Cedric pioline documentary hypothesis

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Cedric pioline documentary hypothesis: FOR someone who, in the

Pete Sampras 2. Carlos Costa. Ivan Lendl. Petr Korda. Monte CarloMonaco. Stefan Edberg. And so, to Noth, Cross, and their enthusiastic audiences, it seemed reasonable to imagine that what was true in or about this other corpus might also be true in or about the corpus of ancient Israel and Judah. And this imagination could take on a life of its own, operating on materials that were less familiar and, frankly, less closely scrutinized even by those who were using them.

Obviously definitely, quite concrete historical presuppositions are involved. In all but one of these cases—Gen —Shechem itself is not mentioned, but instead the altar on Mt. The Joshua 24 passages likewise refer only to instances in which Joshua exhorts the people to worship YHWH, with no additional description of place or league.

But, in none of these cases is there any evidence of an institution actually headquartered at or near Shechem, nor are any of these stories terribly distinct from other accounts of altar construction scattered throughout the text Noth, History of Israel, They, presumably, were functioning in an orderly way, too. And this is where we reach the shores of the parallelomania I am describing—because the Greek amphictyonies he so relies on do not operate in the way he imagines either.

Here, Noth staked his claim largely on the fact that there were twelve tribes of Israel and that twelve, or six, appear to be typical numbers for amphictyonies as well, including of the best known, the Delphic.

Cedric pioline documentary hypothesis: The dissertation explores the processes

Or we might put it another way. That he was able to build an argument this way is part of what should interest us. After all, there is nothing that appears complicated about the available counter-arguments. There is, however, a still greater mystery, the unplumbed mystery that requires the solution I have suggested here: why his argument was so popular, beyond him, given how little it seems like it would take to refute it.

And it was very, very popular. As for accounts in classical scholarship of oddnumbered amphictyonies that would have been available to Noth, see G. U 22 William F. Dinkler, ed. George Arthur Buttrick, vol. Neither, though it may seem otherwise, is it to insult the contributions of two scholars who made a great many that have proven enduring. It is, instead, simply to point out that the way he made his argument, the combination of its success, and its extraordinary lack of evidentiary support, constitute a phenomenon that requires an explanation it has never received—even though we no longer need to ask whether the argument itself is valid.

In other words, we might expect scrutiny to be commensurate with the important role the argument played. For quite some time, the opposite was true, and we can—and should—still ask why. What I suggest, of course, in answer to the question is parallelomania.

Cedric pioline documentary hypothesis: () In today's men's semis, Frenchman

See the discussion in De Geus, Tribes of Israel, 55— Texte d. Alten Testamentes u. Kampf um d. Staat Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, His larger scholarly audience felt just the same way. That is, Noth linked the origins of Israel explicitly with the origins of the Pentateuchal narrative itself. Indeed, I would go further. Wellhausen, of course, had argued that the Pentateuch was not only a physical product of the post-Exilic period but mainly reflected the historical imagination of that period, rather than historical realities.

Thus, Noth, by suggesting that so many texts about the tribes are primarily memories of a sort, and even about pre-Israelite experiences, was adding more fuel to this particular fire. In other words, here as in the next section, it was this combination of the desire for a particular scholarly outcome with the relative obscurity of the ancient Greek corpus from the perspective of the typically trained twentieth century Hebrew Bible scholar—that produced, as it often produces, a parallelomania.

Desire made the ancient Greek traditions appear to be something they were not; obscurity defended them from a scrutiny that would reveal as much. Shelley L. Birdsong and Serge Frolov, vol. Hinneberg Leipzig: B. Teubner,51— My purpose here is not, and has not been, to point out the flaws in that widely acknowledged to be fatally flawed.

Specifically, it tends to survive as an influence in places where his argument is treated as a much more general version of itself— more like the general possibility that the Pentateuchal narrative was based on epic traditions of some sort, and to some extent, than the quite specific case he actually made—that it was based on an oral, poetic epic of long ago, in the mode of Homeric epic.

David Konstan and Kurt A. Obviously, just as there are many fields upon which parallelomanias may alight that are obscure by virtue of not being typical primary focuses of inquiry in a discipline, there are many different desires that might shape how they operate. Indeed, if this essay focuses on high-profile instances in which ancient Greek evidence was improperly used to make a case for the early origins of the Pentateuchal narrative and its relationship to historical experiences, today we might be experiencing something of the opposite problem.

In other words, today there are those who see in the same comparative corpus the potential for demonstrating its late, Hellenistic origin. However, I also think that at least some of these studies treat superficial similarities between these two corpora as decisive parallels in order to make their case in just the same way that their predecessors did, towards quite different conclusions.

Thomas L. Thompson and Philippe Wajdenbaum Durham: Acumen,— It is hard for me to believe that any of these are more than a reflection, simply, of societies that are set up in fairly similar ways in terms of gender roles, the importance of wells, and so on. That it did not seem so showcases a still powerful willingness to find proof of this proposition when it should hardly have even been considered discoverable, any longer.

It seems quite clear that in any given context, societal influences help give shape to how many people understand the past, which is collective memory, but much less clear that the older, Romantic model of a society handing down one set of memories from generation to generation—let alone memories that were created by actual experiences—has any basis whatsoever.

In other words, my sense is that what appears to be collective memory is as dramatically reshaped over time as any other aspect of tradition. There is no reason to doubt the Israelite epic traditions preserve accurate reflections of the social institutions, and especially the religious lore of the old time of which it sings. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, Richard E.

It does not use, of course, epic hexameter verse. Its prosody is characterized by parallelism in bicola and tricola. To some extent, we might read this cedric pioline documentary hypothesis as a response to certain criticisms, especially those by Charles Conroy, on the point that epics, as traditionally understood, tend to revolve around heroic glory in a way that the Pentateuch certainly does not.

Norton, Van Seters, In Search of History, Actually, in this essay, he offers a two-part definition. The Hebrew epic recounted crucial events of developing nationhood and gave classical expression to Yahwistic religion. There are no prose versions of the Iliad or the Odyssey or the works of Hesiod. Thus, it is already the case that someone less taken with the conclusions Albright had reached would have presumably shown more care in advancing this argument.

The central problem, however, still lies not with this, but with the analogy Cross makes, and the extent of his dependence on it, just as it did with Noth. And here, his reconstruction of the Israelite epic was based, more or less, entirely on how he understood what Homer was to the Greeks—Cross no more had an actual epic, prose or otherwise to work with, than Noth did a biblical account of the Israelite amphictyony.

And here, too, it should have been obvious, not only in retrospect, that this was very much not what Homer was to the Greeks. To be sure, they would likely have agreed, especially Lord, that the presence of formulaic expressions in almost any literature was enough to assert the presence of an original oral composition of surpassing importance.

But they could not have gone farther than that — they could not have claimed that the Homeric poems were the national or normative account of the early Greeks, with respect to their era of legendary origins. Homer makes her simply the daughter of Zeus and Dione. One point I would make here—and return to later—is that there is a certain irony in this, in the sense that a straightforward consideration of the phenomenology of Homeric epic should actually have made the opposite point to the one Cross wanted to make.

In other words, the diversity of early Greek traditions shows how unlikely it is that there was ever one, single, ruling epic in ancient Israel and Judah. This is a point Van Seters makes as well — that there were, of course, those who drew on Homeric epic in ancient Greece, and Hesiodic as well. They were often busy discovering new legendary events or inventing new connections between the heroes through genealogical constructions.

In fact, an interesting point in a similar vein had long since been made by Wellhausen himself. In earlier periods there may have been fewer poems, but certainly more than these two. See M. Ultimately, then, the fact that Cross, or Albright, or whomever did not arrive at any of these recognitions of course sharpens the sense that their perception of the ancient Greek evidence was shaped, first and foremost, by what they desired to find there.

Indeed, I would go so far as to say that from a technical perspective, what Cross did is—quite inadvertently—reverse the direction of his comparison at the crucial moment. That is, rather than extrapolating what an epic was from the Homeric poems and applying it to the Israelite context, as he claimed to be doing, he seems instead to have imposed the apparent singularity of the pentateuchal narrative as early Israelite charter tradition onto the world of early Greek traditions.

This singularity is, however, only apparent in the biblical case—an accident of survival—and it manifestly does not fit the busy and varied world of early Greek visions of legendary events. In other words, it is the Pentateuch, not Homer, that appears to be the national and normative account of Israelite origins simply by virtue of the fact that it is the only one complete narrative of this sort that survives.

Homer, by contrast, looks like what Homer is. His are, and were, the most popular of many different traditions about the same events, alongside many other traditions about important early realities and experiences, some of them quite different from the rest. And this is why Cross should indeed have drawn the opposite lessons from his foray into comparison, but it is also why it is so clear that he saw what he wanted to see, rather than what was there.

Indeed, with Cross, the pattern of selective use, conflation, and mischaracterization appears even in his use of scholarly arguments. I could point to a number of examples. Black,5. However, it is Nilsson whose most famous contribution concerns the importance of the correlation between the major cities in the Homeric poems and the major cities of Mycenae itself see, for example Nilsson, Mycenaean Origin of Greek Mythology, 27— This is very different, and another instance in which the comparison might easily lead to the opposite conclusion—that an oral poem can become important as a textual composition without having been a centrally important oral tradition earlier on.

Such, generally, is the transformative power of desire in a scholarly context where inquiry lacks the external controls that often come along with greater familiarity. Here, he cites Finley, World of Odysseus, And the cedric pioline documentary hypothesis begins not only with thinking seriously about how to avoid some of the issues described above, but acknowledging which ones cannot be avoided in a systematic way.

Again, this need not be a very considerable obscurity—I can hardly claim that no biblical scholar had read the works of Homer, or Strabo. Noth, as an early reviewer of this essay pointed out to me, would even have gotten quite a good classical education at Gymnasium. But neither are any of the other parallelomanias mentioned above premised on real obscurity.

Anyone can read the Elephantine papyri, or rabbinic, or Near Eastern materials these days. In the latter case, the scholar may well see in the text what they want to see, through quite unintentional motivated reasoning. Of course, desires change—certainly the intensity of the one discussed here has waned. They were, I think, still more intense than is often acknowledged, even now.

While researching this essay I was actually most struck, not by either of the examples above but by a claim made by Albright—not a terribly consequential one, really. But in the course of his Archaeology and the Religion of Israel he asserts that Once we can read the tablets of Cnossus and Pylus. Until then we cannot effectively disprove the views of radical critics who insist that the Iliad was not composed until about the eighth century B.

Even so, it is easy to miss how odd an argument this is to make. The obvious answer is what puts it in conversation with what we have seen so far—that this argument is meant to work by analogy. If one set of Iron Age texts can show what Bronze Age religion was really like, why not another? But Albright never really explains why this should be the case any more than Noth or Cross explained why Greek amphictyonies and epics should be found 69 William F.

This is visible in more than the above gloss of unreadable evidence—because, in fact, there were editions of this book published after the decipherment of Linear B and Albright does update the text somewhat to reflect as much. He shows himself, however, far less interested in the reality than he was, initially, in the power of the analogy.

And this is despite the fact that so many of the most influential classical inquiries occurred between the cedric pioline documentary hypothesis of the former and the latter. Just as importantly, however, Van Seters was, of course, comparing two existing prose accounts of the heroic past. Especially when it has the obscured shape of something beheld at a distance to operate on.

Today, this particular desire has indeed changed, if not quite so much as we might like to believe. But others exist, and always will. And that is where the central problem of this last discussion comes in—that the relative obscurity of ancient Greek traditions, from the perspective of the typically trained Hebrew Bible scholar, has not changed, and presumably will not change.

This is not to say that individual scholars cannot gain enough expertise to make these comparisons useful—I am certainly among those who have tried! At the same time, there is no real prospect of a critical mass of Hebrew Bible scholars gaining enough proficiency with ancient Greek materials not only to make, but to assess these kinds of comparisons unless the field changes dramatically.

In other words, as long as facility with Near Eastern and Levantine comparisons remains the sine qua non of Hebrew Bible scholarship— with perfectly good reason! Van Seters, Schmid, and Rendtorff shared many of the same criticisms of the documentary hypothesis, but were not in complete agreement about what paradigm ought to replace it.

In the midth century, some scholars started a critical study of doublets parallel accounts of the same incidentsinconsistencies, and changes in style and vocabulary in the Torah. These documentary approaches were in competition with two other models, the fragmentary and the supplementary. Crucially, this historical portrait was based upon two earlier works of his technical analysis: "Die Composition des Hexateuchs" 'The Composition of the Hexateuch' of —77, and sections on the "historical books" Judges—Kings in his edition of Friedrich Bleek 's Einleitung in das Alte Testament 'Introduction to the Old Testament'.

Wellhausen's explanation of the formation of the Torah was also an explanation of the religious history of Israel. In the mid to late 20th century, new criticism of the documentary hypothesis formed. These three authors shared many of the same criticisms of the documentary hypothesis, but were not in agreement about what paradigm ought to replace it.

Van Seters and Schmid both forcefully argued that the Yahwist source could not be dated to the Solomonic period c. They instead dated J to the period of the Babylonian captivity — BCEor the late monarchic [ clarification needed ] period at the earliest. Some scholars, following Rendtorff, have come to espouse a fragmentary hypothesis, in which the Pentateuch is seen as a compilation of short, independent narratives, which were gradually brought together into larger units in two editorial phases: the Deuteronomic and the Priestly phases.

Some scholars use these newer hypotheses in combination with each other and with a documentary model, making it difficult to classify contemporary theories as strictly one or another. The general trend in recent scholarship is to recognize the final form of the Torah as a literary and ideological unity, based on earlier sources, likely completed during the Persian period — BCE.

A revised neo-documentary hypothesis still has adherents, especially in North America and Israel. Wellhausen used the sources of the Torah as evidence of changes in the history of Israelite religion as it moved in his opinion from free, simple and natural to fixed, formal and institutional. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk.

Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiversity Wikidata item. Hypothesis to explain the origins and composition of the Torah. History of the documentary hypothesis [ edit ]. Wellhausen and the new documentary hypothesis [ edit ]. Critical reassessment [ edit ]. The Torah and the history of Israel's religion [ edit ].

See also [ edit ]. Notes [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. Jews and Judaism in World History. Abingdon : Routledge. ISBN Bibliography [ edit ]. Baden, Joel S. Anchor Yale Reference Library. Yale University Press. Barton, John Barton, John; Muddiman, John The Pentateuch. Oxford University Press. Berlin, Adele Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative.

Berman, Joshua A. Brettler, Marc Zvi The Jewish Study Bible.