ABSTRACT
During the long eighteenth century, the practice of reading Genesis changed dramatically. The field of biblical criticism registered this change in formal terms as it began to argue that scripture was a composite text built out of distinct editorial strands. In 1753, the French physician Jean Astruc became the first exponent of what has since become known as the documentary hypothesis when he identified two different original narratives within the book of Genesis. Published anonymously, Astruc’s Conjectures is an oddity in the work of a man known primarily for his second-hand erudition and theoretical conservatism in the realm of medicine.1 His manual of obstetrics, for example, widely translated and highly regarded at the time, was also criticized for two reasons: his open admission that he had never himself delivered a child, and a lengthy exegetical digression to explain how Adam and Eve, born without umbilical cords, knew what to do nonetheless during the delivery of Cain, their first-born.2 In the apparent eccentricity of his insistence on taking scripture literally as medical evidence, Astruc exemplifies the difficulty of defining Enlightenment in any simple way.3 Although state-of-the-art in its review of contemporary medical science, the guide nevertheless violated two commonplaces of scientific rationalism: the necessity of hands-on experience, and the rejection of the authority of the Bible. Astruc’s Conjectures poses a similar problem of categorization: although fully cognizant of recent developments in the historical and linguistic methodology of biblical criticism, Astruc continued to adhere to an orthodox understanding of the privileged epistemological status of scripture. Astruc’s hypothesis itself was the most recent solution proposed to explain an old dilemma: the apparent inconsistencies, repetitions,
and stylistic differences in the Genesis text.4 The kernel of Astruc’s proposition was that Moses composed Genesis out of two original sources, or mémoires. The insight came less from lengthy analysis than from a shift in the interpretative paradigm:
This enterprise was not as difficult as one would have thought. I only had to join together all the places where God is consistently called Elohim: I placed these in one column which I called A, and I regarded them as so many pieces, or if you like, fragments of an original mémoire, here designated by the letter A. I placed next to it, in another column which I call B, all the other places, where God is always given the name of Jehovah, and here I assembled all the pieces, or at least, all the fragments of a second mémoire, B. In doing this, I paid no attention to the chapter divisions of Genesis, or the verse divisions of the chapters, because it is certain that these are recent and arbitrary.5
