So if I complain that #HebrewBible scholars have a narrow view of their field's history, they are in good company!
But my goodness reading about nineteenth-century German biblical scholarship makes it sound like very little has changed in two hundred years or more. The debates are the same.
Positions that were initially proposed based on the erudite but unsubstantiated intuitions of learned scholars sometimes fall out of favor, and then get revived later.
3/?
Baden says that J reading straight from Ex. 1:12->2:11 makes Moses "a common Israelite," but his reconstruction of J doesn't say that. We're not told who Moses's parents were! Maybe J's Moses wasn't an Israelite at all, for all we know from Baden's J!
Aha, I see that Prof. Baden addressed the issue, only in an endnote. (I hate endnotes!) He says that introducing Moses with וַיְהִ֣י׀ בַּיָּמִ֣ים הָהֵ֗ם וַיִּגְדַּ֤ל מֹשֶׁה֙ וַיֵּצֵ֣א אֶל־אֶחָ֔יו ("And it happened in those days and Moses grew up") is like "That was the period in which Abraham Lincoln came of age." But is it?
I'm not aware of any other introduction in ancient Hebrew literature (even famous figures like David, Solomon, Abraham, Noah,
If Moses killing the Egyptian followed immediately after Exodus 1:12 in J, then the source gave no introduction to who Moses was or his parents. (Baden 2012:74)
I expected an eminent professor's treatise "reviving the #DocumentaryHypothesis to persuade me, but it's having the opposite effect.
Okay, here's a silly argument (p.69-70 of Baden's Composition of the Pentateuch):
Sarah "says explicitly that she is barren-'Yahweh has kept me from bearing' (16:1)-a concept unique to J" and justified in note 114 (pic).
What do we call inability to conceive?
Baden isn't referring to Sarah ascribing her barrenness to YHWH in 16:1 as J's uniqueness, since the note asserts that E and P do not mention Sarah's barrenness as the reason for lacking kids.
I realized that one model for the #DocumentaryHypothesis is Tatian's treatment of the four gospels in his #Diatessaron . But if we only had the Diatessaron, would we be able to reconstruct four gospels, using Hebrew Bible scholar methods? The answer is no, in part because gospels share material.
I'm struck by how many times Baden asserts that this or that detail is "only in J." If the source documents agreed verbatim, why would a compiler duplicate them?
#HebrewBible
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