Source Criticism

Introduction

Source criticism is a misnomer. Something of a strange way to open a book titled Source Criticism, admittedly, but it’s worth putting the issue on the table from the beginning. Generally, when we talk about various types of criticisms, what we are describing is a set of questions. Form criticism looks into the form of a textual unit; tradition criticism asks about the traditions underlying the text; feminist criticism centers the role of women in the text and the history of its interpretation. In each of these, the type of criticism—form, tradition, feminist—determines the course of the critical inquiry. But this is not the case with source criticism. In source criticism, the discovery of sources isn’t the aim of the approach; it is, rather, the result.

As we will see, no one ever picked up the biblical text and thought, I’m going to find myself some sources in here—now how should I do that? Rather, they picked up the text and thought, Well, this is odd—why does the text look like this? And the answer that they came up with, in all sorts of variations, was that the most likely reason that the text reads the way that it does is because it was not originally written by a single author at one time. Rather, it is the product of the combination of disparate literary pieces, from different hands. Sources are the conclusion, not the starting point, of the analysis.

Another way that source criticism differs from other types of criticism is in its scope and applicability. Every text is susceptible to form criticism—every text participates in a literary form. Every text builds on traditions. Every text can be subject to a feminist reading, or a queer or post-colonial critical lens. (I mean every text, biblical or not, ancient or modern.) But not every text is open to a source-critical inquiry—especially if what we mean is that the text was created out of multiple distinct original sources. It is only those texts that demonstrate certain literary qualities, certain unexpected oddities—only those texts that make someone ask, Why does the text look like this?—that demand this sort of analysis.

It is for this reason that source criticism almost always refers to the analysis of the literary history of the Pentateuch in particular. It was this corpus that caught the attention of early biblical scholars, insofar as it was in the Pentateuch that the most prominent literary oddities were most readily identifiable. Why does the Pentateuch look like this? Eventually, the most common answer would be sources. But the same couldn’t be said for just any text. Sources were the explanation for the Pentateuch’s unique literary shape. A different corpus, with different literary qualities, wouldn’t—indeed, shouldn’t—result in the same literary history.

Of course, any text’s literary history may be investigated. But to call such investigations source criticism is not quite accurate. Better, perhaps, to talk of literary-historical criticism, where the guiding question is how did this text come to be? Sometimes, as with the Pentateuch, the answer might be sources! But sometimes it will be single authorship, or perhaps single authorship with a few later additions. So here too we must be careful with our terms. As we will discuss in the following chapters, sources refers to a very specific type of literary history. Later additions to an extant text are not technically, or necessarily, sources.

All of this is to say: the term source criticism can be misleading. If it is used in its most narrow sense, to refer to the claim that the Pentateuch is the product of a combination of sources, then it is not really a criticism, but a conclusion. If it is used in its broadest sense, as it often is, to refer to the study of the literary history of any biblical text, then it is not really about sources.

So then what is this book about? It is about the literary history of the Pentateuch, and about the history of that literary history: what theories scholars have put forward, but just as importantly why they have put forward those theories in particular. Some of those theories involve sources; others don’t. While my own perspective will become apparent, the aim of this volume is not to make a positive argument for any one position. It is, rather, to recognize that the literature on this topic is vast and complicated, and goes back to the very beginnings of critical biblical inquiry. No scholarly position exists independent of those that preceded it. The study of the literary history of the Pentateuch, like that of the rest of the Bible (but perhaps even more so), has not occurred in a vacuum, but has always been swept up in broader intellectual trends.

The aim of this volume is to lay bare and make accessible to non-specialists the shape of pentateuchal scholarship, to orient them to its history and current trends, and thus to allow them to more clearly understand and evaluate the scholarship, past and present, that has shaped discussions around the formation of the Pentateuch.

As noted above, source criticism (defined narrowly or broadly) didn’t begin with a desire to find sources in the biblical text. It began with a problem. The problem was that the Pentateuch didn’t seem to make great sense as a narrative. Its overall shape was reasonable enough, but its details—that’s where things got tricky. Some stories seem to be told twice: Moses getting water from a rock in the wilderness (Exod 17:1–7 and Num 20), for example, or God changing Jacob’s name to Israel (Gen 32:29 and Gen 35:10). Sometimes things are told twice even within a single story: God informing Noah about the flood and telling him to bring animals onto the ark (Gen 6:13–21 and Gen 7:1–4), or God promising not to bring another flood (Gen 8:21–22 and Gen 9:9–17). These repetitions are known as doublets. Then there are those places where one passage seems to disagree with another: contradictions. What is the name of Moses’s father-in-law: Reuel (Exod 2:18) or Jethro (Exod 3:1)? Is the Tent of Meeting in the middle of the camp (Num 2–3) or is it outside the camp altogether (Exod 33:7)? Again, such issues arise not only between passages, but even within single episodes. How many animals was Noah to bring onto the ark: two of each species (Gen 6:19–20) or fourteen of some species and two of others (Gen 7:2–3)? How long did the flood last: forty days (Gen 7:12) or 150 days (Gen 7:24)? As these last examples suggest, doublets and contradictions often come together. The same basic event or speech is related twice, but with differences. In Numbers 14, God declares that the entire exodus generation will die in the wilderness, except for Caleb (Num 14:21–24). Then, in a doublet, God declares again that the entire exodus generation will die in the wilderness, except for—in a contradiction—both Caleb and Joshua (Num 14:29–35).

The legal sections of the Pentateuch exhibit the same sorts of issues. Laws are repeated, sometimes nearly verbatim, in multiple places: for example, the somewhat befuddling instruction not to boil a kid in its mother’s milk shows up in Exod 23:19, Exod 34:26, and Deut 14:21. A basic topic may show up over and over again, whether it be festival instructions (Exod 23:14–17; Lev 23; Num 28–29; Deut 16), the treatment of enslaved persons (Exod 21:2–10; Lev 25:39–46; Deut 15:12–18), or the establishment of cities of refuge (Num 35 and Deut 19). Doublets—triplets, even—and also contradictions. How is the Passover offering to be prepared: by boiling (Deut 16:7) or by roasting and definitely not by boiling (Exod 12:9)? Is one permitted to slaughter a cow or sheep whenever and wherever one wants (Deut 12:20–21), or is one required to slaughter such animals only as sacrificial offerings at the sanctuary (Lev 17:3–7)?

There are hundreds of such examples that could be brought. And this very abundance of issues changes the nature of the question, from a localized oddity here and there to a more global problem affecting the entirety of the Pentateuch. How this concatenation of doublets, contradictions, and related literary issues is to be explained has varied substantially over the past three centuries—and that variation is the subject of this book. But at the heart of all those variations, of all the theories, is the common underlying set of problems.

Not included in this set of problems, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, is the question of whether or not the Pentateuch was written by Moses. In part this is because the traditional claim of Mosaic authorship had slowly been eroding, quietly and then more openly, for hundreds of years. There were simply too many indications that Moses could not have written parts of the Pentateuch, most famously the narration of his death at the end of Deuteronomy. (My personal favorite of all such passages is Num 12:3, where, according to the traditional position, Moses is supposed to have written about himself, Now Moses was a very humble man, more so than any other man on earth.) And in part Mosaic authorship is not precisely a source-critical concern because what is at stake is not who wrote the Pentateuch but whether any one hand, Moses’s or otherwise, could be responsible for it. As we will see, some early critical scholars sought to maintain both a source-critical understanding of the Pentateuch’s origins and, at the same time, something like the traditional claim that Moses wrote—or at least wrote down—the text. In other words, saying that Moses wrote the Pentateuch alleviates none of the literary problems of the Pentateuch—but, at the same time, saying that Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch doesn’t solve those problems either.

It is one of the main observations of this book that the various theories of the Pentateuch’s composition are inseparable from the broader intellectual trends of their times. It is, therefore, worth noting that the same can and should be said for the identification of the literary problems that underlies those theories. What separates modern critical approaches from interpretive positions that preceded them is not the recognition of the literary phenomena in question—the doublets and contradictions—but rather the designation of such as problems to be solved. Close reading of the biblical text is hardly a recent trend. Those readers for whom every minute detail of the Bible was worthy of nearly infinite study and speculation, especially the classical Jewish interpreters of the first millennium CE, had long since recognized virtually every potential bump in the Pentateuch: every repetition, every contradiction, every slight variation. They simply didn’t see these as problems, but rather as opportunities for a deeper sort of understanding. They brought to their reading a set of assumptions about the biblical text: the belief that it was divinely inspired, to be sure, but also the position that it was endlessly significant. Doublets and contradictions were not only not errors, they were sites for interpretations that sought to make a new sense out of a text understood to be designed for this very interpretive purpose.¹

It is easy enough, from where we sit, to write off such interpretive assumptions as ancient, or uncritical, or otherwise a mere product of a different era. Yet what we describe as modern and critical interpretations are themselves equally a product of their era, of their time and place. We read the literary phenomena of the Pentateuch as problems not because they are so by definition, or in some objective sense. They are problems because we have different assumptions about what texts are, and especially about what the Bible is; because we are interested in a different set of questions. When the rabbis saw a contradiction, they asked, What meaning can we make from this? When critical scholars see a contradiction, we ask, How did the text come to look this way? Both questions are, in a sense, really asking, Why is the text like this?

The Enlightenment brought with it a rejection of traditional and traditionally authoritative truth claims, particularly those handed down by the religious establishment. But the rationalistic perspective that replaced those traditional claims is equally bound to its own set of authorities and establishments. One is not true while the other is false; rather, both operate within their own systems of meaning-making and interpretation, with their own assumptions. Thus we should not declare either the traditional or the critical approach better or worse, preferable or not. Rather, we should recognize that we continue largely to inhabit the post-Enlightenment rationalistic mindset. Source criticism is no more a challenge to traditional