As I noted, sometimes it looks more a work by Jackson Pollock than even Picasso.
By the way, I may not have made it clear in various previous threads, but I am not at all persuaded that we can exhaustively narrow the authorship down to half-verses and interpolations. For example, to me, the difference in “voice” between the verses ending at Gn 2:4a and those beginning with Gn 2:4b are pretty distinct even in English translations, but to correctly and unquestionably identify unique authors in these passages on the flood
P: Gn 7:13 - 7:16a
J: Gn 7:16b
P: Gn 7:17a
J: Gn 7:17b
P: Gn 7:18 - 7:21
seems to be pushing it. (This division could be 100% accurate, I simply used it as a case where the assigning of authors gets pretty picky.)
I have seen how many of the conclusions are drawn and I respect the work that is done, but that does not mean that I simply accept the works of the various scholars as gospel (pardon the pun).
Dex mentioned that among anomalies, some J verses use Elohim to identify God while some E and P verses use the Tetragrammaton to name God. To elaborate on this, the various practioners of the literary criticism are not simply “making it up as they go along” assigning verses to whichever author they’d like. In the P and E sections, only Elohim is used to identify God until God identifies Himself to Moses in the burning bush. After that point, those two traditions use Elohim to refer to God and the Tetragrammaton to name Him. The point of naming the threads according to the word used to identify God is not an absolute in the literary research. Rather, the earliest attempts to unravel the threads were prompted by the noticeable contrast between various styles of speech and the recognition that each of those styles tended to use one or another of the words for God. (P was originally identified as E until it was recognized that E had two separate voices. J also has more than one “voice” and there are scholars who distinguish between J (being very religious in tone) and an L–laity–source that uses the Tetragrammaton but is generally quite secular in the tone of the thread.
Later analysis does not simply “follow the name” but looks for thematic consistency, the continuity or interruption/resumption of specific stories, and the apparent theology that any given tradition might appear to be putting forward. (Most scholars, today, speak of the various “traditions” instead of presuming a specific single human author.)
While this calls for subtle inferences about what is going on in the text, it is, of course, open to charges of conjecture. It can be a lot of fun, but it is by no means at the level of certainty that construction engineering requires.
Another aspect of the deductions made so far is that not only is Joshua an extension of the Pentateuch in a Hexateuch, but that some of the literary traditions (rather than authors) continue on (separately) in Judges, then in Samuel and Kings or in Chronicles. This links all of the narrative books in a single (multiply authored) work that synthesizes Jewish belief as they perceive themselves interacting with God in history.
To get to that level of analysis, you really need to get an actual text on the subject. Friedman’s Who Wrote the Bible is probably an excellent place to start. I have purchased it in the last couple of years, but I’ve only dipped into it here and there. (It got shoved behind a couch and went missing for a while, so I haven’t had time to read the whole thing, yet.)
(Factoid: The single-letter identifiers, J, E, P, D, H, (and L) are known as sigla.)
Tom~