With Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament now complete, I have time to think about other questions that have occupied my mind. One of these is how one might go about establishing the date of the Pentateuch. There is no question that establishing the dates of these texts would be significantly more difficult than establishing the date of any New Testament text. This has to do with the issue of source criticism. In approaching the gospels (the area of NT that is most impacted by source criticism) in Rethinking, I was largely able to avoid dealing with the dates of hypothetical source texts such as Q, M, or L. This was not done out of judgments regarding their existence. Rather, it was done in order to minimize the number of “moving parts” with which I need to deal. But to a large extent this was made possible by two fact: one, that the Gospel of Mark—the date of which I did address—likely served as a source for the gospels of Matthew and Luke; two, the temporal distance between the hypothetical sources and the canonical gospels are measured at greatest in decades. By contrast, none of the Pentateuch’s sources are elsewhere preserved in the biblical canon (or otherwise extant apart from the Pentateuch itself), and the distance between J, E, D, or P (the four source texts classically thought to lie behind the Pentateuch) and the Pentateuch itself could potentially be measured in centuries. The work of establishing the dates of the Pentateuchal texts could very plausibly require one to establish the dates of J, E, D, P, and the more or less “final forms” of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
And none of the above touches the fact that source criticism of the Pentateuch is itself less fully settled. Comparable considerations motivated my decision to side step source criticism of the gospels in Rethinking. One could of course mitigate such concerns by approaching the date of say the Q source as a thought experiment. “If Q existed, when was it likely written?” But this is made difficult by the fact that there is disagreement regarding the text of Q. The obvious temptation is to utilize the Critical Edition of Q as the definitive text, but then confidence in one’s argument will only be as strong as one’s confidence in that particular reconstruction of Q. Although I’m not a Pentateuchal scholar and thus could be wrong in what I’m about to say, my sense is that there is nothing even comparable to the Critical Edition of Q when it comes to J, E, D, or P (one imagines due to the sheer size of such an undertaking). My guess is that while establishing the dates of hypothetical source texts for the gospels is a difficult task, doing comparable work with regard to the Pentateuch would be several orders of magnitude harder.
And all of this is before we even begin to consider the extent to which the Pentateuchal data lacks really solid chronological markers of the sort that we’d most love to see. Jeremiah 1:1–3 situates the following visions explicitly from the thirteenth year of king Josiah through the eleventh year of king Zedekiah, which corresponds to c. 627 through 587 BCE. Nothing comparable exists in the Pentateuch. So, even if we established the contents of the various source texts with which we might have to deal, there is still going to be a lot of inferential guess work to be done when it comes to actually arriving at absolute dates for their composition.
This probably all speaks to why temporal estimates for the composition of the Pentateuch tend to vary widely.
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