Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: mls@sfsup.att.com (Mike Siemon) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Documentary Hypothesis and the Homeric Question Message-ID: Date: 23 Nov 90 06:16:29 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Lines: 235 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu The main point of this note is an explanation of why the "Homeric question" is NOT a good analogy for those who reject the Documentary Hypothesis. I have also a few comments on specific statements by Mr. O'Keefe; in effect, it seems to me that he is "refuting" a caricature of the argument, while coming very close to accepting its basic contentions. Unfortunately, I have not ever found a good modern presentation of the data. No _Einleitung_ I have looked at really addresses the issue in terms of an empirical investigation -- most simply start from an acceptance of the basic DH outline, with some indications of problems or limits of its application. The commentaries (Speiser, Westermann, ...) address general issues without really trying to *demonstrate* anything. Or, as I will illustrate below, they give useful "test" cases without ever presenting the full data -- and thereby they leave one uncertain as to how convincing the hypothesis is in general. My problem on this is that I have essentially no Hebrew, so I can't really gather my own data in any useful way. As in Dave Davis' request, I also would be *very* interested in a good modern treatment (the moderator mentions Noth; there is also von Rad, but these are propaganda for the most extreme form of documentary dissolution of the texts -- provocative reading if you are inclined *towards* the DH, as they will confront you with the question of just how far the methodology can be taken.) Anyway, Ricard O'Keefe writes: > There are several levels at which one may consider a documentary hypothesis: > > H1) The Pentateuch is based in part on earlier documents. > > As far as I am aware, tradition has never claimed anything else. > _This_ much is virtually certain. "Tradition" both Jewish and Christian is that Moses wrote the Books of Moses, with at least a bias towards the notion that Moses got his "data" direct from God, not by library search. > H2) Much of the text which was incorporated from earlier documents > was not significantly altered. > > In one sense, this is likely. Based on analogy with the NT and > Kings/Chronicles, one would expect a story like Noah's ark to be > copied INTACT and more or less verbatim. So what we'd expect is > a collection of stories due to earlier sources joined together > by "scaffolding" provided by the redactor. This is the statement in which Mr. O'Keefe seems to me to accept the fundamental framework of the DH. Setting aside the NT (where the textual relations of gospels to each other is its own kind of complex issue), the relation of Chronicles to Kings, and of Kings to the sources it cites, is not a bad starting point. Kings itself provides evidence of (a) a party within Israel that centralized worship in Jerusalem both as against non- Yahwistic and other Yahwistic parties and (b) "discovery" of Deuteronomy at a critical point in this process. Stylistic similarities of Deuteronomy itself with Jeremiah are said to be marked (here is where my lack of Hebrew leaves me completely dependent on others' commentary.) The question then becomes, *how well* can we separate out stylistic differences in the Pentateuch, and do these stylistic differences correlate with theological differences -- and furthermore can such differences be coherently ascribed to different "parties" (either contemporaneous or over time) with different interests and different "constituencies" and with a reasonable "need" to have produced a documentary tradition. The extremes of German exposition (as in Noth) are associated with some particular ideas about "religion history" among the early Israelites; doubts about that history will obviously weaken the force of arguments that depend on it. One may, of course, be skeptical that we know *anything* about the history of Israel sufficently well to "excavate" the literary strata of the texts -- but in THAT case, the conclusion must surely be to reject "traditional" readings even more forcefully than one doubts the DH! Those who reject the DH because they find it implausible had better face the fact that an historian finds the *traditional* account utterly ludicrous. If you take the position that the text must be PLAUSIBLY explained, you had better be prepared to offer up a MORE plausible explanation than Wellhausen's before rejecting his. > On the face of it, > that's exactly what we have in Genesis: the scaffolding being > the genealogies, with "the generations of X" serving as "chapter > headings". This illustrates that Mr. O'Keefe is in fact unfamiliar with the details of the DH. Systematic use of genealogies is characteristic of the Priestly source (on the DH account, of course :-)), not of the Redactor. There are few genealogical verses NOT in the Priestly material in Genesis, and they provide a fairly good "empirical test" of the hypothesis. What I mean by that is that traditional textual "difficulties" in the early chapters of Genesis (up to Abraham) gain reasonable explanations *on the basis of the stylistic division into JEPD* -- look at the first volume of Westermann's Genesis commentary to see what I mean (vol. I of Westermann, p.345ff in my edition, which is the Augsburg 1984 translation, ISBN 0-8066-1962-7). [ Incidentally, Speiser and Westermann (and even von Rad :-)) are good for this kind of "spot checking" the DH; the trouble is that they do not really present a systematic listing of criteria by which one could go over the texts and apportion verses to J, E, P, D or _incerti_ ] > But that's _not_ the kind of copying which the Higher Critics > have professed to detect. They claim to be able to detect > multiple sources _within_ single stories. For example, the > basis of the original method was the claim that one (set of) > source(s) used YHWH for God and another (set of) source(s) > used ELHM, hence "J" and "E". But in the story of Noah, > *both* names are used, hence the story of Noah is distributed > amongst at least two different sources, with the Redactor > apparently cutting and pasting and weaving together two or > more sources. This is unfair. The Deluge story is just about the ONLY one in which there is such an (apparent) weaving together. It is far more common that there are *duplicate* stories -- as in the duplication of the giving of the Ten Commandments; the Redactor is seen as providing (sometimes!) a context in which the duplication may acquire some theological differentiation. Take the first two chapters of Genesis -- these are very different creation myths, and the most literalistic (Creationist) interpreters will insist that chapter 2 deals specifically with Eden, while chapter 1 does not. I do not take the Creationist readings very seriously, but they illustrate that ANYONE who tries to deal with the text will find "divisions" in it. All that the DH requires is that we find some coherent _sitz im Leben_ for the divisions, where I specifically mean "coherent" within the framework of historical explanation. > This really seem rather implausible. We *KNOW* what happened > when ancient authors produced an edition of the material in (say) > Genesis, because several of the results survive. Specifically, I > refer you to "The Antiquities of the Jews" by Flavious Josephus I'd like to point out that ancient Greek "quotation" conventions are not the same as ours. It was *assumed* that a literate audience would notice the parallels with earlier literature *that was deliberately NOT quoted literally* -- look at Plutarch's essays for examples. Many of our "known" fragments of ancient philosophers (poets are a somewhat different case) are actually paraphrases, and it is hard to know whether we have original words or not. Josephus, incidentally, is working *within* this standard convention of Hellenistic literature. It is notable that Eusebius, a few centuries later, does NOT employ that convention -- and one can usually extract "exact" quotations from Eusebius, where the same is impossible in Josephus. Conventions change; the issue with regard to the Pentateuch is whether we can *from the text itself* identify any such conventions; strong forms of the DH assume that we can. Weaker forms can get by with less. > Basically, Wellhausen's approach requires that the redactor of > the Pentateuch was willing to chop up his originals into > separate phrases and interweave phrases from separate traditions > (it is quite common to find half-verses attributed to different > sources) yet was fanatically literal about the *words* in the > scraps he was so carefree about chopping up and re-arranging. As I said, that is only very rarely the case -- and it is as surprising to the DH people as to their critics. What is odd about the Flood story is that it (a) DOES separate into two very different tales, with major stylistic differences and (b) nonetheless "weaves" together so well -- it is a major accomplishment for whoever managed to put it together! One may guess that the impetus here is that a single universal flood that is then promised not to happen again can hardly be given in two independent accounts! (but that doesn't explain why Creation *can* be so presented. :-)) > H3) The methods developed by Wellhausen's school and refined by later > scholars are able to recover these documentary units. > > It is no longer fashionable to believe this about Homer. I don't > see why anyone would believe it about the Pentateuch. Consider Here is where I claim some expertise. The cases are *not* parallel, though they seemed to be so to mid-19th century critics (and so, those moderns like Cassuto who know the sequel in the Homeric case try to use that against the DH -- I regard such a move as intellectually dishonest, at least for those who really know what Milman Parry did.) The history of this is complex. Fundamentally, it was recognized that in Homer, as in the Pentateuch, there were traces of SEVERAL different communities -- Homer has some Aeolic dialect forms, some Ionic ones, and a few that don't fit very well into any of the classic dialects (some may in fact go back to Mycenaean Greek.) In the OT case, the *language* differences correlate with theological (and *possibly* also with cultural) differences that may point to different sources for the strata so noted. Some scholars who worked on both classical and religious texts *thought* to "dissect" Homer into contributions from different communities. There are even a couple of hints from ancient sources that this might be reason- able (charges by Aegina that Athens had "done it wrong" in the recension of Homer undertaken in Pesistratid times, for example.) But what emerged from such "studies" beyond associating heroes with their cities was very meagre -- unlike the theological differences between Deuteronomy and Levi- ticus, for example, there is NOTHING in Homer to indicate conceptual or political differences. Mostly, there is just this bizarre distribution of dialect forms that guarantee that no significant stretch of Homer can possibly have been spoken as idiomatic colloquial language by ANY Greek. What Milman Parry *demonstrated* was that if you *tabulate* Homer's famous epithets (the phrases of a word or so associated with the various heroes) against their positions in the hexameter line -- and this is something that the ancient scholars *could* have done, but didn't -- you find a wonderful economy: there tends to be *exactly* one way of "padding" the line to have the hero's name come out in the position it actually occupies. And there is roughly one possible epithet for every possible position of the name. This is -- at one stroke -- a perfect explanation for the mixture of the dialect forms (why get rid of a perfectly usable formula?) and the total lack of correlation of these with any "literary" point. (Some subsequent work indeed tries to find a subsidiary *use* of the formulas that can be taken as poetically sensitive -- that is, at most, a secondary level of composition, and I am not disputing its possibility, any more than I am disputing the intelligence and theological subtlety of the Redactor of the Pentateuch.) There is, perhaps unfortunately, NO WAY a similar study can apply to the OT -- it simply isn't (for the most part) in verse (and even in verse, the Hebrew forms are not anywhere NEAR as constraining as Homeric hexameters). The modernly accepted "unity" of Homer is nothing but the recognition that there is an ECONOMY of word choice there, where earlier generations had thought to see arbitrary usage of different dialects. In any case, the distribution of stylistic forms in the Hebrew *is* signficiant of meaning, in a way that Homeric epithets demonstrably are NOT -- in the sections that are ascribed (on *stylistic* grounds, mind you) to Jahwist and Elohist, one finds for example that the Jahwist has a negative attitude towards the Aaronic priesthood while the Elohist is positive. Such *major* theological differences DEMAND an explanation (a schizophrenic redactor?) that is in fact supplied by the Documentary Hypothesis and NOT by any other (that I know of :-)). It's all very well to criticize Noth for his excesses; what the critics of the "generic" DH need to do is to deal in some sensible way with the data correlating style and theology that the DH claims to explain. If you have no explanation (or only the kinds of ad hoc stuff that the rabbis give, which is certainly pious, but tends to obscure rather than clarifying the data), then a DH "adherent" like me can only ask, "what do you suggest in place of this, which I find historically plausible?" -- Michael L. Siemon "O stand, stand at the window, m.siemon@ATT.COM As the tears scald and start; ...!att!sfsup!mls You shall love your crooked neighbor standard disclaimer With your crooked heart."