The Unity of the Hebrew Bible.

• Author: Brichto, Herbert C.

Winston Churchill is credited with the observation that England and the United States are two countries divided by the language that they hold in common. What "English" does for those two countries "the unity of the Hebrew Bible" does for D. N. Freedman and myself. For me the phrase means that the ideological, theological, and moral vectors in the Hebrew Scriptures (in narrative and precept, poetry and prose, history and fiction) may vary within an arc of a few degrees at most. If the variance in such normative thrusts is so large as to displace the North Star by so much as ten or more degrees, the postulate of that scriptural unity is seriously challenged. Hence such clear and consistent discrepancies as enable source-analytic scholarship to isolate J, P, and D strata need not be in polar opposition to constitute evidence for the Hebrew Bible as essentially a conflationary rather than a unitary literary phenomenon.

What the unity of the Hebrew Bible bespeaks for D. N. Freedman remains quite unclear to me. This despite his avowal that it has something to do with attempts "to trace or demonstrate some unifying or unitary theme throughout the Bible, thus producing a sense of unity in the midst of the obvious heterogeneity and disparity of the Bible's component parts" (p. v). Perhaps the vagueness of "unifying theme" is what troubles me and the fault lies in my own idiosyncratic understanding of the specificity of theme and overall viewpoint required to make separate genres, books, and pericopes part of a unitary whole. If so it would constitute churlishness on my part to deny to my colleague his object: "to reconstruct or describe a rational process by which the admittedly varied and disparate materials in the Bible were consciously and purposefully put together in a complete work by a compiler or an editor working either alone or with a small group of advisers" (p. VI). But then it would also behoove us to flag the obvious: what we have here is yet another construction of how, not only the Tetrateuch or...