So we are ready to jump into our study of the Pentateuch. These first five books of the Bible, Penta, of course, means five. Teuch means scrolls in Greek or books.
So the first five books, you likely know them. We start with Genesis. The names that have come to us in English have come...
from Greek and then and then through to us. The Hebrew name for Genesis is Breshit, in the beginning. Hebrew names come from the first word, first few words of the book. Breshit is the first word in Hebrew of the Bible, in the beginning.
So Genesis, the idea of origins in Hebrew, in the beginning. So we've got this Genesis is a book of origins but not just of the world, but then of God's people. And we're going to see how that structurally kind of breaks out in the book. After Genesis, of course, we have Exodus in Hebrew, Shemot, El Shemot. These are the names, Shemot means names.
These are the names of the sons of Israel. So start moving from the end of Genesis where we learn about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and then the sons of Jacob. And now the names of the sons of Jacob.
Israel as Israel now is going to emerge as a people in the book of Exodus. This book in the name in English has this idea of exiting. The name in Hebrew maybe connotes a little more of the shaping and formation of a people that happens in the book of Exodus.
We have the book of Numbers. Now you have astutely noticed that I skipped a book. I go Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, and that's how we're going to study them because that is the, that's the narrative of the Pentateuch.
The storyline of God's people, of the Israelites, moves from the end of Exodus to the book of Numbers. Leviticus functions slightly differently. So I go Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, and of course, Numbers, I put question marks here.
Why do we call this book Numbers? As you begin to read the book of Numbers, there are lots of lists and numbers at the beginning of this book, later in the book, chapter 26 of the book, lots of numbers. It's probably a fairly big turnoff, maybe a worse name for English speakers if we had followed the Greek arithmoid, which is where we get our word numbers. Arithmetic, math, maybe if we called it math, that would have been even worse.
to turn people off. And often people get very discouraged after the first few chapters of the book of Numbers. But don't be fooled. There is a great deal of narrative.
There is story. The storyline of God's people advances in significant ways in the book of Numbers. And we'll look at that.
The Hebrew, much more inviting, B'midbar, in the wilderness. And that gives you a picture of the storyline that unfolds in the book of Numbers. So we go from Genesis.
beginnings to Exodus, the coming out of Egypt, but the formation of God's people. These are the names of the Israelites. And now into the wilderness, the story of Numbers. Now, of course, between Exodus and Numbers canonically comes the book of Leviticus, the Levites, the tribe of Levi, a central component of this book that is a a grouping of the law. Okay, so this is how we think about the legal codes of the Israelites that have been given in Exodus, continually formed through Leviticus and in Numbers.
There's a tiny bit of narrative, and of course it's set. The Hebrew of this book is Vayikra. Then the Lord called to Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meeting.
So this idea, the picture I have here is of the tabernacle, the tent of meeting. This place around which centers the religious life of God's people with the Levites being those intermediaries of that religious life and the legal code that shapes God's people as his people. So that's what we have with the book of Leviticus in specific ways.
And then, of course, the Pentateuch ends with Deuteronomy, Deutero second, Namas. law. So this is the second giving of the law that happens.
Again, the narrative kind of has stopped at the end of Numbers, and then the whole book of Deuteronomy takes... is set where the book of Numbers ends with God's people on the verge of entering into the promised land. And we take the time at this point to reiterate and reflect on the law. We look back, we give some of their history, and then we look forward as we are thinking of moving into the promised land and how God's people are going to be God's people as they exit the wilderness. And this this narrative of their time and then are going to be entering the promised land and living there as God's people.
That's the setting of the book of Deuteronomy. So these five books, whether we call them the Pentateuch, that's kind of the academic term, the first five books, Penta, or Torah is the Hebrew term for these books. Torah often gets translated to law.
It may be bigger than that. Instruction, the book of Genesis is part of Torah. contain any law, any legal sections per se, but all of these books are instruction for God's people, instructing us in who God is, in who we are as humanity, and then specifically as God's people, and how who God is is going to impact how he relates to us. and the interconnection of God and his people as it happens here.
So this is Torah, sacred, kind of the most sacred part in Jewish thinking of God's word comes here in Torah. And it is how we think about these books shapes how we read all of scripture in many ways, in many ways. Of course, as Christians, we read it through the lens of Christ and who he is.
These books also shape then how we read the New Testament. We'll be talking about that. These books, the Pentateuch also gets called other names. The Book of the Law of Moses, the Book of the Law, the Law.
Often when these terms are used, they are sometimes referencing kind of all of the Pentateuch, other times maybe referencing just portions of the Pentateuch, where sometimes we're not always sure. But it does lead us to a very interesting consideration and discussion that I want to have, which relates to the authorship of the Pentateuch. I hope you can see that yellow introduction to the documentary hypothesis.
Now, I struggle, always struggle with where to put this in the class. This, the whole idea of the authorship of the Pentateuch, the New Testament, you know, it's Jesus. We have Jesus's life, that his life on earth ends in the thirties as in with his ascension back to heaven. 30s AD, Anno Domini, the year of our Lord, the 30s of the Common Era, if you want to do BCE kind of idea.
But the beginning of the New Testament as it's written down happens probably in the 50s and is completed in the 90s. So, you know, a very short span of time versus the Old Testament, which has a very long composition and transmission history, which leads to... leads to complexity in how we understand, how we think about it, and how scholarship deals with it.
Particularly with the Pentateuch, the documentary hypothesis is a large part of the modern thinking about and scholarship surrounding how we got the Pentateuch. When it was written down, who wrote it down, how it all came together, how it um gotten to us. So I want to start this conversation. Sometimes I keep this conversation for the end of the class. I decided to put it here because one of my goals for you in this class is that you're getting a chance to be introduced to different types of scholarship related to the Pentateuch.
You're in Bible commentaries. You're making, you're familiarizing yourself with your resource, the resources that are at your disposal in commentaries, in Bible dictionaries, etc. And you're going to encounter this. And so while we're not going to spend a significant amount of time on this, some graduate classes on the Pentateuch would spend half, if not three quarters of the time focusing on this type of scholarly theory. We're not going to do that.
But in order for you to successfully interact with modern scholarship on the Pentateuch, you need to have an idea of how modern scholars think about authorship, compilation, the putting together, the redaction is another word that implies compilation of these books. And I want to start. with a verse from the book of Jeremiah. Ah, sovereign Lord, you have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and outstretched arm. Nothing is too difficult for you.
I had a professor who first taught me the Pentateuch and he started this discussion with this verse and it's always resonated with me because it affirms who God is as Christ. creator of heaven and earth, what the Pentateuch is in part teaching us. And nothing is too difficult to him, for him, including helping us, aiding us, and in our understanding of how we think about the compilation of these books.
And in the very compilation of the book, his revelation of himself as it appears to us in the Torah and the Pentateuch. So with that firmly in our heart and minds, I also want to turn to a great quote from F.I. Anderson. This happens to be from his Job commentary.
He's a biblical scholar. There's nothing in the doctrine of divine inspiration of the Holy Scripture that requires that each of the biblical book, that each biblical book must have been written by only one person within a brief space of time. God can create something in a moment. And he can inspire someone to produce a book in a single spurt of creativity.
We know this. He can inspire you to produce a sermon in a single spurt of creativity. Yet, let's kind of flip that.
God can also make things slowly by processes of growth through historical conditions. A book produced as a result of the successive work of several people over a considerable period of time, which is what the Bible is. Let me insert that right the entire book, the entire Bible itself is that a successive work of several people over a considerable period of time. That's true of the whole Bible. That's true of the Old Testament.
That is true of the Pentateuch. That type of work is not disqualified by such a literary history. from being part of the word of God.
And so as I'm introducing this topic to you, I say this up front to allay any fears. The Pentateuch, the Torah as we have it, is the inspired holy word of God, period. And we look to it for transformation, for understanding, for revelation of God, understanding of the revelation of who God is and who we can be in relationship with.
Okay, so That is not in question. So what we're going to look at now is just a very, very brief overview. I have made some resources available to you.
If you're very, very interested in this topic, I can have discussions. I can make more resources available to you. But authorial discussions, authorship discussions related to the Pentateuch, you're going to look at them in Bible commentaries as you're going to read about them.
Start with Mosaic authorship. Now, Until 150 years ago, Mosaic authorship was assumed. I mean, there was not even a question. This had been the position of both rabbinical tradition, but the tradition of the church.
And so we read the Book of the Law of Moses, we take that as an authorial statement. But let us be clear that neither the Pentateuch itself, nor any reference Book of the Law of Moses, that... reference comes up several times in the Old Testament, comes up in the New Testament, Book of the Law, the Law of Moses, those types of references, comes up throughout Scripture.
We don't want to make those statements say more than they say, right? There is never a statement in the biblical text that demands or requires that we understand Moses as the one who penned the writer of every word of the Pentateuch as it stands. You know, often I point out the end of the Pentateuch, we get the account of Moses's death. So either he wrote that, you know, if in Mosaic authorship theory, either he had to write that prophetically before it happened, or at least at the very end, someone came in his name and his hand and wrote that. But over time, the idea of Moses as this The one who wrote down all of Scripture, all of the Pentateuch as Scripture, has...
not been the scholarly consensus. In an article in the IVP dictionary, which is the one that I made available to you, it says, it nowhere, the Bible nowhere clearly states that he is the author of the entire scripture, the entire Pentateuch in its present form. One must be careful in defending a position that goes beyond what scripture itself demands, just as on the other hand, one should hesitate to deny any mosaic input.
at all in the light of these scriptural claims. So the idea of mosaic authorship is one that we take seriously. And yet we don't want to go beyond what scripture itself claims.
So where did we begin to have this move? Jean Astruc was a French layman and physician who began this process of us thinking about how the Pentateuch potentially came into being. And he noted places like Genesis 1 versus Genesis 2 and 3, where we had kind of similar stories, Genesis 1 about creation, Genesis 2 also about creation.
And we saw these differences in the name of God that was used. So Genesis 1 uses God exclusively, whereas Genesis 2 and Genesis 3 uses the Lord God exclusively. And so he saw here two different hands to different sources to different traditions, oral traditions likely, that had become, that had been then woven together to give us, to give us scripture. This then in the mid to late 1800s, 19th century, was further then developed by Julius Wellhausen, Wellhausen. German biblical scholar.
And he is the author of this idea of the documentary hypothesis, which over the years since then has gone through many iterations, many further discussions. And this is what we call the idea of redaction criticism. So redaction criticism is this thinking about this understanding of the long gradual process of growth and expansion that um, brought the Pentateuch into its final form, many authors, many hands, something going from simple compositions that existed and then were, um, woven together into this more complex, um, composition.
So what is the documentary hypothesis also known again in yellow? Hope you can see it. J E D P. What do these letters mean? Well, J, um, would have been the Yahwist. This is the Yahwistic strain of the Pentateuch authorship.
And so the Yahwist uses the name Lord or Lord God. Yod-Heh-Vav-Heh is the Hebrew you have written there. The name of God that is not pronounced.
So when we see that, we say Adonai, we say my Lord, potentially pronounced Yahweh, Y-H-W-H. Maybe you've seen it written out as Yahweh. How it was pronounced, there's no tradition for that because it was an unpronounceable name.
To protect ourselves from potentially taking the Lord's name in vain, from bearing it falsely, we just didn't pronounce the name. So that's, but that, the Yahwist, you notice the Y versus the J that then comes through. So the J strand is the Yahwist, the E is the Elohist, using the Hebrew Elohim, just kind of the more... general word God. The D then is the Deuteronomist, and you see the word Deuteronomy in there.
This, the D strand is really only in Deuteronomy, though there may have been an other hand elsewhere, but really D is Deuteronomy. And then P is the Priestly Writer. And the Priestly Writer has strands all throughout, obviously maybe large chunks in more of the Priestly legal codes. but had a hand in throughout the pentate, shaping of the Pentateuch in the book of Genesis, for example, and was the final redactor, the one who put it all together. So this is Wellhausen's kind of original view of the documentary hypothesis.
And again, it's gone through many iterations and you'll see scholars put forth many variations on that theme. We'll talk through those just a little bit, but it All of this is kind of built around the idea that there are these duplicate stories, and maybe duplicate's not as good of a word as just doublets, these... Genesis 1, Genesis 2, side by side, that seem to tell a generally the same story or at least are dealing with the same type of content and yet we see these different authorial hints in there.
So other examples include Genesis 16 versus Genesis 21. This is the Hagar Ishmael, the Hagar Ishmael story is Genesis 16. They're brought back but Genesis 21 they're expelled and again we have the differences in names. So Lord as J, God as E. I wish that yellow was showing up a little better.
Note to self for in the future. Genesis 6 through 9, the flood story has this inner mixture of actually probably J and P is what most would say. And so other things that tip off these ideas of potential different strains, different traditions coming together are small differences in detail.
So two animals, two of each kind of animal versus seven of each kind of clean animal. You know, are these different traditions that are being woven together at different points? Interestingly, Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 and 3 that I already mentioned, Astruc first looked at them and saw potentially a J and an E.
Most now would say that Genesis 2 and 3 is J, whereas Genesis 1 is P. The priestly writer kind of appended this point. prologue that creates kind of a tapestry of creation theology. That's a quote by Dr. Bill Arnold. But that the priestly author saw a need to have certain emphases, theological emphases, brought into our creation theology.
So for example, so why pee? Well, we have a strong emphasis on the Sabbath. In Genesis 15 and Genesis 17, again, you have the different names of God, but Genesis 15 as J, but Genesis 17 as P with the strong emphasis on circumcision.
So these are the two significant covenantal moments with Abraham. So as you're looking at this, I'm kind of painting big strokes here. You'll find in articles, books on the Pentateuch, a breakdown of the Pentateuch. Verse by verse, with one verse being one strand, another verse being a secondary, a different strand. So J and P right next to each other, verse to verse to verse.
You know, maybe chunks of different chapters given to one particular, particular strand. The complexities of this redaction, then you can begin to think, OK, how did this happen across time? Well, one way.
to potentially parse this out. This is just one potential idea that has come through scholarship. We start with an oral tradition.
I haven't mentioned that much, but that's a very important segment of the composition and transmission. Again, if we're going to think seriously about Moses as a source, potentially Moses served as a strong oral source. How much of Moses was actual, did...
did Moses actually compose in a written form? Of course, we don't know that, but there is an oral tradition that extends back and even beyond Moses, of course, to extend some of these traditions for us. But the compositions themselves began, J, potentially, for example, in the 10th century BCE. um, in the 900s.
So the 10th century would be the 900s time of David Solomon, potentially this, this epic of, um, of God's people of the Israelites was created at that point. And then E, maybe a little later in the ninth century of 800s around the time of Elijah, Elisha, these are just times of, I'm not giving authorial statements here. Um, some have argued that J is a Southern Judean.
Jerusalem source, whereas E is a source that comes from the north of Israel. There have been discussions about how that potentially plays into these two epics. But at some point, these two were combined. So J and E became combined, or maybe they were never separate.
You're going to find that in the literature as well. Having an idea of J and E helps explain it. some of these doublets, and yet how separate they ever were literarily in a written form is a big question. D then is 7th century, so the 600s around the time of Josiah. So thinking about Josiah's reconstruction of the temple and the finding of the book of the law, many would say that is, that's where we're looking at to see the origins potentially of the book of Deuteronomy.
There is probably a most scholarly consensus around Deuteronomy being this later cohesive work. We can talk a little bit more about that in a bit. But at some point, J and E were then combined with D to then allow for the priestly source to come in in the 6th century, maybe even the 5th century, so time of the Babylonian exile or slightly thereafter. And then to kind of begin to write the priestly portions, but then all of those being combined by the P school, perhaps sometime after the exile.
So 400s, 300s, the times of Ezra, the characters of Esther, Ezra, Nehemiah, those same types of characters. And this is just one potential idea of how all of that may have come together. Okay, so we think about all of this and there can be some frustration as we deal with biblical criticism and how we...
are getting into some significant minutiae, particularly around redaction, so redaction criticism, the compilation, the writing, and then the bringing together the authorship questions of these texts. It's important that we understand that this is a diachronic discussion. So how we got the text through time is the primary concern of redaction criticism. other source criticism, in other words, you'll hear form criticism, all of those kinds of words, thinks about the origin of the text and how it came to us.
And there is a strong focus on the variety in the text, right? All the different hands that came together to weave this story together for us. Why do we even do this? Well, it is important for us as the privileged readers of this text who have the entire text at our disposal to realize that that has not always been true through time.
So we often think Genesis 1 and 2 are our starting points, right? We think of, we go creation theology, using Sandra Richter's term, Epic of Eden, that you're reading or going to be reading. The original intent, okay? So that can be our starting point. We also know final intent ideas, and then how we can have those as our two touch points that would then weaves everything together in between.
That's a great privilege that we have. But we have to understand that through time, there were many of God's people that didn't have any of this text at their disposal. And it might have been a much later group of God's people that even ever had Genesis 1, for example, as a foundation point. to root them in their theology.
So it helps us even we can think very linearly about the text potentially. It helps us understand and think about the theology of God's people at a given point in time as we're reading the entire Old Testament in the sense that they might not have had all of the text as we think of it. Even if maybe there were some oral traditions around. it had not necessarily been woven together in the same way that we have it.
It also helps us think carefully. If we think about, say, the book of Deuteronomy, as I mentioned earlier, it has its setting with God's people as they're about to enter into the promised land. But if that was a book that was actually written quite a bit after that time period, it helps us think about God's word, his law.
the way he shaped his people to be his people, is something that developed over time. And this is maybe a later reflection moment, thinking back onto those people as they were, that group of people of God's people, as they were about to enter into the promised land. Ways that we realize now, we God's people, the author at this point realizes, We need to think about how God was trying to shape us then and how that speaks into our lives now. Isn't that a picture of what we do as ministers, as preachers, right?
To try to think about, okay, we have this moment of, um, um. of God's word and that was handed to us. But how does that function in our life now?
How does it speak? How might we expand? How might we focus a particular truth of God's word into our lives today?
And this kind of diachronic approach gives us the ability to kind of see that play out in the writing of God's word. which is, I think, powerful and can give us significant moments of reflection. That said, the diachronic approach can feel like rabbit holes, that you're just going deeper and deeper down into this abyss of picking out tiny minutiae in the text that leaves you throwing up your hands potentially and saying, what is the point?
That I would argue potentially has led some people to say, I'm done with this. I can't, I can't trust any of this. I don't even, we don't even know where it all came from. And we definitely want to avoid that. Go back to some of my, kind of the way I started this conversation, which does give us the great joy of entering into a different types of biblical criticism.
Again, biblical criticism. This is canonical criticism. literary criticism has different names, narrative criticism, different types of names and expressions here.
But this is a more synchronic approach. Okay, so the primary concern here is the text as we have it. Synchronic means same time.
So the text as we have it. We deal with the biblical text as we have it, and we focus on features of style, of structure, interconnections between the different points of the text, even if they're written disparately at different times. Ultimately, they have the same author, God, the Holy Spirit, who was inspiring the writing of these texts.
And we can make connections. We can read from Genesis 1 straight through and have a building and growing understanding of who God is, of our theology or understanding of who God is and who we are in his image. So this shows the cohesion in the text, right?
How they do fit together. And for me, I live here. This is a much more satisfying exploration of the text.
And yet I don't want to completely jettison this because there are great spiritual truths, I think, here to be learned, as well as just a deeper understanding of the text, its composition. We can learn more about the text. um, itself and how it came, how it came to be. I think of this diachronic and synchronic just a few moments ago, as I was starting this video, I stopped and I prayed for, for you, for each of you, um, for, for us as a community. And I prayed for you in this moment, um, which is months before you're going to be watching this text, this, this video.
Um, and I prayed for you where you are in this moment. And then I prayed for you through time. where you are going to be when you watch this and when you experience this.
And I prayed that the Holy Spirit would speak the words today that you are going to need to hear when you're sitting and watching this. And that to me was a beautiful picture of bringing this diachronic and synchronic together. Both are important. The time when we are together.
watching this, even though we aren't going to be watching this video, even at the same time as we do that. And yet we will be, we will be joined through space and time, um, in beautiful ways by the power of the Holy Spirit. Um, so what is the right answer when it comes to Pentateuch authorship?
Um, the, um, the documentary hypothesis, let me give you some broad conclusions. Um, the IVP article I've been mentioning by T.D. Alexander, which is posted for you. These are some of his broad conclusions that speak. um, to my heart as well.
So let me just, um, put a few of these up here. Moses as a respected source. I don't want to, again, I don't want to jettison that.
I don't want to just, um, sweep that under the rug. Um, though I, I wouldn't claim full mosaic authorship in terms of penning, writing down, penning every word of the Pentateuch as we have it. Um, and yet I think we can, I think we can hold those, both of those very well. Um, so we, we don't just, um, dismiss any type of mosaic source of these books.
And we can also affirm that the traditions that have been preserved through the power of the Holy Spirit, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, through time and through many lives, those traditions are both ancient and they are authoritative. So we don't, even as Deuteronomy, the Deuteronomist was composing De potentially in the time of Josiah, that is an ancient source that is authoritative for our lives today. And it's then our goal and our work before us to understand fully how all of that fits together.
And this understanding of both the unity and the diversity, we could say unity and disunity. I like diversity better because there's not a disunity, but there is a great diversity, variety within the text. And all of those can speak significantly into how we understand and interact with the text.
All right. So I want to move from that directly into. Oh, let's go back to this verse. I forgot about this. Nothing is too difficult for our Sovereign God.
And so we can rest and trust in that.