A Source-Critical Translation of the Pentateuch: Issues and Challenges

For some time I have been working on a Hebrew-English edition of the Torah that will display, both separately and combined, the four Pentateuchal documents as reconstructed by contemporary, Neo-Documentary criticism. In the course of attempting to create, for the first time, a source-critical translation of the Torah, it became apparent that existing translations obscure the pervasive disunity and discontinuity of the canonical Hebrew text, that is, the very features that necessitate source-critical analysis in the first place. They render the canonical Torah into a deceptively flowing, coherent text; consequently, when the segments that constitute each of the sources are arranged consecutively, it is the sources that appear, no less deceptively, to be incoherent.

A source-critical translation of the Torah must do just the opposite. It must enable the readers to discern what harmonistic translations conceal: that the text of the Torah in its canonical form is replete with discontinuity and inconsistency, while the reconstructed sources are largely continuous, coherent texts.

This paper, which I shall present along with my collaborator and assistant Noah Avigan (University of Chicago Divinity School), will illustrate several of the ways that we have come to recognize – some of them barely perceptible – in which the existing translations of the Torah obscure the features of the Hebrew text to which source-critical analysis responds. In each example we shall identify an element of the Hebrew text to which we feel a source-critical translation must be particularly attentive. We shall then suggest a translation designed to reflect accurately both the difficulties in the Hebrew text and the consistency and flow of the reconstituted sources.