The Problem With The Theory That the Pentateuch Was Written in Alexandria

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Secret Alias
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Re: The Problem With The Theory That the Pentateuch Was Written in Alexandria

Post by Secret Alias »

Actually, it has been argued that virtually NO Jerusalem traditions appear in the Pentateuch at all.
It's a northern Israelite document. Look at the geography. Look at where the Patriarchs are buried.
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neilgodfrey
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Re: The Problem With The Theory That the Pentateuch Was Written in Alexandria

Post by neilgodfrey »

Thank you, Austen, for your detailed responses. I look forward to studying and responding to them with equal thoroughness.

I will attempt (where I think I can) to reconstruct some of your arguments so they are even stronger. For example, whenever I see an argument presented as a rhetorical question I am reminded of Daniel Dennett's words in Darwin's Dangerous Idea (p. 178):

I advise my philosophy students to develop hypersensitivity for rhetorical questions in philosophy. They paper over whatever cracks there are in the arguments.

austendw wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 7:54 am Why is the command not to "seethe a kid in its mother's milk" (or "boil a suckling kid" according to another interpretation) repeated verbatim in three places (Exod. 23:19b; Exod. 34:26b; Deut. 14:21b)? Why did a "contemporary collaboration" come up with three statements of exactly the same rule, situated in three quite distinct law codes? It should be pointed out that modern scholarship no longer considers Exodus 34:11-26 as an earlier Yahwistic text makes an attempt to incorporate and conflate laws from different codes and remove (or paper over?) the conflicts between them. As one of the codes included in this is HS, and literary criticism has determined that HS is not a source independent of P, but a supplementary expansion of it, we can establish a diachronic succession: P > HS > Ex 34:11-26.
What comes to my mind with that question is all the times I read repetitions of details, motifs, sayings, in works of single authors from ancient times from ancient epics right through to the New Testament narratives and up to today.

But to turn the scenario implied in the question around:

I try to imagine a scribe reading the law about seething the kid in its mother's milk written by a scribe of a previous generation. Why does that scribe or priest decide to add those words a second time to the text "in another law code"? Why repeat what's already there?

But the problem increases. In a later generation we have another priestly scribe now reading the same law twice. Why does that third scribe decide it is a good idea to add some more code where the same law is repeated so it now appears a third time?

In other words, does such repetition really advance the diachronic argument?

Or does the diachronic hypothesis raise bigger problems than it answers?

More to follow.
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neilgodfrey
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Re: The Problem With The Theory That the Pentateuch Was Written in Alexandria

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Secret Alias wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 11:14 am
Actually, it has been argued that virtually NO Jerusalem traditions appear in the Pentateuch at all.
It's a northern Israelite document. Look at the geography. Look at where the Patriarchs are buried.
Yeh, the Greeks had no right to be there, nor even in Alexandria. Interlopers! Trespassers! Invaders!
austendw
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Re: The Problem With The Theory That the Pentateuch Was Written in Alexandria

Post by austendw »

neilgodfrey wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 2:34 am Anyone who is confused after skimming through the exchange between austendw and me might find points of interest in Can the Documentary Hypothesis be Rehabilitated -- that's an article by Russell Gmikin that, in my view, goes for the jugular of the argument.
I read this when it was first published and wasn't impressed - largely because it seems to rely on as text analysis that is uncritically based on that of Richard Elliott Friedman in the 1980s (albeit without Friedman's chronological scheme, of course) which much modern scholarship has rather significantly undermined. My recent skim of the footnotes of that 2020 essay showed that the vast majority of the "modern" scholars referenced were writing before 2000 and though the last 20 years have been very productive in some scholarly circles, Gmirkin doesn't refer to their very different literary analyses of the Pentateuchal texts at all. Anyhow, it looks like I'm going to have to re-read the essay and respond.
neilgodfrey wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 2:34 amThe reason I have repeatedly asked in this thread for data that can only be explained by authors of different historical periods adding their layers to the Pentauech is that I cannot escape the possibility that all the examples cited so far can even more simply be explained as evidence of collaborative authorship! That is, scribes of different ideological perspectives sitting down together and producing a document for "all parties".
It may be simpler, but I cannot see that there is evidence, simple or otherwise, of collaborative authorship. I am of course distinguishing authorship from redactional activity, which is quite a different matter.
neilgodfrey wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 2:34 amOne does not need to confine oneself to Gmirkin to acknowledge the evidence for such a cooperative effort.
Who else really does argue for "collective authorship"? There have certainly been scholarly arguments in favour of collaborative redaction by Samaritan and Judean scholars, a sort of scholarly "compromise" to produce an authoritative text that was acceptable to both parties. But collective authorship? Who other than Gmirkin argues for this?

(As I mentioned earlier, John S Bergsma argues that that Judean input into the Pentateuch may actually be rather less than commonly thought. If this is the case then "collaboration" or "compromise" may not really be appropriate descriptions of what was going onat all. For example, it is a commonplace of modern scholarship that the originally northern story of the founding of Bethel received a subsequent emphatically Yahwist Judean redaction, but evidence that the revision was actually Judean is not actually particularly strong. Yahweh was worshipped in the north too, after all so there's no reason why the updating of an earlier pre-Yahwist foundation story with Yahwistic terminology needs to be considered particularly Judean in nature)

Meanwhile, Neil and others, may wish to read the Introduction to "Social Groups Behind the Pentateuch" - which is very germane to the discussion, but is a completely different different take on the subject. It does mention the work of many recent scholars that Gmirkin doesn't discuss in his essay.
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Re: The Problem With The Theory That the Pentateuch Was Written in Alexandria

Post by austendw »

Secret Alias wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 11:14 am
Actually, it has been argued that virtually NO Jerusalem traditions appear in the Pentateuch at all.
It's a northern Israelite document. Look at the geography. Look at where the Patriarchs are buried.
Er.... Hebron. Seventeen miles south of Jerusalem.
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Re: The Problem With The Theory That the Pentateuch Was Written in Alexandria

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austendw wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 11:41 am
neilgodfrey wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 2:34 amThe reason I have repeatedly asked in this thread for data that can only be explained by authors of different historical periods adding their layers to the Pentauech is that I cannot escape the possibility that all the examples cited so far can even more simply be explained as evidence of collaborative authorship! That is, scribes of different ideological perspectives sitting down together and producing a document for "all parties".
It may be simpler, but I cannot see that there is evidence, simple or otherwise, of collaborative authorship. I am of course distinguishing authorship from redactional activity, which is quite a different matter.
It is a matter of interpretation. One interprets the overlaps, stratification, etc as either accumulations over an extended time or one interprets them as some sort of collaborative project.

The evidence is the same as yours -- the inferred different social, religious groups etc. who contributed to the different layers.

Did they succeed each other over an extended time or did they work together?

This brings us to what we can infer about the social-economic-religious-political conditions at different times of Samaritan and "Jerusalem-oriented" histories from the independent evidence -- usually archaeology.

austendw wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 11:41 am(As I mentioned earlier, John S Bergsma argues that that Judean input into the Pentateuch may actually be rather less than commonly thought. If this is the case then "collaboration" or "compromise" may not really be appropriate descriptions of what was going onat all. For example, it is a commonplace of modern scholarship that the originally northern story of the founding of Bethel received a subsequent emphatically Yahwist Judean redaction, but evidence that the revision was actually Judean is not actually particularly strong. Yahweh was worshipped in the north too, after all so there's no reason why the updating of an earlier pre-Yahwist foundation story with Yahwistic terminology needs to be considered particularly Judean in nature)
Again the same question: How likely is it that those with a particular agenda added to a document with a contrary agenda instead of replacing it or revising it entirely to conform to what they believed the correct agenda?

If they kept different agendas side by side then some might think that suggests some sort of collaborative compromise.
austendw wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 11:41 amMeanwhile, Neil and others, may wish to read the Introduction to "Social Groups Behind the Pentateuch" - which is very germane to the discussion, but is a completely different different take on the subject. It does mention the work of many recent scholars that Gmirkin doesn't discuss in his essay.
The concluding sentence there:

The volume may nevertheless contribute to a renewed discussion of the shift of the focus of the pentateuchal study from the literary stratification of different layers to social, economic, religious, and political agendas behind the texts and the scribes who produced them.

The question raised by the Hellenistic provenance viewpoint is whether such agendas came one after the other or were in some sort of contemporary dialogue.
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Re: The Problem With The Theory That the Pentateuch Was Written in Alexandria

Post by neilgodfrey »

StephenGoranson wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 4:49 am besides the acrobatics of defending the Gmirkin scenario while simultaneously distancing from it,
It's called referencing independent sources for information that supports a thesis.

(Let me be clear, though, Stephen. My "distancing" from Gmirkin's scenario us not the result of any embarrassment or shame to be associated with his arguments. The only reason I returned to this forum after a little hiatus was because I had learned that various persons here were ridiculing and smearing Gmirkin and I chose to defend him and his work against misrepresentation.)
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Re: The Problem With The Theory That the Pentateuch Was Written in Alexandria

Post by austendw »

neilgodfrey wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 11:35 amI advise my philosophy students to develop hypersensitivity for rhetorical questions in philosophy. They paper over whatever cracks there are in the arguments.
Firstly, I didn't mention the three law codes with repeated laws as an argument in favour of diachronicity as such - I have other arguments for that. And it wasn't a rhetorical question at all. I was asking you a question I hoped you would answer: namely how Gmirkin's scenario can explain the three laws in three separate law corpora. But you have actually answered a question with another question and avoided giving an answer to mine.

Be that as it may:
neilgodfrey wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 11:35 am I try to imagine a scribe reading the law about seething the kid in its mother's milk written by a scribe of a previous generation. Why does that scribe or priest decide to add those words a second time to the text "in another law code"? Why repeat what's already there?

But the problem increases. In a later generation we have another priestly scribe now reading the same law twice. Why does that third scribe decide it is a good idea to add some more code where the same law is repeated so it now appears a third time?

In other words, does such repetition really advance the diachronic argument?

Or does the diachronic hypothesis raise bigger problems than it answers?

Actually I think there are a couple of pretty compelling diachronic explanations for the repetition of particular laws in their different law corpora.

(1) The two later Law Codes were conceived as separate revisions or update of the earlier law collection that were not desgned to appear in the same collection as the earlier version. Deuteronomy was its own book, with its own introduction (and its noticeable that the historical survey in the introduction to Deuteronom, itself probably later than the laws themselves, does not suggest that Moses recited the CC to the people at Horeb, so there's no reason for an early reader of Deuteronomy to think that that there was any other law corpus other than this one. In such a scenario, the compiler of Deuteronomy (D) would have been happy to include earlier laws that unobjectionable, hence the repetition of the suckling kid law. Only later, when the CC was added to the Exodus narrative, and redactors linked Deuteronomy to Exodus via Leviticus and Numbers, did the two sets of laws appear in the same five-book "anthology". Something similar was presumably behind the way the Holiness Code was conceived by its authors/tradents, though there is evidence that they were aware of both the CC and D. They were happy to include the suckling kid law in their code, which was part of a collection of purely priestly documents that had not yet been amalgamated with non-priestly narratives in Exodus or with Deuteromony. However, not long afterwards, perhaps, all three law codes became part of the amalgamated Pentateuch or Hexateuch, or whatever the combined anthology first looked like before further supplements were added.

(2) There are other possibilities for other diachronic explanations of similarities in laws. There are some indications that the various law collections didn't start their lives quite as alike as they subsequently became. Either (a) at an earlier stage, when there were "rival" law corpora each in their own literary contexts or (b) at a later stage (possibly a bit more likely), when the laws had all been collected by incorporation in the proto-pentateuchal narrative setting, scholars or scribes remedied the apparent differences in the corpora by adding laws from other corpora and so harmonising them. Sara Milstein in "Making a Case" (an intriguing discussion of the Pentateuch's casuistic laws and their pedagogic scribal origins which I only know of because Neil has mentioned it on this board) has argued very plausibly that, because Ex 21:13-14 interrupt the squence of "he shall surely be put to death" pronouncements of the verses surrounding it, it is likely that "Exod 21:13-14 constitutes an addition that was inspired by Deut 19:4-13, given the shared illogical sequence and the vague reference to Yahweh appointing 'a place to which [the killer] can flee'." We have a number of harmonistic DSS texts such as 4QDeutn, where where a scribe has written the basic Deuteronomy text of the 4th commandment (Sabbath) but added the Exodus explanation that isnt in Deuteronomy. So there is clear evidence that this sort of thing happened.

The first of the above diachronic explanations is more theoretical, the latter more literary-critical. They are not mutually exclusive.

So, back to my non-rhetorical question...
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Re: The Problem With The Theory That the Pentateuch Was Written in Alexandria

Post by austendw »

neilgodfrey wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 1:17 pm It is a matter of interpretation. One interprets the overlaps, stratification, etc as either accumulations over an extended time or one interprets them as some sort of collaborative project.

The evidence is the same as yours -- the inferred different social, religious groups etc. who contributed to the different layers.

Did they succeed each other over an extended time or did they work together?
Well, literary criticism has certain "rules". There are certain identifiable technical factors that can distinguish an earlier and a later text by one's literary relation to another. And if there are supplements to supplements one can identify a relative chronology. It is for example quite clear that when laws concerning the Sabbath day and how holy and significant it is can I think always be shown to be supplementary additions to earlier base texts. The Sabbath laws are always supplements added to earlier texts. The most obvious case is the first in Genesis 1. The six day creation scheme plus a rest day, awkwardly added to the eight acts of creation, added to the the fact that no other cosmogonic narrative anywhere divides the process into days, strongly indicates that these passages were added to an earlier creation account that lacked both day divisions and the divine rest. They were later additions as the Sabbath clearly is an addition to the festival list in Leviticus 23.
neilgodfrey wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 1:17 pm Again the same question: How likely is it that those with a particular agenda added to a document with a contrary agenda instead of replacing it or revising it entirely to conform to what they believed the correct agenda?
What specifically contrary adendas that were diametrically opposed to earlier agendas are you referring to? There are many reasons why ancient documents came together and I've gone through some of them in my previous post. But older texts that presumably weren't totally objectionable and were valued in themselves could be "extended" to incorporate "updated" views. Or made to harmonise with other texts. Of course it's possible that editors did scrap some texts that they felt they could do without, for ideological reasons or for editorial expediency. We'll never know if they did or not.
neilgodfrey wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 1:17 pmIf they kept different agendas side by side then some might think that suggests some sort of collaborative compromise.
Yes, it may well be a compromise, but I see it as a redactional compromise, rather than authorial collaboration from the start. That ultimate redactional aim was to be as inclusive as possible, to unite different scholarly schools in one all-inclusive formula, and often to find ways of accomodating and disguising differences between texts or harmonising them. Actually it has been argued by some diachronic scholars that the Holiness School, one of the later post-priestly schools, actually does seem as a matter of content and style to combine characteristics of the other strands - both priestly and non-priestly.
neilgodfrey wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 1:17 pm
The volume may nevertheless contribute to a renewed discussion of the shift of the focus of the pentateuchal study from the literary stratification of different layers to social, economic, religious, and political agendas behind the texts and the scribes who produced them.

The question raised by the Hellenistic provenance viewpoint is whether such agendas came one after the other or were in some sort of contemporary dialogue.
"One after the other" is a simplification of what diachronists are proposing, as indicated in my previous post. Some of these scribal schools developed in parallel over time - eg Priestly and Deuteronomistic "schools" - only later coming together when other redactors took on the job of collating and combining to create a unifying anthology of shared tradition.
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Re: The Problem With The Theory That the Pentateuch Was Written in Alexandria

Post by neilgodfrey »

austendw wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 2:15 pm
neilgodfrey wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 11:35 amI advise my philosophy students to develop hypersensitivity for rhetorical questions in philosophy. They paper over whatever cracks there are in the arguments.
Firstly, I didn't mention the three law codes with repeated laws as an argument in favour of diachronicity as such - I have other arguments for that. And it wasn't a rhetorical question at all. I was asking you a question I hoped you would answer: namely how Gmirkin's scenario can explain the three laws in three separate law corpora. But you have actually answered a question with another question and avoided giving an answer to mine.
Yes, I did, because I am still trying to find a justification for your interpretation that makes it superior to the cooperative thesis. I get the impression the only argument against Gmirkin's view is "incredulity". I interpret most of your responses as simply repeating the evidence for different strata and declaring that the strata are best explained on the diachronic model.
austendw wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 2:15 pm Be that as it may:
neilgodfrey wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 11:35 am I try to imagine a scribe reading the law about seething the kid in its mother's milk written by a scribe of a previous generation. Why does that scribe or priest decide to add those words a second time to the text "in another law code"? Why repeat what's already there?

But the problem increases. In a later generation we have another priestly scribe now reading the same law twice. Why does that third scribe decide it is a good idea to add some more code where the same law is repeated so it now appears a third time?

In other words, does such repetition really advance the diachronic argument?

Or does the diachronic hypothesis raise bigger problems than it answers?

Actually I think there are a couple of pretty compelling diachronic explanations for the repetition of particular laws in their different law corpora.

(1) The two later Law Codes were conceived as separate revisions or update of the earlier law collection that were not desgned to appear in the same collection as the earlier version.
I don't dispute that there were reasons. Of course there were reasons. But the question remains.... need I repeat it? ;)
austendw wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 2:15 pm Deuteronomy was its own book, with its own introduction (and its noticeable that the historical survey in the introduction to Deuteronom, itself probably later than the laws themselves, does not suggest that Moses recited the CC to the people at Horeb, so there's no reason for an early reader of Deuteronomy to think that that there was any other law corpus other than this one. In such a scenario, the compiler of Deuteronomy (D) would have been happy to include earlier laws that unobjectionable, hence the repetition of the suckling kid law. Only later, when the CC was added to the Exodus narrative, and redactors linked Deuteronomy to Exodus via Leviticus and Numbers, did the two sets of laws appear in the same five-book "anthology". Something similar was presumably behind the way the Holiness Code was conceived by its authors/tradents, though there is evidence that they were aware of both the CC and D. They were happy to include the suckling kid law in their code, which was part of a collection of purely priestly documents that had not yet been amalgamated with non-priestly narratives in Exodus or with Deuteromony. However, not long afterwards, perhaps, all three law codes became part of the amalgamated Pentateuch or Hexateuch, or whatever the combined anthology first looked like before further supplements were added.

(2) There are other possibilities for other diachronic explanations of similarities in laws. There are some indications that the various law collections didn't start their lives quite as alike as they subsequently became. Either (a) at an earlier stage, when there were "rival" law corpora each in their own literary contexts or (b) at a later stage (possibly a bit more likely), when the laws had all been collected by incorporation in the proto-pentateuchal narrative setting, scholars or scribes remedied the apparent differences in the corpora by adding laws from other corpora and so harmonising them. Sara Milstein in "Making a Case" (an intriguing discussion of the Pentateuch's casuistic laws and their pedagogic scribal origins which I only know of because Neil has mentioned it on this board) has argued very plausibly that, because Ex 21:13-14 interrupt the squence of "he shall surely be put to death" pronouncements of the verses surrounding it, it is likely that "Exod 21:13-14 constitutes an addition that was inspired by Deut 19:4-13, given the shared illogical sequence and the vague reference to Yahweh appointing 'a place to which [the killer] can flee'." We have a number of harmonistic DSS texts such as 4QDeutn, where where a scribe has written the basic Deuteronomy text of the 4th commandment (Sabbath) but added the Exodus explanation that isnt in Deuteronomy. So there is clear evidence that this sort of thing happened.

The first of the above diachronic explanations is more theoretical, the latter more literary-critical. They are not mutually exclusive.

But this is only an explanation for the motives behind a diachronic process. The diachronic process is assumed at the outset, and then you offer explanations for how it would have worked. That's not actually an argument for the diachronic process -- it's an assumption of a diachronic process that is used as the framework for interpretation of the text. Is it not?
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