By One Hand?

Computers reread Genesis

Jewish tradition holds that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. Conservative Christians agree. But 19th century Protestant critics emphasized the Pentateuch's diversity rather than its unity. They deemed it a scissors-and-paste job on materials from different centuries by four anonymous authors: the Jahwist ("J"), Elohist ("E"), Priestly writer ("P") and Deuteronomist ("D"). Though traditionalists rejected it, this J.E.P.D. theory hardened into liberal orthodoxy.

Now the four-author thesis has come under a powerful new attack. The ancient view, it seems, is supported by that most modern deity of omniscience, the computer. Bible Scholar Yehuda Radday of Haifa's Israel Institute of Technology reports that a five-year computer study of Genesis shows that it is the work of a single writer and that the J.E.P.D. theory must be "rejected or at least thoroughly revised."

Radday and three aides studied "the only unquestionable data," the words of the Hebrew text, and concentrated on 56 criteria of "language behavior" (such as use of conjunctions and word length) that are outside the conscious control of an author. The key finding: a remarkably high 82% probability that the same person wrote the supposed J and E passages. The P passages were as distinct as the critics have long maintained, but Radday contends that the difference can be explained totally by the formalistic content. Says he: "My love letters to my wife are completely different from my scholarly articles."

None of this proves that the single writer was Moses, but Radday is already hard at work on Exodus and will then search Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Radday's challenge will be fiercely resisted by scholars who favor the entrenched J.E.P.D. theory, partly because he deals exclusively with linguistic criteria and ignores stylistic variations. Radday is no right-wing ideologue, however. Earlier he earned wide acclaim when his whirring computers supported the conventional theory that multiple authors produced the books of Judges, Zechariah and Isaiah. Says Radday: "These scholars can't have it both ways, approving a method when it suits them, and repudiating it when it does not." qed

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