I am currently at Virginia Theological Seminary, where I will be until Sunday. I will be doing research morning to night every day, so I thought I would engage in a little Open Source Scholarship ™ while I am here. I will be posting blogs about my research for each individual day as a way for me to sort out some things in my head. If others have comments or critiques they would like to make, I would be glad to hear them too.

I have some research I want to do and some I have to do, and I thought I would treat myself on the first day by doing the stuff I want to do. So, I started on some research dealing with the dating of the Priestly layer in the Pentateuch.

The idea I am researching is this: linguistic studies aimed at dating P have given mixed results. Avi Hurvitz found P to be linguistically earlier than Ezekiel.1 Robert Polzin, on the other hand, has found Pg to have some late elements and Ps to have a lot of late elements.2

It occurred to me that neither of these studies takes into account the division of P into P and H that Knohl and Milgrom have made. This is not surprising, since both these studies were done before Knohl’s work. But since Knohl has shown that H is later than P, I was wondering if the data would show that P is early and H is late. So, I have been working through Hurvitz’s and Polzin’s data to see if there is a correlation.

So far, there does appear to be. The few late features that Polzin found in P are not truly late features, and it therefore appears that there is no reason to date P to either the exilic or post-exilic periods. This, along with Hurvitz’s demonstration that P is prior to Ezekiel, implies a pre-exilic date. The late features Polzin points out in Ps, however, mostly appear to be actual late features (with one or two exceptions). Since most of the Ps passages he names fall into passages Knohl would ascribe to H, this appears to argue for a late exilic or early post-exilic date, since the language in H is not as late as Chronicles.

What this suggests to me is that P preserves documents from the pre-exilic period. I say documents, because it does not seem to be a unified whole. H, on the other hand, seems to be a reworking of these priestly documents for the early post-exilic community, and may have been written as a part of the effort to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem and reestablish the priesthood.

If P is pre-exilic, this has other implications, especially if you accept John van Seters’s idea that J is dependent on D. Since D is definitely pre-exilic and quite possibly late pre-exilic, this would mean that P must therefore be earlier than both D and P. The only way around this is to posit that D was written prior to its discovery in 621 BCE by Josiah. The likely time for such a document would be the late 8th century in the rule of Hezekiah. But if P does preceed D and J, this would resolve the debate over whether P is a source or a redaction. If it is prior to D and J, it obviously cannot be a redaction. It would have to be a source or sources.

Again, this reinforces my conviction that the correct order is PDJH.


  1. Avi, Hurvitz, A Linguistic Study of the Relationship Between the Priestly Source and the Book of Ezekiel: A New Approach to an Old Problem, Cahiers de la Revue Biblique 20 (Paris: J. Gabalda, 1982). See my review. [back]
  2. Robert, Polzin, Late Biblical Hebrew: Toward an Historical Typology of Biblical Hebrew Prose, Harvard Semitic Monographs 12 (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1976). [back]
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