properly stated, the documentary hypothesis is a very modern thing, formulated by wellhausen in 1870's. however, he was influenced in part by rabbinical observations of peculiarities in the text, and in part by scholarly thought that already existed.
other than this particular reference on religioustolerance.org
quote:
The belief, centuries ago, by archaeologists and linguists that writing among the ancient Hebrews only developed after the events portrayed in the Pentateuch. Thus, Moses would have been incapable of writing the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures.
i'm not aware of any such argument. religioustolerance.org is a somewhat useful site for basic information on things, but this is hardly scholarly work here. and it's incredibly vague. which archaeologists or linguists? how many centuries ago? specifics, please.
and, to be fair, modern archaeology isn't even quite "centuries" (plural) old. it's mid 19th century... just like the documentary hypothesis, the discovery of gilgamesh, etc. but to my knowledge, wellhausen's claims weren't even particularly new, just collecting bits that had already been known into a coherent theory.
the earlier enlightenment scholarly work, and rabbinical commentary, (all pre-archaeology) was entirely based on textual criticism. "they didn't know how to write back then!" might be something you hear (uninformed) people say on the internet, though, which is likely why it appears on religioustolerance.org.
wikipedia has a much more comprehensive and specific rundown. and for the real arguments, i suggest pretty much anything by friedman ("who wrote the bible" or "the bible with sources revealed" are fairly good, iirc).
Not what I mean. The "one specific angle" involves only textual criticism. It doesn't bring other factors into play, like literary content or cultural context.
err, any good textual criticism pays attention to literary content, cultural content, cultural context, historical context, socio-political context, etc...
And I know you say you don't see a big difference between before and after Genesis 12, but I honestly do. For instance, Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden isn't simply their own expulsion, but everyone's.
how do you figure? they're simply the first in the genealogies of the hebrew people. as evidenced by the story itself, once they leave the garden, there are already other people around.
All of the biblical genealogies essentially spring from Adam, therefore his story is a universal story.
doesn't follow. it's still a very personal story, about one man and his wife (and a talking snake). you're reading universality from
implication, because what adam does affects all of his descendents (who just happen to be everyone). the same could be said for noah. but the problem is that the authors of the text
aren't concerned with everyone. they're concerned with the ethnographic history of the hebrew people -- see how the promises get passed down from abraham, to isaac, to jacob? they're not concerned about ishmael, or esau, and go to great lengths to justify why that promise doesn't apply to them and their descendants. this is the same with adam and his son -- what ever happened to cain? nothing's ever heard from him again. the author is only concerned with the happenings of the patriarchs in the line to the (then) modern hebrew people.
i'm not sure, exactly, how you can force this
implicit difference, but fail to see the
explicit difference between the universal "mankind" in genesis 1 and the personal "the man" in genesis 2.
I'm not using modern science to analyze the text. I'm using modern science to supplement what the text itself tells us. Remember, when this text was originally written, the context would've been perfectly clear to anyone reading it. But now, thousands of years later, it's not. We know through science what the average lifespan was back then. We know from what the text tells us that the lifespan of the patriarchs was said to be much longer.
what conclusions would the ancient reader draw from this? what conclusion would the ancient reader have drawn from the immortal utnapishtim?
The way this passage is written is thus. Just like Jacob/Israel is said to "struggle" with God, this passage describes God's spirit as "striving" with man. But the text puts this in the negative: God's spirit will not continually strive with man. Why? Because he is flesh, and his days will be 120 years. But as you pointed out, it takes several more generations before his lifespan finally does get that short. The alternative -- that there are roughly 120 years until the Flood -- doesn't fit the context of what's being said.
sure it does.
Both before this verse and after this verse, the subject is intermarriage. It would make very little sense for this not to be referring to the end result of that intermarriage.
yes, the offspring of the sons of god, and the daughters of men. the "giants" or men of great renown. there's obviously something about this that god finds troubling, i agree. but it doesn't seem to be about limiting their lifespans -- it seems to be in context of the flood. god is
repentant that he made man, and aims to right that wrong.
In any case, it looks like Noah waited until he was about 500 years old to marry, likely because there wasn't anyone left who hadn't already intermarried with people not descended from Adam. His sons were the first to die younger than the average at the time, and it kept going down from there.
but you don't get a figure less than 120 until the very end of genesis. it's clear that god wasn't talking about that. he said, "let there be light" and there was light. he said, "mankind gets 120 years to their lives" and has to wait more than a thousand years for his commandment to be fulfilled?
How about the fact that Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers are all given in the context of the 40-year wanderings, and Deuteronomy is supposed to address how they are to live once they're in the promised land?
...yet largely repeats exodus, leviticus, and numbers? clearly, the laws given in exodus weren't just meant for the sinai, they were supposed to not honor other gods when they got to the promised land, too. well call it "deuteronomy" because so much of it just re-hashes what's already been said in other books of the law. the issue, though, is that there are a few conspicuous additions.
And what anachronisms? Anything that can't be explained instead by later editing by Josiah?
no, they're all explained by editing under josiah. as is
the rest of the book. deuteronomy is very obviously using source material we're familiar with: something very much like the rest of the torah that we have today. so, of course, the parts we're interested in are the parts that would have been editted under josiah. the rest is essentially old hat.
but this is not to say that these sources were copied
in whole cloth, no. clearly all or nearly all of deuteronomy was re-written from those sources as a new document. it was not simply redaction that went on. the argument for that comes from the writing style, and comparison to the other texts (and, i believe extra-biblical texts). dueteronomy has a much more evolved writing style than really any of the other sources in the torah.
Also compare Job 9:8-9 and Amos 5:8. I find it very interesting that Egyptian mythology connects the seven stars of the Pleiades with the "way of Horus" (represented by the constellation Orion) that leads back to the place where creation occurred. This place was destroyed in some cataclysm, from which a new creation arose from the watery depths, in the place of reeds. It looks to me like both Job and Amos were referring to these myths -- even if only by polemic -- when they used these astrological symbols.
perhaps. i think that might be reading too much into it, though.
אָרַח
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