Letter #198: What's It All About?

The devil's in the details.

Dad,

As part of my job (professional word nerd), I have occasion to read a lot of what they call “textual criticism.” This is the “science” (big scare quotes) of “identifying” (even scarier quotes) the “original words” “behind” (Texas Chainsaw Massacre quotes) the various manuscripts on which a book or play or poem has been passed down through the ages. Naturally people love to do this with the Bible.

I summarize this stuff so you don’t have to: basically, in the 19^th century, buncha Krauts decided the five books of Genesis through Deuteronomy (the “Pentateuch”) were written not by one guy (Moses) but by a variety of different authors, stitched together over time into one continuous narrative.

One author (the “Yahwist”) frequently used the sacred name YHWH for God; another (the “elohist”) tended to use the more common noun elohim. And so on, based on differences in style, grammar, storytelling, etc., until you end up with a patchwork of at least four different “originals.” Something similar was supposed around this time to have happened with the poems of Homer.

Now, inside of me there are two wolves. Part of me (the nerd part) loves this stuff. I want to know everything we can about how the Bible got the way it is. I want to stay up late into the night speculating about the conjunctive waw. And I genuinely think it matters—up to a point.

The other part of me thinks: OK, but what’s it all about, Alfie? When you get done swimming in the river of minutiae, does the Bible look any different, say anything different, from the opposite shore? Half the time the different “strands” seem like they could just as easily be the work of one author writing in a variety of styles, like Shakespeare writing tragedy and comedy as the occasion warranted. And the last people I trust to treat such matters with sensitivity are 19^th-century Germans, who—God love them—tended to have the literary sensibilities of a brick.

Besides which, I’ve read a lot of surveys of this stuff, and half the time they end up saying something like “well, even if there were multiple authors, the text has such internal consistency that it must have been put together by a very sophisticated editor.” At which point, what’s the difference? Robert Alter’s introduction to his wonderful Pentateuch translation is a typical example: “the edited version of Genesis—the so-called redacted text—which has come down to us, though not without certain limited contradictions and disparate elements, has powerful coherence as a literary work, and...this coherence is above all what we need to address as readers.”

You ask: “what is truth?” I submit that the answer may be similar in doctrine and in textual criticism alike. Facts matter hugely, and denominational hair-splitting has its uses. But once you’ve made your best, honest effort to get things right—what are you going to do about it? What's it going to do to you?

Love,
Spencer