‘Cause, heck, I’d like to read the full text of “J”.

Anyway, yeah; in fact I recently returned to the library a commentary on “J”, which was interesting because it included the full text of J divorced (to the best of their ability) from the other three sources. It was strange to read it as one unbroken tale, but also stunning in how well it held up as an independent text.

But what’s interesting to me right now (as someone who, while now accepting the Bible’s lack of divinity, is still driven by a need to know what exactly he based the first 25 years of his life on) is the textual criticism of the previously-existing materials utilized by the 4(+) authors of the Pentateuch. I don’t think Friedman gets much into that, as he’s mainly concerned with parsing the four texts and explaining authorial motivations, but there’s a lot there, some of it arguable or just utterly unconvincing, some of it simply revelatory.

One example herein shall suffice: that the name “Moses” itself is first of all grammatically incorrect if it’s Hebrew, second that it makes no sense that his adoptive mother would call him a Hebrew name given the situation, and third that his name is actually obviously not only Egyptian but edited if you view it in that context. “msy” (remember, no vowels in that region) is a common suffix denoting a relationship to another word, usually a god (like “Elijah”, “El” being a reference to the Hebrew deity). Just look at “Ramses”, “Thutmose”, etc.

The name “Moses” is therefore more or less certainly only half a name – the Egyptian god honored in his name having been excised by some previous editor.