Source Criticism, Joel S. Baden, Cascade Books, Eugene, Oregon, 2024

A Brief Review.

Anyone who has approached the Bible, particularly the first five books of Hebrew Bible, the Pentateuch, is aware of its complexity and of “the bumps in the road” in making one’s way through it. But only specialists are aware of the vast body of sophisticated scholarship that has been devoted to it. Baden would like to take you through it, particularly that western scholarship that began with the Renaissance’s “return to original sources” and which gained momentum in the Enlightenment and in the succeeding age of Romanticism that has shaped Western life.  The core of the attempt was to uncover the sources of the Bible, in particular of the Pentateuch.  Throughout the 19^th and 20^th century, German university scholars had a dominant role in this pursuit.

Baden’s book is intended to be an introduction for “nonspecialist.”  I think that it is essentially the open lectures of a course on the Hebrew Scripture as one might find in a seminary or theological school as “required,” I would hope, for a candidate for MDiv or MTh degree. Each chapter ends with an exercise in which the method discussed the chapter is applied to a text, Genesis 26:10-29.  no less than six times, illustrating what effect each method had for interpretation. I would highly recommend it to anyone attempting a study of the Bible, particularly whose ministry would be based on it.

Overall, Baden demonstrates how much this scholarship was biased by in presuppositions, as he admits is true of his as well.   The classic body of the Hebrew Bible, the Pentateuch in particular was largely Protestant. As result, its read set aside the ritual for the ethical, the latter being the original source and former being the latter corruption.  It was also true that it had a social orientation link to the German quest to construct a common “volk” out of their, up to then, diverse population. So, the source material that they identified in the Pentateuch as its foundation was the formation of a people. Bandon’s critique is not so original, but it does have the additional dimension of disclosing just how deeply anti-Semitic it was. He also makes clear that the source method they employed replaced the text by the source, where source criticism for him should be the means own the text.

By the middle of the 20^th century, their source theory, which claimed that the Pentateuch was the result of four documents, J, E, D and P, was widely accepted.  There were some significant new efforts which raised questions about how complete this analysis was. Baden identified Gunkel, Von Rad and Eichorn as scholars that raised new questions, but it was the general consensus that these would be answer within confines of the documentary thesis. This did not happen in the seventies, as Baden points out, where an attempt was made to “reimagine source criticism.”  This called for the abandonment the document theory and a new start with what it called the “smallest literary unit” of the text.

The heavy historical exploration was set aside as unnecessary, abstruse or impossible and the text as discreet pieces becomes the source.  The effort is associated with the work of Rendtorff and continued through final decades of the 20^th century. This led to the assumption that documentary theory had been made irrelevant. The problem, as the exercise at the end of chapter 5 shows, ends in fragmentation with an endless number of possible solutions.

In his final chapter, 6, “A Return to Sources,” Baden provides his solution to how Pentateuch studies should proceed.  He argues that while the classic sources did not exist as documents there did exist a more diverse set of sources.  Identifying these sources does not give one a basis for replacing the text, but a means of giving the text its meaning.  It will be interesting to follow Baden’s effort to carry out his methods as it promises to be more helpful to the student of the Pentateuch than the sterile reductionism of the most recent period which seemed only serve personalist use of the Biblical text, be it the Pentateuch, the rest of the Tanach, or the Christian testament.

I would close with a personal note.  My formation took place in the sixties when the document theory was solidly entrenched, at the very institution, YDS, that Baden serves as Professor of Hebrew Bible.  Of course, many of us who went form there in pastoral ministries followed the rule that much of what they had learned was best left behind, but some of us felt called to carry it into our ministries. I taught source theory in the parishes that I served. In fact, the Episcopal lay curriculum, EFM, included it in its first year. My experience was that this did not put off the laity but energized them in regard to scripture.

I carried from seminary some experience with Scandinavian scholarship and an introduction to Gunkel, Von Rad and Eichorn so I anticipated a continued development of source criticism.  As my pastorate was coming to an end, I noticed in my rear-view mirror that sources criticism was coming apart to my dismay.  So Baden’s work excites me. I am short on time, so I don’t expect to be around to catch the new wave, but take great solace in calling his work to your attention,

Michael J. Tancreti, MDV Berkeley YDS 1967

aka The Elder of Omaha