The Documentary Hypothesis

[I'm not at all happy with what I wrote this week for the Changing Face of Evil series, so I'm going to redo it and post it next week. In the meantime, I know several people have asked me about the documentary hypothesis I did a video for, so today I'm posting the script for that particular movie. This will make it much easier for those wishing to share it with their friends without having to show them a movie.]

The Documentary Hypothesis

When I was in Jr. High School during the early 70's, I used to always read one chapter in my bible every night before bed. One night I noticed something very odd. I was reading Genesis 20, and it told about how Abraham and his wife, Sarah, were traveling through a land called Gerar, and Abraham instructed Sarah to tell the people in this place that she was his sister. He did this because she was a beautiful woman, and he feared that some man might murder him in order to take his wife. The strange thing was, that I had just read something very similar a few nights earlier in Genesis 12, only that time they had been traveling through Egypt, but once again Sarah had said she was the sister of Abraham, and for the same reason. However, in Genesis 20 Abraham explains that when they had first left his father's house way back when and begun to wander, that he had already asked Sarah then to say everywhere they went that they were brother and sister. So apparently this was to be a regular motif during their wanderings. However, a few chapters later in Genesis 26 we find Abraham's son, Isaac, traveling with his wife through the exact same land of Gerar, and it is still ruled by the same king, Abimelech, or a son of the king who took on his father's name, and Isaac pulls the exact same stunt asking his beautiful wife to tell the people that she is his sister.

One might conclude that Isaac had simply learned from his father's ways. However, it seemed very strange indeed to read what seemed like the same story, only slightly changed, three times in the span of 16 chapters in the same book. I was too young to know it at the time, but I later learned that this repetition of the same story in the bible is known as a triplet, or a doublet if told twice, and that doublets and triplets appear quite often in the bible. Now this triplet seems harmless enough, and fairly explainable, but others can often be very contradictory. We have two creation stories in different chapters that are a little off, two flood stories intertwined that are very much at odds, two stories of the ten commandments (actually more like three) that are again, similar, but different in small details. The famous 19th century bible scholar, Julius Wellhausen, noticed something very surprising when he began to study the doublets and triplets in detail. The separate stories more often than not, referred to God by a different name and had a slightly differently writing style. This led him to conclude that the stories, though very similar, came from different sources, and were later woven together by a skillful editor which he referred to as a redactor.

In Genesis 1 we find a story of the creation of the world. Genesis 2 and 3 retell it, only slightly different. In Genesis 1 God created all the vegetation on the 3rd day, and then he created both men and women on the 6th day after everything else. In Genesis 2:4 it starts out recounting everything saying:

4 This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created. When the LORD God made the earth and the heavens-- 5 and no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth and no plant of the field had yet sprung up, for the LORD God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no man to work the ground, 6 but streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground--7 the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

So man is created before the vegetation and even before the animals. Woman, however, is not created until much later in verse 21.

Further, and perhaps more importantly, the story in Genesis 1 always refers to the creator as Elohim or the shortened version--El, 35 times in fact. In the Genesis 2 creation story, all eleven times the creator is mentioned, he is named as Yahweh. So right away we have this bit of mystery. We for some strange reason have an account of the creation of the world, and immediately thereafter have another account of the creation of the world which is slightly different and which calls God by a different name. What could the purpose of this be?

In Genesis 6 we find a very odd account of the story of Noah and the flood. It starts out in verse 5 with God lamenting over all the evil that humans had done the Earth over.

5 The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. 6 The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. 7 So the LORD said, "I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—men and animals....

Then starting in verse 11 God repeats himself in slightly different terms:

11 Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence. 12 God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. 13 So God said to Noah, "I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth.

It's very redundant, but the redundancy hardly ends there. Between verses 9 and 22 we get what seems a complete account of God grieving over creation, him telling Noah to build an ark and what creatures to take into it, and how he will destroy the whole Earth in a flood. Verse 22 sounds like the end of the story saying:

22 Noah did everything just as God commanded him.

However, Genesis 7 seems to begin the story all over, once again telling Noah what kind of animals to take into the ark. Then in verse 6 it says:

6 Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters came on the earth. 7 And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons' wives entered the ark to escape the waters of the flood. 8 Pairs of clean and unclean animals, of birds and of all creatures that move along the ground, 9 male and female, came to Noah and entered the ark, as God had commanded Noah. 10 And after the seven days the floodwaters came on the earth.

But, beginning in verse 11 it restates everything it just said, again slightly different:

11 In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. 12 And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights. 13 On that very day Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, together with his wife and the wives of his three sons, entered the ark. 14 They had with them every wild animal according to its kind, all livestock according to their kinds....

If you read through the entire flood account, you will quickly see how redundant the entire flood story is, constantly saying everything twice, but each time a little differently. In fact, it is very easy to separate the verses in such a way as to have two entire accounts of the flood. They would be as follows:

Account One: Genesis chapter 6 verses 5-7; chapter 7 verses 1-5, verse 7, verse 10, verse 12, the last sentence from verse 16 through verse 20, verses 22-23; chapter 8 verse 6, verses 8-12, the last sentence of verse 13, and verses 20-22.

Account two: Genesis chapter 6 verses 9-22; chapter 7 verse 6, verses 8-9, verse 11, verse 13-16 (except the last sentence of verse 16), verse 21, verse 24; chapter 8 verses 1-2 (except the last sentence of verse 2), the last half of verse 3 through verse 5, verse 7, the first sentence of verse 13, and verses 14-19.

Here is how the two passages read after separating them:

First Account:

Genesis 6
5 The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. 6 The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. 7 So the LORD said, "I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air—for I am grieved that I have made them." 8 But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.

Genesis 7
1 The LORD then said to Noah, "Go into the ark, you and your whole family, because I have found you righteous in this generation. 2 Take with you seven [a] of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and two of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, 3 and also seven of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth. 4 Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made."

5 And Noah did all that the LORD commanded him.

7 And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons' wives entered the ark to escape the waters of the flood.

10 And after the seven days the floodwaters came on the earth.

12 And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.

16... Then the LORD shut him in. 17 For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth. 18 The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water. 19 They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. 20 The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet.

22 Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. 23 Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; men and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.

Genesis 8
2... and the rain had stopped falling from the sky. 3 The water receded steadily from the earth....

6 After forty days Noah opened the window he had made in the ark...

8 Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. 9 But the dove could find no place to set its feet because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark. 10 He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. 11 When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. 12 He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him.

13... Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry.

20 Then Noah built an altar to the LORD and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. 21 The LORD smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: "Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done.

22 "As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
summer and winter,
day and night
will never cease."

Second Account:

Genesis 6
9 This is the account of Noah: Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God. 10 Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth. 11 Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence. 12 God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. 13 So God said to Noah, "I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. 14 So make yourself an ark of cypress [c] wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. 15 This is how you are to build it: The ark is to be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high. [d] 16 Make a roof for it and finish [e] the ark to within 18 inches [f] of the top. Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks. 17 I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish. 18 But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark—you and your sons and your wife and your sons' wives with you. 19 You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you. 20 Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive. 21 You are to take every kind of food that is to be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them." 22 Noah did everything just as God commanded him.

Genesis 7
6 Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters came on the earth.

8 Pairs of clean and unclean animals, of birds and of all creatures that move along the ground, 9 male and female, came to Noah and entered the ark, as God had commanded Noah.

11 In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.

13 On that very day Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, together with his wife and the wives of his three sons, entered the ark. 14 They had with them every wild animal according to its kind, all livestock according to their kinds, every creature that moves along the ground according to its kind and every bird according to its kind, everything with wings. 15 Pairs of all creatures that have the breath of life in them came to Noah and entered the ark. 16 The animals going in were male and female of every living thing, as God had commanded Noah....

21 Every living thing that moved on the earth perished—birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind.

24 The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.

Genesis 8
1 But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded. 2 Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens had been closed....

3... At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down, 4 and on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. 5 The waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible.

7 And he sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth.

13 By the first day of the first month of Noah's six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth....

14 By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry.

15 Then God said to Noah, 16 "Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives. 17 Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you—the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground—so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number upon it."

18 So Noah came out, together with his sons and his wife and his sons' wives. 19 All the animals and all the creatures that move along the ground and all the birds—everything that moves on the earth—came out of the ark, one kind after another.

As you can see, you get two narratives that are fairly complete. You'd be very hard pressed to do that with any book outside of the bible. And again, we have two stories that are each written in very different styles and each using their own name for God. The first narrative uses the name Yahweh while the second uses Elohim. The first has seven pairs of clean animals and one pair of unclean. The second has simply one of each kind. The first story has a 40 day flood--the second a 370 flood. In the first Noah sends out a dove--in the second a raven. The second writer is very concerned about ages, dates, and measurements in cubits while the first writer shows no such concern for details like that.

Most scholars think there are at least four writers of the Torah whose works were later combined and interwoven. These are commonly known as the J, E, P, and D authors. The J stands for Yahweh (originally discovered by the German scholar, Julius Wellhausen, who wrote in German where the Yahweh is written as a Jahweh). E is for Elohim. P stands for Priestly. And D is for Deuteronomist. The J writer used the term Yahweh for God almost exclusively. The E writer nearly always referred to God as Elohim. The P writer was likely a priest who was very concerned with rules and regulations, and this was the writer of the second flood story. And the Deuteronomist wrote just about all of Deuteronomy only.

If we ask ourselves why anyone would bother to merge together separate stories about the same events to make one compilation story, there is one quick answer which will become apparent. The Jewish nation had a civil war which lasted about 200 years shortly after the death of Solomon. During this time you had a divided nation with Judah in the south and Israel in the north. Most scholars believe they each had their own versions of the Torah, and quite possibly these were simply oral versions. These versions differed slightly because of the attitudes and dislike the two kingdoms had for one another. We can plainly see that the J writer came from Judah and the E writer from Israel because the J stories are nearly always concerned with Israel and the E stories are concerned with Judah. When we untangle the various stories we can see that the two writers are often trying to place one another in a bad light. For instance, both the J and E writers each tell a story of how the Israelites acquired the city of Shechem. Jeroboam would then make Shechem the capital of Israel. Remember now that the J writer is from Judah. In his version of the story, it says that the prince of the city fell in love with Jacob's daughter--Dinah and sleeps with her. He then asks for her hand in marriage. Jacob's sons, however, reply that they could not approve of such a thing because the prince and the other men of the city are not circumcised. The prince then has himself and all the men of the city circumcised. While they were still sore and recuperating from this surgery, two of Jacob's sons charge into the city and kill them all. So the Israelites acquired the city by way of flat-out treachery.

Keeping in mind that the E writer is from Israel in the north where this city is the capital, his version of the story is that Jacob simply buys the land.

So, when we separate the various E and J stories we find this type of sniping at one another's nation more often than not. This is usually done by taking pot shots at various leaders.

We also find certain discrepancies within the separate J, E, P, and D stories. These are sometimes as simple as differences in numbers and years. But this sometimes can be important. For instance, according to Genesis 11:26, Abraham was born when his father, Terah, was 70 years old. Genesis 12:1 says that Abraham is told to leave by God after the death of his father. Now according to Genesis 11:32 Terah died at the age of 205. This would have made Abraham 135 years old when he left. However, it says in Genesis 12:4 that Abraham was 75 when he left. Obviously there is a discrepancy here. When we realize, however, that there are two or more points of view being expressed and merged together, we begin to realize just why the text is so convoluted in places like this.

Imagine if someone had taken the four gospels and tried to merge them together into one version. If that editor was trying to show respect for all of the versions, then he might well try to keep all their points of view. This would make for discrepancies. And of course there are several disagreements within the gospels. One of the more obvious ones is the account of the men appearing at the tomb of the risen savior. When the women arrive there, Mark says they saw one man, Luke says they saw two, Mathew says they saw a single angel. John says nothing of them seeing anyone initially, but after the women leave to tell the disciples what they had seen (an empty tomb), and then after Peter and John went to look for themselves and also leave, then it says Mary went back to the tomb alone and saw two angels. Obviously we would have a very convoluted account of the empty tomb episode if we tried to combine them, and this is exactly the kind of thing we see in the old testament, particularly the first five books, over and over, but the difference is that the old testament writers are so often taking pot shots at each other's version of the stories. Both the P and E writers are mostly associated with the southern kingdom of Judah. Jeremiah, who is from the northern kingdom of Israel during the civil war, sometimes can be seen lashing out against the P writer. The P writer said in Leviticus: "This is the Torah of offering, grain offering, sin offering, trespass offering, installation offerings, sacrifice, and peace offerings which Yahweh commanded Moses in Mount Sinai in the day that he commanded the Israelites to offer their sacrifices to Yahweh in the wilderness of Sinai." Then during the Jewish civil war Jeremiah wrote: "For I did not speak with your fathers and I did not command them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt about matters of offering and sacrifice." He disparages the P writer often enough that it shows that he knew exactly what parts of the Torah were written by the P writer, and this is very significant to the documentary hypothesis.

After the two kingdoms were eventually merged back together, one might ask what the actual impetus was that would make anyone bother to take the various religious writings from both kingdoms and try to merge them? Theologian Joseph Blenkinsopp came up with an interesting idea pertaining to this. The Jews during the Babylonian diaspora suddenly found themselves under Iranian rule when the Persians defeated the Babylonians. One aspect of the imperial policy was the insistence on local self-definition inscribed primarily in a codified and standardized corpus of traditional law backed by the central government and its regional representatives. Blenkinsopp suggests that redaction may have served a political purpose for the Persians, to provide for the regional law that Judah would have been required to have. Having two or more versions of their history and laws is not very standardized.

This has been only a brief glimpse at the documentary hypothesis. If we were to take the very old and outdated notion of Moses having written the entire Torah, then the idea of different writers with different points of view concerning old testament events having their writings later interwoven by a redactor would be without merit. However, we know that Moses didn't write all of the Torah, if much at all. I gave several reasons for this in my 2-part video on fundamentalism. One of the reasons I gave was that there were several kings and kingdoms mentioned throughout the Torah that didn't exist until well after Moses was dead. Someone recently asked me for details on that. Genesis 11:31 describes Abraham as living in Ur of the Chaldeans, but the Chaldeans did not exist at the time of Abraham. There are eight Edomite Kings listed in Genesis 36, all of which lived between 1152-995 B.C. hundreds of years after Moses was dead. Some of them are actually mentioned again later in the bible during the reigns of David and Solomon. They are also referenced by peoples groups outside of Israel, so it is well corroborated.

The documentary hypothesis makes sense of things like the doublets and triplets along with many of the discrepancies within the old testament that never made sense before. Almost every major theologian in the world today excepts some form of the hypothesis. The Vatican itself estimates that probably 90% of them do. The hypothesis is as well accepted among theologians as the theory of relativity is among cosmologists.

If we try to make out the bible to be the very words of God, we're always going to be disappointed at its clumsiness and inherent contradictions. When we come to realize that it's a collection of books that simply gets the gist of things, we actually come closer to whatever truths are to be found in it.

From George MacDonald~~~

“Human science is but the backward undoing of the tapestry-web of God’s science, works with its back to Him, and is always leaving Him.”

“The truth of the flower is, not the facts about it, the idea of God is the flower. Its botany is but a thing of ways and means—of canvas and color and brush in relation to the picture in the Painter’s brain.”

“We must not wonder things away into nonentity.”

“The appearances of nature are the truths of nature, far deeper than any scientific discoveries in and concerning them. For their show is the face of far deeper things. It is through their show, not through their analysis, that we enter into their deepest truths. To know a primrose is a higher thing than to know all the botany of it—just as to know Christ is an infinitely higher thing than to know all theology, all that is said about His person, or babbled about His work. The body of man does not exist for the sake of its hidden secrets; its hidden secrets exist for the sake of its outside—for the face and the form in which dwells revelation: its outside is the deepest of it.”