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.
GENESIS AND EXODUS AS TWO FORMERLY INDEPENDENT TRADITIONS 197
sic sense, but he simplifies the traditional Documentary Hypothesis
by reducing it to just the four sources and one compiler. This may
be elegant in terms of a literary description, but seems inadequate in
terms of likelihood of development from oral traditions to literary
sources 17. Apparently, Baden seems to accept independent oral ver-
sions (163), but between the oral prehistory and the sources of the
Pentateuch, there are no intermediate stages. Baden considers this to
be an advantage of his theory; I don’t think that such an assumption
complies with the complex findings in the Pentateuch, which point
to the existence of fixed literary entities like the Abraham cycle, the
Jacob cycle, the Joseph story, or the Moses story, and in some in-
stances even to small literary units like the Bethel story (Gen 28,11-
19) or the Table of Nations in Genesis 10.
III.Non-priestly, either pre-priestly or post-priestly?
Baden mentions a couple of non-priestly texts in Exodus – Num-
bers that, according to him, clearly presuppose the Genesis narra-
tives. I do not object to this characterization in general, but I seriously
doubt whether texts like Exodus 3; 32,26-29 or Num 20,14-16 are
necessarily pre-priestly. Of course they are non-priestly, but Baden
sticks here with the basic assumptions of the Documentary Hypoth-
esis that non-priestly essentially equals pre-priestly 18. Such an as-
sumption could be a possible result of pentateuchal exegesis, but it
cannot by any means function as an a priori conviction, or a position
that deserves special favor or disfavor. It is just one option among
others, and it must be decided by exegetical means whether it is plau-
sible in each case. I don’t want to repeat the arguments that have been
put forward by recent scholarship as to a possible post-priestly ori-
tusâ€, The Pentateuch. International Perspectives on Current Research (eds. T.B.
DOZEMAN – K. SCHMID – B.J. SCHWARTZ) (FAT 78; Tübingen 2011) 17-30.
Even L. SCHMIDT, “Die vorpriesterliche Verbindung von Erzvätern und
17
Exodus durch die Josefsgeschichte (Gen 37; 39-50*) und Exodus 1â€, ZAW
124 (2012) 19-37, a sound defender of the Documentary Hypothesis, claims
that J presupposed and incorporated a well-defined written Joseph story, end-
ing with Gen 50,22, in his own work.
See E. OTTO, “Forschungen zum nachpriesterschriftlichen Pentateuchâ€,
18
TRu 67 (2002) 125-155.
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