We see a similar process at work in much of the Bible where strands of multiple sources are edited together to form a unified whole. No better is that demonstrated than in the first two chapters of the book of Genesis.
The very first chapter of Genesis has the familiar six-day creation story. Throughout the chapter, appears the formulaic “And God said…” followed by some command (“let there be light”, “let the waters be gathered together”, and so on), words indicating the fulfillment of the command (“it was so”), and an assessment (“God saw that it was good”). In Gen 2:3. God blessed the seventh day because that is when he rested (shabat, in Hebrew, the basis of the noun sabbath). The main point of the story is an explanation of why we should rest on the Sabbath. A secondary point is a polemic against rival religions by showing that God is the creator of objects like light, astral bodies, and animals that were regarded as divine beings in other cultures.
"Creation of Sun and Moon" on the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo |
Gen 2 is an entirely different creation story from Gen 1. The order of events in Gen 1 are plants-animals-humans (male and female). The order of events in Gen 2 are human (male)-plants-animals-human (female). In Gen 1, God orders something created and it is done. In Gen 2, the Lord God “formed” humans and animals out of the ground. Even the words for the deity are different. In Gen 1, the deity is referred to as “God” (elohim) but in Gen 2, the deity is called the Lord God (YHWH elohim).
In most English translations, “Lord” sounds like an honorific title (for example, “Lord Byron”), but it is actually the deity’s personal name, Yahweh (written in Hebrew using only the consonants YHWH). Jews do not utter the deity’s personal name, so in synagogue readings, they will say “my Lord” (adonay) wherever YHWH appears in the text. English translators followed this tradition, and put “Lord” is small caps to indicate that YHWH is being translated. Elohim is the common noun used to refer to a deity. The combination YHWH elohim only appears in Gen 2-3 (except for Exodus 9:30 where it may be a scribal mistake).
So what we have here are two creation tales that were joined together at some point. In the first, we have a heaven-centered viewpoint with Elohim, the universal deity, creating by divine fiat. In the second, we have a much more human-centered viewpoint with YHWH, the personal name of Israel’s deity, forming humans and animals from the ground the way a potter fashions earthern vessels. When the two stories were placed together, the redactor added the common noun Elohim after personal name YHWH in Gen 2-3, possibly to make the transition less jarring or to subtly indicate that the personal deity of Israel is the same universal deity of creation.
Continuing to read through the remaining chapters in Genesis and the other books of the Pentateuch, we will continue to notice the jump from Elohim to YHWH and back again. Using different names for the deity is one of the clues that we are dealing with different traditions or sources. Other clues are names (Israel vs. Jacob, Sinai vs. Horeb), distinctive vocabulary, or favored themes (rituals, laws, dates and numbers). Much like a detective identifying four different individuals at the scene of the crime from the clues they left behind, biblical scholars have identified at least four different traditions that were combined to make up the first five books of the Bible. This theory of composition is usually referred to as the documentary hypothesis.
There are some detractors of the documentary hypothesis. Some are fundamentalists who believe that the first five books were written by Moses because Jesus said it was (e.g., Luke 24:44). Others are critical scripture scholars who think supporters of the documentary hypothesis have developed an overly-complicated theory or doubt that individual traditions can be separated into individual continuous sources. Whether an editor combined completely separate sources or just fragments of various traditions together, there does seem to be overwhelming evidence that we are dealing with multiple sources and not just a single work by one author. Just like with “A Day in the Life”, the end result is a harmonious composition, but the individual components come from separate artists...and sometimes the seams show.
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