A technical term in Biblical studies and classical philology, referring to a story that appears twice in the same document. The presence of doublets in the Hebrew Bible led the nineteenth-century Biblical scholar Julius Wellhausen to conclude that the Torah was not written by a single person. It was traditional in Wellhausen's time, both among Christians and among Jews, to maintain that the first five books of the Hebrew Bible were written by Moses. (The bit of Deuteronomy that describes Moses' death was said to have been appended by Moses' follower Joshua). But the doublets in the Bible suggest that there were multiple authors and multiple sources behind its composition. Eventually Wellhausen's research led him to develop the Documentary Hypothesis.
Example 1: The Wife-Sister Motif
One of the most interesting examples of a doublet in the Hebrew Bible is actually a triplet!
- In Genesis 12:10-20, Abram and Sarai are travelling through Egypt when Abram is paralyzed by the fear that the Pharaoh will kill him and take his beautiful wife for himself. Abram suggests that they tell the Pharaoh that Sarai is his sister rather than his wife, presumably to fend off the Pharaoh's jealous rage. The plan sort of backfires, since God punishes the Pharaoh for lusting after another man's wife (even though he didn't know that's what he was doing), and soon the deception is made public.
- In Genesis 20:1-18, Abram's name has been changed to Abraham, and Sarai's to Sarah. This time they are travelling through a land called Gerar. Once again Abraham tells the local ruler that his wife is his sister. This story is much longer than the story in the first example. The ruler, Abimelech, receives a warning from God in a dream, and then agonizes about doing the right thing.
- Finally, in Genesis 26:7-11, Abraham's son Isaac is travelling through Gerar with his wife Rebekah. He too tells the king, Abimelech, that his wife is his sister; this version of the story is the shortest of the three.
Abraham in Egypt under Pharaoh; Abraham in Gerar under Abimelech; Isaac in Gerar under Abimelech. It is not completely beyond the bounds of possibility that these two men tried the same trick three times on two different kings, but Wellhausen thought it much more likely that the person who compiled the book of Genesis was recording three versions of the same story. For whatever reason -- probably having to do with respect for his sources -- the compiler wanted to keep all three without throwing anything away.
Example 2: The Creation Story
A comparison between the first account of creation, found in Genesis 1, and the second account, found in Genesis 2-3, has been noded elsewhere, so I will simply talk about its relevance as a doublet. Wellhausen looked for clues about each author's perspective and each author's agenda in these stories. Contemporary scholars of the Bible do the same thing, though they often come to different conclusions than their nineteenth-century counterparts.
The first version of the creation story in Genesis betrays a fascination with cosmic order. It contains a lot of numbers and a careful sequence, and its God is distant and majestic. Furthermore, it refers to God by the generic word Elohim, rather than using God's personal name. Thus, Wellhausen concluded that it was probably written by P, the Priestly source.
The second version has a much more earthy, anthropomorphic God. Moreover, it uses the name YHWH, a word that P refuses to use until God reveals his personal name in Exodus 3. Therefore, according to Wellhausen, it was probably written by the Jahwist, J -- who lived, as it happens, centuries before P.
Again, as in the wife-sister case, the final editor had too much reverence for these two texts to want to delete one, so he combined them. It is a testament to his skill that so many readers, even thousands of years later, do not even notice the seams any more.
Doublets in the New Testament
Since the New Testament was compiled over a much shorter time than the Tanakh (a century as opposed to a millennium), there is not quite as much richness in the combination of sources. However, a few New Testament doublets do exist, and scholars use them to aid in solving The Synoptic Problem.
For example, Matthew 5:29-30 and Matthew 18:8-9 preserve slightly different versions of Jesus' command to destroy a part of one's body if it sins. Since Matthew was using Mark as a source, it seems clear that at least one of these stories came from Mark 9:43-48. But why does the command appear twice in Matthew and only once in Mark? And why does the version in Matthew 18 (hand-foot-eye) resemble the Markan text more closely than the version in Matthew 5 (eye-hand)? Could the version in Matthew 18 come from some other source, now lost? Is this a rare case where Q and Mark overlap? The jury is still out.
The Broader Point
No repetition is exact. As we can see, redactors preserve differences just as carefully as they preserve similarities. Sometimes the differences between versions are very slight, as in the case in the Matthean example above. Sometimes the differences are very dramatic, to the point of forcing us to question whether we are even talking about the same story. Arguably this is the case with the creation accounts in Genesis.
In any event, a close reading of two versions of a story can say quite a lot about the ancient writers behind them. Wellhausen noticed, for instance, that when a story in the Torah was told twice, the versions were often set in different cities -- valuable clues about where the original sources may have come from. I find exactly the same thing happens with contemporary urban legends: the "New York" version of a story is going to differ in details from the "Chicago" version of the same story, and this can tell us something about local landmarks, popular trends, and so on.
Similarly, even the same geographical site is sometimes referred to by different names. For example, the mountain where Moses received his revelation is called Horeb in Exodus 33:6 and Sinai just a few verses later in Exodus 34:2. This probably preserves a variety of local naming conventions, and it, too, can move us closer to an answer to tough questions about who wrote an ancient document.
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