101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

xvi 101 Myths of the Bible
Over the course of several centuries, despite aggressive opposition by the churches,
a handful of scholars pointed out a number of logical inconsistencies in the idea of
Mosaic authorship for these works. For example, Deuteronomy 34:6 says, “And he
buried him [Moses] in a valley in the land of Moab, over against Beth-peor: but no
man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.”
This passage not only describes the burial of Moses but also says that the location
of his grave is unknown unto this day, indicating that the passage was written well after
the death of Moses and couldn’t have been written by him.
Beginning in the eighteenth century, several scholars began to pay increasing attention
to the problem of “doublets,” two contradictory stories about the same event. Even
a casual reader could see that there were many such instances: two different accounts
of Creation, two different claims about how many animals were brought onto Noah’s
ark, two different explanations for why Jacob changed his name to Israel, two different
occurrences in which Moses draws water from a rock at Meribah, and so on.
As these doublets came under scrutiny, the scholars noticed some unusual features.
Most importantly, in many of these doublets, one set of stories always used the
Hebrew word Jahweh for the name of the Hebrew God while the other used Elohim.
Then, when they sorted out the stories according to which name was used, they discovered
that stories that used one particular name for God had different themes and
literary styles from those stories that used the other name.
This division of style, theme, and name led to the idea that there were at least two
separate literary strands combined into a single document, at least one of which must
have been written by someone other than and later than Moses.
The Documentary Hypothesis
This line of research led to an even more astounding discovery. By the early nineteenth
century, analysis of historical time frames, story sequences, literary styles, and
religious themes showed that there were at least four separate source documents integrated
into the Five Books of Moses, each with its own underlying point of view and
each written at a different time. And, of course, there had to be at least one editor after
the fact who combined the sources into a single narrative.