Not everyone believes the Documentary Hypothesis explains the first five books of Moses. There appears to be a divide between American & European scholarship. Colby Townsend will tell us more about the differences in scholarship. And we will also see what implications this has for the Book of Mormon.
GT: Alright, so where are we at today? Because it seems like some scholars don’t like the documentary hypothesis, and then we’ve also got the biblical literalists, who I assume would hate it.
Colby: Right. No, a lot of people really don’t like it still. And there have been a handful of different attempts by more traditionally-minded scholars to come up with new methods and new approaches to explain all of the problems that we’ve been talking about, about the formation of the Pentateuch particularly. So, a lot of people really don’t like it. But really, a lot of the time, there are a handful of scholars that try to say, “Oh, well, this fragmentation of the scholarship obviously makes it so that the documentary hypothesis goes away. And then we don’t have the problem of, the five books being written later.” But none of that goes away.
If you don’t accept the documentary hypothesis, that’s fine. There’s a whole lot of evidence to support a version of the documentary hypothesis. So really the main competing arguments right now within scholarship are what I described. So you can either go with the documentary hypothesis, which tends to argue that the different sources were written a little bit earlier. So maybe the earliest of those would be eighth, ninth century BCE, which I haven’t mentioned yet, is really early for lengthy writing in Hebrew, at least. Because one of the main arguments that really shuts down the possibility of Moses being the author of the Torah, is the fact that written Hebrew didn’t develop until after Moses’ life.
GT: Moses didn’t speak Hebrew?
Colby: He would have spoken it, probably a version of it, a much earlier version of it.
GT: He wouldn’t have written it.
Colby: But yeah, he wouldn’t have written it, not in the form…. (Linguistic form, I guess is really the best phrase I should have used) that the Torah is written in. It doesn’t develop until after his life. So there are continuing debates about that as well. What does that mean for the writing of it? But really most scholars, pretty much all scholars that are really engaged in Pentateuchal criticism, agree that Moses couldn’t have written it, and that the five books of Moses couldn’t have come together until at the very earliest, the return from the Babylonian exile, which also has other implications for…
GT: What year is that, approximately?
Colby: That would have been 530 BCE or so. So toward the end of the sixth century BCE, and so that’s the earliest that they would have been compiled together. That’s more conservative.
GT: So the Torah would have been compiled, and I’m going to try to put this in Book of Mormon terms. The Torah, the five books of Moses would have been written long after Lehi left Jerusalem.
Colby: Compiled into five books. Yes.
GT: And that’s an interesting [point.] That leads into your paper, doesn’t it?
Colby: A little bit. Yeah, there’s definitely some connections there. Yeah, if we’re shifting gears here.
GT: Before we go there, I still want to hit this idea of what do faithful Latter-day Saints, and even faithful Christian scholars do? Because it seems like at least in my Sunday School classes, when we do talk about the Old Testament, there ain’t nobody talking about the documentary hypothesis.
Colby: Yeah, no.
GT: We’re just going to take it on faith. Moses wrote the first five books, take it or leave it and we’re going to take it.
Colby: Right, and even if it comes up.
GT: Yeah, and so, people might get into did the flood really happen? Were Adam and Eve real people? But nobody’s going to spend any time on a documentary hypothesis. And I think most people are going to just say, “Moses wrote all five books.”
Colby: Probably.
Was Joseph Smith aware of the Documentary Hypothesis? It appears he was aware! How did that affect his translation of the Book of Mormon and revision of the Bible? Biblical scholar Colby Townsend will fill us in.
Colby: [Joseph’s] grandfather Asael Smith came over to the house one evening and was angry that Joseph Smith Sr. had been going to the Presbyterian Church with Lucy. And so, he came over to almost literally knock some sense into his son. And by almost literally I mean that he got into a very heated argument. Asael wasn’t really into established institutional religion and thought it was all priest craft and that “they’re trying to use you,” basically and “dupe you out of your money” and everything else. And so, as Asael was leaving, he turned. The door must have been open, because he turned and he hurled Tom Paine’s “Age of Reason” into the house and screamed to Joseph Smith Sr., essentially saying, “Read that until you get some sense into you.” Yeah. [It was] like “Stop going to the Presbyterian Church.” It is interesting because he was actually successful. Lucy wrote later that Joseph Smith Sr. said, “We should probably stop. I don’t want this kind of stuff to come up.” So it worked. Asael was able to get it.
But for Lucy, at least in her retelling of that story a couple of decades later, in her biography of her son, Joseph Smith, Jr., that was a key part. It wasn’t just he turned and threw some book or some anti-Bible book or something because it really wasn’t anti-Bible. But he specifically threw Paine’s “Age of Reason.” That was a symbol of the problems of organized institutional religion, but also the problems with the Bible and religion that their society, they believed, hadn’t really fully grappled with yet.
Colby also discusses secret combinations.
Colby: So one of those is that after the French Revolution, in America and in Britain, there was a very large push against a Jacobin party of the French Revolution. [Maximilien] Robespierre was seen as the personification of all things horrible about the Jacobins. And so, there were in the 1790s, anti-Jacobin societies that popped up all over the states.
…
GT: They were all a bunch of noisy atheists, it sounds like.
Colby: Pretty much yeah. Noisy in the dark. Because it really became one and the same with like the Illuminati, and all of these other dark secret organizations and when you look at newspapers of that period, in the late 18th century, the phrase secret combination starts to pop up a lot, and in particular, against Jacobins. So, one of the documents that I looked at, in that chapter was a review of a recent history. This is in the late 1790s. There was an American review of a French history of the Jacobins. And this anonymous author said, “This is a really great history. You guys should read it.” It was I think it was like three or four volumes in length. But the author of that history doesn’t go back far enough. The real origins of the Jacobin party go much further, so not only to the Garden of Eden with Satan convincing Adam and Eve both to eat the fruit, but also in the council in heaven, where Lucifer was able to convince one third of the host of heaven, that they should democratize and that they could throw off the system of government in heaven.
…
And then all throughout the Book of Mormon, you have these little nods toward the secret combinations and the oath that Satan had made with Cain. So in my thesis, I essentially look at that and say, as far as anti-Jacobinism is concerned that anti-masonry is extremely important for understanding the development of the Book of Mormon. But anti-masonry didn’t just pop up. There was a much broader context, and that there was a much broader literature as well. Thirty years before the Book of Mormon was being dictated by Joseph Smith, so in the late 1790s, you already had a lot of this literature that has a lot of these similar ideas, and similar themes, similar language that you would you would find in the Book of Mormon only a couple of decades later. So that’s key. I think that’s really important that as scholars continue to go forward, and as I continue to do research, I’ll keep looking at that and looking for other really interesting connections. But even more importantly, the main argument that I make in my thesis is that The Book of Mormon, sort of just alludes to the story. It’s an extra biblical account of Cain.
Do lean for or against the Documentary Hypothesis? Why? Even if you are against, how do you explain the Moses problem in Deuteronomy “Moses died”? Were you aware that Joseph’s grandfather Asael was against religion?
Wheat & Tares 
There is some evidence that what we have in the Book of Mormon is closer to the original than what is contained in the Bible. http://russellyanderson.com/response/BofM/brplates.html
If Moses originally wrote in Egyptian or reformed Egyptian and the Brass plates was that original source, then that explains why most of the text of the Bible has to be created after the time of Lehi. Because when Lehi left with the Brass Plates, they had no original source anymore.
This seems like wishful thinking.
It seems to me there are two quite different documentary hypothesis topics, at least when I’m in the company of Book of Mormon readers.
First, a Book of Mormon reader is very likely to understand the internal logic of the Book of Mormon requiring a Hebrew bible–Torah and more including most or all of Isaiah–complete and ready to pick up and take in about 600 BC. That’s a challenging date under any version of the history of the bible that I read about. Which leaves the Book of Mormon reader choosing to reject a lot of evidence about how and when the bible came to be, or to do what feels like significant re-framing of the Book of Mormon.
Second, and largely independent of Book of Mormon thinking, there are questions and debates about when and from what source the Pentateuch or Torah comes to be. However, here most of the new or revisionist views that challenge the classic documentary hypothesis tend to find *later* dates for some of the sources and/or for compilation.
In short, for the Book of Mormon reader, the arguments against the traditional documentary hypothesis are not helpful–they move in the wrong direction (“wrong” for purposes of saving the internal logic of the Book of Mormon). As noted in the OP.
Hi Cristian,
If you read “Who Wrote the Bible” by Dr. Friedman (Jewish, not Mormon) he puts all the dates as before 600 BC and gives compelling reasoning for why those dates are valid.
Regarding Isaiah, the BoM doesn’t claim to have the entire 66 chapters of Isaiah. It has 2-14 & 48-54 (forgive me if I’ve missed other, I’m going off the top of my head). I’ll freely acknowledge that the latter verses are 2nd Isaiah which is traditionally dated to Babylon. Having said that, I’ve also seen scholars date portions of Proto Isaiah to Babylon i.e. Chapters 13-14. Chapters 13 and 14 both say Babylon but the chapters are actually describing the Assyrian destruction. They even stop saying Babylon and move back to Assyria (14:25).
So what I’m getting at is that dating Isaiah is not cut and dry and the DH does not invalidate the BoM.
John Sorenson famously wrote a Dialogue essay showing that the Book of Mormon shows characteristics of being an E Source. In a very good essay no longer on the web, Steven St. Clair extended the argument, showing more Northern Kingdom traits. For a Nibley Festschrift, Robert F. Smith wrote a less famous essay arguing that the Book of Abraham shows signs of being an J document. And Ben McGuire presented at FAIR and in JBMS showing that scholars have argued that the story of David and Goliath was originally two seperate tales, spliced together, in the same way that Friedman has argued that the Noah story consists of two separate versions spliced together. McGuire then goes on to show that while the story of Nephi and Laban consistently alludes to the story of David and Goliath, all the allusions point to only one of the two versions spliced together in the Bible. That alone is pretty neat trick for a plowboy with a stone in a hat, and two months in Harmony to kill.
Kevin Barney wrote an excellent essay in Dialogue called Reflections on the Documentary Hypothesis, very much worth reading for any LDS student taking one’s bearings.
Friedman’s book remains a valuable, if not essential introduction. I’ve also read his The Hidden Book of the Bible. While I use Friedman at times, I do have a few caveats. After reading Friedman, I ran across a book called Before Abraham Was, which pointed out that the Noah story is chiastic. As a personal exercise, decades back, I once copied out the text of the Noah story, and first reformatted the J and P portions (using all caps for one), and then further reformatted the whole thing for chiastisity. There is an overall structure, plus, a number of distinctive substructures, some of which, like the overall form, I notice, impressively bridges the supposed division between authors. I still do not know what to make of that. It is an unresolved, and I think, unresolvable tension. At the very least, as Kevin Barney notes, is makes me skeptical of the ability of DH scholars to provide absolutely certain microsurgery on who did what when and why.
Robert Alter, in his The World of Biblical literature and also in The Art of Biblical Narrative, has some interesting observations about the uses of repetition, and the narrative uses of allusion that clash with some aspects of the formal DH, which tend so assume repetition equals pointless duplication. On the other hand, Alter has stated that the Deuteronomists are the one editorial school that everyone agrees on. Barker sometimes refers to a book by R. N. Whybray (The Making of the Pentateuch) that points out that the major assumptions behind the DH overall are just that. Repeating assumptions doesn’t turn them into facts.
Friedman had suggested that Jeremiah (or perhaps his scribe Baruch) was the Deuteronomist, on grounds that Jeremiah agreed with the Deuteronmy and the Deuteronomist history on every important point. After reading a lot of Margaret Barker, and coming to appreciate how her view of Josiah’s reform casts light on the Book of Mormon, I realized that Friedman’s statements contain a hidden assumption that we don’t have to ask any further questions on what the “important points” are. I saw that while Jeremiah shows familiarity with Deuteronomy, he happens to contradict it on exactly those points that Barker describes as the key to understanding the reform, the changes to “the heart of the temple” (I discussed this in an Interpreter essay, “Prophets and Kings in Lehi’s Jerusalem.” Lehi agrees with Jeremiah on exactly those points.) Friedman has nothing to say about the verses that demonstrate this issue. Nor do any of the other Biblical scholars writing about Josiah and the reform. And that is a reminder that every theory is also a filter. It highlights some aspects, while sliding others to blind spots, which then do the work that blind spots do so very well.
One thing the Book of Mormon does impressively, as Hardy and others have discussed at length and in great detail, is that it draws attention to the work of human editors and source documents. (John Gee also has a very good essay called “Limhi in the Library” that shows how important this is.) And our text openly admits that the editors are people with personalities, preferences, sources and human weakness. That alone should remove the scandal of the DH for LDS readers, and should allow us to consider various arguments on their merits, rather than on our favorite authorities’ opinions, and it should free us from the need to needlessly fret.
Gerald Smith wrote a good summary of how Joseph Smith’s productions fit with the DH, and Joe Spencer reposted it here:
https://feastuponthewordblog.org/2011/12/27/the-book-of-mormon-and-the-documentary-hypothesis-from-gerald-smith/
FWIW
Kevin Christensen
Canonsburg, PA
It’s nice that some LDS scholars engage with the Documentary Hypothesis (which for most biblical scholars is rather stronger than a hypothesis at this point) but to me it seems like they sort of nibble at bits and pieces while avoiding the main issues. Genesis 1 and 2, for example, are separate creation stories, one from P and one from J, but the standard LDS treatment, both in our texts like Moses and in our teachings, simply conflates the two. The standard LDS claim that God directed Adam and Eve to multiply and replenish the Earth (Genesis 1) and that their later decision to partake of the forbidden fruit so they could get on with some multiplying and replenishing (Genesis 2) doesn’t make sense if they were separate accounts.
Likewise, the standard Mormon reading of 1 Nephi 5:11-13, where Lehi reviews the contents of the Brass Plates, is that these verses describe more or less the Old Testament as we have it today: “the five books of Moses” (although that’s an anachronistic way of referring to the Torah), “a record of the Jews … even down to the commencement of the reign of Zedekiah,” and “also the prophecies of the holy prophets” down to Jeremiah. In fact, the P material was composed during or after the exile, and D underwent considerable editing during the exile. The final form of the Hebrew Bible was a post-Exile creation.
It’s these big issues (and I didn’t even mention the Second Isaiah problem) that need addressing by LDS scholars if they really accept the Documentary Hypothesis. I think most of them only accept the DH when it doesn’t conflict with standard Mormon views, which is a much different proposition than actually accepting the DH.
Hi Kevin, interesting stuff. I’ll have to read that over. When looking at the passages done with the passages formated to show poetic form (e.g. breaking out couplets) you see them looking more like a poetic repeat.
Having said that, when I look at how Friedman shows that P can be read as a continuous document, it’s extremely compelling to believe that P was it’s own source competing with the JE narrative. I could also argue that the compiler was an educated person that understood the poetic forms and merged the documents to allow for this (although that’d be a lot of work but then again, so is compiling the Pentateuch).