Category: Bible

Last year I tried to give sure-fire evidence from a single chapter in Exodus supporting the claim that the first 5 books of the Hebrew Bible were arranged from multiple sources. One negative response to my three-part post came from Julie M. Smith over at Times and Seasons.* She said, essentially, that if this was the extent of the evidence for the Documentary Hypothesis, she’d lost her faith in what she’d been taught during her Master’s Degree in New Testament studies. In the discussion of her post that ensued, the disagreement centered on the existence of possible alternative explanations for the material I was discussing. I argued that we have clear evidence that Deuteronomy knew only one version of Moses’ re-ascent of Sinai (Horeb) preserved, in integrated fashion, in Exodus 34. The only logical explanation for this is that the author of Deuteronomy (not Moses) had before him two distinct sources (or one of the two), which he incorporated into his own source. On the other side, people including Julie argued that this is not the only (nor, I assume they meant to say, the best) explanation of the phenomenon. After all, because our literary sensitivities differ from those of the ancient world, we don’t have license to go carving up the text, especially not one that, tradition tells us, was penned by Moses himself. This is a common (if vernacular) type of critique of the DH, the misconceptions of which need to be dispelled.

Continue reading “What you have to explain without the Documentary Hypothesis”

Most LDSs who have actually read Genesis 38 and 39 have undoubtedly had the thought, or heard the thought, that the juxtaposition of these two chapters teaches important lessons about chastity (see the OT SS manual, where this is made explicit). After all, in the former we have Judah’s wicked sons, the second of which (Onan) ‘spills his seed’ and dies because of it, and then Judah himself is trapped by his penchant for a prostitute. In the latter, we have the righteous Joseph who, unwilling to sleep with his owner’s wife, is thrown into prison because of his refusal, only to rise to second in command of all of Egypt and save Israel. Indeed, Genesis 38 clearly interrupts the Joseph story that began in Gen 37, thus the redactorial insertion, given the topic and putative lexical connections, appears to be the result of someone having seen a connection in these two texts. As James Kugel points out (see pp. 25ff.), even two prominent scholars (Robert Alter and Jon Levenson) have argued on linguistic grounds that these chapters were deliberately put in this order: “A few recent scholars have suggested that the story’s insertion was not the act of a mindless redactor, but a deft move by someone who established, or at least saw, a number of subtle connections between the Joseph saga and the Judah-Tamar episode.”

Kugel rightly challenges each of these linguistic connections and then puts forth what I think is the correct theory: that there was no demonstrable intent to juxtapose these stories. Continue reading “Judah, Joseph, ‘Chastity’, and Authorial Intent”