Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Tracing the Hand of Moses in Genesis



by

Damien F. Mackey


 
 

Prologue
 

Three lines of evidence will be presented here in support of the traditional view that Moses was substantially the editor, or compiler (though not actual author), of the Book of Genesis. The first two lines of evidence, upon which two colleagues and I, in 1987, built our article, “A Critical Re-appraisal of the Book of Genesis” (SIS Chronology and Catastrophism Workshop, UK, Nos. 1 and 2), will be derived from a combination of:

 

(i) P.J. Wiseman’s colophon (Hebrew: toledôt) theory on the ancient structure of Genesis (Ancient Records and the Structure of Genesis. A Case For Literary Unity, Thomas Nelson, 1985), and

(ii) Professor A. Yahuda’s thesis that Genesis - and indeed the entire Pentateuch - is saturated with the Egyptian language (The Language of the Pentateuch in its Relation to Egyptian, Oxford U.P. 1933).

 

These two theses, when combined, are an explosive package capable of shattering the documentary (JEDP) theory.

The third line of evidence will be taken from:

 

(iii) I. Kikawada and A. Quinn (Before Abraham Was. A Provocative Challenge to the Documentary Hypothesis, Ignatius Press, 1989), an argument for unity in the arrangement or compilation of Genesis.

 

That the Book of Genesis shows evidence of having been derived from various sources, at least in part, none but the very obstinate, or excessively pious, would deny. The clever pair of Kikawada and Quinn, who are able to prove against the JEDP documentary theorists that Genesis is in fact a unity, nevertheless regard it as “mere polemic”, they say, to dismiss the claims of the documentists out of hand, without giving them a hearing; or, more especially, without being prepared to confront the JEDP assertions in the process of one’s arguing for an alternative. That is why I found quite unrealistic a recent paper sent to me for evaluation; an article written in French in which the author attempts to uphold a traditional view that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch (or first five books of the Bible). This paper seemed to be proposing (as far as my knowledge of French would allow me to grasp it) a blanket view of this tradition: namely, that Moses wrote every single word of the entire Pentateuch, even the account of his own death. And that no extra-Mosaïc sources whatsoever were involved (whether pre- or post-Moses).

My own view, based on the tradition of substantial Mosaïc authorship of the Pentateuch, is that, whilst Moses substantially wrote the books of Exodus to Deuteronomy, he was the editor or compiler, not author, of Genesis.

In this new article, “Tracing the Hand of Moses in Genesis”, I hope to update this 1987 SIS article and thereby to arrive at a more exact view of what was Moses’ own personal contribution to the Book of Genesis.

But let us firstly listen to what Kikawada and Quinn have to say about the JEDP theory, about its virtually complete grip on contemporary biblical scholarship - for which very reason they think it cannot simply be brushed aside without one’s mounting a properly constructed challenge to it. Whereas others (e.g. P. J. Wiseman) have been content largely to replace JEDP theory with what they consider to be a far more scientific alternative, without going through all the painstaking process of assessing and refuting it on its own grounds, Kikawada and Quinn have done the valuable and necessary service of tackling the JEDP theory as it stands, and attempting to refute it according to its very premises. I, on the good advice of a colleague, had done the very same as Kikawada and Quinn in regard to Eduard Meyer’s Sothic theory of Egyptian chronology. My:

 
Sothic star theory of the Egyptian calendar: a critical evaluation

 

 
or, the simplified form of it:
 

 

 

My own inclination had been to bypass Meyer completely and erect an entirely new system. Today I realize the value of this good advice. But the product of such a necessary effort, delving to the very foundations of what is identified as a defective system, does make for arduous reading, as with Kikawada and Quinn. So I do not intend to go through all of the twists and turns that they already had to, but rather to build upon their new foundation, largely summarizing their thesis. Here, though, I take a portion of what they have to write about the pervasive influence of the JEDP theory (Their “Introduction”):

 

No thesis has had a more liberating effect on biblical scholarship during the past hundred years than the documentary hypothesis of the Pentateuch. It has taught us to perceive the Pentateuch as a mixture of literary layers of varying antiquity. The greatest drama recorded in the Pentateuch becomes not the explicit history that is narrated, but the implicit history of the Pentateuch's own composition. The formation of the Pentateuch itself becomes for us the most important guide to the evolution of ancient Hebrew religious consciousness.

 

The authors now make a most relevant comment about the historical era in which the documentary hypothesis first reared its head:

 

Not surprisingly, this approach to the Pentateuch first came to the fore in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Within this intellectual milieu, the documentary hypothesis was not an isolated phenomenon. This was the great age for the discovery of time: process, history, change were found everywhere, even in rocks. And if rocks could be made to yield the story of their formation, then the Torah, with some coaxing, should tell its story as well. The documentary hypothesis was, in short, a characteristic product of its time - but it has also turned out to be much more than that.

 

Further on, I shall also allude briefly to the Kantian philosophical influence of that very time and how it too may well have influenced the thinking of Graf and Wellhausen.

 

Kikawada and Quinn now turn to the complex evolution of the fourfold JEDP sigla itself:

 

Since its original formulation the documentary hypothesis has had its own complex historical evolution. A recent survey of that evolution has distinguished no less than ten separate stages. The traditional designation of four layers - J, E, P, D - has been subjected to many further refinements. Some scholars have thought they could distinguish a separate stratum L; others have argued for distinguishing between E1 E2 E3, and so forth. Of course, these suggested refinements, at least some of them, are easily enough ridiculed for their excesses, but such ridicule does not touch the central core of the hypothesis. The simple fact is that by the 1880s, as a result of the work of Wellhausen, the documentary hypothesis was supported by a broad consensus of critical biblical scholars. And by the midtwentieth century, thanks to the work of other great scholars like Gerhard von Rad and Martin Noth, that consensus had become so strong that it seems virtually unquestionable today.

Von Rad in the last edition of his famous commentary on Genesis (published not long before his death in 1971) could write proudly, “How can we analyze such extremely complex materials [as Genesis]? There is now no fundamental dispute that it is to be assigned to the three documents J, E, and P, and there is even agreement over detail”. His claim was, if anything, understated.

 

Moreover, challenges to the JEDP theory, they claim, have generally not been adequate:

 

Of course, there have always been those who have dissented from the consensus, more often on theological than on critical grounds. Compared with the calm understatement of a von Rad, these dissenters often express their view with a shrillness that makes them difficult to take seriously. Perhaps the most persuasive of these voices in the wilderness is Umberto Cassuto. He offers many plausible alternatives to documentary readings of individual passages. And yet, even he concludes his own discussion of the documentary hypothesis with the assertion, “This imposing and beautiful edifice has, in reality, nothing to support it and is founded on air”.

This is mere polemic. The documentary hypothesis is supported by more than a century of scholarship - and a remarkable body of scholarship it is. After reading even a fraction of it, someone who had not already prejudged the issue cannot help sympathizing with the exasperation expressed by Cassuto’s contemporary, Gressmann: “Anyone who does not accept the division of the text according to the sources and results flowing therefrom, has to discharge the onus, if he wishes to be considered a collaborator in our scientific work, of proving that all research work done until now was futile”.

Gressmann and more recent proponents of the documentary hypothesis (a virtual Who’s Who of Old Testament scholarship) obviously feels that a rejection of the documentary hypothesis entails a rejection of all the scholarly research done under its aegis, and therefore a rejection of the cumulative results of more than a century's work. A rejection of the documentary hypothesis becomes tantamount to a rejection of modern biblical scholarship, a reductio ad absurdum for any but the most reactionary of fundamentalists.

 

P. J. Wiseman, whom we shall encounter further on - by no means ‘shrill’ in his criticism of the documentary theorists - will tend though to bypass their theories, whilst partly excusing the documentists on the grounds that they would never have advanced their internal critical theories had they been aware at the inception of JEDP theory of:

 

(a) the great antiquity of writing (then thought not to post-date c.1000 BC), and

(b) the ancient scribal methods.

 

Kikawada and Quinn, on the other hand, will even argue for some genuine insights in JEDP theory. Avoiding polemic, they have tactfully preferred to employ the following clever analogy between the JEDP theory and the development of the physical sciences:

 

And yet does a rejection of the documentary hypothesis really entail this broader rejection? Certainly it does not if we take the physical sciences as an appropriate analogy. In the twentieth century many of the most cherished principles of Newtonian science have been unceremoniously overturned. Alfred North Whitehead could write, “I was taught science and mathematics by brilliant men and I did well in them; since the turn of the century I have lived to see every one of the basic assumptions of both set aside; not, indeed, discarded, but of use as qualifying clauses, instead of as major propositions; and all this in one life-span - the most fundamental assumptions of supposedly exact sciences set aside”.

 

Kikawada and Quinn look to put this scientific evolution into proper perspective:

 

These changes, however, were regarded by no one as having rendered futile all physics done since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. It was precisely the developments within Newtonian physics that required the resolutions of the twentieth century. If the new physics swept away Newtonian principles, this same physics did so in order to fulfill Newtonian inquiries and aspirations.

 

I shall leave Kikawada and Quinn on this last tactful note, to return to them again soon, when I come to discuss the matters of the Flood narrative and the unity of the Book of Genesis, their strong point. As with previous writings on the subject of Genesis, as a literary construct, I shall be most indebted to P. J. Wiseman’s toledôt theory. This explanation provides, I believe, a far more satisfactory approach to the subject of the sources and structure of the Book of Genesis - due to its being archaeologically-based - than does the Graf-Wellhausen theory, which I shall argue, with Wiseman, archaeology has rendered quite obsolete in some of its major premises. Or, to paraphrase the Kikawada and Quinn analogy from science, “… the new [science - archaeology has] swept away [Wellhausian] principles …”.

Once again, too, I shall be indebted to the linguistic discoveries of Professor A. Yahuda in regard to the Pentateuch, which make something of a mockery of Pan Babylonianism - a close relative of that aspect of the documentary theory that proposes a C6th BC Babylonian Exile era for the writing of a large part of the Pentateuch. The most extreme Pan Babylonianists would place the entire Book of Genesis in a Mesopotamian context, dating its composition to that C6th BC era, whilst however being apparently entirely oblivious to the profound influence of Egypt - especially its language - upon Genesis.

 

Introductory Section

 

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Wait a minute, did I just say that one of the toledôt 'family histories' belonged to 3 persons? Even to 3 persons who had eye-witnessed the Flood?

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The great contribution of Air Commodore P. J. Wiseman to the subject of the literary composition of the Book of Genesis was that he was able to identify the very sources (or documents) of which Genesis is actually composed. Whereas the documentists recognized that there were literary layers here and there - and invented or exaggerated others - the clear-minded and aptly-named Wiseman positively identified the Genesis sources from his first-hand experience of cuneiform documents. Though himself an amateur (his son, D. J., would go on to become a foremost Assyriologist), P. J. Wiseman discerned what no one else had. He had the privilege of being in situ at times during Sir Leonard Woolley’s excavations at Ur and Professor S. Langdon’s work at Kish and Jemdet Nasr. Though P. J. Wiseman himself could not actually read the cuneiform tablets being unearthed in their thousands by these legends of archaeology, he nonetheless took a vital interest in all that was going on and was able to cross check his own ideas with these experts.

Wiseman came to learn that the ancient scribes often added to a written series of tablets:

 

(i) a colophon indicating the writer and/or owner of the tablet, sometimes including a date.

He also learned of other literary devices, such as

(ii) catch-lines, used to link a series of tablets, and

(ii) parallelism between one tablet and another.

 

P. J. Wiseman would come to the firm conclusion that the Book of Genesis itself gave clear evidence of its having been written on tablets according to the most ancient scribal methods, with 11 colophon divisions (the very key to the structure of the book, see his ch. V), also catch-lines and, in places, parallelism. {Kikawada and Quinn, in ch. III, have also pointed to parallelism - adding to that chiastic structure that Wiseman does not address - to explain the complexities of Genesis 1, though they have completely missed out on the Wisemanian notion that this is evidence for ancient tablets.}

Wiseman concluded that the sources that comprised Genesis were determinable from the names featured in the colophon divisions (like signatures at the end of each section), basically the names of the biblical patriarchs from Adam to Jacob; that these were ‘family histories’ (Hebrew, toledôt). Genesis was in fact the history of the great pre-Mosaïc patriarchs. Moses was the compiler or editor of this, his family history collection going right back to antediluvian antiquity.

The first tablet series, however, has no human name in the colophon, only God. Was this a direct revelation by the Creator to the creature? See section Genesis 1:1-2:4 below.

Wiseman did what many who approach a literary study of the Bible fail to do, including the documentists and even the astute Kikawada and Quinn. He read (with expert help) the entire Book of Genesis from the point of view of an ancient scribe, not from a modern Western point of view. And that is why he was so successful in unravelling the structure of the book and writing an even more compelling argument for literary unity in Genesis than Kikawada and Quinn could possibly hope to achieve.

P.J. Wiseman, being an amateur, could easily be dismissed by critics for that reason. Hence sometimes I think that it was a pity that his brilliant son, Donald (D. J.), did not develop his father’s ground-breaking work, though he did edit, and wrote the Foreword to, Ancient Records and the Structure of Genesis, a single volume presentation of his late father’s 1936 study, New Discoveries in Babylonia about Genesis.

“Ancient Records ...” was published as D. J. wrote: “In response to a growing number of requests …”. Perhaps D. J. thought that his father had done so complete a job and that there was no necessity for him to try to improve upon it, except for some minor editing.

 

What was P. J. Wiseman’s special insight?

 

All of a sudden he, having been an eye-witness to the birth of the ‘new science’ (archaeology) that would sweep away the very foundations of the documentary theory, can point to the documents that comprise Genesis and say who owned (or perhaps wrote) them. He could say, for instance, that this part of Genesis was Adam’s history, or that this one was Noah’s, and that this belonged to the three sons of Noah, recording their eye-witness account of the Great Flood.

Wait a minute, did I just say that one of the toledôt ‘family histories’ belonged to 3 persons? Even to 3 persons who had eye-witnessed the Flood?

But isn’t this exactly where the documentary theory first began, when the French physician Jean Astruc (late C18th) thought that he had discerned multiple versions of the Flood in Genesis?

Here is what biblical expert R. K. Harrison, himself a great promoter of P. J. Wiseman’s toledôt theory, has had to say about Astruc, and how close to the truth of the matter the Frenchman came (Preface to Ancient Records and the Structure of Genesis):

 

Only in the seventeenth century did serious questions begin to be raised about the composition of Genesis, and even these dealt with source criticism rather than with the author himself. Thus Jean Astruc (1684-1766) published an anonymous work which maintained that the material in Genesis had been transmitted either in written or oral form up to the time of Moses, and that he organized these ancient sources by making a chronological narrative out of them.

Astruc was probably much closer to the truth of the matter than he realized. Had he been in possession of information that has since come to light, he could well have performed a valuable service to the scholarly community and others in isolating or characterizing the underlying literary sources of Genesis. But having no option save to speculate, he marred his observations from the beginning by speaking of “duplicate narratives” of the Creation and the Flood in Genesis.

Even a casual observation of the material involved shows that the sections are not in fact duplicates, but constitute passages in which the longer accounts represent expansions of summary statements, as for example in connection with the creation of humanity (Gen. 1:27 and 2:7-23).

 

While Harrison may well be right in his last comment, I think that his rejection of any notion of “duplicate narratives” in the Flood account is unrealistic. Astruc was, I believe, perfectly correct in this regard, since the account of the Flood was probably co-written by Noah’s 3 sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth (one could even add Noah’s partial account to make 4).

On the basis of Wiseman, the Flood narrative was not therefore written, as the documentists would claim, by un-connected writers scattered down through the centuries, one writer tending to prefer to use Elohim for God, hence the E document, exhibiting less familiarity with God than another who used Jehovah (in German), hence the J document. No they were written all at once, contemporaneously, by perhaps the three sons of Noah (though the general consensus, as we shall see, seems to be 2, not 3, distinct narratives here).

This, the case of the Flood narrative in Genesis, being the beginning of JEDP theory, gives us a perfect view of how right the documentists could actually be (recognizing sources involved), whilst yet - at the same time - being pitifully wrong (positing various post-Mosaïc sources).

Now here, in regard to the Flood narrative at least, is where the documentary scrutinisers may have provided a real service. Their analytical dissection of the narrative may enable some astute scholar ultimately even to separate from the Flood narrative the individual contributions of the sons of Noah (be they 2 or 3 as regards actual contribution).

But that may not be all.

Since another very useful possible contribution of the documentary theory, this time specifically in regard to Moses’s editing hand in Genesis - the very theme of this article - may perhaps be discerned in the writings of E. Speiser, I shall persevere a bit longer with Kikawada’s and Quinn’s account of the late source theory - still in connection with the Flood story in Genesis 6-10 - including how cleverly they thought Wellhausen had manipulated this narrative to his own seeming advantage. This biblical narrative certainly indicates a degree of duplication:

 

The narrator of [the story of Noah and the Flood] moves easily back and forth from Elohim to Yahweh, from an imminently anthropomorphic God to a supremely transcendent lawgiver, from formulaic expression to human drama. All the contrasts found earlier between separate sections are here together in a single story of considerable charm and power. The documentary hypothesis drowns in the flood - or so it seems.

Actually, the documentary hypothesis had its own Noah, and his name was Wellhausen. Perhaps Wellhausen’s greatest achievement was to show how the Noah story could be transformed from a decisive defeat into a decisive triumph for the documentary hypothesis.

E. A. Speiser summarizes how this transformation was achieved in his own much praised 1964 commentary on Genesis: “The received biblical account of the Flood is beyond reasonable doubt a composite narrative …. Here the two strands have become intertwined, the end result being a skilful and intricate patchwork. Nevertheless - and this is indicative of the great reverence with which the components were handled - the underlying versions, though cut up and rearranged, were not altered in themselves”.

 

Firstly, here is Kikawada’s and Quinn’s impression of Speiser’s explanation [p. 22]:

 

The last sentence of this quotation is the key to why the documentary arrangement at this point is not circular. The claim is that the two flood accounts, although patched together, have been each kept intact. Hence each account can be almost completely recovered from the received text, and each of these will have a greater unity and coherence than the story as a whole. The claim is clear and germane - and the concrete textual argument in its favor is utterly stunning.

 

Important Comment: Speiser’s observation here, that so impressed Kikawada and Quinn, may actually provide us with a very good guide as to the degree of involvement of Moses in the editing of Genesis (significantly more than I had previously estimated), with a fair bit of cutting and pasting of the original that he had before him, to achieve his own literary creation, but without however altering the underlying texts out of “the great reverence” that he held for them.

The interested reader can look up for him/herself the painstaking comparisons that Kikawada and Quinn now have to undertake between the Priestly (E) and Yahwist (J) accounts of the Flood, beginning on their p. 24, and how cleverly the documentists have managed to ‘secure’ these in favour of their own theses (especially p. 30). Surprisingly, after all of this, Kikawada and Quinn will not themselves make their own critical analysis of these documents, saying that this has already been done by a new generation of scholars. Fair enough. But Kikawada and Quinn will later use these very same texts to show that they actually comprise a unity, not only within themselves, but in the context of Genesis as a whole. Here in brief, is their reference to this new generation of documentist refuters, thereby excusing themselves from what they would regard as further, unnecessary literary toil:

 

Indeed, to tell the truth, we are not going to attempt an original analysis of the Noah story. Over the past decade the Wellhausen interpretation of Noah has been systematically dismantled by younger scholars. There have been at least a half a dozen important contributions here. Typical of these critiques is the one made (almost by the way) in F. I. Andersen’s The Sentence in Biblical Hebrew.

Sentences used in the present chapter cut across passages generally assigned to ‘J’ and ‘P’ documents…. This means that if the documentary hypothesis is valid, some editor has put together scraps of parallel versions of the same story with scissors and paste, and yet has achieved a result which from the point of view of discourse grammar, looks as if it had been made out of whole cloth.

What Andersen has done from his own grammatical specialty, others have done from theirs. Objections to a unitary reading of Noah have, one after another, been explained, and objections to a documentary reading - apparently unanswerable objections - have been, one after another, raised.

 

Again the authors may be, at least here in regard to the Flood narrative - and due to their application of modern literary techniques, whilst apparently lacking any familiarity whatsoever with ancient scribal methods (Wiseman) - actually underestimating the insights of documentists like Speiser, whose view they now dismiss, though still tactfully, as outdated:

 

Speiser was accurately representing the situation when, in 1964, he wrote that the documentary interpretation of Noah was established beyond doubt, much as Gilbert Murray was accurate in 1934 when he said that no competent scholar believed Homer the single author of The Iliad. The wheel has now come full circle in Homer. And anyone who has examined recent studies of Noah will find it hard not to conclude that it is coming full circle here as well. (It is a measure of the strength of the documentary consensus that these specific studies have not been used to challenge the hypothesis in general).

 

Against a Late Authorship of Genesis

 

It could be said that the ancient literary methods pointed out by Wiseman in favour of Mosaïc compilation of Genesis were also around much later than Moses, prevailing even into New Testament times (e.g. Matthew 1:1 gives a toledôt of Jesus Christ in the Gospels), and hence these literary methods could therefore have been inserted into texts composed at the time of, say, the Babylonian Exile (C6th BC), almost a millennium after Moses, to give these texts an air of sacredness or antiquity. After all, what Wiseman was drawing his information from were Babylonian scribal techniques, not, say, Egyptian ones, which were quite different. So, why would Moses necessarily have had any involvement in the Book of Genesis (let alone the patriarchs who preceded him)?

Well, this is where the linguistic contribution of Professor A. Yahuda comes in to deal a shock blow to both the documentary theory and to the related Pan-Babylonianism. Yahuda, unlike Wiseman, was an expert in ancient linguistics. His profound knowledge of Egyptian and Hebrew combined (not to mention Akkadian) gave him a distinct advantage over fellow Egyptologists unacquainted with Hebrew, who therefore could not discern any appreciable Egyptian influence on the Pentateuch. Yahuda however realized that the Pentateuch was absolutely saturated with Egyptian - not only for the periods associated with Egypt, most notably the Joseph narrative including Israel’s sojourn in Egypt, but even for the periods associated with Babylonia (presumably the Flood account that we have already discussed, and the Babel incident – though, on the latter, see Anne Habermehl’s surprising shift of geography: https://answersingenesis.org/tower-of-babel/where-in-the-world-is-the-tower-of-babel/). For instance, instead of the Akkadian word for ‘Ark’ used in the Mesopotamian Flood accounts, or even the Canaanite ones current elsewhere in the Bible, the Noachic account, Yahuda noted, uses the Egyptian-based tebah (Egyptian db.t, ‘box, coffer, chest’).

Most important was the linguistic observation by Yahuda [p. xxix]:

 

Whereas those books of Sacred Scripture which were admittedly written during and after the Babylonian Exile reveal in language and style such an unmistakable Babylonian influence that these newly-entered foreign elements leap to the eye, by contrast in the first part of the Book of Genesis, which describes the earlier Babylonian period, the Babylonian influence in the language is so minute as to be almost non-existent.

 

[Dead Sea Scrolls expert, Fr. Jean Carmignac, had been able to apply the same sort of bilingual expertise - in his case, Greek and Hebrew - to gainsay the received scholarly opinion and show that the New Testament writings in Greek had Hebrew originals: his argument for a much earlier dating than is usual for the New Testament books].

While Yahuda’s argument is totally Egypto-centric, at least for the Book of Genesis, one does also need to consider the likelihood of ‘cultural traffic’ from Palestine to Egypt, especially given the prominence of Joseph in Egypt from age 80-110. One might expect that the toledôt documents borne by Israel into Egypt would have become of great interest to the Egyptians under the régime of the Vizier, Joseph (historically Imhotep of Egypt’s 3rd dynasty), who had after all saved the nation of Egypt from a 7-year famine, thereby influencing Egyptian thought and concepts.

The combination of Wiseman and Yahuda, in both cases clear-minded studies based on profound analysis of ancient documents, is an absolute bomb waiting to explode all over any artificially constructed literary theory of Genesis. Whilst Kikawada and Quinn have managed to find some merit in the JEDP theory, and I have also suggested how its analytical tools may be useful - at least when applied to the apparent multiple sourcing in the Flood narrative (and perhaps in the Esau and Jacob narrative) - the system appears as inherently artificial in the light of archaeological discoveries.

Cassuto may not have been diplomatic, but nevertheless he was basically correct in his estimation of documentism: “This imposing and beautiful edifice has, in reality, nothing to support it and is founded on air”. It is no coincidence that documentary theory was developed during the era of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who proposed an a priori approach to extramental reality, quite different from the common sense approach of the Aristotelian philosophy of being. (Those interested in a proper exposition of this important subject could do no better than to read Gavin Ardley’s masterful, Aquinas and Kant, 1950.) The philosophy of science is saturated with this new approach.

Kantianism is, I suggest, well and truly evident in the Karl Heinrich Graf and Julius Wellhausen attitude to the biblical texts. And Eduard Meyer seems to have carried over this thought process into his study of Egyptian chronology, his Sothic Star theory, by devising in his mind a quantifying a priori methodology - an entirely artificial one that had no substantial bearing on reality - that he imposed upon his subject with disastrous results.

Again an “imposing and beautiful edifice … founded on air”.

 
....

To read complete article, with charts, go to:
https://www.academia.edu/8175774/Tracing_the_Hand_of_Moses_in_Genesis

 

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