When I tell people that I have written a book about the Bible’s origins, those who know a thing or two about the subject usually ask, “So, you explain where all the different sources come from?”
“No,” I say. “My book is titled The Man Who Wrote the Bible. It argues that the entire biblical narrative, from Genesis through Kings, is a creation of a single person.”
More often than not, my interlocutor looks confused.
That’s because colleges, universities, and seminaries teach it as an established scientific fact that Genesis-Kings is a pastiche of “sources” or “documents” written centuries apart and reflecting different, often conflicting ideas.
In fact, although not so many scholars have the guts to admit it, the only result of two hundred years of intensive and extensive research is utter failure to prove that this is indeed the case. No one has ever been able to outline a plausible scenario under which the multiple-author model might work.
Here is one simple and well-known example.
The first two chapters of the Book of Genesis present two wildly different accounts of creation. In Genesis 1, animals are created after plants and humans after animals; in Genesis 2, God first creates Adam, then the garden of Eden, and then the animals. Moreover, both plants and animals are created for Adam’s sake. In Genesis 1, men and women are created at the same time and receive a joint blessing from God and a joint commission to govern other species (verses 26-28). In Genesis 2, woman is created out of man and for his sake, as a “fitting helper” (verses 18-24). In Genesis 1, God speaks things into existence; in Genesis 2, he works as a potter (“forming” Adam and then the animals out of clay, verses 7 and 19), a gardener (“planting” the garden of Eden, verse 8), and a carpenter (“building” Eve out of Adam’s “side” or “beam,” verse 22). In Genesis 1, the Creator is referred to as elohim – God; in Genesis 2 (starting in verse 4), it is yhwh elohim, usually translated into English as Lord God. Genesis 1 is highly repetitive and formulaic; Genesis 2 is a plain, straightforward narrative. And so on.
Since the eighteenth century, these contrasts have been explained by the two chapters coming from two different “sources.” There was some debate as to which exactly, but eventually scholars settled on ascribing Genesis 1 to a “priestly” author (P) and Genesis 2 to a “Jehovist” (J).
The two sources were also detected in the Flood story (Genesis 6-9), this time interwoven rather than placed side by side, which caused repetitions (Noah, his family, and all the animals are reported entering the ark in 7:7-9 and again in 7:13-16) and contradictions (did the Flood last 40 days or more than a year?)
But what about in between?
The story told by Genesis 2 flows logically and effortlessly into Genesis 3 and then into Genesis 4. This means that between chapters 1 and 6 only chapter 5 can be assigned to P.
And that creates a major problem.
In Genesis 1, the world created by God is perfect. Everything is “good” (see especially verse 31), everything is in its proper place, so God can enjoy a well-deserved rest (2:1-3). In Genesis 6, by contrast, the world is thoroughly rotten, so rotten that God decides to destroy it. How did it get to that?
Chapters 3 and 4 do provide a convincing background: the snake seduces Adam and Eve to eat the fruit of knowledge, and they are expelled from paradise; then Cain kills Abel, and evil continues to fester in subsequent generations of Cain’s family (see especially 4:23-24). But all this build-up is in J. Chapter 5, a genealogical chain devoid of any action, explains nothing. Even Julius Wellhausen, the poster boy of the documentary hypothesis, had to admit that “the Priestly Code has entirely lost the preparation for the flood, which now appears in the most abrupt and unaccountable way.” Indeed.
And even that is not all. If Genesis 5 comes from P, in J it is Noah that appears out of the blue because chapter 4 only takes us to Eve’s third son Seth and his son Enosh (verses 25-26). In other words, according to the documentary hypothesis J-source ran like this:
And Adam knew his wife again and she gave birth to a son and called his name Seth, meaning “God has established for me another seed in place of Abel, for Cain has killed him.” And to Seth a son was also born, and he called his name Enosh; at that time they started to give names after Yhwh. And it happened, when humans began to multiply on the face of the land, that daughters were born to them. And the sons of God saw the human women, that they are beautiful, and took for themselves wives from all that they chose. And Yhwh said, “Let my breath not reckon with humans forever for they are also flesh; let their days be one hundred and twenty years.” There were Fallen Ones on the earth in those days and also after that because the sons of God came into human women and they gave birth to their children; these were heroes, people of renown since forever. And Yhwh saw that great is human evil on the earth and that in the heart of every living creature there is nothing but evil thoughts all day long. And Yhwh felt sorry that he had made humans on the earth and became sad in his heart. And Yhwh said, “I will erase humans whom I have created from the face of the earth for I am sorry that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in the eyes of Yhwh. And Yhwh told Noah: “Enter the ark…”
Noah who?
This is probably the reason why the proponents of the documentary hypothesis talk a lot about what comes from which source but hardly ever show us the reconstructed sources in their entirety. The ugly truth is that while certain parts of the Bible as we know it may be enigmatic, even baffling, trying to understand these parts by positing multiple authorship yields “original:” texts that make no sense whatsoever.
Some of my colleagues might protest that the “sources” were not included in the existing biblical text lock, stock, and barrel; the compiler proceeded by cutting and pasting them. But that brings us back to square one. Essentially, we begin by asking, “Why is the Bible written this way?” only to end up asking, “Why is the Bible assembled this way?”
And “written” is preferable to “assembled” because that is the default setting. There is a millennium-old principle known as Ockham’s razor (after William of Ockham, a thirteenth-century friar who was one of the first to formulate it) or the rule of parsimony. It states that all other things being equal the simplest explanation is the best. In the case of the Bible, it is the simplest to view the entire Genesis through Kings as a creation of a single person (or at the very least a group of close collaborators) because there are no explicit indications of multiple hands having worked on it. If conjuring up “documents” and compilers could get us anywhere in terms of better understanding, it would be a legitimate way to go. But as we have just seen it does not.
There is only one hand behind Genesis-Kings. It is an integral project. As I explain in my book, with that in mind we can determine its date, historical background, and purpose with relative certainty and even tentatively identify its author.