The power of any great work is in its ability to speak to diverse souls and times. This is further confirmed when it successfully crosses the boundaries of the language within which it was conceived. If its impact outlasts next Sunday’s op-ed page - we can comfortably suggest the human poetic. Among the most problematical works of this type is a tangled text of myth, malice, and mystery to which we’ll now direct our attention. Although we might have mislaid our bedside copy it patiently awaits our perusal at any Motel 6. Yes, this text – (courtesy of the Gideons who delivered it, the fevered prophets who composed it, the patient priests who compiled it, and the multitudes who died for it) is, in the profoundest of understatements, the Bible.

Its wonder has been greatly reduced by Sunday morning platitudes that discourage individual discovery. This is a lamentation that we might add to Jeremiah’s collection and conclude with the preacher of Ecclesiastes that "all is vanity and chasing after wind." That its most vocal proponents claim it to be the exclusive word of God is certainly enough to set one off one’s morning tea. One suspects that deity has, on occasion, visited elsewhere in the literature the world deems Scripture. There seems to be, as well, some evidence of man’s manipulation of a line or two of the holy text. That aside, whether by guile or God the Bible is among the most sublime imaginings to grace the mind of man.

Judeo-Christian tradition has held tenaciously (for twenty centuries) to the belief that the initial scribe of the Torah (what Christians call the Pentateuch) was the prophet Moses. Most of the first five books were complied in the century of Aristotle. That a variety of writers were involved might make us suspect that deity was better served by committee than by a voice crying in the wilderness.

Many are the chefs contributing to the canon’s rich broth. The ‘opening up’ of the Bible has been to its benefit and to the world’s heritage of Scripture. In the 11th century Issac ibn Yasush noticed that a list of Edomite kings in Genesis 36 included many who had lived long after the time of Moses. By not appreciating the prophet’s prescience, Issac was termed "Issac the blunderer" by lbn Ezra in the 12th century. Ibn himself had wondered why Moses had spoken, on occasion, in the third person (as if some other hand had been transcribing his words) and how it was that he spoke, as well, of places he never could have been. His advice to silence on questions of this ilk was followed until the 14th century. Bonfils suggested that a portion of the divine writings of Moses must have been by other hands. That these other hands were divinely inspired was not enough for his reflections to avoid being subsequently deleted from later additions of his work.

In the 15th century it occurred to Tostatus, the Bishop of Avila that an argument might be made for Moses not recording the advent of his own death. In the following century Andreas van Maes concluded that there must have been subsequent interpolations to the words of Moses. Thereafter, he found his own words placed upon the Catholic list of condemned books. It isn’t until the 17th century that the preceding suspicion of the last six is stated categorically by Hobbes: Moses did not write any of the books that had long been attributed to his name.

Spinoza submitted a more thorough analysis. In spite of his benevolence the 17^th century proved less than appreciative:

"Spinoza is the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers. Intellectually, some others have surpassed him, but ethically he is supreme. As a natural consequence, he was considered, during his lifetime and for a century after his death, a man of appalling wickedness." (1)

Given a personal humility that bespoke little of his own towering genius, he had a mild difficulty with Moses’ own report of being the humblest man on earth. It seemed to Spinoza that the report might have come from someone other than the world’s most humble man. Add to this the appraisal in Deuteronomy, "that to this day there has not appeared as great a prophet." (2) One might suppose, along with the Dutch Jew, that the day in reference was one in which the greatness of Moses had become a revered memory. Spinoza’s analysis led, in part, to his expulsion from Judaism, the ranting anathema of the Christians and a subsequent attempt on his life.

On occasion (in our dreams) we think of a canvas that the world has never seen. It is of a Jew (of Rembrandt’s many Jews) suggesting Christ (among his many Christs). From the quiet of chiaroscuro, Spinoza arises from the depths that the artist has left us in the shadowed self-portraits of his own broken soul.

It is one of the unintended burdens of the Bible that it has been used as an excuse for murder in each of the more than twenty centuries it has companioned. Speaking of this sentiment Joseph Campbell quotes the Psalms: "The fool in his heart says ‘there is no God.’" Campbell further dilates: "There is, however, another type of fool, more dangerous and sure of himself, who says in his heart and proclaims for all the world, ‘There is no God but mine.’" (3)

In the 17^th century Richard Simon, a Catholic priest contended against Hobbes and Spinoza. He blamed Biblical irregularity on the ineptitude of scribes recording the words of Moses. For suggesting that any of the first five books was by a hand other than Moses he was dismissed from his order and his books burned.

The cat, however, was continuing to jump out of the bag. In the 18th century numerous authors were pouring over the Bible’s text in the warmer climes of the enlightenment. Voltaire and the Encyclopediasts were confronting what they termed L’infame -- the power of the church to blight the minds of men. Early in the 19th century scholars isolated four different writers speaking with voices centuries after the Mosaic attribution.

Lest one fears we are treading on hallowed ground it might do well to point out that the Catholic church issued a writ in 1943, assuring researchers that they were no longer in danger of the stake for pursuing their course of study. (4) Which is to say that it might be considered judicious to ride in the caboose to avoid being run over by the train. The Pope was Pius Xli and his words were as follows:

"Let the interpreter then, with all care and without neglecting any light derived from recent research endeavor to determine the peculiar character and circumstances of the sacred writer, the age in which he lived, the sources written or oral to which he had recourse and the forms of expression he employed."

 

In reading the King James Version of the Bible we have the luck that the translators employed were within a generation of the Elizabethan age. Some might have known the mellifluence of Shakespeare from the Bard himself. The use of the words God and Lord to our eye and ear seem to bespeak the same character. We use the two interchangeably. They are, in fact, representative of two distinct personalities. In the original Hebrew texts we find that "Lord" or "Lord God" has been translated from YHWH, or JHVH – the Tetragrammaton, the mysterious unutterable name of God.

The third commandment’s injunction to never take his name in vain was to the orthodox a commandment to never speak it at all. Rabbinical authorities felt more at home with the substitute name of Adonai, (My Lord). Its vowels, (a,o,a) were often placed above the sacred consonants and later interpolated into them. When the faithful did speak this hybrid they got it wrong and pronounced it Jehovah. Now (to the dismay of the Jehovah’s Witness) it is thought that Yahweh is closer to the pronunciation of the unutterable. This is the name of God as he might be listed in the yellow pages as George Yahweh or Yahweh Jones. Yahweh is not alone among the gods - he is simply the head honcho – one must take care to place none-other before him. It is acknowledged that Baal and Moloch are entities of equal reality, but of a lesser order. Yahweh is ascendant over these other gods but no less anthropomorphic.

Yahweh is decidedly a tribal deity. In animating Adam he breathes life into his lungs, as in artificial respiration. When Noah offers up some tastey barbecue Yahweh confesses that the sacrifice is pleasing to his nostrils. He further admits to petulance and jealousy. At times he regrets the hard time he visits on his creation. We find him lamenting the evil he has done - as if he had overstepped the boundaries of a proper rage.

The term for which we derive God in Hebrew is Elohim. Elohim is the plural of El – a pagan deity from the Caananite portion of Northern Palestine. As Elohim he was thought to be more than a god of single attribute, such as Haddu, god of the wind. He is a further reaching archetypal than a god with a personal name. This places him at a later stage of development than his Biblical counterpart to the South. As Elohim he starts the monotheistic process of absorbing competing pantheons in the region. He begins to grow closer to the ultimate ground of being that the Bible, at its best, moves us toward. The Indian sages of the Upanishads were at work in this same era. The Bible’s most profound influence in Western Philosophy is found in the writings of Spinoza. This alone should give us a hint as to the profundity that an open reading of the canon might confer.

The writers of the Upanishads saw the fall as an ontological event that was not precipitated by God’s creation but as a natural evolution of the One that would become the Many. For the Rishis, redemption was the psychological apprehension of the immanence of God within one’s self; an awareness only connected with the history of each individual life as it was lived. We are each strangers in a strange land. It is only from the vantage of a holy mountain or perhaps when sitting down and near a master deep in a forest glen that we discover that we have only been estranged from ourselves.

The stern white bearded father is an image that many are loath to relinquish. Much that is colorful and human in the canon comes from the closeness with which we can identify with Yahweh’s human tendencies. The meditations of Spinoza and the Hindu tendencies within us acknowledge the worth, the meaning, and the placement of any of creation’s beings. Man is not seen as the culmination of God’s efforts but simply as another manifestation of his immanence. The Christian focus on the drama of the fall highlights the distance between man and his God. By believing the event to be historical the church was forced to envision the redemption as being enacted in a subsequent stage of the world’s history. The Jews share this obsession with historicity but believe that redemption was achieved on Sinai and not on the cross

Simon, to his regret, was among the first to point out that Moses was using two different names for a single deity. That they were from differing consciousness, as well, became increasingly apparent to those investigators who were hearing very different voices behind the two names. The basis for this realization is in the repetition of similar stories. We are more familiar with this movement in synoptic repetitions in the New Testament. The belief that Moses was the only writer of the first five books blinded its readers to the diverse minds that contributed to its creation.

We call these repetitions doublets and on occasion triplets. The doublets were first recognized in the repetition of the Yahweh and Elohim formulations. At the end of the 18^th century the Elohim text was discovered to have doublets of its own. These evinced matters of ritual, law, sacrifice and diet each of particular interest to priests The priestly document repeats stories common to both texts and is the largest contributor to the Pentateuch. It can be found throughout Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers. Its unquestioned highlight is the "In the beginning…" text that was selected to begin the whole she-bang. We can view a doublet by reading the first two chapters of Genesis. In chapter one Elohim is substituted for God. In chapter two the original YHWH or Yahweh does like service for Lord God.

Genesis, 1: "In the beginning Elohim created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of Elohim moved upon the face of the waters. And Elohim said "let there be light" and there was light. And Elohim saw the light, that it was good: and Elohim divided the light from the darkness. And Elohim called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day."

Genesis, 2: "In the day that Yahweh made the earth and the heavens, and every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew, for Yahweh had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground, there went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground. And the Yahweh formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

It is not difficult to see why the later Elohim document was placed in the first chapter of Genesis and the earlier Yahweh text placed in the 2^nd. When the Apollo astronauts first orbited the moon they continued with the majesty of the King James rendition of the Elohim text: And God (Elohim) said: "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters." And God (Elohim) made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God (Elohim) called the firmament heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day." That the text could move millions listening from a radio broadcast from the moon is testament to it continuing power. The primal substance of the universe is thought to be a cosmic ocean inundating both heaven and earth, for the earth was void and the darkness of this primordial deep had to await the stirring of spirit upon the face of the waters.

This last is a borrowing from Marduk’s creation saga. Rain is thought to fall from rivers in the sky. The same concept of the cosmic ocean appears in the Hindu notion of Vishnu reclining on the surface of a cosmic sea and dreaming the multiplicity of forms that Elohim precipitates with his division of light from the dark.

In the Elohim text there is no story of a fall such as we find in Genesis 2, where "...Yahweh planted a garden eastward in Eden." The fall in Elohim is the fall of Elohim. He rents the fabric of consciousness in the division of light from dark. Brahma (in the dream of Vishnu) performs a similar feat in each blink of his cosmic eye.

Three separate inquiries in the 18th century (unbeknownst to each other) wrote of the integrity of these disparate sources. Henning Bernhard Witter’s efforts of 1711 weren’t acknowledged until two centuries after his death. In 1753, Jean Astruc (a court physician to the Louis the XIV) published his findings anonymously in Paris at the age of 70. His musing, along with Witter’s, went largely unnoticed. The world took little notice until Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (the son of a pastor and a scholar of respected credentials) arrived at the same conclusions. They noticed in 1780 when Johann published his work. As they accustomed themselves to the possibility of two hands being involved it was discovered that the Elohim stories had doublets, as well.

Moses had become the writers J (which in German is pronounced like Y, for the

Yahweh scribe), E for the Elohim scribe and P for the priestly scribes. Each of these writers compiled their histories after the death of Solomon and the subsequent partition of the land between his two sons. J hailed from Rehoboam’s Judah. He showed a political preference for that kingdom and priests that could trace their authority to the high priest, Aaron.

E was from Jeroboam’s Israel. He, not surprisingly, shows Israel in a more favorable light. He also prefers the Mushite priest who trace their authority through the lineage of Moses. P was aware of both these sources. He expands E’s deity to cosmic proportions but agrees with J that the Aaronite priests are the only fit intermediaries. J, E, and P held their ground as distinct entities - each employing vocabulary; idiom, and concerns that bespoke their own respective voices. The fly in the Biblical ointment showed up in the last of the books that Moses was seen to have no longer penned. In it, there was little to be seen of J, E, or P. Deuteronomy was as distinct from the others as they were from themselves - enter D. In Germany, early in the 19^th century, W.M.L. DeWette concluded that none of the earlier source material continued in this book.

Deuteronomy was written during the reign of King Josiah in the 7^th century, BC. It was proclaimed to be an ancient text written by Moses. It contained a restatement of the Decalogue and an account of the death of Moses.. Its intent was to reestablish the power and authority of the Mushite priests. It also solemnized and assured the rule of King Josiah. In its original presentation it included the subsequent narratives of Joshua, Judges, Samuel 1 & 2 and Kings 1 & 2 down to the celebration of Josiah’s reign. An Egyptian Arrow felled the King and prematurely concluded the festivities. Twenty-two years and four kings later in 587 BC, the Davidic Dynasty, one of History’s most enduring, comes to an inglorious end. Nebuchadnezzar murders the children of King Zedekiah and then, grimly anticipating Shakespeare’s Goneril, plucks out the eyes of the protesting King. Thereafter God’s chosen are exiled by the waters of Babylon, where in remembering Zion, they sat down and wept.

And lest D might feel like the odd man out he was shortly to be accompanied by a fifth voice. Of those we’ve made mention, he is, perhaps, the most interesting. Had he not written 900 years after Moses it is to his shoulder that authorship might be said to fall. We don’t know if he was a single genius or like the translators of King James the genius of a committee. But whoever he or they were took these disparate strands – cut, pasted and beautifully wove them into a tapestry that has enthralled the western world for well over two thousand years. In the 19th century the contributions of Karl Heinrich Graf. and Wilheim Vatke were synthesized in the work of Julius Wellhausen. These three, together with their historical precedents, might be said to constitute the fathers of the "Documentary Hypothesis."

Among many that profess a love for the Bible is an understanding of its history that is somewhere on the far side of nebulous. And even among those who actually take the time to read it there is little comprehension of it having a history outside the mind of God. The J document was written in the 9th century BC in the southern kingdom of Judah. The E document in the 8th century BC in the Northern Kingdom of Israel. The P document in the latter part of the 8^th century BC or early in the 7^th. The D document before the death of Josiah in 609 BC. The Jews had canonized the first five books by the middle of the 5^th century preceding Christ.

J, E, D, P and the editor’s efforts of synthesis march sequentially down the centuries from the 9th to the 5th. The poetic books of Proverbs, Psalms, and Job were written in the 4th century. The writings of the prophets were canonized at the end of the 3rd century. 1st and 2nd Maccabees were written in the 2nd century. From Solomon in the 10th century to Caesar in the 1st we’ve connected a near unbroken strand that concludes with the birth of Christ in Anno Domanai or if you prefer the final canonization at Jamnia.

What Christians declare to be the "Old Testament" the Jews call the Tanakh. This is an acronym for the principle designations in the Jewish Canon. The T, N, K of Torah, Neviim, and Kethuvim — i.e. The Books of Moses, The Prophetical writings and the miscellanies and chronicles that comprise the rest of the collection. For the Jews these sacred writings are not the Old Testament, but rather The Testament.

Once we have gotten a handle on the accepted scholarly mythology of the book’s origin, we are welcome to explore the thornier problem of the history it reports. If we free ourselves from the necessity of connecting the reports of history to anything historical, then that which we deem the province of the past can be more readily utilized in the reality of the present.

History so read places the birth of Dionysus (from the stomach of Zeus) on equal footing with the virgin birth of Christ. When we cease to believe the present has necessarily been preceded by the past we are approaching something of the lyric in our paradigm - something of the music in Eliot’s Four Quartets:

"Words move, music moves / Only in time; but that which is only living / Can only die. Words, after speech / reach into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, / Can words or music reach / The stillness, as a Chinese jar still / Moves perpetually in its stillness. / Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts, / Not that only, but the co-existence, / Or say that the end precedes the beginning, / And the end and the beginning were always there / Before the beginning and after the end. / And all is always now. (6)

At such a juncture it is the light of our own consciousness that divides the light from the darkness. It is at our own behest that a firmament is raised in the midst of the waters. Our recognition of this will not be on the second day but rather, the first. Approaching that Sinai, Cross or Bo-tree is a path of significance that needs no signpost. We undertake journeys to destinations that have already claimed us in arrival.