Bible Critics Respond: An Interview

035

Hershel Shanks: Do you agree or disagree, or don’t you know whether you agree, with Dick Friedman’s contention that J, as we have it in the Tetrateuch, is also the author of the passages he identifies in Deuteronomy and the rest of the Deuteronomistic History through Kings?

P. Kyle McCarter: In one word?

Ronald S. Hendel: Scholars can’t use just one word.

Shanks: You’ll have plenty of chance to explain. I want to get your positions on the table.

McCarter: I disagree.

Richard D. Nelson: I think he makes the best possible case that could be made, but I don’t think he makes the case well enough. So I disagree.

Hendel: I agree, disagree and don’t know. (laughter)

McCarter: Where J ends has always been a problem. Most emphatically, however, it does not include the so-called Court History of David (2 Samuel 9 to 1 Kings 2). It’s very unlikely J goes beyond parts of the Book of Joshua. I’m inclined to end J with the Tetrateuch, as the majority of scholars do. The theme of J reaches its natural culmination in the conquest of the Promised Land, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the end of J is somehow embedded in the Book of Joshua or if J at one time included an account of the conquest of the land and that material has now been lost. But I don’t see any reason to connect the materials in Samuel and Kings with J.

Nelson: Certainly a lot of the themes of J are also in Joshua, Judges and Samuel. What I am unable to 036find is a plot connection. It is not at all clear to me that the Court History of David makes a good conclusion for the narrative problems that are raised in J in Genesis.

Shanks: Can you be more specific?

Nelson: For example, in Genesis J starts with some very big problems, like Adam and Eve and the first murder and the division of the nations at the Tower of Babel and the promise to Abraham that all the nations of the world would be blessed or would bless themselves by or through him. It’s not clear to me how Solomon’s coming to the throne in 1 Kings 1 and 2 [which is where Friedman ends the J narrative] is any kind of answer to these wonderful cosmic problems. Over and over I kept coming back to the question: How does Friedman’s J make any kind of coherent plot structure? I just couldn’t see it.

Hendel: I think Dick [Friedman] has succeeded in raising some very important issues about the continuities in the prose narratives in the first part of the Bible. His proposal is a legitimate one, even if one isn’t convinced by the details. In that sense I’m a big fan of the book. It’s also very readable and very exciting.

Shanks: I think we can all agree that it’s well written.

Hendel: These are the sorts of issues that I think biblical scholars should be discussing. These issues may sort out in a way that differs from Dick’s specific conclusions, but I think that the questions he’s raising are important—and ones that we sort of dropped the ball on over the last century and have not paid enough attention to. If there are these continuities of theme, occasionally of language, of prose style, we need to come up with some approach to accommodate what these similarities are and how they came about. Maybe there’s more than one author [in Friedman’s proposed J], but they influenced each other.

Shanks: The public—we outsiders—have been led to believe that the Pentateuch consists of four strands: J, E, P and D. Scholars have also identified something called the Deuteronomistic History, which consists of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. Now you’re telling us that it’s more complicated and mixed up.

McCarter: I think in one sense there’s a near consensus that the Deuteronomistic History is a single document. But almost everyone thinks that the Deuteronomistic Historian used sources; he did not sit down and write the Deuteronomistic History from Deuteronomy through Kings as an original composition. The historian was drawing on other documents that he included in his history.

We need to understand how ancient writers composed their literature. They didn’t do it the way modern writers compose literature. The great achievement of a modern writer, particularly a writer of fiction, is to write something from beginning to end that is his or her own composition. They want to be as original as possible. In antiquity those principles didn’t apply. The ancient writers tried first of all to be faithful to the tradition, both in retelling traditional stories and in using traditional plot ideas and language. We know this not only from biblical literature but also from other ancient Near Eastern literature—from Ugaritic literature and Mesopotamian literature. Compositions that are centuries apart in Mesopotamia will include passages that are uncannily alike; the reason is that the Mesopotamian writers knew the tradition and they were trying to be faithful to it. They were trying not to be original. There’s every reason to think that Israelite literature arose in the same way. Israelite writers, too, would use similar language and would not try to differentiate their styles.

Many of the things Dick [Friedman] talks about in his book—for example, that Samuel and the Tetrateuch use similar plot ideas—are simply reflections of the fact that you have two different writers who were trained in the same way and knew the same Hebrew style and were trying to produce a work in the same style, but not that they are the same writer.

Shanks: From what you say, couldn’t you conclude that the Deuteronomistic Historian, or whoever put this together, could well have used J as a source?

McCarter: There are two great writings from ancient Israel—or from Israel and Judah. One we call the Deuteronomistic History and the other we can call the Priestly History. At some point during the [Babylonian] Exile [sixth century B.C.E.] or in the post-Exilic period, these two great histories were put together to form what another Freedman—Dick’s colleague David Noel Freedman^a—calls the Primary History, from Genesis through Kings. It was this putting together that created our most difficult problem, because they overlap slightly. The Deuteronomistic History begins [in Deuteronomy] with Moses standing at the Jordan looking at the Promised Land. Where the Priestly History ends we’re not quite sure. It should have ended with the conquest of the land because it’s the story about the land, the national narrative. It’s precisely the points at which they merge in Deuteronomy and Joshua that we have most difficulty in seeing how they can be separated. Each of them originally was a composite piece, and each used older sources. The Priestly 037History incorporated J and E. The Deuteronomistic History, too, incorporated other sources.

The book of the Torah that Hilkiah found in the Temple [2 Kings 22:8] was the core of Deuteronomy. It was the basis of [King] Josiah’s religious reform [purifying the cult and centralizing worship in Jerusalem]. You see these religious ideas and laws in Deuteronomy 12–20. They are the criteria by which the Deuteronomistic Historian evaluates history. Josiah wanted to tell the story of Israel from the coming into the Promised Land and the founding of the monarchy down to his own time, when this reform was instituted, to explain why we need the reform. How do you do this? You look at the laws in Deuteronomy 12–20, and then you look back into the reign of each king. Did that king do what the law says? If so, he gets good marks. If not, as with most of them, he gets bad marks. And of course, Josiah gets the best marks of all, not only because he commissioned the history, but also because he is reforming the cult of the God of Israel in accordance with the law. In order to tell the story and to evaluate the reigns of these kings, the Deuteronomistic Historian goes to the palace archives and gets out all the old scrolls, and he finds the old scroll with the so-called Court History and other material. And he incorporates that into his narrative, but always with his characteristic formulaic language at the beginning, and sometimes at the end, saying how long the king reigned and whether he followed the rules of Deuteronomy.

Shanks: Did he use J?

McCarter: No, he doesn’t use J.

Shanks: Isn’t that the major thesis of Dick Friedman’s book—that he does use J?

McCarter: Yes. Why doesn’t the Deuteronomistic Historian use J? Because J is a book about people and the land. It climaxes with the capture of the land, which is before the Deuteronomistic History begins. On the other hand, I think he knew J. The passage that Friedman is excited about in Deuteronomy 34 [Deuteronomy 34:5–7, describing Moses’ death] may well be J. It probably wasn’t incorporated by the Deuteronomistic Historian but by the final compiler of these two great histories. There may also be some P in Joshua—again, the result of the compilation of these two great histories. But, contra Friedman, J is not a significant source for the Deuteronomistic History.

Nelson: Let me build on what Kyle is saying. Each of the sources that we think the Deuteronomistic Historian used has its own plot integrity. Let me give three examples: 1 Samuel 4–6 and 2 Samuel 6 are narratives about the Ark of the Covenant, which Friedman tells us is by J. When you pull this out and read it, you get a plot that starts with a problem: The Ark is captured by the Philistines. And you end up with a resolution. The Ark comes to Jerusalem and is at home there. That’s not part of a huge work that connects with J in the Pentateuch. It has its own plot integrity. When it’s done, the plot is finished.

Another example: What is often called the Rise of David, 1 Samuel 16 to 2 Samuel 5. There again, we have a plot that is contained in itself: Saul falls apart as a king, David rises to the kingship and finally achieves it all in 2 Samuel 5.

The third example is the Court History, which Friedman also attributes to J and which starts with a plot problem about the succession to David’s throne; and then, when we get to 1 Kings 2, that plot problem is solved by Solomon’s becoming king.

So instead of the Deuteronomistic Historian using one coordinated source, J, for all of this material, when we actually look at it, we see there are three individual works, each of which has its own plot integrity.

Shanks: But isn’t it important to look at the big picture and ask: What’s the relationship that these three plot lines might have to one another? And, the next question, what relationship does this have to the Pentateuch?

Nelson: Right. This is a very important question that needs to be talked about. Why do we have these connected themes? But I don’t think the answer is some sort of an anachronistic reconstruction of a modern historical novel behind all of this. The answer is at the other end of the process: These various materials were brought together under the umbrella of themes that people cared about.

Shanks: We can all agree that the final product represents the weaving together of many sources from many times, often re-edited and reusing similar themes, etc. But are we ever left with anything except speculation as to how this was all put together?

038

Hendel: To say that there are distinct compositions that are drawn upon by the Deuteronomistic History is not just an impressionistic sense of where the story line goes. That’s part of it. Leonhard Rost has done a very impressive stylistic analysis of the Ark Narrative, for example, comparing it to the style of the Court History.^b He found differences in the way sentences and dialogue are constructed. Those details, the little bricks that are different, are an important part of the picture. The editor integrated them into the final product with other differences one senses in plot structure and the like.

McCarter: You asked the question, Hershel, are we left with speculation? To some extent the criteria are subjective. What I see as a stylistic difference, Dick Friedman might not. He might see it as a stylistic similarity. But there are ways of controlling these things. It’s not simply speculation on the part of various scholars. For example, Rich [Nelson] brought up (1) the Ark Narrative, (2) the story of David’s rise to power and (3) the Court Narrative. Those are identifiable not only because of their organic integrity, as Rich described it, or because of their stylistic individuality, as Ron [Hendel] mentioned, but because we have parallels in ancient Near Eastern literature of those kinds of literature. The Ark Narrative, which is a good example, tells the story of the capture of the Ark by the Philistines. While it’s captured, it remains in Philistine territory and it is there because the God of Israel, whose Ark it is, is angry at the Israelites. So he goes into exile voluntarily to punish his own people. Then the Ark comes back riding in a cart, and David later brings it into Jerusalem.

Several years ago, Jimmy Roberts and Pat Miller wrote a very important little monograph, called The Hand of the Lord, in which they collected numerous Mesopotamian parallels to this. In these, the statue of the god, which would be the Mesopotamian equivalent of the Israelite Ark, voluntarily goes into exile, or is captured by an enemy army, because the god (or goddess, in some cases) is angry with his home Mesopotamian city.^c The main example is Marduk. He is angry with Babylon, and then allows his statue to be captured. It remains in captivity for a period of time until finally Marduk is pleased with the new regime in Babylon and the statue comes back in a great celebration. That’s exactly the plot of the Bible’s Ark Narrative. So the author of the biblical Ark Narrative is writing a known genre of Near Eastern literature.

That’s an objective criterion as scientific as you would want. So we can see the Ark Narrative as an individual piece of literature that was there. It was composed in its entirety in order to explain why the Ark was captured and why it came back and also to elevate David as the king to whom the God of Israel found it acceptable to return.

Shanks: Somebody might conclude from what you say that the Ark Narrative was simply made up—that it’s a later fictionalized creation based on the Mesopotamian parallel in order to magnify the stature of David as representing the Israelite God. Is that where you’re going?

Hendel: We are trying to find valid criteria for distinguishing sources. This is something methodological that I think Dick Friedman emphasizes very eloquently—we are looking for a confluence of different factors that help form a coherent model. So we are looking at genre, we are looking at plot, we are looking at style, we are looking at vocabulary, we are looking at theology, we are looking at all of these things, especially when they cohere to form a portrait that indicates this is a separate work.

Shanks: Let’s get specific for a moment. Say you find certain similarities. How do you decide whether these similarities indicate a single author or that a second author was influenced by the first?

Hendel: That’s the rub. It’s very difficult to do.

Shanks: You haven’t given me a single criterion that would help me to decide whether these two passages were written by the same person or whether the second was influenced by the first.

Nelson: One criterion would be, Does this whole work have unity of vision as to where it’s starting, where it’s going and how it’s getting there?

Shanks: And you say that’s what’s missing from Dick Friedman’s view of J?

Nelson: Not only is it missing in the J that he describes, but it is present in smaller pieces that he runs together in his J.

039

Hendel: Yet I still agree with the subtitle of Dick’s book. I think that this is the first prose masterpiece as the pieces are put together. This is incredibly good stuff. In part, he sees it as the work of a single author to explain why it’s all so good, why it is all a masterpiece. And I think that’s a live question. There are things like it in the ancient world, but this is better.

Why is it that there’s this great flowering of writing, even if it’s by more than one person? Something is going on among the groups of writers; there is mutual influence going on. There’s something about this whole oeuvre, this whole movement of literary activity, that is astonishing.

Nelson: We do have this tremendously creative literature. Dick argues that it all goes back to some great original genius. This is an alternative view. I believe what we have is a body of literature that has been screened by a selection process. Its excellence may be that all the bad stuff, all the dull stuff, got dropped out, screened out in the collection process.

Shanks: What period are we talking about?

Hendel: Well, that’s a good question. It seems to me that some parts of Samuel are earliest—the Ark Narrative, the Rise of David, the Court History.

Those date fairly close to the reign of David because the political motivation and political apologetics suit that period. Political reasons for certain positions taken in these passages wouldn’t be valid in a later period.

Shanks: For example?

McCarter: Look at the story of the Rise of David. A young man not even from Saul’s tribe, Benjamin, but from Judah, succeeds Saul even though Saul had sons of his own. The story of David’s rise explains how and why that happened. At the end of the story there are a number of political assassinations: Saul’s heir Ishbaal is murdered; the general who is the real strongman in Saul’s administration, Abner, is also murdered. David is the beneficiary of both of these murders. The story explains how David never intended to be hostile to Saul and had nothing to do directly with either of these murders; it shows that he’s worthy of becoming king of Israel; it defends him against charges of usurping the throne. Those were hot issues when David had just taken over the throne of Israel [10th century B.C.E.]. They weren’t hot issues a century later, when the Davidic dynasty had established itself for several generations (and they certainly weren’t issues even later when scholars like John Van Seters would date this material).

Another example: The story of Absalom’s revolt in the so-called Succession Narrative. David’s son Absalom was an extremely popular figure. He had a huge popular following, more so than the king himself, we’re told, and a civil war took place outside Jerusalem in which Absalom was killed. The story demonstrates that David didn’t ruthlessly murder his own son; it was done by David’s generals—David himself was heartbroken over it. These are issues that were contemporary in David’s own time.

When I was working on my 1 Samuel commentary, I actually reluctantly came to these conclusions about the early date of this material. But I couldn’t avoid concluding that there was Davidic material embedded in the books of Samuel.

Shanks: Does your conclusion have any implications regarding the existence or historicity of David?

McCarter: Absolutely, yes. David was a fully historical figure. He was not a shadowy dynastic founder or an imaginary first king. He was a historical figure who seized the throne of Israel, a very new kingdom, under very questionable circumstances. He commissioned a scribe to write a great deal of apologetic literature explaining why that was all right to do.

Hendel: Let me put an exclamation mark on what Kyle is saying. When you read these stories closely, you realize that they are responding to political charges that were alive at the time. These charges are that David is not a legitimate heir to the throne and, as Baruch Halpern has recently argued in a brilliant article, that people were accusing David, whether rightly or wrongly, of being a serial murderer.^d The story of the Rise of David is a masterful work not only of literature but also of political 044spin. This is politics, exculpating the king from some very serious charges.

Shanks: Why would the final editor of the Bible retain these passages, which, after all, reveal David’s flaws?

Hendel: It’s not only consummate political spin, it’s also great literature. In the end, these stories glorify David. They say he’s the greatest king ever.

Nelson: The final collector may have been more interested in the theology, in God’s appearances in these stories, than in the political literature.

Shanks: How can you have it both ways? On the one hand, Kyle [McCarter] and Ron [Hendel] are telling us that the political spin dates it almost contemporaneously with the events, and you [Rich Nelson] are telling us that it was retained by a much later editor for other reasons.

Nelson: As time went on and these materials gradually became Scripture, people weren’t as concerned that David might not be perfect as long as he was faithful. It’s the presence of God and what he is up to in these narratives that they are really concerned with, as part of the big narrative from Genesis to the end of Kings.

Shanks: When and how do you date J in the Pentateuch?

Hendel: In the eighth century [B.C.E.].

Shanks: Why?

Hendel: Well, for one thing, the Assyrian Empire is occasionally alluded to in J. J mentions Nineveh in the story about Nimrod (Genesis 10:8–11). Nineveh was built by one of the Assyrian kings in the later part of the eighth century. Another example: Ur of the Chaldees is mentioned as Abraham’s birthplace (Genesis 11:27–28). “Chaldees” is an ethnic term. To identify southern Mesopotamia with the Chaldees is appropriate for the eighth century but not before.

In the Garden of Eden, the Tigris River is located opposite Asshur (Genesis 2:14). When is Asshur an important city? During the Assyrian Empire. When you put these little allusions together, it begins to look like this is the background of J’s narrative.

Shanks: How do you know that the final editor didn’t say, “Well, I want to give the reader a little help. Today, we know that Nineveh and Asshur are important cities, and references to them will provide a guide to earlier events. These insertions are not integral to the story, so let’s just stick them in.” How do you know that these allusions aren’t just late insertions into an early narrative?

Hendel: That is possible, but all we have is the data available. We have to go with what little data we have. You also have to look at the linguistic evidence. How does it cohere with the reference to international affairs? All of these things seem best explained by saying that J was written roughly in the eighth or seventh century [B.C.E.].

J is what Frank Cross has termed an epic, the epic story of Israel.^e Cross believes this was originally a poetic narrative that was reduced to prose by the J writer (and the E writer, and so on). So lying behind J was an original oral narrative.

Nelson: Frank’s argument is very cogent. Although J is working in the period of the Assyrian Empire, he’s not making up this national story; he’s taking an older national story and reducing it to prose.

In some passages, you can see some of the old poetry shining through in the prose, where J is reducing this to prose. You’ll see some poetic parallelism, the hallmark of Hebrew poetry, in Exodus 19, for example. This is prose, but listen for parallelism of the kind we get in poetry:

Moses went up to God.

The Lord called to him from the
mountain, saying,

“Thus you shall say to the House
of Jacob, and tell the Israelites:

‘You have seen what I did to the
Egyptians, and how I bore you on
eagles’ wings and brought you to
myself. Now therefore, if you obey
my voice and keep my covenant,
you shall be my treasured possession
out of all the peoples.

Indeed, the whole earth is mine,
but you shall be for me a priestly
kingdom and a holy nation.’”

Exodus 19:3–6

To be sure, this is prose, but prose that has such parallelistic structure that it bespeaks of poetry underlying the prose. Is Cross right? I don’t know. I think that the highest form of Hebrew prose often has a parallelistic structure, so it may be that this is a passage of very elegant prose. That might be the nature of J. Even scholars who haven’t accepted Cross’s idea of a poetic substratum nevertheless think that J goes back originally to some kind of Vorlage that was either written prose or oral poetry or both.

Shanks: What you are saying is that even if we date J to the eighth century [B.C.E.], 045J himself or herself used earlier sources that we really can’t identify. Is that correct?

Hendel: Absolutely. I like to think of the Greek tragedians—Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides and all those guys. They were writing works of consummate literary genius, but they were clearly drawing on the cultural, oral traditions of their people. Their audiences knew roughly what to expect in terms of plot lines and characters—for example, that Clytemnestra and Aegisthus are going to kill Agamemnon. So there’s a synthesis of the traditions that everybody knows about and making those traditions come alive again. That’s what we see in J (and E and other writing as well). This goes back to what Kyle was saying: These are not modern novelists. It would have been inconceivable for them to make up stories about how their nation was founded. They would have been laughed out of town. These are stories that everybody knew in general terms, stories that grandma and grandpa told when they were kids. But this is a fresh retelling, a reactualization of these stories.

Shanks: Was it something other than grandpa and grandma? Was there also a tradition of singers or a scribal class that preserved them? How were they preserved?

Hendel: The Bible tells us that they were preserved by the fathers and the elders:

Remember the days of old;
consider the years long past.
Ask your father,
and he will inform you;
Your elders and they will tell you.

Deuteronomy 32:7

At festivals these stories were told. At the covenant ceremony in Joshua 24, Joshua tells these stories. So these stories were told in cultic contexts, at religious festivals, as well as in domestic contexts, within the house, within the clan, within the tribe. There were multiple contexts in which these stories were transmitted.

McCarter: That many of these stories had an old poetic form, going back to Cross’s idea, is suggested by the fact that the oldest literature in the Bible is a group of old poems. Some of these are historical narratives having to do with the national story. A writer like J probably had available to him poems like Exodus 15, the Song of the Sea, which recounts Israel’s departure from Egypt and Judges 5, which describes Israel’s war against the Canaanites. Poetic narratives like these indicate that J, for example, had a rich and very broad poetic tradition available to him. There probably were Israelite singers who were commissioned to sing and perform at court. We have some of their poems. It is quite possible that in the eighth century [B.C.E.] or thereabouts one of the kings of Judah commissioned the prose narrative that we call J based on these traditional national poems.

Shanks: What’s going on in the eighth century that would have impelled that decision?

Hendel: The Assyrian threat, a big-time national threat.

McCarter: The northern kingdom of Israel is collapsing. In 721 B.C.E. its existence was snuffed out. J, as all scholars recognize, has a southern, Judahite orientation.

My main problem with the basic thesis of Friedman’s book stems from the way I understand the purpose of the J narrative in the Tetrateuch. It is a national epic explaining Israel’s possession of the land. It opens with cosmic issues: The man and woman in the Garden, the expulsion from the Garden, the first murder. These are cosmic issues. The first 11 chapters of Genesis are sometimes called the Primeval History. They deal with issues involving all of humanity, not just Israel. Yet ultimately, those issues all have to do with a relationship between humans and the land. Man is put into the Garden to till the soil. When he’s excluded from the Garden, that makes agriculture difficult. When Cain kills Abel, Cain can no longer be an agriculturalist. The purpose of the Flood is to cleanse the land. After that, the seasons become regular and Noah plants the first vineyard. This all has to do with the relationship between humans and the land. And it doesn’t work [well]. The world becomes increasingly complex in these first 11 chapters.

The divine solution is to select one family to whom this blessing can be given and then transmit it through that family to other families. That is why God says to Abraham that the other families of the land will find their blessing in him (Genesis 12:3, 18:18; cf. Genesis 28:14). Abraham’s descendants are promised that they will become a great nation in their own land. The whole theme of J is about the people and the land, and it quickly focuses on Israel and its land. The natural culmination of the story, then, is the conquest of the land. That’s described in Joshua. That’s why scholars used to speak of the Hexateuch [six books], rather than the Tetrateuch [four books] or the Pentateuch [five books]—because the Hexateuch ends with the conquest of the land. The natural culmination of J is the entry into the Promised Land, promised at the beginning of 046chapter 12 of Genesis. That, not the reign of Solomon, is the natural culmination of J. That’s why it wouldn’t be surprising to find J in the Joshua narrative. But it’s equally possible—the mainstream view—that J ends in the Tetrateuch (with Numbers) with the Israelites standing on the verge of entry into the Promised Land. Being fruitful, multiplying and filling the land is the natural culmination of the J theme.

Robert Coote pointed out long ago (I don’t think he ever published it) that there are only two talking animals in the Bible. The J narrative begins with one of them, the talking snake, and ends with the other one, the talking ass. Balaam’s ass (Numbers 22–24) and Eve’s serpent form a kind of envelope to J.

That may not be a trivial point. By marking the beginning and end, it emphasizes that J’s theme is the land. It’s how Israel comes to be the possessor of the Promised Land. Later the P writer elaborates, in a different way, this same central theme.

Hendel: To be fair, Dick [Friedman] recognizes that his “Super J” may end in Joshua 11:23, where it says “And Joshua took all of the land according to all that Yahweh had spoken to Moses, and Joshua gave it to Israel as a legacy, according to their tribal divisions. And the land had respite from war.” Dick says that this could be an ending to J.

McCarter: The problem is that that language about the land and respite is purely Deuteronomistic language, not J. Deuteronomy 12 is where the promise comes from. Moses is told when you enter the land and capture it, you will be given rest.

Shanks: According to Friedman, J is not only part of the Pentateuch but also part of the Deuteronomistic History (Deuteronomy through Kings). I was very surprised to read Friedman’s suggestion that the Deuteronomistic Historian used J as a source. Is that a new idea?

Nelson: The year 1943 is the magic year for the Deuteronomistic History. That was when the German Bible scholar, Martin Noth, during World War II—I suspect he had a lot of time on his hands—published a volume in which he maintained that all the material from Deuteronomy to the end of Kings is a unified history of Israel in the land, written by someone with a Deuteronomistic outlook. He was able to show how various editorial techniques were utilized by that author to hold all of this material together in a single plotted-out history.

Shanks: Is it a problem for this theory that the Deuteronomistic History used J as a major source?

Hendel: No. It’s long been established that the Deuteronomistic History used J (and E) in Deuteronomy and occasionally quotes J in Deuteronomy. That in itself is not a problem.

Shanks: Do you all agree with that?

Nelson: I wouldn’t be as surprised as you were in your summary, Hershel, to find some of J in the last chapter of Deuteronomy [in Deuteronomy 34:5–7]. That’s not an unusual thing for people to say. The first three chapters of Deuteronomy retell the story from Sinai on. There’s a connection between the texts in the first three chapters of Deuternonomy and parts of Numbers. There’s some kind of relationship going on The Deuteronomistic Historian drew on J, knew about J.

Shanks: Well then, has Dick Friedman identified J in the later books of the Bible?

McCarter: Dick Friedman is a serious biblical scholar. He has written a book that tries to interpret the bigger ideas in the Bible both to a general mass audience and to his colleagues. That’s an admirable thing to do He is a strong writer. He’s a clear thinker. It’s an engaging book. To make his case, however, he would have to go a lot further in a number of areas and engage the existing scholary literature on a number of points. I’ll give you an instance: His hallmark example of the continuity of J beyond the Pentateuch is the similarity of the story of Genesis 19 [Sodomites demand to have sex with male houseguests] and the story of Judges 19 [towns people demand to have sex with male houseguest], in both of which guests are treated inhospitably,to say the least.

Many scholars regard the final three chapters of Judges, Judges 19–21, as being very late, long after J. This is true even of scholars who generally tend to date passages early. So dating Judges 19 to’s time is very problematic. Most scholars would say that these very striking similarities that Dick Friedman enumerates between Genesis 19 and Judges 19 are the result of a literary dependence of a much later author (the author of Judges 19) on Genesis 19. To persuade his colleagues that they are both by J, Dick Friedman is going to have to engage them on that level and argue against that widely held position. If Friedman’s hypothesis is to be accepted, he is going to have to do this again and again and again with regard to various arguments he makes. Friedman is a superbly trained and widely read scholars, but he doesnt do that. In this book, however, he puts his ideas out there and simply says “Here it is. What do you think?” In order to persuade his collegues, he’s going to have to do a lot more than that.

Shanks: I thank all of you very much.BR

Hershel Shanks: Do you agree or disagree, or don’t you know whether you agree, with Dick Friedman’s contention that J, as we have it in the Tetrateuch, is also the author of the passages he identifies in Deuteronomy and the rest of the Deuteronomistic History through Kings?
P. Kyle McCarter: In one word?
Ronald S. Hendel: Scholars can’t use just one word.