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Richard Friedman’s Who Wrote the Bible? is an accessible popular-level introduction to the documentary hypothesis. Recounting the developments of the last two centuries of biblical scholarship, Friedman attempts a reconstruction of the events that brought us the Pentateuch or Torah in its current form, as much as such a task is possible. And he does so with all the interest of a detective story.
The problem is a familiar one to students of the Bible. The five books attributed to Moses present us with repeated accounts of the same stories, inconsistent details, chronological contradictions, and the story of Moses’ own death. Before the Enlightenment, scholars tried to interpret the problem away, but in the eighteenth century, German scholar J.G. Eichhorn observed that the two tellings of a story in a Biblical doublet each referred to God by a different name. He identified two sources – E, which referred to God as “Elohim,” and J, which called him by name – Yahweh (or Jahweh in German). Eighteen years later, two other sources were discovered – P, the Priestly source, and D, the Deuteronomist.
Building on the work of his predecessors, Friedman fleshes out these mysterious characters, identifying their general locations and the periods in which they wrote. He offers hypotheses about who the authors were according to their primary concerns and interests as well as their historical and theological perspectives. In the case of the Deuteronomic source, Friedman is able to credit a particular person with authorship. He proposes that those texts may have been written by the prophet Jeremiah or by his scribe Baruch. Friedman follows other scholars in identifying Ezra as the redactor who combined the four sources into the form in which we have them.
Friedman is sensitive to the relationship of biblical criticism to faith. In Who Wrote the Bible?, he generally leaves it to the reader to wrestle with the theological implications of the hypothesis. He does note that the redactor’s work has provided us with a richer theology and possibilities for interpretation beyond what the original authors could have intended or envisioned. He questions the authorship of the Bible but not its authority. For some this may still be deeply discomforting, but, as doubting Thomas once poked his finger into the holes in the Word, we also may find that the Word is able to withstand our probing and strengthen our faith.
For those interested, Richard Friedman has also provided The Bible with Sources Revealed, his own translation of the five books of Moses. The text is color coded to indicate which passages he attributes to J, E, P, D, and to the redactor. That makes it easy for students to read each source by itself in Friedman’s best reconstruction of its original form, to get a better sense of the original authors’ styles as well as theological and historical perspectives. Extensive footnotes explain the documentary hypothesis and why particular passages are attributed to their various authors.
Will Burrows |