Customer comments on this selection.
 Amazing!
I am taking a theology class studying the Old Testament. I use 2 Torahs and 3 Bibles (NE and NRSV). Someone said in class that this book helped her make sense of what the redactors had done. It is so very helpful; you can read one authors writing, skipping over other's and it makes so much easier. Read the entire text for the ideas, one author at a time for continuity.
If you are studying the first 5 books of the Bible, this book is an invaluable tool. I would have given it 5 stars, but I think additional footnotes would have made it perfect.
 A good picture book!
When most talk about the JEDP theory, they break it up and explain how it may be this or that person. This book stand's out because it does not just tell you, it shows you. He takes the first five books of the bible and shows where J is written in contrast to E and P ect. How the first five books are written are kept intact, he uses various colors to show where J is, another color to show E, and another color to show P and one to show D. So you can see how the theory actually looks like.
If you are interested in this theory, this is a book to have. So when you read in another book that J is stated in this passage, you can turn to this book and verify it. You no longer have to wonder how they come up with it and try to visualize it in your own bible, Friedman did it for you. This alone is worth the price of the book, and therefore, needs to be on every shelf of every biblical student.
A Must Have for any Biblical Scholar
As someone who has made a serious hobby out of academic biblical study, I cannot recommend this book enough. Friedman's idea of actually showing the ways in which scholars differentiate between the different textual strata of the what we have come to call the Pentateuch or the Torah (rather than describe such source critical phenomena in writing) is such a good one that I am compelled to wonder why nobody had ever thought of doing this before. Additionally, the author's footnotes, while they could be more longer and more numerous, are quite helpful, as is his bibliography. Even as my interests in biblical scholarship have shifted over time, this is a book that I find myself coming back to again, and again and again.
No matter what, however, a potential reader should be aware of these two minor, potential drawbacks:
1. The book is only available in English. I realize that for a lot of Americans, that's not at all a drawback, but for those of us who like to study our source criticism in the original, the only solution is to keep this book in one hand, and a Hebrew version in the other. Cumbersome, perhaps, but always worth the effort.
2. Keep in mind that Friedman's ideas of how to divide up the text between the various sources are not universally accepted. No, I am not going to offer the fundamentalist response to biblical criticism, and say that the discipline is worthless, and scholars now know better to practice it. Rather, my point is that not all scholars agree with Friedman's conclusions on, say, where to draw the dividing line between the various textual sources of the story of Balaam and Balak in Numbers, or the where the border is between the Holiness Code and other P material in the book of Leviticus (a point that the author readily acknowledges). Thus, instead of offering any kind of universal, scholarly consensus (something that rarely exists in a humanistic discipline, anyway), this book propounds the opinions of one highly respected and formidable scholar.
 The Best of the 19th Century...
Friedman's text is an excellent review, with slight expansion, of Wellhausen's "Prolegomena." Friedman's fault lies in his complete disregard for a century of scholarship that has significantly undermined the validity of the Documentary Hypothesis.
Helps you better understand the Hebrew Scriptures
The Bible with Sources Revealed: A New View into the Five Books of Moses by Richard Elliott Friedman is a very helpful book for students of the Bible.
Friedman's opening two chapters are amazingly succinct. In a very few pages, Friedman lays out an incredibly compelling case for what is known as the Documentary Hypothesis. This is the widely accepted theory that the first five books of the Bible are a compilation of four main documents, known by the letters J, E, P, and D, which were woven together by later editors known as Redactors.
After the introductory material, the book is a translation of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.
In his chapter, "Collection of Evidence," Friedman catalogs the seven main arguments for accepting the Documentary Hypothesis. They fall into these categories: linguistic, terminology, consistent content, narrative flow, connections with other parts of the Old Testament, relationships among the sources, and convergence of the evidence. I find Friedman's explanation clear and convincing.
What does it matter whether you buy into the idea that sources by J, P, E, and D form the Pentateuch? Because, if you are somewhat familiar with this concept, certain "problems" with the text suddenly become clear as you read the new English translation that follows Friedman's opening chapters. By using two different ink colors (blue and green) and a variety of fonts, average Bible readers like you and me can easily understand various contradictions and redundancies in the text. The four strands are clearly set off, thanks to the wonders of modern technology in printing.
Here's an example of how seeing the sources helps you understand what's going on in the Bible texts. The story of Noah's ark is told in Genesis, chapters 6 through 9. Both J and P originally told the story. The Redactors blended these two accounts. With The Bible with Sources Revealed, I learned that in the P version there is only one pair of each animal, whether pure or impure. See Genesis 6:19-20; 7:8, 9 15. In P, there are no sacrifices until the establishment of the Tabernacle in Exodus 40, so two of each animal is sufficient. However, J specifies seven pairs of pure and one pair of impure (see Genesis 7:2, 3.) This fits with the fact that in the J account, Noah will offer sacrifices at the end of the flood, so he needs more than two of each animal--or else his sacrifice would end a species. Friedman's footnotes clarify such differences throughout the Pentateuch.
Friedman's translation is unique because the text is so clearly marked in terms of sources. You won't be disappointed.
|
