Konrad Schmid, «Genesis and Exodus as Two Formerly Independent Traditions of Origins for Ancient Israel», Vol. 93 (2012) 187-208
This paper is a response to Joel Baden’s article, which claims that the material in Genesis and Exodus was already literarily connected within the independent J and E documents. I suggest an alternative approach that has gained increased acceptance, especially in European scholarship. The ancestral stories of Genesis on the one hand and the Moses story in Exodus and the following books on the other hand were originally autonomous literary units, and it was only through P that they were connected conceptually and literarily.
190 KONRAD SCHMID
Therefore, I also disagree with Baden’s contention that “the
book of Genesis was never understood to be a literary work sepa-
rate from the book of Exodus: there is no inner- or extra-biblical
reference to Genesis or Exodus as an independent text — nor is
there any inner- or extra-biblical reference to any part of Genesis or
Exodus as an independent text†(164). This statement might be con-
ceded only if it refers to the canonical book of Genesis, but it seems
a bit bold to claim that there is no inner-biblical reference to any
part of Genesis and Exodus as a possible or probable independent
text. In my Genesis and the Moses Story, I have pointed to the
Psalms and to the Prophets, where it seems reasonable to conclude
that some of these texts apparently do not presume a continuous
narrative from Genesis to Exodus 8. Especially telling are the find-
ings in the Psalms: except for Psalm 105, which probably presup-
poses the formation of the Pentateuch 9, the ancestors Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob are not mentioned in any of the Psalms dealing
with Israel’s history (Psalms 77; 78; 106; 135; 136), which sug-
gests that the Psalms were not always aware of a narrative conti-
nuity from Genesis to Exodus. And in the Prophets, there are texts
like Hos 12,13-14; Mic 7,20; or Ezek 33,24 that point in the very
same direction. We both agree that these texts refer to the patriarchs
and to the exodus as separate traditions; the question, however, is
whether it can be demonstrated that they refer to these traditions in
terms of literary entities that are not yet connected in a narrative
sequence. Texts like Hosea 12 and Micah 7 are difficult in this re-
spect because the brevity of the allusions to the Genesis and the
formation before the end of their textual growth. To be sure, the question of
“books†or “proto-books†is not limited to the Pentateuch, but needs to be ex-
tended to Genesis – Kings as a whole; see K. SCHMID, “The Emergence and
Disappearance of the Separation between the Pentateuch and the Deuterono-
mistic History in Biblical Studiesâ€, Pentateuch, Hexateuch, or Enneateuch.
Identifying Literary Works in Genesis through Kings (eds. T.C. DOZEMAN –
T. RÖMER – K. SCHMID) (SBL Ancient Israel and its Literature 8; Atlanta,
GA 2011) 11-24.
See 70-80. See also J.-L. SKA, Introduction to Reading the Pentateuch
8
(Winona Lake, IN 2006) 191-216; K. SCHMID, “Genesis in the Pentateuchâ€, The
Book of Genesis. Composition, Reception, and Interpretation (eds. C.A. EVANS
– J.N. LOHR – D.L. PETERSEN) (VTS 152; Leiden 2012) 27-50.
See SCHMID, Genesis and the Moses Story, 291-292.
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