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Kathy Part 3

Nate

Well, after breaking 2000 comments on the previous thread, I think it’s time to move to a new one. Feel free to continue the conversation here.

Also, I want to make a note about future posts. The tone on this blog for the last month or so has been decidedly different than what it used to be. While that’s definitely made things interesting, I’d like to move back to a tone more in line with the way things used to be. So going forward, I want the comments on all new posts to remain civil. We can all make our points, and I expect to see a wide range of opinions. But I don’t want to get into name-calling and bashing when we can’t all agree on particular issues. Let’s try to stay focused on the points and not get side-tracked with personal stuff. Let’s also keep each comment substantive so we don’t rack up so many comments in such a short period of time that it’s hard for everyone to keep track.

If you don’t feel like you can participate within those guidelines, then feel free to continue posting within this thread (and any future “Kathy” threads, if they’re needed), because I won’t be enforcing any guidelines here. But if you want to comment on any other posts, you’ll need to abide by the rules I just laid out. Otherwise, your comment will be subject to deletion, and after a warning, you might find yourself banned from at least that thread, if not the entire blog.

If there are any questions, let me know.

Thanks

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Published by Nate

1,249 thoughts on “Kathy Part 3”

  1. RE: “That is why in Genesis you will see the Hebrew word translated in English as ‘God’ referred to at times by the name ‘Elohim’ and other times by ‘Yahweh’.” – actually, Gary, there’s a little more to it than that. It was the Yahwist (J) Source, writing in c.950 BCE in the Southeern Kingdom of Judah, in Jerusalem, who referred to god as Yahweh, and the Elohist (E) Source, writing about 850 BCE in the Northern Kingdom of Israel, in Schechem, who called god Elohim. When the Elohist group fled south to Jerusalem, to preserve their scrolls from invading Assyrians, the two versions were combined into JE by a redactor in about 750 BCE – these would later be pieced together like a patchwork quilt by yet another redactor in 400 BCE, a hundred and a half years after the Priestly (P) Source had, in an Orwellian rewrite, added their own version of events in the 6th century BCE, while in captivity in Babylon. Deuteronomy, was a stand-alone book, written by the Deuteronomist (D) Source and “found” in a rarely used room in the temple around 800 BCE – many scholars have said that Josiah himself wrote it, in an effort to lend legitimacy to his office as king.

    RE: “Let me give an example: If I sit down, and over the next month, I write a book about the events of World War I” – I’ve used a similar analogy, but I used the assassination of Kennedy.

    BTW – I’ve left a comment for you on your own site, as soon as you approve it.

    I know Steve – he and I have exchanged a number of emails, and I subscribe to his “Contradictions,” but thanks.

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  2. Gary,

    Thanks for the link.

    Gary/arch,

    My relatively brief survey on the topic (before) suggests that the documentary hypothesis is not quite scholarly consensus, but it is pretty much consensus that Moses did not write the Pentateuch. Thoughts/comments?

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  3. Here’s a bit of the history behind the hypothesis, Ratamacue:

    15th Century: Bishop Tostatus suggested that certain passages were written by one of the prophets, not by Moses.

    As early as 1520, Carlstadt, a leader of the Reformation movement in Germany, wrote a pamphlet arguing that Moses did not write the Pentateuch.
     
    In 1574, A. Du Maes, a Roman Catholic scholar, suggested that the Pentateuch was composed by Ezra, who used old manuscripts as a basis.

    Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher, concluded in 1651 that Moses wrote only parts of Deuteronomy. 

    In Tractatus theologico-politicus (1677), Baruch Spinoza, the Jewish philosopher, recognized as one of the founders of modern biblical criticism, reached a conclusion much like that of Du Maes, that Ezra compiled Genesis to II Kings from documents of varying dates. Shortly afterward, Richard Simon, a Roman Catholic priest, often called “the father of biblical criticism,” gathered together the substance of critical analyses up to his time and raised the problem of literary history, thus opening the door to the application of techniques used in the study of non-sacred literature to the Bible.

    Further, explore the works of German minister Henning Bernard Whitter in 1711, French professor of medicine and Court Physician to Louis XV, Jean Astruc, in 1753, and noted and respected German scholar and son of a pastor, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, in 1780.

    In 1806-7 W. M. L. DeWette, a German scholar, published a two volume introductory study of the Old Testament in which he suggested that the book found in the temple in 621 BCE may not have been written by Moses, but by a later author. In 1835-36, Wilhelm Vatke, a student of Hegel, wrote a critical work, Die Religion des Alten Testaments nach den kanonischen Büchern entwickelt, which contained the seeds of a revolution in the ideas held about the Old Testament, which was followed, in 1862, by K.H. Graf, also a student of Hegel, who wrote Der Prophet Jeremia, in which he proposed that the Book of Deuteronomy, surprisingly “found” in the temple, just when its laws were needed, was written by none other than Jeremia himself.

    Then followed, in 1876/77, Julius Wellhausen, a student of Graf stood on the shoulders of these giants who dared to look at the Bible critically, and put together what is now known as the Graf-Wellhausen Documentary Hypothesis.

    Belief in the documentary hypothesis was triggered by a number of factors, such as:
    • Anachronisms, like the list of the Edomite kings
    • Duplicate and triplicate passages.
    • The flood story appears to involve the meshing of two separate stories.
    • Various passages portrayed God in different ways.

    These factors led theologians to the conclusion that the Pentateuch is a hybrid document which was written well after Moses’ death, and much later than the events portrayed.

    Writing by various authors, according to the documentary hypothesis:

    J: a writer who
    • focuses on humanity in his writing
    • might possibly have been a woman. His/her writing shows much greater sensitivity towards women than does E
    • regularly used “JHWH” as God’s name
    • describes God in anthropomorphic terms: God formed Adam from clay; he walked and talked with Adam and Eve in the garden; he spoke to Moses.
    • lived in the southern kingdom of Judah, during an early period of Israel’s history when they followed a nature/fertility religion. May have been a member of the Judean court.
    • wrote a more or less complete story of the history of the Israelites from a Judean perspective
    • J was probably written between 848 BCE (when King Jehoram gained power in Judah) and 722 BCE when the Assyrians destroyed the northern kingdom Israel and took its people into exile. Some scholars date J to the 10th century BCE.

    E: a writer who
    • writes about religious and moralistic concerns
    • in all probability was a man
    • consistently used “Elohim” as God’s name
    • lived in the northern kingdom of Israel
    • wrote a more or less complete story of the history of the Israelites from the perspective of the northern kingdom, including that version of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20
    • probably wrote between 922 and 722 BCE
    • may have been a priest from Shiloh who viewed Moses as his spiritual ancestor.

     D: is a writer who
    • lived after J and E, because he was familiar with later developments in Israel’s history. He lived at a time when the religion of ancient Israel was in its spiritual/ethical stage, about 622 BCE.
    • wrote almost all of book of Deuteronomy, as well as Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel and 1 & 2 Kings. A second writer edited the original text after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587 BCE. He added the last two chapters to 2 Kings and inserted short passages elsewhere to reflect the change in circumstances brought about by the Babylonian attack.
    • lived in Judah – probably in Jerusalem.
    • was probably a Levitical priest – perhaps Jeremiah.

     P: is a writer who
    • focused his writings on God
    • added material from a priestly perspective. It discusses priests’ lives, religious rituals, dates, measurements, chronologies, genealogies, worship and law.
    • was a priest who identified Aaron as his spiritual ancestor
    • views God as a distant, transcendent  deity, less personal than in J and E; sometimes harsh and critical. The words “mercy,” “grace” and “repentance” do not appear in his writing; they appear about 70 times in J, E, and D.
    • was displeased with the work of J and E and wrote P as an alternative history
    • rejected the concepts of angels, dreams and talking animals that are seen in J & E
    • believed that only Levites who were descended from Aaron could be priests
    • lived after J, E and D because he was aware of the books of the Prophets which were unknown to the others. Lived when the country’s religion reached a priestly/legal stage, before the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE.
    • patterned his writing after the topics in J and E.

    R: a redactor who
    • was an Aaronid priest and thus definitely a male
    • joined the writings of J, E, P and D together into the present Pentateuch.

    BTW, in my earlier comment to Gary M, I said Josiah may have written Deuteronomy, when I meant Jeramiah – sorry ’bout that.

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  5. I ran across this, that I thought was worth repeating:

    “There is simply nothing we can do about the rise of atheism, but accept the inevitable and hope that they do not treat Christians the way that Christians have treated them.”

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  7. I don’t mind at all, Gary – it’s all about sharing information and getting it out there to those who need it.

    BTW, not trying to be hard to get along with, but the format on your site is not the most user-friendly. Apparently I accidentally hit on the right combination the first time, but when I tried to enter a second comment, I finally gave up in frustration – I can’t help wondering if others haven’t done the same.

    The format on the site I had was perfect, I can’t believe they decided to discontinue it.

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  8. Another book, Gary, that it’s valuable to own, surprisingly enough, is The New American Bible – the Catholic version. For an organization that blatantly plays musical monasteries with pedophile priests, it’s amazingly forthcoming about a lot of the Bible’s shortcomings, pointing out things like anachronisms, such as the camel not having been domesticated until about 1000 BCE, camels that were allegedly given to Abraham by an unnamed Pharaoh a thousand+ years earlier.

    They also accept entirely, the Documentary Hypothesis – no contest – again, a surprise.

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  10. Arch, does every release of the NABRE have the commentary you’re referring to? From browsing amazon, it seems there are many different “versions” or packagings of it.

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  11. I don’t know, Ratamacue, I’m talking about the “old school” version, that you actually hold in your hand – those may have been before your time –;)

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  12. I take it our Kathy’s in church this morning – surprise!

    I once wrote a poem for a cute little nymphomanic friend of mine – the girl was totally deranged, but in the nicest possible way – she’d been raised in a strict religious atmosphere by her mother, who had stuffed religion down her throat (much like, I suspect, Kathy and her daughter), but as an adult, enjoyed her payback by seducing church-going guys, and in essence, saying to Mom – “Hey, look at me now! Missionary position!” I pinned it to her apartment door one Sunday morning, just before she made her weekly march past my window with her ankle-length dress and her Bibble tucked primly under one arm:
    <blockquote<There was a little Church Cat
    Who went to church to prey,
    And woe to any Church-Mouse
    She meets on Sabbath day!
    I sort of miss her – we found all kinds of uses for that Bible.

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  13. I HATE that you can’t correct these things! The format on Think Atheist gives you 15 minutes! Booo WordPress!

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  23. Thanks for the history on the documentary hypothesis, arch.

    My limited research on it has suggested there are a variety of opinions. I saw someone suggest that there are “documentary hypotheses“. So for now I remain skeptical of the details. Perhaps I will do further research on it someday, but for now, for me, it’s not a priority.

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  25. “Hey Kathy — here’s an article you really should consider reading.” – yeah, THAT’ll happen —

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