After a brief overview of the book, the first essay in A Farewell to the Yahwist? is Thomas Romer’s “The Elusive Yahwist: A Short History of Research.”

Romer begins with a short overview of the development of the idea of the Yahwist. Although much of it is familiar, I was surprised to learn that Wellhausen did not consider the Yahwist to be a particularly solid source. He not only divided the material in J into three sources, but also preferred to speak about the Jehovist (J and E combined) instead. It is also interesting that when most scholars who are not source critical specialists talk about the Yahwist, it is mostly von Rad’s formulation that they have in mind.

He then moves on to talk about some of the perceived problems with J. The main one — and the one that is the focus of the current volume — is the gap between Genesis and Exodus. The fact that the supposed J material in Exodus seems to know so little about the Patriarchs led Rendtorff to question the whole idea of J.

Although J has not been abandoned by everyone, Romer notes that even some people who retain the idea have modified it greatly. H.H. Schmid called into question the idea of a Yahwist working during the Solomonic period. He has been followed in this by John van Seters, who places J in the exilic or postexilic period. The Yahwist has been dated into just about every century from the 10th to 5th centuries BCE in recent years. There is also great debate over whether J is a redactor, a school, or an author. A final problem he notes is that it has been hard for scholars to isolate both a central message and vocabulary for J, and he surveys the theories offered on each of these.

Since this essay is mostly a review of scholarship, there is not much to argue about, although one could question whether the uncertainty about the Yahwist is as wide-spread as he thinks. But I did want to use this initial review as a place to discuss what issues are at stake for my own scholarship.

As I have mentioned before, I think that P is composed some time during the preexilic period. D is also preexilic, with at least the law code formulated by the 8th century. Deuteronomy 4-11 and parts of 27-34 were added during the reign of Hezekiah when the book was combined with Joshua. If van Seters is correct, the J is exilic or postexilic and was written as a prelude to D. Finally, I think H (Knohl’s HS) is the one who combined these three sources and added a lot of his own material to give the Pentateuch the shape it has today.

If the ideas in A Farewell to the Yahwist? are correct (and I have not decided if they are), this would mean that the J material in Genesis and Exodus-Numbers would have to be assigned to two different authors. I have no problem with this, but it would mean that van Seters is right about Exodus-Numbers and wrong about Genesis. They could still both be assigned to the exilic or postexilic period, and it would only require a small change to my hypothesis. I am mainly focused on P and H and how they brought the Bible together. Additionally, some of the papers in the book suggest that P was the first one who combined the tradition of the Patriarchs with the traditions of Moses, the Exodus, and the Wilderness. That would not be a problem for my idea, and I think it might even help it.

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