But try as I might, I just can\u2019t believe that the Five Books of Moses were written by J, E, P and D \u2013 the four main authors whose oral traditions, biblical scholars say, were cobbled together to make the Torah. (The letters stand for the Jahwist, the Elohist, the Priestly source and the Deuteronomist. Those, we may assume, were not their real names.)\u2026<\/p>\n
Why don\u2019t I buy it?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not just because of how stark, uninspiring and vaguely European those four letters look in a byline. Nor is it the fact that in more than a century\u2019s worth of digging up the Middle East by archaeologists, not a single trace of any of these postulated \u201csource texts\u201d has ever turned up. And it\u2019s certainly not because the scholars\u2019 approach contradicts my faith \u2014 after all, it was the willful suspension of faith that led me to consider it in the first place.<\/p>\n
No, faith and skepticism dwell together in my confused bosom like pudding and pie.<\/p>\n
Rather, my rebellion against these scholars comes from experience. Specifically, my experience as an editor\u2026.<\/p>\n
Now compare that with what Bible scholars do when they talk about J, E, P, and D. Not only do the readers not know the writers and editors personally, or even their identities or when or where they lived. The readers live thousands of years later and know nothing about the editors\u2019 goals, whims, tastes, passions or fears \u2014 they don\u2019t even know for sure that the whole thing really went through an editorial process at all.<\/p>\n
(If anything, the same textual redundancies, narrative glitches, awkward word choices and so forth that the scholars claim are the telltale signs of an editing process are, in my experience, very often the opposite: the surest indicator that an author needs an editor, desperately. If the text was edited, it was done very poorly.)<\/p>\n
As with any field of research that tries to reconstruct the distant past, biblical scholars get things wrong on a daily basis\u2026.<\/p>\n
As for the rest of us, it may raise questions about whether we really ought to care that much about authorship at all, or instead just go with Mark Twain\u2019s approach. \u201cIf the Ten Commandments were not written by Moses,\u201d he once quipped, \u201cthen they were written by another fellow of the same name.\u201d<\/p>\n
Using our reason means sometimes admitting there are things we just don\u2019t know, and maybe never will.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
David Hazony: But try as I might, I just can\u2019t believe that the Five Books of Moses were written by J, E, P and D \u2013 the four main authors whose oral traditions, biblical scholars say, were cobbled together to make the Torah. (The letters stand for the Jahwist, the Elohist, the Priestly source and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":197,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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