I have a new friend!
Like the vast majority of friends and acquaintances encountered through the internet, we’ve never met in person, and we may never meet due to living on opposite sides of the country. My new friend is extremely intelligent and a physician, which means we may not have very much in common. However, we have both chosen to focus on our areas of common interests rather than where we might disagree, and in common we share a love of history, a faith in things we cannot see, and an intense desire to seek truth while documenting our efforts via the written word.
Several years ago I wrote an article titled “Encouraging My Christian Friends to Think” in which I was touting the scholarship and content of a book called Who Wrote the Bible?
That was my mistake, and I apologize. I am afraid I might have led some of my readers astray by citing bad scholarship in regard to the authorship of the first book in the Bible, the book of Genesis.
The original theory of authorship regarding the Pentateuch was that Moses wrote those first five books of the Bible.
Then the JEPD “documentary hypothesis” from the incredibly long-titled book Conjectures About the Original Memoirs Which It Appeared That Moses Used in Composing the Book of Genesis with Certain Remarks Which Help Clarify These Conjectures, attempted to identify the “real” authors of Genesis through literary analysis.
That book was written by Jean Astruc, and his documentary hypothesis was later presented by Rabbi Friedmann in his book Who Wrote the Bible? as an alternate explanation for the authorship of Genesis. The JEPD hypothesis appealed to what I like to think of as my ability to think logically and intuitively and allowed me to reconcile my belief that the Bible contains essentially true information, but presented in a often confusing language and phrasing that tends to sometimes muddle the true meaning of that content.
My very wise and learned new friend strongly advised me to stick to exegesis (critical analysis of the text) and warned me against eisegesis (adding one’s own personal opinions or interpretations to what is present in the text) because the former is safe and the latter is dangerous, and in my essay I committed the error of eisegesis, for sure. I wish we had been friends several years ago, when I originally wrote the piece in question.
It is admittedly a very difficult task to read a chapter like Genesis 22 and immediately understand the logic and wisdom of a loving God who allegedly hates human sacrifices in His honor to demand the sacrifice of a man’s only son for no obvious reason. It seems out-of-character for our loving and otherwise benevolent Creator, and creates something of an enigma when trying to argue the benefits of loving this God to non-believers. In my personal opinion, it is far worse to ignore a difficult problem and pretend it doesn’t exist or claim that a story in the Bible was completely fabricated rather than try to solve it, even if the first few attempts at a solution simply don’t work upon further analysis.
We should never be afraid to seek the truth, but careful not to let deceptions and lies fool us. Astruc’s analysis was interesting, detailed, and totally wrong. Yes, I am human, and I made the mistake of assuming because an argument was convincing to me personally, it must be basically true, even though the foundation of the belief turned out to be pure conjecture. In retrospect, it was a very foolish thing for me to do.
Mea culpa.
Having written about the conjecture of evolution theory myself, it seems like an almost unforgivable sin that I would fall prey to an argument about the Bible base on conjecture, but I underestimated the effect of my own cognitive bias.
When Aron Ra recently boasted that he would make me embarrassed to have ever admitted that I believe in creation, I matched his arrogance with my own and assured him his claim was unachievable, because I know the weaknesses and limitations of his arguments long before he has made them. Why? His arguments are neither new nor original–he’s mostly a compiler of the thoughts and ideas of other people, not really a deep thinker in his own right.
Upon further investigation, I discovered that my new friend had given me a rare and valuable gift when he sent me a print copy of Wiseman’s book. It is expensive and hard to find in print (Amazon offers a print copy for $50). I am humbled and very honored that my new friend valued improving my knowledge so much that he would send such a valuable gift to a virtual stranger. I hope to one day prove myself worthy of his friendship.
Now I strongly recommend doing a catalog search before heading down to your local library to look for a copy because they probably don’t have one. I was quite honored and felt undeserving of my new gift. The very least I can do is use what I’ve learned from reading it to set the record straight on the JEPD hypothesis of Genesis authorship and say it is very unlikely to be true.
I will borrow the words of my friend, who explained the problem of Astruc to me in his typical voice of clarity and reason. He explained, “The smoking gun that undermined Wellhausen were archaeological discoveries of written records (clay tablets) that had been around for thousands of years before King David and made reliance on “oral traditions” unnecessary to reconstruct ancient history. The oral traditions were invented to cast doubt on the Bible, excusing Astruc’s apostasy and amplified by godless German critics for the same purpose. No wonder Isaac Asimov (Russian atheist) popularized these JEDP oral traditions in his negative “commentary” on the Bible. But Moses used written clay tablets from the patriarchs to write Genesis, thereby giving substantive support for the veracity of ancient biblical history. That is why Wiseman’s discovery is so important.”
As Wiseman explained in his book and documented with physical evidence of written records older than Moses, Moses could write about the events in Genesis that happened before his time because he had written records from earlier generations. We may not have the actual tablets that belonged to Moses, but we have found similar tablets that existed long before the time of Moses. Many of these early tablets corroborate events in the Bible, such as the Great Flood. Also, there have been a number of archaeological discoveries that lend credence to the history of cities as ancient as Sodom and Gomorrah. The moral of the story is that we should never assume that the content of the Bible is untrue; we should always assume otherwise.
Life is a journey, not a destination. If we believe we exist for some unknown purpose, we might as well assume we are here to learn. I should not be afraid to believe that Wiseman is correct because based on the evidence presented, his argument makes the most sense. However, there will never be a time when I should be afraid to look at new evidence and re-evaluate my current beliefs based on new information that improves my understanding, because understanding truth is the only real goal here. As long as there is breath in my body, I will never be afraid of learning new information, because my life’s goal is to seek truth.
And I’ll never be ashamed or afraid to admit it when I’ve made a mistake or been led astray.
(With sincere and deepest appreciation to my new friend, Dr. R.R. not only for the wonderful gift, but more importantly, for opening my eyes to my mistake.)
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