One of the responses to the papers in the first half of A Farewell to the Yahwist? is John van Seters’s “The Report of the Yahwist’s Demise Has Been Greatly Exaggerated!” The core of this paper was delivered last year at the SBL meeting in Philadelphia in response to Jan Christian Gertz’s paper (also printed in this volume), but it has been expanded to include a response to other papers.

Van Seters begins by taking issue with Römer’s contention that scholars have all sorts of ideas about the Yahwist and that this implies the theory is suspect. Van Seters denies that this is the case and noted that the concept of the Yahwist with which most scholars deal is derived from von Rad’s understanding. But even if scholars do have lots of ideas about J, they also have many conceptions of P, but he points out that most of the papers in this volume happily continue to accept the existence of P. Why should it be different for J?

Not surprisingly, van Seters also disagrees with the notion that P was the first to connect the patriarchs and the exodus. After all, his books Prologue to History and The Life of Moses are arguments in favor of J as an author and historian similar to von Rad’s Jahwist but dated to the exilic period. He critiques both Schmid’s and Gertz’s source critical analysis of the non-P material in the Joseph story and points to connections between the patriarchs and the exodus in the J material.

One of the differences between van Seters and the others has to do with the connections they find (or fail to find) between the patriarchs and the exodus traditions. Schmid and Gertz both point to the lack of explicit connections between the two, while van Seters deals with implicit connections, especially on the level of language. Van Seters, of course, dislikes the idea of a redactor, especially as it is employed by people following Rendtorff’s tradition critical analysis of
the Pentateuch. He discusses this issue more fully in The Edited Bible.

One problem, from my point of view, is that both of the school’s represented in the book assume that either J was first and P added material (van Seters) or that P was first and the J material was edited in (Schmid et al). But as Baruch Schwartz points out, there is a third possibility: J and P could have worked in isolation from each other.1 This matches my understanding of the development. J and P were unaware of each other’s work and were only later combined by H in the postexilic period. This model seems to solve many of the problems. Both P and J could have had explicit connections between the stories that were left out by H when he combined the documents and added a lot of his own material. The fundamental problem once again is that everyone assumes P is postexilic. Why the Persian period should become the catch-all of every imaginable source is beyond me.


  1. Baruch J. Schwartz, “The Priestly Narrative of Israel’s Descent into Egypt,” paper delivered at the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting in Washington, DC, November, 2006. [back]
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