However that article contains a number of flaws. She's good on the archaeology, but not so hot when it comes to the textual criticism or her conclusions about the relevant texts. She makes a strangely sweeping judgement when she says:
Yet if the historical reality of Joseiah's reforms is doubtful, so is the historical reality of an historian who wrote contemporanously to them.
But who thinks that the entire account of Josah's reform is contemporaneous? The passage is clearly heavily supplemented. At least three distinct strata can be found, and only the "cleansing" of the Jerusalem temple cult, making it a Yahweh-only site, can surely be attributed to the earliest stratum. (The extension of this "reform" to outlying areas of Israel is awkwardly inserted into the earlier account and the Bethel story is manifestly an even later myth.)
semiopen wrote:Sort of amazing that the DH sort of seemed to weather these storms but the lack of younger adherents will eventually make its obsolescence obvious.
The DH has survived - albeit in variously amended forms - because although the chronological and historical ideas that Wellhausen developed have indeed suffered major criticism, especially in recent years, the identification of the sources J, E, D, P, and the concept of their amalgamation is still pretty useful in terms of a purely
literary criticism. The DH can and has survived the attacks on the chronological suppositions, because the difference between the major strands of the Pentateuch (Hexateuch?) is the central insight of the theory and one that still has value.
semiopen wrote:Once we get past the 7th century BCE, we're pretty much looking at the exile and after.
But nothing Fried says moves the
terminus post quem for Deuteronomy "past the 7th Century" She says:
The Temple's miraculous survival in 701 after the demise of every other cult site may have given rise to the belief that the Temple in Jerusalem was the only place in which YHWH had caused his name to dwell. The doctrine of cult centralization elucidated in Deuteronomy 12 as not a program for the future, it was an interpretation and explanation of a devastating present. [p.461]
Not only does that
not exclude the possibility that Deuteronomy's centralisation doctrine was written in the 7th Century (i.e. in the years immediately following Hezekiah's reign), it actually
confirms the traditional Wellhausen chronology. I'm not particularly advocating that early dating, but the truth is that neither the archaeology, nor Fried's essay, rules it out.