The Bible with Sources Revealed: A New View Into The Five Books Of Moses - Softcover

Richard Elliott Friedman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 006073065X ISBN 13: 9780060730659

Publisher: HarperCollins (USA), 2005

Synopsis

One of the World's Foremost Bible Experts Offers a Groundbreaking Presentation of the Five Books of Moses. In The Bible with Sources Revealed, Richard Elliott Friedman offers a new, visual presentation of the Five Books of Moses -- Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy -- unlocking the complex and fascinating tapestry of their origins. Different colors and type styles allow readers to easily identify each of the distinct sources, showcasing Friedman's highly acclaimed and dynamic translation.

About this title

About the Author

Richard Elliott Friedman is professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature and holds the Katzin Chair at the University of California, San Diego. One of the premier biblical scholars in the country, he received his doctorate at Harvard and was a visiting fellow at Oxford and Cambridge. Author of The Hidden Face of God, The Hidden Book in the Bible, Commentary on the Torah, The Exile and Biblical Narrative, and the bestselling Who Wrote the Bible?, Friedman is also the president of the Biblical Colloquium West. A consultant to universities, journals, encyclopedias, and publishers, he is also the editor of four books on biblical studies and has authored over fifty articles, reviews, and notes in scholarly and popular publications.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Bible with Sources Revealed

A New View Into the Five Books of MosesBy Richard Elliott Friedman

HarperSanFrancisco

Copyright © 2005 Richard Elliott Friedman
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780060730659

Excerpt

Collection of Evidence

The Seven Main Arguments

The process of identifying the biblical sources took centuries. The process of refining our identifications of these sources has been ongoing, and itcontinues to the present day. Initially, it was a tentative division based onsimple factors: where the name of God appeared in the texts, similar storiesappearing twice in the texts, contradictions of fact between one text andanother. Accounts of this early identifying and refining may be found inmany introductions to this subject and in my Who Wrote the Bible? The collection of evidence here is not a review of that history of the subject. It is atabulation of the evidence that has emerged that establishes the hypothesis. It is grouped here in seven categories, which form the seven main arguments for the hypothesis in my judgment.

1. Linguistic

When we separate the texts that have been identified with the varioussources, we find that they reflect the Hebrew language of several distinctperiods.

The development of Hebrew that we observe through these successiveperiods indicates that:

• The Hebrew of J and E comes from the earliest stage of biblicalHebrew.
• The Hebrew of P comes from a later stage of the language.
• The Hebrew of the Deuteronomistic texts comes from a still laterstage of the language.
• P comes from an earlier stage of Hebrew than the Hebrew of thebook of Ezekiel (which comes from the time of the Babylonianexile).
• All of these main sources come from a stage of Hebrew known asClassical Biblical Hebrew, which is earlier than the Hebrew of thepostexilic, Persian period (known as Late Biblical Hebrew).

This chronology of the language of the sources is confirmed by Hebrewtexts outside the Bible. The characteristics of Classical Biblical Hebrew areconfirmed through comparison with inscriptions that have been discoveredthrough archaeology, which come from the period before the Babylonianexile (587 BCE). The characteristics of Late Biblical Hebrew are confirmedthrough comparison with the Hebrew of later sources such as the Dead SeaScrolls.

Despite the power of this evidence, it is practically never mentioned bythose who oppose the hypothesis.

2. Terminology

Certain words and phrases occur disproportionately - or even entirely - in one source but not in others. The quantity of such terms that consistentlybelong to a particular source is considerable. Thus:

The mountain that is called Sinai in J and P (twenty times) is calledHoreb or "the Mountain of God" in E and D (fourteen times). In thirty-fouroccurrences of these names, there is no exception to this distinction.

The phrase "in that very day" (beesem hayyôm hazzeh) occurs eleventimes in the Torah. Ten of the eleven are in P. (And the eleventh is in R, ina passage that R modeled on P; Deut 32:48.)

The phrase "the place where YHWH sets his name" or "the placewhere YHWH tents his name ?occurs ten times in D but never in J,E,or P.

Continues...

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Edition details

• Publisher: HarperCollins (USA)
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 006073065X
• ISBN 13: 9780060730659
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400