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 207
Baden and myself is that he views the creation of the Proto-Penta-
teuch as a pre-literary development, while I attribute this to P. It might
be helpful to point out that also for Noth, a sound documentarian, P
was the basic document in the Pentateuch that provided the blueprint
for its final shape: “Die also entstandene P-Erzählung ist später zur
literarischen Grundlage der Pentateucherzählung gemacht worden.
Der ‘Redaktor’ […] hat […] die P-Erzählung seiner Arbeit zugrun-
degelegt und sie durch jeweils an Ort und Stelle passende Einfügung
von Teilen jener anderen Erzählung bereichert†36.
To deem P to be the creator of the Pentateuch’s storyline not
only results from what the textual findings suggest, but also allows
for the composition of the Pentateuch to be interpreted along the
lines of the rest of the biblical literature. In no other case within the
Bible do scholars assume that the final shape of a book is a repro-
duction of its initial shape. The Documentary Hypothesis suggests
that the concept of the Pentateuch’s narrative flow is as old as the
Pentateuch itself. In the book of Isaiah or in the Psalms, for exam-
ple, no one would propose that the logic of the final shape of these
books need be presupposed for its earliest stages as well. Of course,
in the historical and literary world, there always can be exceptions.
But we should not posit exceptions unless it is absolutely neces-
sary, and the textual evidence in the Pentateuch, in my opinion,
does not compel us in such a direction.
Theologische Fakultät der Universität Zürich Konrad SCHMID
Kirchgasse, 9
CH-8001 Zürich
dernières rédactions du Pentateuque, de l’Hexateuque et de l’Ennéateuque (eds.
T. RÖMER – K. SCHMID) (BETL 203; Leuven 2003) 99-128 = IDEM, Die Patri-
archen und die Priesterschrift. Gesammelte Studien zu seinem 70. Geburtstag.
Les patriarches et le document sacerdotal. Recueil d’articles, à l’occasion de son
70e anniversaire (eds. J.-D. MACCHI – T. RÖMER – K. SCHMID) (ATANT 99;
Zürich 2010) 13-42.
Noth, Ãœberlieferungsgeschichte, 11 [emphasis by Noth].
36
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