The Important First Lecture on the Bible. Read by Tuesday, Jan. 4.

Lesson #1

Before beginning this lecture you should . . .

Read the book of Genesis (King James Version, KJV).

Read Gabel, John and Charles Wheeler. The Bible as Literature: An Introduction.

  5th edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.  Chapter 7

Introduction:

When we first approach any book, we ask basic questions about the time and place of its composition. For the Torah-the first five books of the Bible-these questions are not easily answered. This lecture asks: who wrote, or may have written, the Torah? It then addresses the challenge that Biblical Hebrew poses to translators, and briefly surveys English-language translations of the Bible.

Consider this ...

1. Who wrote the different books of the Bible? Why were they written?

2. What time span is covered by the Torah? The Prophets? The New Testament?

Authorship and Style in the Torah (the first five books of the Bible; in English Torah means “law”

I. The Hebrew Bible.

            A. The Hebrew Bible contains 24 books (divided into 39 in Christian Bibles).

            B. The Hebrew Bible has three large divisions: the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings.

                       

                        1. The Torah: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. These books give a history of the world from its cre­ation through Moses' final glimpse of the promised land. They also offer the law.

                       

                        2. The Prophets: These are further divided into former (Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings) and latter prophets (Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and "The Book of the Twelve" [minor prophets], Hosea to Malachi).

           

                        3. The Writings: These include Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Daniel, as well as several other works. These books contain a variety of stories, poems, songs, and proverbs.

II. Who wrote the first five books of the Bible (the Torah)? Moses?

            A. The tradition of Mosaic authorship was first systematically questioned in the 17th century by Baruch Spinoza and other Enlightenment forerunners.

           

            B. According to the Documentary Hypothesis, the Torah consists of a later editorial assemblage of four hypothetical sources.

                                   

                        1. The first is known as "J" (the Yahwist, who uses God's personal name, Yahweh). The earliest of these sources is thought to provide most of the interesting stories of the Torah. These stories circulat­ed among the Israelites until the 10th century, when the "J" author wrote them down.

                        2. The second, the "E" (the Elohist-refers to God as Elohim, the plural form of "divine pow­ers"). This document often repeats stories of the "J" docu­ment. For example, in Genesis there are two accounts of Abraham passing his wife off as his sister (Genesis 12 and 20).

                        3. The third source is the "D" docu­ment (the author or authors of the book of Deuteronomy). Scholars think the book of law found in the temple in 622 B.C. is the source for this book.

                        4. Finally, there is the "P" document. The priestly authors compiled the earlier sources and added materi­als on religious ritual and law, genealogies and statistics. These documents date back to the Babylonian Exile of 587 BCE.

           

                        a. The "P" authors are thought to be responsible for references to ritual in Genesis and the rest of the Torah. For example, Genesis 2:3 establishes the Sabbath. Genesis 7 gives the first reference to clean and unclean animals, though this distinction has not yet been fully introduced. Chapter 17 of Genesis establishes the ritual of circumcision.

                        b. The "P" document also pro­vides the genealogies and sta­tistics that occur in the Torah, which gave a sense of continu­ity to the Jewish people.

                        c. Finally, the "P" authors may have been responsible for compiling all of the older documents for inclu­sion in the Torah.

            C.  The most important sources in Genesis are the "J" and the "P"    sources.

           1. The "P" portions tend to be elevated and impersonal, concerned with cosmic order and religious ritual (e.g., Genesis 1-2:3).

           2. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. (Genesis 1:3, KJV)

D. In Genesis, the "J" portions tend to be earthy and dramatic (e.g.,Genesis

2:4-7). They feature multiple voices, including a serpent.

            3. These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when

they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth

and the heavens.

            4. And evety plant of the field before it was in the earth, and evety

herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it

to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.

           5. But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole

face of the ground.

           6. And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and

breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a

living soul. (Genesis 2:4-7, KJV)

III. How has the Hebrew Bible been translated into English?

A. The King James Version (KJV), 1611, closely copies the "paratactic" form (Stylistically, paratactic sentences are very long sentences with many independent clauses linked together by coordinating conjunctions; these are sentences whose ideas are strung together like beads on a string, without any effort at the subordination of one idea to another: We went shopping, and we bought a few things, and my parents met us at the car, and we drove home, and my brother’s car was in the drive)used so effectively by Michelle of American Pie (and last year in band camp)  of the original Hebrew text.  The New English Bible of the 1960s is the first to break, decisively, with the rhythms and familiar idiom of the KJV.  An example of paratactic style from the KJV (Genesis 4: 1-7)

    ¹And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD.
   ²And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.
   ³And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the LORD.
   ⁴And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the LORD had respect unto Abel and to his offering:
   ⁵But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell.
   ⁶And the LORD said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen?
   ⁷If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.

B. One example of the KJV's enduring stylistic influence may be found in the paratactic prose of Ernest Hemingway, as well as in Hemingway's studious avoidance of describing a character's inner thoughts or feelings.

Hemingway example:

                        We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything… Gino was a patriot, so he said things that separated us sometimes, but he was also a fine boy and I understood his being a patriot. He was born one.  (A Farewell to Arms)  (Simple language, not a lot of expressed emotion, and the use of connecting words (conjunctions like and, which make this a paratactic style.)

Summary:

This lecture introduces the leading contemporary theory about the Torah's com­position, the "Documentary Hypothesis." From the question of the Torah's authorship we move into issues involved in its translation, noting that for Europe the Bible has chiefly been a book read in translation. For English-language speakers, the most historically important translation of the Bible has been the King James (or "Authorized") Version, 1611. We see how the KJV achieves a high degree of formal correspondence to its Hebrew source through its distinc­tive "paratactic" style, a style borrowed in the 20th century by the American writer Ernest Hemingway.

FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING

Consider

   1. What are the benefits and drawbacks of the King James Version trans­lation of the Torah?

   2. Do the different creation accounts of Genesis 1-2:3 and 2:4-25 seem compatible or not? That is-might they be seen as different perspec­tives on the same event, or do they seem more like separate accounts of different events?

3. The Documentary Hypothesis is one way of attempting to explain the differences in tone, and the narrative gaps and repetitions, between sec­tions of Genesis. Can you imagine other possible explanations?

Suggested Reading

Asimov, Isaac. Asimov's Guide to the Bible. 2 vols. Garden City, NY:

   Doubleday, 1968-69.

   Bloom, Harold and David Rosenberg. The Book of J. New York: Grove

   Weidenfeld, 1990. (David Rosenberg's translations of the J portions of the

   Torah with Harold Bloom's interpretive commentary.)

   Hauer, Christian E., and William A. Young. An Introduction to the Bible: A

   Journey into Three Worlds. 5th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice

   Hall, 2001.

   McGrath, Alister. In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and

   How it Chanced a Nation. a Language. and a Culture. New York:

   Anchor Books, 2001.

Harris, Stephen L. Understanding the Bible. 3rd edition. London and

  Toronto: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1990.

Websites to Visit

1. Ernest Hemingway His Life and Works- complete listing of the author's works.

2. www.bibleplaces.com - an exceptional resource site for maps, pho­

tographs and other important information regarding the Holy Land.

3. www.bib-arch.org/- home site of the Biblical Archeological Society. Good

resource for up-to-date happenings on archeological findings.

4. http://blble.gospelcom.net - on-line text of multiple editions of the Bible.

ENRICHMENT

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE LOST TEN TRIBES OF ISRAEL?

After the death of Solomon, Israel was divided into opposing spheres. A northern kingdom called "Israel" (the north) became the home of 10 tribes and a southern called " Judah" (the south) home to two tribes. In 720 B.C.E. (Before the Common Era), the ten Northern tribes were overthrown and many re-set­tled in Mesopotamia. It has been suggested that the ten tribes "lost" their identity as Jews and were absorbed into the culture of the country to which they had been deported. Discovering the where­abouts of the Lost Tribes has excit­ed the imaginations of writers and explorers for centuries, and differ­ent authors have argued that descendants of the Lost Tribes could be found among such diverse peoples as the Persians, Japanese, Chinese, British, and especially American Indians. Most modern scholars assume, however, that the ten tribes simply intermarried with the peoples of the Assyrian Empire and ultimately lost any Israelite identity or culture. More recently, though, because of the reliability of genetic testing, some scholars are taking seriously the claims of cer­tain communities in Ethiopia, India, and China to be descended from the Lost Tribes.