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Originally Posted by Difflugia
Friedman is definitely alive and still publishing, both as a researcher and popular author. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a new edition of The Bible with Sources Revealed, though. His ongoing research uses the Documentary Hypothesis as a starting point, but I doubt that his conclusions will have changed all that much about the sources themselves. Also, for what it's worth, more than four sources were identified as far back as the late 1800s, but they're minor players and not discussed a whole lot. Most source identifications list all redactors as a single source, even though authors acknowledge multiple stages of redaction. Friedman simply splits out the several redactions into four individual sources, which brings us up to eight. He then identifies minor sources that seem to share no linguistic affinity with the other identified sources, making ten sources.
It's also worth noting that Friedman disagrees in a number of places with earlier scholars as well as his comtemporaries.
Joel Baden is a currently publishing scholar that disagrees with Friedman on some important points. His The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis is very informative, though I found it dry and difficult to read. The book lists for $50, but it's couponable at Kobo. I got it for $5 with a 90% off "we missed you" code.
I also recommend Julius Wellhausen's Prolegomena to the History of Israel, which can be read for free at Google Books and Sacred Texts. Despite some 19th century turns of phrase and a penchant for run-on sentences, the book is entertaining and relatively easy to read. There's a Project Gutenberg text, but it's terrible.
ETA: You also mentioned some interest in the construction of the Synoptic Gospels of the New Testament. Mark Goodacre's The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze is available for free (and with his publisher's permission) as a scan from archive.org. I also recommend that one. |
All very enlightening stuff. Thanks.
I ended up buying the Kobo. I skimmed through the text, and it certainly has all of the alleged sources distinguished by the different colors that you showed. I wish, however, that a wider range of colors had been used--it takes a second to determine if a color is light green or light blue, for instance. Perhaps Friedman and/or the publisher thought that using, say, red, purple, orange, pink, etc. would be garish or unprofessional for such a scholarly publication. Anyway, it's serviceable as it is.
I am taking note of the O.T. Documentary Hypothesis books that you mentioned. As I mentioned in a previous post, I don't plan to be doing any study of the subject anytime soon, although your posts have stirred my interest. In the meantime, when I find one at a good price, that I know that I'll be interested in in the future, I'll go and ahead and grab it.
I am familiar with Goodacre. Goodacre was a pioneer in providing, free, tons of information on the Internet (the WWW anyway) on the subject. It doesn't quite surprise me that he's making the book that you mentioned available free. I'll certainly download the book. I see his
On Dispensing with Q frequently cited, so I'm assuming that it must be good, too. I doubt that it will be on the Internet Archive anytime soon, though. ha
Speaking of that, occasionally you can find scholarly books free on open access sources, books that are published and sold by scholarly publishers like Eisenbrauns. The open access ones are doctoral dissertations that the scholars were, it seems, required to deposit in their school's open access area before they departed (with a diploma in hand) from the school. There was a book at Eisenbrauns, retailing for $60 or $70, that I found a few months ago that I wanted. I found the author's open access dissertation for free. It appears that the author had changed
nothing in the published book from what he had in the dissertation!