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.
206 KONRAD SCHMID
this point, it is, in my mind, important to stress that there are several
possible virtues in the world of scientific theories. Simplicity or econ-
omy is certainly one. Especially when dealing with historical ques-
tions, however, simplicity is not what one should necessarily expect.
In order to develop a historically adequate theory on the composi-
tion of the Pentateuch, one has to take into account the possibilities
and limitations of the literary culture of ancient Israel and Judah that
can be deduced through comparisons with findings from ancient Near
Eastern literature and the Dead Sea Scrolls. These elements do not
suggest that an easy solution to the question how the Pentateuch was
composed is to be expected. Rather, we need to reckon with indi-
vidual glosses in the text (e.g. Gen 28,19b), with additions to smaller
pericopes that are limited in their scope (e.g. Gen 22,15-18), with
redactional insertions binding together larger units (e.g. Gen 28,13-
15), and also literary structures with the entire Pentateuch or even
the Hexateuch in view (Gen 50,24-25; Exod 13,19). Admittedly, such
a picture is more complex than what Baden suggests, but it agrees
with findings from other parts of the Hebrew Bible and also from ex-
trabiblical literature. Most important, it complies with the books of
Genesis and Exodus themselves.
VII. Biblical reading versus historically-differentiated
reading of the Bible
Baden’s reconstruction of the pentateuchal sources prior to P is
to a large degree unwittingly inspired by P and the redactor who com-
bined P and non-P into a certain form of a proto-Pentateuch (RP). P
and RP intended the reader of the Pentateuch to understand the story
their way, and centuries of Jewish and Christian exegesis followed
their proposal; they perceived the Pentateuch predominantly in terms
of P’s storyline. This perspective continued to dominate the recon-
struction of the earlier sources of the Pentateuch with the appearance
of historical criticism. J and E were thought to be forerunners to P,
telling the same story as P, so P was identified as an epigone. In my
opinion, there is sufficient evidence, however, that P is the begin-
ning, and not the end, of the creative process that eventually led to the
now known storyline of the Pentateuch 35. The difference between
See on this especially A. DE PURY, “Pg as the Absolute Beginningâ€, Les
35
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