by A.Y. Feldblum
Avi Feldblum was a research scientist at AT&T Engineering Research Center in Princeton, and the coordinator of net.religion.jewish's weekly Dvar Torah project. In October 1985, responding to a question from Gary Buchholz at the University of Chicago about whether the Wellhausen Documentary Hypothesis could be reconciled with Torah Judaism, Feldblum composed a careful two-part response. He dismantles the methodological foundations of both lower and higher biblical criticism, shows how the discovery of Ugaritic and other Near Eastern texts undermined the German school's assumptions, and then argues that the Torah tradition meets the same standards of historical evidence it is asked to submit to. The post is a model of scholarly engagement from within Orthodox Judaism — confident, precise, and free of the defensiveness that often mars such arguments.
Gary Buchholz raised the following point: Given that both secular and nonsecular biblical scholarship accept the validity of source criticism as applied to the Pentateuch, can the Wellhausen Documentary Hypothesis be accepted by Torah Judaism?
I'd like to comment and examine several of the points raised by this issue.
Secular Biblical Scholarship and Its Assumptions
First, we must understand what secular biblical scholarship is. As I understand it, it starts from the basic assumption that the Bible is a document that was authored by man at some period in the past. This document was copied and recopied by scribes, and what we call the Bible is the result of that process. The document is then studied by using principles of literary scholarship.
There are two components to this field, usually referred to as "lower" and "higher" criticism. Lower criticism focuses on "errors" that crept into the document during the period of scribal copying. In other related fields, this is determined by examining manuscripts with variant readings, and having a broad base of documents with which to determine the language and grammar. With the case of the Bible, there are basically no manuscripts with variant readings, there were no contemporary documents to use to compare language use and grammatical structure. What the German school of biblical lower criticism did was, to large extent, to simply put any word or grammatical structure that did not fit their view of what was correct biblical Hebrew in the category of "errors."
Much of that work has now fallen into disrespect as contemporary Semitic documents (especially Ugaritic texts) have been discovered, and those words or grammatical constructs turn out to be valid Semitic usage.
The Documentary Hypothesis
The second area is higher criticism, and the Documentary Hypothesis is one result of that work. In higher criticism one tries to study the literary makeup and development of the document. Again, the lack of contemporary documents to base their work on forced them to assume principles and base their results on that. The Documentary Hypothesis is the assumption that the different names used for G-d mark different authors, and there was some final "Redactor" who put it all together. As far as the date, they put it somewhere late in the period of the split Kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
Again, the discovery of Near Eastern documents from the period the Torah is set in strongly points to the documents being from that period. Many details in the stories found in Bereshit indicate a detailed knowledge of the period. Thus the "historical validity" of the Documentary Hypothesis is dubious at best.
Science, Scholarship, and Truth
Having let off some steam about the Documentary Hypothesis, let us look at the larger question of Torah and "Scholarship." Literary scholarship is a part of what we call the scientific method. One important aspect of the scientific method is that it does not claim to be able to determine the "truth." Rather, it is a method of arriving at a self-consistent description of its subject matter, based on admittedly arbitrary assumptions, that (1) completely describes the observables of its subject matter, and (2) correctly makes predictions about future observables. Thus quantum mechanics may not be the correct description of the physical laws. However, all observations of the physical laws are consistent with quantum mechanics, and it has successfully predicted many new phenomena. That it may not be "true" is totally irrelevant.
Biblical scholarship fails miserably at the above two criteria. It is forced to ascribe corruption to its subject matter — the Bible — in order to develop any framework, which has in turn been shown to be defective every time some new Near Eastern document has been found.
The Torah Tradition on Its Own Terms
If we look at the Torah view, on the other hand, we have a very well defined approach that has no historical evidence against it. Rather, the problem with it from a scholarly point of view is that it goes against the arbitrary assumptions that were postulated for the foundation of the inquiry.
Torah says G-d exists and gave the Torah to Moses on Mt. Sinai with more than 1.5 million witnesses. This tradition stretches back three thousand years in oral form, and over two thousand years in existing written form. There is as much, if not more, "historical" evidence for this event, as there is for any event whose validity is based on transmitted literary documents — which, if you think about it, includes most events. The reason for claiming that the Torah is a fraud and is not an accurate description of historical facts is simply that the events reported contradict certain arbitrary assumptions that are accepted as the basis for scholarly criticism.
To summarize: I find no scientific basis for the Documentary Hypothesis, and more importantly I accept the tradition of the giving of the Torah to Moses by G-d to be valid. In that context, I really don't care if my Dvar Torah doesn't conform to their views, and I think that the Torah and the Oral Tradition are firmly "on the ground."
Colophon
Written by A.Y. (Avi) Feldblum (AT&T Engineering Research Center, Princeton, NJ) and posted to net.religion.jewish on October 30, 1985. Feldblum was the coordinator of the Dvar Torah project on net.religion.jewish, which circulated weekly Torah commentaries across the early Usenet network. His posts in this archive reflect both his religious commitments and his training as a scientist. The exchange with Gary Buchholz at the University of Chicago is one of the more intellectually rigorous discussions preserved from this era of the net.
Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026. Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>.
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