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 201
mentary Hypothesis does not deny that each source has a history,
nor does it deny that the Pentateuch itself has a history after the
compilation of the documents†26. From my point of view, this state-
ment is of crucial importance. If it is true that there is a literary his-
tory of the Pentateuch before and after the sources, however they
are being determined — and to my mind there can be no doubt
about that — then such a statement is a significant step towards a
convergence between Baden and me.
IV. The “fathers†in Deuteronomy
Baden further adduces another corpus of alleged pre-exilic origin,
D, in order to consolidate the assumption of a pre-priestly narrative
continuity from Genesis to Exodus. He sees in all parts of D the no-
tion that the “fathers,†if they are not specified explicitly as Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, are — not exclusively, but also — referring to the pa-
triarchs in Genesis all the same, rather than just to the exodus gener-
ation, as some scholars have argued. If so, D would bolster the
argument for a pre-exilic literary sequence from the patriarchs to the
exodus. The problems involved in such an argument are, however,
complex. The discussion about the original identity of the fathers in
the book of Deuteronomy has a long history. As early as 1972, John
Van Seters suspected that the term in many but not all instances does
not refer to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but to the exodus generation.
In 1990 Thomas Römer supported this hypothesis with a substantial
monograph 27. The issue is, admittedly, an open and contested one 28,
but it would be shortsighted to interpret the characterization of all ex-
plicit identifications of the “father†with the patriarchs from Genesis
as secondary — the result of “an attempt to keep all connections be-
tween the patriarchs and exodus out of the pre-priestly literature†(184).
J.S. BADEN, The Composition of the Pentateuch (AB Reference Library;
26
New Haven, CT 2012) 248.
J. VAN SETERS, “Confessional Reformulation in the Exilic Periodâ€, VT
27
22 (1972) 448-459; T. RÖMER, Israels Väter. Untersuchungen zur Väterthe-
matik im Deuteronomium und in der deuteronomistischen Tradition (OBO
99; Fribourg – Göttingen 1990).
See esp. N. LOHFINK, Die Väter Israels im Deuteronomium. Mit einer
28
Stellungnahme von Thomas Römer (OBO 111; Fribourg – Göttingen 1991).
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