Today was the final day of the conference, and my paper was the first one in the morning. It was entitled “From Horeb to Shechem: Deuteronomy and Joshua as a Combined Document.” The paper argues that the earliest stage of the formation of the Pentateuch was the combination of Deuteronomy 4-28* with Joshua 2-11,23 to form a history that led from Egypt (in retrospect from the border of Canaan) through the conquest.

The idea was brilliant. It was so brilliant, in fact, that Norbert Lohfink thought of it twenty years ago. I was informed of this by Rainer Albertz after the paper was finished. This is one of the problems of having access to a research library for only two weeks a year. The article in which he put forth this theory is in ZAW apparently, and the ATLA serials database does not index that journal. Nor did I come across it in my two weeks in the library. So, I presented a paper that puts forth a theory that most Germans knew but few English speaking people did.

While it was somewhat deflating to be told someone else had already thought of it, it is at least comforting to know that I can do original research and come up with some of the same ideas as a great scholar like Lohfink. This means that instead of being submitted for a journal article, I will just turn it into a chapter of a book on source criticism in the Pentateuch (with appropriate footnotes to Lohfink, of course).

If anyone is interested in reading the paper, I will be happy to send you a copy.

I was unable to attend the session in the afternoon, as I needed to get back to Budapest to meet my family. They were coming in from Vienna to see Budapest for a couple of days. If you are interested in hearing about the non-academic part of our time in Austria and Hungary, check our blog Out and About in the coming days for posts on our vacation.

Next year’s EABS meeting will be in Vienna in conjunction with the International SBL.

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