART III | PART IV | PART V | PART VI

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Peregrinus can be contacted at: Peregrinus <peregrinus@catholica.com.au>

©2007 Peregrinus

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