The Bible is an incoherent document.
This is not news. It was noticed long ago and has spawned some two centuries of biblical criticism that has focused on answering the very simple question of how the biblical texts came to be incoherent – that is, if we reject the religious assumption that the biblical text is in fact perfect and that all seeming problems can be solved with creative interpretation, how do we account for the many contradictions, tensions, and repetitions in even short narrative passages?
Biblical scholars have proposed several different models for explaining how the biblical texts reached their present, sometimes peculiar, form, but I think that four explanations are particularly popular:
- Interpolation. A scribe in antiquity, reading a scroll with the text, makes a marginal note on the side. The note might reflect his knowledge of a similar story but with some different details or might be his own suggestion. The next scribe, though, when copying the text over, simply incorporated these marginal notes into the new copy.
- Rewriting. Some sections of the Bible clearly rewrite other sections. The author (or authors) of 1 and 2 Chronicles, for example, simply rewrote earlier historical books in order to emphasize what he/they found important.
- Additions. Scribes would add blocks of material – sometimes just words, verses, or whole sections – because something about the original text bothered the scribe. Sometimes these additions clarified the text, at other times they dramatically changed its message.
- The Documentary Hypothesis. This is what most well-known fruit of biblical criticism. According to this model, scribes had different sources that they wove together into a single semi-coherent narrative.
Rationally, I understand how scholars have arrived at each of these explanations. They often offer a nice and elegant solution to problems in specific passages. But when I stand back to consider the assumptions behind these explanations, I am left somewhat puzzled.
If we take the perspective of the scribe, I understand (1) and (2). We have many documented cases through the Middle Ages of (1) occurring in texts, and there is little reason to think that in the biblical period something similar didn’t happen on occasion with these texts. (2) makes the most sense: if I am confronted with a semi-coherent text, it would be easier to simply rewrite it than to edit it heavily.
But what about (3) and (4)? The assumption that seems to be behind them both is that the scribe thinks that the base text in front of him is considered so holy or sacred that he can’t actually change it or delete anything from it. He can only add to it. Now think about this for a second – how would this work? Would the same people whom I, as a scribe, are afraid of annoying by deleting or changing pieces of their text not also be annoyed if I inserted passages that might change the basic meaning of the text? Do I think that nobody is going to catch the problems that I just created?
I don’t have an answer to this. Explanations (1) and (2) might account for some of the problems in the biblical text, but not all. (3) and (4) don’t fully work for me, but I don’t have any better explanation to offer. If you do, please let me know.
There are documented cases of #4, too — see Jeff Tigay’s book, “Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism.” (I have been promising to write a blog post on this, and may have to do so now.) Read the intro to it here: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jtigay/EmpModIntro.pdf
As for #3, why could not interpolations sometimes be deliberate, for clarification? E.g. מבושל במים of Exod 12:9.
There is a “strong” version of the Documentary Hypothesis that claims the redactor basically just shuffled the cards together, but I see no reason to insist on this, and some good reasons to think the redactor was even a creative artist.
On the general question, Ben can certainly tell you much more than I.
Michael, thank you very much for this reference. I read the intro to which you linked. Tigay is in fact here wresting with precisely one of the things that is bothering me: can we see any other time or place (although the closer to biblical Israel the better) “biblical like” texts, and do they provide analogues that increase the plausibility of these models? I’m looking forward to reading the book – were there analogues to (4) that you found particularly compelling, or not?
Well, the documentary hypothesis really explains very little of the Bible, just, at the maximum, Genesis-Joshua. In fact, in Europe the hypothesis has fallen from favor and they now favor a supplementary hypothesis, according to which uncoordinated texts treating different periods, or even the same periods but of smaller extent, are joined by large-scale literary activity that creates a single long-running text, and then that text is itself interpolated over time by series of smaller and larger pieces of text to give new slant to the whole. Both hypotheses share the viewpoint that narrative incoherence is best explained by successive stages of literary activity. On either model, the people producing such texts have very different notions of the sacredness of the text and on one’s right to intervene in it than developed in the Middle Ages. The range of variability among the Dead Sea scrolls — everything from grammatical, syntactical, lexical and idiomatic updating to texts that retell the contents in new voice, new order, with exegetical changes, that amount to a new text — gives very strong grounds for the critical view of literary activity I described above.
Besides, if you think the documentary hypothesis is counter-intuitive, you should see what goes on in scholarship with respect to the prophetic literature.
Thanks for these comments, Simeon! Of course, that model too leaves me wondering about the human (rather than textual) element to this – what were the scribes thinking? Do you know if anybody in this “European” school as well deals with this question directly?
Hmm. It seems to me that all the discussions I have seen, whether in Biblical studies or Dead Sea scrolls studies, can be boiled to אין הכי נמי. There really is no profound explanation beyond the acceptance that current categories of textual purity and the physical or graphic separation of commentary emerged over time. Perhaps the best is Fishbane’s Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, though its ambitious argument might be a bit overkill and just a bit off topic. In my personal opinion, the closest one might come, as far as I can tell, is to situate literary activity in a professional class, “scribes,” who copy old materials, restore and otherwise improve deteriorating ones, and also produce new ones. I imagine it would be part of the psychological or professional profile of such a guild simultaneously to hold the sanctity of the contents and the endeavor and also to produce new works out of the old. Perhaps one analogy is Lord & Parry’s work on oral bards who simultaneously claim to repeat the stories of their teachers but change them — and can do so with just about every retelling. Emanuel Tov’s Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible might have the kind of discussion you are looking for or references.
You put your finger on the problem. Van der Toorn talks of the scribes, but does not to my recollection really offer an explanation for the production of texts like the Bible; same goes for Lord and Parry’s model of oral narratives – I’m not sure we have empirical evidence of actual incoherent oral tellings. Tov is great on scribal practices on the micro level, but also does not seem to me to address this problem. Maybe Tigay has something; that’s my next stop.
As far as I know, incoherent tellings do exist in other literatures. I believe this is quite marked in some Sumerian works, where loosely related narratives are simply juxtaposed. Akkadian materials have interpolations that both add shape and disrupt. This is true in some Buddhist works too, if memory serves. An entire industry has grown up around Homer’s works alongside biblical studies. Look at the Genesis Apocryphon or 4Q158. Within the Bible, one of the strongest examples regarding the process, to my mind, is the David and Goliath story in 1 Sam 16-18, to which, I hesitate to say, Tov does not really do justice in Tigay’s volume. I do this text with first year MAs and undergrads. First, they read MT and develop a list of what they don’t understand, then they read LXX and their list of problems, then they suggest a process that explains what happens. Invariably: LXX preserves the original form of the story and someone who had a different, written version of just that episode spliced it in. In any case, that, as narrative, the historiographical literature, especially the Torah, is incoherent was unquestionably felt by Second Temple Jews. One finds them reacting to the problems in numerous ways. Let me add, from a completely different point of view: surely we cannot be willing to argue, on the one hand, that Israel’s notions of divinity and nationhood were sui generis at the time, but that, on the other, the way Israel preserves its literature must have complete analogues. Still, all that said, your original question stands as quite on the mark, to my mind: do we have evidence to help understand how and why biblical literature came about as it did, and if not, can we construct a persuasive and useful enough model provisionally?