Treatment of the Bible as a historical text

It's been awhile since I read the analysis of the Pentauch where it's shown that different sources were used. The "El" source using Elohim was one source, there was also the Jahwist source, a priestly and one other, which escapes me at the moment. Whoever wrote Genesis fit these stories together but didn't entirely reconcile them, thus the two creation stories have slightly different orders of events, etc.El was a god who was later asssimilated to Jahwah. The Torah was written after the return of the exiles from Babylon and many sources were fit together. These traditions seem to have carried enough weight that the priests who created the Torah wouldn't change them to eliminate all variance but rather intercut them to include the variations. They also seemed to include material from Babylon such as the flood story.lfen

Arachnophilia,You are a lover of spiders? I had this golden garden spider I named Beauty when I was a boy. I thought everyone would want a golden garden spider for their gardens. They made beautiful webs, had a beautiful golden sunbursts on their bellies, and caught flying bugs that could threaten the garden. I tried to sell her babies door to door. My potential customers looked aghast. I had to accept that.Here is the last book I read on this. It was a very interesting read and was in my public library. It might be found in yours if you want to pursue it a bit.Title: Who wrote the Bible? / Richard Elliott Friedman. BookAuthor: Friedman, Richard Elliott
Publisher, Date: Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice Hall, c1987.Here is a quote about this book from this webpage:http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mbible1.html"Scholars in late 18th century Germany noted that in most of the duplicated stories, one set described God using the Hebrew word Elohim (usually translated "God") while the other set tended to use God's four-lettered Name Y-H-W-H (usually translated "Lord," sometimes miscalled "Jehovah.") This gave rise to the theory that there were two different authors, one called E and one called J (German for Y), whose works were somehow combined to form a single text.Later analysis of the grammar, vocabulary, and writing style provided evidence for two other authors--called P for the Priestly author (mostly Leviticus, and lots of the genealogy) and D for the Deuteronomist, since the book of Deuteronomy seemed different (grammatically and politically) from the earlier books. The multiple-author view has come to be called the "Documentary theory.""Our favorite interpretation of the Documentary theory is presented by Richard E. Friedman in his book, "Who Wrote the Bible?" It's a marvelous book, written for the lay person, and you feel like you're reading a detective story as Friedman disentangles various threads and ties the authorship to historical events. Friedman's version is summarized below (most dates are rough approximations)."So a lot of scholarly work has been done along the lines you are pursuing. Have fun!lfen

I'll try the fancy quote thing, alright, the quotes work for me now. Yeah, the sources were interleaved. In telling the "In the beginning" part the Redactor used first one story and then the other story, and so it goes. Two versions were used of Noah and the ark for example.lfen