Talk:Covenant Code

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wikisource link is bad[edit]

The Wikisource link at the end of this article does not work. I briefly searched Wikisource for "covenant code", but was unable to find anything likely-looking. The link should probably be removed, unless someone can find the correct page name. --Woozle 19:30, 13 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This article is a mess[edit]

I find it very confusing. It would help to know who first proposed this reading of Exodus. Also, how widley is it shared? I know of no major scholar who writes, in any detail at least, about a ritual decalogue. This does not mean there are none - i have not read them all -- but one just cannot tell from this article It is impossibly vague!

This strikes me as a key section:

According to the modern documentary hypothesis, the text was originally independent, but later embedded by the Elohist ("E") in their writings. In biblical criticism, the code is understood to be the Elohist's version of the legal code which the Jahwist ("J") presents as the Ritual Decalogue. In the combined JE source, supposed by such critical scholarship, these two texts appear together, with the Ritual Decalogue appearing to be a summary version. Such academic study also supposes that the Elohist version had the Covenant Code being written on the two tablets of the law, whereas in JE, it is only the Ritual Decalogue which has this feature.

The original Priestly Source, according to the documentary hypothesis, then rewrote this to support their own ideas of law, replacing the Ritual Decalogue with the Ethical Decalogue, and the Covenant Code with the Holiness Code. After accretion of much extra legal material over a course of time, the resulting version of the Priestly source was combined with the JE source, its law code consequently appearing, in the torah, to be God's replacement, and expansion, of the earlier two codes after the incident of the Golden Calf, in which the first pair of the tablets of law were destroyed.

Again, it is vague and perhaps violates NPOV by not clearly identifying the views, and not providing any context. There is no "modern documentary hypothesis," historians who ascribe to the DH actually have competing interpretations, so we need more specificity. For almost every sentence, I want to know, according to whom? Who first proposed this argument? How was it received? What notable scholars accept it? What notable scholars reject it?

I assume the editors who wrote this worked from sources that have this information. I beg you, please put it in. Let's be clear about who and when, let's get a sense of what the context was in which someone proposed such an unusual reading of the Bible and what their evidence was. The result would be a far more educational article. Slrubenstein | Talk 23:49, 10 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It's unfortunate that no one seems to have addressed this earlier. Unfortunately, while I'm not an expert on these matters, I've read enough to know that the claims here are very much over-broad for claims about a matter like the documentary hypothesis, where there isn't consensus on much beyond the very basic observation that the Pentateuch is stitched together from multiple sources. I'll try and replace unsourced statements with sourced statements, but certainly the article could use a look from someone who understands the big picture better than myself. Alephb (talk) 16:41, 3 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]