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.

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