One of the interesting aspects of studying higher criticism of the Bible is the way you can find multiple stories combined in Genesis to make a larger, completely different story. There’s many interesting examples of how stories are combined and retold in a way that make them more than the sum of their parts.

Take a look at this story and see if you can find anything missing or any logical inconsistencies in it:

Yahweh saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. Yahweh was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. So Yahweh said, ‘I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air—for I am grieved that I have made them.’ But Noah found favor in the eyes of Yahweh. Yahweh then said to Noah, ‘Go into the ark, you and your whole family, because I have found you righteous in this generation. Take with you 7 of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and 2 of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, and also 7 of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth. And 7 days from now I will send rain on the earth for 40 days and 40 nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made.’ And Noah did all that Yahweh commanded him. And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives entered the ark to escape the waters of the flood. Then Yahweh shut him in. For 40 days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth. The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water. They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than 15 cubits. Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; men and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark. And the rain had stopped falling from the sky. The water receded steadily from the earth. After 40 days Noah opened the window he had made in the ark. Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. But the dove could find no place to set its feet because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark. He waited 7 more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. He waited 7 more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him. Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry. Then Noah built an altar to Yahweh and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. Yahweh smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: ‘Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done. ‘As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.

Now read story #2 and see if there are any problems with it:

Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with Elohim. Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth. Now the earth was corrupt in Elohim’s sight and was full of violence. Elohim saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. So Elohim said to Noah, ‘I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. This is how you are to build it: The ark is to be 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high. Make a roof for it and finish the ark to within a cubit of the top. Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks. I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish. But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark—you and your sons and your wife and your sons’ wives with you. You are to bring into the ark 2 of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you. Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive. You are to take every kind of food that is to be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them.’ Noah did everything just as Elohim commanded him. Pairs of clean and unclean animals, of birds and of all creatures that move along the ground, male and female, came to Noah and entered the ark, as Elohim had commanded Noah. And after the 7 days the floodwaters came on the earth. In the 600th year of Noah’s life, on the 17th day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And rain fell on the earth 40 days and 40 nights. On that very day Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, together with his wife and the wives of his 3 sons, entered the ark. They had with them every wild animal according to its kind, all livestock according to their kinds, every creature that moves along the ground according to its kind and every bird according to its kind, everything with wings. Pairs of all creatures that have the breath of life in them came to Noah and entered the ark. The animals going in were male and female of every living thing, as Elohim had commanded Noah. Every living thing that moved on the earth perished—birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind. The waters flooded the earth for 150 days. But Elohim remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded. Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens had been closed. At the end of the 150 days the water had gone down, and on the 17th day of the 7th month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. The waters continued to recede until the 10th month, and on the 1st day of the 10th month the tops of the mountains became visible. And he sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth. By the 1st day of the 1st month of Noah’s 601st year, the water had dried up from the earth. By the 27th day of the 2nd month the earth was completely dry. Then Elohim said to Noah, ‘Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives. Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you—the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground—so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number upon it.’ So Noah came out, together with his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives. All the animals and all the creatures that move along the ground and all the birds—everything that moves on the earth—came out of the ark, one kind after another.

Neither of these stories are in the Bible. Both have been interwoven into one larger story which can now be found in Genesis. The first story was written by an author known as J, who wrote most of Genesis. The second one was written by P, who wrote most of Leviticus and Numbers. Now try this with any other story and see if you can get the same effect.

J: Gen. 6:1-8; Gen. 7:15,7,16b-20,2-23; Gen. 8:2b-3a,6,8,-12,13b,20-22; Gen. 9:18-27
P: Gen. 6:9b22; Gen. 7:8-16a,21,24; Gen. 8:1-2a,3b-5,7,13a,14-19
Redactor: Gen. 6:9a
Other: Gen. 7:6

Notice also how the two stories are actually more consistent now that they have been separated:

* J uses the name Yahweh and P uses the name Elohim. This is because P consistently uses the name Elohim in the story until Elohim tells Moses, “I am Yahweh. And I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as El Shaddai” (Ex. 6:2). This narrative device of switching the name at the time of Moses was also used by an earlier source, E, who did the same thing 3 chapters earlier (Ex. 3:14). After this point, all three sources use the name Yahweh consistently.

* J says says that everything “died” (7:22) while P uses a different Hebrew word meaning “destroy” or “expire” (6:17, 7:21).

* J has Noah send out a dove. P has Noah send out a raven.

* J says the rain lasted 40 days and 40 nights. P envisions the flood lasting a year (370 days).

* J has 7 pairs of clean animals and one pair of unclean animals while P has only one pair of each animal. That was because the clean animals were needed for the sacrifice after the flood. But this also matches the theological differences of J and P. J consistently shows Biblical characters making sacrifices at many different places and times before Moses. P has none of the other patriarchs before Moses make sacrifices because it undermines his argument that Jerusalem is the one and only place where sacrifices are legitimate.

* Unlike J, P is concerned with ages, dates, and measurements. This same obsession is found in P’s long descriptions of the temple, the ark of the covenant, the priestly garbs and duties, etc. in his story. P’s penchant for statistics is why the fourth book of the Torah is called “Numbers.”

* J describes Yahweh in very human terms: having regrets, personally closing the ark, and smelling Noah’s sacrifice. P describes Elohim as being more transcendent.

* Throughout the entire Torah, the euphemism “to know” meaning sex, occurs 5 times and only in J. “To lie with” occurs 13 times, and 11 are in J. The term “Sheol” as a place for the dead, as in Hades, occurs 6 times and only in J. The term “to suffer” occurs 7 times and only in J.

* Throughout the entire Torah, the terms “gathered to his people”, “fire came out from before Yahweh”, “he fell on his face”, “be fruitful and multiply”, “property”, “expire”, the root ” ‘dp”, and over 100 references to “congregation” appear only in P.

* Linguistic analysis has confirmed that J and E use an older form of Hebrew than P, and P uses an older form of Hebrew than Deuteronomy. This has been shown in books and papers written by Robert Polzin, Gary Rendsburg, Ziony Zevit, Jacob Milgrom, Avi Hurvitz, and Ronald Hendel.

If you look at Gen. 5, it begins with the sentence “This is the Book of Records of Adam,” indicating it’s the beginning of a different source. The style of repeating exactly how many years were lived before and after the birth of each son is nothing like the way J writes when he gives a geneology from Cain to Lamech in Gen. 4:17-24. If you take out chapter 5, then you have a much smoother, more readable narrative that goes from Cain to Lamech to Noah. Having the Book of Records of Adam inserted into the narrative instead makes this Lamech out to be a different man with the same name from the line of Seth. Lining these two genealogies up shows that they are very similar to one another:

Seth: Cain
Enosh: Enoch
Cainan: Irad
Mahalalel: Mehuya-el
Jared
Enoch
Methuselah: Metusha-el
Lamech: Lamech
Noah

Now let’s look at the story of Joseph:

Story 1:

Joseph, a young man of seventeen, was tending the flocks with his brothers, the sons of Bilhah and the sons of Zilpah, his father’s wives, and he brought their father a bad report about them. And he made a richly ornamented robe [of many colors] for him. Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him all the more. He said to them, “Listen to this dream I had: We were binding sheaves of grain out in the field when suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright, while your sheaves gathered around mine and bowed down to it.”His brothers said to him, “Do you intend to reign over us? Will you actually rule us?” And they hated him all the more because of his dream and what he had said.Then he had another dream, and he told it to his brothers. “Listen,” he said, “I had another dream, and this time the sun and moon and eleven stars were bowing down to me.” When he told his father as well as his brothers, his father rebuked him and said, “What is this dream you had? Will your mother and I and your brothers actually come and bow down to the ground before you?” His brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the matter in mind. “Here comes that dreamer!” they said to each other. “Come now, let’s kill him and throw him into one of these cisterns and say that a ferocious animal devoured him. Then we’ll see what comes of his dreams.” So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe—the richly ornamented robe he was wearing. they looked up and saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead. Their camels were loaded with spices, balm and myrrh, and they were on their way to take them down to Egypt. Judah said to his brothers, “What will we gain if we kill our brother and cover up his blood? Come, let’s sell him to the Ishmaelites and not lay our hands on him; after all, he is our brother, our own flesh and blood.” His brothers agreed. And they sold him for 20 shekels of silver to the Ishmaelites, who took him to Egypt. Then they got Joseph’s robe, slaughtered a goat and dipped the robe in the blood. They took the ornamented robe back to their father and said, “We found this. Examine it to see whether it is your son’s robe.”He recognized it and said, “It is my son’s robe! Some ferocious animal has devoured him. Joseph has surely been torn to pieces.”Then Jacob tore his clothes, put on sackcloth and mourned for his son many days. All his sons and daughters came to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted. “No,” he said, “in mourning will I go down to Sheol [Hades] to my son.” So his father wept for him.

Story 2:

Now Israel loved Joseph more than any of his other sons, because he had been born to him in his old age. When his brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of them, they hated him and could not speak a kind word to him. Now his brothers had gone to graze their father’s flocks near Shechem, and Israel said to Joseph, “As you know, your brothers are grazing the flocks near Shechem. Come, I am going to send you to them.” “Very well,” he replied. So he said to him, “Go and see if all is well with your brothers and with the flocks, and bring word back to me.” Then he sent him off from the Valley of Hebron.When Joseph arrived at Shechem, a man found him wandering around in the fields and asked him, “What are you looking for?” He replied, “I’m looking for my brothers. Can you tell me where they are grazing their flocks?” “They have moved on from here,” the man answered. “I heard them say, ‘Let’s go to Dothan.’ ” So Joseph went after his brothers and found them near Dothan. But they saw him in the distance, and before he reached them, they plotted to kill him. When Reuben heard this, he tried to rescue him from their hands. “Let’s not take his life,” he said. “Don’t shed any blood. Throw him into this cistern here in the desert, but don’t lay a hand on him.” Reuben said this to rescue him from them and take him back to his father. And they took him and threw him into the cistern. Now the cistern was empty; there was no water in it. As they sat down to eat their meal. So when the Midianite merchants came by, his brothers pulled Joseph up out of the cistern. When Reuben returned to the cistern and saw that Joseph was not there, he tore his clothes. He went back to his brothers and said, “The boy isn’t there! Where can I turn now?” And the Medanites sold Joseph in Egypt to Potiphar, one of Pharaoh’s officials, the captain of the guard.

Here’s how these stories were combined:

J: Gen. 37:2b,3b,5-11,19-20,23,25b-27,28b,31-35
E: Gen. 37:3a,4,12-18,2122,24-25,28a,29-30,36
Redactor: Gen. 37:2a

Notice the differences between these stories:

* J uses the name Jacob; E uses the name Israel.

* In J, Joseph is sold to Ishmaelites; In E, he is sold to Midianites (although the last sentence instead refers to them as Medanites). The original person who combined J and E made it appear that the Midianites sold him to the Ishmaelites, but he leaves a contradiction in that Potiphar is said to have bought them from Medanites.

* In J, Judah tries to save Joseph; In E, Reuben tries to save Joseph. This fits with J’s favoritism towards Judah.

* In the Blessing of Jacob in Gen. 49 passes up the older brothers Reuben, Simon, and Levi in order to bless Judah: Reuben for “ascending your father’s bed” and Simon and Levi for their “implements of violence”, which roughly correlate to Reuben sleeping with his father’s concubine and the J story of Simon and Levi massacring prince Shechem (the original capital of Israel) in revenge for the defiling of their sister Dinah. But in Gen. 48, E has Israel bless Joseph and his sons instead, in particular Ephraim, north of Jerusalem, corresponding to E’s location in Shiloh. The prophet Ahijah from Shiloh instigated Jeroboam’s rebellion against Solomon, but then felt betrayed when Jeroboam failed to make them the sole priests of Israel and instead set up the golden calves.

* In order to get the blessing intended for Esau, Jacob deceives his father by using his brother’s cloak and the meat and hide of a goat (Gen. 27). We know this earlier narrative is a J story because it also uses J words like Yahweh and Jacob. Thus, Jacob’s sons using the blood of a goat is ironic retribution for Jacob’s own deception, which is very characteristic of J’s strong reoccuring themes on family deceptions.

* In J, the brothers (not the Midianites) sell Joseph for 20 weights of silver. Later, Joseph will arrange to have 20 portions of silver returned to their grain sacks (9 brothers come back on the first return, and 11 come back on the 2nd return), again hinting at an ironic payback for the brother’s deception.

* J is also the main author of Judges and 2 Samuel. By reading J in it’s original version (which can be found in Richard Friedman’s “The Hidden Book in the Bible”), it’s much easier to see the many correlations that J makes between the patriarachs and the Court of David. The way the Bible is set up now, having to plow through the tedium of Leviticus and Numbers makes most readers completely forget the things they read in Genesis by the time they get there. For example, the destruction of Sodom in Genesis 19 directly mirrors the destruction of the Benjamanite city of Gibeah in Judges 19. The story of Levi and Simon avenging their sister while Jacob does nothing is mirrored in the story of Absalom avenging his sister while David does nothing. All of these connections are almost impossible to remember reading the Bible from front to back.

* What’s even more fascinating is the way J effectively brings his story full circle when he ends his story at 1 Kings 2:37-46, with Solomon telling the rebellious Shimei “In the day you go out of Jerusalem, you will die!”, mirroring Yahweh’s words in Eden, “In the day you eat from it: you will die!” Much of the same words like “knowledge”, “good”, “bad”, and “death” are repeated numerously both at the beginning and ending of the story.