Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/20/26

One of the special interest rabbit holes I've gone down in the past few years is the history of the composition of the Bible, and I've become particularly fascinated by the so-called Documentary Hypothesis, which is one theory (though by no means the only accepted one) about how the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) were put together. Joel Baden's The Composition of the Pentateuch has what's probably the most recently formulated version of it, which goes something like this: at some point after the Judean elite returned from the Babylonian exile, some scholar or scholars took four different source documents that told different versions of the stories of the creation of the universe and the early history of the Hebrews, and edited them together into a single narrative. This editing consisted of meticulously figuring out how the different episodes could be strung together chronologically without creating discrepancies like characters dying and then coming back to life, though as you would expect, it still creates a lot of puzzling results. (For instance, Baden demonstrates that the story of Joseph being sold into slavery is really difficult to follow because it's actually three somewhat contradictory stories mashed together.)

Anyway, here's what's to me the funniest aspect of this. The first four books of the Torah, covering the creation of the world, the legendary arrival of Abraham's family in Canaan, their descendants' enslavement in Egypt, and their descendants' escape and wandering in the desert, were created by interweaving three different sources, called J, E, and P by scholars, together. There's a fourth source, D, that covers much of the same narrative territory. But D, as originally written, had a literary framing device: on the last day of the Exodus, just before the Hebrews cross into the Promised Land, Moses stands before the multitude and recaps for them the history of the Hebrews and the laws that they received. And because the editors are so single-minded on keeping things chronological, this recap (the book of Deuteronomy) is placed at the very end of the story, so the effect of reading the edited version is that you read the whole thing and then you get a retelling at the end, which differs in quite a few details from the earlier versions of it you've already read!