01_VanSeters_copiaaaa_01_25 28/04/15 11:15 Pagina 3 DATING THE YAHWIST’S HISTORY: PRINCIPLES AND PERSPECTIVES 3 Consequently, I will make the case for dating the Yahwist to a particular time and place in history, i.e. the latter years of the Baby- lonian Exile, based upon the more easily dated biblical texts, such as the Prophets, and relevant external historical evidence. This is not to suggest that the Yahwist’s narrative of the patriarchal migra- tion from Mesopotamia reflects old traditions of an actual migration of Amorites in the early second millennium BCE, or that J’s account of the exodus from Egypt reflects the time of Ramesses II, as was done by the Albright School and others some decades ago. Rather our task is to treat the Yahwist’s narrative as a literary work that can be dated to a quite precise historical period by means of various clues from the social and cultural environment in which it was writ- ten. There are therefore two broad fields of comparison that may be used with some confidence in establishing a date for the Yahwist: one consists of the evidence derived from the biblical record itself; the other from comparisons with well-documented historical texts from the broader Near Eastern environment. In the discussion that follows I will deal with these two fields of evidence in order. I. The Yahwist and the Prophets Compared First let us consider the biblical texts whose dates may be accepted with some confidence and which are directly relevant to dating the Yahwist’s composition at some point in the period of the exile in Baby- lon. These are the prophecies of Ezekiel in the early exilic period and that of Second Isaiah towards the end of the Babylonian hegemony and the rise of Cyrus. In addition, comparison may be made with the older traditions of the patriarchs and the exodus reflected in Hosea and Amos (8th century BCE), and with Deuteronomy, whose composition in stages includes primarily the period from the Josiah reform until the early to mid-exilic period (late 7th to early 6th century BCE), al- though the dates of some of these later additions may be disputed and the dating therefore less certain. Nevertheless the course of this devel- opment of the patriarchal and exodus traditions seems fairly clear 7. 7 In this review I have largely avoided discussing parallels between J and the historical parallels in Deuteronomy because these have been dealt with in great detail in J. VAN SETERS, The Life of Moses. The Yahwist as Historian in Exodus and Numbers (Louisville, KY 1994).