Customer Reviews

Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel

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I would have given five stars, but the fact that this is an OCR version forced me to give four (OCR is a technique for converting a printed version into a digital version using a computer; sometimes the computer makes mistakes and the editor misses them).

As for the content of the book, if you are interested in the historical critical approach to Old Testament studies this is arguably the most important foundational work, upon which all modern scholarship is based. The book details what is known as the 'documentary hypothesis', which most modern scholarly theories of the development of the Old Testament use as a reference point.

The documentary hypothesis is extremely relevant in modern biblical studies. It is taught in most undergraduate religious studies programs; a perusal of respected scholarly journals, such as the Journal of Biblical Literature, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, and Vetus Testamentum to name a few, will show that the language of discourse in these publications is only intelligible in terms of the ideas put forth by Wellhausen in this book, that is, in terms of the documentary hypothesis.

The reason this edition is much cheaper than others is: it's basically an OCRed version of Wellhausen's Prolegomena. If you are serious about studying this author while citing him, this is not for you (its pagination doesn't match that of scholarly editions); if you're interested about its content only, it's a good deal - compare the prices.

My comment applies to the publisher's blurb not the volume itself. To claim that Wellhausen's contribution is comparable to Einstein's to physics shows just how unworldly and abstracted from ordinary academic standards traditional liberal theology has become. It is pure, hollow hyperbole. Wellhausen is not only hopelessly dated, his predictions discredited, he's obsolete - his only value is as the marker to a grandiose historical misturn.

The text of this material is available free online so don't bother spending money on it. In fact, as one of the other reviewers pointed out, it's only important for historical reasons. I had to edit this review because I just read A.H. Sayce's The "Higher Criticism" and the Verdict of the Monuments, and from his first edition in 1894 to his updated seventh edition in 1910, he knew what was wrong with Wellhausen's work; see my review. Umberto Cassuto raised different objections in the 1940s and continuing with Whybray and Van Seters at the end of the 1970s, Wellhausen's conclusions and those of his school have lost cogency.

One of the hard core problems with Wellhausen is that he addresses only one piece of archaeological data. His students have followed suit: Ernest Nicholson's Pentateuch in the 20th Century references only the information about the Mesha stone in the Prolegomena. Ten years earlier than Nicholson, however, Whybray pointed out that the "names of God" pillar doesn't fit with the archaeology of other cultures in the area (besides the fact that it doesn't apply for more than 2/3 of the Pentateuch).

Another serious problem is that studies in folk literatures show that Wellhausen and his successors require processes demonstrated in no other culture. Wellhausen ignored the work done in his own time by the Grimm Brothers. Further while Hermann Gunkel (a Wellhausen follower) adopted the Epic Laws posited by Axel Olrik, nobody in the field inspired by Wellhausen has examined the rest of Olrik's Principle For Oral Narrative Research which (see my review) show that the work that started with Wellhausen doesn't pass the test of Occam's Razor. While Olrik himself analyzed a part of Pentateuch in terms of what is now known as Documentary Hypothesis, he failed to realize that his principles can replace DH and coordinate better with related fields. The "doublets" issue only arises from conflation according to the DH; Olrik's principles give other possible reasons such as emphasizing a concept by repeating a related action, or lengthening a popular story (a sort of in-text sequel). DH claims that some stories are composites of various written texts; Olrik declares that to split a story up requires that the fragments must still form a coherent plot and also that the person claiming to show the composite nature of a narrative must be able to point to the sources out of which the narrative was compiled.

One of the fields has developed since Wellhausen's (and Olrik's) time, Sapir-Whorf linguistic theory. This field basically claims that cultures develop the language that express in-culture issues, and also shape themselves around the words they use. It shows that words only have meaning in context of the culture that uses them, whether the context is written or oral. Thus the "names of God" issue takes the words out of context and fails to examine how the culture uses particular names for particular facets of God. Further, Wellhausen applied Hegelian theory to the Pentateuch, the existence of which not only predated Hegelian philosophy but also Western metaphysics as a whole. Explaining Pentateuch in Hegelian terms is a reading in of Wellhausen's views, not a reading out of the actual cultural content of Pentateuch.

While many of DH's problems can be blamed on shoddy work by later scholars, Whybray points out that Wellhausen himself failed to avoid fallacious claims. Wellhausen claimed that there was no legalistic material in J, but when he realized that the J/E composite contained legalistic material, he not only claimed that it all originated in J, but also that it was inserted _after_ J/E became a composite document.

So the only real reason for reading the Prolegomena is as background to other books, and if you want that background, get it for free.