Literary Biblical Criticism

Kenneth A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: 2003), pp. 492-493

With the evolutionary [of religion] ladder gone, what happens to the biblical literature? Where do J, E, D, P, now belong, if the old order is only a chimera? Or, in fact, do they belong at all?

Here we will be concise, open, and fairly staccato. First, the basic fact is that there is no objective, independent evidence for any of these four compositions (or for any variant of them) anywhere outside the pages of our existing Hebrew Bible... They exist only in the minds of their modern creators... This very simple fact needs to be stressed. Our resourceful biblicists are not sitting on some secret store of papyri or parchments that contain any such works. The Dead Sea Scrolls show no sign of them whatever... Modern guesswork, as we all know, is often extraordinarily and breathtakingly clever and ingenious - one can only reverently take one's hat off to it all, in respectful amazement, sometimes. But... it does not constitute fact, and cannot substitute for it... The standards of proof among biblical scholars fall massively and woefully short of the high standards that professional Orientalists and archaeologists are long accustomed to, and have a right to demand. Some MSS, please!...

Second, time and time again the modes of analysis (and their criteria, variant vocabulary, "styles," etc.) have been demonsrated to be defective. And not just by "conservatives" either. Suffice it to refer to the very careful and conscientious study by (e.g.) the late R. N. Whybray (no conservative), The Making of the Pentateuch. On the internal data, it is a damning indictment of these methods. He offers a largely unitary Pentateuch, but of a relatively late date...

Third, people sometimes talk glibly about the "literary strata" in the biblical writings, as if they weer somewhat parallel to the strata in an archaeological mound. Yes, it sounds very appropriate, but which way do your strata run? In an archaeological site, the successive strata (by and large) lie in succession roughly horizontally, one above the other... But the "strata" supposed in J, E, D, or P, H are of an entirely different kind. Here, to distinguish passages of J, E, P (say) in Genesis, vertical cuts have been made, all the way through the book... No archaeologist worth his salt would dream of accepting as "strata" a set of vertical sections cut separately, over a mound.

UPDATE: In the comments section, Kochav gave a link to this article by David Hazony about biblical archaeology.