What this actually reminds me of is creationists who tell you that they are going to refute evolutionary biology, then start talking about abiogenisis.
@@aaronpolichar7936"Yes, MICRO evolution is real, but MACRO evolution is a lie of the devil." Yeah, I know - all evolution is micro evolution. And when you combine that with the *fact* that it's been occurring for a very, very, very long time (much longer than 6000 years), micro evolution adds up to macro changes.
I'm laughing at the first section- this is great. The strawman assertions about the documentary hypothesis are so shallow, but they appeal to people who want a simple answer to a complicated question. Sadly, there are a lot of people like that. Thanks for your presentation. I appreciate the list of helpful books, also.
"There is a floor to how simple the truth can be and still be the truth. Falsehoods don't have that; there is no limit to how simple an idea can be when it doesn't have to conform to reality." - Innuendo Studios (youtu. be/dF98ii6r_gU)
I learned a bit about the Documentary Hypothesis almost 40 years ago, when I took Humanities courses with Professor Richard Friedman at UCSD, and it challenged me to examine a lot of things about religion and history in a different way than some of the simplistic things I was taught when I was younger. That process is still going on for me.
Hm, I remember as a kid 50(?) years ago sitting at the breakfast table while my parents argued, and my Dad saying to my Mum, yeah, but is that an E text or a J text? I sometimes explain to people that how I got weird is by being a preacher's kid. Maybe I should go further and try to explain to them what _kind_ of preacher's kid. Perhaps I'm _very_ weird. But in any case it hadn't really occurred to me that there was anyone who _didn't_ know about this. Maybe plumbers discuss pipe threading over breakfast, instead? Meanwhile I just grew up thinking that maybe I was some sort of Christian, but clearly not a Jew, and not someone with a super great opinion of all of the New Testament authors and editors. This, it transpires, is a super commonly _held_ viewpoint but not a super commonly _acknowledged_ one. Weird, huh?
When I was in high school in the end of the sixties, our religion teacher told the story that the first books were constructed by some Israelis that came back from exile. Don’t know if the story is true. But it was obvious that it wasn’t written by one person. And that explained that the stories didn’t always match. It were the stories they remembered. This was a Protestant school, but part of the students were of the reformed churches in the Netherlands, bible reading is very important in this denomination. (My brother always invite Jehovah Witnesses inside to discuss the Bible, cause he misses the discussions)
The Torah does not claim Mosaic authorship, and the internal literary context of each book consistently precludes Mosaic authorship; people who insist the term “books of Moses” be taken literally are only making themselves look illiterate, even if it were to be assumed the documentary hypothesis were false.
Apologetics is different tho because they’re selling snake oil without even realizing it. They bought it from someone else and now they swear by it and wanna sell it to others.
FWIW: Archeological evidence for the Hittites were first discovered in the early to mid 19th century. The language was first hypothesized in 1902 and was fully deciphered within twenty or so years.
Former seminarian here: I remember nearly all classes at my evangelical school that dealt with the Pentateuch dismissed the documentary hypothesis with essentially a hand wave. Introduced it, pointed out how some of its points were in contention, and used this fact to suggest that the whole thing was just a silly mess based on tendentious and flimsy reasoning and unjustifiable presuppositions, and that we should ignore it so we could get on to exegeting scripture within the bounds of all the usual traditional assumptions. This is why I like your use of the phrase "evidentiary basis," to distinguish between controversies about the details of pentateuchal source criticism and the features of the text that inspired the endeavor in the first place. I was never required to really engage with (or even read) any primary sources on the subject, and did not do so until I forced myself to do it as I was preparing to apply to PhD programs. And golly gee, whaddayaknow! Turns out a framework that is accepted by nearly every scholar who specializes in the field has very good evidence and arguments to recommend it. Whodathunk? So advice to any young aspiring students of the Bible or any scholarly field really: If you find yourself defending a minority opinion in your field, you owe it to yourself to at least throughly dig into what it was that convinced everyone else to disagree with you.
Thanks Dan. I really appreciate your commitment to dealing with these sorts of apologetic responses to your videos. Sometimes scholars struggle with popular criticisms of their work, even when they can adequately respond to other scholars. You're doing amazing work, as always!
I appreciate that Dan engages these. The lenses and presuppositions we bring to the Bible and then any secondary source (academic, devotional, or apologetic) are often unreflected and applied as objectivity. Good reading of any text requires we interrogate not only the text, but also ourselves and everything we bring to each text.
Ouch! Someone got burned. This creator is so intent on showing Dan to be a liar that he went ahead and made a video of something he clearly knows nothing about. Embarrasing!
Dan, got a sentence to preface your videos: “Biblical scholars analyze and critique text; Apologists use text to substantiate belief systems. I am not an Apologist, I am a Biblical scholar.”
The only times I have heard Dan change his tone is when a creator or people are using dogma against other people. And, even if short, it's harrowing. The level of conviction Dan has for knowledge is captivating.
Apologists, don't bring generalities ("some critics", "some authors") to a data discussion. Who said that? In what publication? Can you show us the document? You know, like Dan does.
Dan for the win. Thanks for your work. I am not a biblical scholar but thoroughly enjoy what I can gather from your depth of knowledge. There is so much that can still be learned from the literature and history. Thanks.
I think there's a basic misunderstanding, where non-academics hear "literary criticism about X" and assume it means "people criticizing X". No, that's not what it means. Literary criticism is the comparison, analysis, interpretation, and/or evaluation of works of literature. Literary criticism is essentially an opinion, supported by evidence, relating to theme, style, setting or historical or political context. Similar misunderstandings that are currently popular: "critical race theory" is not anything about races that the conservatives don't like. It's a specific academic theory (developed by legal scholars) that you won't get taught outside the university.
@@PIA-tj5hc asking questions is not the problem. Making bold claims without actually examining the data is the problem. If you can support your claim, go ahead. If you're just spouting off at someone way more informed about your individual opinion, that is just ignorance. Analysis can be challenged but it cannot just be challenged because you feel it's wrong based off nothing. It's like telling a physicist that atoms don't exist because you disagree. Okay, well now you have to prove that and that's a personal challenge.
“Scholars have been questioning the conclusions of the documentary hypothesis for a long time now.” “So they’ve come back around to Mosaic authorship!” “Oh, heavens no! If anything, they’ve moved even further away!” Although, I understand the confusion because scholars communicating with lay audiences, like myself, just present JEPD and the documentary hypothesis and note that it’s no longer the scholarly consensus. “This exercise has been left to the reader” doesn’t work as well in this context.
Baden does a great job putting stories back together in the original form to show how our current text cut up stories in the middle and spliced in other parts to give a unified document. Thanks for the good work Dan!
@@fordprefect5304 I clarified my comment to make clear that I agree 100% with Dan. I meant that the person, to whom Dan is responding, keeps digging deeper, because Dan was responding to some other 100% unfounded criticisms by that guy yesterday.
As a lay-someone long specializing in Pentateuchal Studies, the source video gave me a raging migraine. It's hard to fathom such confidence with such _glaring_ unfamiliarity with the field-I'd be mortified to critique another field that way. 😬 (And I even have reservations with speaking authoritatively against scholars in "my own"!)
Thanks, Dan! Would love to hear you and Joel Baden have a conversation about the different biblical literary theories on your podcast! It’d be interesting to see the pros and cons of each view.
I appreciate your holding the books up long enough for me to pause and get the title and author. I have the Oxford Book of the Pentateuch and was glad to hear you say it was the latest authoritative book. (I would like someone to publish the Pentateuch with each "document" in the hypothesis in a different pastel color.) I have ordered your book , YHWH's Divine Images..., and am anxious to read about the cognitive approach. Scholarly biblical books are expensive and so am grateful that you often highlight the best of the many available! Thanks.
Richard Elliott Friedman wrote a book called The Bible with Sources Revealed that literally color codes who he thinks the sources are! The introduction to that book is worth the price alone.
So about the question of the hittites... I attended a Presbyterian college in the United States where we were taught that previous to the discovery of the hittites capital they were believed to be mythical. In fact, the school asserted that the Hittites quote not existence quote used to be presented as evidence that the Bible was false and that these cities discovery proved its historicity.
@@fordprefect5304 and says that every letter of the torah will be fulfilled. This can only be the case if he believed in a perfect word for word preserved torah
Thanks for the recommendations of further reading. I’ve been wanting to get into this topic more, but didn’t know where to start besides watching RU-vid videos like this and History Valley.
Different authors wrote texts and they were put together by another editor or editors. I mean the torah (the 5 books) writes ABOUT Moses upto 100 times. The torah writes about his grave being unknown TO THIS DAY. So there must have been a big time between Moses and the author. The torah says that until THIS DAY there was no prophet like Moses in Israel. Again, huge gap between Moses and the author. There are so many of these examples which show that many different authors wrote the books
When an ignoramus tells you that you are wrong about everything under the sun and not only calls you a liar, and then tries out his best "snide professor" voice in the hopes of coming off superior, holy, knowledgeable, and sane. One for the FAIL ARMY vaults for sure.
This guy has already shown himself to be dishonest and uncritical. So let's rate his gamer setup instead. The RGB condenser mic that hasn't been taken off the factory "party mode" setting. The cheap gamer chair in black and red. The RGB casting on the walls but only in blue. The placement of stuff on the shelves with no eye towards hiding the cheap rail style shelving hardware. The military fetishism. I rate this a: Please don't think I'm not straight/8 It seems like someone adopting an aesthetic in a shallow attempt to appeal to "the youths". Little thought has been put into demonstrating any kind of personal style nor how everything comes together on camera. He seems like he would be much more comfortable recording this in his car (truck?), as is typical of your average, aggressively hetero cis male cartheist. Perhaps Dan is not the only thing this guy is lying about?
Dan, any reason Richard Elliott Friedman's "Who Wrote the Bible" is not included in your list? One of the things he did that I liked was show how much better some of the stories flowed, when you only include a single author in the narrative. I seem to recall that he color-coded passages based on the presumed authors, so you could get a better feel for the motivation of each of the authors. I'd love to see you critique his book, "The Exodus" in a future video. I thought it was a fascinating hypothesis with something for everyone.
I think Dr. Tim Mackie had said in the Bible Project a few things about how he doesn’t entirely agree with Documentary Hypotheses. If I understood, it’s that it’s unlikely there were just the JDEP sources and there’s way more breakdown. I’m not familiar with Neo Doc Hyp (got my BA in Bible back in 2010 and we didn’t cover that, but profs. taught us JDEP), but he might have been more of a supporter there. I mention Mackie because he’s also a public scholar with A LOT of influence in the evangelical church at large. So if he said something, you’ll see a lot more Christians following somewhere behind. There were obviously more authors than Moses and a mashup of different kinds of texts (narrative, myth, law, song/poetry, military reports, history).
Typical Danny boy's redaction scholarship of the minimalists scholors : he is an Apologist for his side : the Bible actually speaks this will happen in the last days. We R not surprised!
@david the consensus of all scholars is that Moses didn't write the Torah. your own church fathers admit that the torah got forged and forgotten and was reestablished by Ezra the scribe.
that guy is a rather noxious distillation of all the popular apologists in one rancid draught. All of them would recognise a piece of themselves in this portrayal of internet lay theologian - well, to be fair, if recognising the substance of data when it's in front of them, they wouldn't be internet apologists, but..
While in Bible College, I remember a critique of there being 4 sources when an Instructor mentioned one verse using language that suggested the 4 different sources. Thereby being proof that it was false. Wish I could remember the passage for discussion purposes.
Wow, that guy is, like, way out there. How in the heck does "Camels weren't domesticated" have any bearing on whether it was written by Moses or anyone else?
It places the context in the wrong time period. The Torah dates itself to the 6th century BCE When camels were common. The writers were unaware that 1000 years before domesticated camels were not in the Levant.
@@fordprefect5304 Well that could be explained by having Moses live at a different time than asserted, couldn't it? Yeah, something has to give, but why assume that is authorship?
@@flowingafterglow629 There are numerous examples of anachronisms in Old Testament stories where events that are described taking place over thousands of years all seem to depict the world as it was known to Judahites around the 7th century BCE. That suggests that the 7th century is most likely when those stories were either compiled into their authoritative versions or when a fluid oral tradition was fixed in writing. The problem here is that this time period isn't a blank slate. We never have as much information as we would like, but we know enough about what Egypt and Judah were up to in this time to know that the story of Moses doesn't fit. So if we did want to assume that Moses was a biblical author, the result is assuming that Moses was just some guy otherwise unattested to by history who claimed that he had an adventure in the distant past, and somehow his contemporaries believed him enough to go along with it. This is already a pretty unlikely scenario, and when we weigh it against the evidence FOR Mosaic authorship (ie, tradition) it's simply not a very convincing position. My personal position is that there were real people at the heart of the Exodus story, including Moses, and centuries of oral transmission, literary conventions, and politically-minded retellings have made the version of the story that has come down to us so derived from the true events that took place that it makes the most sense to treat it as a piece of literature more than history.
"Project Tabs" a group of some 9 Rabbi's all with PHD's has separated some of the stories by who wrote them J P E or D. Example there are 2 complete Noah stories that have been unwound.
Kind of amazed when people say that the Hittites were an "imaginary people". I've just got back from Egypt looking at the temples in Luxor a few of which were adorned with carvings of Ramses II defeating the Hittites at Kadesh.
@@MM-jf1me Armstrong Institute of Biblical Archeology puts the date at 1893 which is the end of the 19th century. First Discoveries Evidence of the Hittite kingdom first began to be uncovered in Turkey in the early-to-mid-19th century. In 1834, French archaeologist Félix Marie Charles Texier discovered monumental ruins in Boğazköy (central-northern Turkey). It wasn’t until 1886 that his compatriot Georges Perrot, an archaeologist who also excavated the site, first identified it as Hattuša, the Hittite capital. Prof. Félix Marie Charles Texier Public Domain Between 1893 and 1905, the site was probed by various archaeologists. They began discovering clay cuneiform tablets written in the Akkadian language and another, then obscure, language. As the ancient ruins of Hattuša were being exposed during the 19th century, scholars were beginning to unlock a number of long-lost, ancient languages. This was famously spearheaded by Jean-François Champollion, who in the first decades of the 19th century utilized the recently discovered Rosetta Stone to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs. That same century also saw the decipherment of various cuneiform-script languages, including Persian, Babylonian, Akkadian and Sumerian. Scholarship no longer needed to rely on early classical historians who wrote in understandable languages like Greek and Latin; the very archives of the ancient civilizations themselves could be read and understood. New frontiers of understanding were being opened.
@@MM-jf1me The problem with the Hittites in the bible is that they were found by Joshua to be in Canaan along with the Nephilim. 2 problems #1 The Nephilim were all supposed to be drowned in the flood #2 Egypt controlled Canaan and they were mortal enemies. So it makes no sense.
@fordprefect5304 No evidence of the Hittites!? I have quite literally told you that the Temples are Karnak are covered of hieroglyphics that describe the Hittites! They describe the battle the tributes the leadership, where they lived (ancient Israel), their customs, even how their wore their hair. And this is a source that has nothing to do with Bible and because it is contemporary with the Hittites, has never been diluted or distorted through rewriting or oral history. It's a BETTER source for the Hittites THAN THE BIBLE.
I first became interested in the Documentary Hypothesis while preparing to read portions of Genesis in the Synagogue, as a Torah reader. The Joseph story is what stuck with me, and it was hard not to notice how the vocabulary changed from one piece to another, YHWH vs Elohim/Jacob vs Israel/Reuben vs Judah/ 'amtahat vs saq/ etc. Now I am told that scholars see JE as a single source. I'm sure you have covered this in a video, but I could not locate it. Please explain.
Wait. Critical scholarship has tenets that must be followed, or eternal damnation is the punishment? And secular schools that have a critical view have statements of faith that their faculty are required to sign and follow, or risk losing their position? Remember, less than 10 years ago, a fairly prominent scholar lost his job at an evangelical university partially because he dared to suggest that the graves opening during the resurrection in Matthew might be hyperbole, or poetic.
Critical scholarship does not have eternal damnation, tenants that are not debatable based on arguments from evidence, or statements of faith. There are conclusions from analysis of evidence that if you contradict them from a position of faith then you risk your career in scholarship, but that is because you are favoring conclusions from less or lower quality data over conclusions from more or better quality data. Critical scholarship is fundamentally about preferring conclusions from data, so going against the data is the same as abandoning the field. Abandoning the field abandons any career within the field.
Dan, I was going to come here to say that, you shouldn't bother replying to so many Text-to-speech, stock photo slideshow videos, because those are generated by content farms. They often control dozens of channels and push hundreds of videos a day. They don't bother to pay a narrator. They may not have put any time or thought into their videos. However, that also describes quite a few of these Christian apologist videos that also have little or no time or thought put into them, so maybe you should just od your thing.
😢 the original creator reduced themselves to cute editing and alternative frame rates rather than actually citing critical scholarship that supports their thesis. Citations? Nope, just a summarized set of titles. We used to call that the "spread" in debate, and it's an approach that never depends on evidence. However, I am open to seeing other evidence. So, I simply request the original creator have his deity come and sit down with scholars to explain the discontinuities and other issues present in the Bible. It seems to be the only way that an apologist's hypothesis can actually be supported. 😮😮😮
Awwhhhh, thats so cute, you triggered him. On thing I have to say, I like the low frequency voice morph. It would have been cool if you could have thrown "fee, fye, foh, fum" in there.
Two auestions for Dan: What do you believe that is different from the documentary hypothesis? You mention this in on screen text at 1:22. Also, do you think Moses existed? Carrier says the consensus shifted to believing Moses didn't exist in the 1970's, but it seems strange that most people are apparently unaware of this "consensus".
I find apologists to be the most insecure of people. I am a religious Jew and I have no problems at all with the DH (in terms of the ideas it presents, I can't comment on the methodology or anything like that). The notion that the foundational text of my religion came together over centuries and was brought into written form much later than the time Moses would have lived doesn't cause me any problems at all. I don't feel combative, depressed, shocked, or any other negative feeling or emotion. I understand that no matter how and when the various books of the Bible were authored, it will always be the case that my religion was crafted and altered over millennia. A practicing Jew from 2000 years ago would not recognize a practicing Jew of today, and vice versa.
(Reviews notes) so in an attempt to disprove the documentary hypothesis original poster got Dan on this case and Dan completely debunks Josh McDowell as having any credibility whatsoever. A major christian apologist just became a footnote. RIP McDowell.
General obs: Among religious dogmatists, you'll notice a common style of articulation, a rapid, staccato pace of bullet points. In Ben Shapiro, it's the Galloping Gish of stringing together poorly-made arguments, half-truths, cherry picked outliers, and a few outright lies to smother a debate. This creator too fires off his canned points, without the natural, deliberative pace of someone truly thinking through an argument, genuinely seeking clarity for ALL. Creators like this guy and Shapiro typically worry first about their base viewership clicks and scoring unilateral points to their "side." They're also keenly aware of being outside the scholarship community, so they tend to "gin up" (as Dan likes to say) their salvos out of self-generated insecurity -- and to fire up their clickyclick base.
Not a big fan of the documentary hypothesis (i see the first five books as a pentateuch rather than a torah), but the pentateuch was obviously not something that one person wrote down as it reflects multiple authors, multiple redactors, and multiple time periods (Exodus generally fits the “reign” of Jeroboam l, deuteronomy generally fits the reign of josiah, etc.).
The names for the "Hittite" people + city/country + one of their kings, as seen in their own writing, use the root syllable "Hat". What reason is there to connect that with the "Hit" in the Bible, other than the place & time roughly fitting and two of the three sounds fitting?
"Hat" Well Hatta was the capital of the Hittite empire. The Northern Kingdom of Israel would have engaged the remnants of the Hittite empire at the battle of Quaqar as they were Assyrian allies. The problem is that the bible places them in Canaan when Joshua and scouts found them and the Nephilim. Which is a joke unto itself. Anyway the Hittites were mortal enemies of the Egyptians who controlled Canaan. So the story makes no sense.
What I have come to understand is that even if I tried to make a video supporting Dan, I'd still be in absolutely no position to do so comprehensively. So when I think about other content creators looking to make videos doing the opposite.... RIP.
Its my understanding that those who came agaisnt the documentary hypothesis couldn't agree on a new critism. Is that correct? What does Dan subscribe to? He stated in this video he disagrees with it
The title "what if there aren't any empirical models for pent. criticism" was kind of... mind-breaking. I mean - if you have a work X, then wouldn't everyone have an internal 'model' for it...? And sans empirical methods by which to substantiate or refute those, then we'd have to fall back to a null-hypothesis or face-value/parsimonious model, right? It's like a rabbit-hole of rabbit-holes.
Wow, talk about strawmanning... it should be noted that the vast majority of Christian scholars who make up biblical critical scholarship use the documentary hypothesis as their bread and butter to understand the texts. I have seen the claim that the DH was "debunked" on creationist websites, such as AiG (including websites promoting recent ark-related documentaries) and other creationist apologist sites.
why do you continue to engage this boy? 😅 does he only study from what he finds online, or is he actually a scholar that does research in person at various libraries, colleges, and with other scholars and professors? has he ever tried to meet with you to discuss anything, or does he just think he's smarter than you? Does he have degrees and doctorates? is he published? has he ever explained why he believes he knows more than you? or do you respond because he calls you out directly by name? it all seems a little schoolyard "he started it" to me. even though you always seem to win 😂
the Doc Hype is pure subjective interpretation of German 'Higher' (allegedly) Criticism which was fashionable at the time - CS Lewis noted that the same approach had been applied to Homer, but the mood had changed in his lifetime with scholarship then switching to re-assert that belief in the actual bard as a living person and the single author of the Iliad and the Odyssey being respectably believable once more.
Well, too bad for Lewis, but the scholarship has shifted again (or maybe he was just not thorough in his search for it in his time). Now most classicists don't consider Homer to be historical, and the composition of the epics has been pushed forwards, quite akin to the Pentateuch; it is now dated to the 600s BC rather than the 700s- och even 800s. Nowadays Homer is viewed as only one of many poetic personas that only later were historicised, like Hesiod, Orpheus, Abaris, and Epimenides
Exodus 24:4 says Moses wrote down the words God has spoke on Sinai. That constituted the Covenant Code, which is only one of multiple different codes within Exodus, which are themselves only a portion of all the codes found in the Pentateuch, which also don't even constitute half of the Pentateuch, which is mostly narrative, the composition of which isn't addressed at all in Exodus 24.
In translation, at least, that passage identifies Moses as a scribe for the true author, and Exodus 24:7 implies that it was only of the Book of the Covenant (about 3 chapters of Exodus), not the Pentateuch.
@maklelan, could you sometime address the idea that the Hebrews didn't even have a written language until maybe 300-500 years after Moses? "In the original autographs" is a common claim of inerrantists/biblicists, but if that written language dating is correct, no such "original" could possibly exist, which sort of nullifies any claim that Moses "wrote" anything (except maybe in Egyptian language forms but certainly not in any form of Hebrew).
1. Exodus 24 4 writes about Moses, its not Moses writing 2. It doesn't say Pentateuch 3. It refers to the laws Moses received. Not to stories, genealogies etc 4. Genesis for example doesn't even mention Moses once😂
@@maklelan Hi Dan, thanks for your reply. Rashi explains there Moses wrote the Torah’s text from “In the beginning” (Gen 1:1), until the giving of the Torah. He also wrote the commandments that they were commanded in Marah. Since all this took place before the giving of the Torah, Moses could write only up to that point.
This guy has already shown himself to be dishonest and uncritical. So let's rate his gamer setup instead. The RGB condenser mic that hasn't been taken off the factory "party mode" setting. The cheap gamer chair in black and red. The RGB casting on the walls but only in blue. The placement of stuff on the shelves with no eye towards hiding the cheap rail style shelving hardware. The military fetishism. I rate this a: Please don't think I'm not straight/8 It seems like someone adopting an aesthetic in a shallow attempt to appeal to "the youths". Little thought has been put into demonstrating any kind of personal style nor how everything comes together on camera. He seems like he would be much more comfortable recording this in his car (truck?), as is typical of your average, aggressively hetero cis male cartheist. Perhaps Dan is not the only thing this guy is lying about?
