Genesis, a finely unified tapestry

by Damien F. Mackey P. J. Wiseman, like I. M. Kikawada and A. Quinn, will present a case for the more traditional view of the Book of Genesis against JEDP theory, though with a twist. Moses substantially the author of the Pentateuch, was not properly speaking the author of Genesis, but its editor. I: The artificial and the real Is the Book of Genesis a patchwork, or a unity? Or is it, as someone today might put it, “a bit of both”? According to the flyleaf of Isaac M. Kikawada and Arthur Quinn’s book, Before Abraham Was (Ignatius Press, 1985), it emphatically is “not a literary patchwork”, as is borne out also by the book’s subtitle, “The Unity of Genesis 1-11”. From that same flyleaf, we might also get the impression, perhaps, of a fierce polemic raging within the book’s pages, a rebellion against all current hypotheses: “Rebelling against a century of OT scholarship”, the authors will argue that Genesis 1-11 is “the work of one author of extraordinary subtlety and skill”. Nothing could be further from the reality, though, as the two authors, themselves employing “extraordinary subtlety and skill”, will studiously avoid recourse to polemic. P. J. Wiseman, like I. M. Kikawada and A. Quinn, will present a case for the more traditional view of the Book of Genesis against JEDP theory, though with a twist. Moses, substantially the author of the Pentateuch, was not properly speaking the author of Genesis, but the editor. The Book of Genesis comprises a series of patriarchal histories pre-dating Moses - this being the “patchwork” aspect of it if you like - which series editor Moses organised into a coherent whole - the “unity” aspect of it. {I would propose that, whilst Moses was likely the book’s main editor, other inspired editors such as Samuel, Solomon, Ezra, also had a part in it} From the flyleaf of P. J. Wiseman’s book, Ancient Records and the Structure of Genesis, also published in 1985 (Wiseman died in 1948 and his Assyriologist son, D. J., edited his earlier work), one might get the impression of a somewhat milder, more scholarly approach by Wiseman, as compared to Kikawada and Quinn. Though Wiseman’s intent to contradict any notion of Genesis being a compilation of post-Mosaïc sources is clearly signalled here: P. J. Wiseman argues that the literary study of Genesis should begin with sources that were available to its author. He presents often over-looked evidence from genealogies inscribed on Mesopotamian tablets which, taken together, form a pattern paralleled in the Hebrew Bible. In so doing, Wiseman challenges theories that fragment Genesis into a series of documents strung together long after the time of Moses and the exile of Israel. The subtitle of Wiseman’s book, “A Case for the Literary Unity of Genesis”, is very similar to Kikawada and Quinn’s “The Unity of Genesis 1-11”. Wiseman’s effort is more of a unity in diversity, though, I would suggest. {The flyleaf’s use of “its author” I find to be somewhat confusing}. The two approaches, to virtually the same end, could not, however, be more different. Kikawada and Quinn, far from being polemical, are forever at pains to disassociate themselves from that word. They go to great lengths to praise the achievements of JEDP theory and to show how reckless they think it might be to dismiss the system out of hand. There is ‘method in their madness’. They will undermine JEDP using subtlety. Dismiss out of hand, though, is virtually what Wiseman will do [along with R. K. Harrison, in the Preface, who writes (p. 14): “… the only credible source in the entire Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis is D, the book of Deuteronomy, which was already in existence as a complete document before any form criticism arose”]. Studying Wiseman’s attitude to JEDP theory reminds me of something that I have just read (August 8th-9th, 2021) about a USA basketballer in the Tokyo Olympics, Kevin Durant: “He played as if the opposition didn’t exist. Barely seemed to look at them or even notice their presence. He certainly didn’t acknowledge them”. (Will Swanton in The Sunday Telegraph, p. 05). Kikawada and Quinn, being part of the scholarly establishment, University of California at Berkeley, had need to be far more circumspect about what they were writing. Wiseman, on the other hand, an Air Commodore and only an amateur archaeologist and linguist, could ‘play’ somewhat more like basketballer Kevin Durant, though with occasional necessary passing glances at JEDP. Amateurs and mavericks can often arrive at some game-changing insights, free, as they are, from the stifling constraints of academic consensus and peer pressure. A desire for academic credibility, on the other hand, would probably explain why Kikawada and Quinn are so loathe to dismiss JEDP theory as worthless (pp. 9-10): Since its original formulation the documentary hypothesis has had its own complex historical evolution. A recent survey of that evolution has distinguished no less than ten separate stages. …. The traditional description of four layers – J, E, P, D – have been subjected to many further refinements. Some scholars have thought they could distinguish a sperate stratum L; others have argued for distinguishing between E1, E2, E3, and so forth. Of course, these suggested refinements, at least some of them, are easily enough ridiculed for their excesses, but such ridicule does not touch the central core of the hypothesis. The simple fact is that by the 1880s, as a result of the work of Wellhausen, the documentary hypothesis was supported by a broad consensus of critical biblical scholars. … And by the midtwentieth century, thanks to the work of other great scholars like Gerhard von Rad and Martin Noth, that consensus became so strong that it seems virtually unquestionable today. Von Rad in the last edition of his famous commentary on Genesis … could write proudly, “How can we analyze such extremely complex materials [as Genesis]? There is now no fundamental dispute that it is assigned to the three documents J, E and P, and there is even agreement over detail”. His claim, if anything, was understated. Kikawada and Quinn would probably take a dim view, therefore, of the kind of approach adopted by Wiseman, and, especially, by R. K. Harrison, though these latter are hardly characterised by the sort of “shrillness that makes them difficult to take seriously” to which the authors will now refer to (pp.10-11): Of course, there have always been those who have dissented from the consensus, more often on theological than on critical grounds. Compared with the calm understatement of a von Rad, these dissenters often express their view with a shrillness that makes them difficulty to take seriously. Perhaps the most persuasive of these voices is Umberto Cassuto. He offers many plausible alternatives to documentary readings of individual passages. And yet, even he concludes his own discussion of the documentary hypothesis with the assertion, “This imposing and beautiful edifice has, in reality, nothing to support it and is founded on air”. This last quote would no doubt echo P. J. Wiseman’s sentiment as well. “Imposing”, the documentary hypothesis may well be, “beautiful” might be debatable, but certainly Wiseman would, like Cassuto, consider it to be without legitimate foundation. So why should he bother overmuch with it? Kikawada and Quinn would claim to read the likes of Cassuto quite differently, however, that word “polemic” again: This is mere polemic. The documentary hypothesis is supported by more than a century of scholarship – and a remarkable body of scholarship it is. After reading even a fraction of it, someone who has not already prejudged the issue cannot help sympathising with the exasperation expressed by Cassuto’s contemporary Gressmann. “Anyone who does not accept the division of the text according to the sources and results flowing therefrom, have to discharge the onus, if he wishes to be considered a collaborator in our scientific work, of proving that all research work done until now was futile”. …. Gressman and more recent proponents of the documentary hypothesis (a virtual Who’s Who of Old Testament scholarship) obviously feel that a rejection of the documentary hypothesis entails a rejection of all the scholarly research done under its aegis and therefore a rejection of the cumulative results of more than a century’s work. A rejection of the documentary hypothesis becomes tantamount to a rejection of modern biblical scholarship, a reductio ad absurdum for any but the most reactionary of fundamentalists. The university pair, Kikawada and Quinn, have been at pains to pitch their tent with the ‘calm and understated’, the justifiably ‘exasperated’, in opposition to the ‘shrill, polemical, not to be taken seriously, reactionary fundamentalistic’ deniers of JEDP. Whether von Rad is understated is open to question. Gressman, however, comes across as a bullying type, as if ‘it’s my way or the highway’. Sure, the consensus for “more than a century’s work” may be heavily in favour of the documentary theorists, but that, weighed up against the long centuries of Judaeo-Christian tradition that preceded the German blitzkrieg of the Scriptures, makes it appear quite puny. And even the more so when one contrasts the objective, biblically attested evidence for Genesis against the subjective and artificial JEDP. Certainly had Air Commodore P. J. Wiseman been writing a university thesis, he may have been advised to do what Kikawada and Quinn will do in their 144-page book, only in far greater depth (a thesis), and probe to the very core of JEDP before trying to refute it. But Wiseman was not writing a thesis and so he had no need to accommodate a Gressman, “to discharge the onus”. If anything, the “onus” to be ‘discharged’ ought to sit with the documentary theorists themselves, considering their rejection of centuries of tradition about the authorship of the Pentateuch. The JEDP theory actually sits strangely between those centuries that gave an entirely different (from JEDP) viewpoint, and modern archaeology, whose findings have - as Wiseman will show - completely obliterated the foundations of the JEDP theory, making it obsolete - a brief curiosity in the overall scheme of things. Cassuto was completely correct in describing this “edifice” as having “in reality, nothing to support it and is founded on air”. Wiseman will justifiably cut to the chase. Kikawada and Quinn, on the other hand, have set themselves the more onerous task of having to investigate and acknowledge a monolithic system with which their conclusions will not agree, before being able to tackle it. Theirs is a clever ploy, insofar as they - whilst seeming to be sympathetically aligned with the documentary theorists - know that their thesis, if accepted, would bring crashing down that whole JEDP superstructure. But they would never dare to admit that to demolish the documentary hypothesis was what they were hoping to do. I, acting on some good advice, had to do something similar in a university Master’s degree, explore the foundations of the conventional Egyptian chronology - a bit of a chore, knowing that I did not agree with it - before being freed up to develop a new system, a “more acceptable alternative”, as one examiner called it. That is what one does in university theses, and Kikawada and Quinn are university men. Wiseman, on the other hand, who was out of the university circuit, and who would have been entirely unaffected by Gressman’s bullying words, would have felt no such constraint. Thus his son will write on his father’s behalf (Ancient Records and the Structure of Genesis, p. 8): P. J. Wiseman’s idea is a simple one. Taking his cue from the recurrent “catch lines” or colophons in Genesis of the form, “These are the family histories (generations) of …”, he examines them as clues to the literary structure of Genesis and as indicative of its origin and transmission. He takes the Genesis narratives as they stand and relates them to well-attested ancient literary methods. My father always thought that such a subjective theory as that of the Wellhausen school would hardly have been conceived or copied had the many literary texts (among them thousands of cuneiform tablets which have since been discovered) been known at that time. Note the key comment here: “[Wiseman] takes the Genesis narratives as they stand …”. Not really any ‘shrill’ polemics here, for Wiseman, like that formidable USA basketballer, Kevin Durant, did not need to engage much at all with the other side. He had the massive advantage of archaeology, which showed up those critics who claimed that writing did not arise until around 1000 BC (and we still have learned Dominican priests claiming that Moses and Joshua did not write anything – certainly nothing historical, anyway). P. J. Wiseman writes (p. 21): Until the beginning of the last century, the only known contemporary history that had been written earlier than 1000 BC was the early part of the Old Testament. The ancient historical records of Babylonia had not been unearthed but lay buried and unknown beneath mounds and ruins which had hidden them for millenniums. It was because the earlier books of the Bible stood alone and unique in this claim to have been written centuries before any other piece of writing then known to the world, that a century ago critics endeavored to prove that they must have been written at a date much later than Moses. On the other hand, the defenders of the Mosaic authorship could not then know that writing was in frequent use a thousand years before he was born. Consequently both sides of the controversy imagined that the contents of Genesis had been handed down by word of mouth, it being assumed that writing was impracticable, and almost unknown in the times of the patriarchs. P. Ewald was prepared to admit that Moses was acquainted with the art of writing, but he says that “the accounts of the patriarchal time contain no sure traces of the use of writing in that early age”. Even as late as 1893, H. Schultz wrote, “of the legendary character of the pre-Mosaic narratives, the time of which they treat is a sufficient proof. It was a time prior to all knowledge of writing” (Old Testament Theology). A shift in direction Kikawada and Quinn’s approach had had of necessity to be more subtle. Heap praise upon the opponents before commencing to dismantle their platform. On p. 11 we first notice their shift in direction: And yet does a rejection of the documentary hypothesis really entail the broader rejection? Certainly it does not if we take the physical sciences as an appropriate analogy. In the twentieth century many of the most cherished principles of Newtonian science have been ceremoniously overturned. Alfred North Whitehead could write, “I was taught science and mathematics by brilliant men and I did well in them; since the turn of the century I have lived to see every one of the basic assumptions of both set aside; not, indeed, discarded, but of use as qualifying clauses, instead of as major propositions; and all this in one life-span – the most fundamental assumptions of supposedly exact sciences set aside”. …. What is really going on here? How is it that a scientific system of such long-standing, its major assumptions seemingly unassailable, and supported by “brilliant men” - and presumably by brilliant women - can, in a seeming instant, be thrown out almost completely? Kikawada and Quinn will now ramp up the rhetoric, and, in so doing, provide another instance of the overthrowing of a monolithic system with an example that fits closer the JEDP situation: namely, “Homeric interpretation” (pp. 11-12): A closer historical analogy might be helpful. The same discovery of time that led to the documentary interpretation of the Pentateuch also led to a revolution in Homeric interpretation. … The Iliad, no less than Genesis, was now considered by some scholars as a mixture of diverse sources. And much of Homeric scholarship of the nineteenth century, the best Homeric scholarship, attempted to retrieve these original sources from the received text by focusing on its apparent inconsistencies. In Homeric studies Wilamowitz occupied the same position as his friend Wellhausen did in Pentateuchal studies. (Wilamowitz himself dismissed the received text of The Iliad as a “wretched patchwork”). Remarkable is the degree to which these two fields of scholarly inquiry parallel each other through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And this makes it even more intriguing that they should have so sharply diverged from each other in the midtwentieth century. At roughly the same time that North, von Rad, and their colleagues were hammering out the detailed consensus of which von Rad was so justly proud, someone of equivalent stature within German classical studies, Wolfgang Schadewalt, was profoundly challenging the documentary approach to Homer. … To be sure, there had always been doubters. Goethe, after first hearing of the documentary hypothesis of Homer, wrote to Schiller, “When all is said and done, there is more subjectivity in this business than they think”. Subjectivity and objectivity are vital considerations in our project of contrasting the methods of Kikawada and Quinn, and Wiseman. Thus in Wiseman’s book, R. K. Harrison will be critical of the highly subjective approach of the pioneer of the documentary hypothesis, Jean Astruc: “Quite without any warrant in terms of objective, factual data, Astruc held that the Genesis material was presented in incorrect chronological order, and accordingly he set about remedying the situation”. And again (p. 12): “The entirely subjective nature of such literary analysis naturally led to considerable conflict of opinion among those who interested themselves in advancing their own views on the manner in which Genesis and the other Pentateuchal books were compiled”. Compare this account of JEDP theory by R. K. Harrison with what D. J. Wiseman had written of his father’s approach: “[Wiseman] takes the Genesis narratives as they stand …”. And what Kikawada and Quinn will next write about Schadewalt, could rightly, I think, be applied to the far less celebrated P. J. Wiseman concerning the JEDP theory (p. 12): “Schadewalt’s work on The Iliad, however, was enough to drive many a documentary critic to despair. As one of them put it, Schadewalt’s Iliasstudien “brought crashing to the ground a century and a half of German scholarship”.” …. While Wiseman and his supporters would probably be quite comfortable with such graphic terminology, Kikwada and Quinn are quick to qualify the matter (p. 12): “Actually Schadewalt’s work was so effective precisely because he did not bring the earlier work crashing to the ground. He did not want to render it futile. He did not want to because it had provided the true basis of his own work”. The same could not be said about P. J. Wiseman’s work, whose foundations were not set in subjective literary criticism, but in hard scientific, archaeological fact. As queried above: What is really going on here? Kikawada and Quinn find “Remarkable … the degree to which these two fields of scholarly inquiry [Genesis and Homer] parallel each other through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And this makes it even more intriguing that they should have so sharply diverged from each other in the midtwentieth century”. But it is not so remarkable at all, as it reflects a philosophical mindset that, beginning with the late Renaissance, has continued on into our day. II: The Philosophy behind the artificiality Dr. Gavin Ardley will tell of a sharp bending in human thinking, why and when it occurred (Berkeley’s Renovation of Philosophy, Martinus Nijhoff, 1968, Preface, vi): The 17th Century witnessed a giant eruption of pseudo-metaphysics, of intellectual hubris combined with intellectual poverty. …. The effects of that explosion have lasted until this day. The revolt against metaphysics, which has gathered to a head in the 20th Century, seems to be in large measure a belated attempt to throw off the tyranny of the 17th Century. Like all reforms too long delayed, it has come blindly and without discrimination. The vital distinction between good and bad metaphysics is unrecognised. The modern reformers seem likely to leave us in a worse state than we were before. God always provides some wise and discerning human instrument who will recognise a clear path out of the labyrinth. And sometimes these are maverick types, like P. J. Wiseman, or psychiatrist, Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky, in the case of navigating through the monolithic textbook Egyptian chronology. Or medical doctor, John Osgood, with his revision of the Stone Ages and important identification, archaeologically, of the era of Abraham. Then there is Wolfgang Schadewalt (of whom I know nothing) for the Homeric revolution. Sorely needed, too, are scholars to bring crashing down the artificial evolutionary theory, which, by now, has already begun to take some very heavy blows. These reformers, revisionists, renovators, tend to be people of common sense. They are not always religious, believing people. God, not limited in his actions and designs, may even choose an atheist as his instrument. And Dr. Ardley tells of bishop George Berkeley, the subject of his book, an Irishman of undoubted common sense (pp. vi-vii): Two centuries ago Berkeley put forward his modest proposals for a return to common sense and intellectual sanity. He was unheeded or derided. But now, with the chastening experience of contemporary reformers who succeed only in substituting one intellectual tyranny for another, we may have recourse with profit to Berkeley’s 18th Century generosity and good sense. …. Berkeley had no great architectonic gift. But he had a rarer gift: he had in him “the soul’s love of wisdom” which, for Plato, is the root of the matter. Further, he had a good measure of the Aristotelian virtue of eutrapelia, the playful-seriousness of the mind; the virtue without which philosophy runs either to trifling or to over-earnestness. As a philosophic eutrapelos he joins a very select company. By entering into Berkeley’s world we participate in some degree in that graceful society. As Kikawada and Quinn cringe from the word, polemic, so does Gavin Ardley shudder at philosophic “over-earnestness”, which he often refers to as “zeal” (probably in the context of zealotry), that is, making everything conform to a single hard philosophical mould. Gressmann obviously suffered from this complaint with his all-encompassing JEDP. Ardley, with degrees in both philosophy and science, was eminently qualified to write books (including Aquinas and Kant, 1950) on the philosophy of science, or the nature of the modern sciences. He, like Kikawada and Quinn in their relation to JEDP theory, can see the enormous benefits, even beauty, of the sciences and mathematics. Berkeley likewise – and Immanuel Kant, too. In Ardley’s wonderful book on Kant, he argues that the German philosopher had managed to discern what the new sciences were all about. That they were an active imposition of rules and laws upon nature. But Kant, unlike Berkeley and Ardley, men of native common sense, would conclude that this is how the human mind naturally works. It formulates a priori laws and imposes these upon nature, which is per se unknowable. Gavin Ardley’s: “The 17th Century witnessed a giant eruption of pseudo-metaphysics …”, closely synchronises with the era when Kikawada and Quinn tell of the rise of the documentary hypothesis (Introduction, p. 9): Not surprisingly, this approach to the Pentateuch first came to the fore in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Within this intellectual milieu, the documentary hypothesis was not an isolated phenomenon. This was the great age of the discovery of time: process, history, change were found everywhere, even in rocks. … And if rocks could yield the story of their formation, then the Torah, with some coaxing, should tell its story as well. The documentary hypothesis was, in short, a characteristic product of its time To which statement the authors will ‘characteristically’ add their softener clause “– but it has also turned out to be much more than that”. What it is, in fact, is a product of a, Western, largely European, scientised pseudo-philosophy, that, whatever its benefits may be for humankind (and Dr. Ardley is generous in his praise of such modern benefits in his books), when applied to the ancient text of the Book of Genesis fits worse than a cheap, second-hand suit – Genesis being neither western, nor European, nor modern as to either its science or philosophy. JEDP theory largely ticks none of the right boxes. Nor could it. Perhaps somewhat more surprisingly, the same can basically be said for the fundamentalist biblical approach, ridiculed by Kikawada and Quinn as reactionary. For although those, such as the Creationists for instance, might give the impression of their complete dedication to uncovering the truths of the Bible - and I am sure that that is generally their sincere intention - they, too, read the text from a modern, generally Westernised, scientific point of view. In fact one astute commentator has rightly described Creationism as a form of modernism, attempting to reduce Genesis to science. That brings us back to P. J. Wiseman, and what his son, D. J. wrote of him: “He takes the Genesis narratives as they stand and relates them to well-attested ancient literary methods”. This is an approach exactly opposite to the modern ‘scientific’ one that has served to mould JEDP theory. Instead of reading the structure in the ancient text, the modern theorists read their a priori structure into the text. Like the Creationists, they impose their modern will, if you like, upon the ancient Genesis narrative. As Ardley would put it, they make it fit their preconceived views. The process is largely artificial. P. J. Wiseman and like-minded thinkers are completely justified in dismissing it as such. Umberto Cassuto: “This imposing and beautiful edifice has, in reality, nothing to support it and is founded on air”. R. K. Harrison: “… the only credible source in the entire Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis is D …”, “… advancing their own views on the manner in which Genesis and the other Pentateuchal books were compiled”. P. J. had the advantage of knowing, unlike the pre-archaeological JEDP theorists, that human writing began far before 1000 BC. Kikawada and Quinn, while mounting a very useful and compelling argument for the unity of the Book of Genesis, will, despite their immense scholarship, by no means be capable of unlocking its inner secrets, its ancient structure, since they themselves (like the JEDP theorists and Creationists) will nowhere engage with ancient scribal methods and texts (except for fantastic pseudo-Genesis myths such as the Epic of Gilgamesh). I can only urge interested readers to study the commonsense writings of P. J. Wiseman (and, indeed, of Dr. Gavin Ardley).