“It appears that everybody but Moses wrote the Torah.”
Book Review: Who Wrote the Bible?
0. What is this book, anyway?
Who Wrote the Bible?, Second Edition, by Richard Elliott Friedman
The Torah, also known as the first five books of the Christian Bible and the first five books of the Tanakh, are generally divvied up into Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. However, most people who attended a big fancy university on the subject will tell you that those books were not written in order, not written as those books, and not written by remotely the same author.
I know, I know, tradition says that Moses wrote the Torah. You’ve probably heard the jokes about how Numbers 12:3 makes that unlikely, and this book really gets into the nitty-gritty of how exactly we can be sure that that isn’t the case; but honestly, for me, what really cinched it was just reading the Torah straight through, from “In the beginning” to “in the sight of all Israel”. It’s clearly not the same guy! Not only is the writer working from a bunch of different sources, but it’s not even the same writer! It’s not just that each book is by a different writer - some paragraphs switch writers.
But maybe you want to form an opinion on this without having to read through six hundred and thirteen laws on not boiling a goat in its mother’s milk. Better yet, you’d like to know who exactly wrote one of the foundational texts of Western civilization. Well, the bad news is, we don’t know exactly who. But we can actually make some surprisingly educated guesses as to their backgrounds, nationalities (...besides just “probably Israelite”), agendas, and - in two cases - names! Enter Richard Elliott Friedman, who intends to explain to us just that.
0.5. Who wrote this book, anyway?
Before believing anything anyone says with “Bible” and “history” in the same sentence, paragraph, or day, it’s generally a good idea to see if they have any formal academic qualifications whatsoever. (I realize this is exactly the kind of credentialism we should be eschewing in our enlightened times, but you might not have seen the nuts I have when it comes to Biblical scholarship.) This goes double for books written for popular audiences, such as this one. Fortunately, however, Dr Friedman has a doctorate in Hebrew Bible and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard, a master's in same from same, and a master's in Hebrew Literature from the Jewish Theological Seminary. He was also a fellow at both Cambridge and Oxford, and was a professor (in relevant subjects) at UGA and UCSD. So we aren’t dealing with a Dinosaurs Built The Pyramids type here - or rather, if we are, at least he’s probably got good reasons for being one. Probably.
So. Dr Friedman - not to be confused with famed Biblical scholar David Noel Freedman - claims that he has a pretty good idea of who wrote the Torah. In fact, he claims that there’s a good chance that a certain glass display case in Israel has the autograph of the guy who wrote Deuteronomy! While he’s at it, he’s also going to make an argument for who wrote a good portion of the books after the Torah and up to 2 Kings, because why not.
Now, we should note that this book is a bit old. (I am reviewing the second edition, which came out in 1997; the first edition had come out ten years before.) I’m really not abreast on what the newfangled theories they discuss at Union and Princeton Theological Seminary are these days, so commenters feel free to tear to shreds every aspect of this book and/or review. But, since the broad strokes of what he says does approximately match the standard version of the Documentary Hypothesis, let’s assume that reviewing this book will give us more true information about the Bible than we had before.
0.75 What is the Bible, anyway? (Skip or skim this if you’re familiar with the basic story of the Bible)
Literary context: the Bible is a collection of religious works which, among other things, describes the legendary/mythical/religious history of Israel/the Israelites/the Hebrews/the Jews. Said collection has twenty-four to sixty-six sections (“books”), depending on which version you use. The first five of those books (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), are generally referred to as a collective by the name of ‘the Torah’; confusingly, ‘Torah’ literally means ‘law’, even though only part of the Torah is laws. The Torah is generally a mix of law and (supposed) history. Friedman’s book covers mainly the Torah and to a lesser extent the later books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings.
Historical context: the national god of Israel, historically, is a fellow whose name we don’t know. Probably it’s something like ‘Yahweh’, but all we know for sure is the consonants, which are YHWH. (Most English translations translate “YHWH” as “the LORD” and “Elohim” as “God”. The latter is an accurate translation, the former not so much.) YHWH was the supposed divine father of Jesus. The legendary ancestor of the Israelites/Hebrews/Jews is Abraham, whose grandson was Jacob, who was renamed Israel; his sons and grandsons founded the Tribes of Israel, and went down to Egypt. Said tribes all got enslaved by the Egyptian government a couple generations after (says the Bible). YHWH’s biggest prophet was Moses, who with the aid of YHWH led the Israelites/Hebrews/Jews out of bondage in Egypt and into their promised land of Israel/Canaan/the Levant. Once settled down, they were ruled by a loose theocracy until King Saul took over; after a lot of epic-type stuff, King David was the first imperial king of the whole realm. (Friedman takes the position that the two kingdoms, Israel in the North and Judah in the South, were sort of kind of basically more or less unitedish under David and Solomon. That’s more of a minority view today, but it is quite possible.) David’s son was the last king of the united kingdom; after him, the kingdom split (back) into Israel in the North and Judah in the South. History kept trundling along until the Assyrians invaded and deported a ton of the locals. Okay, that’s all the historical context we’ll need for now.
(Yes, it is extremely confusing that only half the Israelites lived in Israel, since Israel was next door to the Kingdom of Judah, where lived the other half of the Jews.)
I. The Documentary Hypothesis
Right, onto the good stuff. We’re all familiar with the Internet Atheists expounding upon the zillions of contradictions in the Bible. If you’re Jewish - or fundamentalist Protestant - you’re probably also familiar with the Heraclean efforts commentators go to to explain how Abraham was born in both Ur and Haran. But, I mean, come on; Biblical infallibility is clearly not what’s happening. Obviously the reason that God changes Jacob’s name to Israel twice isn’t because God changed Jacob’s name to Israel twice, but because there were two stories in which God changed Jacob’s name to Israel. Friedman goes into a brief history of how people gradually figured this out over the centuries - generally they realized that they should keep their dang mouths shut if they knew what was good for them - until we get to Julius Wellhausen in the nineteenth century, who put together the basic model of the Documentary Hypothesis we (or at least Friedman) use today.
The basic idea is as follows: Sometimes the Bible refers to God as “YHWH”. Sometimes the Bible refers to God as “Elohim”. When the Bible refers to “YHWH”, it’s usually portraying God as being a pretty anthropomorphic figure. When the Bible refers to “Elohim”, it’s usually portraying God as being a more metaphysical, high-up god. Sometimes if you take only the sentences belonging to the former category, and put them next to only the sentences in the latter category, you can see that each category tells a different version of the same story. (This is really obvious in the narrative of the Flood; each and every sentence in that story belongs to one of those two categories, and either can be read perfectly fluently in isolation.) Even among the stories that refer to God as “Elohim”, sometimes it’s super in favor of the Aaronid priesthood, and sometimes it’s super against the Aaronid priesthood; the former tends to show an even less anthropomorphic god than the latter; and sometimes you see doublets between those!
Also, sometimes the Bible is Deuteronomy.
So with this, we have four main sources: the Yahwist (abbreviated J), named for obvious reasons; the Priestly Source (abbreviated P), also named for obvious reasons; the Elohist (abbreviated E), also named for obvious reasons; and the Deuteronomist (abbreviated D), also named for obvious reasons.
This sounds super made-up. But if you really investigate it in detail, as Friedman and the last 150 years of exegetes have, there are actually a ton of things in the Torah that this model causes to make sense. For example, some passages of the Bible seem bizarrely pro-Aaron, which makes a lot more sense when you consider that one of the sources was written by Aaronid priests. Or, other passages seem bizarrely in favor of the Southern Kingdom of Judah over the Northern Kingdom of Israel, which makes a lot of sense when you consider that “YHWH” was the Southern way of referring to God. And there are so many doubled stories that call God “YHWH” in one version and “Elohim” in the other. As a quick and easy demonstration, Friedman demarcates the two Flood stories, and reading it, it’s pretty dang hard to say that the basics of the Documentary Hypothesis aren’t real.
II. J and E
Friedman begins by giving us a snapshot of Israel as it was from the end of the Bronze Age (when archaeology tells us the Israelites settled into permanent, non-nomadic dwellings) to the Assyrian Conquest. We have some nice little scene-setting to understand what sort of place the author would have herself lived in. For example:
People lived in one- and two-story homes, mostly of stone. In cities the houses were built closer together. Some of the cities had impressive water systems, including long underground tunnels and huge cisterns. Some houses had indoor plumbing. Cities were surrounded by walls. People ate beef, lamb, fowl, bread, vegetables, fruits, and dairy products. They made wine and beer. They made pots and jars of all sizes out of clay. Their metals were bronze, iron, silver, and gold. They had wind, string, and percussion instruments. Contrary to every Bible movie ever made, they did not wear kaffiyehs (Arab headdress).
J and E, says Friedman, lived in this period.
This sort of thing is neat just for background, but it can be pretty important as regards the geography (more on this below):
In the northeast was a beautiful freshwater lake, the Sea of Galilee. It flowed into the Jordan River to the south. The river flowed in a straight line south and emptied into the Dead Sea, which was…thick with salt. It was surrounded by hot wilderness….The northern part of the country was fertile, with plains, small hills and valleys. The center of the country had beaches and lowlands along the Mediterranean coast on the west, and hills and mountains on the east. The southern part of the country was largely desert. It was hot and humid along the coast, especially in summer. It was drier in the hills, still drier in the desert. It was cold enough to snow occasionally on the hills in winter. It was beautiful. The people could see the beauty of the sea, the beauty of the lake, flowers, and fields, and the beauty of desert all within a few miles of each other.
Friedman says that J lived in the South, in Judah. We can tell this for a few reasons. In a scene referring to God as “YHWH”, Abraham is described as living in the capital of Judah. In the version of the Covenant that refers to God as “YHWH”, God describes Abraham’s promised land as matching the supposed borders belonging to the Judahite king David. In a story that Friedman says belongs to J, the capital of Israel was founded via a brutal massacre the Israelites committed. In the scenes depicting the births of the sons (and grandsons) of Jacob, the tribes involved in the various stories referring to God as “YHWH” are the Tribe of Judah (and tribes who by the story’s writing no longer existed). In the J version of Jacob’s death, Jacob says that Judah is the best and will lord over the other tribes.
Similarly, it really looks like E lived in the North, in Israel. In a story referring to God as “Elohim”, Jacob names a city in Israel. E (says Friedman) described the capital of Israel as having been founded by a totally legitimate purchase, no massacres involved, nosiree. In the scenes depicting the births of the sons (and grandsons) of Jacob, the tribes involved in the various stories referring to God as “Elohim” are all Israelite tribes and only Israelite tribes. In the E version of Jacob’s death, Jacob gives a special blessing to the tribe that would later host Israel’s capital city.
You can see this kind of partisanship all over the Torah. There are two different versions of the one brother who tried to save Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat: in one version, it’s Judah, and in the other version, it’s the founder of the Israelite tribe of Reuben. Certain descriptions of royal borders pun, several times, on the name of a Judahite king. A story referring to God as “Elohim” says that Joseph’s bones were buried in the capital of Israel. J doesn’t do much with Joshua, a member of a Northern tribe, but E loves him. When the Hebrews arrive at the promised land in the Exodus, the spies report seeing various parts of Judah, and the only spy who’s virtuous in the story is a Judahite. J talks a lot about the Ark of the Covenant, which ended up in the capital of Judah (ie, Jerusalem, where was the Temple); E never mentions it.
This can lend itself to all sorts of interesting interpretations of various stories in the Bible. For example, “YHWH” says that Esau will be Jacob’s servant. Friedman argues that (since Esau represents Edom and Jacob the Israelites/Hebrews/Jews) J wrote this and E didn’t, because Edom was next door to Judah, and thus not really a place E would bother writing about.
Here’s another cool example. (For context: in ancient Israel, the priests were all descended from the tribe of Levi, and some of them were descended from a Levite named Aaron.) The Golden Calf scene portrays Aaron as acting disgracefully and the rest of the Levites as acting piously. Did you know that the Aaronid priests lived in the capital of Judah, and much of the non-Aaronid Levite priests lived in Israel? (This is one of the pieces of evidence indicating that E was a Levite but not an Aaronid.)
Admittedly, there is another thing that muddies the waters. In J, humanity always knew God’s name, ie YHWH. In E, God first reveals His name as YHWH to Moses on Mount Sinai. From then on, E is happy to refer to God as “YHWH”. Makes the source criticism more difficult. Happily, J almost never refers to God as “Elohim”, so it could be worse.
(Friedman buys into the theory that the Israelites were always in the Levant, worshiping El, until a bunch of Levites showed up from Egypt and said, “We’re the same people as you! We worship the same god, we just call him by a different name!” However, you need not believe that to realize that J and E have different ways of referring to God.)
Can we get any more specific about E other than “The guy who wrote the seven-day creation story probably lived in Israel”? Friedman says we can. E is even more pro-Moses than J, and pro-Levite but anti-Aaron, and seems to be really angry about an incident with the priests of Shiloh which they were also angry about. Thus, Friedman says E was likely a non-Aaronid, Levite priest of Shiloh.
We can also can get a good idea of some bones of political contention in ancient Israel simply by looking at what certain parts of the Bible are weirdly insistent about. For example, the J version of the Ten Commandments bans molten gods. When this was being written down, Israel had golden calf statues and Judah had gold-plated cherubs (in the Temple). By contrast, the E version of the Ten Commandments includes a ban on golden idols period.
(Like the polytheism, there’s a ton of idolatry in the Bible that the Biblical writers try really hard to justify or explain away.)
Similarly, Pharoah’s enslavement of the Hebrews is referred to by the same word as a tax that King Solomon imposed on the Israelites. Subtle! (Though likely this was written after the reign of Solomon himself, and was intended as a criticism of his subsequent dynasty.) J is not quite so heavy-handed, but what she lacks in politicization she makes up for in her enormously terribly puns that try to explain the etymology of basically everything and everyone, like how ‘Eve’ means ‘life’ because Eve is the mother of all living even though the Classical Hebrew words for ‘Eve’ and ‘life’ do not sound like each other.
“Hang on, [name],” you say. “Why do you keep referring to J as ‘she’? Was J a woman?”
Maybe. E, Friedman says, “was almost certainly a male.” E was, again, very probably a Levite priest, and therefore probably a fella. “The case is much harder to argue with J.” It’s definitely true that ancient scribes were usually male. However, J seems pretty concerned with the Judean court, where women had a relatively high status, and so she may have been one of those high-status women. And J on the whole is way, way, way more concerned with women than E is. (Harold Bloom insisted that J was a woman, and Friedman, in a later book, notes sharply that at no point did Mr Bloom cite him in doing so.) I myself refer to her as ‘she’ because in the Garden of Eden story (one of the stories that is almost universally assigned to J), the more feminist bits are subtle matters of wording, and the actual temptation scene is shown 100% from the perspective of a woman.
Now then, we get to see how J and E were stitched together. Answer: rather crudely.
II.5 J and E together
Friedman says that J and E got combined probably around 722 BCE, when the Assyrians smashed Israel and huge numbers of Northerners moved to Judah as a result.
The assimilation of recently arrived Israelites into the Judean population after 722 B.C. need not have presented insurmountable difficulties in itself. The Israelites and the Judeans were kin. They spoke the same language: Hebrew. They worshiped the same God: Yahweh. They shared ancestral traditions of the patriarchs [eg, Jacob] and historical traditions of exodus and wilderness. But what were they to do with two documents, each purporting to recount sacred national traditions, but emphasizing different persons and events - and occasionally contradicting each other? The solution, apparently, was to combine them.
Friedman says that the priests of the newly-cosmopolitan Judah wouldn’t have been able to get away with proclaiming J as the only correct text or E as the only correct text. “One could not tell the story of the events at Sinai without referring to the golden calf incident, for example, because someone in the audience (especially a former northerner) would remember the story and protest. One could not tell the story of Abraham without telling the story of the events at Hebron, because someone else in the audience (especially someone from Hebron) would object.” But if they kept both of the texts “side by side on the same shelf”, it would not be the best PR for there to be two obviously separate versions of Israel’s sacred history. So some priest or priests decided to combine the two sources into JE, which we will come across again later down the line. For now, let’s move on to P.
III. P
P is generally pretty easy to pick out, first because it’s really concerned with priestly stuff (eg, the Creation story is all about the Sabbath), and second because, Friedman says, “the language of P is so characteristic that undergraduate students can generally identify a P passage in the Bible on sight within weeks after being introduced to this study.” The whole of Leviticus is P - you may have guessed that from the name - and the source as a whole makes up about half the Torah
Friedman gives us a blow-by-blow of why he disagrees with the standard view on P, which I’ll mostly skip over. His main disagreements with the standard view are:
- That he thinks the prophets refer to P (which does appear true - “I looked at the earth, and here it was unformed and void, and to the heavens, and their light was gone” sounds a lot like a certain story lasting seven days, “multiply and be fruitful” is probably not a line Jeremiah came up with himself, Ezekiel is obviously quoting the components of the P covenant when he talks about a violation of the covenant, and so on; Friedman also cites a fancy linguistic analysis saying that P’s Hebrew is more archaic than the prophets’)
- That P wasn’t written in a society where everyone sacrifices in a central location (P keeps insisting that people sacrifice in a central location OR ELSE!, a concern that obviously would not be a thing in a society where everyone already did that)
- That academics are wrong in saying the P authors made up the Tabernacle to come up with a Mosaic rationale for all their rules about the post-Mosaic Temple (P described the Tabernacle as having different proportions than the Temple, and different materials, and a different layout, et cetera. Friedman argues that the Tabernacle fits the exact description of the center of the Holy of Holies, implying that there was a historical Tabernacle that was made the centerpiece of the Temple, or that the centerpiece was modeled off of the Tabernacle. He does provide a ton of circumstantial evidence for this, but Fermat’s Last Theorem).
You don’t have to agree with him on that last one to see that P probably predates the Prophets.
P was rather clearly written by an Aaronid priest. For example, if you look at the Plagues in Exodus, there are some really obvious parts where the writer is trying to shoehorn in Aaron for basically no reason. He was also working off the combined JE, since P was presumably written later and has waaaaay too many shared stories (25) to be a coincidence. The motivation for writing P was most likely the hilariously anti-Aaron content of JE, like how Aaron made the golden calf (and came up with the world’s lamest lie about it).
So basically, they wrote their own version: The Torah According to the Aaronids.
As one might expect, we see some doctrinal differences. P tries to tell us that “the consecrated priests are the only intermediaries between humans and God. In the P versions of the stories, there are no angels. There are no talking animals. There are no dreams. Even the word ‘prophet’ does not occur in P except once, and there it refers to Aaron.” P is also not a fan of mercy, preferring instead to show God’s “justice”. They also aren’t a fan of Moses (since, naturally, they prefer Aaron). And P really, really, really likes law.
As per usual with the Bible, we can also make a guess at the author’s identity by seeing who hated them. Deuteronomy quotes P, and Jeremiah at one point says, “How do you say, ‘We are wise, and YHWH’s torah is with us’? In fact, here, it was made for a lie, the lying pen of scribes.” Now, it sounds like Jeremiah is there referring to Deuteronomy. But he agreed with the Deuteronomist (more on him below) on basically everything! And presumably he was not attacking JE. No, it had to have been P he was denouncing as fraudulent. Thus, P lived before Jeremiah.
Since P was working off a combined J/E, P must have lived after 722 BCE. Since Jeremiah knew of P, it must have been written before Josiah’s death (more on that below) in 609 BCE. Happily for us, there was a king in between those two dates who was the only one to share both P’s love for centralized worship and opinion that the Aaronids were the only Levites fit to be priests. Also, Chronicles, which was written by Aaronid priests, loves that king. The king in question is Hezekiah, who will show up briefly below.
So did P live in the reign of Hezekiah? Maybe! P probably lived around that time period, at least. Friedman says that the person who wrote the stories of P most likely was one Aaronid priest living during the reign of Hezekiah, and who compiled (and added to) the holy laws.
IV. D
After the Assyrians basically destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE (deporting so many Israelites that that’s where we get the legend of the Ten Lost Tribes - ten of the twelve tribes were supposedly banished and never returned), the Hebrews/Israelites/Jews were mainly living in the Kingdom of Judah, which was theoretically under the broad power of Assyria. Shortly after 722 BCE, King Hezekiah came to the throne of Judah. According to the Biblical books of Isaiah and 2 Kings (and 2 Chronicles), he essentially banned all sacrifices to YHWH (and, apparently, to non-Yahwistic idols) at places other than the Temple. The Temple just so happened to be in Hezekiah’s capital of Jerusalem.
Assyria did not appreciate a vassal king banning the worship of Assyrian gods, but due to a shockingly well-historically-attested siege (we have both the Assyrians’ record of it and the Bible’s!), settled for being paid off. Since this siege was on Jerusalem, regarding the worship of YHWH, and the ultra-pious Hezekiah theoretically won, the end result of all this was that the Temple in Jerusalem was the Temple, the only proper place to offer sacrifices to YHWH. Decades later, King Josiah did the same thing, minus the war, destroying all non-Temple temples and mandating that the Temple was the Temple.
Why does all this matter? Because of a funny thing in 2 Kings. (I quote the later summation in 2 Chronicles, but it’s the same story.) The funny thing is as follows:
While they were bringing out the money that had been brought into the [Temple], the priest Hilkiah found the book of the law of YHWH given through Moses. Hilkiah said to the secretary Shaphan, "I have found the book of the law in the [Temple]"; and Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan. Shaphan brought the book to the king [Josiah]...Shaphan then read it aloud to the king. When the king heard the words of the law he tore his clothes. Then the king commanded Hilkiah..."Go, inquire of YHWH for me and for those who are left in Israel and Judah, concerning the words of the book that has been found; for the wrath of YHWH that is poured out on us is great, because our ancestors did not keep the word of YHWH, to act in accordance with all that is written in this book."
Once, when I sat in the Cathedral of [Redacted] as a young [redacted], this passage was the day’s scripture reading. I thought, “Does no one else find this incredibly suspicious?” The priests claim that they “discovered” a mysterious lost set of laws from Moses, and then the king says, ‘Aha! If we follow these rules, we’ll have God on our side, and the only reason this country is going to wrack and ruin is because we haven’t been obeying these rules already!’
(Shortly thereafter, King Josiah was killed at the age of forty by an Egyptian archer. His successors reinstated the non-Temple temples. But that’s not the point.)
This book of laws was the first ~95% of Deuteronomy, says Friedman. According to Friedman, most of Deuteronomy is written in essentially the same style as the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. What’s more, the laws of Deuteronomy set up the moral framework by which those later books judge the kings of Israel whom they depict. Thus, whoever wrote the bulk of Deuteronomy also wrote those other books; hence why are they are referred to as the Deuteronomistic History. However, this writer is a literal writer; much of the DH is taken from preexisting texts that he conservatively rewrote into a coherent and continuous narrative. (Kings took a lot more actual coming-up-with-words, since there was no single history of the two kingdoms.)
The Deuteronomistic History takes the stance that the line of David is destined to rule the Jews/Hebrews/Israelites forever, and that if any of the Davidic kings suffer in their reign it’s because said king is disobeying YHWH; and even the disobedient kings will not prevent the dynasty from having the throne for all eternity. Forever and ever, no kidding!
This provides us a handy little clue as to what the DH was written before.
In 587, as you may recall from history class, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon invaded and crushed Judah in a pretty brutal, humiliating, and agonizing way. The conquest involved (fainthearted readers, skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want to read Mycroft Canner’s fever dreams): the destruction of the Temple, a siege in which food got so scarce that mothers ate their own placentas and pretended to hide their own infants when in reality they had eaten them, and the king being forced to watch the execution of his sons and heirs before having his eyes put out so the last sight he ever had was of his children’s deaths.
At this point, basically every Judahite/Hebrew/Israelite/Jew fled to Egypt. The blind king was hauled off to Babylon along with a host of captives. The kingdom was well and truly fallen. So the DH was almost certainly (mostly) written before 587 BCE, because it would take a very foolish prophet to say that Judah would never fall after Judah had fallen. (Barring some careful wording.) Also, the DH refers to things remaining “to this day” even if those things were destroyed in 587.
The especially Biblically literate among you may object that actually the Book of Deuteronomy and the Book of Kings do talk about the fall of the kingdom when the Babylonians invade! Friedman says, yes they do, but those are pretty clearly post-facto edits hastily added to make the books seem not blatantly incorrect. But what about the lines that say the king will lose the throne of Israel when he turns away from YHWH? Those lines refer only to specifically the throne of Israel; “All of the unconditional passages spoke of the kings’ holding the throne.”
This petty difference of wording was not so petty to the writer. He had to deal with the historical [controversial] fact that David’s family started out ruling the whole united kingdom of Israel, but that they had lost all of it except their own tribe of Judah. He therefore pictured the covenant promise to David to be partly conditional and partly unconditional. The throne of Judah in Jerusalem was unconditional. It was to belong to David’s descendants forever. But the throne of all Israel was to belong to them only if they were worthy. Which they were not. And so they lost it.
(Friedman says that the writer didn’t make up this covenant, but probably just uniformized it from a preexisting tradition. It would have been difficult to make up a deal David made with God, four hundred years after David had died.)
So, who was this writer? Well, the DH spends a weirdly large amount of time talking about Josiah’s largely unsuccessful religious reforms, and describes him in the same words it uses to describe Moses but no other king, and describes him as reading the Torah like the priests did under Moses. Also, the DH says about Josiah:
And there was none like him before him, a king who returned to YHWH with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might according to all the law of Moses, and none arose like him after him.
Shockingly, Friedman thinks the DH was written in the reign of Josiah.
Friedman presents a slew of fiddly details to really hammer in the case, but really I’m willing to buy it already. (Oh, also, the DH criticizes every king except Josiah and Hezekiah for not abolishing the non-Temple temples until Josiah, after whom the issue isn’t even brought up. Same with comparing kings to David.)
However, the laws in Deuteronomy were probably not written by a member of Josiah’s court. We know this because one of the laws in Deuteronomy says that the king isn’t allowed to have too much money. Also, a couple of the military laws seem to presume a draft that was rescinded well before Josiah’s reign. And the laws in Deuteronomy are very pro-Levite, so we can probably be pretty safe in saying that the author was a Levite priest; but Deuteronomy also gives no special distinctions to the Aaronid Levites, or in fact mentions them at all, so the author probably wasn’t an Aaronid Levite.
Friedman does some more analysis of various parts of the Deuteronomy laws, and comes up with this:
The place to look for the author of Deuteronomy, therefore, [is] in a group (1) that wanted centralization of religion, but not tied to the ark [of the Covenant, the Indiana Jones one] or to the Jerusalem priesthood; (2) that cared about all Levites’ livelihood, but would enfranchise only a group of central Levites; (3) that accepted having a king, but wanted limitations on his rule; (4) that had a premonarchy approach to matters of war.
Friedman says this description matches the same folks who came up with E, namely the priests of Shiloh (albeit some centuries later). However, he says, the priests of Shiloh likely wrote only Deuteronomy’s law code; chapters one through eleven were added by the Deuteronomistic Historian, along with a scene where Moses writes the law code on a scroll and tells the Israelites to keep it in the Temple (well, Tabernacle).
(Also, the parts of E and the Book of Deuteronomy written before the Shilohites had access to the Ark don’t mention the Ark, but the parts written when the Shilohites did have access to the Ark do.)
So who’s the Deuteronomistic Historian? We can tell a few things about him:
“Okay, [name],” you say, “we get the picture! Friedman claims that Jeremiah wrote most of Deuteronomy and the four later books!”
Nope! See, we don’t actually think Jeremiah wrote anything. Because his own book, the Book of Jeremiah, wasn’t written by him! According to that very book, the prophet dictated it to his secretary: a man named Barcuh, son of Neriah. Not to say that an illiterate prophet couldn’t dictate a book or six, but the Book of Jeremiah contains lots of stuff that’s obviously by a narrator and not prophecy; the natural assumption is that Baruch wrote that stuff.
In the first edition of Who Wrote the Bible? I raised the possibility that Jeremiah might be the Deuteronomistic historian. I now admit that I was wrong and that such a speculation is extremely unlikely. It is far more probable that the author of the prose history in the book of Jeremiah was also the author of the Deuteronomistic history, whose prose resembles it so strikingly. What I do retain from my earlier views is the idea that it may be best to think of the Deuteronomistic writings as a collaboration, with Jeremiah, the poet and prophet, as the inspiration, and Baruch, the scribe, as the writer who interpreted history through Jeremiah’s conceptions.
And this is where the autograph comes in. In 1980, they dug up a seal which says, “in a Hebrew script of the late seventh and early sixth century” BCE, “belonging to Baruch son of Neriyah the scribe…It is now located in the Israel Museum. It means that we have the signature of the recorder - and possibly the author/editor - of eight books of the Bible.”
IV.5 D, Second Edition
But remember how Josiah died unexpectedly and the kingdom’s religion went to heck? So did Baruch! (Or Jeremiah, whoever.) After that happened, some twenty-two years after the writing of the first portion of Deuteronomy, he snuck in prophecies in Deuteronomy saying that the Israelites would be exiled, and put one in the DH saying that YHWH cursed Jerusalem because of what Josiah’s grandfather had done as king. However, he couldn’t get away with editing out the Davidic Covenant, so he said that it was the people of Judah who had turned away from God, not the king.
Friedman essentially admits that it’s hard to prove any single line was really a later insertion. Part of it is him basically asking us to take his word that he, as an expert on Biblical Hebrew, can notice weird inconsistencies in grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. But I think what makes him sure is the sheer inconsistency we have of a book that seems to be constantly switching back and forth between saying that the king will rule forever and that the king is doomed. (And it really is true that there are ridiculously clear-cut verses saying things like THE TEMPLE WILL STAND FOR ALL ETERNITY NO MATTER WHAT and also verses saying things like Welp, Jerusalem’s gonna be razed.)
Are we certain that this later editor was the same guy as the DH? Friedman’s pretty sure. The later editor wrote in the exact same style as the first edition and yet didn’t see the need to actually rewrite more than a few sentences of it. Friedman admits that it could have been a student of the first guy or something along those lines (in fact, he says that’s the majority view), but says the writing style is just so similar that it’s most likely the same person.
Upon reading this, one might get tempted to get mad at Baruch (or whoever) for forging a history of God’s Chosen People, thereby damaging the historical record for all time and having enormous repercussions when it ended up incorporated into the holy text of the largest empire the world had ever seen. Friedman says this characterization would be unfair.
Jeremiah…and Baruch were no frauds, pious or otherwise. The Deuteronomistic Historian built his history around the Deuteronomic law code, which was an authentically old document, and which he may well have believed to be by Moses himself. He used other documents as well, and he fashioned a continuous history out of them. His own additions to that history gave it structure, continuity, and meaning. His last chapters told of events that he had witnessed personally. There need not be anything fraudulent in this. Quite the contrary. It rather appears to be a sincere attempt, by a sensitive and skillful man, to tell his people’s history - and to understand it.
V. R
Finally, the three main sources - J/E, P, and D (not including the additional DH) - were combined into one Torah. The usual way of referring to the guy who did that is R, for Redactor. He was actually very careful about what he did. He couldn’t delete any story that people would complain would be missing. D had been read to the public every seven years, so he couldn’t leave out anything from it that anyone might remember. “J and E had been around for centuries and were quoted in D. P had been around since Hezekiah’s days, it had been associated with a national reform, and it had the support of the priesthood that was in power.” But he had to combine them, since they were all supposedly by Moses, and it was not a good look to have three mutually contradictory versions of the same story by the same supposed author!
His only guideline seems to have been to retain as much of the original texts as possible without intolerable contradictions. The evidence for this is that when we separate JE from P in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, each flows sensibly on its own with very few gaps in its story. There are few signs of the redactor’s having cut anything.
Sometimes he could be very simple about it. Two creation stories? Put one after the other! Sometimes it was more difficult. Two stories obviously describing the exact same flood? Better do this sentence-by-sentence. Sometimes he had to take some liberties.
In the case of the story of the rebellion at Peor…he cut off the beginning of the P story and the end of the JE story to create the continuity he sought. Did it bother him that the seductive women were Moabite in the first half of the story and Midianite in the second half? Apparently not.
…Thus some repetitions and contradictions were tolerable to him, and some were not. He was not prepared to have two floods that each destroy all the world except for a man named Noah. But he was willing to have Moses strike two rocks at two places called Meribah.
He also had to figure out when everything took place relative to each other, so the story would be more or less in chronological order. Makes the poor schlubs at DC Comics look like pikers, hey?
He did write Numbers 15, because that’s an obvious tack-on: it’s a whole section of the law that, unlike every other section of P ever, gives rules for sacrifices without saying they have to be at the Tabernacle. This is because R was, of course, living after 587, when the Temple was destroyed. He also composed a bunch of lone sentences “to enhance the transitions and combinations of his sources and to clarify or emphasize points that were especially important to him.”
R had to have been an Aaronid priest, or at least a huge fan of them, because: each of the five books begin with P extracts, the P Book of Generations begins each major section, the Egyptian plagues are broken up and uniformized by P quotes, and his own occasional insertions are written in a similar style to P.
This redactor was an Aaronid priest like the person who produced P. But, ironically, his task was the exact opposite of that earlier person’s. The person who produced P was fashioning a work that was an alternative to earlier sources (JE). The redactor was fashioning a work that reconciled opposing sources. This was the key I found which, I believe, along with other supporting evidence, made it possible to separate P and the redactor’s work from each other. The P texts struggled with the other sources. The redactor’s text embraced them.
Okay, so who was this guy? Do we know his name? You guessed it: probably! Friedman says that R is most likely none other than Ezra. This is because…well, actually, Friedman presents essentially no hard evidence for this identification. It’s basically just the common-sense guess that the R must have been a big enough deal that the Bible would have at least mentioned him, and of all the people in that time period whom the Bible mentions, only one of them was a huge enough deal to possibly get away with making the Torah. “He had the backing of the emperor…And his authority was directly linked to a scroll that he brought to Judah, a scroll that is identified as ‘the Torah of Moses which YHWH God of Israel gave.’” See, Ezra - according to the Bible - was the first person to present the Torah to the people of Israel. Also, when he did so, it included a passage nobody had ever heard of…which actually is in the Torah, in a really random place that makes it look like it was a post-facto insert by, oh, I don’t know, Ezra.
This does not prove that it absolutely had to be Ezra who fashioned the Five Books of Moses. But he was in the right priestly family, in the right profession, int he right place, in the right time, with the authority, and with the first known copy of the book in his hand. If it was not Ezra himself who composed the work, then it was someone close to him - a relative, a colleague in the priesthood, a fellow scribe - because it could not have been produced very long before he arrived with it in Judah. The Temple had been standing for only about one generation when he came to Jerusalem.
Friedman talks for a bit about how mashing all the sources into one Frankensteinian book creates literary juxtapositions that add rich and fascinating new readings to one of the foundation texts of Western Civilization or whatever, but honestly after all this I find myself wishing that somebody had kept a copy of the sources in their original forms. Imagine if we had to read Hamlet without knowing that the Gesta Danorum was a thing.
...Though now that I type that example out, I remember that we’re actually not sure what the main source of Hamlet was. And we’re poorer for it!
VI. What to make of all this
Should you buy this book, or at least borrow it from the library? If you want more details and more fiddly little bits of evidence, yes. If you want to see exactly which parts of the Bible Friedman claims are from which author, yes, because that’s listed in the appendix (though if that’s what you’re after then you’re probably much better off buying his later book The Bible With Sources Revealed…unless you’re colorblind). I can’t help but curse the citation system he uses (requires you to have three pages open at once), but it might be a handy book to have in your library just to refer back to. If you’re a Christian or Jew who cares about Torah, it would probably be pretty useful to have a better idea of various authors’, well, agendas.
I’d say the biggest failing of this book is the lack of control group. (The exception to this is his claim that the DH is ridiculously pro-Josiah; Friedman convincingly compares the DH’s treatment of the very similar king Hezekiah.) Biblical source analysis is a Rubik’s Cube of “Okay, so if the presence of the Divine Name indicates this passage is J, then probably its obvious distaste for the Northern Kingdom reflects J’s, unless J actually wasn’t as nationalistic as we thought she was and actually this is one of the few E passages to use the Divine Name…”, and Friedman doesn’t do an amazing job of proving that you can’t use just-as-convincing reasoning to come up with a totally different source theory. To be sure, some of the conclusions he draws are undeniable: you can’t possibly say that the two creation stories in Genesis don’t portray YHWH to be a more anthropomorphic god than Elohim. But some of the nitty-gritty, like pointing out that the supposedly-J extracts use certain words way more than the supposedly-E extracts do, aren’t as obvious. I’m sure that this is partially due to being a book written for general audiences; presumably his more academic papers go more in-depth on the minutia of evidence. Still, it makes it a bit harder to trust the details.
But this is a book worth reading! Even if it’s proven by future/modern/past scholarship to be totally wrong in the details, it’s valuable simply as an introduction to the basics of where the Torah comes from. The Bible is one of the most influential books in the world - and, if you count the good parts, one of the best books in the world - so any information we can gain about who wrote it and why is invaluable.
But I will be up-front and say that if you think this review is enough to never read the book, I will not blame you.