Bible Criticism - a criticism

UPDATED

The field of Bible Criticism has challenged the traditional religious, whether Karaite, Rabbanite or even Christian.  However, many claims made by this field are based on wrong or questionable assumptions.   And this can be, for example, misreadings of the Biblical text, which was written in Ancient Hebrew.

An example that fooled even me is as follows:

Exodus 6:3 is usually translated like this:

“I am Yahweh. I appeared to Abraham, and to Isaac, and to Jacob as God Almighty, but by My name Yahweh I did not make Myself known to them.” 




Such  an understanding would be problematic, since in Genesis, God was known to the fathers by this Name.

I came across a novel reading of this verse - where the last 3 words -
 

לֹא נוֹדַעְתִּי לָהֶם


are posed as a question, or rhetorical question - hence,  "Did I not make Myself Known to them? "


This is perfectly reasonable, and does not stretch the plain meaning of the verse beyond limits of reason, as often do the Rabbinic midrashim.

Such a reading is consistent with Genesis, at no cost to the intellect.  Interesting thing, is that Chief Rabbi Hertz's approach to this problem (Hertz Chumash) is quite unconvincing and stretches the verse to be meaningless.


I found this argument in the following link:

https://www.biblearchaeology.org/post/2010/09/24/The-Documentary-Hypothesis.aspx#Article