The Priestly Document in Numbers
While I was continuing to work my way through From Priestly Torah to Pentateuch last night, something occurred to me.
As I pointed out in a previous post, Nihan argues that Pg ends somewhere in Leviticus (I haven’t gotten far enough in his book to know where he thinks it ends). Others argue that it ends with the instructions to build the tabernacle in Exodus 25-31 or the completion of the tabernacle in Exodus 40. All of these make sense from a narrative perspective.
But this raises a new question for my own research. I am currently working on a paper that deals with the relationship of PT, Ezekiel, and HS. I started this paper in the summer of 2006, but put it aside to work on some other projects. In short, the paper sees a PT layers in Numbers 16-18 that Ezekiel re-interprets in Ezekiel 44. HS takes Ezekiel’s reading and edits Numbers 16-18 to bring it into line with Ezekiel.
The problem, obviously, is that if Pg ends in Exodus or Leviticus, it doesn’t continue into Numbers. The question then becomes, what was Ezekiel reading when he came across the story in Numbers 16-18? Was it a priestly document that was not a part of Pg? Given the similarity in vocabulary and terminology between Numbers 16-18 and Ezekiel 44, I find it hard to believe that it was not a written document. So what was it?