One of the viewers of our YouTube/Rumble Channel asked this question concerning the compilation of our Hebrew Bible called the Tanakh which includes the Torah, Prophets and Writings.

HE ASKED:
"Is there an ancient Hebrew text of the Torah of the northern kingdom? Or, are you reaching your conclusions from a high criticism reading approach of the current Masoretic Text? You are correct, we can see often that there are more than one version of the story in the MT. For example, there are four creation stories."

MY RESPONSE:
Yes, there is an ancient text that points to a distinct difference between the stories we find in the Tanakh and particularly in the Torah. That work is those self-same texts we read and study every day called The Torah itself. And yes they can be found in the Hebrew texts found in the Masoretic rendering as well as other writings of the Bible found in Qumran (The Dead Sea scrolls - many in which are older than the current accepted Masoretic. It does require a critical understanding of ancient Biblical Hebrew (over a period of that language's growth), a knowledge of the history, stories and mores of the various priests, scribes and redactors, their intent in, first retelling the oral stories of their tribes and communities, the times in which they lived, the political and religious foundational beliefs of each tribe (community) in the Northern and Southern parts of Israel/Judah and how the editors and redactors over the centuries following the Babylonian exile and how they, as best as possible, blended the Israel/Judea stories together to make a pretty good cohesive adaptation. It took years to do and was finalized under the period following the exile under the leadership of men like Ezra, Nehemiah and others and fully completed by the end of the Maccabean revolt against the Greco-Syrian rulership of Antiochus the IV.. Before the exile there was no fully comprehended text as we had following that 70 year exile. For example, most of the stories found in the first 10 chapters of Bereshit (Genesis) were a summary of ancient Sumerian and Akkadian stories, both oral and those written in cuneiform tablets; stories brought by Avraham from Ur and Haran (Sumeria), his original home, and modified or changed over great periods of time to fit a One G-d narrative pushed by the priestly and scribal class during that 70+ years trying to interweave the sometime conflicting stories into a combination that eventually became the texts we have today. That is a process and product of critical hermeneutics, language adaptation and a historical knowledge of the lives of those living in that divided kingdom of Israel to the North and those in Judea in the South pre-Babylonian exile.

(Many need to understand that the break up and creation of a Northern and Southern Kingdom after the death of Melek Shlomo wasn't just over Shlomo's son being a real dick of sorts to those living in Northern Israel, but also because of certain cultural, philosophical and religious differences that always existed and grew over 80 years between the two peoples. Once the reigns of David and Shlomo died there was nothing binding to hold the nation together until after the 70 year exile in Babylon. That patchwork was sewn into a whole cloth with the new edited version of the stories we now call the Bible.)

If you would like to begin to study this blending process might I suggest as a beginning step these books for your further research into the actual history of how the Hebrew Bible came to be over centuries of time and how those sometime contradictory patch stories were weaved into a compliant whole cloth:

1. Who Wrote the Bible? - Simon and Schuster 1987 by Professor Richard Elliott Friedman

2. Why Abraham Murdered Isaac: The First Stories of the Bible Revealed - 2021 by Tzemah Yoreh

3. How the Hebrew Language Grew - 1960 & 1988 by Edward Horowitz

4. God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism - 1955 & 1983 by Abraham Joshua Heschel

These four books will help open up this fantastic journey into understanding the beginnings, framework and foundational rising of our understanding from both a scholastic and a lay perspective of the Hebrew Bible and the religious/philosophical framework for what we call the Torah, the Nuvim and K'tuvim.

"Have fun storming the castle."

Shalom