The Weakness of Context

I've given in the last week or so some reflections upon the work of establishing the dates of the Pentateuchal texts. I am going to put I see as the core difficulty into technical terms, of my own devise. In Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament, I develop a simple, tripartite rubric for organizing data relevant for establishing the date of an ancient document. This rubric consists of authorial biography, which seeks to situate the text as precisely as possible within the author's life; synchronization, which seeks to relate the text to other events (including the composition of other texts); and contextualization, which seeks to relate the text to social, cultural, doctrinal, literary, etc., developments. With regards to the New Testament, authorial biography is most relevant for the work of establishing the dates of those Pauline letters one deems to be authentic. This is due to two evidentiary realities: one, the Pauline letters provide more autobiographical information than any others in the NT; and we have access to a relatively early text that devotes significant attention to Paul's career (i.e. the Acts of the Apostles). The classic example of synchronization with regard to the New Testament is the fall of the temple in 70 CE. It goes without saying that if a text clearly is aware that the temple has fallen, then it must postdate that event. (Synchronization, in my usage, also includes the evidence of external attestation and source criticism). An example of contextualization that has recurred throughout the history of establishing the date of the New Testament texts is the development of Christology, where at times scholars have assumed a correlation between higher Christologies and later composition.

I organized the rubric above intentionally from that which in principle can give the most precise dates for a text to that which can give the least precise. With regard to the seven Pauline letters that most would consider to be authentic, there is remarkable agreement regarding their dates of composition. Even the most "radical" proposals for their dates differ by just a few years from where most people would situate them. This is due to the potential precision of authorial biography. In most situations, synchronization will not permit the same degree of precision. Part of this has to do with its dependence upon relative dates. Take the canonical gospels. We know that they were written after the events surrounding Jesus' death, because they report these. We know that they were written by the early to mid 2nd centuries, given their attestation in writings of that period. More precise dates rest upon our judgments surrounding their knowledge of the events of 70, whether Mark is a source for Matthew and Luke, etc. But generally speaking, synchronization can usually hope only to narrow the possible range down to within a decade or two, at best.

Contextualization is even more problematic. The example of Christological development helps make this clear. It is certainly the case that a "higher" Christology (acknowledging the imprecision of the "higher" versus "lower" axis here) is consistent with a later date. But it's not clear that it is inconsistent with an earlier one. This has been emphasized by the so-called "early high Christology" school, which has argued that high Christology is already evidenced in the earliest New Testament writings. Whatever one thinks of their argument, it does force us to recognize that Christological development is a weak foundation for establishing the dates of a New Testament text. This tends to be true of contextualization more generally.

This brings us back to the Pentateuchal texts. Authorial biography is a virtual non-starter for these texts. Few biblical scholars today would still affirm Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuchal texts. Whether Moses even existed is a vexed matter. Indeed, it is unlikely that any of the Pentateuchal texts had anything resembling an author in the way that we can refer to Paul as author of his letters—and even if they did, we have no data regarding their lives. As such, the work of authorial biography with regard to establishing the dates of the Pentateuch consists largely of explaining why authorial biography cannot help us here. Synchronization offers a bit more assistance. It can establish the absolute upper and lower dates of composition. The Pentateuch ends with the Israelites about to (re)enter the Land. As such, no matter how we understand Israel's origins, we can reasonably suppose that the Pentateuch as it stands dates no earlier than its approximate establishment in the Land. I suspect that there is a soft majority that would place their establishment in the Land—either as a foreign presence or as the result of shifting patterns of land use, etc., among certain indigenous communities—relatively close to the Merneptah stele (c. 1207 BCE, which contains the first extra-biblical mention of Israel). So, we might perhaps set c. 1200 BCE (the traditional year for the advent of the Iron Age in the region) as a soft lower limit for the dates of the Pentateuchal texts as they stand. On the other end, there can be little question that the Pentateuch exists in the Hellenistic era. Synchronization has helped us, but still allows a range of possible dates upwards of a millennium.

So, ultimately we are left largely with contextualization. We can compare the Hebrew of the Pentateuch to that found in other texts and inscriptions (as for instance did Ronald Hendel and some other guy recently), and see where it is best situated. We can consider the economics supposed by the texts (as did Sandra Richter recently, with regard to the core of Deuteronomy), and compare these for instance with what we know about the economics of the Land from the advent of the Iron Age through the Persian era. Etc. The precision of such work is always limited, and all the more so when we consider that the Pentateuch consists of five texts that each incorporate material from a number of preexisting but no longer extant sources (and moreover the five books probably share one or more sources in common). So, for instance, Avraham Faust has recently argued that the so-called Priestly source (P) reflects the late Iron Age, especially the 8th or 7th centuries. If granted, then this would establish that one source behind the Pentateuchal texts dates to the latter pre-exilic period, but would say nothing about any other possible source.

Put most succinctly then, the difficulty regarding the compositional dates of the Pentateuchal texts is that we have to rely upon the least precise category of evidence in order to consider texts that draw upon sources potentially written over several centuries. This combination of low imprecision and high temporal diversity do not necessarily set the quest for the dates of the Pentateuchal texts up for resounding success.