Genes, Giants, Monsters, and Men Joseph P Farrell

Prev Next

2. The Documentary Hypothesis: Astruc to DeWette

One may get a sense of the enormous implications of Delitzsch’s discovery — at least for the biblical literalists of the period — by posing an obvious question: what was a supposedly uniquely Hebrew proper name for God doing in cuneiform texts manifestly much older than the book of Exodus, and in a very un-Hebrew, very Sumerian context?

But what of the problems it posed to the literary higher critics? Why did they take umbrage at Delitzsch’s cuneiform tablets? To answer that question requires a short excursion into a critical theory called “the Documentary Hypothesis,” or as it is also sometimes known, the “Graf-Wellhausen Hypothesis” or the “JEDP theory. In its recognizable modern form, this theory holds that the first five books of the Old Testament — the “Pentateuch” or “Torah” — were composed from different underlying documentary “sources” indicated by the four letters J, E, D, and P. The theory began in Enlightenment France with the observations of the French physician Jean Astruc.

Astruc noticed that in the Hebrew text of the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis, each chapter referred to God by a different name, Elohim 020

translated “God” in the Authorized version, was the name used in chapter one, and Yahweh 021

translated “LORD” (in all capitals) in the Authorized version in chapter two. In order to account for this difference, Astruc reasoned that Moses, when composing the “creation accounts” (which he assumed both chapters represented), had in fact utilized two independent sources, or “documents.”³⁰ In so arguing, he provided the metaphysical and philological first principle that would guide subsequent scholarship to elaborate the fully fledged Documentary Hypothesis: different Divine Names indicate the presence in the extant text of different underlying source material for that text.

By 1853, nearly a century later, the German critic Herman Hupfeld would extend this principle to its logical conclusion: differences within passages of overall style or vocabulary constituted a sufficient basis upon which to posit different underlying documentary sources from which those stylistic differences derive. With “the Astruc Principle” and the “Hupfeld Corollary,” a critical agenda of its own was emplaced and empowered, for now the various names of God could come, with a certain brazen and nominalistic elegance, to stand for something completely mundane rather than for some characteristic metaphysical property of God; they came, within the historical phenomenology of the hypothesis itself, to stand only for the source documents from which the final extant text was alleged to derive. The divine names, so to speak, were only the revelations of no-longer-extant source documents, which were the task of critical scholarship to discern and disentangle. And the Germans, more than anyone else, were the ones most busily engaged in this process.

It is worth pausing to consider the implications of all of this as possible manifestations of yet another agenda. By empowering the critic himself, with all his specialized tools of knowledge of the original languages, philology, and other ancient texts, a complete end run was done around existing ecclesiastical magisteria and doctrines, and additionally, the entirety of the Old Testament came to be viewed within such circles as the special creation over centuries of the Hebrew priesthood and elite, with the occasional bow to Egyptian origins for much of it.³¹

In any case, once the first two chapters of Genesis had been subjected to the “Astruc Principle” and the “Hupfeld Corollary,” there was nothing logically to prevent their application to other passages of the Torah.³² Indeed, it was Johann Gottfried Eichhorn who first extended Astruc’s criterion of the divine names as indicating separate source documents to the remainder of the book of Genesis and on into the first two chapters of the book of Exodus, in his Introduction to the Old Testament, published in Germany between 1780 and 1783. This work earned him his lasting epithet as being the “father of Old Testament criticism.”³³ What was new with Eichhorn was the coupling of Astruc’s philological principle with the new assumption that Moses had not authored any of the Torah or “Five Books of Moses.” In other words, it was Eichhorn who in fact accomplished the empowerment of the critical scholar and the accompanying agenda, for if Moses did not author those books, and they were, on the contrary, the editorial compilation from sources made over time, then it followed that a massive task of historical reinterpretation and reconstruction would have to be undertaken. In Eichhorn’s case, the “ancient agenda” at work in the text was simple: he maintained that the ancient Hebrew theology had evolved or developed from a primitive polytheism to an advanced personal monotheism, an evolution that in turn implied a post-Mosaic date for the emergence of the Torah in its final textual form.

Once the Torah was no longer the work of “Moses,” or, to put it differently, one author, the way was then clear for critics to question the compositional, and therefore, the metaphysical and moral unity and integrity of the Torah. Indeed, as the elaboration of the Documentary Hypothesis proceeded throughout the late eighteenth century and all throughout the nineteenth, as the presupposition of unitary authorship collapsed, the discovery of textual, moral, and metaphysical contradictions within it grew in inverse proportion. With Eichhorn, then, we have Astruc’s division of two “sources,” the J or Jahwist source, and the E or Elohist source, extended to the entirety of the book of Genesis and on into Exodus chapters one and two.

One of the first to pursue the implications of Eichhorn’s abandonment of Mosaic authorship was Wilhelm M.L. DeWette in the first half of the nineteenth century. He maintained that the Book of the Law which was discovered in 621 B.C. during King Josiah’s reign, as recounted in II Kings 22, was in fact the book of Deuteronomy. DeWette argued that, since King Josiah and the high priest Hilkaiah were concerned to abolish localized sanctuaries and places of sacrifice and to centralize worship in the Jerusalem Temple, then, so his argument ran, the book which was “discovered” had in fact been deliberately composed for that purpose by an agent of the Temple, and its discovery was staged at the appropriate moment. For DeWette, the whole production, in other words, was in the service of a hidden agenda, namely, to centralize worship, thus solidifying the kingdom, and enriching the royal and temple treasuries. Readers of my previous book, Babylon’s Banksters, will recall that it was precisely in alliance with ancient temples that the ancient banking fraternity often hid its own agendas.³⁴ But as we shall see in chapter three, there are possibly even more hidden, technological agendas at work in this maneuver. In any case, this pinpointed the date of the book of Deuteronomy to 621 B.C.³⁵ With DeWette’s “discovery,” the third document, D for the “deuteronomist” document, had been found. We now have J, E, and D.

Prev Next