Breuer’s Aspects Theory part 1

The documentary hypothesis stands in direct contradiction to the traditional Jewish world-view, which views the Torah as a unified creation emanating from a Divine source.

Like the historical aspect of the documentary hypothesis, its literary aspect, too, contains significant difficulties, and has caused scholars of recent generations to gradually reject parts of the approach. The attempt to create a uniform continuity within the various documents was unsuccessful, and therefore various attempts were made to divide the documents themselves into sub-sources. Various disagreements on many elements of the hypothesis undermined the reliability of the approach as a whole.

The main difficulty in the documentary hypothesis is the very notion that several sources were brought together to form a single work – not an anthology comprising several sources placed in succession, but a single, continuous text in which the various sources are intertwined so as to preserve continuity of theme, despite the disparate origins of the sources. There is no precedent for such an enormous editorial enterprise and there is no known document from the ancient world that was compiled in such a way. 

Yet despite all the difficulties with documentary hypothesis and similar models, the textual problems which prompted the hypothesis still remain. The contradictions and duplications present in the Tanakh, and the impossibility of reading the Torah as a single continuum remain unanswered.  Any student of the Torah therefore must confront the challenge of how the contradictions and duplications within the Torah should be addressed.

A revolution in the attitude of Jews who believe in the unity of the Torah towards the research by biblical scholars was brought about by Rav Mordekhai Breuer who developed the "aspects approach.” The principal innovation of the approach was to acknowledge and utilize the claims of the documentary hypothesis which saw the Torah as made up of multiple and frequently contradictory texts, while maintaining that these differences and contradictions were nevertheless Divinely authored and intended, rather than a combination by a later editor of multiple human authors and traditions. 

The contradictions are part of God's method of writing the Torah in such a way as to present different subjects in their full complexity. According to this approach, the Torah presents different aspects of reality – on both the narrative and the halakhic level – through the technique of multiple descriptions of a given topic or event.

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Edited by the HaTanakh Site team

Courtesy of the Virtual Beit Midrash, Yeshivat Har Etzion