Lecture

In this lecture, number twelve, I think I should take the time to go back over the book of Genesis and say something about the higher critical views. We remember that the book of Genesis ends with a coffin in Egypt, as is sometimes said. I made some brief reference to the dying blessing of Jacob which is given in Genesis 49. We might just finish up with the story of Jacob at the moment by saying that Genesis 49 deals with Jacob’s blessing on the twelve tribes. The twelve boys were gathered there before him, and he gives some words about them; some commendatory and some are not.

This is an example of poetry and recent studies by Dr. Albright have argued that this is quite early poetry. Albright has considered the linguistic characteristics of the poetry and claimed that this chapter—along with the poem of the song of Miriam and, of course Judges 5, the song of Deborah, and some of the Psalms also—do indeed represent a very early stage of the language. This is a new and interesting development and bears, of course, on the higher critical questions.

When he was dying, Jacob gathered his sons around him; but, first of all, he had Joseph bring him his two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh. There’s just a word that we can say about that. He blessed Ephraim and Manasseh and adopted them, as we have said, as his own sons. So they were not to be counted as grandsons but as sons. And, of course, this is the reason why Ephraim got a tribal portion later on, and Manasseh got a tribal portion too. This actually makes thirteen tribes instead of twelve, and this was solved later on by Levi being chosen to be the tribe that dealt with the worship of the tabernacle and from whom came the priests.

It is noteworthy that this adoption was an oral adoption, and it was in effect a dying blessing and a will. There is an example in Nuzi of a man who claimed that his father gave him a certain share of the estate when he was dying, and he had witnesses of the father’s oral message. And this oral message—what we would call an oral will—actually stood up in court in Nuzi.

There’s another interesting detail. Jacob guided his hands—the King James says “wittingly”—he guided his hands in such a way that he put his right hand on the head of the younger of the two boys. He crisscrossed his hands, and so the younger of the two boys, Ephraim, got the major blessing. Joseph said, “No, this is the firstborn, Father. You’re making a mistake.” He thought he was blind and didn’t know what he was doing. “Not so,” he said. The birthright, or the higher right, went to the younger son. And this, too, was the privilege of the father, as shown in Nuzi. The birthright could be passed around, and as we’ve already seen, the birthright could be bought and sold.

Well, mention of this song also brings up Genesis 49:10, a Messianic passage. There Jacob blesses Judah, and in his blessing of Judah he has the words that the kingship, the rule, “will not depart from Judah.” He says that many blessings are promised to the different ones and to Judah too. But in this chapter and verse he says that “the scepter shall not depart from Judah,” nor as the King James says, “a ruler’s staff from between his feet.” In the Hebrew poetic parallelism we have the scepter, which is obviously the sign of authority, and the lawgiver. The Hebrew word is Mechoqek and is translated in the King James “Lawgiver.” Some other translations would have the word “ruler’s staff from between his feet.” It seems to me that it makes no great difference. The word “staff” or “ruler’s staff” would be more parallel to the word “scepter.” In any case, it is a statement that Judah shall have the kingship. “From between his feet,” I think, is rightly interpreted in the Septuagint translation as “from his loins;” that is to say, “from the posterity of Judah there would come a ruler” and that he would last “until Shiloh come.”

Now “until Shiloh come” is a rather enigmatic statement. Many people interpret that in the light of the book of Ezekiel, chapter 21, as the word where through the prophet it says, “I will overturn the kingdom,” evidently overturn it is reduplicated three times, “and this shall not be until he shall come to whom it belongs.” There is there the picture that there is coming one who shall have the right of rule, and to him shall be the rule, as it says here in 49:10, “to him shall the gathering of the people be.” This interpretation of Shiloh takes it not as a name, Shiloh, but as a [shane, shuh], which is equivalent to the Hebrew relative. The words “a share” are used in the Ezekiel passage, until he shall come which or whom it belongs to him, taking the el as the Hebrew preposition lamed meaning “to” and the ending “o” as the pronoun “him.” “Until he shall come to whom it is,” to whom it belongs, which is a very close equivalent to the passage in Ezekiel 21, and it is very likely that the passage in Ezekiel depends upon this.

Now to turn to the question of higher criticism. This is, of course, a very big subject. A whole course could be given on this, so we can only in brief compass give the general outlines. I would refer you to two major books on the subject. There is, of course, very extensive literature. One of these is by the late Dr. Oswald T. Allis, The Five Books of Moses, speaking particularly of the division by the critics into different documents—the division of the Pentateuch and other books which they carry on. The other book is by Dr. Gleason Archer, and it is called A Survey of Old Testament Introduction, by Moody Press, and is, I think, the best general work on the subject.

A few brief words of history are given by Allis on pages 14 to 18, and we would just sketch them. Back in the 1700s a French physician by the name of Astruc noted that in the book of Genesis there were two different major words for God. One is what we call the tetragram, four letters of the Hebrew word translated “Jehovah” in the Revised Version, translated “LORD” in the King James Version. The tetragram was not pronounced by the Jews, and so we do not know exactly what vowels should be used with these four letters. But the word “Jehovah,” sometimes pronounced by critical scholars particularly as “Yahweh,” was one of the names for the God of Israel. He is also called God. Astruc suggested that this really shows there were two sources that were used in the composition of Genesis. One source used the word “Jehovah,” and the other source used the word “God” or “Elohim,” as the Hebrew has it. Astruc felt that Moses had written the Pentateuch, but that Moses used these two sources in his composition of Genesis.

Shortly after Astruc, others developed his theory and applied it to the rest of the books of the Pentateuch. The rest of the books of the Pentateuch, then, in their view, were not written by Moses, but were written by later people who used sources. Moses, of course, would hardly have been using sources for Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, because he was there and took part in the major events and speeches. So if you hold that the division into documents is also valid in the other books, then you deny the Mosaic authorship. And it has been common for a generation or two of German scholars, particularly, to deny the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. With this, there is also a denial of the normal authorships of the other books of the Old Testament. Isaiah, for instance, is divided into two or three parts, some into many parts. The Psalms are dated late, the book of Daniel is dated late, the book of Micah is cut in two, the book of Zechariah also, and so it goes. The higher critical view disintegrates the Old Testament as a whole usually.

We should say something about the history of this view and also its bases. After a while, a man named [Hookfelt] in the mid-1800s, studying these documents, argued that the document that was called the Elohistic document, using the word Elohim, that this Elohistic document was not a unit at all, but that two different documents could be separated out of it. Now this is interesting because it really is a contradiction of the main principle of the division so far. So far they had argued that the use of the divine names gives you a division of the Pentateuch into two major documents. Now we have a document which uses the one divine name—Elohim—and yet it shows, they thought, such differences of other stylistic criteria that it must be divided into two different documents. So here you find the criteria of the divine names contradicting other criteria that are used in division. And this makes you wonder whether or not these criteria are properly used.

It turns out that when you divide this Elohistic document into two parts—one is called P now, and the other is called E—it turns out that the E part, which uses the divine name Elohim, is closer in its general criteria to the J document than it is to the old P. And so, you see, here you have two documents, the J and the E, which are close in general criteria—sometimes they say even indistinguishable—and yet they are different in the divine names. So, again, the divine names criterion works against the other criteria. And this makes you wonder, of course, whether the criteria themselves are correct, but this problem is solved by the critics by having several different documents.

The D document also was separated out, and almost the whole book of Deuteronomy was said to have been written at a totally different time and written pretty much as a unit. It was indeed the product of the time of the reign of Josiah. For many years it has been one of the main points of criticism that the book of Deuteronomy was not written by Moses but was written by some unnamed priest who, in the days of Josiah, brought it out as if it were Mosaic and palmed it off as ancient and that he had rediscovered this writing of Moses. He gave it to King Josiah, who was much impressed, and Josiah reformed the religion and the activities of Israel on the basis of this newly discovered book of Deuteronomy, which he thought was Mosaic, but actually was the work of one of his contemporary priests. So it has been held repeatedly that the book of Deuteronomy is the basis for the Josianic reform of around 620 BC; it was written at that time and has nothing to do with the times of Moses. The declaration is that the book of Deuteronomy was the first writing that urged the children of Israel to worship at one central tabernacle or place, for this time, the temple in Jerusalem. So on the basis of this newly discovered document, , Josiah eradicated all of the local shrines and told everybody that they must worship in Jerusalem. Of course, the usual and orthodox view for years has been that the children of Israel were worshiping at these local shrines irregularly, that they had violated God’s command, and that they actually were now called to come back to the original position and worship there in Jerusalem. However, the critics have been very positive that Deuteronomy was written at this late time.

I think we must say that there are some little problems in the Pentateuch which the critics can point to and argue that the book was not written by Moses. I think I’ll just point out a few of these. One is given from Numbers 12:3, where it says Moses was one of the meekest men of all the earth. The declaration is that if Moses were so meek, he certainly wouldn’t be proud of it, and so a man could not praise his own humility like this. Even an anonymous writer, they said, would not certainly praise his own humility. Well, of course, one answer to that is to note that in the book of Acts, the apostle Paul in Acts 20:19 rather declares that he had “served the Lord with all meekness and humility,” and if Paul could do it in Acts 20, it is quite possible that Moses could have done it as a statement of fact. And I’m not sure that the passage in Numbers 12:3 actually says that Moses was proud of his humility. Certainly somebody wrote that word, and they say if an anonymous writer would certainly not praise his own humility, somebody who wrote it felt that it was perfectly proper in the lips of Moses. It seems to me it can be defended; at least it is a very minor thing.

The one that is very frequently alleged against the Mosaic authorship is thought to be quite decisive, and that is that Moses wrote about his own death in chapter 34 of Deuteronomy. I think we should remark that it hardly proves that Moses wrote nothing of the Pentateuch simply because of this last chapter in the book. If we look at the last chapter of several of the books of the Old Testament, we find that there is something special about them. We don’t have time to do that in detail. Let me just say that the book of Joshua also speaks about the death of Joshua, and indeed the first chapters of Judges include those same verses with which Joshua ends. They seem to be a kind of a tie-in between Joshua and Judges. Judges goes on and includes, in the old Hebrew documents, the book of Ruth; and the book of Ruth ends with the genealogy of David that ties it in with the book of Samuel. Likewise, we might say that the book of 2 Chronicles ends with a couple of verses that are repeated in the first chapter of Ezra, tying Ezra in with 2 Chronicles. So we may say that it was typical of Hebrew historiography to have what might be called a bridge, an addendum, on one book that tied it in with the following book. This is also typical of the clay tablets in the land of Mesopotamia. The clay tablets of Mesopotamia, in the series, will have a catch line on the bottom of one tablet identical with the same line at the top of the next tablet so that you can tell what tablet to go to next. Though we do not have time to argue it out in detail, it’s quite possible that the 34th chapter of Deuteronomy should be considered in a situation by itself, that the 34th chapter of Deuteronomy is actually written by Joshua as a bridge to tie in Deuteronomy with Joshua. And the last chapter of Joshua, the few verses dealing with the death of Joshua, were written by the author of Judges to tie Joshua in with Judges.

It would seem as if we should not argue against the Mosaic authorship merely on the basis of this final chapter. Again, the formula unto this day, they say that this could not have been written by a contemporary. Well, that depends on what the formula means. In more recent studies—and particularly I’m thinking of an article in the “Journal of Biblical Literature” by Reverend Brevard Childs—Childs argues that the formula unto this day is not a statement of what happened in past times still good, but it is rather a statement of emphasis. And if it is a statement of emphasis, it could be used for a contemporary. Indeed there are places where it would seem that you must hold that it is, if we look at all the instances of its use.

Then they also say that there are place names referred to. They’re referred to in the story of Genesis, although they could not have been called that in the days of Genesis or in the days of Moses. We think of Genesis 14:14. Here it says that Abraham pursued the Mesopotamian army on up to Dan. We learn in the book of Judges that the tribe of Dan first lived down south, and then they went up north and conquered a city named Laish up there and changed its name to Dan, after the name of their founder and the name of their tribe. So this name of Dan in Genesis 14:14 must have been put there after the movement of the tribe of Dan, after the conquest of the land of Palestine by Joshua. So here we have what really would be called an anachronism. This could be true. It is not at all impossible that in Genesis 14:14, as Moses wrote it, it says that Abraham went up as far as Laish in his pursuit of the kings of Mesopotamia. A later author changed the word Laish to the word Dan so that people would know what city they were talking about, because they no longer used the word Laish. Just as we try to translate the Bible again and again so that the people of high school age would understand it, in the same way the ancient scribe may well have changed the old name of Laish to the current name. It is something like a situation we would say that the Dutch founded New York. Of course, the Dutch didn’t found New York; they founded New Amsterdam. Later on it was changed to New York, and that’s the name of the place as we use it today. So this anachronism—there are two or three such—should not disturb us, and neither do they prove that Moses himself did not write the Pentateuch.

Also, it says in Deuteronomy 1:1 that the land of the territory where Moses was standing was “the other side of the Jordan.” In the King James Version, it says, “These are the words which Moses spoke until all Israel on this side of the Jordan.” But some later translations make that, “spoken to all Israel on the other side of the Jordan.” Well, if Moses was speaking this on the other side of the Jordan, the author of the book of Deuteronomy would presumably be on the side opposite. If Moses was in Trans-Jordan when he spoke this, in the wilderness—and it is specified Moses did not go into the Promised Land—then presumably the author of Deuteronomy was on the Palestinian side of Jordan and said that Moses spoke it on the other side of the Jordan. This is taken to be a very positive argument against a Mosaic authorship of the book of Deuteronomy. Of course, that depends on the meaning of the phrase, which in the Hebrew is Ever HaYarden and which is said to be literally “on the other side of the Jordan.” The trouble is the word ever etymologically means “other side,” but it is not certain that it means “other side” in all contexts, nor that the word ever necessarily meant beyond, or perhaps just beside. To prove that, you see, we should look not to the etymology of the word but to the usage of the word, and it is instructive to take a concordance and look up this word “the other side.” In Numbers 32:19, this word, “the other side of the Jordan,” is used twice and is used once with reference to the east side of the Jordan and the other with reference to the west side of the Jordan. And it specifies in each case which side of the Jordan the Ever HaYarden really is. The verse says, “we will not inherit with them on the other side of the Jordan beyond because our inheritance fall unto us on this side of the Jordan eastward.” I’m reading there from the text of the New Schofield Bible, which has changed the King James slightly. But here you have a verse where “the other side of the Jordan” is used of both sides of the Jordan in the same verse. So the meaning of the phrase is not what some of the critics have alleged.

So these are small items which are alleged to prove that Moses could not have written the Pentateuch. The attitude of G. Charles Aalders, in his book Short Introduction to the Pentateuch, is that there are in the Pentateuch some few phrases which are what he calls “post Mosaic.” That is they are phrases put in after the book was written by Moses by some later scribe. It is not impossible that there are a few such explanatory glosses, and they ought not to disturb us greatly if there are some there. Actually, as I have indicated, there is a question whether some of these are really later explanatory glosses. The word “Dan,” for instance, might be the name of the town which was earlier called “Laish,” but the word “Dan” means judge, and the name means “the seat of a judge.” And just as there are many new towns in English, so it may well have been that there were many “judge” towns in those days. We know of many towns called Kadesh, which simply means “holy place,” and that there are different cities named Dan is quite probable in that day.

No, the higher critical argument ought not to be argued or argued against on the bases of a few incidental verses like this. The question is: Did Moses write the whole of the Pentateuch and at broad sweep and whether or not there were a few phrases that might have been put in by later scribes who intended to explain the text in such a way that their contemporaries would know what was meant. So we should check the main arguments of the critics which are otherwise.

The main arguments of the critics include the difference of style that is alleged between various portions. We have said the difference of style in the use of the divine names, for instance; the difference of style in the use of other words and other representations should be mentioned also.

Then there is also the problem of doublets. More than once, as we have gone over the book of Genesis, we have suggested that critics refer the two-fold representation of Abraham denying his wife, for instance, as a doublet. They declare that there was only one incident, and it is reported variously by the J document and by the E document. There are several of these doublets that are alleged, like two namings of Beersheba and so on; but then there are also doublets that are artificially doublets. We think of the two stories of creation. These would be alleged as two different things, two different traditions; one of them using the word Elohim, Genesis 1, and the other using the word “Jehovah,” really “Jehovah Elohim,” in Genesis 2; and they claim contradictory accounts here.

But when we come to the flood account, there is only one flood account. And yet critics with a hypercritical eye separate out from the flood account. They separate two different documents; again, a J document and a P document. They do this by selecting. It says more than once that animals went into the ark, and so they say one of these instances belongs to one document, the other belongs to the other document, and a redactor has woven these two documents together somewhat skillfully; but he has also bumbled sometimes. So, by being extremely careful and observant, we can disentangle these two documents and get two duplicate accounts of the flood. Then these two duplicate accounts are thought to be contradictory. In one case, it says that two animals of each kind went into the ark; in the other case, it says that seven of the clean animals went into the ark. Well, of course, it is possible to think that it was all done by one author and that both are true, that two of the ordinary animals went into the ark to preserve life, but that seven of the clean animals were taken into the ark in order that Noah might have something to eat with his family during the time he was on the ark. They did not have refrigerators. They took their food in on the hoof.

So the duplicate accounts and various representations are alleged. Then they also declare that these two different accounts—three totally in the book of Genesis, J, E, and P—if they are read, form each a complete story. The P document begins with the creation, and the J document also begins with the creation. Unfortunately, the E document has nothing about the times before Abraham. It doesn’t begin, some would say, till chapter 15; some would say till chapter 20 in the book of Genesis. So it is not a complete document. But the claim is that there are different accounts presenting doublets of one incident, that these different accounts are contradictory, and therefore cannot be by one author, and these different accounts show different viewpoints. The viewpoint of the J document is the storyteller of someone who lived close to God, and God comes down and walks and talks with men. The P document shows God as transcendent. There is a different type of religion.

So these different representations are found representing the different documents, especially in the book of Genesis, but it continues on through Exodus, Numbers, and through Deuteronomy. Some would even put it on through Joshua to make a “Hexateuch,” or even through Joshua and Judges to make a “Heptateuch.” This would be, in general, the division into documents or what we call “the higher critical theory.”