The Five Major Fallacies of the Fundies about the DH

1. Textual Interpretation is all subjective, its not a science

Well of course its not physics. Duh. But just because something is not physics doesn't mean you can just do whatever you want. There are reasonable interpretations and there are unreasonable interpretations. Fundies who argue like this are disingenuously adopting (and intentionally warping) an extreme post modernist stance. Sure, maybe from a sociological point of view authorial intent doesn't matter, and whatever interpretation actually sticks to a text is what does matter in the here and now, but that has absolutely nothing to do with Biblical textual analysis. Using clues from the text, plus extensive knowledge of linguistics, history, Ancient Near East religion and texts, the entire world (apart from the fundies) all agree that the text is late and composite. And you don't need to be a Biblical Scholar to see that - just read the text! It's obvious.

2. We all have biases, academics too

This one is downright chutzpadick. The global community of academics have all converged on one position (i.e. composite text), even though they could have easily continued arguing about that, just like they do about every other detail. And they could have easily said one author but not Divine, so this has nothing to do with God. Yet there is not a single serious (i.e. non fundie) academic school of thought which holds anything like single authorship. On the other hand, fundies are emotionally brainwashed from birth (or through being born again) to hold of TMS. Not only that, but halachically they (believe they) are required to hold of TMS. Do you know how painful it is for a committed fundie to give up the belief in TMS? Well I do. I know it first hand. It is literally emotionally and mentally painful. I'm not kidding your heart and your brain actually HURT.

3. There is no DH, just lots of contradictory theories

The hypocrisy is interesting here. When you point out to fundies that all religions contradict each other, they respond well at least they all believe in the supernatural, so that's an argument for God. Yet when it comes to the DH theories, the lack of consensus in the details has them arguing that the whole thing has no credibility! I agree that when it comes to specific details of who said what and when and why, mostly we have a lot of theories. The matter is far from solved on a posuk by posuk basis, and probably never will be, the text is just too much of a mess to adequately deconstruct where exactly it came from. And actually, I think the problem is inherently unsolvable, because its not like a single editor took 4 sources and edited them. It was a long process from oral to textual, over hundreds of years. There's just no way you could ever map that out for every word, at least not with current technology. But again, that's not the issue. The issue is that the text is clearly a composite.

4. You don't know how God writes

This one is extremely hypocritical, because the whole enterprise of learning Torah and darshening the posuk is based on the fundamental assumption that God writes like a normal human being, and we can decipher the texts using normal rational thought. Once you say "you don't know how God writes", you've just destroyed any rational chance of understanding the Biblical text at any level. Also, any God who writes deliberately like multiple people and a redactor is clearly a trickster God, and not One I would worship.

5. Chazal/Meforshim/Cassutto have already answered all the questions

Not even remotely true. If it was, you can be sure that the MO fundies would have that material, but they don't. They try to score a few pot shots here and there, but thats about it. Theres a ton of reasonable arguments showing composite text, and mostly lame answers in response. The MO fundies KNOW the DH is a problem.

Of course there are other bogus arguments, but they're even stupider. For example, one argument that Gil has used on occasion is that the academics don't believe in God, hence according to them the text must be composite. But if you were to allow God in, you could agree with single authorship, because the drashos are so complex and amazing, only a God could have written the Torah like that. This is such a twisted argument I don't even know where to start.

Another oft repeated argument is that the DH backstory (political fighting, merging of texts to keep people happy etc) is not very likely. Oh, and a God writing a book is??? This argument only even gets off the ground (in fundies minds) because they have been so culturally conditioned to believe that God wrote the bible. Otherwise you would never pick that hypothesis. Not even if the text was completely cohesive.

And ultimately, this is what it all boils down to. A God writing a book is an amazing claim. You don't get to make that claim without really solid proof. Otherwise, any religion could just claim that God wrote their holy book. Oh wait, they do! Never mind.