CRITICAL APPROACHES to

the BIBLE

Hebrew
Scripture

RS131

A/Prof Sr. Miriam Dlugosz, SSpS

 CRITICAL
METHODS
FOR THE STUDY
OF THE
SCRIPTURE
After this lecture you will be able to:

• Name different source criticism

• Explain why the source criticism is also
historical criticism.
• Know some names of famous biblical
scholars connected to source criticism.
 The JEPD Theory

A long tradition holds that the five books of the

Pentateuch or Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus,
Numbers, and Deuteronomy) were written by Moses.
But it is highly unlikely that he is the author of the Torah
because of inconsistencies and duplications. Besides, it
looks that Moses would have to write about his own
death before it happened. Scholars in the last century
have felt that the best way to explain the various
inconsistencies in Torah is to assume that the books are
a redaction—that is, an edited version of different
original sources.
Using the techniques of source criticism and
redaction criticism, some scholars propose
that four sources contributed to the five books
of the Torah. These sources are the following:

• Yahwist (abbreviated J from the German

word for Yahwist)
• Elohist (abbreviated E)
• Deuteronomist (abbreviated D)
• Priestly (abbreviated P)
The Yahwist (J)
The Yahwist source originated in the southern kingdom
(Judah), (Kings: Solomon; David). It is the earliest
source, from the 10th century BC. Its theology is
focused on God’s promises for salvation and the
importance of cultic worship. The characteristics of the
Yahwist source:
 God is referred to as Yahweh (LORD). The holy
mountain is called Sinai.
 God is anthropomorphized, he is given human
characteristics and feelings. (He walks in the garden
and talks with Adam.)
 The natives of Palestine are called Canaanites.
 Examples: the story of Adam and Eve (see Genesis 2:4–25)
and the account of the Ten Plagues (see Exodus 7:14—10:29).
The Elohist (E)
The Elohist source developed in the northern kingdom
(Israel). It developed in the ninth century BC. Its
theology focuses less on Temple worship (J Theory) and
more on morality and Israel’s response to God: faith and
fear of the Lord. Some of the characteristics of the
Elohist source are:
• It emphasizes prophecy
• God is referred to as Elohim (“Lord God”)
• The holy mountain is Horeb.
• The natives of Palestine are called Amorites.
• God speaks in dreams.
• Examples: the sacrifice of Isaac (Gen 22) the Ten
Commandments (Exodus 20:1–17).
The Deuteronomist (D)
The Deuteronomist source is the independent
source. The unknown author wrote most of the
Book of Deuteronomy and probably the historical
books of Joshua through 2nd Kings (without Ruth).
This collection of books, is called the
Deuteronomistic history, written around the 7th
and 6th centuries BC. However, the Book of
Deuteronomy is often associated with the book
found by King Josiah (622 BC; 2 Kings 22). Its
theology teaches that sufferings of the Israelites
were God’s punishment for the sins of the leaders
and the people.
Characteristics of the Deuteronomistic source:

• The book of Deuteronomy (“second law”) is a

retelling of the stories of Exodus through Numbers.
• Deuteronomy interprets Israel’s history as a cycle
of God’s forgiveness and renewal of the Covenant,
followed by the people’s failure to live the
Covenant, and God’s punishment.
• It emphasizes the Israelites’ covenantal obligation.
• The holy mountain is Horeb.
• It emphasizes law and morals.
• An example is the Book of Deuteronomy.
The Priestly (P)
The priestly source developed during and after the Exile
(587–538 BC). Some think it never existed as an
independent source but is the work of the final person
or group revising and adding to the JED sources after
they had been joined. The theology of this source is
that the Jewish people’s religious identity is found in
proper worship and special laws that set them apart
from other people. It represents the priestly class’s
rejecting the idea of religious identity being found in a
divinely appointed king. This source focused on cult and
ritual.
The priestly source has these characteristics:

• emphasis on Temple cult and worship

• emphasis on the southern kingdom of Judah
(because that is the location of Jerusalem and the
Temple where cultic worship occurs)
• emphasis on the role of the Levites, the priestly class
or tribe
• emphasis on genealogies and tribal lists, which
established the different groups in Israelite society,
including the priestly class
• emphasis on order, the majesty of God and creation
examples: first Creation story (see Genesis 1:1- 2:4),
the Book of Leviticus.
Different terms have been used to describe the
modern, critical study of the Bible in the late 19th
century:
1. LITERARY CRITICISM – is analyzing the literary
features of the text: the terminology, the style,
the motives. But because the goal of this
literary critical school was to identify specific
sources, it is also referred to as SOURCE
CRITICISM.

Nowadays the term ‘source criticism’ is more

frequently used.
The purpose of SOURCE CRITICISM was to
clarify as far as possible the relative dates to
one another, and to enable the work of
historical reconstruction to proceed:
First of all - a reconstruction of the history of
the religion of Israel, and the historical
situation of the authors of the different
sources.
Therefore literary criticism is not only called
source criticism.
It's also called
HISTORICAL CRITICISM,
because its ultimate goal and purpose
was not just to identify the sources,
but to arrange them according to
proper dates as far as they might be
established, and then to chart changes
in Israel's religion.
So to sum up:
the documentary hypothesis is an effort to
explain the contradictions, the doublets,
anachronisms and so on in the Bible by means
of theoretical source documents.

J–E–P–D
So the theory suggests hypothetical sources,
traditions and documents to explain the current
shape of the Torah the way we have it, to
account for some of these phenomena that we
find.
Once the sources assigned dates, not absolute
dates, relative dates, they are analyzed to
identify the different stages of Israel's religious
history.

Why the ‘source

criticism’ is also known as
‘HISTORICAL CRITICISM’?

Mainly, because it is a tool for getting to know

more about the history, not just at the text, but
eventually a history of Israelite religion.
That is how it has been used.
The HISTORICAL CRITICAL METHOD, and the
DOCUMENTARY HYPOTHESIS are simply
analytical tools, which help:
• to look at the text and its features and
• draw some conclusions based on what is
found.

They can be applied fairly to the text, and

they're found to be very useful.
It needs to be remembered that the
documentary hypothesis is only a hypothesis.
An important and a useful one. But none of
those sources has been found independently:

• we have no copy of J,
• we have no copy of E,
• we have no copy of P by itself
• or D by itself.

So these reconstructions are based on guesses.

Some of them are excellent guesses, well
supported by evidence, but some are not.
While it is a very important to analyze the
component sources and examine their specific
concerns and contribution, we must remember that
whatever sources were woven together, it was done
with great skill and care by a final redactor, who
wanted them to be read as a unity.

Therefore, the Bible can be read both analytically and

synthetically. While we need to be aware that there
are some uncertainties, which derive from different
sources, we also need to be sensitive to the
originality of the final composition.
Let us now look at the text for a moment before
we return to talk about a whole contradictory set
of methodologies, or methodologies that pull in
another direction.
In Genesis from chapter 6 – 9 there is description
of flood, and then we move into Genesis 10. In
Genesis 10 contains a genealogical table of
nations.
In this table, peoples of various lands are
portrayed as having descended from a common
ancestor, Noah, through his three sons, Japheth,
Ham and Shem.
Shem: Shemites, Semites.
Shemites descended from Noah's son, Shem. The biblical
text at this point is understanding humanity as basically
sharing a common root united by a common language.

The story that follows in Genesis 11 can be understood as

a certain kind of myth, a tale that explains the existence
of different languages. When we look around we see that
in fact people do not seem to be that united, they are in
fact divided by their languages.

How should we explain the diversification of languages,

the existence of different ethnic linguistic groups
throughout the lands if we all come from one common
creative moment, one common ancestor?
Genesis 11 explains that. The story is therefore going to
act as a bridge between the first section of Genesis which
has an universal scope, and what happens in Genesis
beginning in Chapter 12, where we are going to focus on
one ethnic, linguistic group and one land.

This story serves as the bridge, first of all explaining how

it is that a united humanity speaking a common language
becomes diversified linguistically and ethnically, to focus
later on one group and one land.
Babel, pronounced "bavel" in Hebrew, is Babylon.
The tower in the story of the Tower of Babel is
identified by scholars as a very famous tower,
a ziggurat, a ziggurat to Marduk in Babylon.
Babel Story
Gen 11
• The three sons of Noah give rise to seventy nations
that populate the entire earth.
• God’s salvific purpose, even under the Old Covenant,
always has all of mankind in view.
• the call of Abram (Gen 12:1-3) will be for the purpose
of blessing “all the families of the earth” recorded
here in Genesis 10.
• The Tower of Babel incident represents a widespread,
collective rebellion of mankind against God.
• The tower is like a synthetic or man-made “holy
mountain”. “Let us make a name [Hebrew shem] for
ourselves” (Gen 11:4) rather than following their
righteous ancestors by calling on the “name” of God
(Gen 4:26).
• In order to prevent this, God “confuse[s]” their speech (Gen 11:7).
This confusion is necessary to compel mankind to fulfill the divine
mandate to “fill the earth” (Gen 9:1), but it also causes division in
the human family. This confusion will not be overcome till New
Testament at Pentecost
• The Tower of Babel is thus a kind of “Fall of the Nations”, which sets
the stage for the call of Abram, through whom the divisions
introduced at Babel will ultimately be undone, when “all the
families of the earth” are blessed (Gen 12:3). The call of Abram is
God’s solution to the problem of Babel.
In the Bible there is an Israelites' hostility to
Babylon since the Babylonians destroyed them in
586.
This story has a satirical tone.
The word Babel, Bavel, means the Gate of God.

This word can also mean confusion of languages.

So this mighty tower that was obviously the pride
of Babylon in the ancient world is represented by
the biblical storywriter as the occasion for the
confusion of human language.
Some interpreters see this story as representing a
rejection of civilization or certain aspects of civilization.
Monumental architecture, empire building, these are
always things that are looked upon with suspicion for
most of the biblical sources and biblical writers.

Those sorts of ambitions are viewed negatively. They lead

to human self-glorification. They indicate an arrogant
self-reliance - that the prophets will certainly speak
against - and in some sense forgetting of God.

So this is a time in which humans spread out, lose their

unity, and this is also a time really when they turn to the
worship of other gods.
The first 11 chapters of Genesis then have given us
a cosmic, universal setting for the history of Israel.
Those first chapters cover 2500 years if you go
through and add up the chronologies. The rest of
Genesis, Genesis 12 through 50, will cover just
four generations:
 the generations of the patriarchs
 and the matriarchs.

They will be Abraham and Sarah;

their son Isaac, his wife Rebekah;
their son Jacob, his two wives Rachel and Leah,
and finally their children,
12 sons and one daughter.
Many scholars, Kaufman, Sarna and others, say that one of
the differences between these myths of Israel and the
mythologies of their neighbors is that in Ancient Near
Eastern mythologies is the struggle of good and evil cosmic
powers. In the myths of the Bible this is replaced by a
struggle between the will of God and rebellious humans. So
these myths are telling also of a struggle, but it's on a
different level.
Adam and Eve, Cain, the generation of the flood, the
builders of the tower of Babel - God has been continually
rejected. So He changed his focus, choose to reveal himself
to one small group, as if to say:

"Okay, I can't reach everybody, let me see if I can just find

one person, one party, and start from there and build out.“
And so in Genesis 12 which begins the
second stage of the Bible's historical
narrative, we read that God calls to Abram
to leave he land of his fathers and travel to
a land which God will show him, beginning
a whole new stage of the biblical narrative,
and we'll sense that there's a very different
feeling when you get to Genesis 12.
In preparation for looking at the biblical narrative
material that deals specifically with the Israelites,
we need to think of some, or learn about some,
of the other critical methodologies that are used
in biblical scholarship, and for a moment we're
going to the take up the role of historian.

We have to think like historians now

and look at Genesis 12 through 50.
The source critical method focuses on the
hypothetical period of the compilation of 4 sources
into the Torah. But later scholars began to ask about
the pre-history of those sources, their origins?
Why should that be important? Remember that the
source critics claimed and concluded that J, E, P and
D were written from the tenth to the sixth
centuries, but despite the fact that they meant to
tell of events prior to 1000, in fact they're not
reliable for those periods. They were written
centuries after that, we really do not know much
about Israel, its religion, history, religious history
before the tenth century.
That was a very dissatisfying conclusion to many
people, because the writers of J, E, P and D
probably did not sit down at typewriters and just
invent their documents out of whole cloth. It did
not happen this way.

They didn't invent all of these cultic rules and

ritual practices all of a sudden. It seems likely that
they were drawing on older traditions
themselves:
older stories, older customs, older laws, ritual
practices.
Scholars in the next wave of biblical scholarship began to
ask about materials that the compiler or the compilers of
J or E or P draw on in the composition of those sources?

Did they use more ancient materials, and if so can we

figure out what they were? Do they contain reliable
traditions for an earlier stage? And if so, then maybe we
do have access after all to information regarding Israelite
history prior to the year 1000.

Suddenly we see an analytical approach to the Bible

that's going to pull in the exact opposite direction from
the classical source theory.
One of the leading scholars to take up this question
was Hermann Gunkel. Gunkel had a great knowledge
of the oral literature of other cultures, other nations,
and that led him to ask: Can we analyze these four
literary source documents and figure out the pre-
literary stages of their development?
What went into their compilation and composition?
He found support for this idea within the Bible itself
because at times the Bible seems to name earlier
sources quite explicitly.

We don't have records of those sources anymore,

but they seem to be named in the Bible.
In Numbers 21:14 there's a little poetic excerpt that gives
the boundaries between Moab and the Amorites, and it
is quoted from the Book of the Wars of the Lord. It is
quoted as if this is a source that the person is drawing on
and using in the composition of his text, and it's quoted
in a way that give impression that the source should be
known to the reader.
We also have mentioned of a book called the Book of
Yashar in Joshua, also quoted, in Joshua 10:13.
In 2 Samuel 1:18, David is lamenting, a beautiful lament
over the death of Saul and his beloved Jonathan. It seems
to be an epic song that recounts acts of Israel's heroes.
He is reciting that now lamenting over the death of these
two, it seems to be an earlier source that has been put
into the story of David and his lament.
So it seems reasonable in light of the practices of
other people, other ancient cultures and literatures
as well as some contemporary literatures, and it
seems reasonable in light of the explicit citation of
sources in the biblical text to suppose that in fact

the four primary documents

are themselves compilations
from other source materials,
or drawing on written or oral materials from an even
earlier period.
Gunkel began to focus on small little units. He was
interested in small units within the four primary
documents, and he identified genres or forms, what
he called forms.

He would identify these small units, and that gave

rise to the name of this approach, which is

form criticism.
He believed that what he was doing was identifying
older, pre-literary forms that had been taken up and
incorporated by the literary sources, by J, E, P and D.
Examples of the kind of form that he would identify are
things like a hymn, a proverb - we often have biblical texts
quoting proverbs that seem to be folk sayings - laws, rituals,
folk stories of a particular type, poems, legends, songs,
fragments of mythology. E.g.: Genesis 6:1-4:
When men began to increase on earth and daughters were
born to them, the divine beings saw how beautiful the
daughters of men were and took wives from among those
that pleased them. The Lord said, "My breath shall not abide
in man forever, since he too is flesh; let the days allowed him
be one hundred and twenty years." It was then, and later
too, that the Nephilim [these giants of some kind] appeared
on earth--when the divine beings cohabited with the
daughters of men, who bore them offspring [these giants,
these Nephilim].
They were the heroes of old, the men of renown.
That is just stuck in there, in Genesis 6:1-4.
This is an older fragment of a mythology or a legend which is
put into place here. It is explaining the origin of heroes and
great men of old days. He also says that there are etiological
stories. We have talked about those legends that give the
origin of a name, or a ritual, or an institution.
There are different types of etiological stories. He says there
are ethnological legends that will give you the story
accounting for the origin of a particular people: so the
Moabites for example, and the Ammonites - not a flattering
story at all following the destruction of Sodom and
Gomorrah.
Obviously the Israelites didn't care for those people very
much and gave them a pretty nasty origin.
We also have etiomological legends, because they're
explaining the name of something. It's given this particular
name because of an etymological connection with some
event earlier. So all of these things, he argues, are probably
older existing traditions that have been taken up and
adapted by the biblical writer, and they may preserve some
historical reminiscence.
More important then the actual events that they might be
reporting, is the fact that behind each of these is some sort
of function. Each one of these did some sort of cultural
work, it had some function or setting in life. That's what we
can discover when we isolate these forms: this setting in life.
That helps us learn something about ancient Israelite society
or culture, long before the 10th century as Gunkel claims.
So form criticism was not satisfied with just
identifying these various types of material, these
various genres; it asked what was their function?
What was their Sitz im Leben? What was their
situation in life, their cultural context? What does it
tell us that we have a large number of liturgical
texts?

What does it tell us that we have a large number of

texts that seem to point to some sort of judicial
context? What does it tell us that we have a great
deal of proverbs, or wisdom material in certain parts
of the Bible that we might date to a certain time?
What does this tell us about society and what people
Growing out of form criticism is tradition criticism. This is a
type of criticism that focuses on the transmission of
traditional material through various stages, oral stages and
literary stages, until it reaches its present form in the text.
Now you can imagine as a story is told and then it's retold, it
is obviously changed and adapted. Tradition criticism looks
at that. Looking at Ancient Near Eastern parallels is very
helpful. You can see how some of those motifs and themes
were changed in the process of being transmitted within
Israelite culture and society, and again, to serve some sort of
cultural function, or purpose. So the present text of the
Pentateuch obviously rests on a very, very long period of
transmission, both oral recitation and transmission, very
much like the Greek classics, Homer's classics, the Odyssey,
the Iliad: they also had a long history of oral recitation and
transmission, and were transformed along the way.
Tradition criticism likes to look at the way people
receive traditional material, rework it in creative
ways and then adapt it to their own purposes and
contexts and transmit it.
Sometimes that process is reflected in the Bible
itself. Traditions in one part of the Bible will be
picked up in a later part of the Bible, and written
rather differently with a different point of view. So
Deuteronomy, for example, recounts events that
we've also read about in Exodus, and sometimes the
differences are startling. Sometimes there are
completely new emphases and the story can come
out to be a very, very different story.
 THANK YOU
Any questions?