As many of my readers know, one of my areas of interest is the two priestsly layers in the Pentateuch. These two layers — known as PT and HS — were first proposed by Israel Knohl in The Sancturary of Silence. I have been working on a compositional history of the book of Numbers, so I thought I would walk through some of the process here. This series will look at Numbers 1-10, with the intention of assigning the passages to PT, HS, or other sources. I will be taking as my starting point the work of Martin Noth, whose divisions have been helpfully laid out in Campbell and O’Brien’s Sources of the Pentateuch.

The first thing I wanted to do is decide what came before and after Numbers 1-10. What is the passage in P that comes before Numbers 1-10 and what passage picks up after that story?

The final chapters of Leviticus are the Holiness Code (17-26), which according to Knohl would not have been part of the original PT layer. Noth assigns 11-16 to late P layers, so they can be excluded as well. This suggests that the P story directly preceeding the census in Numbers 1 would have been the ordination of Aaron and his sons in Leviticus 8-9 (and possibily 10).

This matches well with the chronology of P. In Exodus 40, which would have immediately preceeded Leviticus 8-9, the tabernacle is set up on the first day of the first month of the second year (Exod 40:17). Aaron and his sons would have then been consecrated. Then, on the first day of the second month in the second year, the census would have been taken (Num 1:1).

After the material in Number 1-10, the people would have left Sinai, which they did on the twentieth day of the first month of the second year (Num 10:11-12), immediately after the census. From there, they journyed to the edge of Canaan and sent spies into the land (Num 13ff.)

In other words, after the tabernacle is set up in P, Aaron and his sons are consecrated. This is followed by the census and the departure from Sinai. The chronology in this section is rather tight and leaves little room for expansion. But it is on this thread that the pearls in Numbers 1-10 have been strung.

In the second part of this series, I will look at the material in Numbers 1-10 to determine the basis on which material can be assigned to PT or HS. Stay tuned!

>>> Continue to the second post in this series.

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