Friedman’s Thesis: An Overview

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The Hidden Book in the Bible
The Discovery of the First Prose Masterpiece

Restored, Translated and Introduced by Richard Elliott Friedman
(San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998) 404 pp., $25.00 (hardcover)

In his latest book, The Hidden Book in the Bible, biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman purports to have discovered a hitherto unknown book embedded in the biblical text. He names this book the way Jewish tradition names the books of the Pentateuch, by its first word in Hebrew. As B’reshit, traditionally translated “In the Beginning,” is the title of Genesis, so B’yom, “In the Day,” is the title Friedman gives to the book he has extracted from Genesis through Kings.

“In the Day,” Friedman tells us, is “the first great prose work of world literature.” It was written by a single author—the world’s “first great prose writer”—nearly 3,000 years ago. Despite its chronological priority, it is “far from a rudimentary, primitive first attempt at writing.” On the contrary, it is “a masterpiece,” ranking “among the great works of literature of all time.” It is also “the first known attempt at history writing.” (“History writing,” Friedman says, “began in Israel and not Greece.”) Theologically, this hitherto unidentified composition has “affected the course of virtually all subsequent ideas of God in Western religion.”

Once discovered, this composition is seen as “pure, spontaneous and beautiful.” To read it is “to experience the feeling of being close to the Bible’s heart,” for it is in fact “the heart of the Bible.” Friedman likens his discovery to a great archaeological find. “Imagine,” he entices the reader, “you had the good fortune to be in the archaeologist’s office” when he pulls from his drawer the manuscript itself. You now have “the opportunity to read this work that no one has read for almost three millennia.”

What is this work that Friedman has discovered—or, more precisely, restored—for us? It is the work known familiarly as J, generally recognized as the oldest authorial strand of the Pentateuch. But Friedman finds that J extends beyond the Pentateuch—into the biblical books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. Identifying the passages in these post-Pentateuchal books and attributing them to J is Friedman’s contribution.

Friedman writes beautifully, and he has given us one of the clearest, most succinct and most convincing accounts of what J is and how it has been identified in the books of the Pentateuch.

The classic statement of the documentary hypothesis, as it is known, was formulated by the German scholar Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918), who divided the Pentateuch into four strands. In chronological order, they are J, E, D and P, although scholars disagree over whether D or P is older. J, the earliest strand, stands for the Yahwist (Jahwist in German), after the name of God (YHWH, or Yahweh, the personal name of the Israelite God) used in this strand. E stands for the Elohist, who uses Elohim, a more generalized name of God. At some point, J and E were combined into JE. P stands for the Priestly Code; D stands for the Deuteronomist and consists of the Book of Deuteronomy. J and E (or rather JE) were later combined with P by an editor or redactor, called R, to form the four books of the so-called Tetrateuch. D is responsible for Deuteronomy, which completes the Pentateuch—the familiar Five Books of Moses.

Although there have been some modifications in the divisions and attributions, and continuing argument over whether J and E ever existed separately (Friedman argues that they did), the main lines of 032Wellhausen’s analysis have held up remarkably well in modern scholarship.

A typical attack on the identification of the strands, for example, notes that in J God is sometimes referred to as Elohim, rather than as Yahweh, thereby supposedly exploding the theory that J and E can be separated by the name each uses for God (Yahweh by J and Elohim by E). Friedman’s answer is simple and convincing: In J, the narrator always refers to the deity as Yahweh; Elohim is used only in quotations by others when they refer to God but is never used by the narrator.

The distinction between the two strands by means of the name of God each uses is only part of the defense, however. Friedman explains that an enormous combination of factors sustains the validity of the distinction between these two strands—and indeed between each of these strands and P and D. Friedman refers to this as the cumulative strength of the case for the distinction. Thus, it is not just that different names for God are used, or just that repetitions (called doublets) are attributed to different sources, or just that most of the contradictions in the text evaporate when attributed to different sources. It is the cumulative effect of many factors like this. In Friedman’s words:

It was not that there were doublets. Everyone had been aware of that for two millennia. And it was not that there were contradictions in the story, and it was not that there were different names of God. It was that the doublets could be divided into groups, and the different names of God fell consistently into one of these groups or another, and this division resolved most of the contradictions. These and other categories of evidence accumulated, so that many different bodies of data were all pointing in the same direction.

Before the development of the documentary hypothesis, each problem in the text was treated as a separate problem with a separate explanation. The documentary hypothesis provided a convincing wholesale explanation. Again, in Friedman’s words:

Traditional rabbinic and Christian scholarship had offered explanations of the doublets, contradictions, and so on, all along, but it was doing it one verse at a time. If there were two thousand such problems, there were two thousand separate explanations for them. Critical scholarship explained it all with vastly fewer premises. The success of critical scholarship was a quintessential demonstration of the compelling quality of Occam’s razor.

Friedman applies these same methods to identify the continuation of J beyond the Tetrateuch to include parts of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, books traditionally attributed to an editor known as the Deuteronomistic Historian. His major additions to Pentateuchal J fall into three categories: (1) The extension of the story to cover the conquest of the Promised Land under Joshua, as described in the first twelve and a half chapters of the Book of Joshua (2) the so-called Court History of David in 2 Samuel 9 through 1 Kings 2 and (3) other passages between the conquest of the Promised Land in Joshua and the beginning of the Court History of David in 2 Samuel 9. Thus J, as reconstructed by Friedman, starts with Creation and ends with the death of David.

Actually, the first two additions have been suggested by earlier scholars. The third is more nearly Friedman’s original contribution.^a

The promise to Abraham in Genesis is not fulfilled in the Pentateuch; Moses dies without entering the Promised Land. The promise is actually fulfilled in the next book, Joshua; hence the addition of the relevant chapters of Joshua. As Friedman points out (and others have noted), these passages have substantial stylistic, linguistic and other similarities to J and mention some of the episodes contained in J.

The Court History of David includes most of 2 Samuel. On stylistic grounds alone, the great literary critic Erich Auerbach thought J and the Court History were written by the same person. Both Karl Budde and Otto Eissfeldt, German biblical scholars, regarded the court stories of David as a continuation of the J source, as have others, although the matter is still controversial. (Friedman mentions only Budde, not Eissfeldt.)

In what the Anchor Bible Dictionary calls an “epochal study,” Leonhard Rost isolated parts of 2 Samuel into what he identified as a single literary unit containing the Court History.^b Subsequently, scholars have divided Samuel into Samuel A and Samuel B. Friedman finds that Samuel B is substantially part of J.

With this basic structure Friedman fills in the gaps from these and other biblical books to build a continuous narrative.

One suspects that Friedman constructed the narrative first and then tested it to see if the hypothesis held up. He has no doubt that it does. And he makes a good, if not compelling, case. As he emphasizes, it is not just one factor but the cumulative weight of the argument that carries it along.

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For example, in an appendix Friedman lists 22 words and phrases that appear multiple times in his reconstruction of J but not at all in other narratives in the Bible. Thus, the Hebrew word for “foolish” appears ten times in the passages he attributes to J and nowhere else. “Resident of the land” appears six times; elsewhere not once. He also notes that the passages he attributes to J are rich in puns. While puns are used in other parts of the Bible as well, here the puns play on some of the words that recur in J and nowhere else. “The punning on the very terms that recur in this collection reveals an author who was thinking about these words, deploying them with literary purpose. Their disproportionate occurrence in this collection is not just a matter of random distribution.”

This alone is not enough to win the day (as a careful study of the appendix reveals; most of the occurrences are in Pentateuchal J; others occur only in a couple of passages throughout the narrative). But there is more.

As noted, the reconstruction of J forms a continuous, coherent account. Each text takes off where the preceding one stops. Each part flows into the next. “The story in [Pentateuchal] J continues logically and geographically into the beginning of Joshua…Likewise, the story in Judges continues logically and geographically into Samuel B, which in turn continues into the Court History.” (The only weak link, as the foregoing suggests, is between Joshua and Judges. To explain this, Friedman postulates the possibility of two discrete works that were somehow related.)

Friedman also finds in the continuous narrative five sets of parallel stories that have what he calls “dense clusters of common terminology” spread throughout the connected texts. For example, take the story in Genesis 19, attributed to J, about the travelers (actually angels) to Sodom who are given hospitality by Lot. A crowd of Sodomites surrounds Lot’s house and demands that he deliver his guests so that they might have sex with them. Not wanting to break the code of hospitality, Lot delivers his two virgin daughters to the crowd. Not satisfied, the crowd of Sodomites presses for more. Finally, the next morning Lot, his wife and daughters flee at the urging of the angels, and fire and brimstone soon rain on Sodom (and Gomorrah).

In Judges 19, we find a similar story. A Levite and his concubine arrive in Gibeah of Benjamin, where they intend to spend the night. Like the angels in Genesis 19, they are invited to stay in a local home. A crowd of Gibeahites demands that the owner of the house deliver the Levite to them so that they can have sex with him. Instead, the man delivers to the crowd his virgin daughter and the Levite’s concubine. The men seize the concubine and rape her all night. She returns and collapses on the threshold of the house, where, as dawn breaks, she is found dead.

Friedman points not only to these structural and thematic similarities but to detailed verbal similarities:

In Genesis, Lot says to the angels, “Turn…and spend the night” (Genesis 19:2). In Judges, the travelers “turned to spend the night” (Judges 19:15).

In Genesis, the angels answer, “We’ll spend the night in the square” (Genesis 19:2). In 034Judges, the man in the house says, “Don’t spend the night in the square” (Judges 19:20).

In Genesis, Lot offers the visitors the washing of feet (Genesis 19:2). In Judges, too, “they washed their feet” (Judges 19:21).

In Genesis, “the people of the city surrounded the house” (Genesis 19:4). In Judges, “the people of the city surrounded the house” (Judges 19:22).

Lot pleads with the crowd: “Don’t do bad, my brothers” (Genesis 19:7). The man pleads: “Don’t, my brothers, do bad” (Judges 19:23).

Observes Friedman: “It should be obvious that there is something going on here that is more than an editor with an eraser and a pencil.”

Another connection involves repeated prose images within Friedman’s expanded version of J. For example, in Exodus 3:5, Moses is instructed to remove his shoes at the burning bush: “Take off your shoes from your feet because the place on which you’re standing: It’s holy ground.” The exact same words are said to Joshua when he is encamped before Jericho (Joshua 5:15). As Friedman points out, these are not just two authors saying the same favorite old line: This repetition allows us to understand Joshua’s role as Moses’ successor.

As Friedman piles on more and more evidence like this, his case becomes more and more convincing. But is it just clever, or does he, in fact, prove his case? He has no doubt he is right. He expresses himself without hesitation.

Several biblical redactors, or editors, are responsible for the final biblical text: J and E are combined by a redactor Friedman refers to as RJE. Another editor combined the so-called Deuteronomistic (or sometimes Deuteronomic) History, or DH for short.

But if Friedman is correct, the author—or, more precisely, the editor—of DH used J as a source! The initial identification of DH as a single work is usually attributed to the great German scholar Martin Noth in the 1940s. DH consists of Deuteronomy and the subsequent books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. The eminent Harvard scholar Frank Moore Cross brilliantly identified two editions of DH, which he calls Dtr 1 and Dtr 2. The identification of DH is very widely accepted. Although “some scholars have spoken of [DH] as if its historian had written the entire work in his own words,” Friedman tells us, “that is not the case.” The author or editor of DH used existing sources. One of them was J.

The Bible, then, was put together something like this: J and E were combined by an editor to form JE. P was later combined with JE to form the Tetrateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers), or JEP. Independently, another redactor created DH. Changes were made to the original edition of DH, creating a sort of second edition, which is what has come down to us. But the creator of DH did not simply write it. He was largely an editor, using existing 035texts—most importantly J, which, according to Friedman, included the Court History. The editor of DH used this and other passages from J to create his separate masterpiece. Friedman even finds a passage from J in the last chapter of the Book of Deuteronomy itself (Deuteronomy 34:5–7, describing Moses’ death), an assertion that may come as a surprise. To illustrate how novel this suggestion is, the Anchor Bible Dictionary’s nine-page entry on DH by Steven McKenzie makes absolutely no reference to J or to the possibility that parts of DH could be attributed to the author of J.

Probably a major weakness in Friedman’s presentation in The Hidden Book in the Bible is his failure to treat the DH issue more directly and explicitly. He does not really discuss how the author/editor of DH happened to be using so much of J. Moreover, strangely, the editor of DH uses almost none of J in Deuteronomy, which is a second telling of the preceding four books. He then uses large chunks of J in the subsequent books of DH, while the redactor of the Tetrateuch used large chunks of J in his work but apparently ignored J’s account of later events.

It seems that there was a difference in how the two editors—the redactor of the Tetrateuch (JEP) and the redactor of DH—used J. According to Friedman, the redactor of JEP took pieces here and there, but not the whole story. As a result, when we extricate J from JEP, there are holes and breaks in the narrative. Not so with DH. The redactor of DH apparently wove the entire account of J pertaining to the post-Mosaic period into DH so that we have, in Friedman’s words, “an almost complete story.” Question: Why didn’t the redactor of DH include more of J in Deuteronomy, since he (or she—see below) apparently used the entire post-Mosaic portions in his (or her) edition of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and 1 Kings?

Friedman also explores the possibility that J might be a woman. He originally raised this issue in an earlier book, Who Wrote the Bible? (Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1987). Although the world of J is clearly a man’s world, it nevertheless depicts numerous women who achieve very considerable power. Without acknowledging Friedman or his priority to this idea, Harold Bloom, in his best-selling book The Book of J (New York: Grove-Weidenfeld, 1990), picked up Friedman’s suggestion and “transformed it into a full-blown claim.” Friedman says he is “disappointed at [Bloom’s] claim to originality,” adding that “Bloom spoke of the author of the Court History as her [J’s] male rival! One will understand my lack of trust in Bloom’s confidence in his sense that the author of J was a woman, given that he sensed another part of the same author’s work to be by a man.”

On the following pages, we asked three biblical scholars to discuss Friedman’s proposals. They are P. Kyle McCarter, William F. Albright Professor of Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and author of the Anchor Bible commentary on Samuel; BR columnist and book review editor Ronald S. Hendel, associate professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University, who is completing a new edition of the Anchor Bible commentary on Genesis; and Richard D. Nelson, Kraft Professor of Biblical Studies at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, who has just completed the Old Testament Library commentary on Joshua.

Bible scholar Richard Elliott Friedman claims to have found the world’s first prose masterpiece embedded in the Bible. This hidden book, he claims, opens with the Creation and ends with the death of David. Our two-part coverage begins with an article by BR editor Hershel Shanks, who details Friedman’s unconventional theory. In part two, Friedman’s book serves as a springboard for a spirited discussion among three leading scholars on how the Bible came to be.