Karl Heinrich Graf gets credit for establishing J and E beyond a doubt. At least, Wellhausen gives him that credit. Graf’s book The Historical Books of the Old Testament is on the web. The introduction is a beautiful indicator of why DH has gone so wrong.
Graf says that Torah has to become divorced from Jewish culture to be properly understood.
Because you have been reading this blog, you know that it has been a divorce from Jewish culture that has led to urban legends which I have debunked.
Graf says that it is the insistence on a single perspective that has tied Jewish commentators up in shackles (his word), the same as the Catholic church has been tied up in shackles. That demonstrates Graf’s prejudices. He writes as if Protestantism is the only possible correct perspective for any research into the Bible.
Graf says that a single school of study which claims for itself all rights to judge what is correct, will later find itself stymied.
No truer words were ever spoken. That is the position where DH now finds itself. Claiming that it knows THE truth about Torah, and ignoring advances in archaeology as well as in our understanding of how language develops and operates, has created a paradigm with an infinitesimal probability of being true. But true to Victorian scholasticism, Graf believed that his own work will never be overturned by later discoveries or trends.
Graf specifically rejected Astruc’s (and later Hermann Gunkel’s) idea that Torah came together out of fragments.
This is the essence of the doctrine of completeness and invention ab initio, one of which is too ambiguous for proper proof, and the other of which I will deal with some time from now.
I don’t know how Graf could believe that manuscripts survive centuries without scribal errors. He surely knew about the Masoretic annotations I discussed in the Lost in Translation section.
The problem of variations in manuscripts was well known in his time to people studying Samaritan scripture; it was known to Rev. Brian Walton who produced the London Polyglot Bible in the 1600s, incorporating both Samaritan Pentateuch and Samaritan Targum. It was known to the collectors of manuscripts of Samaritan “Chronicle” starting in the 1500s and continuing into Graf’s times, according to Turnbull.
The problems of manuscripts are even better illustrated in the Qumran scrolls. Of course Graf didn’t know anything about Qumran.
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