Blue Cord

The first response in the A Farewell to the Yahwist? is Christoph Levin’s “The Yahwist and the Redactional Link between Genesis and Exodus.” Levin is the author of Der Jahwist, so he is very much at the forefront of the current debate. But because he holds that all of the pre-P material was edited together prior to being joined with P, he was an excellent choice as a respondent.

Levin begins by outlining the points where he agrees with the papers in the first half of the book:

• Genesis and Exodus were separated at a secondary stage.
• The non-P narratives did not originally form a coherent composition.
• The Yahwist is much later than the date assigned in the Documentary Hypothesis. He places the dating in the exile.
• The Documentary Hypothesis is still important.

Ultimately, he says, the differences between him and them comes down to the redactional linking of the material. He points out that they use Wellhausen’s famous phrase, “It is as if [P] were the scarlet thread on which the pearls of JE are hung.” In this, he says, they are wrong. Instead, P and non-P are two different threads that have been braided together:

P has not come down to us unscathed. It therefore cannot simply be understood as the basic document. The fact that the sequence of the whole narrative as we have it today holds together is due to the existence of a second continuous source parallel to P. From Gen 12 it took over the literary lead, just as P took the lead in the primeval history. . . . The Tetrateuch thus does not hang on a single thread but on a cord plaited together from two strands. This cord makes it possible for the work as a whole to avoid falling apart when one of the two threads is torn, or missing, which is several times the case.

He thinks the way to resolve the problem is through redactional criticism. The Yahwist did inherit previous material, stories that were already written down. The Yahwist edited these together. This brings together von Rad’s idea of J as a historian and theologian and Noth’s idea that the material came together in blocks.

Levin finishes his paper with an appendix that studies J as the editor of Exodus 3 by looking at the language used. As this discussion is very technical in nature, I will not summarize it here.

It is with great sadness that I heard today about the death of Pat Hollingsworth Holshouser. Pat was the former first lady of North Carolina when her husband Jim was the governor in the mid-1970s, and she is remembered as a remarkable first lady. She had been battling lung cancer for the last two years and died in her home on Wednesday.

Pat was my father’s first cousin on his mother’s side. Her father, Leon Hollinsworth, was a long time chaplain at Wake Forest University.  Her twin sister Nancy works in early childhood. Pat has a daughter named Ginny who serves with her husband as a missionary in Southern Mexico. If you would like to read an account of Pat’s life of service to others, it can be found in the Raleigh News & Observer.

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.

The Review of Biblical Literature for this month contains a review of the published form of my dissertation. It was published last year under the title The Campaign of Pharaoh Shoshenq I into Palestine by Mohr Siebeck in the FAT series. The review is in French, having been done by Youri Volokhine at the Université de Genève in Switzerland.

Overall it is a good review. He critiques me in a few places for things he would like to have seen covered, although several of them are things I purposefully chose not to cover because it was primarily a textual study of the campaign. One of the issues that he wanted to see discussed was the issue of the archaeology of the campaign, since some, such as Israel Finkelstein, have called into question the assignment of destruction layers to Shoshenq. I had discussed this issue with Finkelstein a bit and he had seen the paper I had delivered at the SBL in 2000. But because the issue was so up in the air and I am not a research archaeologist, I decided to leave that question for others.

Volokhine also notices that I passed over the scenario of Shoshenq taking the ark of the covenant back to Tanis as proposed by the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. I agree with him that the idea is a phantom, which is why I only included it in a footnote. Volokhine also picks a few nits, especially when he notes that I made a few orthographic mistakes in the French works in the bibliography. Oh, well. C’est la vie!

Volokhine concludes by saying,

[L]’étude de Kevin A. Wilson offre l’étude de référence que l’on attendait sur cet épisode de l’histoire du Proche-Orient ancien. Il est acquis désormais que la campagne en Palestine du pharaon libyen demeure une affaire essentiellement biblique, et que la documentation pharaonique, qui confirme l’expédition, ne permet pas d’en tirer plus au clair ni les circonstances ni le déroulement. Cette étude confirme donc le bien fondé de la prudente réserve que certains égyptologues avaient adoptée.

For those who don’t read French, it says,

[The] study offered by Kevin A. Wilson provides the study of reference that has been awaited on this episode in the history of the ancient Middle East. From now on it must be recognized that the campaign in Palestine of the Libyan pharaoh is essentially a biblical affair, and that the pharaonic documentation that confirms the expedition does not shed further light on either its circumstances or its sequence. This study confirms therefore the well founded and prudent reserve that some have adopted.

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.