SOURCE: "Sacred History and Theology: The Redaction of Torah" in The Creation of Sacred Literature: Composition and Redaction of the Biblical Text, edited by Richard Elliott Friedman, University of California Press, 1981, pp. 25-34.

In this essay, Friedman claims that the Priestly redaction of the Torah—the combination of the Priestly source with the Elohist-Jahvist document—significantly shaped the Pentateuch's conception of God and the portrayal of the magnalia Die.

One of the significant consequences of the enterprise of source criticism is the demonstration that the Torah (and ultimately the Hebrew Bible), more than perhaps any other book, is the product of a community—it is quintessentially a national work of literature, not the creation of a particular man or woman in a particular historical moment, but the offspring of a continuing, developing culture.

A more troubling consequence of the source-critical enterprise is the difficulty it engenders when one...