Sunday 24 June 2018

Do Contradictions Belie the Sanctity of Torah?

Can the contradictions and duplicating material in the early stories of Genesis be explained, in a manner that leaves religious faith intact?
Genesis contains two creation accounts, for instance, which differ significantly. In the first creation account, the name for God is Elohim; in the second it's Yahweh. The first account says the cosmic beginning is watery; the second says the earthly beginning is dry.
In the first account, birds are created from water; in the second they are created from earth. Animals were created before man and man is to rule them, says the first account; the second says the beasts were created after man, to be his possible companion.
And, strikingly, in the first creation account, male and female were created concurrently, but in the second, man was created first.
The Noah story is also contradictory: Noah is asked to bring two of all flesh into the ark – birds, animals and creeping things (Genesis 6:20). Genesis 7:15 says the living things will come to the ark of their own accord. And come Genesis 7:3-2, Noah is then asked to bring seven pairs of pure animal and birds and a pair of each impure animal into the ark.

So far the contradictions. The story of Noah also contains noticeable repetitions, such as:
“And YHWH saw that the wickedness of man was great upon the earth, and every imagination of his heart was but evil always. And YHWH regretted that He had made man upon the earth, and He was pained in His heart. And YHWH said: ‘I will blot out man, whom I created, from upon the face of the earth, from man to cattle to creeping thing, to the fowl of the heavens, for I regret that I made them.’ But Noah found favor in the eyes of YHWH.” (Genesis 6:5-8)
And a few sentences later:
“And the earth had become corrupt before Elohim, and the earth had become filled with injustice. And Elohim saw the earth and behold it was corrupted, for all flesh had corrupted its way upon the earth. And Elohim said to Noah: ‘The end of all flesh has come before Me, for the earth is filled with injustice through them, and behold I am about to destroy them from the earth. Make yourself an ark . “ (Genesis 6:11-14)

The most common explanation in academic circles for these contradictions and extraneous material is the documentary hypothesis developed in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The documentary hypothesis
The documentary hypothesis proposes that the Pentateuch (the Five Books of Moses) is a composite of four primary sources – the Yahwist source, which exclusively used the Tetragammon or YHWH name for God and which was composed in the southern Kingdom of Judah in about 950 B.C.E.; an Elohist source that called God "Elohim," which which was written in about 850 B.C.E. in the northern Kingdom of Israel; a Deuteronomist source written in about 600 B.C.E. in Jerusalem during a period of religious reform; and a Priestly source put together in about 500 B.C.E. by Aaronic priests in exile in Babylon.
Others suggest that the Priestly source was composed much earlier during the First Temple period. The God of the Priestly source reveals himself in stages – first as Elohim, then to Abraham as El Shaddai, and finally to Moses as YHWH, they postulate.

According to the theory, these primary sources were joined together by a “redactor,” probably during the Babylonian exile. It is assumed that the redactor had considerable reverence for his original sources and was prepared to ignore contradictions and duplications.
The religious solution
The documentary hypothesis is, of course, anathema to religious Jews, since a man-composed Pentateuch undermines the Bible’s authority as a source of Divine instruction.
Religious Jews had only two ways to deal with these contradictions and duplications – to ignore them or synthesize them.
For instance, the much-studied Jewish commentator Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki), writing in the 11th century, suggests that the second creation account is but an elaboration of the first. Noting that birds were created from either water or earth depending on the account, he explains that in reality birds were created from mud.
The Cassuto approach
There is a third approach, developed by the academic biblical scholar Umberto Cassuto in the early 1900s.
Cassuto felt that the Pentateuch was a unitary account, although he was not prepared to say that its author was divine. Because of this, his ideas were largely ignored by the religious world, while secular biblical scholarship found his ideas irrelevant. His ideas were not, therefore, widely disseminated. Nevertheless, his ideas are not incompatible with a Divine origin for the Torah.
To Cassuto, the two creation accounts are allegories rather than factual accounts. Differences exist because these are two different allegories.
Like the documentary hypothesis, Cassuto’s unitary hypothesis is linked to the names of God used in the Bible. The names YHWH and Elohim are not a reflection of different authors but represent different aspects of God, he suggests.
Elohim, from the first chapter of Genesis, is a transcendent God who creates a universe specifically for man and is concerned with the general providence of mankind. The Tetragammon, YHWH, on the other hand, describes the immanent aspect of a God concerned with individual providence.
YHWH first appears in the second creation account, always linked with Elohim, as YHWH Elohim. The only exception is when the serpent speaks; this seems to emphasize that both aspects of God relate to a single Deity.
The name YHWH also has tribal significance: it is this aspect of God that elects Noah, and subsequently Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, as progenitors of the Jewish people. Appreciation of the YHWH aspect of God becomes remote late in Jacob’s life, and his son Joseph refers exclusively to the name Elohim, the universal God knowable by all humanity. But it is YHWH who reveals Himself to Moses at the Burning Bush.
The documentary hypothesis holds that the Priestly and Yahwist authors both wrote stories about Noah, and the contradictions and extra material in today's version results from the redactor intermingling the two sources to build a composite account.
The unitary hypothesis, on the other hand, says the Noah story contains two stories because this is how it was written. There is a story about how the universal aspect of God, Elohim, destroys the earth but saves one righteous person and his family in order to repopulate the world. The immanent aspect of God, YHWH, recognizes the righteousness of Noah and chooses his family to repopulate the earth. This aspect of God will eventually call on Abraham, who comes from the lineage of Noah’s son Shem, to bring “righteousness and justice” to the world.
Elohim requires only two of each animal species (male and female) to repopulate the earth. Throughout the Bible, anything connected to a sacrifice is related to the YHWH aspect of God, since a sacrifice enables a person to draw close to a personal God. Noah is therefore commanded by YHWH to bring seven of each pure species, plus a pair of each unclean animal, into the ark. Without these extra animals, sacrificial service would have rendered these species extinct.
According to biblical source criticism, the following sentence is an example (albeit an unusual one) of the redactor joining a Yahwist source to a Priestly source within a single sentence in order to maintain the flow of the passage:
“Thus those who came [into the ark], came male and female of all flesh, as Elohim had commanded him [Priestly], and YHWH shut him in [Yahwist].” (Genesis 7:16)
By contrast, Cassuto’s unitary hypothesis would maintain that this is a crucial sentence describing the confluence of the Elohim and YHWH aspects of God. The transcendent God Elohim has brought all flesh into the ark to be saved as the flood ravages the land. Now, Noah’s personal God, YHWH, lovingly closes the ark on his behalf.
The personal God revolution
The Elohim and Yahwist aspects of God continue to wind their way through the Genesis stories. This results in some apparent duplications.
The universal Elohim aspect of God renames Abram and Sarai, and informs him that another son will be born to him besides Ishmael (Genesis 17:4-23). The name Abraham means “the father of a multitude of nations” and Sarah “a princess (to these nations).”
However, it is the YHWH aspect of God who calls on Abram to leave his homeland and come to the Land of Israel (Genesis. 15:1-21). YHWH also informs Sarah that she will have a child.
But why would scripture mix two stories into a single account in this unusual way?
The notion of a single god who created the universe and is concerned about the fate of all humanity was a revolutionary idea in the ancient pagan world. So also was the notion of a personal god. The gods of the ancient world were never interested in individuals; if anything, they were often hostile to human interests.
Contemporary people can oscillate comfortably between the immanent and transcendent aspects of God because the Bible delineated these two aspects of the Jewish deity, blending them together into a single narrative, using the two names for God.
Richard Friedman, a leading writer on the ideas of biblical criticism, noted in the last chapter of his book “Who Wrote the Bible?” that the Bible contains “a dramatic and theologically profound ... balance between the personal and the transcendent quality of the Deity.”
To Friedman this was an accidental result of the work of the Bible’s redactor. By contrast, the unitary hypothesis would say that this is how the Bible was constructed from its inception, and it offers a very plausible alternative to the documentary hypothesis.
by  Arnold Slyper

Noah's Repetition and Contradiction


Read the Noah story—the whole thing, from the very end of Genesis 5 and not just from the beginning of the parashah—and you will immediately sense that there is a problem. Why are there so many repetitions, tensions, and outright contradictions? Why are we told twice about Noah's offspring (5:32 and 6:10)? Why does the story offer two explanations for God's decision to destroy all creatures, removing them from the face of the earth—one explanation relating to the transgression of the divine/human divide and the wickedness of the human heart (6:1-7), and the other relating to human violence (6:11-12)? And why, in almost a single breath, does the Torah contradict its own representation of God's command to bring animals onto the ark, first requiring two of every species (6:19) and then requiring seven of each pure species and only two of each impure species (7:2-3)?
These are the problems that made the Noah story one of the primary foundations of the so-called Documentary Hypothesis of biblical origins. In fact, if you divide the story according to the name of God used in each part (Elohim [E] or Jahweh [J]), you will find that the division produces two neat and almost complete stories, each with its distinct version of the Noah tradition. For this reason, many modern critical readers of the text have concluded that what we have here is two original documents (E and J) combined to create a larger whole, but with relative disregard for the issues their combination creates. To be sure, dividing the story eliminates the problems exemplified in the paragraph above, but it does nothing to make sense of the Torah's story as we have it, whatever its origins.
In the world before the invention of the printing press, a world that was largely illiterate, the tensions and even contradictions we see today when reading the Torah's text would mostly not have been a problem. When people experience a text orally and aurally—read out loud by a reader whose words they hear but do not see—they tend not to hear tensions or even contradictions, and they certainly cannot go back to compare what they hear now to what they heard before. Consequently, they tend to modify their memory or understanding of the earlier in light of the latter. Repetitions are assumed to be there for emphasis or simply because orality demands repetition for clarity, and tensions or contradictions are smoothed over without the listener even being aware that a problem was there to be solved. In the world where people heard but did not read the Torah, our Genesis 2 (the "second Creation story") would have been heard as a specification or filling out of Genesis 1 (our "first Creation story"), and the Noah story would have been worked out with similar lack of difficulty.
This does not mean, however, that the difficulties do not exist, and we as readers should pay attention to them. I would like to suggest that the Documentary solution provides us with an important key, but not because separating the stories solves the readers' problems. When we read the part of the story in which God is referred to by the J name and compare it with the part of the story in which God is known by the E name, we find that the two strands offer us two very different pictures of who God is and the nature of God's relationship with humanity. First separated and then combined, these two parts offer us, in the end, a very complex theology, one from which we can all learn.
In the J story, God wants to protect God's status vis-à-vis human beings and other creatures. It is in this story that the "divine beings" sleep with human women, provoking God's wrath. One expression of God's wrath is to limit the length of human life to one-hundred-and-twenty years, ensuring a clear distinction between humans and divine beings who live forever. It is in this story that God requires Noah to bring onto the ark seven of every pure animal, because it is in this story that God will demand animal sacrifices of Noah when he emerges from the ark. The God of the Jstory is appeased by the sweet smell of the sacrifices, because they are an expression of human subservience and obedience. All told, this is a God who demands a clearly superior position with relation to God's creation; the Supreme King to whom all creatures are radically subjects.
The God of the E story is portrayed very differently. The sin that this God sees is human violence; being concerned for human welfare, this God acts against that violence, but S/he never limits the length of human life (this God requires no such radical division between God and humans). This God requires only two of each species—male and female—to board the ark, because S/he will not demand sacrifices; the animals are needed only to perpetuate their species. Instead of demanding sacrifices upon Noah's exit from the ark, the God of the E story begins by blessing the humans, and then gives them laws. The most important of these laws is the one that protects human life.
Crucially, the God of E then goes on at length to express God's covenantal commitment to humanity, ensuring that flesh will never again be destroyed by a flood. The fact that this commitment is covenantal—the word covenant (brit) appears in this context (9:8-17) seven times!—is significant. A covenant is a contract, one in which two parties commit to one another by mutual agreement. The fact that this God can enter a covenant with humanity means that S/he views humanity as a worthy partner, not necessarily an equal but also not a radically submissive subject to be commanded and little more.
These are two very different Gods, one jealous and superior, the other caring and available for relationship. How could they have been put together? What is the meaning of the two when represented as one? The answer, I think, lies in our own need for different Gods or, to be more correct, for one God differently imagined. My guess is that most of us are more immediately and naturally attracted to the God of E, the one who respects us enough to make a covenant with us. But such a God would be only partial. We also need a God—the God of J—who is radically superior, one totally unlike us, one to whom we can submit. Perhaps better expressed, sometimes we need the God as represented in one of these stories, at other times the God represented in the other. Put together, as in the Noah story, we have a fuller God, one we can address in all of our complexity, even if God is, in reality, much simpler (i.e., more singular) than these stories express.
The publication and distribution of the JTS Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee and Harold (z"l) Hassenfeld.

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