Who Wrote the Bible?
Murmuring against Moses by John S. Bergsma and Jeffrey L. Morrow
This is a powerful and surprising deconstruction of the “Documentary Hypothesis.” The Documentary Hypothesis is the paradigm developed nearly two centuries ago. The Documentary Hypothesis claims that books of the Pentateuch — the first five books of the Old Testament, aka the Torah — were stitched together from pre-existing texts written by different unknown authors.[1] When these texts were written is not specified by the Documentary Hypothesis [DH], although it is assumed that the texts were written long after the events of the Exodus. The DH also posits that the actual texts of the Torah — the text we know today — were not assembled until the “Babylonian Captivity” in the sixth century BCE (approx. 597–538 BCE.)
The authors of Murmuring Against Moses (MAM) explain that the kernel of the Documentary Hypothesis was in the air long before the nineteenth century. The Roman Neo-Platonic philosopher Porphyry[2] debunked the historicity of the Book of Daniel and took a similar attitude toward the Torah:
The most serious challenge to the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch from antiquity came from the Roman Neo-Platonist philosopher Porphyry. Porphyry’s challenges were the most serious to date and the most direct. Unlike other critics of Judaism and Christianity of the time, Porphyry made careful study of the Bible. He gathered together all of the arguments against the Bible he could find from Gnostic, Marcionite, Manichaean, and other sources. It should come as no surprise that after 361, when the Roman Emperor Julian took control of the Roman Empire, he borrowed his major arguments against Christianity from Porphyry. One of Porphyry’s main points of attack was to detail the portions of Genesis he found to be absurd. Porphyry went further than many other critics of the time in maintaining that the entire Pentateuch was composed over one thousand years after Moses by the scribe Ezra. (p. 274.)
Islamic scholars also took a hand in questioning the accuracy and historicity of the Torah. In their case, the motivation came from the Muslim belief that the texts of the Torah and Gospels had been corrupted. These scholars denied the Mosaic authorship of the Torah.
Some Christian scholars followed the Muslim critique. Peter Abelard opined that the true text of the Torah was lost until it was rewritten by Ezra after the Babylonian Captivity. After the Reformation, both Catholic and Protestant scholars noted that there seemed to be anachronistic entries in the Torah. One of these scholars was Cornelius A Lapide:
CORNELIUS À LAPIDE Cornelius à Lapide wrote a number of important biblical commentaries, and his exegetical work became fairly well known across Europe.17 When it came to Pentateuchal composition, he was clearly aware of the basic history of the discussion. À Lapide thought that Joshua may have compiled, or at least organized, the Pentateuch. Joshua seemed to à Lapide to be the most logical candidate. If this is the case, à Lapide suggests that perhaps Joshua utilized and based his work on Moses’s very own notes, which he would have taken during his time leading the Israelites.18 À Lapide was no skeptical scholar and was well-respected by many, and thus his views were understood as significant. In light of both the wide reach of à Lapide’s works as well as the broad respect they earned, Malcolm writes, “Thanks to à Lapide, the idea that there were post-Mosaic materials in the Pentateuch became widely diffused in early seventeenth-century Europe.”19 (p. 315.)
The authors particularly credit four seventeenth-century scholars — Isaac La Peyrere, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and Richard Simon — for redeploying philological and skeptical traditions about the Pentateuch. The authors argue that the objective of each of these scholars was less about objective scholarship and more about furthering a theological-political goal. In Spinoza’s case, the motivation included a backlash against the Jewish community that had excommunicated him. Hobbes sought to put the power of interpreting scripture into the hands of the monarchy.
In the 18th century, Biblical Studies was created along the lines of Classical Studies, which severed the Bible from theology. Classical Studies was in the throes of source criticism and was fixing its attention on the issue of whether prior texts could be discerned in Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad.[3] Wilhelm de Wette took up the challenge to apply this approach to the Pentateuch as if by religious inspiration. The authors describe de Wette’s importance as follows:
Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette is the next important figure we encounter after Eichhorn.27 Few doctoral dissertations on Scripture have had the effect on the discipline that de Wette’s had, to the point where the impact can still be felt today more than two hundred years later! What is even more remarkable is that the most enduring point was not so much the overall argument of the dissertation, but an aside in a single footnote. De Wette’s 1805 dissertation argued that Deuteronomy was from its own literary source, distinct from the rest of the sources that composed the Pentateuch. His momentous footnote argues that Deuteronomy is likely the book mentioned in 2 Kings 22 that was discovered during King Josiah’s reign. (p. 360–361.)
De Wette was both anti-semitic and anti-Catholic:
De Wette also had an aversion to ritual that went hand-in-hand with an anti-Jewish28 and anti-Catholic bias against such distinctively Jewish and Catholic notions about sacrifice. This anti-cult position would continue through scholarship in the nineteenth century and is even prevalent today. (p. 361.)
The combination may sound strange, but a great deal of anti-Catholic criticism has relied on configuring Catholicism into a caricature of Judaism:
In Germany — and this becomes even more important when we consider Wellhausen below — anti-Judaism (or, later, anti-Semitism) and anti-Catholicism often went hand-in-hand, and a critique of Judaism in biblical scholarship was often an attack on present-day (or historical) Catholicism. There were political factors at work here beyond simply theological views. In the context of de Wette, Pasto makes some of the most important points linking de Wette’s scholarly views directly with his political context. One of Pasto’s main conclusions is that “de Wette was writing his Biblical past as a metaphor for his German Protestant present, and . . . he thus transformed a unified Israelite-Judean past into dualistic Hebraic and Judaic pasts in order to inscribe and authorize his German Protestant present.”34 The key linking the denigration of Judaism, in light of the ever-present “Jewish Question” in Germany, with Catholicism was the long drive for a unified Germany, which would happen in Wellhausen’s lifetime. These were important political concerns for de Wette. De Wette was staunchly in favor of a smaller unified German state, with a Prussian head, rather than the larger German conglomeration of states that would include Catholic Austria. He feared Catholic influence would undermine the German state. (p. 364.)
The Documentary Hypothesis made its full appearance in the writings of Julius Welhausen in the 1870s — which was also the period of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church. The authors explain:
This final form, J, E, D, and P, articulated by Wellhausen, became how the Documentary Hypothesis was taught around the globe. It survives to the present day in classroom lectures and textbook summaries. Other contemporaries of Wellhausen, and later scholars as well, continued to advance other formulations. Today, virtually no source critical scholar follows Wellhausen’s exact formulation. And yet, it is Wellhausen’s exact formulation — minus the complex developmental history he posited — that every student of the Bible has to memorize. (p. 374.)
To make his J, E, D, P system work, Wellhausen had to create an occult version of history. Wellhausen erased Jewish history before the sixth century BCE on the supposition that the Pentateuch had been written in Babylon during the sixth century. With this blank slate, Wellhausen could create whatever conditions he needed to assume to maintain the consistency of his theory. Thus, if the Samaritans had a nearly identical Pentateuch, that was due to an imagined period in which the Samaritans and Jews shared the text. Likewise, the Prophets took precedence over the Law (Torah); the Torah was rendered a problematic retcon by Ezrah in the view of the Documentary Hypothesis.[4]
The authors pay special attention to the Kulturkampf angle. In 1870, Bismarck put together the mostly Protestant German Reich. In 1870, Bismarck’s Reich had a substantial Catholic minority and was bordered by Catholic France and Catholic Austria, both of whom had lost power and longed for revenge. The Catholic minority presented the German Reich with the problem of divided loyalties:
In many ways, the anti-Catholicism of the Kulturkampf was the final culmination of nearly a century of anti-Catholic sentiment and measures in Germany. Michael Gross claims in fact that the Kulturkampf’s point was nothing other than “to break the influence of the Roman Catholic Church and the religious, social, and political power of Catholicism.”55 Thus we find the expulsion of religious orders and a host of anti-Catholic legislation erected and enforced. Catholicism became viewed as the enemy, in part, because the Catholic Church represented the paradigmatic transnational authority, and members of religious orders not only circumvented the state-appointed bishops’ authorities but were also often composed of foreigners. Thus, the majority Protestant Prussia viewed the nationalism of Catholics skeptically. As in England after the Protestant Reformation, so too in late-nineteenth-century Germany the loyalty of Catholics was suspect, and Catholics were viewed as potential enemies of the state. This provided the immediate socio-political context for other areas in biblical scholarship beyond Wellhausen’s Documentary Hypothesis. (pp. 375–376).
The Catholic allegiance to an international power remained an issue for the Nazis, whose avowed enemies were International Communism, International Jewry, and International Catholicism.
The Documentary Hypothesis intuitively mapped Israel onto the German political situation.
Wellhausen and his work fit neatly into this political context.57 It is no mere accident that Wellhausen’s developmental theory seems to match a Hegelian evolutionary philosophy — and not merely because of Hegel’s influence. Wellhausen’s theory set Judaism, and Catholicism (its symbolic representation), in the worst light as a corruption of a purer, pristine religion of the heart. He preferred the religion of the Prophets, but his view of the Prophets was inextricably bound to post-Enlightenment Protestant understandings both of Paul and of the Prophets; that is, Paul and Prophets shorn of any resemblance to cultic and priestly vestiges of Judaism and Catholicism.
Wellhausen’s theory foreshadowed one aspect of National Socialism, which would make its appearance in fifty years. Like the Nazis, Wellhausen prioritized Germany’s mythic pagan past to undercut its real Catholic history:
His history of Israel, not by coincidence, developed along the exact same lines as Jacob Grimm’s (of the Brothers Grimm, whom Wellhausen long admired) history of Germany, shaped by Enlightened Lutheran sensibilities more than by historical evidence.58 Grimm attempted to get around Germany’s pre-Reformation Catholic past by going back to its pre-Christian past. As George Williamson amply documents, Grimm and others attempted to help formulate a new mythology for Germany wherein pre-Christian pagan roots would be mined for civic and cultural virtues apart from Jewish and even Christian traditions.59 Grimm’s pre-Christian Germany resembles Wellhausen’s patriarchal Hebrew culture, and both appear remarkably the way liberal Lutheran Protestantism looked in Grimm’s and Wellhausen’s post-Enlightenment Germany. The corruption of Israel’s cultic and priestly infrastructure (the Torah) maps onto this history the way legalistic and overly ritualized Catholicism corrupted Europe. Finally, the prophetic return to a family religion and religion of the heart, of morality and faith, is akin to the Protestant Reformation’s liberation of Germany from the vile clutches of Rome. (pp. 376–377.)
This book is fascinating in the way that it maps Homeric source criticism to Bible source criticism to anti-Catholicism, which will lead to Volkisch nonsense and “Who wrote Shakespeare” nonsense (admittedly these latter points are not found in this book. ) By my reckoning, the authors have ably demonstrated that the Documentary Hypothesis is damned by a genetic fallacy.
All of this is in the third part of the book. In the first two portions, the authors raise substantial concerns about the integrity of the Documentary Hypothesis on scholarly grounds. The gist of the authors' argument is that the Documentary Hypothesis has been around for two centuries, during which time we have learned a lot that was unknown to Wellhausen. For example, Ancient Near East scholarship has developed such that texts comparable to the Pentateuch are now known to ANE scholars. Those texts show that literary tropes that Wellhausen thought were the clues to the Documentary Hypothesis are found in texts that no one could think were compiled or redacted. Likewise, the Pentateuch has been vetted by ANE scholars who confirm the accuracy of its details. The result is that ANE scholars have criticized the Documentary Hypothesis. Kenneth Kitchen observes:
In another lengthy excerpt, Kitchen summarizes his conclusions based on the massive amount of evidence for the authentic second millennium Egyptian background to the exodus and wilderness traditions, making the figure of Moses, and Moses as author of the Pentateuch, seem more likely than ever before: The particular and special form of covenant evidenced by Exodus-Leviticus and in Deuteronomy (and mirrored in Josh. 24) could not possibly have been reinvented even in the fourteenth/thirteenth centuries by a runaway rabble of brick-making slaves under some uncouth leader no more educated than themselves. The formal agreeing, formatting, and issuing of treaty documents belongs to governments and (in antiquity) to royal courts. . . . So, how come documents such as Exodus-Leviticus and Deuteronomy just happen to embody very closely the framework and order and much of the nature of the contents of such treaties and law collections established by kings and their scribal staffs at court . . . in the late second millennium? . . . To exploit such concepts and formats for his people’s use at that time, the Hebrew’s leader would necessarily had to have been in a position to know of such documents at first hand. . . . In short, to explain what exists in our Hebrew documents we need a Hebrew leader who had had experience of life at the Egyptian court, mainly in the East Delta . . . including knowledge of treaty-type documents and their format, as well as of traditional Semitic legal/social usage more familiar to his own folk. In other words, somebody distressingly like that old “hero” of biblical tradition, Moses, is badly needed at this point, to make any sense of the situation as we have it. (pp. 75–76.)
This is positive evidence that the Pentateuch was written when it claims.
Likewise, the theory of a redaction in Babylon is problematic. The authors point out that the Pentateuch has a definite slant in favor of northern Israel and against Judah. Further, there are no mentions of Zion or Jerusalem, which would be expected if the Pentateuch was created in Babylon. The Documentary Hypothesis assumes that the authors of the Pentateuch were exiles from Jerusalem who wanted to preserve the glory of Zion, Israel, and Jerusalem. Yet, contrary to this foundational assumption, these redactors never incorporated anything that glorified Jerusalem.
Further, there is the problem of the Samaritan Torah, which is essentially identical to that of the Jewish Pentateuch. The Judah-Samaritan split occurred before the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem. If the Pentateuch was redacted in Babylon, how did the Samaritans get a copy that was essentially identical?
The final compelling point is that the prophets all know the Law. As noted, Documentary Hypothesis proponents prioritize the Prophets' historicity over that of the Law. But the Prophets regularly quote the law of Moses as it is found in the Pentateuch. This suggests that they actually read the Pentateuch. This contradicts the Documentary Hypothesis’s “Prophets First” timeline.
This book is quite accessible for persons with interest in the subject but who are not scholars. The authors walk the reader through the arguments without assuming background knowledge. They are not calling for overthrowing the Documentary Hypothesis, but they are pointing out that there are substantial questions. As someone with a more than a casual interest in history, I had been substantially exposed to the Documentary Hypothesis. I had assumed that it was unquestioned. I was surprised to find that there are substantial problems with this theory. My current perspective is that the timeline promoted by the proponents of the Documentary Hypothesis is on par with the occult phantom time theory of Heribert Illig, until, at least, I get better answers.
Footnotes:
[1] A chief feature of the Documentary Hypothesis is the contention that the different texts can be seen in the different chapters that use variant names of God, e.g., Yahweh v. Elohim. This has led to the doctrine that the sections using Yahweh were written by the “Yahwist author,” and the sections written with the name Elohim were written by the “Elohist author.” These authors had different perspectives, perhaps owing to their location in Israel versus Judah. The DH has also discerned other authors, such as the Priestly author, who focuses on rituals. Discussions involving the Documentary Hypothesis invariably involve some variant of the J, E, D, P sources.
[2] For more on Porphyry, see my review of Porphyry’s commentary on Aristotle’s “Categories.”
[3] The same technique was applied to the writings of William Shakespeare which has led to the banal and silly search for the true author. See Contested Will by James Shapiro.
[4] “Retroactive Continuity” is a technique used by comic books to change a character’s history to maintain the character’s continuity with contemporary readers. When he first appeared, Sgt. Fury was a veteran of World War II; for today’s readers, he fought in the Second Gulf War.
