Tag Archives: Documentary Hypothesis

Contradictions in the Bible

Posted on December 24, 2012 by Steven DiMattei

Did you know that the Bible contains thousands of contradictions, from minute differences in narrative details to sweeping theological and ideological disagreements? And that this has been a well-known fact in the scholarly community for roughly three centuries!

Join in this educational adventure here, at my new website, where I will be posting and explaining a biblical contradiction a day! That’s right—a contradiction a day!

Unlike many sites that have attempted to enumerate the Bible’s many contradictions, and in somewhat simplistic or even antagonistic terms, this site is devoted to explaining why there are contradictions in the Bible using modern biblical source criticism. As the term implies, this methodological approach to the Bible looks at the Bible’s sources, that is its once separate and individual texts—all of which were penned by more than 70 different authors, over a period of roughly 1,000 years, to vastly different audiences, and to … Read more

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The Yahwist

Posted on September 2, 2012 by Steven DiMattei

The textual tradition know as the Yahwist (J) was so named by academics because of its consistent and unequivocal use of the god of Israel’s name, Yahweh. Even though the divine name appears approximately 1,800 times in the Pentateuch alone, the other Pentateuchal sources (Elohist, Deuteronomist, and Priestly) restrain from using it prior to its revelation to Moses in Exodus: at 3:14-15 in the Elohist tradition and at 6:2-8 in the Priestly tradition. Only the Yahwist text, in other words, affirms and acknowledges—in contradiction to the claims of the later Priestly source—that the name Yahweh was known to and frequently invoked by the patriarchs prior to its revelation. Indeed, it is for this reason that the Yahwist tradition does not narrate a revelation of the divine name. According to this tradition, it was known right from the first generation of mortals (Gen 4:26). This is merely one of dozens of … Read more

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The Documentary Hypothesis: How Scholars Discovered J, E, D, and P (3)

Posted on June 23, 2012 by Steven DiMattei

This posts is part 3 of the ‘Did Moses Write the Torah?’ series. It too has been excerpted from my writing.

Nineteenth century scholarship: post-Mosaic by centuries

The observable textual data collected over the centuries leading up to and including the nineteenth century no longer supported the long-standing traditional and pre-critical claim that the Pentateuch was written by Moses—a traditional view, moreover, that the text never claimed to begin with and which only came into existence through culturally conditioned theological and ideological interpretive agendas of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. By the nineteenth century the large majority of biblical scholars realized that the Pentateuch was composed out of a variety of sources, all of which postdate Moses by centuries. It was the work of Wilhelm de Wette (1780-1849) that ushered in this new paradigm.

Previously commentators had claimed that the textual data suggested that much of the Pentateuch’s narrative … Read more

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