Baruch J. Swartz in his article: “Does Scholarship’s Critique of the Documentary Hypothesis Constitute Grounds for Its Rejection?” argues that the only legitimate way to discredit the Documentary Hypothesis (DH) is to prove that it is not the best solution to the literary “problems and contradictions” contained within the Pentateuch. He also argues that many critiques of the DH are illegitimate. Among one of the Swartz’s more interesting critiques is that he doesn’t believe that disproving the historical process which we think generated the Pentateuchal sources disproves the literary division of the Pentateuch into its sources. In other words, though new research brings doubt to the current historical model behind the creation of the Pentateuch sources, that research has little impact on the literary evidence of the Pentateuch’s sources. Thus, he separates the DH from the historical model behind DH:
In my understanding, the higher criticism of the Torah consists of two parts: a literary-critical stage, which seeks to explain why the text looks the way it does by separating it into its constituent parts and to determine how they were combined, and its historical-critical stage, which attempts to place the separate components, and the process by which their combination has ultimately resulted in the composition we call the Torah, within plausible contexts in the history of ancient Israel and its religion…The Documentary Hypothesis per se belongs exclusively to the first stage. Its point of departure is literary. its aim is literary, and its essential claim is literary too: that the greatest number of textual problems posed by the attempt to read the Pentateuch in its present form is solved in the mot economical manner when it is posited that the Torah is an amalgamation of four preexisting documents [i.e. JEDP].
Central to Swartz’s thesis is that the DH represents a solution to these textual problems, but the article does not go deeper into how the DH solves those problems. What I like about Swartz’s article though, is the focus on a literary solutions to the problematic texts of the Pentateuch. I think Swartz’s article represents a step in right direction. Before we postulate historical models over the creation of a particular text (and thus assume a literary model), we should work to describe the text on the philological and literary level first. If we focus on literary solutions, I think we can avoid running roughshod over the text with inadequate historical models. I do not want to seem like I’m sweeping the problem under a rug, but I ultimately think we can come up with a better literary solution than the DH while maintaining the unity of the message and literature of the Pentateuch without dividing it into its various sources (although I speak as a humble student). Yet, I was encouraged to read Swartz’s thoughts on methodology even though I disagreed with his stance on the DH.
nathanielcooley 