"...And my name YHWH I did not make known to them"

Parshat Vaera

This week we'll focus on a verse that had in the past troubled me a lot.  It was a question that I searched a while for an answer for, but never found a good one.  It turns out there is a pretty damn good answer to this question, but it was not one that any Rabbi was willing to offer me.

I will remark on the outset that this post will require discussion of the tetragrammaton, which I will represent by YHWH.  I realize that this must be off-putting to some religious people who might stumble across the blog, but it is far too cumbersome to euphemize the name.

The Burning Question

This parsha picks up right in the midle of the conversation between God and Moshe (Moses).  We won't go any farther than the first two verses, which read (Exod 6:2-3):

2 And God spoke unto Moses, and said unto him: 'I am the LORD (YHWH); 3 and I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, as God Almighty (El Shaddai), but by My name YHWH I made Me not known to them.

Verse 3 gave the title to the blog post, as I would translate it, and is the source of the problem.  Bonus points to you if you picked up on it already. If you haven't, the problem is that this verse is a blatant contradiction with various previous stories.  God says here that he never told Avraham, Yitzchak, or Yaakov, about his name YHWH, instead appearing as El Shaddai only.

The first question to ask is does God use El Shaddai in conversations with the patriarchs?  The answer is yes.

1 And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said unto him: 'I am El Shaddai; walk before Me, and be thou wholehearted. (Gen 17:1)

10 And God said unto him: 'Thy name is Jacob: thy name shall not be called any more Jacob, but Israel shall be thy name'; and He called his name Israel. 11 And God said unto him: 'I am God Almighty. Be fruitful and multiply; a nation and a company of nations shall be of thee, and kings shall come out of thy loins; (Gen 35:10-11)

Both Avraham and Yaakov also use El Shaddai in their own conversations.  But what about the other half?  Does God use the name YHWH.  Unfortunately, for me, I remembered from being a ba'al korei (Torah reader) that he did not too many weeks ago.  There is one clear example of God introducing himself to a patriarch as YHWH.

12 And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. 13 And, behold, the LORD stood beside him, and said: 'I am the LORD (YHWH), the God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac. The land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed. (Gen 28:12-13)

However, there are also numerous times where the Patriarchs appear to know this name.  A couple of examples will suffice:

unto the place of the altar, which he had made there at the first; and Abram called there on the name of the LORD (YHWH) (Gen: 13:4)

And Abraham planted a tamarisk-tree in Beer-sheba, and called there on the name of the LORD (YHWH), the Everlasting God. (Gen 21:33)

And he builded an altar there, and called upon the name of the LORD (YHWH), and pitched his tent there; and there Isaac's servants digged a well. (Gen 26:25)

And he (Yaakov) came near, and kissed him (Yitzchak). And he smelled the smell of his raiment, and blessed him, and said: See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field which the LORD (YHWH) hath blessed. (Gen 27:27)

And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said: 'Surely the LORD (YHWH) is in this place; and I knew it not.' (Gen 28:16)

And many more.  Not only do the Patriarchs seem to be very familiar with this name, Even the wicked Lavan (Laban) seems to know it:

And Laban said unto him (Yaakov): 'If now I have found favour in thine eyes--I have observed the signs, and the LORD (YHWH) hath blessed me for thy sake.'  (Gen 30:27)

And to top it all off, we have this cryptic verse all the way back in Gen 4:26 which seems to indicate that the name was known publicly to everyone in the 3rd generation!

And to Seth, to him also there was born a son; and he called his name Enosh; then began men to call upon the name of the LORD (YHWH). (Gen 4:26)

A Blatant Contradiction?

We have here what appears to be a blatant contradiction.  Furthermore, it's one that ancient Rabbis could not have failed to notice.  However, despite this, I was not able to find any good explanations. I'm not going to devote too much to traditional answers, if you want, you can read more about them here (Part 3).

Most of the answers in the linked article, and the ones I heard from Rabbis capable of answering the question relied on either tortured readings of the verse, or some kind of esoteric meaning of the word shem (name).  For the second explanation, it meant that it wasn't the literal name, YHWH, that God was talking about, but rather some sort of alternative concept, that could very well mean whatever you want it to, as long as it didn't make more contradictions.  This is a standard tactic in traditional explanations to resolve contradictions.  You just force an alternative interpretation on one of the verses and, voila, the contradiction is resolved.

However, there is a much better answer, but before we get there, we'll divert a bit to give some background.

How the Documentary Hypothesis was Formed

One of the first steps on the road to formulation of the Documentary Hypothesis was noticing that there were multiple stories where the same thing appeared to occur twice.  We've already seen some instances of this, such as the multiple stories of a Patriarch pretending his wife was his sister in a foreign land.  Or the multiple times Yaakov was renamed as Yisrael, or Beth-el was named [1].

However, there was another piece of evidence that was a bit curious.  It seemed that in many of the repeating stories in the book of Bereishit (Genesis), each version used a different name for God.  Some used elohim, which is a generic word for "god," and can be viewed as a sort of title.  The other used YHWH, the tetragrammaton, which was more akin to a personal name.  This discovery was made simultaneously by Astruc, Eichhorn and Witter in the 19th century [2].   The next step was to separate the stories into multiple authors or sources.  One source used one name, the other used a different name.

Chances are, if your yeshivah, synagogue, or any other religious based institution you frequented addressed the Documentary Hypothesis at all, the view they gave was one of multiple authors who just happened to prefer using one name of God or the other.  This was certainly the description I was given, and I've seen it described as such today among Orthodox Jews.  However, it's incredibly incorrect, or rather, it represents a formative view at the very beginning when they were just figuring out what was going on. The verse we were discussing provides the key as to why one author would prefer to use YHWH an another would eschew it.

What the Documentary Hypothesis Actually Says about the Names of God

What the Documentary Hypothesis actually says is not that each source just happened to pick a name of God they liked and ran with it, but rather there was an important theological reason for their choices.  One of the authors believed that the name YHWH was hidden from mankind until it was revealed to Moshe at the burning bush.  In fact, this is told to us explicitly in Exod. 6:3, quoted above.  The other author thought that YHWH was known to mankind from the beginning, or at least from Gen 4:26. 

This also explains why the name YHWH gets used frequently in all stories after Exod 6:3, including in both parts of later doublets (For example, the quails stories in Exod 16 and Num, 11).  Furthermore there are multiple other idiosyncrasies that can be used to differentiate the sources.  (Friedman or Kugel in the references link are good sources to learn about these.)   Regardless, the narrative makes sense without resorting to tortured readings provided you are ok with there being multiple storylines or traditions.

The simple story I've painted in the last two paragraphs isn't the actual opinion held today, even with the version of the Documentary Hypothesis held by proponents like Friedman.  For them there are four authors, with two authors holding the view that YHWH was not known before Moshe.  Although, one of them, does not appear much in the Patriarchal stories.  The fourth author is confined entirely to the book of Devarim (Deuteronomy) and comprises the first 31 chapters of that book.

Even then, there are some cracks in this four author story (again Whybray in the references section can point out some problems.)  But the general idea of there being multiple storylines holds across nearly all modern secular scholars.  The contradictions are far too many, and the coincidences are far too strong to argue for anything else.  In a couple weeks we'll see that even defenders of traditional readings commonly quoted by religious Jews are forced to admit the presence of contradictions arising from multiple sources, even if they weren't actual written documents.

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1. For example, check the posts in previous weeks here or here. ^

1. See Friedman, "Who Wrote the Bible" Summit 1987, p. 23. ^

The Story or Stories of Joseph and the Pit

Parshat Vayeshev

Up until this point I've only vaguely mentioned the Documentary Hypothesis (DH), which is among the leading hypotheses to explain the creation of the Torah, and is taught in every secular biblical course at the university level. I have mentioned that different paragraphs were probably written by different people at different times. I've also mentioned the most agreed upon statement that Deuteronomy (minus the last three chapters) was written by a different author or authors than the other four books. However, these kind of claims are more general than the DH. They can be attributed to many other hypotheses about the writing of the Torah.

What is unique to DH is that it states that the Torah existed as separate complete or near-complete documents, and that these documents were merged together by a redactor. One piece of evidence for this process appears in stories which are repeated in separate places, like the stories of Avraham (Abraham) and Yitzchak (Isaac) passing off their wives as sisters in foreign lands. Another piece of evidence, and the focus for today, are stories that look like they were spliced together from two distinct sources. When the sources are separated, various inconsistencies and contradictions vanish, and you are left with two complete stories. This is a very difficult procedure to do for any standard writing you would pick up, and its repeated success in many stories in the Torah should at the very least provoke some serious thought as to why the Torah was written in this way.

As an example of this process, we'll look at the story a the beginning of this week's parsha which deals with Joseph's brothers throwing him into the pit.

Problems in the story

The story of the selling of Joseph appears in 37:18-36 and is pretty convoluted. It's probably a good idea to pause and read it now. If you've read it you'll notice a very strange sequence of events. in 37:28 Midianites pass by, and "they" drew Joseph out of the pit and "they" sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites for silver, and "they" brought Joseph to Egypt. Then later in 37:36, the Midianites sold Joseph to Egypt. In order for the surface reading to make sense, Rashi interprets the first they, the people who bring Joseph out of the pit as the brothers, even though the previous sentence had the subject as the Midianites. He also interprets the second they as the brothers, and says that the brothers sold them to the Ishmaelites, who then sold them to the Midianites. Rashi does not specify which group was responsible for bringing Joseph to Egypt, but presumably it's the Ishmaelites, which means the second "they" in verse 28 refers to them, even though they haven't appeared yet in the story!

There's another bizarre wording issue in the text.

21 And Reuben heard it, and delivered him out of their hand; and said: 'Let us not take his life.' 22 And Reuben said unto them: 'Shed no blood; cast him into this pit that is in the wilderness, but lay no hand upon him'--that he might deliver him out of their hand, to restore him to his father.

When I used to read it, I would read the second sentence as elaborating on the first. However, there are problems with this reading. First, the second sentence repeats Reuven said, where the Torah usually would  use something like "And he said" when the speaker does not change. This is a small problem. The bigger problem is later in the text it is Yehudah (Judah) who is responsible for taking him out of the pit and not killing him. Where was Reuven? Later he comes back to the pit and no one is there, and he's distraught.

Breaking into Two Stories

Now let's see what happens when we split this story into two. The first story looks like this:

19 And they said one to another: 'Behold, this dreamer cometh. 20 Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into one of the pits, and we will say: An evil beast hath devoured him; and we shall see what will become of his dreams.' 21 And Reuben heard it, and delivered him out of their hand; and said: 'Let us not take his life.' 25 And they sat down to eat bread; and they lifted up their eyes and looked, and, behold, a caravan of Ishmaelites came from Gilead, with their camels bearing spicery and balm and ladanum, going to carry it down to Egypt. 26 And Judah said unto his brethren: 'What profit is it if we slay our brother and conceal his blood? 27 Come, and let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and let not our hand be upon him; for he is our brother, our flesh.' And his brethren hearkened unto him.  28b and sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites for twenty shekels of silver. And they brought Joseph into Egypt.

And the second one:

18 And they saw him afar off, and before he came near unto them, they conspired against him to slay him 22 And Reuben said unto them: 'Shed no blood; cast him into this pit that is in the wilderness, but lay no hand upon him'--that he might deliver him out of their hand, to restore him to his father. 23 And it came to pass, when Joseph was come unto his brethren, that they stripped Joseph of his coat, the coat of many colours that was on him; 24 and they took him, and cast him into the pit--and the pit was empty, there was no water in it. 28a And there passed by Midianites, merchantmen; and they drew and lifted up Joseph out of the pit, 29 And Reuben returned unto the pit; and, behold, Joseph was not in the pit; and he rent his clothes. 30 And he returned unto his brethren, and said: 'The child is not; and as for me, whither shall I go?' 31 And they took Joseph's coat, and killed a he-goat, and dipped the coat in the blood; 32 and they sent the coat of many colours, and they brought it to their father; and said: 'This have we found. Know now whether it is thy son's coat or not.' 33 And he knew it, and said: 'It is my son's coat; an evil beast hath devoured him; Joseph is without doubt torn in pieces.' 34 And Jacob rent his garments, and put sackcloth upon his loins, and mourned for his son many days. 35 And all his sons and all his daughters rose up to comfort him; but he refused to be comforted; and he said: 'Nay, but I will go down to the grave to my son mourning.' And his father wept for him. 36 And the Midianites sold him into Egypt unto Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh's, the captain of the guard.

The Documentary Hypothesis puts authors to these stories

According to DH, the top story is by J, which I would describe is something like "tales and legends of the southern kingdom". Notice how in this version, Yehudah (Judah) is the one who takes control of the situation. He is the one who steps up, the leader. This will be true throughout the Yosef saga, Yehudah is the head of the tribes. In the second version, the version attributed to E, which could be read as "tales and legends of the northern kingdom," Yehudah is not relevant at all. Here it's Reuven who is the one who saves Yosef, and Yehudah isn't even mentioned! Also, splitting into these two stories makes the surface reading clearer as far as Reuven returning to the pit. In this version, the brothers threw him into the pit, left to eat, the Midianites took him out, and then when Reuven returned to rescue him, Yosef was gone. In the patched together version, Reuven must have wandered off somewhere when the rest of the brothers, led by Yehudah, sold him. None of the other brothers even felt the need to inform him that Yosef isn't actually dead, just sold to Egypt?

Splitting the stories resolves all the textual problems. The two consecutive sentences that begin with "Reuven said," the convoluted selling chain, the narrative inconsistencies of Reuven knowing or not knowing that Yosef is alive. To me it's pretty clear. This is one of many instances were separate stories were cobbled together to create a single harmonized reading.

In general, I think DH oversells its claims, but it's foolish not to recognize where it does admirably well.  This is just one example of a situation where it works extremely well to clarify a biblical story.