Between documentary hypothesis and textual fact

IN the Middle Ages, the Bible was widely believed to have been written down in exactly its present form and to be infallible because it was the word of God.

We are no longer in the Middle Ages.

The belief that the Bible (however defined and delimited) was written by people has many far-reaching consequences since it implies that the same things that are usually true of most things written by people, by many people rather than a single man, by people living at different times, with different backgrounds, indeed in different languages, making different assumptions, pursuing different agendas and knowing different things, are also applicable to the Holy Scriptures.

It means recognition that the biblical text is heterogeneous in content, style and genre; brings together elements composed in different periods and contexts; and has reached its present form (which in the case of the Hebrew Bible of which Genesis forms part was fixed and codified in writing by the mediaeval Masoretes) through a prior process of written and oral transmission in the course of which changes occurred, either deliberately or unwittingly.

The evidence of all these things is everywhere to be seen in the existing text, as irrefutable as the unearthed bones which prove the existence of dinosaurs on the face of the earth many millions of years ago. Bible scholars of today, whether they be Jewish or Christian, Protestant or Catholic, religious or secular, accept these basic facts, and the study of biblical texts is so much more fascinating because of it!

Just as the scientific analysis of dinosaur bones reveals information about dinosaurs who lived long ago and suggests many ideas about what they were, what happened to them and so on, so the scientific analysis of the words that have been preserved in the biblical text can tell us many things, not always with complete certainty but in the form of theories and hypotheses which we may assume to be true with varying degrees of confidence, about the people who wrote these things and how these things came to be written and to say what they say. But just as we don't know everything about the dinosaurs and their world, and surely never will, so also there are limits to what we can be sure of about the origins of the books we variously call the Holy Bible, the Old and New Testaments, the Scriptures, the Tanakh, the Torah and so on.

And in any case, when all is said and done, when we have finished (for now) speculating and trying to double-guess the source of these texts, we can call it a day or take a rest, sit back in our armchair and take up our favourite edition of a great book, open its pages and read it again, in the original language or in the translation that we prefer, because that, at least, is a fact: the text that we have is the text that we have! Whenever we wish, we can hold off on the questions, and just let the book speak to us and envelop us in its seductive words. Let's not forget that.

Let's not lose sight of the fact that the book of Genesis is an enjoyable read. For many people today, there are obstacles to that because it is like the books that are great literature but which you were required to read at school when you didn't want to, and have never enjoyed on account of that. If that happened, remember that it isn't the book's fault! That is one of the things literature is for, and this is literature after all: enjoyment. Part of the purpose of telling a story is to tell a story. And one reason why we sometimes read a story (or better yet, listen to one) is because we just feel like reading or listening to a story. And by story, I don't mean just tales (short fictional narrations), I mean a story or a poem or an essay or whatever genre of literature one wishes. The text is the text. Then there is everything we can say about the text, dissecting, interpreting or explaining this or that. There is that, and then there is the text which we can come back to, and try to forget everything we "know" about it and let it talk to us again.

When we wonder and make conjectures about the teams or individuals who, at different points in the history of our book, contributed to composing, writing down, compiling and editing the material we are reading, which is something that we do out of fascination for such an interesting work, we should try to remember that those people also knew this. They knew as authors that whatever went into it, when they are done a book is a book, a text is a text, it is meant to be heard or read by an audience. By putting down things as they did or placing them in the format they acquired, they knew what they were doing: they were focusing on all those people who were going to be consumers of that text and take away something from it, in the form they were going to give it. Like any author of any other book, they were thinking of us, the readers; and as they thought of us, this is the book that they wrote for us, thousands of years ago!

That is an important difference between a book like Genesis and a pile of dinosaur bones. The dinosaur didn't go to where it did to die in a certain place and position thinking "If I die like this, one day people can find my remains and learn something about prehistoric life forms". On the other hand, the text of Genesis is as it is precisely because somebody wanted everyone, now and forever, to read that text. So we can read the text (as literature) or we can pore over it (as "evidence"). And luckily we needn't choose because we can do both. Now a great many readers may choose not to do both and content themselves with listening to the story, and that is an excellent decision if that is what they wish, but a translator is best advised to do some of both. Both ask questions (and seek answers), and shut up and listen.

The nineteenth century was an era of widespread rational inquiry and great advances in the progress of human knowledge and technology which laid the basis for the vast changes undergone by the world (or at least the "developed world") ever since. People were full of questions and determined to find answers!

In the realm of language, linguists (then called philologists) wanted to know where languages really came from and how they developed over time to reach their present state, and so they did, with astounding success, sensationally breaking away from the untested assumptions and baseless myths of earlier generations to construct new models and explanations for many things. Here as in other domains, humanity seemed to be coming of age at last, leaving behind childish fairy tales and learning to really think. But then in the early twentieth century the new paradigm was challenged in a way that probably hadn't been expected. Yes it's fine to know where all the different languages come from, complained the twentieth-century linguists, but that still doesn't tell us what a language IS! So synchronic linguistics was born and announced a new programme: to describe a given language as it is at a given place and time, as a self-contained structure.

Now it appears that a rather similar progression has taken place in modern biblical studies. Thus, once the taboo on questioning the myth of unique, direct authorship by God or one of his proxies was overcome in academic circles focused on discovering new truths through human inquiry, the nineteenth century saw an enormous explosion of studies and theories by some brilliant scholars thanks to which we now know and understand much more than was the case in the past about the sources of the biblical text, and this is truly wonderful. Except that when we read a text we are not only interested in its sources. A good novel is fun to read for other reasons than just curiosity about how the author came to write it!

This comment is not meant to belittle the achievements of source criticism in the least, just to help us keep in mind the "synchronic" perspective too: that of Genesis (say) as a literary work in its own right, and indeed as an intentional product of someone, not only as a hodgepodge of remnants from earlier documents that "happened" to get stuck together. When somebody says I am hungry it is not an appropriate response to reflect deeply on the origins of the word hungry. We do not look only at the seams and make conjectures about the stitching technique used when admiring a beautiful dress. Genesis has a very complex historical origin which invites endless interest and speculation, but Genesis is also a great book waiting to be read and enjoyed as the masterpiece it now is.

I coincide therefore with much of what Everett Fox wrote in the introduction to his (for me, certainly) inspiring work Genesis and Exodus: a new English rendition with commentary and notes (Schoken, New York, 1983; pp. xxv-xxvi in the 1990 paperback edition):

As far as the prehistory of the text is concerned, readers who have some familiarity with biblical criticism will note that in my Commentary I have made scant reference to the by-now classic dissection of the Torah into clear-cut prior "sources"... What has interested me here is chiefly the final form of Genesis and Exodus, how they fit together as artistic entities, and how they have combined traditions to present a coherent religious message. This was surely the goal of the final "redactor(s)," but it was not until recently a major goal of biblical scholars... I have concentrated in this volume on the "wholeness" of biblical texts, rather than on their growth out of fragments.

Speaking for myself, I would prefer to substitute "literary" for "religious" and also make it clear that it is not the case that I am not interested in the text's layering and complex sources since knowledge about these contribute to a more profound knowledge and appreciation of the text. But the text is not only the sum of its sources. The whole is greater than the parts, and the text is the text.

Once that is clarified, a word about the procedures and tenets of the field of source criticism may be found useful by some readers, so let me touch on this briefly. In a nutshell: you don't need to read very far in Genesis to start to notice, if you are paying the slightest bit of attention, that the main character in the story is sometimes called אלהים (Elohim) and sometimes called יהוה. The consonants in the latter are y-h-w-h but the Masoretes did not indicate the vowels for this word and we don't know how it was to be pronounced. The reason why they didn't tell us the vowels is either because they didn't know (just as we don't know) or for the same reason why we don't know: because it is forbidden to pronounce it. There are many things that are forbidden in most religions, sometimes for a known reason, sometimes for an unknown reason; in some cultures this concept is known as taboo (kapu in Hawaiian). It is furthermore a fairly widespread cultural practice for certain words and especially certain names to be taboo: they cannot be said (or not in polite society anyway).

God's name is taboo, it is not to be pronounced, although it must not have been fully taboo yet when the consonantal text of the Torah was written down because this text was presumably meant to be read out loud and the name occurs thousands of times! But by the time of the Masoretes that had changed and Jews were in the habit, as some are today, of substituting another word, adonai, which means literally 'my lords' (the plural merely expresses respect, it is also formally present as -im in the other word for God we have mentioned: Elohim). The reason why Elohim is not a taboo word is, apparently, that it is understood as a generic 'god' rather than God's name. This also explains, or is one way of explaining, the fact that sometimes both names occur together: יהוה אלהים (adonai elohim) 'YHWH, (the) God', which is traditionally translated into English as "the Lord God".

Some people (evidently not frum or strict Jews who would never dream of pronouncing the tetragrammaton, i.e. the four letters) decide they want to say it anyway and pronounce it Jehovah, using a pronunciation that is evidently wrong and stems from lack of knowledge of the conventions of Masoretic vowel marks. It is true that the vowel signs written around the tetragrammaton in the chumash (the bound book version of the Torah) do look like they spell something like "y'howa", but that is clearly not what those signs actually mean. The Masoretes had a "code" for such instances where what the consonantal text says is different from what we are required to read (usually to make sense of the text). For example, in some places in Genesis the consonantal text says הוא which is how you spell the word for 'he' (pronounced hu) but which from context we know really should be 'she', not 'he', and that is היא (pronounced hi). The Masoretes use a sort of shorthand to indicate the correct reading while not tampering with the written consonants: they place a dot which means the vowel [i] in the "wrong" word (with vav), which makes no sense literally, but it is a wink to tell us that whatever it says, we shoud read hi and carry on.

And this is exactly the kind of "code" the Masoretes used to tell us how to read the tetragrammaton. The vowels placed around the four consonants actually make no sense understood literally: the result is not really "y'howa" but something unpronounceable. That is because these are actually the vowels of the word adonay or adonai 'the Lord', and the meaning is therefore not "y'howa" but "say Adonai!".

The fact is that nobody can pronounce this taboo name because nobody knows for sure how it was ever pronounced. Some have speculated it might have been yahwe (or yahve) but actually that is again only a conjecture. Note that very frum Jews have taken the whole thing one step further and believe that you shouldn't say Adonai either, except when praying, so they have made that a taboo word as well and in ordinary conversation or writing substitute another expression, hashem, meaning 'the name'. No disrespect for anyone is meant by my failure to observe such niceties in my writing, which is due to a wish to be understood by my readers.

Returning to the text of Genesis then, sometimes we read אלהים (Elohim) and sometimes it is יהוה (YHWH), and they seem to be used interchangeably, in that they refer to the same entity, but on the other hand there is a pattern: there are some passages of the book where it is always one, and some where it is the other. Why would that be? Well, somebody came up with the theory that what is going on here is that the book we know as Genesis was compiled, at some point in its history, from more than one previous text; these texts contained different passages (but with some overlap); different passages or snippets from different source texts were sewn together to make the composite text we know today; and that apparently, there was a source text that always called God אלהים and another text that referrerd to God as יהוה, so that when you put them all together what you got was a resulting text in which sometimes God is called one thing and sometimes the other.

At least two major source texts were thus posited by different authors, perhaps from different parts of the country and following different local traditions, one of whom (who came to be called E) always said Elohim while the other (called J, which represents the "y" sound in German) referred to him using the tetragrammaton. Once this hypothesis was adopted and the passages were teased out into parts of the two respective hypothetical source documents, scholars started noticing other support for the hypothesis because there are correlating differences between the two documents posited in terms of words and expressions they like to use, topics they like to talk about and so on. It also became apparent that some stories must have been told by both E and J, and the compiler must have rolled both accounts into one by stitching together sentences from one and the other. Here God is alternatively called by both names!

What is more, we often see ideas or whole scenes being repeated. Perhaps the two creation accounts with which Genesis begins can be explained in this way. That was the initial idea, anyway, but very soon scholars started noticing some things which the simple theory didn't explain very well and this led them to start modifying the theory to fit everything together. But I will let E.A. Speiser, writing at the beginning of the 1960s in his introduction to Genesis: A new translation with introduction and commentary in the Anchor Yale Bible series (Yale University Press, 1964/2008), sum up the situation as it was then seen (pp. xxi):

The all-important point, at any rate, the conclusion which virtually all modern scholars are willing to accept, is that the Pentateuch was in reality a composite work, the product of many hands and periods. This is the fundamental fact behind all recent progress in biblical study, as it has opened the way to a solution of many difficulties that would otherwise remain unresolved. The result is a working hypothesis which should be judged solely on how well it does its work.

It is a fascinating idea, but in the last resort it seems that the theory has run into trouble and is falling out of good scholarly repute. Since I am not a specialist in this area I feel unqualified to comment or even sum up the arguments. Let me conclude with another summing-up of the documentary hypothesis in somewhat more detail (interested readers can take it from there!), by quoting the introduction of the Wikipedia article on the subject (27-11-2014):

The documentary hypothesis (DH), sometimes called the Wellhausen hypothesis, proposes that the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) was derived from originally independent, parallel and complete narratives, which were subsequently combined into the current form by a series of redactors (editors). The number of these narratives is usually set at four, but the precise number is not an essential part of the hypothesis.
The hypothesis was developed in the 18th and 19th centuries from the attempt to reconcile perceived inconsistencies in the biblical text. By the end of the 19th century it was generally agreed that there were four main sources, combined into their final form by a series of redactors, R. These four sources came to be known as the Yahwist, or Jahwist, J (J being the German equivalent of the English letter Y); the Elohist, E; the Deuteronomist, D, (the name comes from the Book of Deuteronomy, D's contribution to the Torah); and the Priestly Writer, P.
The contribution of Julius Wellhausen, a Christian theologian and biblical scholar, was to order these sources chronologically as JEDP, giving them a coherent setting in a notional evolving religious history of Israel, which he saw as one of ever-increasing priestly power. Wellhausen's formulation was:

• the Yahwist source (J) : written c. 950 BCE in the southern Kingdom of Judah.
• the Elohist source (E) : written c. 850 BCE in the northern Kingdom of Israel.
• the Deuteronomist (D) : written c. 600 BCE in Jerusalem during a period of religious reform.
• the Priestly source (P) : written c. 500 BCE by Kohanim (Jewish priests) in exile in Babylon.

While the hypothesis has been critiqued and challenged by other models, especially in the last part of the 20th century, its terminology and insights continue to provide the framework for modern theories on the composite nature and origins of the Torah and Bible compilation in general.

Remembering that my job is to translate Genesis, not trace its origin, and that as translator it is my primary task to consider Genesis as a finished and complete work, a literary whole, and try to offer readers or speakers of another language access to the cognitive content and aesthetic experience conveyed by that product, and given that the historical background and composition process that led to Genesis are not known and do not form part in a direct sense of the content and experience conveyed by the original Genesis, it is not necessary or even wise to present my translation in such a way as to spell out its documentary origin and background either. On the other hand, an understanding of origins and processes can help me to understand better what Genesis says and how it says it and why, so I consider information about the hypotheses of this kind pertinent to my work. And besides, it is far too interesting not to want to read about such views. But as Everett Fox says, the reconstructed original documents, if they ever existed, are unknown to us, but the resulting text of Genesis is real. And that is the textual reality I must try to translate.