Documentary Hypothesis – The Name of God

On my six month visit – work attempt in Britain last year I happened to go to the outdoor museum for Welsh history in Cardiff.  In amongst the various industrial, pre industrial and celtic round houses was a small little church.

While disassembling the St. Telios church the museum discovered that the building which was over 600 years old had original paintings underlying the protestant white wash.  These paintings were not fantastic designs and creations of a wealthy class or church where money was not an object.

These paintings as the one on the right demonstrates were more like sacred attempts by local artists to point to the divine.  Simplistic in tone but not in message.  In fact this painting is of the Trinity encapsulating the Father on the throne, the Holy Spirit on the top of the cross in a form of a dove and God the son upon the cross.

In each case this manifestation of God as three while in one in some ways is found in the modern bible in the old testament.  Yahweh is just one name for God.  There is also El, Elohim, El-Shaddai and Adoniah which is translated often as LORD (though literally means master) in the English language versions.  Each of these names means something slightly different to Biblical era Israelites and the Jewish exiles.

For scholars these names were the first hint that maybe the Torah or the first five books of the Old Testament was not the work of a single writer but a mash up of various writers. For the Documentary Hypothesis these names of God meant different things. Much like how we identify the Trinity as three separate personages to use Joseph Smith’s dated term.

The difference with scholars is that they see each of these as different because in large part they are taking from different writers.  Each with a different historical and political reason for their viewpoint.  In some ways that would seem easy, but even with these names there is more confusion as each so called group uses all of them.  So not so straight forward and obvious.  In fact after Moses received the name of God as Yahweh they converge and use either Yahweh or Adonai.

So what to make of this idea.  Well you can look at it two ways.

1. The reasons for the various names is that before Moses the Patriarchs did not know Yahweh by that name so for narrative purposes it was not mentioned.

2. Or is it a case of different writers using different conventions or traditions J writes about God = Yahweh throughout while E, and P only bring the name in after Moses.

If 2 is correct then how do we view these naming conventions and do they make a difference.  A scholar may say that it points to the Canaanite origins because El was the head of their gods and Yahweh was a storm god who was not as important.  If that is the case then how do the reconcile the eventual merger of the two names.

One reason argued is that E was a Northern Israeli version of the Torah while J is the Jewish version.  What seems odd then is why did the P or Priestly version then adapt the E version of the story.  So much so that some argued at times that there is no E and that what we think of as E is really P.

In a Mormon perspective then we are left with some interesting ideas.

 Multiple names for deity

If one looks at archaeology and other sources scholars like to point to multiple deities of Canaanite gods make up the the beginnings of the monotheistic Israelites.  For many Christians and Jews that would be a difficult argument and for most Mormons as well.  Yet if we believe in a idea of becoming gods ourselves than it would be logical that there would be more than one God.  In fact we make that statement quite clearly.

So the concept that there may be some bleed over about the names of God and the names of gods seems to be less problematic in some ways for us.  Not a perfect fit I grant you but it might be something to explore as others have done with Asherah.  In some ways the alternative message might be that as Mormons we are ready to keep an open mind rather than close ourselves off on a book that we believe the word of God as far as it has been translated correctly.

I have more thoughts on all of this later specifically is E real, if it is real does it represent the brass plates?  Also what are we to make of the academic retrenchment arguing against the Documentary Hypothesis but now to bed.

Is the Documentary Hypothesis antithesis of Mormonism or a point of explanation? A discussion

Kevin Barney at the turn of the century published a fine article in Dialogue discussing the Documentary Hypothesis and specifically its effect on Mormon thought about the writers of the Bible.  The idea that Moses is not the writer of the five books which we claim he wrote is not a new discussion.  In fact one might say that much of what was written down, including his final speech in Deuteronomy would obviously fall after his death so logically could not have been documented by him.

When I first and secondly read the Old Testament I found these first five books particularly hard to overcome.  In much of the later three books I was glazed over.  In some respects I put that on a combination of thousands of years separating me from the authors and the fact that the book we used in the LDS church is so full of Shakespearian era dialect that it almost impossible to make it through without a guide to get you through.

But as I have learned over the years having a document compiled by multiple authors by an editor who for reasons only known to him/them left conflicting stories to intermingle in the book.  It now made sense in a totally different way why I could find this all so much more difficult to read.

The idea that documentary hypothesis works well with me for that reason to begin with.  The idea that there are multiple writers with varying agendas makes perfect sense.  As a historian I have noted that the past is a combination of everyone’s viewpoint.  From the eye witnesses to the various second hand accounts to the academic papers each offer a slice of a historical argument and each of us makes are piece with what we can accept.  Sometimes we accept myth making over history because it makes us feel better.  Sometimes we prefer history because we want to see a fair viewpoint.

At times with ancient literature we only have their word for it.  In some cases archaeology can help but it cannot always answer in a definitive way.  Many times it is educated guess work no different than a historian looking at Herodotus or Julius Caesar.  So while one has to be careful at making broad gestures I think it is important that we understand the academic need to understand why things came to be.  

Given those ideas we now have to go back and examine what our own challenges are with this hypothesis.  Will it always be something which we cannot agree like Evangelical Christians who see this as challenging to their understanding to their view point on Biblical inerrancy. Similar to Muslims who see the Quran as a book from God to man with no middle interpretation.  

What I am proposing here is an examination of the articles by Barney, Sorenson and others who argued for the hypothesis and see whether the foundations of this idea and how these compare to Book of Mornon scholarship and if there are ways we can build a bridge to where each of the variant ideas carry us and how they can be defined.  Is there four authors, many more fragments which make up the five books, is there points that come from after the exile that must be evaluated in light of what Joseph translated.  

I personally love Sorenson’s hypothesis that the brass plates were the Northern tribes version of the Bible which make up the E version or P version of the scriptures depending on the current viewpoint.  Whereas J version speaks to the Jews in Judah during the monarchical period. In many ways I want to continue that discussion.

So I hope you will join me in this process as it has been a while since I wrote here I hope you will join me along the road.  Apologies if this does not completely make sense but hopefully we will achieve something of interest for more than just me.