Professor Dawkins appears to be so enamored with the document hypothesis that he commits a fallacy: the argument from personal incredulity. In other words if I find something hard to believe then it must not have happened. In this case, Prof. Richard Dawkins appears to find it hard to believe that two similar events could have occurred in the history of the world, or in the history of a nation, or in an individual’s life.
Having made reference to Genesis 19 Prof. Richard Dawkins makes that following comment in referring to Judges 19:
“This story is so similar to that of Lot, one can’t help wondering whether a fragment of manuscript became accidentally misplaced in some long-forgotten scriptorium: an illustration of the erratic provenance of sacred texts.”1
Likewise, having referenced Genesis 12 he makes that following comment in referring to Genesis 20:
“Is the similarity another indicator of textual unreliability?”2
He has furthermore written,
“a distinguished Cambridge geologist_who justified his own Christian belief by invoking what he called the historicity of the New Testament. It was precisely in the nineteenth century that theologians, especially in Germany, called into grave doubt that alleged historicity, using the evidence-based methods of history to do so.”3
Prof. Richard Dawkins is making reference to the document hypothesis (concocted in 1880), which claims that Moses did not write the first five books of the Old Testament but rather that various editors, with various motivations, through the centuries pieced together various fragments of stories. This view places more faith in an ethereal hypothesis than on the actual existing evidence. Adherents of this “scholarly” school should be asked to identify where in the world the evidence is for their hypothesis, where are the manuscripts that bare the out the hypothesis. The response will be that no evidence exists, none at all. The New Testament equivalent is another document that does not exist known as “Quelle” or succinctly “Q” (Eta Linnemann’s well rounded discussion of the “Q” issues is found as Adobe or html). Again, we find that more faith, yet by necessity blind faith, is placed on a document for which no tangible evidence exists that on the circa 25,000 manuscripts that we do have of the New Testament.
But what is the hypothesis based on? There are at least two answers to this question:One is that it is based on assumptions that are illogical inferences from the text of the Old Testament.
Two is that the originators of the hypothesis, the so called “higher critics” based their hypothesis on an a priori anti-supernatural bias and an outdated understanding of the history of ancient customs and writing. For a study of other biases please see Stan Meyer’s article, Hitler’s Theologians: The Genesis of Genocide.
On the first point: succinctly stated, the hypothesis holds that we can discern the various fragments that were later compiled into the Old Testament. They note, for example, where the text refer to God as “Jehovah” (or “YHWH”) or “Elohim” or whether the authors contrived the book of Deuteronomy (ergo “D”) or betrayed their motivations as favoring the “Priestly” class (ergo “P”). Therefore the hypothesis makes reference to the “J,E,D,P” authors/redactors.If I take credit for writing the sentence “The LORD, God Almighty is my Savior” the higher critics would concoct the “L,G,A,S theory”. They would reason that it is obvious that one author referred to the deity as “LORD” another as “God” another as “Almighty” and one final one as “Savior.” Then at some point in history I merely edited various manuscripts, concocted a sentence and passed it off as having been authored by only by myself.
On the second point: the higher critics themselves admit their biases the bottom line being that since miracles do not happen then any recounting of a miracle is obviously false.
One of the originators of the Graf-Wellhausen theory, Julius Wellhausen commented as follows regarding Moses receiving the tablets from God on Mt. Sinai, “Who can seriously believe all that?”4 Is this to be the criteria by which to study documents? This is a materialistically spiked argument from personal incredulity.
Note the biases of Langdon B. Gilkey of the University of Chicago as he considers the episodes of the Exodus:
“the acts (which the) Hebrews believed God might have done and the words he might have said, had he done and said them – but of course we recognize he did not_We deny the miraculous character of the event and say its cause was merely an East wind, and then we point to the unusual response of Hebrew faith.”5
A. Kuenen of the University of Leyden,
“So long as we attribute a part of Israel’s religious life directly to God and allow supernatural or immediate revelation (prophecy) to intervene even in one instance, just so long does our view of the whole remain inexact, and we see ourselves obliged to do violence here or there to the well-assured content of the historical accounts. It is only the assumption of a natural development that takes account of all the phenomena.”6
A. Kuenen,
“The familiar intercourse of the divinity with the patriarchs constitutes for me one of the determining considerations.”7
Note that he is not merely surveying the text but is forcing it to adhere to absolute materialism. His worldview is “one of the determining considerations” and is the reason that he must consider “the assumption of a natural development that takes account of all the phenomena.”
The anti-supernatural bias produces various side effects. For instance, the books of the Old Testament were, by necessity, re-dated not due to historical/archeological insights but because prophecy is impossible. Since prophecy is impossible then the Bible does not prophesy anything. And Since the Bible does not prophesy anything any book that included prophecy had to be re-dated to after the events that it claims to prophesy. Moreover, functioning off of an evolutionary view of the progress of religion caused further assumptions to be placed upon the text. For instance, Wellhausen comment regarding the Biblical statements about one God who created the universe, “in a youthful people such a theological abstraction is unheard of.”8 Besides the biases also keep in mind that Wellhausen lived 1844-1918 and concocted his theory in 1880. Thus, he missed many of the historical/archeological finds of the past eighty nine years including the Dead Sea Scrolls that demonstrate the accurate transition of the Old Testament for 2,000 years. For a good example of historical research rather than Darwinian assumptions on this topic see Don Richardson’s book “Eternity in Their Hearts.”
G. E. Wright,
“The Graf-Wellhausen reconstruction of the history of Israel’s religion was, in effect, an assertion that within the pages of the Old Testament we have a perfect example of the evolution of religion from animism in patriarchal times_to monotheism. The last was first achieved in pure form during the sixth and fifth centuries BC. The patriarchs (Abraham and his sons in 1800 BC) worshiped the spirits in trees, stones, springs, mountains, etc. The God of pre-prophetic Israel (1000 BC) was a tribal deity, limited in his power to the land of Palestine_It was the prophets who were the true innovators (inventors of monotheism).”9
Cyrus Gordon serves as an example of a scholar who abandoned the documentary hypothesis after studying ancient history and archaeology,
“The cuneiform contracts from Nuzu have demonstrated that the social institutions of the patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, etc.) are genuine and pre-Mosaic. They cannot have been invented by any post-Mosaic J,E,D, or P.”10
Henri Blocher,
“The critics, when they judge the internal phenomena (of the Bible) project into it their customs as modem western readers, and neglect all that we know today of the writing customs used in Biblical times. The taste for repetition, the structure of a global statement-repeated with development, the replacement of a word by its synonyms, especially the change of a divine name in a text (i.e., the names of Osiris on the stele of Ikhernofret), are well attested characteristics of ancient Middle Eastern texts_The Biblical text, as it is, agrees with the literary canons of its time.”11
K.A. Kitchen,
“The conventional forms of literary criticism (‘J, E, P,D,’ etc., oral tradition) were evolved in a vacuum and their criteria can be proven to be non-significant and just plain wrong when compared with the ways in which people really wrote in the Biblical world. The evolutionary scheme of concepts_is wholly illusory when measured against the entire Biblical world of the Near East_When the Old Testament writings and the theoretical reevaluations of them are finally measured against the visible, tangible_Old Testament world-then it is the extant documents (of the Old Testament) that match with their Near Eastern context, and not the reconstructions based on false premises and false criteria.”12
Umberto Cassuto’s (aka Moshe David Cassuto) conclusions about the “pillars” upon which the documents hypothesis is built,
“I did not prove that the pillars were weak or that each one failed to give decisive support, but I established that they were not pillars at all, that they did not exist, that they were purely imaginary.”13
Clearly, the hypothesis was built upon fallacious assumptions. But if anyone insists on holding to this view just ask them where the documents are? Where are the manuscripts from which the Torah was redacted? Surely, they have withered away into nothingness which is why the “evidence” is a hypothesis. On the other hand prior to the early 20th century we could prove 1,000 years of accurate transmission of the Old Testament text and since then 2,000 years (see some of our comments on these issues here and here).