The final essay in the central section of A Farewell to the Yahwist? is Thomas Dozeman’s “The Commission of Moses and the Book of Genesis.” Dozeman is not among those that wants to reject the idea of a Yahwist (or at least a pre-P layer), so his article is a critique of the position espoused by many of the other papers.
Dozeman attacks the problem by examining the two commissions of Moses in Exodus 3-4 and 6-7. Schmid has interpreted 3-4 as a post-P insertion that reinterprets 6-7. Dozeman examines both commissions from a form critical and redactional perspective. He concludes that 3-4 are formulated as a prophetic call narrative while 6-7 only secondarily reflect this form. And, since 6-7 would reject the idea of Moses as a charismatic leader –instead picturing him as someone who leads by virtue of his being descendant from Levi — Dozeman concludes that 6-7 is adopting the form of 3-4 and reinterpreting it in a priestly manner.
He also examines the priestly plague narratives alongside the signs given to Moses in 4:1-9. He argues that they could not be post-P. Instead, these three signs are pre-P and provide an organizing feature for the pre-P exodus and wilderness traditions. Turning water in the blood is a sign of the crossing of the sea, the turning of the hand to leprosy foreshadows the leprosy of Miriam, and the turning of the staff into a snake looks forward to the copper snake that heals the people.
While I may or may not agree with Dozeman’s idea about the pre-P layers, I do think that this last argument is a bit of a stretch. Yes, the idea of water, leprosy, and snakes occur again, but is this really the organizational principle of the pre-P wilderness stories? It doesn’t seem like a particularly strong correlation.
Dozeman then turns to 4:10-18 and 5:1-6:1, where it has been argued that the appearance of Aaron indicates a priestly insertion. He points out that the description of Aaron as a Levite is not consistent with the P source, which distinguishes between the priests and Levites. Knohl, however, has argued for a distinction between P and H, with only the latter assigning a lower status to the Levites. For those who accept Knohl’s division (as I do) this weakens Dozeman’s argument.
Dozeman ends by restating his acceptance of the fact that Exodus 3-4 is part of a pre-P composition that included both Genesis and Exodus. But he does agree that the ancestor stories and the exodus traditions were originally separate, and he notes that this has serious implications for our understanding of the theology of the OT. These two stories have been set side by side, and we must take that seriously instead of trying to harmonize them. J and P harmonized to a certain extent, but we should not go beyond what they did.