Hitzonim | Outsiders

When interpreting biblical texts historically, it is crucial to acknowledge the difference between the world of the narratives and the world of the narrators and to account for this difference in a methodologically controlled manner.

Konrad Schmid, “Distinguishing the World of the Exodus Narrative from the World of Its Narrators: The Question of the Priestly Exodus Account in Its Historical Setting,” 2015

We’re going way back, then forward, and by the time we get to now, I hope to have said something worth reading about the parsha. I read the Tanakh, especially the Torah, through a source-critical lens. What I mean to say is that I encounter the text through the lens of theories of composition and the geopolitical and historical events that shaped the sources of that composition.

While I imagine that most of us would not ascribe Mosaic authorship to the text, the view that the Torah was composed by Moses by divine transmission at Mount Sinai, I also think that those of us who do not engage the text principally on religious grounds are not often equipped with ways to think about the text divorced from a halakhic reading. This is sort of what I’m up to, or trying to be.

I guess my goal here is to communicate an academic approach to the text that offers a way to appreciate parashot through a secular framing. I don’t take an academic approach to be anathema to a religious approach, but as to where I fall out on things, considering the human-authored development of the text over thousands of years draws me into a relationship with the material that is engaging and edifying. I think this week’s parsha, Terumah, offers a paradigmatic case where such source analysis is useful.

The primary theory of source critical analysis with respect to the Torah is the Documentary Hypothesis; this hypothesis claims the Torah is the product of four key document sources, really better understood as literary traditions, and the editorial workings of an ultimate redactor that stitched the sources together. These are J, E, D, P, and R, the reactor. Let’s get into it.

Let me first say some things about the Deuteronomist, or Deuteronomic Historian, a Levitic school of authorship abbreviated “D” in the Documentary Hypothesis. This is a great starting point for engaging the hypothesis because the geopolitical influence on the development of the text is fairly clear.

Three thousand years ago, Israel in the north, and Judah, in the south, were vassal states of the Assyrian empire. Yearning for independence, the north revolted but were conquered in 722 BCE. Refugees fled south to Judah, bringing their cultic traditions (their nuances of the sacrificial system, for example) and other framing narratives with them, including the commitment that YHWH is the central deity of the cult. Richard Elliott Friedman has the definitive book on this, from the perspective of ease of accessibility. Friedman considers the north to prioritize another source tradition, the Elohist, or “E,” that lifted up Moses, allowed sacrifices at multiple sites, and featured the Exodus tradition as a core narrative. Through the parashot of the past few weeks in Exodus, we’ve been reading mostly E material; whereas, Judah tended toward the Yahwist account, “J.” This J source is friendlier to Aaron and shares other key distinctions. The traditional view is that J and E were combined following the flee to the south, but note that some scholars lack confidence that such distinct J and E sources can be isolated, but we’ll set that aside for now to get the overall picture.

In the seventh century BCE, King Josiah was installed king of Judah and engaged in a project of religious centralization in Jerusalem. Josiah’s crew composed a text that reinforced this project or religious reformation and consolidation, a second giving of the law, Deuteronomy, well, at least its core law code appearing in chapters 12-26. This law code expressed a particular point of view. And not only is this view expressed in Deuteronomy, including ongoing revision to Deuteronomy to accommodate the geopolitical events of the 6th century BCE and after, the school of this tradition produced a body of literature. The composers of these texts made choices in their telling of history. Taken together, all of that literature represents another source in the composition of the Torah, called “D.”

So far we have the ancient narratives, J and E, combined into JE, and this legal history, D. Thereafter, in the sixth century BCE, scholars identify the development of an alternative history that follows the JE sequence of events but is distinct from it. This source is especially concerned with cultic practice: the Priestly source, or “P.” Some scholars suggest this source is related with the tabernacle that may have existed independently pre-first temple and/or was housed within Solomon’s temple. In short, E is ancient story, and P is ritual. That’s probably a careless characterization but is rhetorically useful.

I begin with this sloppy rehearsal of composition because it somewhat neatly reflects the rhetorical influence on the development of the text to serve group identities and their political aims. Or to put things slightly differently: Our texts have origin points that we can learn more about, and for someone more secular like me, tracing the history of the texts and our ancestors is a meaningful way to engage Torah.

Isolating sources in Torah and seeing where these literary traditions were stitched together is a way to access the material that does not prioritize the religious gaze, and here’s the cool thing: When you shift from one source to another, you change the viewpoint, the time of composition, you change the place, and you change the version of the history that is being told. The Bible does not speak with a single voice or perspective, and source critical analysis helps us to see this.

Ever since leaving Egypt in the constructed narrative that is the Exodus, mindful that we do not have factual history in the way us moderns view history; rather, we have a framing narrative to give identity for our ancestors borrowed from other ancient southwest asian semitic groups like Canaanites or Midianites, we’ve been tacitly following the E account. If you wondered how the story this week proceeded from grand narrative to technicalities about tabernacle construction, what we’ve done as readers is follow the editor’s work stitching together E with P material. Notice the change in focus and tone. Exodus chapters 25-31 comprise a big chunk of P material dropped into an E history.

Here is how I encounter the text, and maybe this is an interesting way for you to think about building a relationship with the text that prioritizes its authorship, and by extension, with our ancient priestly and political leaders (though that divide would not have existed).

In application, this view of Torah first into my life in this way. When our family lights Shabbat candles on Friday nights, I don’t do that for religious observance, at least that’s not how I’d put things. I do it for Jewish observance. There is a difference, I think. I light candles because it is something we do, and have done, for millennia. If religious observance is a surrogate for holding ideas of divine or Mosaic authorship, then a more person-centered view is the norm these days for a lot of us. I think there’s a cool way to engage with the text, not seeing it as a practice of religious observance; instead, we may read Torah to understand its historical development and our reading it as a chain of connection with ancient literary traditions and their authors.