The following intends to show that the Old Testament contains different traditions arising from different quarters and different times. The average reader is not always aware of the differences but on closer inspection the "seams" of these traditions become more and more apparent. Many tend to regard the Bible as a book completed at one sitting yet the Bible has a long, interesting and sometimes complicated history.
The Old Testament was written over a period of almost a thousand years. Some of the individual books evolved over a period of centuries and are therefore not completed by one single writer, and because many of these writers lived in different times and different circumstances far removed from one another they tend to add to the scriptures from a different viewpoint.
By the time when great philosophers of Greece, on whose heritage Western culture drew, came into prominence, Israel had already ceased to exist as a political force. Most of the Old Testament had already been written, when people like Aristotle and Plato were alive, and therefore we should not interpret it or treat it as a western document of theology. We can at best make a historical reconstruction of the progress of Israel's conception of God as reflected in the Old Testament. Before we can make a historical reconstruction of how the Bible came about we have to know first of all who are the Hebrews, their origins and who they worshipped.
As the Israelites and their ancestors experienced various circumstances and cultural phases they gained various religious insights. The oral traditions recalling the beliefs and deeds of the early patriarchs of the Hebrew tribes was written down at a latter date by authors who wrote in other images and who saw their spiritual experiences from a different world view. The first Writers where those who experienced the Jewish cultural zenith under David and Solomon. Those who edited and added to their writings afterwards lived during the split up of the kingdom into two separate and relatively prosperous kingdoms that later fell into decline, was conquered and finally banished by the Babylonians from Palestine.
To believe that the same God inspired the whole of the Bible, ideas on God as recorded in the Bible Scriptures in the period before the Babylon exile necessarily have to be in agreement with views on God during or after the exile. The Old Testament however is in all respects a catholic document in the sense that it universally deals with more than one view of God and these views appear side by side, viewpoints that cannot in all circumstances be reconciled with one another. It would be wrong to summarily assume that a text deriving from 1000 BC has the same message as a text dating from 100 AD.
If I can just sketch a brief introduction of the origin and growth of the books of the Old Testament by introducing is principal authors, we then can examine actual Bible passages for evidence. An useful method to interpret the first five books of the Bible is the view that the early Hebrew sacred scriptures came to be written by a process called the four-document theory, originally proposed by the Graf-Wellhausen school of biblical scholars in the nineteenth century. These German biblical scholars developed a critical method called form criticism, adhering strictly to the text they compared parts of the Bible and through textual analysis of its contents they traced the history of its contents of proverbs, myths, genealogies, historical claims, ritual observances and other forms.
Through this method they managed to discern four different sources in the first five books of the Bible. These first five books Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy were later collated in the fifth century before Christ into the final text of what is known as the Pentateuch. They proposed that the Old Testament Bible is the result of four separate strands of biblical narration namely Yahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomic and Priestly, each with its own agenda but later these strands became merged into one continuous biblical narrative.
This theory has been harshly criticized and have since then been constantly modified as knowledge expands in biblical research, but it still nonetheless continues to be affirmed almost incontrovertibly. Nobody has yet come up with a more satisfactory theory as to the two different accounts of key Biblical events such as for example the creation and the flood or why the Bible sometimes contradict itself. I wish to expound on this theory and show how these early writers basing their writings on oral traditions developed the concept God.
Firstly we have to understand that there was two main streams, those Hebrews who originally followed the God El, the God of the patriarchs, and those who followed the god Yahweh, after the Moses. Yahwist writers who at a later date edited the Bible we must understand how these gods came to be one God in latter traditions propagated this God of liberation and law. The early writers also followed these two distinct traditions and so we talk of the Elohist writers and the Yahweh writers and those latter writers who edited their work afterwards namely those writers labeled as Deutro-Isaiah, the Chronist, the Prophets and the Protesters
Oral Tradition
The compilation of the Old Testament books has its origins initially in oral traditions, which were transmitted orally from one generation to the next. This applies to the narratives such as those on the patriarchs, the Exodus, the experience at Sinai, the Hebrew's settlement in parts of Palestine and various experiences after their settlement of Canaan. The Bible has a curious history, part folklore and part record. History is said to written by the victors, and those Biblical writers who where most victorious became the carriers of history.
The history of the Israelis is the history of a people who had to stop being nomad and pastoral and had to become an agricultural tribe. Most modern Biblical scholars agree that they only started writing down some of these narratives in and around Jerusalem shortly after the death of David, about 960 Before Christ. These narratives was collected into larger units forming the earliest written old Testament material that the Old Testament writers drew from. Thus the material most Old Testament writers drew from was written during a period when the Israelis was at a cultural peak and needed an written history to justify or explain their cultural origins and practices.
It is thus understandable that the Law and the words of Moses did not achieve written form until at least three hundred years after Moses lived. If we are to assume like many fundamentalists that Moses was the author of the Torah we must take also in to consideration that Abraham lived 400 to 550 years before Moses. How can we be confident that the words and events of Abraham passed on only in spoken form from person to person from Moses remained exactly the same for even 400 years?
Anthropologists have done some research into the oral traditions in places such as Albania, western Ireland and among Australian Aborigines to see how accurately they hand on their verses and how they changed them. They found that in most oral traditions the bards do not learn the verses by rote and memory but in general terms of plot. Stock lines and phrases are repeated, but the bard is free to improvise and polish within the ground rules of his craft. It is then reasonable to conclude that the stories of the patriarchs where a living, changing tale and the words ascribed to the patriarchs is not precise quotes of the patriarchs or of Moses. Their phrases might well be of an ancient origin nevertheless, however since then these texts has repeatedly been reworked, only remnants of the patriarchal tradition remain. These fragments that remain in our present versions of the Old Testament give us some clues what the patriarchal religion was like.
More coming soon!