After publishing my previous post, it occurred to me that in some cases it might sound like I am using the word late in a pejorative sense. This is, in fact, how some scholars (and theologians!) use the term. If something is late then it is not original. It is not fresh. It can be ignored.
This is not, however, how I am using the word. Just because something is late does not mean that it is not a part of the Bible. It is still in the canon and is still authoritative. Things that are early are no better or worse than things that are late.
I am not one of those who is trying to place everything in the pre-exilic period. Neither do I view everything as late as the Scandinavian school does. I want to know the date of the texts I am studying, but I am no happier with an early or late text. They are all part of the history of ancient Israel.
One of the tenets of the Documentary Hypothesis is that P is a relatively late document / source / layer. This is due to the work of Wellhausen. Although others had separated J, E, D, and P, Wellhausen was the first to place them in that order. His great “insight” was that P was the last source, not the earliest. This dating has been questioned by some — most notably Kaufmann and those who follow his approach — but by and large it has been accepted by most scholars.
Because I have become convinced that this dating is incorrect, I thought I would critique several of the arguments that are usually put forth in favor of a late date of P.
The first one that can be dispatched is the idea that P must be late because it shows a calcified form of Israelite religion. Wellhausen and others viewed Yahwism as having begun as a dynamic faith (as exemplified by the prophets) that later devolved into the dead form of religion represented by the Judaism of Jesus’ time. For Wellhausen, this meant that J must be early, given its lively depiction of God, while P was late.
There are at least two problems with this. First, it is an anti-Semitic depiction of Judaism. It takes a highly negative view of Judaism, especially first century Judaism. This is taken in part from some of the rhetoric of the NT, although it is also enhanced by 2000 years of church polemics. It does not, however, reflect the reality of first century Judaism.
The second problem is that it depends on a Hegelian view of history. Hegel depicted the entirety of history as being a series of advances that later lost their original dynamic character and became dead. Original, lively Yahwism devolved into the dead legalism of Judaism. Jesus came and renewed religion, but his religion later devolved into the dead legalism of Roman Catholicism. This, in turn, was revitalized by the Protestant Reformation. And on it goes. Hegel’s philosophy of history has long been criticized, and it is time that we abandon it in biblical studies as well.
With Hegel’s mode of history out of the way, there is no reason a priori to think of P as late. We must therefore depend on internal data to make our decision. Such internal data include the Hebrew used in P, historical references, and references to P in other biblical texts.
All this is much too complex to discuss in one post, but I did want to make a few comments.
As for the Hebrew of P, I argued in a paper at the New England regional SBL meeting this past spring that some elements of P are pre-exilic while others are post-exilic. (See also my post from summer 2006.) These two layers correspond to Israel Knohl’s PT and HT respectively. Even if we date the final redaction of P to the post-exilic period, we must still recognize that substantial portions of P are pre-exilic.
References in other biblical texts are more difficult but ultimately more helpful. Such references are rare in pre-exilic prophetic books. They are more numerous in Ezekiel (such as the innerbiblical exegesis being done on Numbers 16-17 in Ezekiel 44). They are prevalent in post-exilic works like Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah.
Obviously, when you can find a clear reference to a passage from the Pentateuch in a non-Pentateuchal book, the passage from the Pentateuch must be earlier than the passage in the other book. But how much earlier? The other book only provides a terminus ad quem. The passage from the Pentateuch could be much earlier. On the other hand, the second book could know the passage from the Pentateuch only in oral form, although I suspect the Priestly layers of the Pentateuch were not well known in oral form outside the priestly guild in Jerusalem.
It seems to me that the fact that a good deal of the priestly material would have been insider knowledge not shared with those outside the guild has not been taken into account enough. I do not mean that the priestly were hoarding secret knowledge, although part of it may have fallen into that category. But there is no reason to suspect that texts such as the Manual of Sacrifice in Leviticus 1-7 would have circulated outside of priestly circles. If you wanted to know what sacrifice to bring, you didn’t need to sit down and read the entire Manual of Sacrifice. You just went to a priest and asked. The priest had the knowledge and would readily dispense it when needed, but there would have been no reason for the people to have had the Manual, particularly since few of them would have been literate.
This means that we should not expect priestly material to have been common knowledge until after the exile. This would explain why so few references to passages from P are found in pre-exilic literature. Only when the corpus was promulgated in its final form would the knowledge have become more wide-spread. Obviously, this line of reasoning cannot be used to argue in favor of a pre-exilic date, but it does diffuse one criticism of those who propose an early date.
All in all, I find no support for the idea that the entirety of P is late. While some parts certainly are, I think the standard idea of P being post-exilic is wrong. There are substantial portions that are early, and we have good reason to think that many of these early portions were organized into a larger whole prior to the exile.
