Connecting with Source

That’s where you get the ritual in Leviticus 16 , the famous Day of Atonement ritual, where the priest has to sort of lay his hands on the head of that scapegoat and confess all of the sins of the Israelites over it and then banish that goat into the wilderness. It’s only the rabbis who say it has to get driven over a cliff. That’s not actually in Leviticus. Love that addition. But it’s not actually in Leviticus. It just gets driven into the wilderness in Leviticus.

Also, I’ve seen goats on cliffs. They’re actually very sure-footed. I don’t know.

You know, those are, they are quite good climbers, I have to say.

We need a David Attenborough special following the scapegoat into the— —into the desert. Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we try to increase the public’s access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Man, I’m excited. We’re gonna, we’re gonna increase some, some, some public, whatever you just—access. We’re gonna do that thing because we—

We have, we got work to do.

We got double the scholars on today’s show, so I think that’s always a good thing.

Speaking of which, we have a guest today. This is Liane Feldman, assistant professor of religion at Princeton University, newly minted assistant professor of religion there. How are things today, Leanne?

Things are great. It’s finally starting to feel like fall, so I’m excited.

I’m not as excited. I have a—now my oldest daughter started high school a couple weeks ago, and so I’m having a whole new type of existential crisis.

You’re an old man.

Yeah. And it’s also still in the 90s in Utah, so.

Yeah, yeah. That doesn’t help.

It does not. Leanne is the author of the recent The Consuming Fire: The Complete Priestly Source from Creation to the Promised Land, which is a wonderful, not incredibly thick book, very accessible translation of what scholars so lovingly refer to as P, the Priestly Source. And I thought this would be a wonderful opportunity to discuss a little bit about Pentateuchal composition, the theories that are out there, and the nature and function of the Priestly Source for our audience. And thus we have Leanne here with us today. Just to start, I read through the preface and the translator’s note and everything else, but would you mind telling our audience where the idea for this book came from and why you think why this is an important book for the public to have?

Sure. So the idea for this book initially came from, honestly, a lot of my colleagues. I realized as I was working on my first book, revising the dissertation, turning it into a book, that I had a good sense of what P was and what the scope of the story looked like and all of its ins and outs, but that a lot of my colleagues who aren’t Pentateuchal specialists had no idea, or they would know some basics, like we all know Leviticus is part of P. But I would get these requests from colleagues of mine, like, “Could you send me, you know, the P stories, story of the plagues?” Or could you send me the P story of the Flood? Or, you know. And so I was making these one-off, like Word documents using sort of NRSV or JPS translations, just putting it together and then adjusting where necessary for a lot of my colleagues who are asking for these things. And I realized pretty quickly, gosh, it would be really useful if I could just take this knowledge that’s in my head that I’ve been working on for a decade, that a lot of us specialists—and I say a lot of us, probably like 20 of us in the world—have in our head.have in our head.

But for me, that sounds like a lot and make it a little bit more accessible. And then the pandemic hit and the project that I was supposed to be working on, I didn’t have access to libraries, so I was like, you know what? I have everything I need to do this at home, mostly. And so it was an opportunity for me to take time during COVID and just dive into this project since I couldn’t work on what I had planned to work on.

So for those of us who aren’t in the world of biblical scholarship, let’s go back and start at the very beginning of this and talk about what is P? What are we actually referencing with that?

Sure. So what we’re referencing with that is there has been, you know, for the last, I don’t know, 250 years or so. 200, 250, depending on where you want to date it. This theory that the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, are a composite text, meaning they are written. The materials in Genesis through Deuteronomy are written by a number of different authors that were sort of later combined together by one or more editors. That’s a sticking point. I can get into it if you want, but we don’t have to. And so one of those sources, one of those distinctive strands, has been identified pretty early on as the priestly source. I actually hate that terminology.

Do you have a sense of where. Why it was called that?

It was called that. Yeah. So it was called that because of Leviticus, largely because Leviticus is the only book in the Pentateuch, in my opinion, that belongs wholly to one source. And Leviticus is full of sacrificial instructions, rules around the ordination of the priesthood, laws around purity and impurity. So it has to do with things related to the cult and the priests who run that cult. So that is largely, I think, where it got its name. It wasn’t its original name. In fact. Like back in the late 1800s, early. Or. Sorry, late 1800s, early 1900s, Wellhausen actually called it the Q source for its four covenants, which is one of the narrative themes that he saw in it. But that. That didn’t stick and we instead got the P source. And much as I don’t love that terminology, it is. It is what stuck. And so I did keep it for this because that way people know what it is.

If. If you were given the prerogative to rename it, do you have something in mind that you would prefer?

Yeah, that was. That was the hard part. I actually don’t know what I would rename it. I mean, we obviously called it the Consuming Fire. That was more of a work of the editorial team at the University of California Press than myself. They wanted something a little bit catchier, so they went with that. And I think it. It at least fits the source, so I’m okay with it. I actually am not quite sure if there’s a quick, easy name that I would name it. If I were taking ancient naming conventions, I might just call it When God Began. Let’s start with Bereshit. Start with the first couple of words. That doesn’t really capture what the story is about, though.

So how would, let’s say, one of the people anciently responsible for the collation of this source, let’s say they got into an argument with somebody who was a proponent of D or something like that. What would they highlight as the most important parts of their source? What stands out as why it’s important to have what we now refer to as P? P?

Yeah, so I think one of the most important parts of this source, one of the things that comes through in P that doesn’t necessarily come through quite so strongly in any of the other sources, D included, is the idea that the Israelite cult, the sanctuary, the sacrifices made at that sanctuary are really the center of the life of the Israelites. And that it’s not something that is distant from their day-to-day activities, but that it’s wholly and completely bound up in how their community is organized, how their life is arranged, and that the Israelites are fundamentally necessary for the maintenance and ongoing sort of continuation of this cult. And that right there is why I don’t like calling it the Priestly Source, because it makes it sound like it’s about the priests. And I– And I really think that the priests are a part of it, but they are a means to an end of the Israelites really supporting this enterprise. And by calling it the Priestly Source, you kind of erase some of the lay Israelite involvement in the enterprise.

Okay, so everybody is contributing to the successful execution of all these cultic maneuvers and everything. And within P, do we see the concern for how this activity contributes to cosmic order, to social order, to all those things, or is that coming from outside of P?

Yeah, so I do think it’s coming from within P to a degree. So, and here I should say I’m talking about P as if it’s a unified whole. And I sort of treat it as a unified whole in this book. And that’s a specific sort of editorial decision on my part. P itself is multiple strata over the course of a few hundred years by multiple different scribes. So not every stratum of P thinks exactly the same thing. But I think what binds them together is that they all buy into fundamentally the same story and largely the same worldview, even as they quibble about how that might be executed. So with that caveat in place. Yeah, so some of the sort of cosmic order that P is working with, developing, advancing in this text, it’s actually far more pronounced than in some of the other sources that we have.

And here it’s the idea that there’s sort of a place for everything and there’s a particular sequence that everything sort of works or functions in. But what’s interesting to me is it’s not fixed, right? So we see this at first in Genesis 1 , with things being sort of put in order on each of the six days, and then the seventh day being rest. And God creates this world that is good. And almost immediately after the creation of that world, it’s no longer good. What God sets up in Genesis 1 is supposed to be sort of a well-oiled machine that runs on its own without much interference from him at all. And it falls apart and the wheels come off right away. And by Genesis 6 , which comes pretty closely after Genesis 1 , we don’t have any of the Cain and Abel or the Adam and Eve story in P. So by Genesis 6 , the world is full of violence. The order that God has set up between animals and humans, not killing each other, that has fallen apart.

There’s bloodshed everywhere. And God realizes very quickly: This idea that I had about how things would work, it’s not going to work. I have to revise. And this is, I think one of the really unique parts about P is it’s a God that’s constantly revising and reacting to what’s going on on the ground. So it’s not a sort of all-knowing God that knows what’s going on from the beginning. It’s a God that’s reacting to sort of the unpredictability of their creation. And so some of that is actually built into the fabric of how this works. That’s actually the impetus for why the cult exists in the first place, is that because of that, P’s God decides I’m going to have to live on the earth so I can keep a little bit of a closer eye on them.em. And the entirety of the sanctuary, the tabernacle, the sacrificial rules, the purity laws, all of that is actually enabling God to live on earth. Like that’s the. How is this going to work?

So that’s sort of bringing a kind of cosmic order of the separation between holiness and impurity. Because God is fundamentally imagined as this holy thing, the epitome of holiness. Not so hard to understand why, but holiness in P can’t really coexist with impurity. It’s kind of like oil and water, they sort of repel. And impurity is not a bad thing, but it’s just what human beings are, just by the nature of living, they generate impurity. So in order for God to exist on earth, there has to be some sort of pure space.

Now this, this pure space there for a long time, the understanding of a lot of the ritual and cult that’s going on in places like Leviticus, the idea was that this was cleansing the people. But my understanding is that since the 70s and later and even before that, to some degree, the idea is now, no, this is cleansing the space from the people so that God’s presence can dwell there so that they are not driven out. And we see similar ideas where this sin that people are committing, it generates kind of a metaphysical contamination that pollutes the land. And so it’s not so much something internal interior to people or their spirits, it’s the fact that we are generating contamination that is polluting the space or the land. And then either God cannot dwell there or the land cannot tolerate the presence of the people there. Is that, is that a fair assessment of where things stand these days on ritual theory?

Yeah, absolutely. And so this was like Baruch Levine, Jacob Milgrom. These are the people in the 70s, 80s and 90s who really advanced this. Jacob Milgrom’s, you know, 3,000 page commentary, which was my introduction to Leviticus as a first year master’s student.

Oh, gosh, that’s intimidating.

If you survive that, then you’re just, you must really like Leviticus. So, yeah, that, that was really sort of one of the things that Jacob Milgrom really advanced. And there’s quibbles and disagreements around sort of the finer details of how this works. But by and large, I do think, you know, Jacob Milgrom was largely right, especially when it comes to sort of P proper, Leviticus 1 through 16, give or take a few things here and there. It gets a little bit different when we get into the Holiness Code, which is one of those other strata of P that I was talking about, that, that actually does have a little bit more of a focus on purifying the people themselves. And this is one of the things that it sort of extends. It’s sort of both and it’s purify the space and purify the people in the Holiness Code, but sort of the fundamental base level of P, sort of the ritual materials really are largely focused on keeping the physical space pure and keeping the, removing the things, the contaminants from impurity, the contaminants from sin.

This is where people often conflate impurity and sin. And this is where we get this idea that impurity is sinful.

Right.

The way that this system imagines it working, at least in P, it’s again, a little bit different in H. But the way that the system in P imagines it working is both impurity and sin generate sort of this miasmic contaminant which then magnetically kind of attaches itself to like holy things. So you think, you know, for me, if I’m wearing a white shirt, I will always, always find some kind of dirt it just somehow magnetically attracts. It’s kind of that same idea, but sort of on an invisible level. This is why I don’t wear white. I can’t do it. But this is how. So we have this sort of contamination from impurity or from sin.020] Liane Feldman: So the mechanism is the same, but the implications are different. So impurity is just natural. It’s an inevitable part of human life. Sin is obviously not inevitable. It’s not. And so the ways that these two things contaminate are a little bit different.

But the fundamental premise is that they both contaminate. And so both things need to be purified from the sanctuary quite regularly in order to keep that sort of clean zone, that pure zone, so Yahweh can remain.

I’m curious, would you talk just a little bit about, like, what kind of ritualistic things they would do to purify these areas?

Yeah. So I’m happy to talk about what they are as long as you don’t ask me why this is how it works. Absolutely no idea. And I have yet to see a good explanation for it. So largely the way that it seems to be imagined to work is that it’s via the sacrifices. So this is largely what sacrifice is for, especially the involuntary ones, the— What I translate as decontamination offering. And I hope at this point it’s a little bit clear why I’m translating it as decontamination offering and not just purification offering. So the decontamination offering and the Asham, the guilt offering, these two are the ones that really do the work of cleaning. And it’s these two types of sacrifices in particular, where the priests— Well, the regular Israelite slaughters the animal, but the priest manipulates the blood, and the blood of the animal gets smeared on very specific places, depending on who’s offering the animal and what subtype of decontamination offering it is.

So often it’s on the horns of the altar, and there’s two altars. Which horns and which altar depends on how severe the contamination is. But the idea is that by putting the blood on the horns of whichever altar is necessary, that is actually part of the decontamination process. This blood becomes a kind of ritual detergent that removes the impurity and removes sort of, I would say, the low to moderate level impurities, the really, really severe stuff, sort of the worst of the impurities. That’s where you get the ritual in Leviticus 16 , the famous Day of Atonement ritual, where the priest has to sort of lay his hands on the head of that scapegoat and confess all of the sins of the Israelites over it and then banish that goat into the wilderness. It’s only the rabbis who say it has to get driven over a cliff. That’s not actually in Leviticus. Love that addition, but it’s not actually in Leviticus. It just gets driven into the wilderness.

In Leviticus, I guess also I’ve seen goats on cliffs. They’re actually very sure-footed. I don’t know that.

You know, those are— They are quite good climbers, I have to say.

We need a David Attenborough special following the scapegoat into the— Into the desert. So I have a question. We’ve kind of talked a bit about P, but I’d like to situate this in— Within the broader scholarship regarding Pentateuchal composition just so people can gain a little bit better purchase on the relationship of this—this to other texts. And you’ve talked a bit about how he begins in Genesis 1 , goes a tiny bit into Genesis 2 , and then we pick up some genealogical stuff in Genesis 5 . We skip over the Bene Elohim in the beginning of Genesis 6 and we go right into the story of Noah. So those other stories come from somewhere. So could you talk a little bit about the other sources that are hypothesized to have been brought together into the Pentateuch. And then we’ll get into the controversies about Neo-Documentarianism and— And some of the other.me to take care.

And I promise you, listeners at home, I’m gonna try to make sure that we all understand this. Everything that’s.

That’s the.

Because these two can. Can clearly get into weeds that I will never be able to climb into. So.

Yeah, well, we’ll get there. I love it.

This is great practice. I’m doing this with my students in like two weeks.

So this is awesome.

Keep me out of the weeds.

Glad we could.

So, yeah, I was going to say there’s a couple different ways to go about this. Right. The most basic thing to say is that the Pentateuch is made up of three main blocks of material. And I think pretty much whatever methodology you come at this from, a Supplementarian methodology or a Neo-Documentarian methodology, we all fundamentally agree about this. There’s the Priestly material, there’s the Deuteronomic material, which is mostly everything in Deuteronomy, but not every single word. That’s what we’re calling D. What we’re calling D. Yeah.

Okay.

I don’t think Supplementarians would necessarily call it D, but they would identify the same block of material as largely. And then what I often diplomatically just call the non-Priestly material. That is everything that’s not P and not D. Okay. And the easiest way I can put this is that almost all of the ink that’s been spilled over Pentateuchal composition is about that material, the non-Priestly material. That’s where our greatest disagreements lie. Not to say we don’t have quibbles over bits and pieces of P and D. We do, but most of the disagreement is around the non-Priestly materials. So from a Neo-Documentarian perspective, which is the methodology into which I was trained, and I will caveat this with saying I spent all of my graduate years training as a Neo-Documentarian, I do think it’s the best explanation for the evidence that we have. But I also am very much not an expert on the JE, and I have only ever used Neo-Documentarianism insofar as it came to identifying P. Can we just.

Can we take just a second to describe what Neo-Documentarianism, as opposed to the other thing that you said?

Yeah, sure. So Neo-Documentarianism is a, let’s say, revision, updating, rehabilitation perhaps, of the idea introduced by Wellhausen, most famously by Wellhausen, in the early 20th century, late 19th, early 20th century, that there are fundamentally four sources that make up the Pentateuch, what he named the Yahwist source. For us, J, German has no Y. So German is spelled with a J. So that’s why we call it the J source, the Elohist source, E, the Priestly source, P, and the Deuteronomist. Deuteronomist. Deuteronomist source. Wow. That one is a tongue twister. Or D. So the idea that there’s.

These four, and these four sources, it’s called the Documentary Hypothesis, because the idea is that they were four independent documents.

Exactly.

That were circulating on their own and then were brought together.

Exactly. So that these were four somewhat parallel but still rather different stories that were written by at least four different people, slash, groups of people that at some point most scholars would, say in the Persian period were joined together. And now it might have happened once, it might have happened a few times. I’ll stay out of the weeds on that. But that’s sort of the Wellhausen approach. And one of the ways that he initially sort of differentiated between these sources and most famously was by the use of the divine name.ame. If it says Yahweh, it’s the J source. If it says Elohim, it’s the E source. And this is one of the ways that sort of it started to get divided up in Genesis. And I mean, lexical considerations of other types of words also became important later on. But sort of the most famous, recognizable one is J says Adonai and E says Elohim; that’s strictly not—

It works like 80% of the time. The problem is P also says Elohim for all of Genesis because it’s a plot point in the story in Exodus 6 that God introduces himself to Moses as Adonai and says, you know, “your ancestors knew me as El Shaddai,” in that case Elohim and El Shaddai, “but actually my name is Adonai.” So it’s not a foolproof situation.

And this is one of the… I know folks who prefer Mosaic authorship. Not many scholars, but in the broader public, a lot of folks believe that the Documentary Hypothesis is built entirely on this foundation that, oh, if it says Adonai or if it says Elohim, then that’s a different source. And… And that makes for a rather brittle foundation. And so it’s a way to kind of dismiss the whole thing. But that’s really not the strongest evidence that we have for these literary layers.

And so, yeah, this… This is largely the evidence that was leaned on most heavily in the early 20th century. And that is like mostly continental European scholarship. I don’t want to differentiate it completely geographically because there are some American scholars who also take this approach, but largely. But that continental European scholarship, especially German-language scholarship in the mid-20th century, really rightly critiqued and like, tore apart and said, “this doesn’t work.” And they’re right, it doesn’t. So in the late 20th century, 1970s, 80s, and really 90s, a movement at Hebrew University—Baruch Schwartz was one of sort of the spearheads of this—sort of revitalized the Documentary Hypothesis. And this is what we call the Neo-Documentary Hypothesis. You know, very obvious naming reasons there, but there’s a much greater focus on sort of concepts of what makes a narrative and how do we understand narrative continuity, narrative coherence?

What are the things that we can point to that show the breakdown of a story? So from a methodological standpoint, Neo-Documentarians will start with the final form of the Pentateuch. We’ll take, you know, all five books and I’ll just start reading. And I’m making it sound easy. It’s really not.

None of this sounds easy, I promise.

Great. But I start reading, and then when I get to a point where, you know, something that’s already happened once happens again without explanation. So the most obvious one is the world is created in Genesis 1 , and then it’s created again in Genesis 2 . There’s no sort of reconciling of that, or when I get to sort of irreconcilable facts. The flood lasts 40 days or it lasts 150 days. The bird is a dove, the bird is a raven. These are the kind of two, you know, some of the flagship, like main, main things that we point to, but there’s all sorts of smaller contradictions like that a character all of a sudden seems to forget something that they had just said or just done and proceeds in a completely different direction. The characterization of a particular character is completely, wildly different. These are the kind of things that we sort of flag and we start to delineate sources on the basis of what we call narrative inconsistencies or narrative contradictions.

So, you know, another famous one is Moses. In Exodus, Moses goes up the mountain twice in a row without coming down.own. How’s that work? So we sort of look at that. And when you start looking at these, when you start tracking these, you can sort of break them apart and see different strands. That’s the really basic way of putting it. And what Neo-Documentarians argue is that when you break apart these strands without adding any words, without subtracting any words, without changing the order of any words—with a few exceptions, I literally just published an essay changing a couple orders—but without changing the order of most words, you have very continuous, coherent, consistent stories. And that’s what makes it so compelling to me, is that you can get these four continuous stories that really make sense and they actually tell fundamentally different stories and they’re internally consistent in terms of their characterization, in terms of their worldviews, in terms of the particular arguments that they’re making.

So when I’m talking about J, E, P and D, I’m talking about four independent stories.

So are we— Sorry, this just clicked for me. When you talk about these different sources, do we have ancient source materials or are these reconstructions based on pulling what we currently have apart?

These are complete reconstructions. Okay, okay.

I had not understood that. I’m… I’m kind of the dummy. So that, that’s really interesting to me.

Yeah, so most people—and most people don’t realize that this is—this is all hypothesis. Same with the supplementary model, which I’m happy to explain.

Also, I, I think a really fun example is—well for me, fun, for most people, just mind-numbingly dull. But a fun example is the story of Joseph being sold into slavery because we seem to have again, these narrative incongruities. And is it the Midianites? Is it? Is it the Ishmaelites? And… And there are all kinds of apologetic attempts to kind of generate background details that aren’t in the story to make it all fit. But you can tease these things apart based on these incongruities, and you come up with two somewhat parallel stories, their own beginnings, their own middles, and their own ends, and they tell the story in a different way. And that’s one example where it doesn’t seem like anything was lost. It seems like someone literally just took two stories and just kind of wove them together, which I think is very strong evidence that at least in that case, we have two very clear, different sources for this story. When we think about the Pentateuch as five separate books, you point out in the introduction that this division into five books was probably a product of technological limitations where they could not preserve the entire thing on a single scroll.

And so it might not have been that all these sources came together to produce Genesis and then came together to produce Exodus, but that there was a single corpus that was being brought together, and then at some point along the line, they were divided up into these kind of macro-narratives with all the different patriarchal cycles of Genesis and then getting into the story of the Exodus. Could you talk a little bit about that? Because I think that might surprise an awful lot of people.

Yeah. So I find this surprises my students all the time, is that the idea of these books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, no scribe set out to write Genesis. No scribe even set out to write Leviticus. And I can get into some arguments with—especially I’m thinking here, if Christophe Nihan might disagree with me here. But I think no scribe set out to write Leviticus. Instead, what we have is… So when these stories were put together, at least from a Neo-Documentarian perspective, it’s really on the basis of chronology within the world of the story. So, you know, Moses goes up the mountain, and the next thing that happens is he’s on the mountain. The next thing that happens is that he comes down. So when you have different parts of the story, or with, you know, the Genesis 37 example, Joseph being sold, you know, you have to. When you have two stories that you have, and I often do this exercise with my students, right. I often say, you have these two stories, put them together, turn them into one story without getting rid of anything, how would you do it?

And very often they do actually use chronology. I don’t tell them, I don’t give them any hints about how it might have been done. But the thing that makes the most sense is to follow the chronology of the story. And so when we do that, these texts obviously become much longer. And so this idea that technology is the limiting factor, I get from a series of articles that Menachem Haran wrote in the 70s and 80s. I think there’s like 10 or 11 articles or something like that that he wrote in various venues for about a decade that he talks about and analyzes, given what we know about the scrolls at Qumran, how long could a scroll have been? How long could, like a physical scroll, how much text could it, like, actually support? And so he looks at some of the longest scrolls we have, and he finds that it could support about the length of one of the Pentateuchal books. And that, give or take, most of the Pentateuchal books are about the same length and that we have.

I mean, I guess I should say. I should correct that and say a little bit more like it’s just a little bit more than what the Pentateuchal books can hold. Because we actually do have scrolls from Qumran that are Genesis-Exodus or Exodus-Leviticus that contain parts of both books that sort of go over not the entirety of both, but at least parts of both books. But what Haran really importantly argued is that these divisions between the books are not arbitrary. It’s not the scribe wrote until he got to the end of the scroll and said, I’m going to stop here. Guess I need a new page, you know, or I guess I need a new notebook to fill this in. And sort of modern terminology, though nobody uses notebooks anymore. So modern. But they’re also thematic. So you pick a point in the story where it makes sense. That’s about the length of material that would have fit on a scroll, but makes sense. So what we get is, you know, creation to the Israelites in Egypt.

That makes sense. The departure from Egypt, the story that starts in Exodus 1 , until they get to the setting up of the tabernacle, what I call the dwelling place in the translation at the end of Exodus. That makes sense as a unit. We have sort of the cultic rules and the purity laws. That makes sense as a unit. The wilderness wanderings make sense as a unit. So it’s sort of grouping, sort of almost five acts of a play. If you want to use drama language, figuring out where those most logically break. And in some cases, you know, it makes perfect sense. In some cases I would quibble a little bit and you can see, you know, I put my divisions in this translation, often across book lines. You know, my chapters don’t quite line up with the chapter or book divisions that we currently have. But, yeah, these decisions were often made based on technological limitations and based on sort of thematic arcs, so to speak.

So you mentioned at Qumran, some texts where you go over the book and include a little bit of Exodus. I don’t recall having seen in the manuscripts. But is there a very clear break in the transcription where we get to our book divisions?e we get to our book divisions? So the main question is, do we already have our standardized book divisions when these scrolls are being transcribed, or is it something that’s in flux even in that time period?

I love this question so much because the assumption is that, yes, we have standard book divisions, but I actually think an entirely different project I’m working on that I’m not going to get into because it’s still incredibly hypothetical at the moment. And I may be very, very wrong. But part of it was looking at sort of the extent of these scrolls. And as best as I can tell, there is one fragment. Because the thing to remember about these Pentateuchal texts is that they are so incredibly fragmentary. There are very, very few pieces that contain more than at most two lines, three lines. There’s a section of Leviticus that’s longer that I got to see in person this summer. That was incredible. But for most of these texts, we’re talking tiny, tiny fragments with a few words on them, a couple of letters. So we don’t actually have a continuous text. So when I’m talking about these scrolls that are Genesis-Exodus or Exodus-Leviticus or Leviticus-Numbers, these are scrolls that the original editors determined were in the same hand, largely material that looks like it’s from the same parchment.

So they’re calling them the same scrolls, you know, probably found in the same area. So they determined that these are from the same scrolls. There’s actually DNA testing being done on some of these scrolls right now, which is super interesting to figure out. Are they actually from the same parchment? Can we corroborate some of this? But all that to say, as far as I can tell, there’s exactly one fragment that has the last letter of the book of Genesis and perhaps the first letter or two of the book of Exodus on it. And there’s a gap. There’s not. It’s not like a line gap, it’s just like a gap in the line. But it is also a sort of change in this. You know, it’s a change in scene in the story, we have fragments very clearly that have, you know, chapter breaks or logical breaks that also have gaps like that. So I don’t know. Like, the question is it may have been preserved, but the fact that we have what scholars tell us is Genesis-Exodus, Exodus-Leviticus, and that those don’t line up, they’re not all the same.

Right. They don’t line up at the same start in Genesis and the same ending in Exodus. Some of that may just be because we don’t have those fragments.

Right? Yeah.

So I don’t want to read too much into it, but to me it seems like it may not have been quite as stable as we think it is.

Okay. But so it could still be an open question if the divisions of the books had become standardized by that point.

Yeah, we know that they’re pretty standard, but it’s like later, a few centuries into the Common Era, that’s when we have really good evidence that they’ve standardized.

So speaking of dating, I know a question that I have and that I imagine a lot of people are going to have is you’ve mentioned that there were several literary layers, that the coming together of P is something that took a long time. When do you date the first attempt to collate what we would call the first layer of P?

So what I think the oldest layer of P is, I think it’s funny, the more I work on this text, the later the date starts to get. But I, I do think I would still hold to a late 7th, like 7th to 6th century context. I do think we have some material here and it’s mostly me looking at the architecture described in the Tabernacle and really seeing Neo-Assyrian style temple blueprint.0:40:01.490] Dan McClellan: Okay. And that a lot of the temple sites that we see in places like Tel Dan, Tell Tayinat, Ain Dara, they all share this kind of Tel Arad as well. They all share this kind of tripartite three-room sanctuary plan, which is a very sort of Neo-Assyrian plan that we see from roughly the 10th to the 7th-6th century.

That that’s sort of its heyday. So part of it is I’m still kind of clinging to that a little bit and saying this is what’s being reflected here. Maybe, you know, I, I hold it very lightly, but I do think that some of what we see here may be sort of 7th-6th century, but probably not the majority of it.

Okay. Now once we get into the 6th century, now we’re talking about the Babylonian exile, we’re talking about a period when there was no temple. Are you of the opinion that a lot of this is really folks who are outside of Israel kind of fantasizing, trying to put together and organize in their heads how they want this all to work, even in the absence of the cult? Or is this mostly coming after they come back and are re-establishing the cult?

Yeah, so this is a hard question for me to answer because so here I really love Benjamin Sommer’s piece on pseudo-historicism and the perils of dating the Pentateuch. I’m messing up that title, but it has all those pieces in it. And he makes a really compelling argument in that article that we could just as easily place something like… I don’t know if he uses P specifically, but we could just as easily place something like the construction of this elaborate narrative about a sanctuary, a sanctuary in the exile, with somebody longing for a return, trying to, you know, like Ezekiel trying to imagine what will be when the time comes. We can also very easily place it at the return, as a program for the rebuilding, as a program for sort of the ideal in the early Persian period about what it should be. Or we could put it pre-exilic and say this is how it was and they’re reflecting.

So what for me, when it could equally make sense in any of those contexts… I don’t want to guess which context it’s in because it doesn’t feel like there is solid ground to do so. And then it just becomes guesswork on my part. And I think it’s one of the things I say in the dating section because I, you know, much as I often resist dating, I did write a section in the introduction on the dating. But at the end of that section I said one of the things that I… That’s very distinctive about P is that it fundamentally, in the way it tells its story, resists being dated in a way that kind of makes the story present itself as timeless, present itself as trying to defy geopolitical movements and changes in particular situations. So I want to respect the fact that it’s actually not giving us any good hooks. There are a few, like in terms of economics and architecture, like, we can get a few hooks that at least there’s things in the real world that are being reflected.

But in terms of dating, the whole dating, why somebody might have written this, I have no idea. And I wish I did. I wish I could go back to that period and ask or watch somebody write this so I could figure out what it was. But I think that that’s one of the things that’s both frustrating and beautiful about this text is that it really does actively resist that.

And I think that ambiguity, the fact that it can work in so many different settings, I think is one of the reasons that Genesis 1 at least, does seem to transcend that and seem to function as something that a lot of people understand as just this very poetic kind of absolute beginning that is not easily reducible to a given ideology or historical period. Which brings me to another question I wanted to ask about translation, because you talk a little bit about translation philosophy in here, and there are two parts that I wanted to get your thoughts on. One, I appreciated very much the way you talked about the fact that a lot of the kind of lexicalized terms that we use in contemporary translations are really just kind of incidental lexicalization of overly literal renderings from the King James Version and elsewhere.ng James Version and elsewhere.

And could you talk a little bit about why you think it is more helpful to kind of break that habit, how it can render things both more foreign and more familiar to not use the terms that have become traditional?

Yeah. So one of the big ones for me in this translation was tabernacle. And I’ve used it I don’t know how many times in this interview because it’s a really hard habit to break. And when it comes to speaking with other scholars, I just default to tabernacle because that’s what they know and that’s how I communicate effectively. But I categorically refuse to translate Mishkan as tabernacle in this translation. Now, I never learned Latin, so forgive me, all those who are listening who do know Latin. But my understanding of the research I did is that tabernacle is a pretty literal translation of Mishkan in the Latin meaning like hut or house. And that’s fantastic because that means that when we had it translated, you know, via the Vulgate and into the King James, tabernacle really was capturing the idea that this sanctuary, this Mishkan, is a physical home for the deity to dwell in. But my issue with using that is that it’s become a pretty static term in modern American English.

And my aim was to translate this into modern American English. That was what I was going for. And we hear tabernacle and we think, you know, either the Mormon Choir, there’s that. We think, you know, there’s churches with the name tabernacle in the name, or we think some weird structure that I’m not quite sure what it is. It seems kind of… it’s some particular ritual thing. And I don’t know what that is. That’s often what I get from students. “Oh, that ritual thing,” when I say tabernacle. And that actually takes the structure that is quite literally, in my opinion, the beating heart of the P Source and makes it completely sterile. It makes it something so other that we actually forget. And the word tabernacle enables the reader to forget what it is because it’s not something that we’re familiar with.

And Mishkan, quite literally in Hebrew, means the place of dwelling. The verb there means to dwell or to live. And the mem on the beginning of it is sort of a type of noun that indicates a place where something happens. So it quite literally means dwelling place. And that really is one of the fundamental points of this story. The reason this exists, the reason we have all of these complicated, you know, to our perspective, complicated instructions, is so that the deity can dwell among the Israelites on earth. And that is fundamentally what this Mishkan structure is for. And so I wanted readers to be confronted with that over and over again as dwelling place, dwelling place, dwelling place, so that you can’t forget the central role of this. You can’t think of it as something sterile or other, but that it actually becomes, hopefully, that home, that breathing entity that it actually is in the text.

And I think that’s such an important part of translating a text with which so many people are familiar is defamiliarizing things so that we take notice of it and then actually dedicate some cognitive effort to figuring out what is this referring to. Because, yeah, we’ll just glide right past the word tabernacle without thinking about it at all. And another, the very beginning of Genesis 1 in your translation was something I commented on on Twitter, something I talk about about every three or four weeks I have to bring it up on my social media. And it was what we talked about the very first episode of the Data Over Dogma podcast. Can you tell me why you rendered for Genesis 1:1 , “When God began to create”?te"?

Oh, yeah, I thought you were going with tohu va vohu there. So sorry, I was like, I was going.

Well, that’s part of. That’s right there in the next clause. I’d love to hear about that as well, but. But I think that all of it together would be wonderful.

Yeah. Oh, I’ve seen you talk about this on various social media things, so I mean, I feel like I’m just going to be repeating your own words here, because what you’re saying about them is.

Well out of the mouths of two witnesses.

So. But, yeah, basically, you know, we can translate. I think historically it’s been translated “In the beginning,” but really, Bereshit is a construct phrase which in Hebrew means it is bound. It is tied to the word that comes next. So that’s often a relationship, actually, of dependency. So here, because it’s verbal, we have when God began. Bereshit bara is “when God began.” It’s just. That’s the particular syntactical formation that this is. And so it becomes kind of the introductory clause to a more complicated sentence that then goes on to describe the conditions. So when God—sorry, when God began to create the heavens and the earth, what did it look like? And then so in verses two and three, we have sort of a longer description of what that looked like. What was the material with which God was working, what did it look like at that point of beginning?

And it looked tohu va vohu, which you render. And I think to some degree, following a little bit after Alter’s attempt to try to maintain some of the alliteration. How did you go about verse two?

Yeah, so I, you know, for as much as I quibble with bits and pieces of Alter’s translation style, and I’ve taught translation seminars with grad students, and we go at it in those seminars that he. He was on to something. And I think Fox did this also, although I don’t have that. That’s in my office at Princeton, so I don’t have that one to look at. But at least with Alter, he translated as welter and waste, which I think tohu va vohu is, you know, a term. It’s a. It’s two words in Hebrew, three, but two in Hebrew that are sort of alliterative rhyming. They have a particular cadence to them. They’re also kind of nonsense words. They don’t have a real specific meaning to them. In fact, I recently learned that they’ve come into other languages as meaning like Tohuwabohu. And I think there is like in German. It’s come into German as a static phrase, which is fascinating to me.

A friend of mine did a thread somewhere on this. I probably should have looked that up. I don’t remember exactly.

There’s. There’s a new edition of the Einheitsubersetzung from a couple of years ago that likes to transliterate where they think that the style is more important than the substance. So like Isaiah tsav latsav, kav lakav, they just transliterate. So that could be where we see that but that’s interesting.

So it becomes this kind of word that. It’s this phrase that’s very, very difficult to translate. And I appreciated Alter there trying to keep some of the alliteration because one of the things that you said just a little while ago was that Genesis 1 is. Is very poetic sounding. It has that sort of high language. I’m not going to call it poetry. I’m not on the bandwagon that calls it poetry, but it has a poetic nature to it.. And tohu va-vohu is that—I did sort of take issue with Alter’s “welter and waste,” because that’s… It’s not communicating. It kind of communicates a wasteland. It communicates, like when I hear “welter and waste,” I think kind of dry, arid wasteland, kind of like the… Similar to… Often you’ll see tohu va-vohu translated as formless and void. And so that’s what I was really trying to get away from, because in… There’s this misconception that in Genesis—in Genesis 1 —it is creation out of nothing, right?

That God started with nothing and just created all the parts of the world. And that’s—that’s genuinely not what this text is saying. What this text is describing, if we go on, is a world that is really sort of watery. The land emerges out of the water. So God kind of gathers the waters and the land comes up. Everything’s—all of the stuff and substance of creation is already there under these waters. And it’s the act of separating them, of moving them, of pooling them that enables creation. So I really wanted to get at the swampiness, because if I think about, like, all sorts of stuff hidden in water, like, I think kind of like murky, swampy. And so I landed on murk first because I’m like, it’s kind of messy. And like, what else has kind of got that watery, slightly messy sense? And so I went with mire, and so I went with mire and murk to try to get that, because those words for me evoked a little bit of a wateriness, of a sort of swampy nature.

And I go on to really harp on the fact in the translation, really try to draw out the fact that this isn’t creation out of nothing. But I was hoping that by at least picking mire and murk, I could push back a little bit against the formless and void, the wasteland, the nothingness idea.

Now, this account of creation has pretty close ties with other ancient Southwest Asian and even Egyptian concepts of kind of land emerging from the chaotic waters of creation. Are you a proponent of the idea that Genesis 1 is kind of a domestication of something along the lines of the Enuma Elish’s Chaoskampf, or do you think that we’re further removed from… From that. That it’s not an adaptation of that earlier myth?

Yeah, so I think there are parts of P that are very much sort of an adaptation of Mesopotamian myths. I don’t really see the connection with Genesis 1 and Enuma Elish particularly strongly. I think in broad conceptual terms, it’s there. I guess if you want to compare the phrase Enuma Elish to Bereshit maybe, but even then it’s a little—it’s—it’s not quite so. You know, for me, the idea that there is a separation of waters and creation comes out of waters is very, very broad and very general. And I’m not necessarily a proponent of Genesis 1 is taking us directly from Enuma Elish so much as the idea of creation out of a watery mess is something that is, you know, in the lore of the area, kind of…

Drawn from a shared matrix without necessarily being directly…

Exactly. I would talk differently about the flood story in Atrahasis, but I, at least in terms of Enuma Elish, not so much.

Okay, so somewhat similar to David Tsumura’s take in Creation and Chaos.

Yeah.

Okay, very cool. Well, and—and that actually ties into… I think that we have—well, obviously we have our one creation account in Genesis 1 . We have another creation account in Genesis 2 and 3, which is the work of another source. And then we also, I and many other scholars have argued, have at least one more creation account or at least vestiges of one more creation account scattered around Isaiah and Psalms and Job and elsewhere.. And I’m going to be teaching an online class on September 20th. So anyone interested in hearing my own take on what’s going on across these three different creation accounts is welcome to check out the… We’ll put a link in the in the description to Daskalo.

Solid plug, Dan.

Solid plug. We were at a podcasting conference, and every time someone who recognized me came up to say hi, Dan would lean in and say, did you know he has a podcast? And they would all say, no, I didn’t. And so I’m I’m trying to become a better business person, at least trying to.

A cross-promoter.

A cross-promoter? Yeah. Is that the that the the jargon? So I’m sorry to step all over your your interview with that bit of self-promotion, Liane. But very glad to have been

able to tee that up for you.

That’s right.

But Liane, before we sign out, I want you to plug… talk to us about your book, tell us where we can get it. Talk to us about anything else you want us to know about in your work.

Yeah, sure. So yeah, this book is published by the University of California Press. I will say the title of it one more time. Oh sure. The Consuming Fire: The Complete Priestly Source from Creation to the Promised Land. A bit of an audacious title, and you’ll see I qualify that in the introduction, from the Neo-Documentarian perspective anyway. But yeah, so this is… it’s available from the University of California Press. It was incredibly important to me that it was affordable. So I think the book, before any applicable discounts, is like 19 dollars or something like that.

19.95 is the retail price.

There we go. And I have a discount code that I can email if you want to include it with this, that I think gets either 30 or 40 percent off, which brings it down to around 13 dollars. So there’s that. The only other thing I will plug is that I am in the very final stages of finishing the next edition of this, which should be coming out sometime probably later in 2024, which is everything that is in here, but also the Hebrew text.

But don’t let that stop you from buying the current version, and then you have got to go and buy the next version after.

What I will say is the Hebrew version, the version that has… so just to be clear, I am not translating the introduction or the notes into modern Hebrew. This is including the biblical Hebrew text that I translated. And in large part, this is not something that the University of California Press usually does because this is a World Literature in Translation series, but because this is a text that is hypothetically reconstructed, obviously using scholarly methods… But I think sentence one is, why am I not just making things up? I sort of talk about the method, that since this isn’t a text that is available in Hebrew, you know, nobody can really question my translation or quibble with choices I’ve made. Because you don’t have access to the text that I translated, because you don’t know which words I kept in or out. And so it was very important to me to have that transparency, to say, look, I have this text that I translated. I want to make it available to scholars, to students who know Hebrew, and to those in the broader community who can read biblical Hebrew so that they can see too, so they can, you know, argue with me about the translation and argue with me about choices.ation, argue with me about choices.

This was not meant to be the definitive statement. So when I say it’s an audacious title to say The Complete Priestly Source, I wanted this to start a conversation. I wanted to make the knowledge that was in my and maybe 19 other people’s heads accessible to everyone else. And I hope people disagree with me. I hope people argue. I hope this is the start of a broader conversation about what this source can be. I absolutely love this text. I fell in love with it in 2009 and I’m still not done with it. So, you know, I just want other people to see what I love about it and to have a chance to tell me that I’m wrong about it. So the Hebrew will be coming out sometime in 2024 once I manage to… To catch all the errors in the proofs with the help of a wonderful copy editor.

So this is really an opening volley in what will hopefully turn into a longer discussion. And I… And correct me if I’m wrong, but Seth Sanders is also using your text for a digital online version of the Priestly source. That will be… Are you aware?

I know he… I know Seth has a digital open access online Priestly source. I didn’t realize he was using my text. That’s amazing. If he…

I don’t… Well, I don’t want to get him in any kind of copyright trouble because if he chooses to do…

That, I’m very honored by it. I don’t know.

I don’t want to be misrepresenting Seth either. He is in some way, shape, or form referring to your text in an outline of the Priestly source for his open access digital version that is also annotated.

And so just at least right now his is English only, I think. I don’t know.

Yes.

I don’t know if he has plans to put the Hebrew up, but yeah, he put that out. That was out. It’s been out for about a year, I think. And it’s a great resource for anyone who doesn’t want to buy the book, who wants to compare. Because I think some of his source divisions are a little bit different than mine. So that’s what I mean about having, about arguing, about having discussions.

So, so it might be… it was… He was originally basing his off of yours, but fiddling with it here and there.

Or he had, when I looked at it a year ago, he had based it off something else. Then my book came out. Maybe he changed something, maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. I haven’t looked at it.

Okay, well, you should still go ahead and… this is a very affordable book and the introduction and the translator’s note is worth the price of admission just because I think there are important principles in there that a lot of folks who are not among the 19 other people in the world who really have a firm grasp on these data, I think that can help a lot of folks orient themselves to understanding what’s going on with Pentateuchal criticism, at least as it pertains to the Priestly source, P, perhaps the most important source in the Pentateuch. And I’m trying not to alliterate so much with the P sounds. Well, thank you so much, Leanne, for your time. We really appreciate it, appreciate your expertise and really appreciate you publishing this book that I think will be very helpful. Dan, did you have something to add?

Just that anyone who would like to write into us can do so by writing to contact@dataoverdogma.com. If you would like to support this show and all of its goals, you can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and kick a couple bucks our way. Leanne, thank you so much for joining us.oining us. We really appreciate having you on.

Thank you for having me. This was a blast.

Excellent. Bye, everybody.

Take care.