Multiple Authorship

It is generally held by most believers in the Torah, that it was composed by a single author, Moses.

In order to maintain this point of view, the loyalist often needs to dance around certain issues. In this post, I am focusing on the problem of the repeating story, specifically, the Creation stories in Genesis. While there are others, such as three versions of the “don’t tell the king that you are my wife, but tell him that you are my sister” stories, the Creation stories introduce us to the idea that, just maybe, multiple stories were actually composed by multiple people.

The Breakdown

If you are not already aware of it, the Torah was one or more scrolls of unnumbered text. The numbering of the chapters and verses came much later in its history. While some separation of chapters may be based on logical separations, others are fully ideological. This breakdown comes to the verse numbers as well. Christians and Jews have their own numbering systems. Most of the time, they agree, but there are many times where they do not agree. It is always interesting to pause when one comes to such a disagreement in order to consider why a specific difference exists.

While there is not a Christian/Jewish argument over the chapter and verse number of each of the Creation stories, the agreement of the odd breakdown is equally interesting.

I will be referring to Genesis 1:1-2:3 as “Genesis1”, and Genesis 2:4-25 (the end of that chapter), as “Genesis2”. Chapter 3 isn’t really a Creation story, but it is interesting to note that the types of differences that exist between Genesis1 and Genesis2, also exist in that 3^rd chapter as well.

The differences between Genesis1 and Genesis2

1. Genesis1 uses “Elohim” as a name of God. Genesis2 uses YHVH-Elohim.

2. Genesis1 creates plants, animals, then, man. Genesis 2 creates man, plants, then, animals.

3. Genesis1 creates male and female together. Genesis2 creates man, then animals, and, later as almost an afterthought, the female human.

4. Gernesis1 tells man and woman to eat of any herbs from the ground, or fruits from the tree that they want. Genesis2 tells the man (and not the woman) that if he eats a specific fruit, he will suffer a terrible death (the doubling of Hebrew words, such as “die a death” is often used as an intensifier).

5. Genesis1 has God creating things by His word (“bara”). Genesis2 has God being more hand-on (“yetzar”). He needs mud to mold a man and animals, the Hebrew term used for “planting” is one of taking direct action on the ground, indicating that God didn’t simply create the garden, but farmed it.

6. Genesis1 speaks of a unity of male and female. Genesis2 speaks of a division (“I will make for him help that will oppose him” – 1:18).

7. Genesis1 creates the female by His word. Genesis2 creates the female by taking a side from the man and forming it into a woman.

8. Genesis1 has created vast fields across the land. Genesis2 makes a garden in a specific location by the Euphrates River (“parat”).

9. Genesis1 is concerned with the heavens above, detailing their creation. Genesis2 is not concerned with the sun, moon, and stars and only refers to “heavens” in passing (2:4).

10. Genesis2 makes an effort to explain why man is called “Adam” (from the ground, adamah, and why woman “isha” is called that (“because she came from an “ish”). Genesis1 is not concerned with such meanings.

The Anthology “Problem”

The Torah is an anthology of stories, authored by anonymous sources, most likely from oral traditions, and stitched together into a not-so-orderly whole. It is also from different periods, so the views, the meanings, and the intents of each story can differ from chapter to chapter, and, because of the verse numbering that came later, from verse to verse.

And this is certainly true from one book to the next.

For example, Genesis2 has God warning Adam that He is going to kill him horribly if he eats that special fruit. But in chapter 3, God not only doesn’t kill Adam, but He never refers to the threat of death at all. He does fire Adam and evicts him (Eve isn’t mentioned in the eviction) because of what Adam might do, and not because of what he did.

In the Torah, one chapter is often ignorant of the demands of a previous chapter.

One example of this is God saying that the descendants of Abraham will be slaves for 400 years, but it only lasted 210 years. In another example, we have God telling Moses that he never told Moses’ ancestors His name of YHVH, but in Genesis, we see that He did.

The only reason that “anthology” is a problem is if one holds that a single prophet (who isn’t even mentioned in the Book of Genesis) wrote the entire text by himself.

So long as you don’t need that to be true, then reading the parashah requires a lot less work. It takes a lot of effort to resolve the many issues that exist to maintain a “single-author” viewpoint, as evidenced by the fact that the Targum for Genesis1 replaces every instance of “Elohim” with “YHVH” in order to hid one of the 10 very important differences.

Here are some memes that I have made up to outline the points in this post. Enjoy!