Konrad Schmid’s essay “The So-Called Yahwist and the Literary Gap Between Genesis and Exodus” is the programmatic paper of A Farewell to the Yahwist? In it, Schmid lays out the reasons that many European scholars now view the patriarchal traditions and the Moses and exodus traditions as been separate prior to the work of P.

Schmid first points to what he sees as a literary break between Genesis and Exodus. He points to the chronology of the stay in Egypt, which both pictures the period of slavery lasting 430 years as well as presenting Moses as Levi’s grandson. Second, he also notes that the Joseph story serves as a poor bridge between the patriarchs and Moses. On the one hand it shows Joseph as the second most famous person in the land, while on the other the pharaoh who follows has never heard of him. Third, and most convincing to my mind, is the fact that the promises to the patriarchs in Genesis do not look forward to a period in Egypt and the deliverance from Egypt and the giving of the land does is not pictured as the fulfillment of that promise in the J texts. The one non-P text where it does occur is Genesis 15, which many new studies see as being post-P.

Schmid also surveys the connections between the Patriarchs and the exodus in the P layer of the text. He argues that although P does connect the two, it is obvious (at least to him) that this connection is secondary. He sees the evidence for this in Exodus 6:2-8, which he sees as having been composed especially to bring the two blocks of material into relation to one another. While this is a possible reading of the text, it is also possible to see the two sets of tradition having already been joined but now being overlain with a theology of progressive revelation of the divine name.

He also draws attention to the fact that only in P are the patriarchs pictured as strangers who are sojourning in Canaan. This is only necessary, he says, if one has the tradition that they later left the land. J knows of no such idea, because for him there was no stay in Egypt associated with the patriarchs. When P combined the two traditions, however, it was necessary to picture the patriarchs this way.

One of the interesting historical results of his thesis is that it means that the Jacob stories and Moses stories were two competing ideas of the origins of Israel. If this is true, it seems to me that the two ideas could have been part of two different people groups who merged to form Israel. Could the Jacob story come from the north and the Moses story come from the south (or vice-versa)? If the two tradition were combined, it would make sense for this to happen in a period when the two nations were merging, such as the time of David when we have one king ruling over both Israel and Judah for the first time. Although it is a wild theory, it might be worth exploring whether P is a document from the time of David and / or Solomon that combined the two traditions in order to foster national unity. An alternative (perhaps a more likely one) would be that the priests at the time of Hezekiah combined the traditions to encourage the Israelites to come to Judah after the fall of Samaria.

Schmid concludes that the two traditions of the patriarchs and Moses could not have been combined prior to P. This may be the case, but I do not agree with him that P is a postexilic creation. As I have argued before, P has linguistic features of preexilic Hebrew (when one separates the H material). Even though P may be the first to combine these traditions, it still could have happened in the preexilic period.

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