Table D Source Analysis: Revisions and Alternatives

Table D Source Analysis: Revisions and Alternatives

Martin Noth Martin Noth pioneered a new way of understanding the composition and development of the Pentateuch called tradition history. Instead of viewing the Pentateuch as composed of four written sources, Noth argued that blocks of material developed around the key historical experiences of the early Israelites. His major work on the Pentateuch is entitled A History of Pentateuchal Traditions (1948).

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Theories of pentateuchal sources continue to be revised and refined and refuted in modern scholarship, and the process goes on.The approaches summarized here are only some of the more noteworthy, but certainly not the only, proposals.

Supplement Hypothesis

The supplement hypothesis accepts the notion of written source documents. In its reconstruction of the composition process it claims one of the documents was the backbone of the Pentateuch and others were added to fill out the story. The Priestly document is usually identified as the backbone.

Fragment Hypothesis

The fragment hypothesis was inspired by the difficulties scholars had in firmly identifying documents that served as sources. It denies that they actually existed as identifiable written works. Instead, this hypothesis argues that the Pentateuch was composed of a great variety of originally independent oral and written traditions, none of which was a dominant source.

Tradition History

A major reconstruction of the Pentateuch was developed by Noth (1948). He revised and supplemented the documentary hypothesis with a study of tradition history. Tradition history starts with the oral traditions that lie behind small textual units and traces how these units were combined into more comprehensive tradition blocks.
   Noth identified a small number of core Israelite beliefs about God's direction of Israelite history. The earliest beliefs were guidance out of Egypt and guidance into the promised land. To these were later added the themes of God's promises to the ancestors, guidance through the wilderness, and divine revelation at Sinai. These core beliefs attracted illustrative stories and clusters of episodes, or tradition blocks, accumulated around those beliefs. After these tradition blocks combined, they became the foundational narrative about Israel's past. From this narrative the Yahwist, Elohist, and Priestly written sources derived.
   Noth saw the evolution of the written sources as a dynamic process of reworking and expansion as the tradition developed in conversation with the ongoing history of the Israelite people. He identified the Priestly source as the backbone of the Pentateuch to which the Yahwist and Elohist sources were added.

Priestly Editing, No Priestly Source

Cross (1973) argues that a combination of Yahwist and Elohist sources is the core of the Pentateuch. He argues that a Priestly source never existed independently. Rather, Priestly writing consisted of editing the other two sources and adding comments and other material as needed.

Late Date for the Yahwist Source

Schmid (1976) argues that the Yahwist source, usually dated to the reign of Solomon in the tenth century B.C.E., should instead be dated to the time of the exile in the sixth century B.C.E. He claims the Yahwist source must have come later because preexilic classical prophecy (eighth and seventh centuries B.C.E.) makes virtually no reference to the stories contained in the Yahwist source.
   Van Seters (1975) examines the Abraham stories in Genesis and concludes that they reflect names, customs, and institutions of the exilic period of Israel's history, and not the time of a supposed Yahwist in Solomon's kingdom. Consequently, he argues that it arose in the exilic period.

Tradition Complexes

Rendtorff (1990) rejects the tradition historical reconstruction of Noth by arguing that there was no early foundational narrative. He concludes that the glue holding together pentateuchal themes is very late, coming from the Deuteronomic school. He argues against the whole enterprise of source analysis and claims that there were no Yahwist or Elohist sources, only late tradition complexes.

Literary Process

Whybray (1987) accepts the existence of pre-existing traditional material, yet argues that the process of composition was a literary process. Supported by insights from literary critics such as Alter (1981), Whybray suggests that repetition, the use of different divine names, and inconsistencies in the text were deliberate literary devices used to create texture. He claims such phenomena should not be used to reconstruct underlying documents.