Transcription
One question that comes up for a lot of people is the great gap between what tradition says about the origins of the Torah, that it was given to Moses at Sinai, and what academic biblical scholars say about the same topic. And the problem is, is a particularly burning one because it essentially pits us between two commitments, and we're not really ready to give up on either one. On the one hand, we want to be fervent and pious, but we don't want to have to lose our intellectual integrity in the process. If the Torah tells us that two plus two is going to be five, or if, if Judaism mandates us to believe that the world is flat instead of round, this will be difficult. And this is a type of difficulty that we don't really want to have to find ourselves in.
And so therefore, when we have a situation where tradition tells us one thing about the Torah's origins, but then we know or we hear that in academic circles, where presumably there is no prejudice about this issue, where there is just objective thinking about the issues based on hard core evidence, and the conclusions are otherwise, that the Torah is written in different centuries and maybe in many different parts, this can be a great source of conflict. And that's what I want to discuss here today at TorahCafe.com.
If you're at all familiar with this issue, then there's probably the name of one scholar that you've heard of, and that's Julius Wellhausen. Wellhausen was a German Bible scholar who lived in the second half of the 19th century. And when people say biblical criticism, and they think of Wellhausen, what they're really thinking of is his, uh, his theory of, uh, what's called the Documentary Hypothesis, how the Torah came to come together from four different, uh, individual original documents. And what I want to do today is to share with you the basic outlines of what Wellhausen's theory said. And then what I want to share with you is not why an orthodox rabbi doesn't accept that, but why the nearly the entire establishment of biblical scholarship today no longer accepts what Wellhausen says, and is now able to see back as to to what stood behind Wellhausen's program, what were the agendas that maybe even he himself was not aware of.
So let's begin. What, what did Wellhausen say? Well, it really didn't start with him. Already, I'd say for about two centuries, scholars that preceded him, whose names aren't really so important for us here, began to notice things that our sages already had noticed much earlier, but explained in a different way. And perhaps I'll get to that soon. And that is that the Torah seems to have inconsistencies in it. By that, I mean two accounts of things. There seems to be two accounts of creation, Genesis chapter one and Genesis chapter two, and they describe things in different orders. And what's the relationship between men and women? Well, how could the world be created in two different ways? Or, um, the Decalogue, the Aseret HaDibrot, the, the same ten mitzvot are listed twice, but with different wording. God said this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then that's in Exodus. And then in Deuteronomy, God said this, and you see there's all sorts of little changes in there. How could God have spoken two different ways? Some of the mitzvoth, how are we meant to execute the various requirements of Pesach? In some parts of the Torah, it appears this way, and other parts, it appears that way. The story of the golden calf is told in two different ways. The story of the spies is told in two different ways. And on and on.
And therefore, it's not surprising that scholars, uh, critical scholars, two centuries ago, began to hypothesize that, well, maybe what we have here were different accounts of what went on, and then these were later brought together. And they began to sort of figure out, well, could we identify main streams or different things that went together as smaller pieces that were then kind of glued together? And it all came to a head with Wellhausen. And what Wellhausen said was the following. He said, we can identify four main subparts of the Torah, not in the order that we see it, it's not Genesis and Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers, etc., but, um, different, uh, this is what he hypothesized. That we have part of the Torah that came from, um, uh, the southern kingdom of Israel, and that's affiliated with the name Yud-Keh-Vav-Keh, or what's sometimes written as Y-A, Yahweh, or all sorts of ways of pronouncing that. And so lots of sources that discuss Yahweh, Yud-Keh, all those, we'll put together, we'll call that one source. And then he said, after that, after that came another source that was affiliated with the northern kingdom of Israel, and we'll be able to identify that source based on the use of Elohim, right? E. He called that one E, as in. So then we had that source. And then those two sources, one from the southern kingdom, one from the northern kingdom, were brought together. What he said was the earlier source, what he called the J source, that emphasized piety, spirituality, striving for God. The E source was more about institutions. And then those were brought together. Maybe they were brought together, well, he has different theories about that. So they were brought together by what's called a redactor, what we might call an editor, someone who took the two and kind of stitched them together, sometimes by placing one account from the J source next to another account from the E source, sometimes by mixing them together versus one from the other. And so they created a kind of, what they call, a conflated, uh, a mixed view of an event.
Then he said, after that came the D source, Deuteronomy, because the book of Deuteronomy seems to recapitulate, review some of the things that were earlier. So he said, then came the D source. And then at the end, the last part was what he called P, priestly, all the things having to do with the Tabernacle and with sacrifices and the priests. All of this, he called the priestly source, that he ascribed to the exile or post-exile, when Israel returned from Babylon, in the time of Ezra and thereafter. That's when he assigned that's what he said was the P source. And then every time you had two stories, so he had ways of trying to assign, oh, this is from this original source, that's from that original source. Two versions of the Aseret, well, that's, this is from here, that's from there. This won the day. It totally won the day. Um, everyone in the world who was not, you know, committed because of religious beliefs, found this and was involved in, in critical academic endeavors, followed what Wellhausen said, and it stood, I would say, for about a hundred years. He sort of brought this whole theory together in around 1876. It was really until the 1970s that this held sway everywhere.
And then the walls began to crumble and tumble down. The main faults that people began to notice, and once I say them, you're going to say, gosh, you know, it seems so obvious that how could this have had credibility to begin with? The faults that, that scholars, again, this isn't orthodox rabbis speaking, this is, if you go to the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting, uh, this is what you will hear people saying, is that several things. First of all, it's very, very difficult to pin down the criteria that make up each of the separate, the separate documents. Moreover, this whole idea that you would have authors that would write according to a certain philosophical outlook, and then, but then how do they come together? Why do we have this mishmash according to this theory? Oh, because we had editors who then brought them together. But why would editors do that? What were they trying to achieve? You can understand if someone wrote one continual history of Israel and never had any inconsistencies in it, and you can even theoretically understand that maybe there were two people that might have done such a thing. But then why would someone come and mix it all together? What were they trying to achieve? I'll just, there's nothing like this in the history of literature anywhere. What you sometimes have is that there are different versions of things, and then someone comes along and tries to make something that's seamless. This happened in Christianity, actually, as you may know. In Christianity, in the, in the New Testament, there are four accounts of the life of Jesus. These are called what are called the Gospels. And perhaps I'm not meant to teach the Gospels here at TorahCafe.com, but for one minute, it will be illustrative. There are four different accounts of the life of Jesus, and they are different, separate books by different, separate authors. And on some issues, they line up, and on many issues, they don't. A later church father said, well, we can't have this. And so what he tried to do was to take all the four versions of the life of Jesus, and he made one smooth version out of it. And you can understand what he was trying to achieve. He wanted to have one authoritative version that didn't have any inconsistencies. But that's not what's happening here in the Wellhausen theory. In the Wellhausen theory, there are different sources with inconsistencies, and someone comes along and sometimes smooths them over, sometimes puts one next to another, sometimes takes a little bit from this one and a little bit from that one, but we're left with the inconsistencies at the end of the day. There is no piece of literature in the history of literature that we can see that this has been done in an intentional way. So critics have had a difficult time understanding what is the role and what of these different redactors, editors, who at different stages put things together.
Finally, modern, modern day biblical critics have discovered that a lot of the criteria that Wellhausen postulated don't hold up, especially the idea of different divine names. As I mentioned before, in Torah, we sometimes find the Almighty referred to as Yud-Keh-Vav-Keh, or Y-H, or Yahweh, or however you want to pronounce it. We don't really know how to pronounce it. That's a great secret. But we just sometimes phonetically pronounce it Yahweh. You'd. And then sometimes the Torah refers to the Almighty as Elohim, or with a Hay instead of a Kuf, Elohim. Modern day critics now know two things. A, that when you look at other ancient literatures, you see that peoples called their gods by many names because they recognized that their relationship to their own gods, idolatrous gods, had different facets. And so they could relate to God with this name, and they could relate to God with that name. Just like each and every one of us probably has several names. Probably even at home, when your spouse uses your formal name, that implies one thing about the relationship. And when they call you by your nickname, that's a different part of the relationship. And it turns out that this is not just the way we speak, it's the way in which ancient people spoke about their gods. And so it shouldn't surprise us that in the Torah, as well, perhaps we have different ways of relating to the Almighty with different names, and they reflect different aspects of Him. Certainly, rabbinic tradition viewed these different names, uh, in that way. And then other critics even pointed out that, you know, it's not even two names. You know, Yahweh, that is a name. That is God's name. Each and every one of us has a name. But the word Elohim, or Elohim, that just means god, a god, as opposed to the name of the God. And so for all these reasons, uh, scholars are very down on a nice, neat, orderly, uh, plan to separate out the different, uh, the different parts of what came to be the Torah, especially because it's difficult to understand why people would put things together in in such a a diffuse and inconsistent fashion.
But what has also come to the form, once I say that, you say, yeah, you know, that, that that makes sense. Kind of idiot would have thought of this in the first place, and why was Wellhausen's theory so well accepted? And what I want to explain now, in the next few minutes, are what modern scholars understand as the intellectual backdrop behind Wellhausen's theory, and why in the 19th century, especially, it was so popular. There are many reasons for this. There may be six reasons. Reason number one, the 19th century in Germany loved big ideas. You know, some of them, have you heard of Freud? Have you heard of Einstein? These were men that said, we're going to explain everything you want to know about the human soul, psychology. Here, here's, I'm going to map it all out for you. That's what Freud said. You want to know the basic working blocks of how the world works? Einstein said, here, I'm going to explain it to you. The, the, the human soul. In Germany, in the 19th century, thought big, sometimes creating enormously wonderful things, sometimes, as we know, just a little bit later on, enormous things that had a very, very different aspect to them, could be very destructive. But the idea of grand theories was part of the way in which 19th century German intellectuals thought. And so when Wellhausen said, I'm going to split it all, I'm going to take the entire Pentateuch and show you exactly where it came from, people are ready to have that today. I think modern people today understand things a little bit more complex. The more you try to swing for a home run, the greater your chance of striking out. But if you try to explain something small today, then that, that people are ready to listen to. So it was an age of big theories.
There's another reason why, uh, Wellhausen's theory was so well accepted at the beginning in the 19th century. The idea of studying history, studying history was born. What do I mean by that? There was, uh, considered the first major modern historian, Leopold von Ranke. He said, we can't just rely on what our various traditions tell us happens. We have to go back and check the sources. If we want to know about what life was like in ancient Greece or an ancient Rome, then we can't just read what people are saying now about what happened. We should go back and try to find the earliest manuscripts possible that we can from those periods. Those will give a more accurate picture of what happened. Only by looking at the full range of ancient sources that we have at our disposal can we really understand what happened way back when. Well, Wellhausen comes along and says, okay, I want to understand ancient Israel. I want to get back to the sources. But there's just one problem. We don't have any sources. All we have is, we have the Torah. We don't have any other original documents. There were no Dead Sea Scrolls back then, and even those post-date the events of the Torah many, many centuries. So what Wellhausen and other biblical scholars did was something that had never been done for any other document. That was to say, we have this document in hand, the Torah itself, and what we're going to do is now try to work back to what the sources were that fed into this. That's a really highly speculative, uh, and, uh, um, a lot of guesswork involved. So it wasn't really doing what everyone else was doing, which was going back to real sources that they could dig up, but inventing the sources by moving, by moving backwards. But that's how you did history, by trying to figure out what the earliest sources were.
I mentioned before that Wellhausen said that the earliest source, what he called the J source, that's when that emphasized piety, people trying to come close to God. Uh, he saw, uh, the, the stories of the patriarchs as being in that way. He saw many of, uh, uh, the great prophets also from that period. And as I mentioned before, the last document, according to Wellhausen, was P, the priestly document, which talks about sacrifice, temples, priests. It's not an accident that the earliest source for Wellhausen spoke about individual piety, and the latest source spoke about temple. Because 19th century Germany is an age of romanticism. Not romanticism of Valentine's Day, of men and women loving each other, but the romantic ideal said the following. It said that the life of a civilization and of a culture was the same as the life of an individual person. An individual person starts off with a very untainted, pure beginning as a child. The child is pure. The child then matures and comes to his mature stage in life. And then at the end, if we're lucky enough to live to be old, often we begin to fall apart. We enter our decrepit stage, and then we die. So that it's not evolution of going straight up, but there's an initial pure stage, then a mature stage, and then the decrepit stage. So for Wellhausen, the pure initial, uh, naive, simple stage was just wanting to be close to God, spirituality. Then came things like kingship and nationhood, that was the mature part. The last part, the P document, Wellhausen said, that was the chronometer. Because, oh, that's decrepit, that's like clunky, ah, who needs all that stuff, temples and sacrifices and ritual, in order to be able to connect with God? So his sense that these things were late developments in Judaism really had nothing to do with Judaism, it had to do with Wellhausen, had to do with the romantic spirit of 19th century German Germany. It also had to do with a particular Protestant Lutheran bias that informed Wellhausen, who was born a Lutheran. And that is, what is good in religion? Spirit, prayer, belief, devotion. All this ritual stuff that he saw in Catholicism, which has, relatively speaking, a lot of ritual, clunky, ew, who needs that? So ritual is viewed as something bad. And so therefore, he viewed everything that has to do with ritual, which is most of the mitzvot, as basically unnecessary. We should just be able to connect to God in that way.
Two other things that seem to have informed Wellhausen's opinion, uh, and his whole, his whole thesis. Um, he saw, as I mentioned earlier, that the first two documents, the J document, which he saw as originating in the southern kingdom, and the E document, which he saw as well, as originating in the northern kingdom, were then brought together. Well, gosh, that's really, really parallel to developments in his own day in Germany. Because, uh, if you know anything about German history, German unification, not what we had now in the last 20 years, but originally, there were different cantons, different parts of, or subparts of the German culture, that Bismarck brought together to create mighty Germany at the end of the 19th century. So Wellhausen loved that. Wow, we, as a German people, are becoming a big state. This is terrific. And so he looked at that as an ideal for ancient Israel as well. Well, there was a southern kingdom and a northern kingdom, and so obviously someone would try to bring them together, just like we're doing today. So it was an imposition of his own self. And finally, is it just a coincidence? Let's see. He said that there were four documents, and each document, I should have pointed this out earlier, was a full, originally a full account of Israel's history from creation until Moses. And then they were all brought together. Four accounts of Israel's history, then brought together. Four accounts of a history. Does that sound familiar? Do we know of another religion that has four accounts of a certain history? Sounds an awful lot like the Gospels, four accounts of Jesus's life. And so it probably just made sense to him that Israel also had four accounts of its ancient history.
So critics have had, to sum this all up, have had difficulty with really pinning down in any accurate way how to get to these different documents. The thing of the divine names went out the window a long, long time ago. It's never been really clear why, if you had individual strands that made sense, you would bring them together and not smooth them out, but maintain the inconsistencies. So that today, it's not orthodox rabbis that reject Wellhausen, it's many, many biblical critics themselves. And what you actually find today is that there's great debate and really no consensus within biblical criticism as to exactly how to account for how all of this came to be.
I'd like to end by offering one idea, because at the end of the day, we do have two accounts of creation, we do have two accounts of the Decalogue, of what the Almighty said to Israel at Sinai. And that is the following. It's an idea that we have in Kabbalah, and that is that reality really presents itself with just one face. What is marriage? What is parenthood? You go on and on for a long time. There's many facets to what it is to be a spouse, whether it is to be a parent. There's many facets to what it means to be a servant of the Almighty. There's many facets about what it meant for God to create man. Could one story really bring it all out? So if you're looking for history, how was the world created, then you're going to wind up very frustrated, because it can't be. There was both this way and that way. But if we're looking for a fuller statement about what it means to be a created human being by the Almighty, then it almost makes sense there would be different accounts, each one presenting a different side of it. What was the Sinai experience like? Different accounts of what that was about. What happened when the children of Israel made the golden calf? Different accounts of that as well. And by having these different accounts, it might make the history of knowing precisely what happened a little less clear. But that's not the purpose of the Torah. The purpose of the Torah is to instruct us how we're meant to engage the Almighty in relationship. And this is a complex and many faceted adventure.
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