In one instance, “The Flood,” R took the two versions and combined them into a single text (see Appendix 2). This accounts for the various discrepancies in the composite story as it is usually translated. In J’s story, the Lord commands Noah to bring seven pairs of all the ritually clean animals and one pair of all the unclean animals into the ark, so that afterward Noah can perform an animal sacrifice without causing the extinction of a species; in P’s story, God commands Noah to bring just one pair of each into the ark. In J’s story, it is rain that causes the flood; in P’s, the floodwaters issue from both the upper reservoir (“the floodgates of heaven”) and the subterranean source (“the wells of the great deep”). In J’s story, the flood lasts for forty days; in P’s, for a hundred and fifty. When the two strands are unwoven, each version becomes clear and self-consistent. We can also see more easily the distinctive elements in each: in J’s story, the regretful Lord, sorry that he ever created humans, like a righteous but not wise man who feels heartsick at the corruption and suffering on the front page of his morning newspaper and can barely repress a wish to blow up the whole world and be done with it, the ridiculous yet touching detail of having the Lord shut the door of the ark behind Noah after he has entered with all the animals, the three flights of the dove (the raven is a variant that I have relegated to the Textual Notes), and the lovely last sentence — “For as long as the earth endures, these will not end: seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night.” While in P’s story we find the detailed instructions for building the ark, the various stages of the rising and subsiding of the waters, the landing on Ararat, and the promise of the rainbow.

Sometimes one story in the doublet is a very inferior version. This is true, for example, of two of the P stories, “Why Jacob Was Sent to Laban” and “Jacob Becomes Israel.” The J versions are among the greatest stories in the Bible, in all literature; but they made an orthodox mind like P’s extremely uncomfortable. Just as the early rabbis of the Midrash (and all the later rabbinic commentators, for that matter) change Esau into a villain and rationalize away Jacob’s dishonesty and disrespect, P eliminates all the brilliant, troubling, morally ambiguous elements of J’s story. “No, no,” he seems to be saying, “it wasn’t like that at all. Jacob wasn’t sent to Mesopotamia because, God forbid, he deceived his father and cheated his brother and was in danger of being killed. It all happened because Esau married two Canaanite women, against the wishes of his parents. So Esau was the bad son. Jacob was the obedient one; he went to Mesopotamia out of filial piety, because his father commanded him to. And he didn’t steal the blessing, God forbid; Isaac gave it to him knowingly.” In the same way, P’s version of “Jacob Becomes Israel,” a clumsy story in an indifferent style, eliminates all mention of the wrestling match and simply states the new name without even trying to explain its meaning.

Some of the doublet stories, though very different from each other, are written with almost equal skill. This is most obviously true of the two creation stories. It is also true of the lesser-known “Hagar and Ishmael.” E’s revision of this story is even more moving than J’s original. Like the P version of “Why Jacob Was Sent to Laban,” it was written by an author who knew the earlier story and wanted to correct it. What seems to have bothered E most are the portrayals of Sarah and Abraham. J’s Sarah is manipulative, insecure, selfish, and harsh to the point of cruelty, while Abraham is a wimp who capitulates to his wife’s jealousy and washes his hands of the whole business. Hagar herself, while an object of pity and admiration in her escape to the wilderness, is also seen as the partial cause of her own misfortune. The only character who comes off well is the kindly Lord.