In this post I’ll talk about internal discrepancies and contradictions. Rather than write the whole thing out, though, I’ve decided just to include a chunk that deals with the issue from my Introduction to the Bible, which is due out in the Fall. Here I am talking about what 19th and 20th century critical scholars discovered with respect to discrepancies within the Pentateuch, leading to the theory that the first five books of the Hebrew Scripture actually derived from four major sources, written at different times, that have been spliced together, creating internal problems.
The internal tensions came to be seen as particularly significant. Nowhere were these tensions more evident than in the opening accounts of the very first book of the Pentateuch, in the creation stories of Genesis chapters 1 and 2. Scholars came to recognize that what is said in Genesis 1 cannot be easily (or at all) reconciled with what is said in Genesis 2. These do not appear to be two complementary accounts of how the creation took place; they appear to be two accounts that are at odds with each other in fundamental and striking ways. Read them carefully yourself. Make a list of what happens in chapter one, then a list of what happens in chapter 2, and compare your lists. Among other things you will notice the following:
● According to Genesis 1, plants were created on the third day; only later, on the sixth day, were humans created. But not according to Genesis 2. There we are told that “the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground” before there were any plants or herbs on the earth (2:4, 7).
● According to Genesis 1, all the animals, of all kinds, were created before humans, on the fifth and sixth days. But according to Genesis 2, “man” was created first (2:7), and then the animals – who were made in order to provide companionship for the man (2:19). Note: it was only after man was made that “the LORD God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air.” None of the animals existed, according to this account in chapter 2, before the man was made.
● According to Genesis 1, humans, both male and female, were created at the same time, as the pinnacle of all creation (1:26-27). But in Genesis 2 the LORD God first creates “man” (adam); he then creates all the animals in order to provide a companion for “man.” And when none of them is deemed suitable, then, and only then, does the LORD God make a woman out of a rib that he has taken from the man.
● It was also noted by careful scholars that the deity is called different things in the two accounts. In Genesis 1 the deity is called, in Hebrew, Elohim – the word that is normally simply translated in English as “God” (even though it is plural); but in Genesis 2 the deity is suddenly called “Yahweh Elohim,” which comes into English usually as “LORD God.” The word “Yahweh” was believed in ancient Israel to be the personal name for God, and eventually it was regarded as being so holy, that faithful Jews were not allowed even to pronounce it without committing a blasphemy. God is called by this personal name thousands of times in the Hebrew Bible. But he is called a number of other things as well: Lord, God Almighty, God the King, and so on. It is striking that only one of these terms is used in Genesis 1, and the other term occurs only in Genesis 2. That would make sense if the two stories came from different sources, each with its own view of what happened at the creation, and each with its own favored term for the deity.
● In that connection, it was noticed that the two accounts seem to have different conceptions of the deity (not just different terms for him). In Genesis 1, God is the Powerful, Almighty, Creator of all things; he is distant, and remote, and above all things. But not in Genesis 2, and its companion story about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3. There God is portrayed in anthropomorphic terms – that is, he appears virtually in human guise. He is here on earth; he works with the dirt; he performs an operation on Adam; he walks through the garden of Eden in the cool of the evening (3:8); he doesn’t know where Adam and Eve are hiding (3:9); and he talks with them and wants to know – as if he doesn’t know — if they’ve done something he told them not to do (3:11).
● Finally, the interests of the two stories are different in key ways. We have already seen that the first creation account, among other things, wants to stress that the Sabbath observance is rooted in the fabric of existence. The second account has nothing like that concern. Here there seems to be an interest in explaining some of the ultimate questions that people have asked over the centuries: Why do women experience such pain in childbirth? Why is it so difficult to provide enough food to eat? Why are men dominant over women? It is also interested in explaining less pressing curiosities, such as why snakes crawl on their bellies instead of walk around like all other creatures.
These kinds of differences suggested to scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that Genesis 1-3 was not providing one account composed by one author at one time, but two different accounts composed by two different authors at two different times – with different interests, understandings of the deity, and views about what happened when humans were created.
Moreover, and just as important, the literary inconsistencies of Genesis are not unique to these two chapters. On the contrary, there are such problems scattered throughout the book. You can see this for yourself simply by reading the text very carefully.
● Read, for example, the story of the flood in Genesis 6-9, and you will find comparable differences. One of the most glaring is this: according to Gen. 6:19 God told Noah to take two animals “of every kind” with him into the ark; but according to Gen. 7:2 God told him to take seven pairs of all “clean animals” and two of every other kind of animal. Well, which is it? And how can it be both?
● You can find similar differences in other parts of the Pentateuch. In the next chapter, for example, we will be looking at the ten plagues that Moses miraculously performed against the Egyptians in order to convince the reluctant Pharaoh to let the children of Israel go free from slavery. These are terrific stories, as good as the accounts of the Patriarchs in Genesis. But scholars have long detected similar discrepancies. It has been noted, for example, that in the fifth plague, the LORD killed “all of the livestock” of the Egyptians (9:6). So, based on this account one would think that “all” of the livestock were, indeed, dead. But then, just a few verses later, Moses performs the seventh plague, in which a terrible hail storm killed not just humans, but also all the “livestock” of the Egyptians that had been left in the fields (see 9:29-20; 25). Livestock? What livestock? It has been widely concluded that this story was patched up from at least two earlier accounts, which, when spliced together, created an inconsistency.
● Such differences occur not only within this or that book of the Pentateuch; similar problems were found to occur between one book and the next, making it appear that the same author is not responsible for the entire work. And so, for example, in Exodus, in one of Moses’ early encounters with the deity, God tells him “I am the LORD (Yahweh). I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as God Almighty (Hebrew: El Shaddai), but by my name ‘The LORD’ (Yahweh) I did not make myself known to them” (Exod. 6:3). Here God is saying that the patriarchs of Genesis did not know the personal name of God, Yahweh; they only knew him as God Almighty, El Shaddai. But that will come as a very big surprise to a careful reader of Genesis. For it is quite clear in Genesis not only that God appeared to the patriarchs as The LORD (Yahweh), but that they called him by that name. Consider Gen. 4:26: “At that time people began to invoke the name of the LORD (Yahweh).” Or even more telling, Gen. 15:6-8:
And he [Abraham] believed the LORD (Yahweh), and the LORD reckoned it to him as righteousness. Then he said to him, “I am the LORD (Yahweh) who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess.” But he said, O Lord GOD (Adonai Yahweh), how am I to know that I shall possess it?”
According to Exodus, God never appeared to or revealed himself to Abraham as Yahweh; according to Genesis, he did. There are clearly different sources that have been incorporated into these stories. That is made all the more evident by the doublets (and the triplet) that we observed earlier in the Patriarchal narratives.
