Blue Cord

Peter Kirby has a new podcast in which he reads from what he considers to be the best of the previous week’s blogging on the Bible and classics.  I am pleased that my review of A Farewell to the Yahwist? was chosen to be included in his initial podcast.

Now we can all listen to biblioblogs on our iPods while working out!

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]

The next paper in A Farewell to the Yahwist? is “The Transition between the Books of Genesis and Exodus” by Jan Christian Gertz. If I remember correctly, this paper was delivered at the annual SBL meeting in San Antonio in 2004.

Gertz focuses on Genesis 50 and Exodus 1, trying to determine the connection between the Joseph story and the exodus account. He is unable to find such a connection in the non-P layer, which he sees as ending with the Israelites family in Canaan after returning to bury Jacob. He can find no trace of the returning to Egypt in this layer. It is only in P and post-P additions that such a connection comes in. The same is also the case on the Exodus 1 side.

Gertz’s reconstruction is a bit difficult to follow, and in some ways it harkens back to the heyday of source criticism when half verses were attributed to different authors. It also seems a bit risky to base the conclusion on what is not found in the text. The fact that there is no non-P story of the return to Egypt could be back it was left out in favor of the P version of the return. After all, it would have been impossible to have both of them, since they only returned once.

Gertz attributes the first connection of the eisodus with the exodus to P. But even here he says it is put together in a rather simple fashion. He states,

With respect to Exod 1:8, one observes first that together with verse 6 the memory of the Joseph story and its drammatis personae has been consistently eradicated. The respect enjoyed by Joseph in Egypt and the servitude of the Israelites are mutually exclusive, and thus Joseph was removed with one stroke of the pen. Regardless of the redaction to which one ascribes this editorial activity, it constitutes solid evidence that the connection between the narratives in the books of Genesis and Exodus postdates the primary literary stratum of the texts.¹

While I agree with him that they are secondarily connected, I don’t think the connection is as sloppy as Gertz portrays it. After all, as Baruch Schwartz demonstrated at this year’s SBL, the P story of the eisodus does not have Joseph becoming an official in phraoh’s court. Instead, Joseph appears before pharaoh but is not mentioned as being granted an office.² If Joseph was not a high official in P, then it is not surprising that the new pharaoh would not know him. This is only a problem when the non-P material is combined with P.

1. Gertz, “Transition,” 82. [back]
2. 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]

“The Jacob Story and the Beginning of the Formation of the Pentateuch” by Albert de Pury is the third essay in A Farewell to the Yahwist? De Pury wrote the ABD article on the Yahwist, so he is no stranger to this subject.

He begins the article by noting that the Jacob story has received little attention as a part of the formation of the Pentateuch. He argues, however, that the Jacob story existed, at least in oral form, long before being joined to the exodus story by P. In his view, the Jacob and Moses stories are competing versions of Israel’s origins. In this, I think he may be correct.

According to de Pury, the Deuteronomists did not like the Jacob story. They left it out completely, except for Deuteronomy 26:5-9, where Jacob is not named and is seen as a weakling. It is in Egypt, according to D, that Israel’s history begins. He thinks D is from prophetic circles and that the prophets were the ones who held to Moses as the originator of Israel.

A part of his argument relies on Hosea 12, where he sees Jacob and Moses being contrasted. If this is the case, then Hosea (a prophet) is holding up Moses (who is pictured as a prophet) as the hero, while painting Jacob as rebellious. This is the part of the argument that I find the weakest. Even if Hosea does contrast Jacob and Moses, he does not seem to be rejecting the idea that Jacob is the ancestor of the Israelites. Quite the opposite. He seems to be arguing the Israel is just like its ancestor. If that is not the case, then his oracle does not seem to hold together logically.

As with others in the volume, de Pury sees P as the one who originally linked together Jacob and the exodus story. I can probably accept this, although I would like to read the rest of the book before making up my mind. But I disagree with him that P is dated to the postexilic period. He even goes farther than most scholars and sees P being written about 535-530 BCE. He does this because he views the formation of P being brought about by the need to produce a law acceptable to Persian authorities. I don’t find that theory convincing, and for reasons I have mentioned before I date P to the preexilic period.

I find it odd that so many people find the dating of the Priestly work to the preexilic period problematic. In every ANE society we know, priestly circles are one of the main loci of scribal activity. It would make sense for the priests in Israel to have been among the first to write, and it seems to me that the narrative part of P is exactly what we would expect of an early attempt to write a history of Israel. In reading over P, it strikes me as being more similar in tone to other works from the ANE, whereas the non-P material seems more verbose. If anyone is writing in the preexilic period, it should be the priests.

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.