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The writings that make up the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Old Testament are on any reckoning among the most influential writings in Western history. In part, their influence may be ascribed to their literary quality, which establishes them as enduring classics—think, for example, of the depiction of the human predicament in the book of Job. But not all books of the Bible are literary classics, nor does their importance depend on their literary merit. The place of the Bible in Western culture derives from the fact that these books are regarded as Sacred Scripture by Jews and Christians and are consequently viewed as authoritative in a way that other literary classics are not. The idea of Sacred Scripture, however, is by no means a clear one, and it is taken to mean very different things by different people. Some conservative Christians regard the Bible as the inspired word of God, verbally inerrant in all its details. At the liberal end of the spectrum, others regard it only as a witness to the foundational stages of Western religion.

It is often the case that people who hold passionate beliefs about the nature of the Bible are surprisingly unfamiliar with its content. Before we can begin to discuss what it might mean to regard the Bible as Scripture, there is much that we need to know about it of a more mundane nature. This material includes the content of the biblical text, the history of its composition, the literary genres in which it is written, and the problems and ambiguities that attend its interpretation. It is the purpose of this book to provide such introductory knowledge. If the Bible is Scripture, then the idea of Scripture must be formed in the light of what we actually find in the biblical text.

The Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament are not quite the same thing. The Hebrew Bible is a collection of twenty-four books in three divisions: the Law (Tōrāh), the Prophets (Nebî˒îm), and the Writings (Ketûbîm), sometimes referred to by the acronym Tanak.

The Torah consists of five books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy (traditionally, the books of Moses).

The Prophets are divided into the four books of the Former Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings; 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings are each counted as one book) and the four of the Latter Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve; the Twelve Minor Prophets [Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi] are counted as one book).

The Writings consist of eleven books: Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs (or Canticles), Ruth, Lamentations, Qoheleth (or Ecclesiastes), Esther, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah (as one book), and Chronicles (1 and 2 Chronicles as one book).

The Christian Old Testament is so called in contrast to the New Testament, with the implication that the Old Testament is in some sense superseded by the New. Christianity has always wrestled with the theological significance of the Old Testament. In the second century c.e., Marcion taught that Christians should reject the Old Testament completely, but he was branded a heretic. The Old Testament has remained an integral part of the Christian canon of Scripture. There are significant differences, however, within the Christian churches as to the books that make up the Old Testament.

The Protestant Old Testament has the same content as the Hebrew Bible, but arranges the books differently. The first five books are the same, but are usually called the Pentateuch rather than the Torah. Samuel, Kings, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles are each counted as two books, and the Minor Prophets as Twelve, yielding a total of thirty-nine books. The Former Prophets are regarded as historical books and grouped with Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah. Daniel is counted as a prophetic book. The (Latter) Prophets are moved to the end of the collection, so as to point forward to the New Testament.

The Roman Catholic canon contains several books that are not in the Hebrew Bible or the Protestant Old Testament: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus (or the Wisdom of Jesus, son of Sirach = Ben Sira), Baruch, Letter of Jeremiah (= Baruch 6), 1 and 2 Maccabees. Furthermore, the books of Daniel and Esther contain passages that are not found in the Hebrew Bible. In the case of Daniel, these are the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men, which are inserted in Daniel 3, and the stories of Susanna and Bel and the Dragon.

The Greek Orthodox Church has a still larger canon, including 1 Esdras (which reproduces the substance of the book of Ezra and parts of 2 Chronicles and Nehemiah), [Page 3] Psalm 151, the Prayer of Manasseh, and 3 Maccabees. A fourth book of Maccabees is included in Greek Bibles, but is regarded as an appendix to the canon, while another book, 2 Esdras, is included as an appendix in the Latin Vulgate. These books are called Apocrypha (literally, “hidden away”) in Protestant terminology. Catholics often refer to them as “deuterocanonical” or “secondarily canonical” books, in recognition of the fact that they are not found in the Hebrew Bible.

Some Eastern Christian churches have still more extensive canons of Scripture. The books of Jubilees and 1 Enoch attained canonical status in the Ethiopian church.

By “canon” we mean here simply the list of books included in the various Bibles. Strictly speaking, “canon” means “rule” or “measuring stick.” The word was used in the plural by librarians and scholars in ancient Alexandria in the Hellenistic period (third and second centuries b.c.e.) with reference to literary classics, such as the Greek tragedies, and in Christian theology it came to be used in the singular for the Scriptures as “the rule of faith,” from the fourth century c.e. on. In its theological use, canon is a Christian concept, and it is anachronistic in the context of ancient Judaism or even of earliest Christianity. In common parlance, however, “canon” has come to mean simply the corpus of Scriptures, which, as we have seen, varies among the Christian churches.

The differences between the various canons can be traced back to the differences between the Scriptures that became the Hebrew Bible and the larger collection that circulated in Greek. The Hebrew Bible took shape over several hundred years, and attained its final form only in the first century c.e. The Torah was the earliest part to crystallize. It is often associated with the work of Ezra in the fifth century b.c.e. It may have been substantially complete a century before that, at the end of the Babylonian exile (586–539 b.c.e.), but there may have also been some additions or modifications after the time of Ezra. The Hebrew collection of the Prophets seems to have been formed before the second century b.c.e. We find references to the Torah and the Prophets as authoritative Scriptures in the second century b.c.e., in the book of Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus), and again in the Dead Sea Scrolls (in a document known as 4QMMT). The book of Daniel, which was composed about 164 b.c.e., did not find a place among the Prophets in the Hebrew Bible, and this has often been taken as an indication that the collection of the Prophets was already fixed at the time of its composition. The preface to the book of Ben Sira also mentions other writings that were regarded as authoritative. There does not, however, seem to have been any definitive list of these writings before the first century c.e. Most references to the Jewish Scriptures in the writings of this period (including references in the New Testament) speak only of “the Law and the Prophets.” The Psalms are sometimes added as a third category. The [Page 4]

Cannon of the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament
Hebrew Bible	Protestant Old Testament
Torah	Pentateuch	Prophets
Genesis	Genesis	Isaiah
Exodus	Exodus	Jeremiah
Leviticus	Leviticus	Lamentations
Numbers	Numbers	Ezekiel
Deuteronomy	Deuteronomy	Daniel
		Hosea
Prophets (Former)	Historical Books	Joel
Joshua	Joshua	Amos
Judges	Judges	Obadiah
Samuel (1 and 2)	Ruth	Jonah
Kings (1 and 2)	1 Samuel	Michah
	2 Samuel	Nahum
Prophets (Latter)	1 Kings	Habakkuk
Isaiah	2 Kings	Zephaniah
Jeremiah	1 Chronicles	Haggai
Ezekiel	2 Chronicles	Zechariah
Minor Prophets	Ezra	Malachi
(“The Twelve”):	Nehemiah
Hosea, Joel, Amos,	Esther	Apocrypha
Obadiah, Jonah,		1 Esdras
Micah, Nahum,	Poetry/Wisdom	2 Esdras
Habakkuk,	Job	Tobit
Zephaniah, Haggai,	Psalms	Judith
Zechariah,	Proverbs	Additions to Esther
Malachi	Ecclesiastes	Wisdom of Solomon
	(Qoheleth)	Ecclesiasticus
Writings	Song of Solomon	(Wisdom of Sirach)
Psalms	(Songs)	Baruch
Proverbs		Letter of Jeremiah
Job		Prayer of Azariah
Song of Songs		and Song of the
Ruth		Three Young Men
Lamentations		Susanna
Qoheleth		Bel and the Dragon
(Ecclesiastes)		Prayer of Manasseh
Esther		1 Maccabees
Daniel		2 Maccabees
Ezra-Nehemiah
Chronicles (1 and 2)

[Page 5] Roman Catholic Old Testament
Pentateuch	Poetry/Wisdom	Prophets
Genesis	Job	Isaiah
Exodus	Psalms (Greek and	Jeremiah
Leviticus	Russian Ortho-	Lamentations
Numbers	dox Bibles include	Baruch (includes
Deuteronomy	Psalm 151 and	Letter of Jeremiah)
	Prayer of Manasseh	Ezekiel
Historical Books		Daniel (with additions)
Joshua	Proverbs
Judges	Ecclesiastes	Hosea
Ruth	(Qoheleth)	Joel
1 Samuel	Song of Solomon	Amos
2 Samuel	(Songs)	Obadiah
1 Kings	Wisdom of Solomon	Jonah
2 Kings	Ecclesiasticus	Micah
1 Chronicles	(Wisdom of Sirach)	Nahum
2 Chronicles		Habakkuk
Ezra (Greek and		Zephaniah
Russian Orthodox		Haggai
Bibles also include		Zechariah
1 Esdras, and Russian		Malachi
Orthodox includes
2 Esdras)
Nehemiah
Tobit
Judith
Esther (with addi-
tions)
1 Maccabees
2 Maccabees (Greek
and Russian
Orthodox Bibles
include 3 Maccabees)

[Page 6] Dead Sea Scrolls include a Psalms Scroll that has additional psalms, and this would seem to indicate that the canonical collection of psalms had not yet been fixed. The first references to a fixed number of authoritative Hebrew writings are found toward the end of the first century c.e. The Jewish historian Josephus gives the number as twenty-two, while the Jewish apocalypse of 4 Ezra (contained in 2 Esdras 3–14) speaks of twenty-four. It is possible, however, that both had the same books in mind but that Josephus combined some books (perhaps Judges-Ruth and Jeremiah-Lamentations) that were counted separately in 4 Ezra.

The fixing of the Hebrew canon is often associated with the so-called Council of Jamnia, the discussions of an authoritative group of rabbis in the period after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 c.e. It is misleading, however, to speak of a “Council of Jamnia,” since it suggests a meeting like the great ecumenical councils of the Christian church in later centuries. Before the fall of Jerusalem, Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai established an academy in the coastal city of Jamnia, and this academy assumed a leadership role after the fall. Its discussions, however, had the character of a school or court rather than of a church council. We know that the rabbis debated whether some books (Qoheleth and Song of Songs) “make the hands unclean” (that is, whether they are holy books and should be included among the Scriptures). There seems, however, to have been further discussions of this kind at a later time, and there is no evidence that the rabbis proclaimed a formal list of Scriptures. Nonetheless, it is at this time (70–100 c.e.) that we first find references to a fixed number of authoritative books. It may be that the list adopted consisted of the books that were accepted by the Pharisees already before the fall of Jerusalem.

It is important to recognize that the books that were included in the Hebrew Bible were only a small selection from the religious writings that were current in Judaism around the turn of the era. A larger selection was preserved in the Greek Scriptures that were taken over by the early Christians, but had been already developed in Jewish communities outside the land of Israel, especially in Alexandria in Egypt. According to legend, the Torah had been translated into Greek at the request of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, king of Egypt, in the first half of the third century b.c.e., by seventy-two elders. (The story is told in the Letter of Aristeas, a Greek composition from the second century b.c.e.) The translation became known as the Septuagint or lxx (Septuagint means “seventy”). The name was eventually extended to cover the whole collection of Greek Scriptures. These included translations of some books that were written in Hebrew but were not included in the Hebrew Bible (e.g., the book of Ben Sira, 1 Maccabees) and also some books that never existed in Hebrew but were composed in Greek (2 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon). There has been some debate as to whether the Jews of Alexandria had a larger collection of Scriptures than the Jews in the land of Israel. But there is no evidence that there ever existed a distinct Alexandrian canon. Rather, the Jews of Alexandria did not set [Page 7] a limit to the number of the sacred writings, as the rabbis did after the fall of Jerusalem. The Jewish community in Alexandria was virtually wiped out in the early second century c.e. Christians who took over the Greek Scriptures of the Jews, then, inherited a larger and more fluid collection than the Hebrew Bible. There is still considerable variation among the lists of Old Testament books cited by the church fathers, centuries later.

When Jerome translated the Bible into Latin about 400 c.e., he was troubled by the discrepancies between the Hebrew and Greek Bibles. He advocated the superiority of the Hebrew (Hebraica veritas, “the Hebrew truth”) and based his translation on it. He also translated the books that were not found in the Hebrew, but accorded them lesser status. His translation (the Vulgate) was very influential, but nonetheless the Christian church continued to accept the larger Greek canon down through the Middle Ages. At the time of the Reformation, Martin Luther advocated a return to the Hebrew canon, although he also translated the Apocrypha. In reaction to Luther, the Catholic church defined its larger canon at the Council of Trent in the mid-sixteenth century.

It should be apparent from this discussion that the list of books that make up the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament emerged gradually over time. The list was (and to some degree still is) a subject of dispute. The various canons were eventually determined by the decisions of religious communities. Christian theology has often drawn a sharp line between Scripture and tradition, but in fact Scripture itself is a product of tradition. Its content and shape have been matters of debate, and are subject to the decisions of religious authorities in the various religious traditions.

Not only did the list of books that make up the Bible take shape gradually over time, so did the words that make up the biblical text. Modern English translations of the Bible are based on the printed editions of the Hebrew Bible and the principal ancient translations (especially Greek and Latin). These printed editions are themselves based on ancient manuscripts. In the case of the Hebrew Bible, the most important manuscripts date from the tenth and eleventh centuries c.e., almost a thousand years after the canon, or list of contents, of the Hebrew Bible was fixed. The text found in these manuscripts is known as the Masoretic text, or MT. The name comes from an Aramaic word meaning to transmit or hand down. The Masoretes were the transmitters of the text. What is called the Masoretic text, however, is the form of the text that was established by the Ben Asher family of Masoretes in Tiberias in Galilee. This text is found in the Aleppo Codex (referred to as A or א), which dates from the early tenth century c.e. This codex was kept for centuries by the Jewish community in Aleppo in Syria. About a quarter of it, including the Torah, was lost in a fire in 1948. It is now in Jerusalem. The Pentateuch is [Page 8] preserved in a tenth-century codex from Cairo, which is referred to as C 3. Codex Leningrad B19A (L) from the early eleventh century is the single most complete source of all the biblical books in the Ben Asher tradition. It is known to have been corrected according to a Ben Asher manuscript. The Cairo Codex of the Prophets (C) dates from 896 c.e., and a few other manuscripts are from the tenth century. These manuscripts are our oldest witnesses to the vowels of most of the Hebrew text. In antiquity, Hebrew was written without vowels. The Masoretes introduced the vowels as pointing or marks above and below the letters, as part of their effort to fix the text exactly. There are fragments of vocalized texts from the sixth or perhaps the fifth century c.e. Besides the Tiberian tradition of vocalization, represented by the Ben Asher family, there was also the Babylonian tradition, associated with the family of Ben Naphtali. The first printed Hebrew Bibles appeared in the late fifteenth century c.e.

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in caves near Qumran south of Jericho, beginning in 1947, brought to light manuscripts of biblical books more than a thousand years older than the Aleppo Codex. Every biblical book except Esther is attested in the Scrolls, but many of the manuscripts are very fragmentary. (No fragment of Nehemiah has been found either, but Nehemiah was regarded as one book with Ezra, which is attested.) These manuscripts, of course, do not have the Masoretic pointing to indicate the vowels; that system was only developed centuries later. But they throw very important light on the history of the consonantal text.

Fragments of about two hundred biblical scrolls were found in the caves near Qumran. Most of the fragments are small, but the great Isaiah Scroll, 1QIsaa, contains the whole book. This scroll dates from about 100 b.c.e.; the oldest biblical scrolls from Qumran are as old as the third century b.c.e. Most of the scrolls contained only one biblical book, but three Torah scrolls contained two consecutive books. The Twelve Minor Prophets were contained in one scroll. Many of these texts are in substantial agreement with the text copied by the Masoretes a thousand years later. But the Scrolls also contain other forms of biblical texts. Several biblical texts, including an important copy of the book of Exodus (4QpaleoExodm), are closer to the form of the text preserved in the Samaritan tradition. (The Samaritan text is often longer than the MT, because it adds sentences or phrases based on other parallel biblical passages, or adds a statement to indicate the fulfillment of a command that has been described.) Moreover, the text of some other biblical books is very similar to that presupposed in the ancient Greek translation (lxx).

Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls our oldest copies of Old Testament texts were found in Greek translations. There are fragments of Greek biblical manuscripts from the second century b.c.e. on. The oldest complete manuscripts date from the fourth century c.e. These are Codex Vaticanus (referred to as B) and Codex Sinaiticus [Page 9] (S or א). Another important manuscript, Codex Alexandrinus (A), dates from the fifth century. These manuscripts are known as uncials and are written in Greek capital letters.

The Greek translations of biblical books were generally very literal and reflected the Hebrew text closely. Nonetheless, in many cases the lxx differed significantly from the MT. For example, the books of Jeremiah and Job are much shorter in the Greek than in the Hebrew. The order of chapters in Jeremiah also differs from that of the MT. In 1 Samuel 16–18, the story of David and Goliath is much shorter in the lxx. In Daniel 4–6 the lxx has a very different text from that found in the MT. New light was shed on some of these cases by the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Scrolls contain Hebrew texts of Jeremiah that are very close to what is presupposed in the lxx. (Other copies of Jeremiah at Qumran agree with the MT; both forms of the text were in circulation.) It now seems likely that the differences between the Greek and the Hebrew texts were not due to the translators, but reflect the fact that the Greek was based on a shorter Hebrew text. This is also true in 1 Samuel 16–18 and in a number of other cases. Not all differences between the lxx and the MT are illuminated by the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Scrolls do not contain a short text of Job or a deviant text of Daniel 4–6 such as that found in the lxx. Nonetheless, the assumption must now be that the Greek translators faithfully reflect the Hebrew they had before them. This means that there were different forms of the Hebrew text in circulation in the third, second, and first centuries b.c.e. Indeed, different forms of the text of some books are preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls. In some cases, the lxx may preserve an older form of the text than the MT. For example, the shorter form of Jeremiah is likely to be older than the form preserved in the Hebrew Bible.

What this discussion shows is that it makes little sense to speak of verbal inerrancy or the like in connection with the biblical text. In many cases we cannot be sure what the exact words of the Bible should be. Indeed, it is open to question whether we should speak of the biblical text at all; in some cases we may have to accept the fact that we have more than one form of the text and that we cannot choose between them. This is not to say that the wording of the Bible is unreliable. The Dead Sea Scrolls have shown that there is, on the whole, an amazing degree of continuity in the way the text has been copied over thousands of years. But even a casual comparison of a few current English Bibles (,say, the New Revised Standard Version, the New English Bible, and the Living Bible) should make clear that there are many areas of uncertainty in the biblical text. Of course, translations also involve interpretation, and interpretation adds to the uncertainty. For the present, however, I only want to make the point that we do not have one perfect copy of the original text, if such a thing ever existed. We only have copies made centuries after the books were originally composed, and these copies often differ among themselves.

The Bible is a product of history. It took shape over time, and its content and even its wording changed in the process. In this it is no different from any other book, except that the Bible is really a collection of books, and its composition and transmission is spread over an exceptionally long period of time.

The Bible, however, is also immersed in history in another way that has implications for how we should study it. Much of it tells the story of a people, proceeding in chronological order, and so it has at least the appearance of a historical narrative. (One of the most influential biblical scholars of the twentieth century, Gerhard von Rad, once said that the Old Testament is “a history book.”) Not all books of the Bible have this history-like appearance. Books like Proverbs and Job have virtually no reference to dates or places that would enable us to locate them in history. But these books are exceptional in the corpus. If we read through the Pentateuch, we follow a story about humanity from the dawn of history, and then the emergence of a particular people, Israel. The story of this people continues in the “Former Prophets” and in Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah (and also in the books of Maccabees if we include the Apocrypha). The books of the prophets repeatedly refer to events in that history, and are virtually unintelligible without reference to it. Only in the Writings, in some of the Psalms, and in the Wisdom books (Job, Proverbs, Qoheleth) does the history of Israel recede from view, and even then it reappears in the later Wisdom books in the Apocrypha (Ben Sira and Wisdom of Solomon).

For most of Jewish and Christian history there has been an uncritical assumption that the biblical story is historically true. In fact, for much of this time the Bible was virtually the only source of information about the events in question. In the last two hundred years, however, copious information about the ancient world has come to light, through archaeological exploration and through the recovery of ancient literature. This information is often at variance with the account given in the Bible. Consequently, there is now something of a crisis in the interpretation of the Bible. This crisis is a crisis of credibility: in brief, if the Bible is not the infallible, inerrant book it was once thought to be (and is still thought to be by some), in what way is it reliable, or even serviceable at all? This crisis reaches far beyond questions of historicity, and reaches most fundamentally to questions of divine revelation and ethical teaching. But historical questions have played an especially important part in bringing it on. In the modern world there is often a tendency to equate truth with historical fact. This tendency may be naive and unsophisticated, but it is widespread and we cannot ignore it. If we are to arrive at a more sophisticated conception of biblical truth, we must first clarify the complex ways in which these books relate to history.

It may be useful to begin with an outline of history as it emerges from the biblical text. The story begins, audaciously, with the creation of the world. In Genesis 5 we are given a chronological summary of the ten generations from Adam to the flood. This period is said to last 1,656 years. The patriarchs of this period are said to live prodigiously long lives. Methuselah’s 969 years are proverbial, but seven of the ten figures have life spans over 900 years. After the flood, ten more generations are listed rapidly, concluding with Terah, father of Abraham (Genesis 11). This period is allotted 290 years, and life spans drop from an initial 600 in the case of Shem to a modest 148 in the case of Nahor, father of Terah. There follows the period of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the sons of Jacob, which is narrated in Genesis 12–50. A total of 290 years elapses from the birth of Abraham to the descent of Jacob and his family into Egypt. The sojourn in Egypt is said to last 430 years in Exod 12:40*. After the exodus, the Israelites wander for 40 years in the wilderness. Then they invade the land that would be known as Israel. After a campaign of 5 years they occupy the land under the rule of the judges for some 470 years. The period of the judges is brought to an end by the transition to kingship under Saul and David, as recorded in 1 and 2 Samuel. According to 1 Kgs 6:1*, David’s son Solomon began to build the temple in Jerusalem in the fourth year of his reign, 480 years after the Israelites came out of Egypt. This figure is obviously incompatible with the total number of years assigned to the judges.

Chronology
Approximate dates implied in Bible for early history
4000 b.c.e.	Creation
2400	Flood
2100	Abraham
1875	Descent into Egypt
1445	Exodus
1000	David

[Page 12] In the generation after Solomon, the kingdom was divided in two. The northern kingdom of Israel survived for two hundred years until it was conquered by the Assyrians and its capital Samaria was destroyed. The southern kingdom of Judah survived more than a century longer until it was conquered by the Babylonians, and Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed. A large number of the most prominent inhabitants of Jerusalem were deported to Babylon. This episode in history is called the Babylonian exile. It came to an end when Babylon was conquered by the Persians. Jewish exiles were then allowed to return to Jerusalem and to rebuild the temple. The period between the Babylonian exile and the end of the biblical era is known as the postexilic period, or as the period of the Second Temple. For most of that time, Judah was a province, subject to foreign rulers, first the Persians, then the Greeks. Judah was ruled in turn by the Greek kingdoms of Egypt (the Ptolemies) and of Syria (the Seleucids). The Maccabean revolt led to a period of Jewish independence that lasted roughly a century, before Judah came under the power of Rome. The Second Temple was finally destroyed in the course of a revolt against Rome.

The destructions of Samaria and Jerusalem allow us to correlate the history of Israel with the general history of the Near East, since these events are also recorded in Assyrian and Babylonian records. The fall of Samaria is dated to 722 b.c.e. The Babylonians first captured Jerusalem in 597, and the destruction of the temple took place in a second conquest in 586. (A number of other events from the period of the monarchy can also be correlated with Assyrian and Babylonian records.) The chronology of the Second Temple period is relatively secure. The restoration of the Jewish community after the exile is dated to 539. The Maccabean revolt took place between 168 and 164 b.c.e. The Roman general Pompey entered Jerusalem in 63 b.c.e. The first Jewish revolt against Rome broke out in 66 c.e., and the Jerusalem temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 c.e.

The chronology of the preexilic period is more problematic. If we work back from the dates of the destructions, by adding up the years of the kings of Israel and Judah, we arrive at a date in the mid-tenth century b.c.e. for Solomon. Because of inconsistencies and ambiguities in the biblical record, scholars arrive at slightly different dates, but most place the beginning of his reign in the 960s and its conclusion in the 920s. If the exodus took place 480 years before the building of the temple, this would point to a date around 1445. This in turn would give a date of approximately 1876 for the descent of Jacob’s family into Egypt and place Abraham around 2100. The seventeenth-century Irish Anglican bishop James Ussher famously calculated the date of creation as 4004 b.c.e.

Modern scholarship has generally accepted the biblical chronology of the period of the monarchy, since it can be correlated with nonbiblical sources at several points. The dates for the exodus and the patriarchs, however, are viewed with great skepticism. The life spans of the patriarchs are unrealistic, ranging from 110 to 175 years. The 430 years in Egypt is supposed to cover only three generations. Most scholars place the exodus in [Page 13] the thirteenth century, on the assumption that the cities of Pithom and Rameses, where the Israelites labored according to Exodus 1, were built by Pharaoh Ramesses II, who ruled Egypt for almost two-thirds of that century. Many scholars now question whether we can claim any historical knowledge about a patriarchal period or even an exodus. For the present, however, it will suffice to note that both the biblical record itself and the majority view of modern scholarship place the emergence of Israel as a people in the second half of the second millennium b.c.e., and that modern reconstructions favor the last quarter of that millennium, roughly 1250–1000 b.c.e.

One implication of this chronological survey is that Israel was a late arrival on the stage of Near Eastern history. The great civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia had already flourished for a millennium and a half before the tribes of Israel appeared on the scene. The history of Israel was shaped to a great extent by its location between these great powers. We shall turn to this broader historical context in chapter 1.

A second implication of the chronological survey is that on any reckoning there is a gap of several centuries between the date when the biblical books were written and the events that they purport to describe. Traditionally, the books of the Torah were supposed to be works of Moses, but it has long been clear that Moses could not have been their author. For much of the twentieth century, scholars believed that the stories contained in the Torah were first written down in the tenth century, in the time of David or Solomon, although the final form of the books was clearly much later. Confidence in the supposed tenth-century sources has been eroded, however, as we shall see in chapter 2. While the Torah incorporates material from various centuries, it is increasingly viewed as a product of the sixth century b.c.e. or later. There is then a gap of several hundred years between the literature and the events it describes.

It now seems clear that all the Hebrew Bible received its final shape in the postexilic, or Second Temple, period. The books of Joshua through Kings, which make up the Former Prophets in the Hebrew Bible, are called in modern scholarship “the Deuteronomistic History.” These books were edited in light of the book of Deuteronomy, no earlier than the sixth century b.c.e., although the events they describe range, supposedly, from about 1200 b.c.e. to the destruction of Jerusalem. The earliest of the great prophets, Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah, lived in the eighth century. The book of Isaiah, however, includes not only oracles from the original prophet, but much material that was clearly composed after the Babylonian exile. (Accordingly, Isaiah 40–66 is called Second, or Deutero-, Isaiah, and chapters 56–66 are sometimes further distinguished as Third, or Trito-, Isaiah, although, as far as we know, there was only one prophet named Isaiah.) The books of the prophets were all edited in the Second Temple period, although we cannot be sure just when. Most of the books in the Writings were composed in the postexilic period, although the Psalms and Proverbs may contain material from the time of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

[Page 14] Modern Chronology
The historical value of the stories of the patriarchs is uncertain. Modern scholars have often proposed a date of 1800 b.c.e. for Abraham.
1250 b.c.e. (approx.)	Exodus from Egypt (disputed).
1250–1000	Emergence of Israel in the highlands of Canaan.
1000–960 (approx.)	King David. Beginning of monarchy in Jerusalem (disputed).
960–922 (approx.)	King Solomon. Building of Jerusalem temple (disputed).
922	Division of kingdom: Israel in the north, Judah in the south.
722/721	Destruction of Samaria, capital of Israel, by the Assyrians.
	End of kingdom of Israel.
621	Reform of Jerusalem cult by King Josiah. Promulgation of “the book of the law” (some form of Deuteronomy).
597	Capture of Jerusalem by Babylonians. Deportation of king and nobles to Babylon.
586	Destruction of Jerusalem by Babylonians. More extensive deportations. Beginning of Babylonian exile.
539	Conquest of Babylon by Cyrus of Persia. Jewish exiles allowed to return to Jerusalem. End of exile. Judah becomes a province of Persia.
520–515	Rebuilding of Jerusalem temple.
458	Ezra sent from Babylon to Jerusalem with a copy of the law.
336–323	Alexander the Great conquers the Persian Empire.
312–198	Judea controlled by the Ptolemies of Egypt (a Greek dynasty, founded by one of Alexander’s generals).
198	Jerusalem conquered by the Seleucids of Syria (also a Greek dynasty).
168/167	Persecution of Jews in Jerusalem by Antiochus IV Epiphanes, king of Syria. Maccabean revolt.
63	Conquest of Jerusalem by Roman general Pompey.
66–70 c.e.	First Jewish revolt against Rome. Destruction of Jerusalem temple.
132–135 c.e.	Second Jewish revolt under Bar Kochba. Jerusalem rebuilt as Aelia Capitolina, with a temple to Jupiter Capitolinus.

[Page 15] Chronology of Modern Biblical Scholarship
1735	Jean Astruc observes multiple names for the divinity in the Pentateuch.
1805	W. M. L. de Wette dates Deuteronomy later than the rest of the Pentateuch.
1822	Jean-François Champollion deciphers Egyptian hieroglyphics for the first time.
1860s	Karl Heinrich Graf and Abraham Kuenen establish a chronological order for the various “sources” in the Pentateuch: (J, E, D, P).
1870s	Discovery of great works of Akkadian literature, such as the creation story Enuma Elish and the Gilgamesh epic.
1878	Julius Wellhausen, in Prolegmonena to the History of Israel, presents his classic study of the Documentary Hypothesis.
1890–1920	Hermann Gunkel pioneers form criticism, which examines the literary genre of shorter biblical passages and their Sitz im Leben (social location).
1920s–1930s	Discovery of Canaanite texts at Ugarit (1929) and the efforts of W. F. Albright to confirm the historical accuracy of the Bible through archaeology.
Mid-20th c.	Gerhard von Rad and Martin Noth examine the editorial history of biblical texts through Redaction Criticism.
	American scholarship dominated by Albright and his students.
	John Bright’s History of Israel (1959) provides synthesis of biblical data and ancient Near Eastern history.
	Biblical Theology Movement, emphasizing the “acts of God in history” typified by archaeologist G. Ernest Wright.
1947–54	Discovery of Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran.
1960s–	Biblical scholarship characterized by a multiplicity of approaches including: study of religion and literature of Israel in light of Near Eastern, especially Ugaritic, traditions (F. M. Cross); sociological (N. K. Gottwald), literary (R. Alter), feminist/literary (P. Trible) approaches; canonical approach to biblical theology (B. S. Childs); revisionist Pentateuchal studies; questioning traditional sources (see overview by E. W. Nicholson); revisionist approaches to Israelite history (see I. Finkelstein and N. A. Silberman).

Most of the books that make up the Hebrew Bible were composed in several stages over many centuries (there are some exceptions, mainly among the Writings and the shorter books of the Prophets). Books like Genesis and Judges incorporate tales that may have originated as folklore or popular short stories. But these stories were shaped and edited, probably by several different hands, over hundreds of years. Moreover, ancient editors were not always as concerned with consistency as their modern counterparts. Consequently, there are many gaps and inconsistencies in the biblical text, and it seems to reflect several different historical settings.

In light of this situation, it is not reasonable to expect that we can read a book like Genesis as we would read a modern novel. The literary critic Robert Alter, who is a leading advocate of a literary approach to the Bible, speaks of “composite artistry”in the case of Genesis. One can, and should, appreciate the artistry of the finished product. But the reason that this artistry is recognized as composite is that there are problems in the text that cannot be explained on the assumption of a unified composition. If we are to take the composite character of biblical narrative seriously, we cannot avoid some measure of what Alter calls “excavative scholarship”—the attempt to understand the sources, so that we can better appreciate the artistry with which they were put together.

The history of biblical scholarship is in large part a sequence of attempts to come to grips with the composite character of the biblical text. In the nineteenth century, “literary criticism” of the Bible was understood primarily as the separation of sources (source criticism), especially in the case of the Pentateuch. (Source criticism was similarly in vogue in Homeric scholarship in the same period.) This phase of biblical scholarship found its classic expression in the work of the German scholar Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) in the 1870s and 1880s. We shall consider the legacy of Wellhausen, which is still enormously influential, in chapter 2. The strength of this kind of scholarship was that it was based on very close reading of the biblical text, and yielded numerous acute observations about its inner tensions. Many of these observations are still important and require explanation. The weakness, however, was that it tended to expect the text to conform to modern expectations about consistency. It relied on rational analysis of the text, but made little use of comparative material from the ancient Near East. Wellhausen can scarcely be blamed for this omission. The great works of ancient Near Eastern literature, such as the creation story Enuma Elish and the flood story contained in the Epic of Gilgamesh (see chapter 1) were only first edited and published around the time that Wellhausen was doing his work on the Old Testament.

A reaction against this kind of source criticism appeared in the work of another German scholar, Hermann Gunkel (1862–1932), in the last decade of the nineteenth century [Page 17] and the first two decades of the twentieth. Gunkel is regarded as the founder of form criticism. This method tries to focus on the smaller units that make up the biblical text, such as the individual stories of Genesis. Gunkel drew attention to the importance of literary form or genre. He recognized that the kind of truth that we may expect from a text varies with its genre. For example, we should not read poetry as if it were factual reporting. He also drew attention to the importance of social location (the Sitz im Leben) for the meaning of a text. It is important to know the purpose for which a text is composed, whether, for example, it was meant to serve as a cult legend in a sacred celebration or was meant for entertainment around a campfire. Gunkel also made extensive use of the newly available Babylonian literature for purposes of comparison with the biblical material. He did not deny the validity of source criticism as practiced by Wellhausen, but it was not the focus of his attention. Some of the later practitioners of form criticism tended to use the study of literary forms as a source-critical tool, and to reconstruct earlier forms of biblical passages that fitted the ideal form. This kind of procedure has rightly been criticized. But Gunkel’s basic insights into the importance of literary form and social location, and of comparison with other Near Eastern literature, remain valid and important.

One disadvantage of form criticism was that it tended to break up the biblical text into small fragments. In the mid-twentieth century, a reaction against this fragmentation arose in the form of redaction criticism. Here the focus was on the way in which the smaller units were combined by an editor, who imposed his own theological agenda on the material. The classic works of redaction criticism were again by German scholars, Gerhard von Rad (1901–71) and Martin Noth (1902–68). Von Rad is best known for his work on the Pentateuch, although he also made important contributions in other areas. His focus, however, was not so much on the final form of the Pentateuch as on the main narrative source, the Yahwist or J source (see chapter 2). His work, then, still relied heavily on source criticism. Noth demonstrated the editorial unity of the Deuteronomistic History (Joshua through Kings). Redaction criticism was closely bound up with source criticism and form criticism, but it showed the beginnings of a shift of interest that has continued in more recent scholarship, placing the main emphasis on the later rather than on the earlier forms of the text.

The scholarship mentioned thus far all developed in Germany, where the most influential biblical criticism developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A different tradition of scholarship developed in North America, which attached great importance to archaeology as a source of independent confirmation of the biblical text. Archaeological discoveries could also help to fill out the context of the biblical material. The dominant figure in North American scholarship through the first half of the twentieth century was William F. Albright (1891–1971). Albright also made extensive use of the literature of the ancient Near East as the context within which the Bible should be [Page 18] understood. He made especially fruitful use of the Canaanite literature discovered at Ugarit in Syria in 1929 (see chapter 1). Albright’s view of the history of Israel found classic expression in the work of his student John Bright (1908–95). It also found an enthusiastic response among Israeli scholars, who have generally been wary of the analytical approach of German scholarship.

In Albright’s lifetime, archaeology was believed to support the essential historicity of the biblical account (not necessarily in all its details), although there were some troubling discrepancies (for example, archaeologists found no evidence of the destruction of a walled city at Jericho in the time of Joshua). In the last quarter of the century, however, the tide turned on this subject. Discrepancies between the archaeological record and the biblical narrative are now seen to outweigh the points of convergence. We shall discuss various examples of this problem in the course of this book. For the present, it may suffice to say that these discrepancies undermine any simple assumption that biblical texts are historical reports, and direct attention again to the literary character of the biblical corpus. (A lucid account of the discrepancies between the biblical account and the results of archaeology can be found in Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed.)

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, biblical scholarship is characterized by a diversity of methods. Here I will comment only on two broad trends: the rise of literary criticism and the influence of sociological methods.

The Bible is literature, whatever else it may be, and any serious biblical study must have a literary component. Literary scholarship, however, is of many kinds. Beginning in the 1960s, literary criticism of the Bible was heavily influenced by a movement called “New Criticism” in the study of English literature. New Criticism was a formalistic movement that held that the meaning of a text can be found through close examination of the text itself, without extensive research into questions of social, historical, and literary context. The attraction of this method was that it redirected attention to the text itself, rather than to archaeological artifacts or hypothetical source documents. Nonetheless, it has obvious limitations insofar as it leaves out of account factors that may help to clarify and explain the text. In general literary studies, a reaction against the formalism of New Criticism has arisen in a movement called “New Historicism,” which appreciates the importance of contextual information, while still maintaining its focus on the literary text.

Another consequence of the rise of literary criticism has been increased attention to the final form of biblical books. (This has also been encouraged by the theological “canonical approach” advocated in the work of B. S. Childs [1923–].) On the whole, this has been a positive development. Some older scholarship was so preoccupied with identifying sources that it lost sight of the actual text as we have it. We should bear in mind, however, that the books of the Bible are not governed by the same literary conventions as a modern novel or treatise. In many cases they are loose compilations and the conventional book [Page 19] divisions are not always reliable guides to literary coherence. There is more than one way to read such literature. If we are to appreciate the “composite artistry” of biblical literature, then the final form of the text cannot be the exclusive focus of our attention.

This introduction is written in the belief that the best guide to the literary character of the biblical text is the comparative literature of the ancient Near East. Gunkel was on the right track when he brought this comparative material into the discussion. Later form critics erred when they tried to dissect the text to conform to modern ideas of consistency. Questions of genre and literary conventions are fundamental, but we are dealing with ancient genres and conventions, not those of modern literature (although comparison with modern literature may sometimes have heuristic value).

The second major trend in recent biblical studies is the increased use of sociological methods. These methods, again, vary. They may be viewed as an extension of traditional historical criticism, insofar as they view the text as a reflection of historical situations. Perhaps the most fundamental contribution of sociological theory to biblical studies, however, is the realization that interpretation is not objective and neutral but serves human interests and is shaped by them. On the one hand, the biblical texts themselves reflect the ideological interests of their authors. This insight follows naturally enough from the form-critical insistence on the importance of the Sitz im Leben. On the other hand, the modern interpreter also has a social location. Feminist scholarship has repeatedly pointed out patriarchal assumptions in biblical scholarship, and has made little secret of its own agenda and commitments. Jewish scholars have pointed out that Christian interpretations are often colored by theological assumptions. But no one is exempt from presuppositions and special interests. One of the clearest gains of recent “post modern” scholarship has been the increased attention to figures and interests that are either marginal in the biblical text or have been marginalized in previous scholarship. Feminist scholarship has led the way in this regard. The text is all the richer when it is considered from different points of view.

In light of this situation, the interpreter has two choices. One may either adopt an explicitly ideological or confessional approach, or one may try to take account of different viewpoints, and so modify one’s own biases even if they can never be fully eliminated. This introduction takes the latter approach. We view the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament as the common heritage of Jews and Christians, not the exclusive property of either. We try to get some distance on the text by viewing it in its historical context, relating it where possible to the history of the time and respecting the ancient literary conventions. In this way we hope to further understanding as to how different interpretations arise. It is of the nature of historical scholarship that it is always subject to revision. One generation learns by criticizing the work of its predecessors, but must do so in full consciousness that it will be subject to similar criticism in turn.

[Page 20] Placing the Bible in its historical context is not, however, an end in itself. For most readers of the Bible, this is not only a document of ancient history but also in some way a guide for modern living. The responsible use of the Bible must begin by acknowledging that these books were not written with our modern situations in mind, and are informed by the assumptions of an ancient culture remote from our own. To understand the Bible in its historical context is first of all to appreciate what an alien book it is. But no great literature is completely alien. There are always analogies between the ancient world and our own. Within the biblical text itself we shall see how some paradigmatic episodes are recalled repeatedly as analogies to guide the understanding of new situations. The use of the exodus as a motif in the Prophets is an obvious case in point. Biblical laws and the prophetic preaching repeatedly raise issues that still confront us in modern society. The Bible does not provide ready answers to these problems, but it provides occasions and examples to enable us to think about them and grapple with them.

Before we can begin to grapple with the issues raised by the biblical texts, however, we must know something about the ancient world from which they arose. We turn to this subject in chapter 1.

Collins, John J. “Before the Canon: Scriptures in Second Temple Judaism.” In Old Testament Interpretation. Past, Present, and Future: Essays in Honor of Gene M. Tucker, ed. J. L. Mays, D. L. Petersen, and K. H. Richards, 225–41. Nashville: Abingdon, 1995.

McDonald, Lee Martin, and James A. Sanders, eds. The Canon Debate. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2002. A comprehensive collection of essays on the formation of the canons of both Testaments.

Tov, Emmanuel. Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Rev. ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002. The most comprehensive and up-to-date treatment.

Finkelstein, Israel, and Neil Asher Silberman. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. New York: Free Press, 2001. Readable account of the results of archaeological research, and their implications for biblical studies.

Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic, 1981. Pioneering literary approach.

Barton, John. Reading the Old Testament. Rev. ed. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996. Good critical treatment of literary methodologies.

———, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998. Contains essays on various approaches to biblical studies (poststructuralist, political, feminist, etc.).

Hayes, John H., ed. Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation. 2 vols. Nashville: Abingdon, 1999. Articles on Archaeology and Biblical Studies, Form Criticism, Redaction Criticism, Literary Theory and Criticism, Sociology and Hebrew Bible Studies, etc. Also on major biblical scholars (Albright, Gunkel,Wellhausen, etc.).

McKenzie, Steven L.,and Stephen R. Haynes. To Each Its Own Meaning: An Introduction to Biblical Criticisms and Their Application. Rev. ed. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1999. Comprehensive survey of modern approaches, including literary and feminist readings.

See also the series of Guides to Biblical Scholarship, published by Fortress Press:

Habel, Norman C. Literary Criticism of the Old Testament (1971) (= source criticism)

Albright,William F. From the Stone Age to Christianity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1957.

Bright, John. A History of Israel,with an introduction and appendix by William P. Brown. 4th ed. Louisville:Westminster John Knox, 2000.

Childs, Brevard S. Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979.

Cross, Frank Moore. Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973.[Page 22]

Finkelstein, Israel, and Neil Asher Silberman. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. New York: Free Press, 2001.

Gottwald, Norman K. The Hebrew Bible: An Introduction with CD-ROM. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002.

Gunkel, Hermann. The Stories of Genesis. Trans. J. J. Scullion.Vallejo: Bibal, 1994.

Nicholson, Ernest. The Pentateuch in the Twentieth Century: The Legacy of Julius Wellhausen. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998.

Noth, Martin. The Deuteronomistic History. 2d ed. JSOTSup 15 Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991.

———. A History of Pentateuchal Traditions. Trans. and ed. B.W. Anderson. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1971 (reprinted: Chico: Scholars, 1981).

Rad, Gerhard von. Old Testament Theology. Trans. D. M. G. Stalker. 2 vols. New York: Harper, 1962–65.

Trible,Phyllis. God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. OBT. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978.

Wellhausen, Julius. Prolegomena to the History of Israel. 1885. Atlanta: Scholars, 1994.

Wright,G.Ernest. God Who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital. SBT 1/8.Chicago:Allenson, 1952.

Life in the ancient Near East can be traced back thousands of years before Bishop Ussher’s date for the creation of the world in 4004 b.c.e. There was a settlement at Jericho as early as the eighth millennium b.c.e., and village life developed throughout the Near East in the Neolithic period (8,000–4,000). With the coming of the Early Bronze Age (3200–2200) the first great civilizations emerged in proximity to the great rivers of the region, the Nile in Egypt, and the Tigris and Euphrates that define Mesopotamia (literally, the land between the two rivers) in modern Iraq.

In southern Mesopotamia, around the junction and mouth of the two rivers, the Sumerians are credited with the earliest known writing system, around 3200 b.c.e. The documents were written with reeds on clay tablets, which were then baked. The Sumerians developed the system of wedge-shaped signs called cuneiform that was later used in Akkadian writing; but unlike Akkadian, Sumerian was not a Semitic language. The origin of the Sumerians is unknown. They developed city-states (Uruk, Lagash, Umma) that were diverse among themselves. Shortly before 2300 b.c.e. the Sumerians were conquered by Sargon of Akkad, which was slightly further north in Mesopotamia but still south of Babylon. Akkad gave its name to the Semitic language that remained the main medium of Mesopotamian literature for two thousand years (Akkadian). Sargon and his successors ruled the first Mesopotamian territorial state for almost two centuries. Then Akkad fell and never rose again. Even the location of the city has been lost. After this, the Third Dynasty of Ur united most of Sumer for about a century around the end of the third millennium. Thereafter the Sumerians faded from history, but they bequeathed to the ancient Near East a rich legacy of art and literature.

[Page 26] Chronology of Ancient Near Eastern History
Early Bronze Age	Middle Bronze Age	Late Bronze Age
3200–2200 b.c.e.	2200–1550 b.c.e.	1550–1200 b.c.e.
Egypt	Egypt	Egypt
From 3100 b.c.e.	2160–2106 b.c.e.	1540–1069 b.c.e.
Hieroglyphic writing	First Intermediate	New Kingdom
	Period
2700–2160 b.c.e.		Ca. 1350 b.c.e.
Old Kingdom	2033–1648 b.c.e.	Amarna Period/
Age of the Pyramids	Middle Kingdom	Akhenaten
	1648–1540 b.c.e.	1279–1213 b.c.e.
	Second Intermediate	Reign of Ramesses II
	Period
	Hyksos rule in Egypt
Mesopotamia	Mesopotamia	Mesopotamia
3200 b.c.e.	18th Century b.c.e.	1124 b.c.e.
Sumerians develop	Rise of Babylon	Elevation of Marduk
first known	under Hammurabi	under
writing system	Assyrian kingdom	Nebuchadnezzar
	becomes an established
2300 b.c.e.	power	14th Century b.c.e.
Sumerian city-states		Canaan: Kingdom at
(Uruk, Lagash,		Ugarit
Umma)
Sargon of Akkad
conquers the
Sumerians

[Page 27] The second millennium saw the rise of Babylon under Hammurabi (eighteenth century b.c.e.), a king most famous for the code of laws that bears his name. Thereafter Babylon’s power declined, and it only became dominant again a thousand years later, under Nebuchadnezzar, the conqueror of Jerusalem in the early sixth century b.c.e. Assyria, in northern Mesopotamia, first became powerful in the early second millennium. The Assyrians attained their greatest power, however, first in the Middle Assyrian period in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries and then especially in the Neo-Assyrian period in the ninth and eighth centuries b.c.e.

Egyptian civilization is almost as old as that of Sumer. A form of writing known as hieroglyphics first appears around the end of the predynastic period (3100 b.c.e.). Stone buildings appear shortly thereafter. Many of the great pyramids were constructed during the Old Kingdom (2700–2160). The Middle Kingdom extended from 2033 to 1648. For about a century in the middle of the second millennium (1648–1540) Egypt was ruled by foreigners from Asia, known as the Hyksos. These were eventually driven out. In the period of the New Kingdom that followed, Egyptian power was extended all the way to the Euphrates. Egypt ruled over Canaan, the region where Israel would emerge, for much of this period. In the mid-fourteenth century, Pharaoh Amenhotep IV abandoned the traditional worship of the god Amun and devoted himself to the worship of the sun and the solar disk (Aten). He changed his name to Akhenaten and moved his capital to Amarna. This period is known as the Amarna period. It is important because of the monotheistic character of Akhenaten’s devotion, but also because of a hoard of tablets from this period that give information about the state of affairs in Canaan. These are the Amarna letters, which were letters sent to the pharaoh by vassals in Canaan. These letters figure prominently in discussions of the origin of Israel. After Akhenaten’s death, his successor, Tutankhamun, departed from Amarna and reverted to the cult of Amun.

In this period, the main challenge to Egyptian power in Asia came from the Hittites, a people who lived in Anatolia or modern Turkey. During the Amarna period, the Hittites established a province in Syria. In the thirteenth century, Ramesses II (1279–1213), who is often thought to be the pharaoh of the exodus, fought an indecisive battle against the Hittites at Qadesh on the Orontes in Syria, but Egypt subsequently lost control of most of Syria and Canaan, although Ramesses later regained it in part.

In between Egypt and Mesopotamia lay the land of Canaan, where Israel would carve out its territory along the southern half of the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. Canaan also extended further north, including modern Lebanon and part of Syria. It was not a political unit, except insofar as it was unified as an Egyptian province. Rather, it was a loose configuration of city-states. Later, in the first millennium, the Canaanites in the coastal cities of Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos were known as Phoenicians, from the Greek name for the area.

[Page 28] The biblical texts sometimes use the designation “Amorite” as an interchangeable variant for “Canaanite.” The name comes from Amurru, the Akkadian expression for the land in the west (relative to Mesopotamia). The Amorites appear to have originated in northern Syria. Whether they were nomadic or settled is disputed. They appear in Akkadian texts around the end of the third millennium, when they exerted pressure on the urban centers of Mesopotamia. Before the end of the Third Dynasty of Ur, the king had built a wall to keep out the Amorites. Amorites were involved in the destruction of Ur at the beginning of the second millennium, and rulers with Amorite names are found in several Mesopotamian cities early in the second millennium. Amorite rulers also appear in the west, in Ugarit and Byblos. Amorite expansion to the west had presumably also taken place. In the mid-second millennium there was a kingdom of Amurru in the upper Orontes valley in Syria. Biblical texts sometimes refer to the inhabitants of the land that became Israel as Amorites, but this may be a loose use of the term.

From the twelfth century on, the people of northern Syria were called Arameans. These were not a unified people, but included several small kingdoms. They became a significant factor in the history of Israel in the first millennium.

One final people should be noted to complete this rapid overview of Israel’s neighbors and predecessors. The Philistines were sea people who came to Canaan from the Aegean. Their origin remains obscure. They were defeated by Ramesses III about 1190 b.c.e., but they then settled in the coastal towns of Palestine, Ashkelon, Gaza, and Ashdod. Thus the territory they controlled was south of the Canaanite (Phoenician) cities of Tyre and Sidon and immediately adjacent to emerging Israel. The history of the Philistines parallels that of Israel to a great degree, as they were repeatedly subject to the various imperial powers.

For much of Western history, these ancient civilizations were known primarily from the accounts of Greek historians such as Herodotus (fifth century b.c.e.) and from references in the Bible. The modern recovery of the native Near Eastern sources began with Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798–1802. Napoleon took with him a group of scholars whom he charged with the task of preparing a record of the country. In the course of their work they found an inscription on stone in Greek, classical Egyptian (hieroglyphics), and Egyptian demotic script (a popular form of Egyptian from the later half of the first millennium b.c.e.). This inscription became known as the Rosetta stone. Since the same text was written in both Greek and Egyptian, it became possible to decipher hieroglyphics for the first time. (Names that were identified in all parts of the inscription provided the key.) The decipherment was accomplished by a French scholar, Jean-François Champollion, in 1822.

[Page 29] The rediscovery of ancient Mesopotamia also began in the early nineteenth century. An employee of the East India Tea Company named Claudius Rich carried out a study of the ruins of Babylon, beginning in 1807. His collection of artifacts, including many cuneiform tablets, was purchased by the British Museum. The first explorations of Assyrian sites (Nineveh, Khorsabad) were carried out in the 1840s by a Frenchman, Paul-Émile Botta, and then, beginning in 1845, by an Englishman, Austen Henry Layard, who excavated palaces at Nimrud and Nineveh. Large quantities of Assyrian sculpture found their way to the British Museum, and some to private collectors in England. The key to the decipherment of Akkadian was provided by an inscription by a Persian king Darius on the rock of Behistun in Persia. The Behistun inscription was written with cuneiform signs in Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian. The decipherment was accomplished mainly by H. C. Rawlinson, an Englishman, and Edward Hincks, an Irishman, in the 1850s. In the 1870s the great works of Akkadian literature such as the creation story Enuma Elish and the Gilgamesh epic were discovered and first translated. The Babylonian flood story, which was contained in the Epic of Gilgamesh, caused a sensation because of its similarity to the story of Noah and the ark.

Other major discoveries followed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These included the Amarna letters, noted above, in 1887. A discovery of major importance for biblical studies was made at Ugarit (Ras Shamra), on the Mediterranean coast in northern Syria, in 1929. A French archaeologist, Claude Schaeffer, discovered over two thousand texts, written in cuneiform script, in a language that proved to be closely related to Hebrew. These texts date from the fourteenth century b.c.e. and include some myths, or sacred stories, as well as ritual texts, legal records, diplomatic correspondence, and other documents. A few years later, beginning in 1933, another major discovery was made at Mari on the Euphrates, by another French expedition led by André Parrot. More than twenty thousand tablets were discovered. The most important of these date to the eighteenth century b.c.e. More recently, a major discovery of cuneiform tablets was made at Ebla (Tell Mardikh, near Aleppo in northwestern Syria) by an Italian expedition led by Paolo Matthiae, beginning in 1964. The Ebla tablets date to the third millennium b.c.e. and constitute the largest single find of cuneiform texts from this early period (approximately 1,750 tablets). Another major find of some eight hundred tablets was made at another site in Syria, Emar (modern Meskene), in the mid-1970s.

The worship of gods and goddesses was a significant part of life in the ancient Near East. It is important to bear in mind, however, that religion was not standardized and systematized in the ways that are familiar to us from Christianity and Judaism. Each city-state had its own cult and its own assembly of gods, headed by the chief god or [Page 30] goddess of that city. The city-states were not isolated from each other, however, and there were periods when various cities in a region were unified—as happened, for example, under Sargon of Akkad and under Hammurabi of Babylon. The status of gods rose and fell with the fortunes of their city-states. Throughout Mesopotamian history, beginning in the Sumerian period, scribes tried to impose order on the multiplicity of gods by composing god lists.

There was, moreover, a corpus of literature that circulated widely in the ancient Near East. As part of their training in Akkadian, scribes had to copy out a prescribed body of standard texts. Consequently, the same works could be found at widely different locations at diverse dates. Copies of the Epic of Gilgamesh were found at Emar on the Euphrates, in the Hittite capital in modern Turkey, and at Megiddo in what later became the land of Israel, all in the late second millennium. Other copies come from Assyrian collections, centuries later. Modern scholars often refer to such texts as “canonical,” but it is important to bear in mind that the “canon” or standard that they established was literary, and that it did not involve an orthodoxy in religious belief. Nonetheless, these standard texts were not idiosyncratic, and can be taken as representative of Near Eastern beliefs, even if they were not normative in the sense later associated with the Bible.

We may get an impression of the Mesopotamian view of the world by considering some of the myths or stories about the origin of the world and of humanity. The word myth is derived from the Greek mythos, or story, but is used especially for sacred stories, or traditional stories deemed to have religious import. In modern English usage, myth is often opposed to factual truth, but this is unfortunate, as it makes it difficult to take myths seriously. The ancient myths are serious but imaginative attempts to explain life in this world. There are several minor creation stories preserved in Akkadian, many of them in the introductions to ritual texts. Two myths stand out, however, because of their length and wide distribution. These are the myth of Atrahasis and Enuma Elish.

The story of Atrahasis is most fully preserved in an Old Babylonian version from about 1700 b.c.e. Over seven hundred lines of this version have been published. Other copies come from the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal in the seventh century b.c.e. The text, then, was copied for at least a thousand years.

The story begins at a point before the creation of humankind, “when the gods instead of man did the work, bore the loads.” But there was already a hierarchy among the gods. As in other early Mesopotamian myths, the chief gods were Anu (or An in Sumerian texts), Enlil, and Enki. When the gods cast lots and divided the world, Anu took the sky, Enlil the earth, and Enki the waters below the earth. (Each had other gods [Page 31] associated with him.) The labor of agriculture was imposed on a class of gods called the Igigu. The first section of the myth deals with the rebellion of these worker gods, which led the high gods to concede that their workload was too heavy. Consequently, Enki and the mother-goddess (called Mami/Mama, Nintu, and Be-let-ili-) created humanity “to bear the load of the gods.” They slaughtered “a god who had intelligence” (probably the god who had the idea for the rebellion), and Nintu mixed clay with his flesh and blood. From this mixture, she fashioned seven males and seven females.

The second section of the myth goes on to give the early history of humankind, culminating in the story of a great deluge. After six hundred years the people became too numerous, and “the country was as noisy as a bellowing bull.” Enlil made a complaint in the council of the gods, and a plague was sent to reduce humanity. At this point, the hero who gives his name to the story emerges: “Now there was one Atrahasis whose ear was open to his god Enki” (the name Atrahasis means “very wise”). Enki advised him to have humanity withhold offerings from all the gods except the one who controls the plague, and eventually that god relented and put an end to the affliction. Enlil made a number of similar attempts to reduce humanity at six-hundred-year intervals, but each time Enki instructed Atrahasis and the danger was averted. (When the other gods forbade Enki to speak to the man, he conveyed his revelation in dreams.) Finally, the gods sent a flood to wipe humanity off the face of the earth. Enki instructed Atrahasis to build a boat that was big enough to ride out the deluge. Atrahasis took his family and livestock on board. The flood lasted seven days and seven nights and wiped out the rest of humanity. The gods, other than Enlil, were horrified at the destruction, but they were mainly affected by the fact that they were deprived of their offerings. When the flood subsided, Atrahasis made an offering in thanksgiving. When the gods smelled the odor, “they gathered like flies over the offering.” There were bitter recriminations against Enlil, but he in turn attacked Enki for frustrating the will of the gods. Enki defended himself by saying that he acted so that life would be preserved. In the end, the gods devised a new scheme for population control. Some women would be barren, some children would die at birth, and some categories of priestesses would not bear children at all.

This story is obviously important for understanding the biblical book of Genesis. For the present, however, we are concerned only with the light it throws on Mesopotamian religion. Two of the most prominent features of the story stand in contrast with modern conceptions of God. First, the gods are anthropomorphic: they are conceived and portrayed in the likeness of human beings. They feel hunger, are troubled by noise, are wearied by labor, argue among themselves, and, in the case of Enki, can be deceitful. Second, there is a whole society of gods, analogous to a human society. Especially important is the role of the council of the gods, where the gods deliberate and arrive at decisions. These gods are not fully in control of events. Rather, they react to [Page 32] crises as they develop. Moreover, they are not the guardians of a moral order. The crises develop for various reasons: overwork in the case of the Igigu, overpopulation in the case of humanity. The actions that lead to the crises are not necessarily wrong or sinful. The gods react differently to these crises, and the eventual solutions are reached by compromise. While Enki frustrates the designs of Enlil, in the end they arrive at a balance of forces rather than the dominance of any one god. While the main emphasis is on the social character of the divine council, the story also notes that a human being (Atrahasis) can have a personal relationship with a particular god (in this case, Enki).

The Atrahasis story also throws some light on the way in which ancient literature was composed. The first part of the myth draws on the Sumerian myth of Enki and Ninmah, where Ninmah creates seven defective humans and Enki finds useful occupations for them. The story of the flood was also already known in Sumerian sources. It also appears in the story of Gilgamesh. Atrahasis, then, was not entirely an original composition, but was rather fashioned as a new work out of traditional materials.

The Enuma Elish was composed some centuries later than Atrahasis, probably in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar I of Babylon (1125–1104 b.c.e.). It celebrates the rise of Marduk, god of Babylon, to a position of leadership among the gods. It was only in the time of Nebuchadnezzar that Marduk was granted that status. This myth was widely copied. It was recited on the fourth day of the New Year’s festival, the Akitu. It was still copied in the Hellenistic period in the third century b.c.e.

The Enuma Elish begins at an earlier point in primordial time than does the Atrahasis story:

At the beginning, then, only the primordial pair, Apsu and Tiamat, were on the scene. (Both Apsu and Tiamat represent primordial waters. Some scholars think that Apsu represented the fresh waters beneath the earth while Tiamat represented the salt [Page 33] waters, or sea.) The story proceeds with the theogony, or begetting of the gods, which must come before the creation of humanity. Here it is the young gods who create a tumult. Finally, Apsu, with his counselor Mummu, goes to Tiamat and complains:

Tiamat resists the proposal (“How could we allow what we ourselves created to perish?”), but Mummu supports it. The young gods, however, learn of the plot because of the wisdom of Ea. Ea then devised a spell, put Apsu to sleep, and slew him. He set up his dwelling on top of Apsu. There he begat new gods, Bel and Marduk. Anu, father of Ea, created four winds and gave them to Marduk to play with. But the winds stirred up Tiamat and made some gods restless, and they incited Tiamat to action. Tiamat then prepared for battle and made Qingu leader of her army. Again, Ea discovered what was happening. Ea and Anu in turn tried to confront Tiamat but were intimidated and turned back. At last, Ea urged Marduk to come forward. Marduk agreed to fight Tiamat on one condition:

Marduk and Tiamat engaged in battle. He released a wind in her face. When she opened her mouth to swallow it she could not close her lips. Then Marduk shot in an arrow that slit her heart and killed her. He rounded up the gods who supported Tiamat and smashed their weapons. He cut the corpse of Tiamat in two, put up half of it to make the sky and arranged her waters so that they could not escape. He then proceeded to establish the constellations of the stars as stations for the great gods. He devised a plan to [Page 34] create humankind, to do the work of the gods so that they might be at leisure. Ea then made humankind from the blood of Qingu, the ally of Tiamat. Finally he gave the command to create Babylon. The gods labored for a year to construct Babylon and the temple Esagila. On its completion, Marduk invited them to a banquet in the temple. The myth ends with a lengthy litany of the names and praises of Marduk.

The Enuma Elish celebrates the exaltation of Marduk, god of Babylon, to kingship among the gods. This development evidently corresponds to the emergence of Babylon as a world power, but it is not a simple political allegory. Rather, the story encapsulates a view of the world. Tiamat is a complex and fascinating figure. She is Mother Nature, at one point concerned for the survival of her offspring, at another ready to devour them. She is not evil; indeed, she is only slowly provoked to rage. But since she is a threat to the lives of the young gods, she must be destroyed. If life is to flourish on earth, nature must be subdued.

The story has a clear formula for establishing a successful society. Faced with the threat of Tiamat, the gods realize that they need to unite behind the strong leadership of a king. The kingship of Marduk among the gods carries a strong implication that kingship is also necessary in human society. There is a clear symmetry between the king and his palace and the god and his temple. The myth can easily be read as a story composed to legitimate the rise of monarchy. But a story like this has many meanings, and we should not try to reduce it to a simple political message.

The monarchical kingship of Marduk, even though it is still accompanied by the council of the gods, must be seen a step in the direction of monotheism. Theoretical monotheism, the belief that only one god exists, was rare in the ancient world, and became possible only with the rise of Greek philosophy. In the Babylonian myth, the reality of other gods is freely granted, but Marduk is preeminent among the gods. In the Bible too, the psalmist will ask, “Who is like you among the gods, O Lord?” (Exod 15:11*). There are differences, to be sure, between the biblical and the Mesopotamian views of divinity, but there is also continuity.

Like the Atrahasis myth, Enuma Elish drew on earlier sources and was part of a stream of tradition. One of its sources is the Myth of Anzu. There too a young hero-god does battle with a monster. In this case, the monster is Anzu, who steals the tablets of destiny. The hero-god Ninurta defeats him by lopping off his wings, and proceeds to provide water to the land that had previously been lacking.

The Enuma Elish is almost entirely concerned with the realm of the gods. But Mesopotamian literature also contains one of the most remarkable dramatizations of the human condition that has come down to us from antiquity. This is the Epic of Gilgamesh. [Page 35] This work is called an epic rather than a myth, because the main characters are human, although gods and goddesses also intervene in the action. (Some people refer to the Enuma Elish as “the epic of creation,” but this usage is loose, and is better avoided.) Gilgamesh was regarded in antiquity as a historical character. He may have lived in the third millennium, in Uruk (Warka) in southern Mesopotamia. The epic, however, developed over many centuries. Its relation to history may be similar to that of Homer’s epics, which also have a starting point in history but are essentially works of fiction and imagination.

Several stories about Gilgamesh were current in Sumerian before 2000 b.c.e. These were short stories, which eventually served as the bases for episodes in the epic. They included separate stories about Gilgamesh and other main characters in the epic: Enkidu, Humbaba, and the Bull of Heaven. There is a story of the death of Gilgamesh. The flood story seems to have been an independent tale in Sumerian. A composite epic is found in Old Babylonian tablets from the early second millennium. It is not clear, however, whether the whole epic was already unified at this point. Fragments of various parts of the story are found at a wide range of locations in the mid to late second millennium. The most complete version comes from Nineveh (in Assyria) in the early seventh century b.c.e. It is possible to trace the development of the epic over more than a thousand years.

According to the epic, Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, was two-thirds divine and one-third mortal. He had no rival, but his excessive energy was a problem and made him overbearing. He would not leave young women alone, and the gods often heard their complaints. Eventually the gods created someone to be a match for him, a primitive man named Enkidu, who lived with the beasts on the steppe. He was discovered by a hunter, who told Gilgamesh about him. Gilgamesh dispatched a harlot with the hunter. They waited for Enkidu at the watering place. The harlot opened her garments and “did for him, the primitive man, as women do.” Enkidu lay with her for six days and seven nights. When he tried to return to the animals, however, they shied away from him and he could not keep pace with them. The harlot consoled him:

Enkidu goes to Uruk, where he becomes a well-matched companion for Gilgamesh. He puts on clothes and learns to eat and drink in the human fashion.

Together, Gilgamesh and Enkidu undertake great adventures. First they kill Humbaba, the giant of the forest. When they return to Uruk, Gilgamesh is so resplendent that the goddess Ishtar becomes enamored of him and proposes marriage. Gilgamesh, [Page 36] however, insults her by recalling the misfortunes that have befallen her former lovers. Ishtar persuades Anu, the god of heaven, to give her the Bull of Heaven to punish Gilgamesh and Uruk. But Enkidu subdues the bull and Gilgamesh kills it.

By killing Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven, Gilgamesh and Enkidu win fame and acclamation in Uruk, but they incur the displeasure of the gods. It is decreed that one of them must die, and the sentence falls on Enkidu, who learns of his fate in a dream. Enkidu complains to Shamash, the sun-god, and curses the hunter and the harlot who first brought him to Uruk. Shamash, however, points out all the good things that came to Enkidu because of the harlot. Enkidu agrees and changes the fate of the harlot to a blessing: “Governors and princes shall love you.… Because of you, the mother of seven, the honoured wife, shall be deserted.”

When Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh mourns bitterly: “Shall I die too? Am I not like Enkidu? … I am afraid of Death, and so I roam the country.” He decides to visit Utnapishtim, the flood hero (the counterpart of Atrahasis in the Atrahasis story), who was granted eternal life and now lives far away at the ends of the earth. The journey takes Gilgamesh into the mountain in the west where the sun sets, through a dark tunnel to the sunrise at the other side. He comes to the shore of the sea that circles the earth, where he finds an inn kept by an alewife, Siduri. He tells her his story and asks for directions. She sees that his quest is hopeless:

She does, however, direct him to Urshanabi, boatman of Utnapishtim. Gilgamesh prevails on the boatman to ferry him over to Utnapishtim, who again lectures him on the [Page 37] inevitability of death. When Gilgamesh presses him as to how he obtained eternal life, Utnapishtim tells him the story of the flood. Before Gilgamesh sets out on his return journey, however, Utnapishtim tells him about a plant that grows in the Apsu, the fresh waters beneath the earth, that has the power to rejuvenate or make the old young again. Gilgamesh dives and brings up the plant. On the way back, however, he stops to bathe in a pool, and while he is doing so a snake carries off the plant. At this point Gilgamesh becomes resigned. When they return to Uruk, he displays the walls of Uruk to Urshanabi, with the implication that the city walls have a permanence that is denied to human beings, even to heroes.

The story of Gilgamesh needs little commentary. It is a poignant reflection on human mortality that belongs to the classics of world literature. In contrast to what we find in the Bible, morality is not a consideration in this story. The exploits of Gilgamesh and Enkidu are neither good nor bad. They win fame for the heroes, but they also bring about their fall. There is a nice appreciation of both the curses and the blessings that attend the harlot. The gods are sometimes capricious (especially Ishtar), sometimes reasonable (Shamash). In the end, however, death is the great leveler of humanity. As Utnapishtim remarks, death is inevitable for Gilgamesh as for the fool.

The role of Ishtar in the Gilgamesh epic draws attention to an aspect of Near Eastern religion that stands in contrast to what we find in the Hebrew Bible. Deities are both male and female; goddesses figure in the stories beside the gods. We have seen the roles of the mother-goddesses Mami/Bêlit̄ilī and Tiamat in the creation stories. In general, the roles assigned to the goddesses decline in the second millennium. In Atrahasis, Enki and Mami collaborate to make human beings. In Enuma Elish, Ea (the Babylonian counterpart of Enki) makes them alone. There is still a mother-goddess, Tiamat, but she has no role in the creation of humanity, and she is part of the old order that Marduk must defeat. In Sumerian texts, the mother-goddess Ninhursag appears as the third of the triad of most powerful deities, after Anu and Enlil. In the second millennium, however, she is replaced by the wise god Enki, as we see in the Atrahasis myth.

One goddess who did not decline in importance in the second millennium was Ishtar. The name Ishtar derives from the Semitic word ˓at̄tar. A masculine god with this name appears in Ugaritic texts, and the feminine Astarte is known in the Bible. Ishtar was identified with the Sumerian goddess Inanna, and is associated with fertility in all its aspects. She is the goddess of thunderstorms and rain, and perhaps because of this association she is also the goddess of battle. (Gods of thunderstorms were often envisaged as warriors riding the chariots into battle.) Above all, she was the goddess of sexual [Page 38] attraction. She was also associated with the morning star. She is most probably the goddess venerated as the “queen of heaven” (Jer 44:17*, 19*)

Inanna/Ishtar is associated with the shepherd king Dumuzi (Babylonian Tammuz) in several stories, most notably a story of her Descent to the Netherworld. After a passionate courtship with Dumuzi, they celebrate a sacred marriage. Another phase of the myth deals with the death of Dumuzi. This is described variously in the texts. In some, Inanna mourns him bitterly. According to the story of the Descent of Inanna, however, she is responsible for his demise. Inanna visits the netherworld, where her sister Ereshkigal turns her into a corpse. She is eventually revived and allowed to ascend, but on condition that she find a substitute. She finds that Dumuzi has not been grief-stricken in her absence, and designates him as the substitute to go down to the netherworld. In the end an arrangement is made whereby Dumuzi and his sister spend alternate halves of the year in the netherworld. This arrangement is related to the seasonal cycle of death and rebirth.

The relationship between Inanna and Dumuzi was ritualized in the cultic celebration of the sacred marriage, between the king and a priestess representing Inanna. The sacred marriage was a ritual to ensure fertility, of the fields as well as of people. The texts often use agricultural metaphors in connection with Inanna and the sacred marriage (e.g., “Inanna, your breast is your field”). The rejection of Ishtar by Gilgamesh is remarkable in view of the Sumerian tradition of the sacred marriage, but this tradition faded in the second millennium, and the king no longer played the part of the god in the marriage ritual. Ishtar, however, was associated not only with marriage but also with extramarital sex and prostitution. She is not a maternal figure, and despite her marriage to Dumuzi she remains an unencumbered woman. As such she is a marginal figure, at once a subject of fascination and attraction and of fear. She represents both sex and violence, and even, because of her descent to the netherworld, death. The ambivalence of Ishtar is prominently expressed in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Yet the conclusion of the epic refers to Ishtar’s temple as a prominent feature of the city of Uruk, in which Gilgamesh apparently takes pride.

Our sources for Canaanite mythology are much less extensive than those for Mesopotamia. Until the discovery of the tablets at Ugarit in 1929, we were dependent on the polemical accounts of Canaanite religion in the Bible and some information in Greek sources (especially Philo of Byblos) which are late and problematic. Whether Ugarit is properly described as Canaanite is a matter of dispute, but the gods that appear in the Ugaritic tablets (El, Baal, Anat, etc.) are the same deities that figure in the Hebrew Bible. The Ugaritic texts are the best representatives we have of Canaanite religion in the second half of the first millennium. Here again we should remember that there was no [Page 39] orthodoxy in ancient Near Eastern religion and that different myths, or different forms of these myths, may have circulated in other locations.

In the Ugaritic pantheon, El was king and father of the gods. His decree is wise and his wisdom eternal. The word El is familiar from Hebrew, where it is both the common noun for “god” and a designation for the God of Israel (YHWH). El is said to live in a tent on a mountain that is the source of two rivers. He presides over assemblies of “the sons of El,” the council of the gods.

By the time the Ugaritic myths were composed, however, El’s position among the gods was largely ceremonial. At least in the Baal cycle of myths, Baal emerges as the dominant figure, although his claim to rule is still challenged by Yamm (Sea) and Mot (Death). Three goddesses figure prominently in the stories: Asherah, wife of El; Anat, sister and wife of Baal; and Astarte, who is the least prominent of the three.

The Baal Cycle from Ugarit resembles Enuma Elish insofar as it describes a conflict among the gods that culminates in the establishment of a king (in this case, Baal). The two myths may be related. Tiamat in the Babylonian myth is related to the Deep or the Sea (the Hebrew cognate, tehom, is the word used for the Deep in the opening verses of Genesis), and the Sea does battle with Baal in the Canaanite myth. The Ugaritic text does not discuss the creation of the world, but it is often described as cosmogonic (that is, a story of the origin of the world), as it can be read as an account of how things came to be the way they are. The first episode of the myth begins when Yamm (Sea) demands that the assembly of the gods surrender Baal into his power. The gods are intimidated by the violent approach of the messengers, and El agrees to hand Baal over. Baal, however, refuses to submit. Instead he gets two clubs, fashioned by the divine craftsman Kothar-wa-Hasis. With these he

[Page 40] Another passage in the myth says that Baal finished off Lotan, the fleeing serpent, the seven-headed monster. This is probably another way of referring to the same victory. Lotan appears in the Bible as Leviathan (Isa 27:1*; Job 3:8*; 41:1*; Pss 74:13–14*; 104:26*).

A second episode of the myth begins with the construction of Baal’s house and a celebratory banquet. At first Baal resists the advice of Kothar-wa-Hasis that he should have a window in his house, but after the banquet he changes his mind. (A window was thought to provide an entry for Death. Compare Jer 9:21*.)

The third episode of the myth presents a more serious challenge to Baal, on the part of Mot, or Death. Baal is terrified, and declares that he is Mot’s servant forever. The story vividly describes how Death swallows Baal:

Baal’s death is greeted with widespread mourning. El gets down from his throne and rolls in the dust. Anat gashes her skin with a knife. Both express concern as to what will happen to the people if Baal is dead. El offers to make one of Asherah’s sons king in place of Baal. One of them, Athtar, tries out Baal’s throne, but his feet do not reach the footstool. Finally, Anat confronts Mot:

Baal then returns to life, and the heavens rain down oil and the wadis (or gullies) run with honey. Finally, there is a tussle between Baal and Mot. Both are strong and fall. The Sun warns Mot that El will be displeased and will undermine his throne and at that Mot becomes fearful.

While the Baal Cycle has much in common with Enuma Elish, it does not seem to have the same political implications as the Babylonian myth. Rather, like the myth of [Page 41] Inanna and Dumuzi, it seems to reflect the seasonal changes, at least in the struggle of Baal and Mot. When Baal dies, there is no rain. The wadis dry up and the fields are dry. When he comes back to life, the rain comes again. This story is not concerned with morality, any more than the Babylonian myth. Mot is not evil; he is just a power that must be given his due. In the end there is some equilibrium between Baal and Mot. A striking feature of the Canaanite mythology is the violence of the goddess Anat, who not only dismembers Death but also berates the high god El on occasion and threatens to smash his skull if he does not comply with her wishes.

Baal’s victory over the Sea is more decisive. We may imagine that the image of a monster with seven heads was suggested by the waves of the sea, beating against the Mediterranean coast. In the Hebrew Bible, we shall find the idea that the work of creation involved setting limits to the sea (Ps 104:9*). The sea must be restrained, so that dry land can emerge. Both Sea and Death may be considered chaos monsters: they are forces that threaten the survival of life. In this they resemble Tiamat in the Babylonian myth. Baal, like Marduk, is a god who protects life, but Baal has much stronger overtones of fertility.

All the characters in the Baal myth are gods or goddesses. But the Canaanites also had stories with human heroes. One such story tells of a man named Danel, who had no son and besought one from the gods. This Danel is mentioned as a legendary wise man in Ezek 14:14*, where he is associated with Noah and Job, and again in Ezek 28:3*, where the prophet asks rhetorically, “are you wiser than Danel?” (The name is often translated as “Daniel,” by analogy with the hero of the biblical book of Daniel.) In the Ugaritic story, Danel is depicted as a king or local ruler, who sits at the entrance to the city gate, presiding over legal disputes involving widows and orphans. His prayers are answered, and he is given a son named Aqhat.

The son is given a present of a bow by the divine craftsman Kothar-wa-Hasis, but this wonderful present is a cause of misfortune for Aqhat. It attracts the attention of the goddess Anat. She offers Aqhat gold and silver for the bow, and when he refuses, she offers him immortality: “you’ll be able to match years with Baal, months with the sons of El.” But Aqhat replies:

[Page 42] He goes on to insult her by saying that she has no business with a bow, as women do not hunt.

This episode resembles the encounter of Gilgamesh and Ishtar, but Anat is more successful than Ishtar in getting her revenge. She makes her servant Yatpan take the form of a vulture and strike Aqhat on the skull and kill him. In his mourning, the father Danel places a curse on nature:

(Baal’s voice was the thunder.) The death of Aqhat, then, results in a crisis in fertility, even if not on the same scale as that which followed the death of Baal. After the seven years of mourning, Aqhat’s sister, Pagat, sets out to avenge her brother. She goes to Yatpan’s tent and plies him with wine. Unfortunately, the ending of the story is lost, but presumably she gets her revenge by killing Yatpan. The motif of the woman who visits a man with the intention of killing him appears again in the book of Judith, in the Apocrypha, at the end of the Old Testament.

The story of Aqhat is fragmentary, and so it is difficult to discern its central purpose. It certainly shows the inevitability of death, even for a hero, just as the story of Gilgamesh did. But it also throws light on some aspects of everyday life in the ancient Near East. For example, when Baal relays Danel’s wish for a son to the council of the gods, he petitions:

We are told that Pagat “gets up early to draw water,” knows the course of the stars, saddles a donkey, and lifts her father onto it. The story, then, is a portrayal of life in ancient times, whether it had some more specific purpose or not.

[Page 43] Another cycle of stories from Ugarit tells the tale of a king named Keret or Kirta, who, like Job, saw his numerous family members destroyed. The gods grant him a new family, but he is afflicted by illness and has to contend with a challenge to his rule by his son. The latter episode recalls the revolt of David’s son Absalom in 2 Samuel.

As in Mesopotamia and Canaan, religion in ancient Egypt was subject to local variations and had no overarching orthodoxy. The status of deities rose and fell with the fortunes of their cities. The Old Kingdom, in the second half of the third millennium b.c.e., had its capital at Memphis. In the Memphite theology, the preeminent god was the creator-god Ptah. The priesthood of Heliopolis, however, exalted the god Atum as creator. The New Kingdom, in the second half of the second millennium, had its capital at Thebes in Middle Egypt, and here the god Amun came to prominence, and was linked with the sun-god Re. Several different gods appear as creators in Egyptian myths: Ptah, Re, Atum, Amun, Khnum, but there is only one creator in any given myth. The multiplicity of creation emerges out of an original unity. Other gods, however, also figure in these myths. The sun-god Re was universally worshiped and appears in almost every creation myth, although his role varies. The process of creation also varied. In the theology of Heliopolis, the sun-god emerged from the abyss on a primal mound, and created the first pair of deities by masturbation or spittle. The god Ptah was said to conceive in his heart the things he wanted to create and bring them into existence by uttering a word. The god Khnum, in contrast, was a potter-god, who fashioned human beings as a potter fashions clay. The models of creation by a word and of fashioning like a potter appear in the Bible, but on the whole the Bible is much closer to the idiom of the Canaanite and Mesopotamian texts than to that of the Egyptian myths.

The Egyptian creation stories place less emphasis on conflict than was the case in Enuma Elish or the Baal myth. The main mythical conflict in Egyptian tradition was the conflict of Horus and Seth. Seth is the symbol of chaos and evil (the Greeks identified him with Typhon). He murders his brother and rival, Osiris. Isis, widow and sister of Osiris, recovers his body, and conceives his son Horus. Horus engages in many struggles with Seth and eventually defeats him. Horus was the defender of the pharaoh, and the pharaoh was regarded as the living Horus. After death, the pharaoh was identified with Osiris. Osiris became the king of the dead, and symbolized the hope for eternal life.

One of the most striking features of ancient Egyptian culture was the pervasive belief in life after death. It is to this belief that we owe the pyramids. Many of the artifacts that stock the Egyptian section of modern Western museums were discovered in tombs, where they had been buried as provisions for the deceased in the [Page 44] afterlife. There is a considerable corpus of Egyptian literature that deals in some way with death and the afterlife. The most ancient corpus of Egyptian religious texts are the Pyramid texts: spells for the protection of the deceased, inscribed on the inside walls of the pyramids. In the Middle Kingdom, such spells were inscribed on the panels of wooden coffins, and are called the Coffin texts. In the New Kingdom many of these spells appear on papyrus scrolls in Books of the Dead.

One episode in the history of Egyptian religion has often been thought to have influenced the development of monotheism in Israel. This was the religious reform of the pharaoh Amenophis IV, also known as Akhenaten (about 1350 b.c.e.). This pharaoh broke with the traditional cult of Amun at Thebes. He moved his capital to Amarna or Akhetaten, further north on the Nile, and concentrated worship on one god alone, Aten, the solar disk. (This period is known as the Amarna period. It is also famous for the Amarna letters, sent to the pharaoh by his vassals in Canaan, describing conditions there.) Akhenaten declared that all the other gods had failed and ceased to be effective. Aten, identified with Re, the sun-god, had given birth to himself and was beyond compare. He was supreme and all-powerful, the creator and sustainer of the universe. Akhenaten defaced the statue of Amun, sent the high priest of Amun to work in the quarries, and diverted income from the temples of Amun to those of Aten. Scholars dispute whether this cult is properly described as monotheistic. It is not clear that Akhenaten denied the existence of other gods. But it certainly came closer to monotheism than any other cult in the Near East before the rise of Israel. The reforms were short-lived, however. Akhenaten died in the seventeenth year of his rule. After his death, his successor Tutankhaten changed his name to Tutankhamun, and moved the royal residence from Amarna to the ancient site of Memphis, south of modern Cairo. Akhenaten’s monuments were destroyed or concealed and the royal cult returned to the old ways.

Many scholars have wondered whether the religion of Moses was not in some way influenced by that of Akhenaten. YHWH the God of Israel is sometimes described with solar imagery, and Psalm 104 has many parallels to Akhenaten’s Hymn to the Sun Disk. But, on the whole, there is little similarity between the Egyptian solar god and the God of Israel. The Egyptian deity is a timeless, unchanging divinity. Although Christian theologians may also conceive of God as timeless and unchanging, the biblical God of Israel, YHWH (usually pronounced Yahweh), is bound up with his people’s history from the beginning, and is revealed through that people’s history, as well as through nature. The ways in which YHWH was conceived owe much more to the idiom of Mesopotamian, and especially Canaanite myths, than to Egypt. These myths were written in Semitic languages that were much closer to Hebrew than was Egyptian.

The material reviewed in this chapter is meant to give an impression of the world of the second millennium b.c.e. and the ways in which people imagined gods and goddesses. The Bible claims that Moses received a new revelation, but even a new revelation was of necessity expressed in language and imagery that was already current. The Hebrew language was a Canaanite dialect, and Canaanite was a Semitic language, like Akkadian. Israelite religion, too, did not emerge in a vacuum. Its novel aspects came into being as modifications of beliefs and practices that had been current for centuries. The Hebrew language uses the word El for God, and the term inevitably carried with it associations of the Canaanite high god. The biblical creation stories draw motifs from the myths of Atrahasis and Enuma Elish, and from the Epic of Gilgamesh. In short, much of the language and imagery of the Bible was culture specific, and was deeply embedded in the traditions of the Near East. Consequently, it is necessary to keep the myths and stories of Near Eastern religion in mind when we turn to the biblical text.

Citations of Mesopotamian myths in this chapter follow Dalley; citations of the Ugaritic myths follow Coogan.

Coogan, Michael David. Stories from Ancient Canaan. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978.

Dalley, Stephanie. Myths from Mesopotamia. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989.

Foster, Benjamin R. From Distant Days: Myths, Tales and Poetry of Ancient Mesopotamia. Bethesda, Md.: CDL, 1995. Literate translation of a wide sample of Mesopotamian literature.

Hallo, W. W., and K. Lawson Younger, eds. The Context of Scripture. Vol. 1: Canonical Compositions from the Biblical World. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Extensive selection of texts from Egyptian, Hittite, Ugaritic, Akkadian, and Sumerian sources, not including laws.

Lichtheim, Miriam. Ancient Egyptian Literature. 3 vols. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975–80. Authoritative translation of Egyptian literature.

Parker, Simon B., ed. Ugaritic Narrative Poetry. SBLWAW 9. Atlanta: Scholars, 1997. Contains the Ugaritic myths, translated by Mark Smith and others.

Pritchard, James B., ed. Ancient Near Eastern Texts. 3d ed. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969 (abbrev. ANET). This is still the most complete single collection of ancient Near Eastern texts, but individual translations have been superseded in many cases.

Smith, Mark S. The Ugaritic Baal Cycle. VTSup 55. Leiden: Brill, 1994. Most complete discussion of the Baal myth.[Page 46]

Wyatt, Nicolas. Religious Texts from Ugarit: The Words of Ilumilku and His Colleagues. BibSem 53. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998.

Substantial articles on many aspects of the ancient Near East can be found in the following encyclopedias:

Freedman, David Noel, ed. Anchor Bible Dictionary. 6 vols. New York: Doubleday, 1992. (abbrev. ABD).

Meyers, Eric M., ed. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East. 5 vols. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997.

Sasson, Jack M. ed. Civilizations of the Ancient Near East. 4 vols. New York: Scribner’s, 1995 (reprinted 4 vols. in 2: Peabody: Mass.: Hendrickson, 2000).

Assmann, Jan. The Search for God in Ancient Egypt. Trans. D. Lorton. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2001. Recent account of Egyptian religion by an influential scholar.

Bottéro, Jean. Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning and the Gods. Trans. Z. Bahrani and M. van de Mieroop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Good introduction to the ancient Near East.

Clifford, Richard J. Creation Accounts in the Ancient Near East and in the Bible. CBQMS 26. Washington, D. C.: Catholic Biblical Association, 1994. Good overview of Near Eastern creation myths.

Frymer-Kensky, Tikva. In the Wake of the Goddesses. New York: Free Press, 1992. Good account of the major goddesses.

Hallo, William W., and William Kelly Simpson. The Ancient Near East: A History. 2d ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1998.

Jacobsen, Thorkild. The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976. Classic account of Mesopotamian religion.

Mieroop, Marc van de. A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000–323 b. c. Blackwell History of the Ancient World. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004. Clear, up-to-date survey.

Oppenheim, A. L. Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1964. Classic account of Mesopotamian civilization.

Redford, Donald B. Ancient Gods Speak: A Guide to Egyptian Religion. New York: Oxford, 2002. Good introduction to Egyptian religion.

———. “The Monotheism of Akhenaten.” In Aspects of Monotheism: How God Is One, ed. H. Shanks and J. Meinhardt, 11–26. Washington, D. C.: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1997. Lively account of the “monotheistic revolution” of Akhenaten.

———. Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992. Historical survey of Egypt in the late second millennium.

The first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy; collectively known as the Pentateuch) tell the story of the prehistory of Israel, from creation to the death of Moses on the threshold of the promised land. Genesis 1–11 deals with primeval history, from creation to the flood, and the Tower of Babel. Genesis 12–50 is the patriarchal history, the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the sons of Jacob. The Joseph story, in Genesis 37–50, is a distinct block of material within this corpus. It is a transitional story that explains how Israel came to be in Egypt, and thereby sets the stage for the exodus. Exodus 1–18 tells the story of the liberation from Egypt. Then Exodus 19–40 and the book of Leviticus present the revelation at Mount Sinai. The book of Numbers describes the sojourn in the wilderness. Finally, Deuteronomy is the farewell address of Moses.

These books are traditionally known as the Torah, and as the book of Moses. Both of these designations are problematic. The Torah is commonly, but not quite accurately, translated as “Law.” Much of the Pentateuch is a presentation of laws, but Genesis and the first half of Exodus consist of narratives. The Hebrew word torah has a broader sense than “law,” and includes a sense of traditional teaching. The attribution to Moses, however, arises from the prominence of laws in these books. The book of Deuteronomy is introduced as “the words that Moses spoke to all Israel beyond the Jordan” (Deut 1:1*), and Moses is again said to be the source of various other parts of Deuteronomy (4:44*; 31:24*; 32:45*). In the books of Joshua and Kings, “the torah of Moses” refers to the [Page 48] laws of Deuteronomy (Josh 8:31–32*; 23:6*; 1 Kgs 2:3*; 14:6*; 22:5*). Later books of the Hebrew Bible, such as Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles, refer to the Torah of Moses, with reference to the laws in Deuteronomy and Leviticus (e.g., Neh 8:1*, 13–18*). The Torah is commonly regarded as the book of Moses in the Hellenistic period. Ben Sira, who wrote in the early second century b.c.e., refers to “the book of the covenant of the Most High God, the law that Moses commanded us” (Sir 24:23*). The Torah is regarded as the book of Moses in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in the New Testament, and in the first-century c.e. Jewish authors Philo and Josephus. The Babylonian Talmud (Baba Bathra 14b) says explicitly that Moses wrote the five books named after him. It seems that this tradition had its origin in the book of Deuteronomy, and was gradually extended until Moses was regarded not only as the mediator of the laws but as the author of the whole Pentateuch, although there is no basis for this claim in Genesis or in the narrative portions of Exodus.

The problematic nature of the supposed Mosaic authorship was noticed at least as early as the Middle Ages. The medieval Jewish scholar Ibn Ezra (twelfth century) noted that Gen 12:6*, which says that “the Canaanites were then in the land,” must have been written at a later time, when this was no longer the case. Similarly, Gen 36:31*, which refers to “the kings who reigned in the land of Edom, before any king reigned over the Israelites,” must have been written after the establishment of the monarchy. Others scholars noted that Moses cannot have written the account of his own death, at the end of Deuteronomy. Attention was gradually drawn to various repetitions and contradictions that suggested that the Torah was not the work of any one author, but was rather a compilation of tradition long after the time of Moses. Such observations proliferated in the wake of the Reformation, when the Bible was subjected to a new level of scrutiny. One of the earliest notable critics of the Pentateuch was a Catholic priest, Richard Simon, in the seventeenth century. Simon argued that the Pentateuch could not have been composed by Moses, but was written centuries later by scribes who drew on archival records. His work was suppressed in France, and he was expelled from his order. Important contributions were made by two great philosophers. Thomas Hobbes, in his masterwork Leviathan (1651), demanded that people be guided by the statements of the biblical books themselves (as opposed to traditional beliefs about them) and held that these books gave considerable evidence about the time in which they were written. In 1670 the Jewish philosopher Benedict Spinoza argued in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus that the Pentateuch and the following books, down to Kings, were compiled by Ezra after the Babylonian exile. Spinoza allowed, however, that Ezra made use of older sources.

[Page 49] A major advance in the study of the Pentateuch is credited to Jean Astruc, a convert to Catholicism who became private physician to King Louis XV. In 1735 Astruc published his “Conjectures about the notes that Moses appears to have used in composing the book of Genesis.” Astruc observed that in some passages God is called by the general Hebrew word for god, Elohim, while in others he is called by the proper name Yahweh. (It is often written without vowels, YHWH, so as not to profane the name by pronouncing it. Jewish tradition substitutes the word Adonai, “the Lord.” The mongrel form “Jehovah” is a combination of the consonants of YHWH, or JHVH, with the vowels of Adonai.) Astruc supposed that different source documents had been woven together in the composition of Genesis.

Astruc’s observation was gradually developed by later scholars into a full-fledged documentary hypothesis, which addressed the composition of the entire Pentateuch. The book of Deuteronomy was recognized as substantially a distinct source. A distinction was made between passages that refer to God as Elohim in Genesis. Some of these passages (e.g., Gen 1:1–2:4a*, and various passages dealing with genealogies) were recognized as part of a Priestly source (P) that is represented extensively in Leviticus. The remaining narrative material was seen as a combination of the Yahwistic source (J, following the German spelling Jahweh) and an Elohistic one (E). For much of the nineteenth century, scholars assumed that the Priestly document was the oldest stratum of the Pentateuch. (In German literature from that time it is called G, for Grundschrift, or basic document.) In the 1860s, however, this theory was revised, so that P was viewed as the latest (or next to latest) document, and the order of the sources was established as J, E, D, P (or J, E, P, D). The new order was argued by a number of scholars, notably the German Karl Heinrich Graf and the Dutch scholar Abraham Kuenen. It received its classic formulation, however, from the German Julius Wellhausen in the 1870s and 1880s.

The Documentary Hypothesis, or the view that the Pentateuch is a combination of (at least) four different documents, enjoyed the status of scholarly orthodoxy for about a century. There were always variations of the theory. Some scholars identified additional sources, or subscribed to a Fragment Hypothesis that allowed for greater diversity of authorship. For a long time Scandinavian scholars defended the view that the tradition was transmitted orally down to the late seventh century b.c.e. Some scholars extended the division of sources into the book of Joshua and spoke of a Hexateuch (six books) rather than a Pentateuch. But the four-source theory was by far the dominant view. Only in the last quarter of the twentieth century did it come to be widely questioned. Before we can evaluate these objections, however, we need to appreciate the kind of observations on which the hypothesis was based.

The different divine names cannot be explained as stylistic variation. In Exod 6:2–3* we read: “God also spoke to Moses and said to him: ‘I am YHWH. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shadday, but by my name YHWH I did not make myself known to them.’ ” Yet in Gen 4:26* we are told that people began to call upon the name of YHWH in the time of Enosh, grandson of Adam. God is often called YHWH in his dealings with the patriarchs, especially with Abraham. It is apparent, then, that Exod 6:2* comes from a different source than these passages in Genesis.

The variation in divine names is by no means the only indication of multiple authorship. In numerous cases we have doublets, or variant forms of the same story. The account of creation in Gen 1:1–2:3* is quite different from that which follows in the remainder of chapters 2 and 3. Two versions of the flood story are intertwined in Genesis 6–9. Several stories in Genesis appear in more than one form. Abraham identifies his wife Sarah as his sister to a foreign king in two separate stories (in chaps. 12 and 20). In a third story, Isaac identifies his wife Rebekah as his sister (chap. 26). There are two accounts of God’s covenant with Abraham (chaps. 15 and 17), two accounts of Abraham’s dealings with Hagar and Ishmael (chaps. 16 and 21), two accounts of the naming of Beersheba (chaps. 21 and 26). The doublets are not confined to Genesis or to the narrative material. There are variant accounts of the crossing of the Red Sea in Exodus 14–15, and different accounts of the revelation of the commandments in Exodus 19–20 and in Deuteronomy. The mountain of the revelation is variously named Sinai or Horeb. The Decalogue (Ten Commandments) is given three times, with some variations (Exod 20:1–17*; 34:10–28*; Deut 5:6–18*). The list of forbidden animals is given twice (Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14). Many further examples could be given.

The argument that these duplications results from the combination of different documents can be illustrated well from the story of the flood. The two versions of the story can be separated as follows:

[Page 51] Yahwist	Priestly
Gen 6:5–8* (J): YHWH saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And YHWH was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So YHWH said: “I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in the sight of YHWH.
	6:9–22* (P): These are the descendants of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation; Noah walked with God (Elohim). And Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw that the earth was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted its ways upon the earth. And God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them; now I am going to destroy them along with the earth. Make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch. This is how you are to make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its width fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits. Make a roof for the ark and finish it to a cubit above; and put the door of the ark in its side; make it with lower, second and third decks. For my part I am going to bring a flood of waters on
[Page 52]	the earth to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is the breath of life; everything that is on the earth shall die. But I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you. And of every living thing, of all flesh you shall bring two of every kind into the ark to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. Of the birds according to their kinds and of the animals according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground according to its kind, two of every kind shall come in to you, to keep them alive. Also take with you every kind of food that is eaten, and store it up; and it shall serve as food for you and for them.” Noah did this; he did all that God commanded him.
7:1–5* (J): Then YHWH said to Noah, “Go into the ark, you and all your household, for I have seen that you alone are righteous before me in this generation. Take with you 7 pairs of all clean animals, the male and its mate; and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and its mate; and 7 pairs of the birds of the air also, male and female, to keep their kind alive on the face of all the earth. For in 7 days I will send rain on the earth for 40 days and 40 nights; and every living thing that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground.” And Noah did all that YHWH commanded him.
[Page 53]	6–16a* (P): Noah was 600 years old when the flood of waters came on the earth. And Noah with his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives went into the ark to escape the waters of the flood. Of clean animals and of animals that are not clean, and of birds, and of everything that creeps on the ground, two and two, male and female, went into the ark with Noah, as God had commanded Noah. And after 7 days the waters of the flood came on the earth. In the 600th year of Noah’s life, in the 2nd month, on the 17th day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened. The rain fell on the earth 40 days and 40 nights. On the very same day Noah with his sons, Shem and Ham and Japheth, and Noah’s wife and the three wives of his sons entered the ark, they and every wild animal of every kind, and all domestic animals of every kind, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, and every bird of every kind—every bird, every winged creature. They went into the ark with Noah, two and two of all flesh in which there was the breath of life. And those that entered, male and female of all flesh, went in as God had commanded him.
7:16b–23* (J): and YHWH shut him in. The flood continued 40 days on the earth; and the waters increased, and bore up the ark, and it rose high above the earth. The waters swelled and increased greatly on the earth; and the ark floated on the face of the waters. The waters swelled so mightily on [Page 54] the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered; the waters swelled above the mountains, covering them 15 cubits deep. And all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, domestic animals, wild animals, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth, and all human beings; everything on dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died. He blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground, human beings and animals and creeping things and birds of the air; they were blotted out from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark.
	7:24–8:5* (P): And the waters swelled on the earth for 150 days. But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided; the fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed, the rain from the heavens was restrained, and the waters gradually receded from the earth. [Page 55] At the end of 150 days the waters had abated; and in the 7th month, on the 17th day of the month, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. The waters continued to abate until the 10th month; in the 10th month, on the 1st day of the month, the tops of the mountains appeared.
8:6–12* (J): At the end of forty days, Noah opened the window of the ark that he had made and sent out the raven; and it went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth. Then he sent out the dove from him, to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the ground; but the dove found no place to set its foot, and it returned to him to the ark, for the waters were still on the face of the whole earth. So he put out his hand and took it and brought it into the ark with him. He waited another 7 days, and again he sent out the dove from the ark, and the dove came back to him in the evening, and there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf; so Noah knew that the waters had subsided from the earth. Then he waited another 7 days, and sent out the dove; and it did not return to him anymore.

8:13–19* (P): In the 601st year, in the 1st month, on the 1st day of the month, the waters were dried up from the earth; and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and saw that the face of the ground was drying. In the 2nd month, on the 27th day of the month, the earth was dry. Then God said to Noah, “Go out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and your sons’ wives with you. Bring out with you every living thing that is with you of all flesh—birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth—so that they may abound on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.” So [Page 56] Noah went out with his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives. And every animal, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that moves on the earth, went out of the ark by families.

8:20–22* (J): Then Noah built an altar to
YHWH and took of every clean animal and of
every clean bird, and offered burnt offerings
on the altar. And when YHWH smelled the pleasing
odor, the Lord said in his heart, “I will never again
curse the ground because of humankind, for the
inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor
will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have
done. As long as the earth endures, the seedtime
and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter,
day and night, shall not cease.”

9:1–19* (P):God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.”

God makes a covenant with Noah, requiring only that he not eat flesh with the blood in it. The rainbow is the sign of the covenant. The whole earth is peopled from Noah’s sons.

It is possible to argue for a finer division of sources in this story (e.g., Gen 7:10*, where the flood comes after seven days, and 7:12*, where the rain falls for forty days and nights, should probably be assigned to J, even though they occur in a P passage). It is also clear that the two versions have not been preserved in full. Noah is never instructed to build the ark in J. But the outline of the two stories is clear enough. In one account Noah takes only one pair of animals into the ark. In the other he takes seven pairs. In one account the flood lasts 150 days, in the other, 40 days and 40 nights. Moreover, these two accounts can be aligned with strands or sources elsewhere in Genesis. There are clear links between the Priestly version and the Priestly account of creation in Gen 1:1–2:3*, typified by the command to be fruitful and multiply. The anthropomorphic character of [Page 57] God in the J account (he regrets that he made humankind, and is pleased by the odor of sacrifice) is typical of the J source.

The example of the flood should suffice to show that sources are combined in the Pentateuch at least in some cases. It also shows that it is possible to line up consistent features of these sources in different passages. Proponents of the Documentary Hypothesis insist that consistent profiles can be established for each of the four sources, so that we are not dealing just with diverse elements in individual passages, but with strands that run through several biblical books.

Profiles of the Sources

The Priestly document is the easiest source to recognize. The rather dry, formulaic style is familiar from the account of creation in Genesis 1. God said “let there be light” and there was light. It is marked by a strong interest in genealogies, in dates (note the precise dating in the Priestly account of the flood), and in ritual observance (the Creator observes the Sabbath by resting on the seventh day). The book of Leviticus is quintessential Priestly material, as is the description of the tabernacle in Exodus 25–31 and 35–40. In P, history is punctuated by a series of covenants, with Noah, Abraham, and finally Moses. P has no angels, dreams, or talking animals, such as we find in other pentateuchal narratives. There is little dispute about the identification of P, although its date remains very controversial. We shall examine this strand of the Pentateuch in more detail in chapter 7.

The D source is also relatively unproblematic. It is found primarily in the book of Deuteronomy, although some scholars now try to identify Deuteronomic passages also in Genesis and Exodus. There are a few independent passages at the end of Deuteronomy (the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32; the Blessing of Moses in chap. 33; the death of Moses in chap. 34), but the main body of the book constitutes the basic D corpus. This material is written in a distinctive style. YHWH is said to love Israel, and Israel is commanded to love YHWH “with all your heart and soul,” to listen to his voice, and to do what is right in his sight. YHWH brought Israel out of Egypt “with a strong hand and an outstretched arm.” The central theme in Deuteronomy is the covenant, and its most distinctive commandment is that it forbids sacrifice outside of the central sanctuary. Since the work of W. M. L. de Wette at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Deuteronomy has been associated with the reform of King Josiah in 621 b.c.e. Deuteronomy is also the subject of chapter 8 below.

The most problematic part of the Documentary Hypothesis is the distinction between the narrative sources, J and E. The distinction emerges clearly in three doublets in Genesis: Gen 12:10–21* (J), with its parallel in 20:1–18* (E; the wife-sister motif); 16:4–14* (J) [Page 58] and parallel in 21:8–21* (E; Hagar and Ishmael); and 26:26–33* (J) and parallel in 21:22–34* (E; controversy at Beersheba). The E versions use the name Elohim for God, and associate revelation with dreams. They reflect on problems of guilt and innocence, and emphasize the “fear of God.” E has no primeval history; it begins with Abraham in Genesis 15. Its narrative is built around four figures who all have prophetic traits. Abraham is called a prophet in 20:7*, and is said to receive revelations in visions and dreams. Jacob and Joseph also receive revelations in dreams. The call of Moses closely resembles the call of prophets in the later books.

The J source is more colorful. It is familiar from the story of Adam and Eve, with its anthropomorphic God and talking snake. God is described in very human terms. He walks in the garden, regrets that he made humanity, is pleased by the odor of sacrifice, gets angry. Abraham argues directly with YHWH over the fate of Sodom, and the Deity is also represented by “the angel of the Lord” who appears on earth. The call of Abraham in Genesis 12 and the covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15 are ascribed to J. The theme of promise and fulfillment is prominent in this strand. This theme has been especially attractive to Christian theologians, since Christianity has traditionally claimed to be the fulfillment of promises made to Israel. Already in the New Testament, in the Epistle to the Galatians, St. Paul appeals to Abraham as a prototype for Christian faith. It is significant that J begins with the story of Adam and Eve and has a substantial treatment of primeval history. Its horizon appears to be wider than that of E, and it is often said to be universalistic in outlook. Abraham is told that in him all the families of the earth will be blessed (Gen 12:3*). These features help explain the great interest in J as an author by Christian biblical theologians such as Gerhard von Rad, but J is by no means a Christian construct. In recent years, the integrity of the J source has been defended vigorously by R. E. Friedman, a Jewish scholar, and eulogized in a somewhat sensational manner by the Jewish literary critic Harold Bloom in his book The Book of J.

While J and E are clearly distinguished in some passages, they are more difficult to disentangle in others. The story of the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22 is basically an E narrative. Nonetheless, we are told in v. 14* that Abraham called the place “YHWH will provide,” and that it is said “to this day” that “on the mount of the Lord it will be provided.” The conclusion of the story in vv. 15ff*. refers to God as YHWH. Many scholars assume that these verses come from a secondary Yahwistic editor, not the original J. Alternatively, one might suppose that both J and E variants of the story existed, and that an editor took part of the story from E, and the conclusion from J. But the mixture of sources is troubling for the traditional source theory. Again, the story of Jacob’s dream at Bethel in Genesis 28 seems to be a combination of E and J narratives. After his dream, Jacob exclaims that “surely YHWH is in this place and I did not know it,” but adds “this is none other than the house of God (Elohim).” In this case, it seems likely that variant [Page 59] forms of the story were spliced together. As a final example of the difficulty of disentangling J and E, we may cite the story of the burning bush in Exodus 3. Moses was guarding the flock of his father-in-law Jethro when he came “to Horeb, the mountain of God (Elohim). There the angel of YHWH appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush.… Then Moses said, ‘I must turn aside and look at this great sight.… ’ When YHWH saw that he had turned aside, God (Elohim) called to him out of the bush.” It is possible to explain this passage as the close intersplicing of J and E narratives, but we must assume that the editor took half a verse from one source and the other half from the other. In light of this situation it is understandable that some scholars prefer to speak of JE, without attempting to separate the sources cleanly. The distinction between J and E becomes even more elusive in the book of Exodus, after the revelation of the name YHWH to Moses, and only scattered verses there are ascribed to the Elohist with any confidence. Some scholars now dispute whether E ever existed as a distinct, coherent source.

Dating the Sources

Once it became clear that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, the dates of its various parts became matters of speculation. One fairly firm point of reference is provided by the date of Deuteronomy. In a groundbreaking dissertation published in 1805, a German scholar, W. M. L. de Wette (1780–1849), demonstrated that “the Book of Deuteronomy differs from the preceding books of the Pentateuch and is the product of a different and somewhat later author.” De Wette observed that Deuteronomy 12 restricts sacrificial worship to the one “place that YHWH your God will choose,” and calls for the destruction of all the places of worship at the “high places” throughout the country. This law stands in contrast to the practice of Israelite religion throughout much of its history. The book of Genesis describes a time before Moses, when this commandment was presumably unknown, but there were still multiple sacrificial sites after Moses, according to the books of Joshua, Judges, and Samuel. In each of these books, leaders of Israel build altars and offer sacrifices at various locations. Samuel offered sacrifice at Mizpah (1 Samuel 7). Elijah rebuilt the ruined altar on Mount Carmel (1 Kgs 18:30*). At least by the time of Elijah the Jerusalem temple was in existence, and was presumably “the place that the Lord chose.” Yet there is no indication that the existence of other places of sacrifice was known to be contrary to Mosaic law. Even prophets such as Amos, who condemn the cult practiced at Bethel and other sanctuaries, never appeal to a law forbidding worship at more than one place. In fact, we know of only two attempts to centralize the Israelite cult and shut down other cult places. The first was by King Hezekiah of Judah, at the end of the eighth century b.c.e. (2 Kings 18), and the second was by his great-grandson, Josiah, in 622 b.c.e., roughly a century later (2 Kings 22). Only Josiah’s reform was based on a written law—the “book of the Torah” [Page 60] that had just been found in the temple. De Wette concluded that the law of centralization was an innovation in the time of Josiah, and that the “book of the Torah” in question was Deuteronomy, or at least major parts of it. While the extent of Josiah’s law book remains a matter of dispute, the thesis that the law of centralization dates from the time of Josiah seems beyond reasonable doubt. This datum provides an Archimedean point for the dating of biblical narratives and laws. Texts that allow or endorse worship at multiple sanctuaries are most probably older than the time of Josiah. Those that reflect knowledge of this law are presumably later. There is, of course, a possibility that some texts written after the time of Josiah might reject the law of centralization, but in that case we should at least expect them to polemicize against it.

Until recent years, most scholars after de Wette have assumed that the narratives ascribed to J and E are pre-Josianic. Julius Wellhausen, the grand master of pentateuchal criticism, put J in the ninth century, E in the eighth, D in the seventh, and P in the sixth or fifth. Wellhausen paid little attention to the dates of J and E. His main argument was that P was later than D. This argument was controversial, and remains so more than a century later. We will consider it in detail in chapter 8 when we discuss the relation between the Priestly source and Deuteronomy. In the case of J and E, it seemed obvious that both were pre-Deuteronomic and it was assumed that J was earlier than E.

Gerhard von Rad popularized the view that the J source was older than Wellhausen had supposed. He argued that J should be associated with the reign of Solomon, which he held to be a time of enlightenment, when the tribes of Israel came of age as a state on the international scene. It is widely agreed that J originated in Judah, in the southern part of Israel. Abraham is associated with Hebron, a village near Jerusalem. There are analogies between J’s account of Abraham and the story of David. Both are associated with Hebron (David was crowned king there) and both are given covenants that require only that they be faithful to their God. Both Abraham and Isaac are associated with the cult at Beersheba, in southern Judah. Judah is especially prominent among the sons of Jacob. Only J includes the long story from the life of Judah found in Genesis 38, which ends in the birth of Perez, the supposed ancestor of David and the kings of Judah. Judah is said to save Joseph from the older brothers who plan to kill him. In the J account of the covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15, God promises that Abraham’s descendants will rule over the land “from the river of Egypt to the river Euphrates.” It has been claimed that these were the bounds of the kingdom of David and Solomon. Recent historians have been very skeptical about this claim, and doubt that these kings ruled over such an extensive area.

In von Rad’s view, however, the Solomonic era was a plateau that could plausibly be understood as a climax of history. The Yahwist was a court historian, who wrote to explain how a people that had been slaves in Egypt attained the status of a kingdom. His [Page 61] explanation was that the Solomonic empire was the fulfillment of a promise made to Abraham centuries earlier. Just as Virgil would later compose an embellished account of Roman origins from the perspective of the Augustan empire, so the Yahwist wrote from the newly attained pinnacle of Solomon’s rule.

Von Rad’s attractive hypothesis, however, has not stood the test of time. On the one hand, scholars have been increasingly troubled by the lack of any evidence outside the Bible for the glory of Solomon. On the other hand, Genesis 15 is now seen as a very thin thread on which to hang a hypothesis about dating. Even if we were to accept that Solomon’s empire extended from the river of Egypt to the river Euphrates, at most this would mean that Genesis 15 was written no earlier than the time of Solomon. It would not guarantee a Solomonic date. Moreover, the lack of overt reference to the Judean monarchy in J is surprising, especially if we are to suppose that J was a court historian. Nonetheless, the southern origin of the J source seems well founded.

The Elohistic source has usually been dated a little later than J, on the assumption that it was created as a northern alternative account of the prehistory of Israel, after the separation of the northern kingdom (Israel) from Judah after the death of Solomon. There are good reasons to associate the E source with the northern kingdom. In Genesis 28 Jacob names the place where he has a dream Bethel, the house of God. Bethel was one of the state temples of the northern kingdom, set up by Jeroboam I, the secessionist king. Jeroboam also built the city of Peniel, which is the site of a struggle between Jacob and God or an angel in Genesis 32. In the E story of Joseph, it is Reuben, rather than Judah, who saves Joseph from his brothers. There is a close analogy between the forced labor imposed on the Israelites in Egypt in Exodus 1 and the corvée, or labor draft, imposed by Solomon and his son Rehoboam, which led to the revolt of the northern tribes. Some stories in the E source are critical of Aaron, the supposed ancestor of the Jerusalem priests. It is plausible, then, that E was composed in the northern kingdom. The prominence of the Arameans in the Jacob story may suggest a date in the ninth century or early eighth century, when the Arameans were the most significant foreign power in relation to Israel. J is generally thought to be slightly older, but the evidence is not conclusive. The editor who put the two sources together gave precedence to the J narrative, but some sections, such as Genesis 22 and Genesis 28, could be very well explained on the assumption that E was prior.

The two narrative sources were probably combined after the fall of the northern kingdom in 722, when many refugees from the north fled to Jerusalem, and the size of the city was greatly expanded. Neither J nor E shows any awareness of the Deuteronomic prohibition of worship outside of the central sanctuary in Jerusalem. It is most probable, then, that these sources were compiled and combined before the reform of King Josiah in the late seventh century b.c.e., although some additions could still have been made later.

[Page 62] Criticism of the Documentary Hypothesis

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, many of the established certainties of the Documentary Hypothesis were called into question. On the one hand, John Van Seters questioned the date of the Yahwist source. One of the central motifs in that source is the migration of Abraham from Mesopotamia to the promised land. Van Seters argued that such a story would make best sense in the period after the Babylonian exile, when Jewish exiles in fact returned from Babylon to Israel. Abraham is not described as a returning exile, and so the analogy is by no means perfect. Nonetheless, the early chapters of Genesis (both J and P sources) show extensive points of contact with Mesopotamia, and these contacts can be explained more easily in the exilic period or later than in the early monarchy. It should also be noted that the story of Adam and Eve is never cited in the preexilic prophets, and becomes a prominent point of reference only in the Hellenistic period. This does not prove that the J source was written late, but it does create some misgivings about the supposedly early date of the J strand of Genesis. It may be that the Primeval History in Genesis 1–11, where most of the Babylonian analogies are found, was a late addition to the J source.

A different line of critique was developed by the German scholar Rolf Rendtorff, a student of von Rad. Rendtorff noted that some influential scholars who continued to affirm the Documentary Hypothesis nonetheless proceeded on quite different assumptions. Hermann Gunkel, the founder of form criticism, treated the stories of Genesis as discrete units, akin to folklore, and paid little attention to the major sources, although he did not deny their existence. Martin Noth, a contemporary of von Rad, analyzed the Pentateuch in terms of five major themes: the promises to the ancestors, the guidance out of Egypt, the wandering in the wilderness, the revelation at Sinai, and the guidance into the arable land. These were traditional themes, which both J and E formulated in their different ways. Implicit in Noth’s analysis, however, was the insight that the patriarchal stories are different in kind from the story of the exodus, even if one recognizes J and E strands in both. For most readers, the differences between these blocks or themes are more obvious and more significant than the difference between J and E.

Rendtorff went farther than Noth and questioned the entire validity of the J and E sources. Building on Rendtorff’s work, his student Erhard Blum has proposed an elaborate alternative to the Documentary Hypothesis. Abandoning the traditional sources, J and E, Blum finds two main stages in the composition of the Pentateuch. The first he calls the “D-Komposition” (KD), which was the work of editors from the Deuteronomistic tradition. He dates this composition to the generation after the Babylonian exile. The second stage is the “P-Komposition” (KP), the work of Priestly writers who edited KD, and so, of necessity, worked even later. This is not to suggest that all of the pentateuchal narratives [Page 63] are as late as the exile. The authors of KD inherited two main documents. One was an edition of Genesis 12–50 from the exilic period, which was itself a reworking of a composition from the late preexilic period. (Parts of the Jacob cycle, however, are thought to date from the formation of the northern kingdom of Israel, after the death of Solomon.) The second was a “Life of Moses,” which had been composed some time after the fall of the northern kingdom, but which, again, incorporated elements that dated from the early monarchy. KD introduced the theme of the promise to the patriarchs as a means of connecting these two blocks of narrative. KD began with Gen 12:1–3* and concluded with a narrative of the wandering in the wilderness. The Primeval History (Genesis 1–11) was added by KP, but also incorporated some older sources. The traditional P material, such as we find in Leviticus, would also have been added at this stage. There have been several other proposals along the lines of Blum’s work, but differing in details.

Perhaps the main issue raised by the work of Rendtorff and Blum is whether the composition of the pentateuchal narratives can be ascribed to Deuteronomistic editors, no earlier than the Babylonian exile. There is an obvious problem with this thesis. The signature element of the Deuteronomic movement was the insistence that sacrifice should be offered only at the central sanctuary in Jerusalem. Yet much of Genesis consists of stories of the founding of other cult sites, including the northern sanctuary of Bethel, by the patriarchs. Such stories could only lend legitimacy to the sanctuaries that were condemned to destruction in Deuteronomy. Blum allows that the narratives of Genesis 12–50 had already been put together before the exile, but it is still difficult to see why Deuteronomistic editors would let so much of this material stand while making major modifications in other respects. It is surely more plausible that the pentateuchal narrative was already established and authoritative before Deuteronomy was added. Also, Blum’s argument does not do justice to the clear distinction between J and E passages in the patriarchal stories noted above. It remains likely that J and E were composed, and probably also combined, before the Deuteronomic reform, although some material in the Primeval History may have been added later.

Nonetheless, the recent debates about the Pentateuch show that the reconstruction of earlier forms of the biblical text is a highly speculative enterprise. Perhaps the main lesson to be retained is that these texts are indeed composite, and incorporate layers from different eras. We should allow for differences and contradictions between different passages. These differences are not eliminated by the “canonical shape” of the texts. The final editors, Deuteronomists, priests, or whoever they may have been, did not revise the older traditions systematically. Rather, they let stand material with diverse points of view, and were content to add their own distinctive emphases to the mix. The biblical text that resulted from this process is not a consistent systematic treatise. Rather, it is a collection of traditional materials that places different viewpoints in dialogue with one another and offers [Page 64] the reader a range of points of view. It is not a text that lends itself to imposing orthodoxy, or even orthopraxy, despite (perhaps because of) the proliferation of laws. Rather, it should stimulate reflection and debate by the unreconciled diversity of its content.

On any reckoning, the Pentateuch cannot have reached its present form earlier than the postexilic period. There is good evidence that the Priestly strand was added as an editorial layer. It provides the opening chapter of Genesis and connects the narrative with its genealogies and dating formulas. It is not apparent that there ever was a coherent Priestly narrative about the patriarchs. We shall also see that some elements in the Priestly strand were added quite late, long after the Babylonian exile. Nonetheless, it is not clear whether Priestly or Deuteronomic editors should be credited with establishing the shape of the Pentateuch as we have it. The evidence for Priestly editing of Genesis and Exodus is much clearer than that for Deuteronomic editing. This suggests that the first four books of the Pentateuch were edited by Priestly writers before Deuteronomy was added. The fact that Deuteronomy stands as the last book of the Pentateuch gives the impression that it was added last, and not thoroughly integrated with the other books. But much depends here on whether one finds persuasive the arguments of scholars like Blum for Deuteronomic editing of the first four books of the Pentateuch. There were certainly some Deuteronomic additions in the earlier books, but the extent of the Deuteronomic editing remains in dispute. Ultimately, there is much to be said for the view that the Pentateuch as it stands is a compromise document, in which Priestly and Deuteronomic theologies were presented side by side, without any clear indication that one should take precedence over the other.

In the following chapters I do not attempt to extrapolate theologies of J or E to any significant degree. There are evidently different strands in Genesis, and light can be thrown on some passages by noting their affinities with J or E. The distinction is also useful sometimes in Exodus, but much less often. My goal, however, is not to reconstruct J or E, but to appreciate the pentateuchal narratives as they have come down to us. P and D, in contrast, correspond to well-defined blocks of text and present clear and well-developed theologies. These sources will accordingly be treated in separate chapters.

Further Reading

Blenkinsopp, Joseph. The Pentateuch: An Introduction to the First Five Books of the Bible. ABRL. New York: Doubleday, 1992. Good history of scholarship. Analysis along the lines of Rendtorff and Blum.

Bloom, Harold. The Book of J. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990. Popular presentation of traditional view of J.[Page 65]

Blum, Erhard. Die Komposition der Vätergeschichte. WMANT 57. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1983.

———. Studien zur Komposition des Pentateuch. BZAW 189. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990. Influential works of a revisionist German scholar. Not yet available in English. A summary of his work can be found in the book by E. W. Nicholson, listed below, 116–31, 171–95.

Campbell, Antony F., and Mark A. O’Brien. Sources of the Pentateuch: Texts, Introductions, and Annotations. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993. This work identifies the sources throughout the Pentateuch, following the analysis of Martin Noth.

Carr, David M. Reading the Fractures of Genesis: Historical and Literary Approaches. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996. Rejects the JE hypothesis and argues for the southern adaptation of fragmentary northern materials.

Friedman, Richard Elliott. Commentary on the Torah with a New English Translation. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001. Staunch defense of traditional source criticism.

———. “Torah (Pentateuch).” In ABD 6.605–21. Nicholson, Ernest. The Pentateuch in the Twentieth Century: The Legacy of Julius Wellhausen. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998. Good review of the history of scholarship, including recent developments.

Noth, Martin. A History of Pentateuchal Traditions. Trans. and ed. B. W. Anderson. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1971 (reprinted: Chico: Scholars, 1981). Classic analysis of major themes in the Pentateuch.

Rad, Gerhard von.“The Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch.” In idem, The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays. Trans. E. W. T. Dicken. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966; German original, 1938. Classic exposition of the J source.

Rendtorff, Rolf. The Problem of the Process of Transmission in the Pentateuch. Trans. J. J. Scullion. JSOTSup 89. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1990. Influential argument against the documentary hypothesis.

Rofé, Alexander. Introduction to the Composition of the Pentateuch. BibSem 58. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999. Concise, helpful illustration of the issues.

Van Seters, John. Abraham in History and Tradition. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975.

———. The Life of Moses: The Yahwist as Historian in Exodus-Numbers. Louisville: Westminster, 1994. Regards the J source as later than Deuteronomy.

Wellhausen, Julius Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel. 1885. Atlanta: Scholars, 1994. Classic exposition of the documentary hypothesis. Enormously influential.

Nebî˒îm Second part of canon of Hebrew Scriptures.

Torah The first five books of the Bible, also called “the books of Moses.”

Former The books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings (= the Deuteronomistic History).

canon The corpus of biblical books, viewed as Sacred Scripture.

Apocrypha Books that are included in the Catholic Bible, but are not found in the Hebrew Bible or in the Protestant canon.

deuterocanonical Books included in the Roman Catholic canon, but relegated to the Apocrypha in Protestant Bibles.

Hellenistic Adjective referring to the Greek-speaking world after the conquests of Alexander the Great (died 323 b.c.e.).

Dead Sea Texts found near Qumran by the Dead Sea, beginning in 1947.

Josephus Jewish historian, late first century c.e.

apocalypse Literary genre of revelations about the end.

Septuagint The Greek translation of the Old Testament.

Masoretic The traditional text of the Hebrew Bible, as fixed in the Middle Ages.

MT Masoretic text

Aramaic Language of Syria. Closely related to Hebrew. Standard language of diplomacy under the Persians.

Qumran Site where Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.

⁴⁰ The time that the Israelites had lived in Egypt was four hundred thirty years.

Exodus 12:40 (NRSV)

¹ In the four hundred eightieth year after the Israelites came out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in the month of Ziv, which is the second month, he began to build the house of the Lord.

1 Kings 6:1 (NRSV)

Samaria Capital of northern Israel.

Second Temple The period after the Babylonian exile, down to the first century c.e. (539 b.c.e. –70 c.e.).

restoration Return of Judean exiles from Babylon to Jerusalem, after the Babylonian exile.

patriarchal Relating to the patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob).

Deuteronomistic The books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings.

Canaan Area including Palestine, Lebanon, and part of Syria, in the second millennium b.c.e.

J Narrative source in the Pentateuch.

E Narrative source in the Pentateuch.

D The Deuteronomic source in the Pentateuch.

P Priestly strand in the Pentateuch.

Akkadian The language of ancient Babylon and Assyria.

Enuma Babylonian account of creation.

Gilgamesh Hero of popular Mesopotamian epic.

epic Story of human heroes, involving actions of the gods.

Documentary The theory that the Pentateuch was composed by combining four main strands or documents (J, E, D, P).

form Analysis of small units of biblical literature, with attention to genre and setting.

Sitz German for “setting in life.” Technical term in form criticism.

Ugarit Modern Ras Shamra, in northern Syria, where important tablets were discovered in 1929.

canonical Theological approach to the Old Testament as Scripture, regarding the final form of the text as authoritative.

source Attempt to distinguish different sources in the biblical text, especially in the Pentateuch.

redaction The study of how books, or blocks of material such as the source documents of the Pentateuch, were edited.

ABD Anchor Bible Dictionary. Edited by D. N. Freedman. 6 vols. New York: Doubleday, 1992

Myth Sacred story.

JSOTSup Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series

JSOT Journal for the Study of the Old Testament

OBT Overtures to Biblical Theology

Amarna The place where Akhenaten had his court.

Akhenaten Pharaoh Amenophis IV (c. 1350 b.c.e.), whose devotion to the god Aten (the solar disk) was the closest thing to monotheism before the rise of Israel.

Hyksos People from Syria who ruled Egypt for about a century (1650–1550 b.c.e.).

Marduk Main god of Babylon.

Amarna Letters from vassals in Canaan to the Egyptian court, in the time of Akhenaten.

Hittites People of Asia Minor (modern Turkey) in the second millennium b.c.e.

Arameans People from ancient Syria.

Mari Place on the Euphrates, where important texts from the second millennium were discovered.

Atrahasis One of the Babylonian accounts of creation.

Akitu Babylonian New Year’s festival.

Tiamat The mother goddess in the Babylonian creation story, Enuma Elish.

theogony Story about the birth of the gods.

¹¹ “Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in splendor, doing wonders?

Exodus 15:11 (NRSV)

Shamash The sun, or sun-god.

Astarte Canaanite goddess also worshiped in Israel.

¹⁷ Instead, we will do everything that we have vowed, make offerings to the queen of heaven and pour out libations to her, just as we and our ancestors, our kings and our officials, used to do in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. We used to have plenty of food, and prospered, and saw no misfortune.

Jeremiah 44:17 (NRSV)

¹⁹ And the women said, “Indeed we will go on making offerings to the queen of heaven and pouring out libations to her; do you think that we made cakes for her, marked with her image, and poured out libations to her without our husbands’ being involved?”

Jeremiah 44:19 (NRSV)

Philo Jewish philosopher in Alexandria, early first century c.e.

El Canaanite high god. The word El is a generic name for “god” in Biblical Hebrew.

Baal Canaanite storm-god.

Anat Canaanite goddess.

YHWH The God of Israel, pronounced Yahweh. Traditionally, Jews do not pronounce the divine name and do not insert the vowels. Instead they say Adonai (the Lord) or ha-Shem (the name).

Yamm Sea. A god in Ugaritic myth.

Mot Death. A god in Ugaritic myth.

Asherah Canaanite goddess, also worshiped in Israel. Also the name for a sacred pole at cult sites.

¹ On that day the Lord with his cruel and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will kill the dragon that is in the sea.

Isaiah 27:1 (NRSV)

⁸ Let those curse it who curse the Sea, those who are skilled to rouse up Leviathan.

Job 3:8 (NRSV)

¹ “Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook, or press down its tongue with a cord?

Job 41:1 (NRSV)

¹³ You divided the sea by your might; you broke the heads of the dragons in the waters.

¹⁴ You crushed the heads of Leviathan; you gave him as food for the creatures of the wilderness.

Psalm 74:13–14 (NRSV)

²⁶ There go the ships, and Leviathan that you formed to sport in it.

Psalm 104:26 (NRSV)

²¹ “Death has come up into our windows, it has entered our palaces, to cut off the children from the streetsand the young men from the squares.”

Jeremiah 9:21 (NRSV)

Athtar God in Ugaritic myth. Morning star.

⁹ You set a boundary that they may not pass, so that they might not again cover the earth.

Psalm 104:9 (NRSV)

¹⁴ even if Noah, Daniel, and Job, these three, were in it, they would save only their own lives by their righteousness, says the Lord God.

Ezekiel 14:14 (NRSV)

³ You are indeed wiser than Daniel; no secret is hidden from you;

Ezekiel 28:3 (NRSV)

SBLWAW SBL Writings from the Ancient World

ANET Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. Edited by J. B. Pritchard. 3d ed. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969

VTSup Supplements to Vetus Testamentum

CBQMS Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series

¹ These are the words that Moses spoke to all Israel beyond the Jordan—in the wilderness, on the plain opposite Suph, between Paran and Tophel, Laban, Hazeroth, and Di-zahab.

Deuteronomy 1:1 (NRSV)

⁴⁴ This is the law that Moses set before the Israelites.

Deuteronomy 4:44 (NRSV)

²⁴ When Moses had finished writing down in a book the words of this law to the very end,

Deuteronomy 31:24 (NRSV)

⁴⁵ When Moses had finished reciting all these words to all Israel,

Deuteronomy 32:45 (NRSV)

³¹ just as Moses the servant of the Lord had commanded the Israelites, as it is written in the book of the law of Moses, “an altar of unhewn stones, on which no iron tool has been used”; and they offered on it burnt offerings to the Lord, and sacrificed offerings of well-being.

³² And there, in the presence of the Israelites, Joshua wrote on the stones a copy of the law of Moses, which he had written.

Joshua 8:31–32 (NRSV)

⁶ Therefore be very steadfast to observe and do all that is written in the book of the law of Moses, turning aside from it neither to the right nor to the left,

Joshua 23:6 (NRSV)

³ and keep the charge of the Lord your God, walking in his ways and keeping his statutes, his commandments, his ordinances, and his testimonies, as it is written in the law of Moses, so that you may prosper in all that you do and wherever you turn.

1 Kings 2:3 (NRSV)

⁶ But when Ahijah heard the sound of her feet, as she came in at the door, he said, “Come in, wife of Jeroboam; why do you pretend to be another? For I am charged with heavy tidings for you.

1 Kings 14:6 (NRSV)

⁵ But Jehoshaphat also said to the king of Israel, “Inquire first for the word of the Lord.”

1 Kings 22:5 (NRSV)

¹ all the people gathered together into the square before the Water Gate. They told the scribe Ezra to bring the book of the law of Moses, which the Lord had given to Israel.

Nehemiah 8:1 (NRSV)

¹³ On the second day the heads of ancestral houses of all the people, with the priests and the Levites, came together to the scribe Ezra in order to study the words of the law.

¹⁴ And they found it written in the law, which the Lord had commanded by Moses, that the people of Israel should live in booths during the festival of the seventh month,

¹⁵ and that they should publish and proclaim in all their towns and in Jerusalem as follows, “Go out to the hills and bring branches of olive, wild olive, myrtle, palm, and other leafy trees to make booths, as it is written.”

¹⁶ So the people went out and brought them, and made booths for themselves, each on the roofs of their houses, and in their courts and in the courts of the house of God, and in the square at the Water Gate and in the square at the Gate of Ephraim.

¹⁷ And all the assembly of those who had returned from the captivity made booths and lived in them; for from the days of Jeshua son of Nun to that day the people of Israel had not done so. And there was very great rejoicing.

¹⁸ And day by day, from the first day to the last day, he read from the book of the law of God. They kept the festival seven days; and on the eighth day there was a solemn assembly, according to the ordinance.

Nehemiah 8:13–18 (NRSV)

covenant A solemn agreement. Used especially of agreements between God and Israel.

²³ All this is the book of the covenant of the Most High God, the law that Moses commanded usas an inheritance for the congregations of Jacob.

Sirach 24:23 (NRSV)

Talmud Rabbinic compilation of commentaries on the Mishnah. There are two Talmuds, the Jerusalem Talmud (Yerushalmi), which dates from the fifth century c.e., and the Babylonian Bavli) from the sixth.

⁶ Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land.

Genesis 12:6 (NRSV)

³¹ These are the kings who reigned in the land of Edom, before any king reigned over the Israelites.

Genesis 36:31 (NRSV)

Elohim The Hebrew word for God. Can be understood as either singular or plural.

¹ In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth,

² the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

³ Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.

⁴ And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.

⁵ God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

⁶ And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.”

⁷ So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so.

⁸ God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.

⁹ And God said, “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so.

¹⁰ God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.

¹¹ Then God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so.

¹² The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good.

¹³ And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.

¹⁴ And God said, “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years,

¹⁵ and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.” And it was so.

(Only first 15 verses of range shown)

Genesis 1:1–2:4 (NRSV)

Grundschrift German for “basic document.” Used in the nineteenth century for what was later called the Priestly Writing (P).

Hexateuch First six books of the Bible (Pentateuch plus Joshua).

² God also spoke to Moses and said to him: “I am the Lord.

³ I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as God Almighty, but by my name ‘The Lord’ I did not make myself known to them.

Exodus 6:2–3 (NRSV)

²⁶ To Seth also a son was born, and he named him Enosh. At that time people began to invoke the name of the Lord.

Genesis 4:26 (NRSV)

² God also spoke to Moses and said to him: “I am the Lord.

Exodus 6:2 (NRSV)