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 203
two references to the three patriarchs of Genesis — 1 Kgs 18,36 and
2 Kgs 23,23. Meanwhile, there are plenty of allusions to and men-
tions of the exodus as the beginning of Israel’s history with its God.
In the Psalms, the term “fathers†never refers to Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob, and, on the other hand, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are
never identified as “fathers.†It seems striking that the explicit iden-
tification of the patriarchs of Genesis as “fathers†within the large
narrative Genesis – Kings occurs only in the Torah, but never in the
Former Prophets. Apparently, such an identification was part of a
redactional process that was concerned with the formation of the
Torah. Ezek 20,5-6 and Ezek 33,24 are witnesses for the earlier pos-
sibility that the exodus and the fathers could be used as the sources
for different arguments regarding the possession of the land 32.
There is one important specification to add. The redaction-histor-
ical differentiation about whom the term “fathers†in Deuteronomy
refers to does not imply that the older layers in Deuteronomy did not
know anything about Genesis and the patriarchs. Rather, as in Hosea
12, they argued for the exodus tradition as Israel’s relevant myth of
origin in opposition to the patriarchal stories.
V. Are the patriarchal and the exodus stories incomplete?
Baden expresses some doubts as to whether literarily independ-
ent patriarchal and exodus stories are conceivable at all. First, he
deems the patriarchal story with its promises as incomplete:
The premise of the independent patriarchal narrative is that it would
have been an account of how Israel came to possess the land of
Canaan through the internal spread of Abraham’s descendants, with-
out any descent to Egypt, exodus, wilderness wandering, or conquest
from without. Yet the patriarchal narrative does not tell that story. If
the promises are included as part of the original non-priestly patri-
archal narrative, then the text is certainly incomplete (185).
This argument might be plausible for readers who posit the
canonical story line of the Pentateuch as a given framework for un-
This was VAN SETERS’s first example in his “Confession Reformulation
32
in the Exilic Periodâ€, 448-449.
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