Before Abraham Was: The Unity of Genesis 1–11

By Isaac M. Kikawada and Arthur Quinn

Rebelling against a century of Old Testament scholarship, Isaac M. Kikawada and Arthur Quinn persuasively argue that the first eleven chapters of Genesis are not a literary patchwork by different editors as widely supposed, but are the work of one author of extraordinary subtlety and skill.

Comparing Genesis 1-11 with primeval histories from the ancient Near East, Kikawada and Quinn urge their readers to appreciate the ingenuity of Genesis's author: "When we think we find this author napping, we had better proceed very carefully. As with Homer or Shakespeare, when you think you have seen something wrong, there may well be something wrong with your own eyes. You are more likely to be wrong than either of them."

Providing a solid case for the unity of Genesis's first eleven chapters, Kikawada and Quinn move on to show how these chapters provide a formal structure for other Old Testament histories. Destined to have lasting impact on biblical scholarship, Before Abraham Was will give scholars, clergy, and students a new appreciation of critical biblical studies and a new hypothesis for the formation of Genesis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Mar 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781498276757

Isaac M. Kikawada

Isaac M. Kikawada taught Near Eastern Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned his PhD. Arthur Quinn taught Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley and holds an MA and PhD from Princeton University.

Book preview

Before Abraham Was

The Unity of Genesis 1–11

ISAAC M. KIKAWADA

and

ARTHUR QUINN

WIPF & STOCK • Eugene, Oregon

Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W 8th Ave, Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

Before Abraham Was

The Unity of Genesis 1–11

By Kikawada, Isaac M. and Quinn, Arthur

Copyright © 1985 by Kikawada, Isaac M.

ISBN 13: 978-1-5326-1769-0

eISBN 13: 978-1-4982-7675-7

Publication date 3/27/1999

Previously published by Abingdon Press, 1985

To John S. and Katsuko Kikawada and Barney Roddy Quinn

Before Abraham was, I am.

JOHN 8:58

CONTENTS

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I

Before the Patriarchs Were: Genesis 1–11 as a Paradigm of Biblical Diversity

CHAPTER II

Many Noahs, Many Floods: Some Parallels in Ancient Primeval Histories

CHAPTER III

Before Abraham Was: The Unity of Genesis 1–11

CHAPTER IV

One Noah, One Flood: The Coherence of the Genesis Version

CHAPTER V

After Abraham Was: Genesis 1–11 as a Paradigm of Biblical Unity

EPILOGUE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

No thesis has had a more liberating effect on biblical scholarship during the past hundred years than the documentary hypothesis of the Pentateuch. It has taught us to perceive the Pentateuch as a mixture of literary layers of varying antiquity. The greatest drama recorded in the Pentateuch becomes not the explicit history that is narrated, but the implicit history of the Pentateuch’s own composition. The formation of the Pentateuch itself becomes for us the most important guide to the evolution of ancient Hebrew religious consciousness.

Not surprisingly, this approach to the Pentateuch first came to the fore in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Within this intellectual milieu, the documentary hypothesis was not an isolated phenomenon. This was the great age for the discovery of time: process, history, change were found everywhere, even in rocks.¹ And if rocks could be made to yield the story of their formation, then the Torah, with some coaxing, should tell its story as well. The documentary hypothesis was, in short, a characteristic product of its time—but it has also turned out to be much more than that.

Since its original formulation the documentary hypothesis has had its own complex historical evolution. A recent survey of that evolution has distinguished no less than ten separate stages.² The traditional designation of four layers—J, E, P, D—has been subjected to many further refinements. Some scholars have thought they could distinguish a separate stratum L; others have argued for distinguishing between E¹, E², E³, and so forth. Of course, these suggested refinements, at least some of them, are easily enough ridiculed for their excesses, but such ridicule does not touch the central core of the hypothesis. The simple fact is that by the 1880s, as a result of the work of Wellhausen, the documentary hypothesis was supported by a broad consensus of critical biblical scholars.³ And by the midtwentieth century, thanks to the work of other great scholars like Gerhard von Rad and Martin Noth, that consensus had become so strong that it seems virtually unquestionable today. Von Rad in the last edition of his famous commentary on Genesis (published not long before his death in 1971) could write proudly, How can we analyze such extremely complex materials [as Genesis]? There is now no fundamental dispute that it is to be assigned to the three documents J, E, and P, and there is even agreement over detail.⁴ His claim was, if anything, understated.

Of course, there have always been those who have dissented from the consensus, more often on theological than on critical grounds. Compared with the calm understatement of a von Rad, these dissenters often express their views with a shrillness that makes them difficult to take seriously. Perhaps the most persuasive of these voices in the wilderness is Umberto Cassuto. He offers many plausible alternatives to documentary readings of individual passages. And yet, even he concludes his own discussion of the documentary hypothesis with the assertion, This imposing and beautiful edifice has, in reality, nothing to support it and is founded on air.⁵

This is mere polemic. The documentary hypothesis is supported by more than a century of scholarship—and a remarkable body of scholarship it is. After reading even a fraction of it, someone who had not already prejudged the issue cannot help sympathizing with the exasperation expressed by Cassuto’s contemporary, Gressmann: Anyone who does not accept the division of the text according to the sources and results flowing therefrom, has to discharge the onus, if he wishes to be considered a collaborator in our scientific work, of proving that all research work done until now was futile.⁶

Gressmann and more recent proponents of the documentary hypothesis (a virtual Who’s Who of Old Testament scholarship) obviously feel that a rejection of the documentary hypothesis entails a rejection of all the scholarly research done under its aegis, and therefore a rejection of the cumulative results of more than a century’s work. A rejection of the documentary hypothesis becomes tantamount to a rejection of modern biblical scholarship, a reductio ad absurdum for any but the most reactionary of fundamentalists.

And yet does a rejection of the documentary hypothesis really entail this broader rejection? Certainly it does not if we take the physical sciences as an appropriate analogy. In the twentieth century many of the most cherished principles of Newtonian science have been unceremoniously overturned. Alfred North Whitehead could write, I was taught science and mathematics by brilliant men and I did well in them; since the turn of the century I have lived to see every one of the basic assumptions of both set aside; not, indeed, discarded, but of use as qualifying clauses, instead of as major propositions; and all this is in one life-span—the most fundamental assumptions of supposedly exact sciences set aside.⁷

These changes, however, were regarded by no one as having rendered futile all the physics done since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. It was precisely the developments within Newtonian physics that required the revolutions of the twentieth century. If the new physics swept away Newtonian principles, this same physics did so in order to fulfill Newtonian inquiries and aspirations.

A closer historical analogy might be more helpful. The same discovery of time that led to the documentary interpretation of the Pentateuch also led to a revolution in Homeric interpretation.⁸ The Iliad, no less than Genesis, was now considered by some scholars as a mixture of diverse sources. And much of Homeric scholarship of the nineteenth century, the best Homeric scholarship, attempted to retrieve these original sources from the received text by focusing on its apparent inconsistencies. In Homeric studies Wilamowitz occupied the same position as his friend Wellhausen did in Pentateuchal studies. (Wilamowitz himself dismissed the received text of The Iliad as a wretched patchwork.)

Remarkable is the degree to which these two fields of scholarly inquiry parallel each other through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And this makes it even more intriguing that they should have so sharply diverged from each other in the midtwentieth century. At roughly the same time that Noth, von Rad, and their colleagues were hammering out the detailed consensus of which von Rad was so justly proud, someone of equivalent stature within German classical studies, Wolfgang Schadewaldt, was profoundly challenging the documentary approach to Homer.⁹ To be sure, there had always been doubters. Goethe, after first hearing of the documentary hypothesis of Homer, wrote to Schiller, When all is said and done, there is more subjectivity in this business than they think. Schadewaldt’s work on The Iliad, however, was enough to drive many a documentary critic to despair. As one of them put it, Schadewaldt’s Iliasstudien brought crashing to the ground a century and a half of German scholarship.¹⁰

Actually Schadewaldt’s work was so effective precisely because he did not bring the earlier work crashing to the ground. He did not want to render it futile. He did not want to because it had provided the true basis for his own work. He accepted the observations on which the earlier scholars had based their consensus. But he used their observations to challenge their inferences. He began his own unitary interpretation of The Iliad with the very books 8 and 11 that had always been the strongest part of the documentary case. He showed, however, that these books were parts of a greater whole; it was just that The Iliad had a far more complex unity than anyone had previously suspected. And we would never have appreciated the extraordinary complexity of this unity had it not been for the century and a half of work by gifted Homeric critics. His work was inconceivable without theirs, much as the twentieth-century revolution in physics was inconceivable without the two centuries of Newtonians who tried to finish his system.

Recent collections of Homeric criticism (at least those published outside of Germany) no longer seriously consider the documentary hypothesis of Homer at all. The editor of one explains:

As late as 1934, Gilbert Murray could discover no reputable scholar ready to defend the view that a single poet had written either or both the Iliad and the Odyssey. Today, the wheel has come lull turn.

A post-Freudian age regards the act of literary composition as one of extreme complexity. Where the nineteenth century editor saw a lacuna or interpolation, we tend to see the indirections or special logic of the poetic imagination. Our entire image of the mind has altered. The higher critics, Wilamowitz or Wellhausen, were anatomists; to get at the heart of a thing they took it to pieces. We, like the men of the sixteenth century, incline to regard mental processes as organic and integral. A modern art historian has written of la vie des formes, the implication being that in the life of art, as in that of organic matter, there are complications of design and autonomous energies which cannot be dissected. Wherever possible, we prefer to leave a thing whole.¹¹

Of course, the fact that classical studies has long since passed Wilamowitz by does not mean that the Old Testament scholars are backward because they still agree essentially with Wellhausen. Genesis does have the appearance of a loosely organized collection of traditional narratives, while The Iliad most emphatically gives the impression of being a single narrative. Perhaps Wellhausen, unlike Wilamowitz, had just found the appropriate material on which to use the method the two scholars shared.

Perhaps, but an alternative explanation does suggest itself. The unity of Genesis might be subtler, less direct than that of The Iliad, and hence more difficult for us to appreciate. If that is so, then we would expect the documentary hypothesis to be able to hold out longer here because the need to see beyond it was less obvious.

What we can conclude from the analogy with Homeric studies (and more emphatically from the analogy with Newtonian physics) is that the issue of unity is not closed for Pentateuchal studies, nor is it likely ever to be. However imposing the consensus, the documentary hypothesis remains an hypothesis. Its formulation may well have represented the dawn of a new day for biblical scholarship, but days have their dawns and their dusks.

In this book we propose a unitary reading of Genesis 1–11. And we do it in the spirit of inquiry, not of polemic. This section of Genesis has played the same role in the development of the Pentateuchal documentary hypothesis as the analysis of books 8 and 11 have for the Homeric. The documentary analysis of this primeval history has been the foundation stone on which all the rest was built. It remains so today, as much as it was in the time of Wellhausen.

For instance, the best recent introduction to the documentary hypothesis has devoted almost a third of its length just to the analysis of this section.¹² Contrarily, the best recent defense of a unitary literary criticism of the Bible, when discussing this section of Genesis, speaks discreetly of its composite artistry.¹³ Quite simply, the analysis of Genesis 1–11 is the most impressive achievement of the documentary hypothesis in its long history. We are, therefore, going to attack the documentary hypothesis at its strongest point, the point at which it appears utterly unassailable to most scholars today.

To attack the documentary hypothesis at its strongest point—this statement makes it seem as if we perceived ourselves as being involved in a military operation, assaulting some citadel. Actually nothing could be farther from the case. We intend to ground our reading of Genesis 1–11 on the many astute observations of the older documentary approach. We do not intend to deny the apparent diversity; we just want to seek a subtler unity within that diversity.

The first step in this task will be to observe carefully the diversity itself. We need to review sympathetically what the grand old hypothesis of Pentateuchal criticism has to tell us about Genesis before Abraham was. Let us start with Genesis 1–5.

Notes / Introduction

1. One interesting introduction to the intellectual history of the period is entitled simply The Discovery of Time by Steven Toulmin and June Goodfield (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).

2. O. Eissfeld, The Old Testament: An Introduction (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), chap. 23.

3. Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of