Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

RICHARD ELLIOTT FRIEDMAN is one of the premier bible scholars in the country. He earned his doctorate at Harvard and was a visiting fellow at Oxford and Cambridge, a Senior Fellow of the American Schools of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Haifa. He is the Ann & Jay Davis Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Georgia and the Katzin Professor of Jewish Civilization Emeritus of the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Commentary on the Torah, The Disappearance of God, The Hidden Book in the Bible, The Bible with Sources Revealed, The Bible Now, The Exile and Biblical Narrative, the bestselling Who Wrote the Bible?, and most recently, The Exodus. He was an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow and was elected to membership in The Biblical Colloquium. His books have been translated into Hebrew, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Polish, Hungarian, Dutch, Portuguese, Czech, Turkish, Korean, and French. He was a consultant for the Dreamworks film The Prince of Egypt, for Alice Hoffman's The Dovekeepers, and for NBC, A&E, PBS, and Nova.

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One of the World's Foremost Bible Experts Offers a Groundbreaking Presentation of the Five Books of Moses

In The Bible with Sources Revealed, Richard Elliott Friedman offers a new, visual presentation of the Five Books of Moses -- Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy -- unlocking the complex and fascinating tapestry of their origins. Different colors and type styles allow readers to easily identify each of the distinct sources, showcasing Friedman's highly acclaimed and dynamic translation.

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The Bible with Sources Revealed

HarperSanFrancisco

Excerpt

Collection of Evidence

The Seven Main Arguments

The process of identifying the biblical sources took centuries. The process of refining our identifications of these sources has been ongoing, and itcontinues to the present day. Initially, it was a tentative division based onsimple factors: where the name of God appeared in the texts, similar storiesappearing twice in the texts, contradictions of fact between one text andanother. Accounts of this early identifying and refining may be found inmany introductions to this subject and in my Who Wrote the Bible? The collection of evidence here is not a review of that history of the subject. It is atabulation of the evidence that has emerged that establishes the hypothesis. It is grouped here in seven categories, which form the seven main arguments for the hypothesis in my judgment.

1. Linguistic

When we separate the texts that have been identified with the varioussources, we find that they reflect the Hebrew language of several distinctperiods.

The development of Hebrew that we observe through these successiveperiods indicates that:

• The Hebrew of J and E comes from the earliest stage of biblicalHebrew.
• The Hebrew of P comes from a later stage of the language.
• The Hebrew of the Deuteronomistic texts comes from a still laterstage of the language.
• P comes from an earlier stage of Hebrew than the Hebrew of thebook of Ezekiel (which comes from the time of the Babylonianexile).
• All of these main sources come from a stage of Hebrew known asClassical Biblical Hebrew, which is earlier than the Hebrew of thepostexilic, Persian period (known as Late Biblical Hebrew).

This chronology of the language of the sources is confirmed by Hebrewtexts outside the Bible. The characteristics of Classical Biblical Hebrew areconfirmed through comparison with inscriptions that have been discoveredthrough archaeology, which come from the period before the Babylonianexile (587 BCE). The characteristics of Late Biblical Hebrew are confirmedthrough comparison with the Hebrew of later sources such as the Dead SeaScrolls.

Despite the power of this evidence, it is practically never mentioned bythose who oppose the hypothesis.

2. Terminology

Certain words and phrases occur disproportionately - or even entirely - in one source but not in others. The quantity of such terms that consistentlybelong to a particular source is considerable. Thus:

The mountain that is called Sinai in J and P (twenty times) is calledHoreb or "the Mountain of God" in E and D (fourteen times). In thirty-fouroccurrences of these names, there is no exception to this distinction.

The phrase "in that very day" (beesem hayyôm hazzeh) occurs eleventimes in the Torah. Ten of the eleven are in P. (And the eleventh is in R, ina passage that R modeled on P; Deut 32:48.)

The phrase "the place where YHWH sets his name" or "the placewhere YHWH tents his name ?occurs ten times in D but never in J,E,or P.

Continues...

Excerpted from The Bible with Sources Revealedby Richard Elliott Friedman Copyright © 2005 by Richard Elliott Friedman. Excerpted by permission.
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