I haven’t said much about the Documentary Hypothesis so far in these divrei. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned it here and there, but I haven’t really tackled it head on. I guess it’s time to do so.

In its broadest strokes, the Documentary Hypothesis posits that the Torah as we have it today is the result of merging several previous documents together into one composite whole. The merging was done thru various strategies, ranging from delicately interleaving individual sentences from two versions of the same story to make one mixed telling of it to just sort of plonking down two different versions of the same legal material in different parts of the text. While there are a number of short sources that only show up as one-offs, the consensus of standard flavors of the hypothesis is that the bulk of the text comes from four main sources, traditionally identified by letters: J, which tends to use the four-letter name for G-d; E, which uses Eloqim to refer to G-d before the revelation of the four-letter name when Mosheh encounters the burning bush; P, which focuses on matters of priestly interest; and D, the book of Deuteronomy and other related materials. To ground these in specific examples: J contributes the Garden of Eden story (Bəreishit chapter 3), E contributes the Binding of Isaac (Bəreishit 22:1–19), P contributes the first creation story (Bəreishit 1:1–2:4), and D contributes this week’s entire Torah portion.

The standard criteria for teasing these sources apart go well beyond which name of G-d is used in a given passage, of course. The J source tends to have a very anthropomorphic G-d, a G-d who looks like a human and walks around and talks in face-to-face conversation. E’s G-d is more remote, and tends to communicate thru dreams, visions, and angelic intermediaries. P is full of structured texts replete with numerological underpinnings — the first verse of the P creation story very pointedly has seven words, the second has fourteen, and other multiples of seven govern other aspects of its account. For its part, D is heavily rhetorical, full of deictic turns of phrase: these are the words, you yourselves have seen, this is the commandment, I charge you today. Dəvarim is a book that is constantly pointing at things. These criteria can get mercilessly technical — which word for “congregation” does the passage use? does this law presume the Hezekian reforms? — and there is, unsurprisingly, tremendous debate over which criteria are valid vs spurious, but we don’t need to get into all those weeds today.

I’ve often seen the Documentary Hypothesis presented as an idea from the nineteenth century, and while there’s certainly a blossoming of rigorous academic attention around it in the late 1800s, the roots of it go back much further. Academic skepticism towards the unitary Mosaic authorship of the Torah was already going strong in the 1600s, and some of the sources were already being named in the eighteenth century. Much earlier than that, the twelfth-century commentator Ibn Ezra flagged several verses in the Torah that he thought could not have been written by Mosheh, tho he cautioned that “the prudent should be silent” concerning the implications. But the Torah itself isn’t always shy about having earlier sources — Bəmidbar 21:13–14, for example, quotes a little snatch of text and attributes it to the (now long since lost) Book of G-d’s Wars. While later religious traditions would stress the unitary, Divine, Mosaic authorship of the Torah, the text itself doesn’t actually make such a claim.

What is new, at least relatively, in the 1800s, especially after the 1883 publication of Julius Wellhausen’s Prolegomena to the History of Israel [a], is the specific form of the hypothesis that fixes a rough date for each of the sources and uses them to chart the historical development of Ancient Israelite religion. The form codified by Wellhausen identifies J and E as the oldest sources, displaying a kind of primordial spontaneous/personal form of worship. These two are followed by D, which this formulation understands as reflecting the moral admonitions of the prophetic books in what is classically described as “ethical monotheism”. Latest of all is P, which this school of thought views as the product of a hidebound, ossified religion sapped of real spiritual vigor.

[a] Or Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, if you want the original German.

In this telling, it’s not hard to see the framework of supercessionism working in the background — the anti-Jewish notion that Christianity is the vital successor religion to Judaism once the latter had outlived its usefulness and withered into a stultifying complex of arcane, unfulfillable rules [b]. This doesn’t necessarily mean the overall chronology is wrong, but it should at least give us pause in accepting it too readily, and its not hard to detect, in scholars who argue for a much earlier date for P, an underlying desire to repudiate the Christian supremacy of these foundational thinkers. Which, of course, doesn’t mean the “early P” camp is right, either, but certainly heightens the background stakes of the whole debate.

[b] Yes, I’m aware that this is an extremely cursory and partial description of supercessionism, which more essentially has to do with the notion that the covenant of the New Testament supercedes (and hence obviates) the covenant of the Hebrew Bible. It’s a big, messy complex of bad ideas, and it’s still very much with us today, unfortunately.

And there’s a lot of debate! The erstwhile consensus around the nineteenth-century formulation of the Documentary Hypothesis has largely collapsed over the last fifty years or so. Beyond the notion that the Torah as we have it is a composite document, basically every other part of this framework has come under sustained attack. As noted above, some dispute the timing, positing radically different chronological arrangements of these texts. Some dispute the existence of discrete sources per se, instead analyzing the text as the result of editorial waves pulling together various independent (and perhaps primarily orally transmitted) fragments with little prior relationship. The E source has come under particular attack as the hallucination of overactive analytic imagination, tho there are certainly still those who maintain its independent existence. Fueled in part by archaeological discoveries, many scholars have also raised doubts about how well the Torah reflects the actual religious practice of Ancient Israel to begin with — if these texts are the product of a small literary elite, they may be very disconnected from what most people were actually doing and believing in the broader societal milieu, which puts the whole project of reconstructing ancient religion via source criticism on the rocks even if the sources really exist and really hail from the times and places source critics argue for. The whole thing is kind of a mess.

So it’s not surprising that, depending on context and audience, more recent writings often pull away from getting too deep into the documentary weeds. Even fairly intense analyses will often refer to JE as a composite to sidestep the question of whether E is real, and it’s not uncommon to go further and commit only to a division between “Priestly” and “non-Priestly” material. For many interesting and deep questions about the text, the exact history of its compilation just isn’t all that pertinent. (Analyses that treat the text in its final from as a literary creation are sometimes grouped under the heading of “redactional criticism”, under the premise that, whatever its seams and contradictions, the final product of the redaction of the text is worth at least as much attention as questions of how it came to be.) Indeed, that’s mostly what I’ve been doing in this project, delving into the meaning of the text as we have it and setting aside questions of history and long-range literary development.

Why run thru all this, then? This week’s portion, and the entire book of Dəvarim, starts out אֵֽלֶּה הַדְּבָרִים | éileh hadəvarim | “These are the words”, and that deictic gesture — these are the words — is a hallmark of Deuteronomistic style, but so what? Why does it matter to us what Deuteronomistic style even is?

Well, to begin with, it’s true. That might seem a bold stance given all the uncertainty outlined above, but even with the unanswered (and perhaps unanswerable) questions still outstanding, there’s not really any denying that the text of the Torah, as we have it today, is clearly assembled from multiple sources. We may not know how many, or how they came to be put together exactly like they are, but we do know that. And the truth is important in itself. It feels a little strange to insist on that, but I’ve encountered enough bad theology that rejects the mutual possibility of meaningful Judaism and non-Mosaic authorship of the Torah to feel I have to say it. You’re not going to build any Judaism worth its while by cutting it off from things that are true.

Because, ultimately, rejecting the truth that many hands contributed to the Torah is to reject the text of the Torah itself. The Documentary Hypothesis, in all its sprawling incarnations, wasn’t fabricated out of whole cloth by anti-Mosaic ideologues; it was developed by close, even agonizing, readings of the text. The die-hardiest atheistic academic trying to tell where exactly J and E do or don’t part ways is engaging more deeply and sincerely in the work of grappling with Torah than the devoutest Jew who categorically rejects the evidence of the very words of this sacred text. Part of our wrestling with this text has to be our wrestling with the truth of how it came to be, as best as we can figure it out. To do less than that is to shirk our duty.

So that is what I want to do today. Next week I’ll probably be back to my more usual redaction-style reading, but this time: What are we to do with the fact that these words come from a different source than those ones, the ones we read last week? What do we make of that?

As far as we can tell, the core of the Deuteronomistic source is a product of the Northern Kingdom, brought south to Jerusalem by refugees fleeing the destruction wrought by the Assyrian army in 722BC. It is, in this way, a product of catastrophe, and its later layers seem to have been shaped by the trauma of the Babylonian exile. There is grief in its genesis, then, but hope, too. It would have been easy to let this text fall by the wayside, to discard it as just one more piece of rubble from the ruins of Samaria. But that’s not what happened. Instead the text was preserved, carried across the years in its new home, to exile and back again, to Diaspora and the present day. Is that not an act of love?

Dəvarim re-states many of the laws we get in Exodus and Leviticus, but with sometimes major contradictions and discrepancies. It would have been easy to edit them out. The fourth commandment in Exodus begins “Remember the Sabbath”; in Deuteronomy, it begins “Guard the Sabbath” — it’s a small difference in English, and arguably smaller in Hebrew: zakhor vs shamor, only two consonants. Harmonizing these wouldn’t have been hard, but it would have meant erasing one of these divergent traditions. Instead, the scribes of our tradition kept both as they were, bringing both forward, letting both stand.

How many moments like this are there in the multi-layered text of Torah? How many parallel stories in Genesis were preserved by this desire to keep alive the unreconcileable stories of neighbor and friend? How many incompatible lists of leaders in Numbers maintain the memories of real people long since lost to us? How many fragments are stitched in with all their contradictions out of a furious refusal to let anyone go without a fight? How much love this represents! Every seam, every doublet, every revision an active choice to prioritize inclusion over homogeny, community over rhetorical purity, building together over winner-takes-all.

If G-d dictated the Torah to Mosheh all at once, exactly as is, what room is there for all this love? Of course you would be careful to transmit the literal unitary Word of G-d, but really, what choice would you have? G-d said it, Mosheh wrote it, you’re copying it out, end of story, what more can you say? Without Divine dictation, there is choice, there is active participation in crafting this text. The composite whole is itself an unfolding record of love across generations, in spite of history, against the constant all-eating onrush of time’s oblivion.

The Talmudic sages, in Babylonian Talmud Yoma 9b, attribute the destruction of the Temples (both of them) to baseless hatred, as illustrated in a long and multifaceted story told in Gitin 55b and following about a man who mistakenly invites a guy he hates to dinner and then humiliates him. The upshot of it all is that the sages attribute to the whole era an unwillingness to make common cause with people you don’t much like when threatened by a more powerful enemy. The Romans certainly didn’t give a shit about internecine Jewish squabbles of the mid first century; the Jews were all just one unruly polity to be subjugated and folded in to the Empire.

The Torah itself, then, understood as a composite text of contradictions, is an antidote to this way of thinking. In place of baseless hatred, to the vicegrip of insisting on perfect alignment or nothing, it offers a vision of clinging together, even in imperfect harmony, to endure the onslaught of history. A record of coming together, even if the fit isn’t perfect.

A third, and final, admonition, then: Is this a vision we can live? Can we make common cause with imperfect allies to build networks of care and power robust enough for the fights we face? Can we build the coalitions we need to overcome fascism, genocide, oppression and destruction of every sort? Can we choose inclusion over homogeny, community over purity, building over erasure?

Tonight is shabbat, the day after Tisha bə’Av. Both days, and every day after, the caustic ceaseless headlong onrush of the world. I hope we heed these admonitions. I hope we prevail, against all odds. Against all odds, I hope we choose love.

[This has been an installment of one-word Torah. You can read the full series here.]