In general Long’s defense of the continuity of the books of the Bible as opposed to the fragmentation hypothesized by the Documentary Hypothesis is based on his analysis of the literary structure found in the books. So for example where the Documentary Hypothesis sees the poetic Song of Deborah in Judges 5 as a very early poetic fragment inserted into the Book of Judges after the prose explanation of Judges 4 of the very same event Dr. Long sees it as simply the author’s way to highlight the event by using poetry. I don’t know enough to make a judgement but it is an interesting exploration and at least a partial reply to the Documentary Hypoethesis.

MH I will cross post the resource reference to StayLDS in case they want to look at it so don’t be surprised.

I have some of Margaret Barker’s books on order from Amazon and will let you know what I find as I get into them though that will probably not be till sometime in November. She seems to argue that the early temple worship was quite different from that of the temple worship at the time of Christ so that will be interesting. I am going to go back and look at my Nibley stuff on the temple which I read almost a decade ago and see how it might fit in to all of this. I guess what I am seeing however is some of the motivation behind at least the Deutoronimist revision of the scriptures and understanding just a weeeeee bit just how much that is “plain and precious” might have been lost. Not to undervalue the Deuteronomist’s work though, by moving the worship practice from a focus on the temple (in a single location , a location they would not have access to for millenia, they allowed the Jewish religion to survive incredible catastrophes, so who is to say that they were or were not inspired?

Margaret Barker is a Methodist Biblical scholar who has specialized in “restoring” the First Temple worship practices of the Hebrews which she claims were one of the main targets of the Deuteronomist revisions of the Hebrew Bible. I’ve just ordered a few of her books including: The Older Testament: The Survival of Themes from the Ancient Royal Cult in Sectarian Judaism and Early Christianity. She uses the full range the apocrapha and other works including material from the Gnostics since she sees that the “refugees” from the Deuteronomist reforms scattered into Arabia and Egypt. You can see a quick overview at her web site: http://www.margaretbarker.com/index.html and of course there is a wikipedia article as well.

She is interesting in the context of the Documentary Hypothesis because she not only reinforces that insight she gives a sense of the motivation behind the major revision of the Biblical text to conform to a more radical version of monotheism and Mosaic law.