Why do We Care?

 

So, why does it matter whether V was written before D or after D?  Of course, there is the narrow question about the historical evolution of the texts if you care about such things but are there any larger implications?  In this post, I want to discuss two:

1. Implications for Broader Evolution of Judaism

How did Judaism evolve?  What came first and what evolved later?  The question of the ordering of the texts has huge importance to this.  Many scholars believe that Judaism originally evolved as a series of rituals and the Biblical narratives evolved as a way to explain preexisting rituals.  This would seem to clash with an early-V hypothesis since V is mostly devoid of any rituals/law but has tons of narrative. 

Indeed, the fact that the Decalogue is the only law in D and that it also dominates the blessings and curses later in the book would seem to elevate the Decalogue in our understanding of the evolution of Judaism.  It would suggest that the religion originally evolved as just the 10-commandments and some narratives/theology and the bulk of the law code came later.  This kind of theory certainly makes sense when thinking about certain laws that aren’t too common in the Torah and seem ancillary such as the law of tzitzis.  But what about other rituals, like the Pascal lamb, which is referred to again and again in the Torah and seems to be a central part of the Exodus Narrative?  Are we to believe that the original Judaism had no Passover holiday and indeed, no holidays at all other than the Sabbath?  If V is the oldest text, that might indeed be the implication.  The fact that the 10-commandemnts are really devoid of ritual and focus purely on theological based commandments (e.g. not worshiping idols) and laws between man (e.g. don’t kill) greatly changes the nature of the religion.  It also helps to explain why the Decalogue is given such importance in the Biblical narrative as the core of revelation.  In our version of the Torah, it is difficult to understand why this is true given the Decalogue is just 10 of many different laws in the Bible

2. Implications for Understanding of Evolution of Biblical Texts

But does the Early-V hypothesis tell us anything more generally about how Biblical texts evolved?  On some level, the answer is no.  V is exactly what we would expect to see from an ancient pre-curser of the Bible: it shares much in common thematically and textually with other Biblical authors but the sentence structure and ordering shows significant editing, with many additions and deletions. 

Nonetheless, there are some important differences between the evolution of V/D on the one hand vs. how scholars generally envision the process of Biblical textual evolution.  So, the question of whether V is early or late has broader implications for whether we need to rethink our understanding of Biblical textual evolution. If V is late, it makes sense that its evolution is different from other examples of textual evolution in the Bible.  If it is early, that might mean we misunderstood the paradigm of Biblical textual Evolution.  How so?

2a. Editing of textual spelling/vocabulary to confirm to author-specific conventions.

DH loves to point out that different authors use different spellings/vocabulary/sentence structure etc. How did this come about?  The simplest explanation (Option 1) is that different authors used different conventions during the original drafting of documents because of their time/place or personal preferences.  When these texts were combined, the different textual conventions became signals of different authors in the combined text.  Option 2 is that at the point of original drafting, the different texts actually started similar to eachother but authors later intentionally edited documents to create these sort of discrepancies intentionally.  There might have been reasons to do such editing such as to make the document conform to certain theological agendas.

When you just look at the Torah, it seems obvious that Option 1 is generally correct (though there may be some exceptions).  First of all, the final editor of the Torah obviously did not edit it to force conformity across authors suggesting Option 2 isn’t correct.  Additionally, it just seems weird to believe that these sorts of editorial corrections were common in the drafting of the Torah and there seems to be no reason to think this was how it generally worked.

However, under the Early-V hypothesis, it seems clear that Option 2 is correct.  V and D differ in how they spell the Hebrew pronoun “I” and the term they use for God. The former appears ~50 times in D and the latter ~200 times in D so these are very common words.  Whichever came second from V/D clearly went through the earlier text and systematically edited the text to change the spelling of the pronoun “I” and to change the name of God as these changes were made systematically.  It can’t be that the later author just used their own preferred spelling in their original drafting since the later document was mostly copied from the earlier one, implying a clear intentional editing to bring the text in-line with the latter author’s drafting conventions. 

2b. Evolution as a keenly textual, not theological, narrative, or legal concept

Even under traditional-DH, it’s quite clear that many of these authors copied from eachother, or at least, that the traditions/narratives etc evolved and so there is much influence from one author to the next.  But, did authors literally sit down and copy specific words from prior texts when drafting their own document?  In traditional DH, we always emphasize the divergent literary, textual, grammatical etc styles between authors to demonstrate that the influence was more related to content and not textual drafting.

When it comes to V & D, this is clearly not the case.  The close textual similarity between the texts on its own suggests a strong textual influence but if you look closely, you can see specific examples where authors seem to be copying words from each other specifically, and not copying content.  One example was in the prior post where we talked about the “10 trials” which in our Torah refers to the 10 times the Jews tested God but in V refers to the 10 plagues.  Thus, the text is similar (10 times) but the meaning is totally different.  Another great example is in the Decalogue:

We have in our Bible:

אָנֹכִי יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ, אֵל קַנָּא--פֹּקֵד עֲוֺן אָבוֹת עַל-בָּנִים וְעַל-שִׁלֵּשִׁים וְעַל-רִבֵּעִים, לְשֹׂנְאָי.  ט וְעֹשֶׂה חֶסֶד, לַאֲלָפִים--לְאֹהֲבַי, וּלְשֹׁמְרֵי מצותו

The parallel verse in V:

לא תשבע · בשמי · לשקר · כי · אנך · אקנא · את

עון · אבת · על · בנם · על · שלשם · ועל

רבעם · לנ

שאי שמי · לשקר

In both texts, God is visiting the sins on the fathers on the sons.  But who are these people deserving of such harsh punishment?  In D, it is the people that hate God “שנאי”.  In V it is those who lift his name “נשאי” in vain.  Note two letters have switched position and the meaning is totally different.  Thus, there is a clear example of copying a text (with a slight modification of letter ordering) that totally changes the meaning.  This isn’t just a matter of a typo since the entire text around this key word in each document pivots to accommodate the spelling in that particular text.  In D, the idea of God visiting punishment against those who hate Him is paralleled with God rewarding those who love Him, a concept missing in V.  In V, this sentence is particularly nestled in the commandment of false swearing (those who lift my name in vain) whereas in D it appears in a different commandment entirely [not worshiping idols].  Thus, whichever author came later copied this text, reversed two of the letters to completely change the meaning and then reworked the text to align to the new meaning, a clear example of copying specifically a text without copying content.  

3. What does this mean for DH?

The above picture paints an evolution of the religion in the form of D/V which is much more textual than the thematic evolution we are familiar with in the DH.  What are the implications?  I think there are three possibility and it largely depends on when you think V was written

3a. Late V

As with the prior posts, if we believe V was much later than the rest of the textual evolution in the Torah, it would explain why the evolution of V is more textual than thematic.  By the time V was written, the Torah was already ossified as a text so when V was drafted, the specific relation of V to the text of the Torah was more important.  This would certainly be true if V was a 19^th century forgery as by that time, most of what we knew of ancient Israelite religion came from the Torah.  But, even if V is 2,000 years old, by that time we have reason to believe the text of the Torah was mostly ossified so V’s close textual relationship to prior texts would make sense

3b. V as an alternative paradigm

The second possibility is that V is indeed ancient and just represents a different paradigm of textual evolution relative to what we’ve seen before.  Why would it be so different?  The obvious answer is that V & D would be two closely related books from the same school so have a different relationship than, for example, P vs. D.  In other words, maybe there were certain schools of thought in ancient Israel, broken down perhaps geographically, temporally, theologically and they produced different documents.  Thus, there might have been 10 different version of the Torah within the P school and another 10 within the D school.  D & V would be two different versions within the D school which explains their close relationship and textual evolution.  Similarly, the same might be true of different texts within the P school but these are no longer transparent to us since all we have is one version of the Torah.  Therefore, when we look at the Torah, we mostly see the starker differences between the schools but that elides more subtle distinctions within the schools that the V/D split allows us to see.

3c. V as a paradigm shift

The final possibility is that our prior understanding of the Torah’s evolution was just wrong.  After all, we don’t have specific examples of original Biblical texts so our understanding of the textual evolution is based on conjecture and piecing together the fragments from within the Torah.  It’s possible that our attempts to do this have been misguided and V is showing us the way texts actually evolved which just wasn’t apparent to us until now without the specific examples of the original texts.  This is the most interesting possibility as it potentially upends our entire thinking about Biblical evolution.  While tantalizing, this possibility rests on an assumption that V is indeed an original text and, per my last post, I am somewhat skeptical of this.