Joel S. BADEN.  Source Criticism [Cascade Companions].  Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2024. Pp. 149. $22.00. ISBN 978-1-6667-6409-3.  Reviewed by Daniel SMITH-CHRISTOPHER, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA 90045.

Joel Baden has made an important contribution to the “Cascade Companions” series with this helpful small book on the history and problems associated with scholarly approaches to the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.  The “Companions” series is similar to the Oxford University Press “Very Short Introduction” series which have proven to be useful summaries of important topics in a compact and easily digested work intended to summarize important topics.

Baden’s book includes 6 chapters.  The first three, entitled “Early Theories: Sources, Fragments, Supplements” (Ch. 1); “Defining the Sources” (Ch. 2); and “The Classical Period of Source Criticism” (Ch. 3) are excellent reviews and summaries of scholarship that would be useful to any serious student of the Bible, lay-person or undergraduate.  The second half consists of Baden’s critical observations and suggestions toward a different way of thinking about the history of the writing of these five books: “Complications: Additions and Subtraction” (Ch. 4); “Reimagining Source Criticism” (Ch. 5); and finally “A Return to the Sources” (Ch. 6).  A brief bibliography

University students are often inaugurated into the joys of “Biblical Criticism” by learning about the history of modern Biblical scholarship by practicing on the first five books.  As Baden points out, for over 1500 years:  “…the fundamental unity, and Mosaic authorship, of the Pentateuch went largely unquestioned…” (13).  But, the problems with this assumption are obvious – and begin right away as one begins to read.  Genesis 1-2:4a tell a creation story (the famous 7 day story) that is immediately recognized as different from the “Adam and Eve” story in 2:4b following.  The order of creation is different, the names for God are different, one starts with a watery world, the other starts with a barren and dry world, etc.  From these opening chapters on, the problems continue – stories repeated twice, different writing styles, conflicting descriptions of the same event (e.g. how “Beer-Sheva” got it’s name, the name of the mountain where Moses receives the law, and so forth).  As Baden points out, beginning in the eighteenth century, the initial attempts to work out these difficulties were based on the idea that different writers, and their writings, came together at some point to form the work as we know it, but only after passing through a number of versions and expansions in the history of Ancient Israel.

As Baden helpfully explains, however, articulating a convincing theory for how this evolution of the text actually took place became increasingly difficult.  Some scholars appear to have argued for discreet written projects that were eventually merged into the form we have today.  Other scholars wanted to emphasize a more ‘piece-meal’ evolution of the documents based on a stronger emphasis on pre-literary oral traditions.  Virtually all theoretical proposals have run into headwinds, however, because there are some texts – and some details – that are not easily accounted for (especially determining a chronological order of the revisions).  Baden proposes that European scholarship has tended toward theories of drawing together multiple stages in writing smaller units, while North American scholarship has tended toward re-dating a form of the classical sources as identified most famously by Wellhausen (the famous “J, D, E, and P” sources) – but re-dating them to a much later period in Israelite history than Wellhausen himself proposed over a century ago.

Baden proposes a number of observations about recent scholarly work, but this short-book format does not allow a detailed theory to be argued in contrast the brief reviews of previous scholarship.   However, Baden does point toward ongoing issues that will need to be resolved as Pentatueuchal scholarship proceeds.  This is a helpful and interesting read, necessarily brief and selective, but a good place to start if one wants to know “What is going on with scholarship on the first five books?”.