Because I had no interviews today, I was free to attend more sessions. I started the morning with a Pentateuch section. The best paper (to my mind) was Baruch Schwartz paper entitled “The Priestly Narrative of Israel’s Descent into Egypt.” Schwartz points out that there are two models of the Priestly document. One sees P as an independent document that developed in reaction to J (non-P) while the other sees it as a redaction of J. He points out that there is a third model which postulates P as an independent document that had no familiarity with J. As an example, he worked through his reconstruction of P’s narrative of the descent into Egypt at the end of Genesis. Like most of the P stories, it is much smaller than the J story. It knows nothing of Joseph being sold into slavery or a famine in Egypt.

Since I view P as being an earlier work that J, I have automatically viewed P as an independent document with no knowledge of J. I see P and J as redacted by H. With all deference to John van Seters (whose The Edited Bible I just bought), I think there were redactors, although I agree with him that they did just as much creative work as authors.

In the afternoon I got together with other bibliobloggers. The august assembly comprised Tyler Williams, Christian Brady, Stephen Cook, and Tim Bulkeley. We had a good conversation, and Chris Brady recorded about an hours worth of our conversation, which he will be editing into a podcast. We talked about everything from blogging to teaching to current research. If you would like to hear the conversation, it can be found at Targuman.

In the evening, I went to the Yale and Johns Hopkins receptions. It was good to see friends and former professors.

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