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.
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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?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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”.
) means “Servant of (the god of) Iunu”, Iunu being the old Egyptian name of Heliopolis (cf. Junker, Giza I, p. 148).
