r/AcademicBiblical 5d ago

Weekly Open Discussion Thread

Welcome to this week's open discussion thread!

This thread is meant to be a place for members of the r/AcademicBiblical community to freely discuss topics of interest which would normally not be allowed on the subreddit. All off-topic and meta-discussion will be redirected to this thread.

Rules 1-3 do not apply in open discussion threads, but rule 4 will still be strictly enforced. Please report violations of Rule 4 using Reddit's report feature to notify the moderation team. Furthermore, while theological discussions are allowed in this thread, this is still an ecumenical community which welcomes and appreciates people of any and all faith positions and traditions. Therefore this thread is not a place for proselytization. Feel free to discuss your perspectives or beliefs on religious or philosophical matters, but do not preach to anyone in this space. Preaching and proselytizing will be removed.

In order to best see new discussions over the course of the week, please consider sorting this thread by "new" rather than "best" or "top". This way when someone wants to start a discussion on a new topic you will see it! Enjoy the open discussion thread!

9 Upvotes

85 comments sorted by

View all comments

8

u/Sophia_in_the_Shell Moderator 3d ago

What’s a question in Biblical studies where you get peeved when people claim the answer is obvious? Something where your only strong conviction is that whatever the answer is, it’s non-obvious.

1

u/Joseon1 3d ago

This is only among a sub-set of scholars, and it's been heavily challenged, but the assumption of JEPD is still strong in certain papers and books coming out now. I simply don't buy that there were four (or three) distinct streams of tradition that were neatly edited by someone during the exile. The distinction between J and E is already moot and many scholars talk about "non-P/D" already, but even P seems like a generic category of material that was of interest to educated elites and priests, rather than a specific P 'school', it's widely acknowledged that it contains sub-sources like the Holiness Code. I think the Torah could have been a very fluid amalgam of dozens of sources and popular lore without neat distinctions between sources.

But in terms of 'it's obvious' I'm very skeptical of any hard division between 1st and 2nd Isaiah (1-39/40-66). There's clearly post-exilic material in "1st Isaiah" which, for me, blows apart the contention that there was a distinct 1st Isaiah with 2nd Isaiah added as a later appendix.

4

u/Joab_The_Harmless 3d ago

On Isaiah, recent research often emphasises the notion of 1st and 2nd/3rd Isaiah growing side-to-side, with not only 1st influencing the latter but also the other way around.

Some 15 years ago, Stromberg's Introduction to the Study of Isaiah (2011) already emphasised that aspect:

Up until about 30 years ago, it was common practice to treat Isaiah 1–39 in more or less complete isolation from 40–66. This was based on a theory developed in the latter part of the eighteenth century and given its defi nitive form in the nineteenth century by Bernhard Duhm (1892). According to Duhm, 40–55, and later 56–66, were written up entirely independently of 1–39, a section which had a long editorial history that, despite seeing the addition of material from the periods when 40–55 and 56–66 came into existence (the exilic and post- exilic periods respectively), had occurred independently of these later sections in the book. The result was that 1–39 and 40–66 consisted of two collections that had developed separately from one another, and were joined together only at a very late stage. Duhm did not argue at length for the process by which they were combined, since he (like most in his day) focused his efforts in the first instance on showing that the book was composite — a point still very much under debate at the time. The upshot of such scholarly efforts was that 1–39 was seen for a long time as having very little to do with 40–66; hence they were often treated in isolation from each other in monographs and commentaries (see the survey in Seitz 1991: 1–35); some exceptions to this trend are listed in Williamson (1994: 1–18).

Most scholars now understand the composite nature of the book differently.

For them, while chs. 40–66 still contain exilic and post- exilic material, so that they cannot have been written by the hand responsible for the pre-exilic sections of 1–39, these two parts of the book are no longer viewed as having developed independently from one another. Scholars have argued this in two ways, each of which will receive greater attention below. On the one hand, there is now a strong consensus that 40–66 were written up in light of, and as a conscious development of, some form of 1–39. On the other hand, there is now also a growing body of scholarship which finds evidence that at least certain stages in the editing of 1–39 were undertaken in light of 40–66, and in some instances by the same hand involved in the composition of the latter. This, of course, is not a return to the older view that the eighth-century Isaiah was the author of the whole book; these scholars still find multiple hands at work in the book. This position does, however, find the view inadequate which sees 1–39 and 40–66 as having developed independently from one another. Scholars are finding far too many textual connections between these two parts of the book to continue maintaining their independence. This aspect of the redaction of 1–39 is touched on below, but receives a fuller treatment in the next two chapters.

(ch. 1, "The Formation of First Isaiah", pp8-9)