Interview with David M.

CarrCurrent state of Bible Scholarship

Posted on January 8, 2012 by Alan Brill | 20 Comments
David M. Carr is one of the top scholars of the redaction of the
Pentateuch in the world. We can debate if he is in the top five or the top ten,
but he is at the top of the field. I was at a social gathering where I heard, over
the din of small talk, a conversation at the other end of the room about the
state of Biblical studies. Specifically, I heard Professor Carr say that the old
documentary hypothesis has given way to new theories. David generously
agreed to a blog interview to explain the current state of scholarship to my
reader. When I told Rabbi Dr Joshua Berman about the blog interview he
emailed: Wow, David is the best, he is the real thing.
David M. Carr Ph.D. is professor at Union Theological Seminary in NY.
He received his degree in Religion from Claremont Graduate University in
1988. Before coming to Union in August 1999, Dr. Carr served as full
professor of Old Testament at Methodist Theological School in Ohio from
1988-1999.
Professor Carrs book-length publications include From D to Q: A
Study of Early Jewish Interpretations of Solomons Dream at Gibeon (Scholars
Press, 1991); Reading the Fractures of Genesis: Historical and Literary
Approaches (Westminster, 1996); The Erotic Word: Sexuality, Spirituality and
the Bible (Oxford, 2003); Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of
Western Scripture and Literature (Oxford, 2005); In October 2011 his most
recent book appeared: The Formation of the Hebrew Bible: A New
Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2011).
The reason for this interview is because if the religious community
wants to respond to Biblical criticism, then it should know what it is talking
about. It has to stop create homiletics about repetitions and thinking that it
answers anything at all. Part of the importance of Prof. Carr is that he thinks
we dont know enough to say much with certainty about the original
Mesopotamian origins of the Torah. We cannot separate it into documents
and we cannot do etymological origins of texts. Carr uncovers specific
evidence that the Hebrew Bible contains texts dating across Israelite history,
even the early pre-exilic period (10th-9th centuries).His method is to use
parallel documents, many of them works edited only in the last 40 years such
as the Ugaritic texts at Ebla & Ras Shamra. Please create a religious response
that includes Sinai and can work with the principles of faith, but first know
the field.
As a believer, liberal Protestants only need a revelation from heaven or
a Divine source, but they dont need it to be from Sinai or Sinai as the defining
moment.
David Carrs prior book Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of
Scripture and Literature (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
stressed that the ancient world did not think of authors and readers the way
most of us do. Instead of reading a text silently, one memorized and placed

on the heart the classic scriptures. Scribal authors then drew on this
memorized knowledge in creating new texts. Carr compares the Bible and its
transmission to scribal guilds and writing in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Ugarit, and
Greece. Of his many significant observations, the following appear to
encapsulate his thought: (1) Students copied texts not only to learn scribal
skills but also to become educated and inculturated with the values of the
society. (2) Orality and writing were not in tension, but were complementary
ways of teaching the culture and recalling the literary traditions. Written texts
were shaped for the goal of oral performance, if only by reflex. (3) Literacy
was not the ability to read or write, but the ability to master core literature,
and that made one part of the social elite. (4) Students sometimes learned
texts so archaic that they seemed nonsensical, but that process taught them
obedience to their society. (5) Scribes might copy a text before them, but often
they generated texts by memory and hence with creativity, like a musician
performing a well-known work. Thus, there was no one original text for
literary works because minor memory variations always existed. (6) Because
the Gilgamesh Epic and the Enuma Elish were used to educate students early
in the curriculum, they came to be known throughout the ancient world.
Thus, biblical narratives reflect the influence of these works because Israelite
scribes learned to write with them. (7) In the postexilic era, scribal training
increasingly became part of the priestly domain, so that selected texts
reflected priestly values. These texts would evolve into the Hebrew
Scriptures. (8) The Bible ultimately is an educational-inculturation corpus, not
a library of texts.
Here is some praise for his works here.
For my readers looking for a reading list or summary of the state of the
field, the blog Hesed we Emet posted his doctoral comprehensive reading list
and also posted his summaries of the reading in long and short versions.
From his notes you can see the importance of Carrs work. (One can also see
how Kugel and his approach does not play a role- see prior blog post.)
1) What is the innovation of your new book on the Bible? Why is
memory important?
A starting point would be that I look to documented examples of
scribal revision for models of how scribes preserved or revised texts. And one
main thing I find is that even scribes reproducing a virtually identical copy of
a given section of text would make the kinds of changes to texts I call them
memory variants that people who have memorized texts do: they would
substitute a synonym of a word for another, add or subtract minor
grammatical particles, switch from one phrase to a syntactic equivalent.
Apparently such scribes often did not visually copy texts they were citing or
reproducing, but had memorized them and wrote them out from memory.
This fluid transmission of texts means that many criteria that scholars thought
they could use for linguistic dating of texts or source identification are not as
firm as we once thought.
Other things these documented examples of transmission teach us are
the tendency of scribes to pollute the evidence through harmonizing texts

with each other, their tendency to make small additions to texts that would be
undetectable without manuscript documentation of different stages, and the
way scribe/authors would only preserve parts of texts that they were
otherwise appropriating large portions of. Observations like this dont mean
that we cant continue to make plausible hypotheses about the growth of
biblical texts, but it means that we now need to evaluate the evidence in
biblical texts differently than we once did.
2) What is the role of historical dating of texts in your approach? And
what tools do you use to date a Biblical text (parallels to other texts, Hebrew
philology, and archeology)?
My main approach is to start by looking at the characteristics or
profile of texts that we have good reason to think come from a given
period. For example, can we build a profile of texts that seem to date from the
Persian period as a way of potentially dating yet more texts to that period. To
some extent, that may include linguistic criteria (philological) that scholars
have used for dating texts to the Persian period before, such as significantly
Aramaized Hebrew. But we must remember that the presence of Aramaic
characteristics is not necessarily a sufficient criterion for dating a text to the
Persian period since scribes easily could accidentally add Aramaic elements
to older texts in the process of transmitting them fluidly, often by way of
memory. Other important characteristics of many Persian period texts
(especially later in the Persian period) are links to Priestly traditions/the
temple and the project of rebuilding Jerusalem in general.
3) What historical documents and parallels need to be mastered to
date Biblical texts?
I hear you asking about primary text resources, and the first thing Id
urge is immersing oneself in documented examples of scribal revision of
ancient texts. I sometimes think that it would be very productive for an
advanced graduate student to spend a solid year doing nothing but precisely
comparing and analyzing the parallel sections of Samuel-Kings and
Chronicles, also looking at the major divergences between the 4QSama
manuscript and MT/Chronicles/LXX, comparing the Septuagint edition of
Jeremiah with Masoretic Jeremiah, looking at the different versions of the
Qumran community rule, analyzing the relationship between 3 Esdras and
Ezra-Nehemiah, etc. And thats only looking at Hebrew and Greek resources!
Adding non-biblical resources, especially different editions of Mesopotamian
materials adds a whole additional and often informative dimension. The more
one does this, the more one gets a gut-level sense of how texts grew. And you
get a lot more humility about what we do if you constantly ask the question,
would I have been able to reconstruct this growth if I didnt have these
manuscripts in front of me?
As for non-biblical, Ancient Near Eastern parallels, Id recommend
the helpful overview in Kenton Sparks book, Ancient Texts for the Study of
the Bible: A Guide to the Background Literature (Hendrickson, 2005). It gives

a survey of many of the most important texts, brief discussion of them, and
some good bibliography.
It takes a lot more than such primary text work, of course, to make
sense of all this information. I do believe that hundreds of years of academic,
historical research on the Bible has much to teach us. For example, scholars
have come up with some interesting and important ideas about how to date
some texts to the time of Babylonian exile even though we know very little
specific about that period. The challenge is to sort the more helpful ideas from
the less helpful ones. Ive tried to do that some in my recent book on The
Formation of the Hebrew Bible, but Ill be the first to admit that my synthesis
has its own strengths and weaknesses.
4) How does your new book lay to rest the older hypothesis?
I dont think it possible to lay any hypothesis permanently to rest, since
hypotheses raised so far all link to different sorts of evidence in the text. That
said, some of the terminological criteria most beloved by traditional source
critics, e.g. variation in divine designation (YHWH versus Elohim) or terms
for maidservant (amah versus shiphah) vary a significant amount in
manuscripts that we have, let alone the centuries of textual transmission
before our existing manuscripts. I still think there is strong enough evidence
for distinguishing Priestly and non-Priestly traditions from one another. And
I think there likely are very early chunks of material in the Bible, including
parts of the Pentateuch. But the case for early, intertwined J and E
sources (within the non-Priestly strand of the Pentateuch) is largely built on
sand rather than rock. It pales in comparison to the case for the distinction
between Priestly and non-Priestly strands in the Pentateuch.
5) What are your thoughts on American Jewish scholars or scholars
in Israel? Why do the Jewish scholars seem to defend the documentary
hypothesis more than non-Jewish scholars?
I dont put a lot of stock in judging the motivations of scholars. We all
have reasons, whether conscious or unconscious, for advocating certain
hypotheses. That said, I sometimes wonder whether the revival of the source
hypothesis among some scholars has been a scientific way of responding to a
perceived drift toward widespread late dating of virtually the entire
Pentateuch. And I actually share reservations about a push to see virtually the
whole Pentateuch as Persian period or later. I think there are very early
chunks of material in the Pentateuch, including legal and Priestly texts. I just
have a lot more skepticism about being able to identify extended J and E
sources and believe ever more profoundly in the need for what I call
methodological modesty as we attempt to identify the earliest portions of
the Bible (including the Pentateuch).
6) (Questions 6 from Joshua Berman) In a text with multiple layers of
editing and redaction so that there will be a so-called Deuteronomistic
core to a text with, say, a priestly level of editing. The inconsistencies are

resolved, according to this theory, by attributing the discordant elements to

different levels of redaction. It is often asked, why then does the editor of
the later level retain the material that does not square with his agenda? The
standard answer that is given is that old material attains a certain status,
and can only be tampered with but not removed. Do you have another
approach?
I do think we need to think through our models for textual growth,
especially when we are positing multiple layers which often conflict with
another. How often, I wonder, could scribal groups pass a given authoritative
text back and forth, each adding to a version of the text previously revised by
an opposing group? I dont know. But I do know that many (not all!) of our
documented cases of scribal revision of texts involve only one or a few layers
of revision, and often these layers seem to have been done by scribes with the
same or a similar theological/ideological orientation.
7) (Questions 7 from Joshua Berman) To what degree can we speak
of authors in the ancient world? More pointedly, when we see fractures
(a Carr term) in a text could it be that we need to give more credence to the
agent responsible for piecing things together as a creative agent, much as
we see with the Gilgamesh epic?
I do think that ancient scribes were highly creative, even as they drew
on and somewhat precisely preserved (with memory variants) earlier
traditions. In this sense we can think of scribes as authors, albeit authors
who constantly built on older oral and oral-written traditions. It was only
toward the later ends of the transmission process, as scribes increasingly
copied certain texts more precisely (such as the Pentateuch within the protoMasoretic tradition) that at least some scribes just conserved and did not
innovate.
8) You write that we cant theorize from the armchair anymore about
how biblical texts came to be. We need to have empirical models about how
literary traditions grew in the ancient Near East. How does that inform your
work and how does that contrast with prior scholars?
To some extent we still need to theorize from armchairs. I just think
that we should learn as much as we can from documented (empirical)
examples before we do so. And the more we learn from such documented
examples, the more we realize the limits of our armchair theorization. We still
can do it, but we will only achieve repeatable results that have some
plausibility for others outside our school if we gather a lot more data for our
models than many of us are in the habit of doing.
9) [question from a frum skeptic] How is JED + P different from
JEPD? Whats the practical difference? Is the work scholars do on the basis
of this theory going to be more productive than the work currently done
using the older theory? How?

The main debate, as I see it, is between two models for the
development of non-P materials: one that distinguishes between D, J and E,
and one that distinguishes between D and other non-P materials but does not
recognize early J and E sources. Usually the latter model (the one without J
and E) invokes other models to explain the features used by older source
critics to argue for J and E. In my view, these alternative models do a better
job of explaining the evidence. But we all need a bit more humility in our
claims of certainty for our hypotheses, especially hypotheses about the
earliest stages of the development of the Pentateuch. In that sense, maybe the
ultimate result of adopting such additional methodological modesty might
feel frustratingly less productive!
10) [question from a frum skeptic] How should the average person
know who to trust if the field changes so often? What would you tell the
simple reader who with their uneducated eyes thinks that scholars are just
stating their personal opinions? How is it a scientific field?
This is a fair question. My first answer to stress those aspects of biblical
scholarship that have proven to have a long shelf-life because they are built
on such strong evidence, such as the distinction between exilic/post-exilic
material in the book of Isaiah from a core of pre-exilic material in that book or
the previously mentioned distinction between Priestly and non-Priestly
strands of the Pentateuch (along with a fair amount of harmonization of each
with the other). Though these distinctions have shifted some, they have held
in their basic form for around two hundred years. Thats good! My hope is
that the kinds of cautions and considerations I raise in my book would help
us develop other broad theories about the growth of the Bible that would
approach that kind of repeatability/longevity.
11) Do you have any thoughts on revelation? or the separation of
history from theology?
One of the many things I appreciate about the Hebrew Bible is the way
it depicts God as working through all kinds of human characters (e.g. Jacob,
Joseph, King David, etc.), even some characters with base or even evil
motives. As Joseph tells his brothers when they are cowering before him in
Egypt afraid of his revenge for selling him into slavery, what you planned as
evil toward me, God planned as good (Gen 50:20; see also 45:7-8). Scribes
and the interpreters who shaped and sanctified the Bible may have had all
kinds of motives and procedures, but God couldand I believe didwork
through them in any case. And in my tradition (Christian-Quaker, originally
brought up Methodist), we just pray that God likewise will work through us
now as we continue to try to interpret the biblical tradition in a life-giving
way. There are no textual guarantees, whether in the origination or ancient
revision of the sacred text or in contemporary interpretation. We always are
dependent on God making the best of our often mixed motives.

12) One of the reviews of your previous book notes that you have
little to say about the attribution of the text to Moses and its sanctity as a
product of Sinai. Can you say anything about the topic?
As a scholar, Im interested in investigating the history of these beliefs
about the Pentateuch. For example, we first start seeing the idea that Moses
wrote the entire Pentateuch in the late Second Temple period, and that idea
has its own background in the dynamics of that time. In this respect, I follow
the great Jewish scholar Elias Bickerman, who suggests that Jews of that time
countered Greek education centered on Homer and his epics with the idea
that their Moses had written the whole Torah, a text which Hellenistic-period
Jews argued was even earlier and better than the Greek classics.
I understand that others have other beliefs about these issues, but for
me it is most important to recognize and stress to my students how the
biblical text has come to be a medium of inspiration of Jewish and Christian
communities over the centuries. I am constantly impressed and amazed at the
ongoing power of these texts to speak to diverse contexts over millenia. That,
for me, is what is profoundly powerful about them. In my opinion,
attachment to specific authorial theories or assertions of historical accuracy
often distracts from the task of seeing how one might responsibly interpret
the text today.
13) If a religious scholar said that his goal was to date the core of the
Pentateuch to the 13th century BCE to be contemporaneous with the Jewish
dating of Moses, what advice would you give?
None of us comes to any such task without presuppositions, but I
would have serious doubts about scholarship on dating that started out with
the goal to date a biblical text to a particular period, whether the thirteen
century BCE or the 2nd century BCE. By now in twenty + years of work, I
have found myself changing my mind about dating and other issues based on
the evidence before me, often in major ways. For me that is part of what
distinguishes an evangelist for a particular perspective from a historian or
thinker (which I aim to be). It is a curiosity about certain questions that
powers a drive to find out more. Sometimes one is led by the evidence to
conclusions that might seem odd or surprising to ones colleagues. Im ready
at this point in my career to risk following such leads and seeing where they
take me, and I learn much from the many others who do the same.
Alan Brill 2012.
source
:
http://kavvanah.wordpress.com/2012/01/08/interview-withdavid-m-carr-current-state-of-bible-scholarship/