Erhard Blum’s contribution to A Farewell to the Yahwist? is the paper “The Literary Connection between the Books of Genesis and Exodus and the End of the Book of Joshua.” Blum supports the idea that the patriarchal materials were collected in written form and existed separately, originally having no connection with the exodus story. He dates this composition to the exile.

Blum begins his study by focusing of Exodus 3-4. These two chapters, he says, were integrated into an already existing pre-Priestly narrative. This has been recognized for a while, mostly on the basis of the direct continuation of 2:23 in 4:19. Although he rejects the idea that chapter 3 was inserted after P, he thinks chapter 4 was included by a post-P redactor who was influenced by Exodus 6-7. The main purpose of this editing was the inclusion of Aaron. Only in this second section (Exod 4:1-17) can we discern links with the material in Genesis.

Blum then turns his attention to the question of the literary context in which these two stories were placed side by side. For this, he focuses in Genesis 50. This chapter, he says, is part of a larger complex of material that pops up in Exodus 13:19 and Joshua 24:32. He suggests that the patriarchs and the exodus were combined for the first time in a work that reached from Genesis to Joshua (a Hexatuech). He sees reference to this in Joshua 24:26, which speaks of Joshua writing down “all these words in a scroll of the Torah of God.” This Torah of God was, in his opinion, either and expansion to the Torah of Moses or an alternative to it. This idea, he says, leaves no room for a J or E source.

The connections between Genesis and Exodus, he says, are in comprehensible without the Priestly passages. Therefore, the redactional material that combined the patriarchal and exodus traditions in the non-P material did so as part of the act of incorporating these traditions within the Priestly narrative.

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