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 205
dus narrative is incomplete on its own. It begins with the Israelite
people enslaved in a foreign country — yet how did these foreign-
ers get to Egypt? Who are they? Why does God care about them?
The exodus narrative presumes that the reader knows the back-
ground to the exodus story. And that background is provided in the
story of the patriarchs: the lineage of the family, their descent into
Egypt, the establishment of their relationship with God†(185). But
there is no need to postulate an eisodos exposition for an exodus
story, especially when taking into account the biblical evidence.
Texts such as Deut 6,21-23; Ezek 20,5-26; Amos 2,10; Hos 2,17;
11,1-11; 12,10.14; 13,4; Ps 78,12-72; 106,6-8; 136,10-15 demon-
strate that the Hebrew Bible can speak of the origins of the people
of Israel in Egypt and the exodus without referring to how they
came to be there. Israel is Israel from Egypt, as many formulaic ex-
pressions in the Bible show. To assume that this story is only un-
derstandable by referring to the Joseph story is already falsified by
the case of P, which does not have a Joseph story, at least accord-
ing to the usual delimitations of P in Genesis 37–50 34. Of course,
there are clear links in the non-priestly text between the patriarchal
and exodus narratives, as Baden correctly states (170-172) and il-
lustrates by examples such as Exod 3,6.15.16; 8,18; 9,26 (cf. Gen
45,10); 32,26-29; Num 20,14-16. But these observations would
only be valid as arguments for a pre-priestly narrative continuing
from Genesis to Exodus if these non-priestly links could be proven
to be indeed of pre-priestly origin which is, at least in the interna-
tional context of pentateuchal discussions, contentious, as I have
discussed more closely in the previous section.
VI. Economical theories versus historical plausibilities
For Baden, it seems very important to opt for the simplest and
most economic solution when different alternatives are available: “It
certainly seems the most economical solution to see the exodus ac-
count as the necessary continuation of the patriarchs, and the patri-
archs as the necessary introduction of the exodus†(186). Concerning
See on this in detail K. SCHMID, “The So-Called Yahwist and the Literary
34
Gap between Genesis and Exodusâ€, A Farewell to the Yahwist? The Composi-
tion of the Pentateuch in Recent European Interpretation (eds. T.B. DOZEMAN
– K. SCHMID) (SBLSympS 34; Atlanta, GA 2006) 29-50.
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