>The Biblical Archaeology Review has published an article by Rabbi Yosef Reinman in which he exposes the fallacies of the Documentary Hypothesis. Here is an excerpt from the article:

I just want to bring people up close to some of the ravages the critics have wrought on the ancient text and the faulty reasoning that drives them. The very idea is amazing. Never in the history of the world has a book been spliced together from multiple documents by the kind of elaborate surgery that the critics perform on the Bible text. Most amazing of all is that after all the analysis and the identification of different documents and subdocuments and subsubdocuments, after all the deletions and emendations and claims of scribal errors, numerous anomalies and difficulties remain.

When all is said and done, the critics are faced with one glaring question: How is it possible that these mythical redactors, who allegedly managed to pull off one of the most colossal hoaxes in the history of the world, were not careful enough to avoid the red flags that drew the attention of the critics? If the first creation story is followed by a second creation story that contradicts the first, why didn`t the redactors fix it? If in one place Esau`s wives are identified by one set of names and elsewhere by another set of names, why didn`t the redactors fix it?

After all, these people were brilliant. They supposedly put together a masterpiece of deception that gave rise to the religions that dominate the world to this day. Why weren`t they more careful with editing and proofreading?

This is an interesting article. However, I believe that the explanations the Rabbis offered for some of the problematic passages in the Torah, like the Ishmaelites/Midianites controversy in the Joseph story, are too simplistic. The article is free online. Read the article by visiting the BAR web page.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: Documentary Hypothesis, Yosef Reinman

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