by
Damien F. Mackey
Pan-Babylonianism
is a far too one-dimensional approach
to
the study of the ancient Scriptures.
Professor A. Yahuda (The
Language of the Pentateuch in its Relation to Egyptian,
Oxford, 1933)
dealt a shock blow to both the documentary theory and to the
related Pan-Babylonianism. Yahuda, unlike P. J. Wiseman (New Discoveries in Babylonia about Genesis, Marshall, Morgan
and Scott, 1936), was an expert in his field. His
profound knowledge of Egyptian and Hebrew combined - not to mention Akkadian - gave
him a distinct advantage over fellow Egyptologists unacquainted with Hebrew,
who could thus 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 customarily associated
with Babylonia (presumably the Flood account and the Babel incident[*]).
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’).
Moses, traditionally the author of the Pentateuch substantially
speaking - and I believe the editor of Genesis - was he not, to all
appearances, “an Egyptian”? Exodus 2:19: “An Egyptian rescued us from the
shepherds. He even drew water for us and watered the flock”. (Cf. Acts
7:22).
[*] Though
Anne Habermehl has, in a recent ground-breaking article, Where in the World Is the Tower of
Babel? (https://answersingenesis.org/tower-of-babel/where-in-the-world-is-the-tower-of-babel/)
completely shifted the playing field, by re-locating the biblical “Shinar”, and
the Babel incident, to the Sinjar region of NE Syria.
This may render even less relevant the Babylonian view.
Most important was this linguistic observation by Yahuda:
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 (Birth of the Synoptic Gospels), 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 for a considerable
period of time.
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 I. Kikawada
and A. Quinn (Before Abraham Was: The
Unity of Genesis 1-11) 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), see my:
Tracing the Hand of
Moses in Genesis
the
system appears as inherently artificial in the light of archaeological
discoveries.
U.
Cassuto (as quoted by Kikawada and Quinn) may not have been diplomatic (their
view), 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 approximate era
of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (c. 1800), who had proposed an a priori approach to extramental
reality, quite different from the common sense approach of the Aristotelian
philosophy of being. Today the philosophy of science is saturated with this new
approach. Kantianism I think is well and truly evident too in the Karl Heinrich
Graf and Julius Wellhausen
attitude to the biblical texts.
And
Eduard Meyer carried this over into his study of Egyptian chronology, by
devising in his mind a quantifying a priori
theory – an entirely artificial one that had no substantial bearing on reality
– that he imposed upon his subject with disastrous results. See my:
The
Fall of the Sothic Theory: Egyptian Chronology Revisited
Again an “imposing and beautiful edifice … founded on air”.
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