Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism

Modern critical scholarship has concluded that the books of the Hebrew Bible have not reached us in their original form but are the products of lengthy evolution. Many of these books are thought to combine the works of more than one author or age and to have undergone considerable revision.

Tigay and the other contributors use comparisons of various texts from ancient Mesopotamia and post-exilic Israel. Such comparisons show that the sort of development of biblical literature that nineteenth-century critics were led to postulate from close study of the texts alone is characteristic of many ancient Near Eastern texts.

Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism is of value to scholars interested in the Old Testament, as well as religion, theology, Jewish studies, Near Eastern studies, and comparative literature.

""It is sometimes said that little new is offered in source criticism and many studies seem exercises in reductions toward absurdity. This collection is a clear exception. It examines ancient Mesopotamian, biblical, and postbiblical texts that have come down in several versions of different dates, as analogues for what source criticism proposes were the processes of development leading to formation of segments of the Hebrew Bible as well as the criteria employed to reconstruct this process and its stages. . . . This is a substantial contribution to a discussion much in need of one.""
--Religious Studies Review

""[This book] is undoubtedly a useful contribution to biblical criticism. It provides new insights into the growth of the tradition and a stimulus to further studies along these lines.""
--The Expository Times

Jeffrey H. Tigay, the editor, is Ellis Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the author of Deuteronomy (The Jewish Publication Society Torah Commentary, 1996).