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 189
vations, and not on “a scholarly imposition on the text†(163). It is
thereby important to note that Noth left it open whether the traditions
before the traditional sources J and E, especially their common source
G, were oral or written 5. He even, and to my mind correctly, down-
played the significance of the written or oral nature of the traditions
before their appearance in the traditional sources of the Pentateuch:
“Die Frage, ob schriftlich oder mündlich, ist kaum noch mit einiger
Sicherheit zu beantworten, aber auch überlieferungsgeschichtlich
nicht so belangreichâ€. Important to him is the following aspect: “Die
Tatsache selbst aber ist sehr wichtig, da sie ein der Abfassung der
Quellenschriften J und E vorausliegendes Stadium im Werden in hin-
reichend sichtbare Erscheinung treten läßt†6. Noth is speaking here
of G, but this is also true for the so-called “major themes†of the Pen-
tateuch that he ordered in the main part of this book according to
their importance, starting with the exodus from Egypt and not the
patriarchs. Indeed, Noth was of the opinion that the independence of
the “major themes†was relegated to the oral stages of the transmis-
sion, but he would not have conceded that this diminishes the sig-
nificance of their original self-contained nature and the importance
of the process of how they grew together. Beyond Noth, I would
however stress the necessity to check (1) whether the independence
of the “major themesâ€, especially the patriarchs and the exodus, did
extend to significantly later periods than he assumed and (2) whether
this independence pertained to their literary fixation as well. My mo-
tivation to think so results primarily from the analysis of the con-
nections between those “major themesâ€, which are (1) literary in
nature and (2) seem to be secondary with respect to the textual ma-
terial they link together.
The assumption of a literary-historical gap between Genesis and
Exodus, accordingly, does not emerge from the later book division.
It is rather the other way round. Because the traditions integrated
and reworked in Genesis and Exodus were so diverse, the later di-
vision into books still reflects this divergence. The natural caesura
has its afterlife still in the canonical text 7.
M. NOTH, Ãœberlieferungsgeschichte des Pentateuch (Stuttgart 1948) 41.
5
NOTH, Ãœberlieferungsgeschichte, 41.
6
In addition, Baden’s statement “Before the compilation of the canonical
7
text, there was no such thing as the book of Genesis or the book of Exodusâ€
(3-4) is not fully accurate, see SCHMID, Genesis and the Moses Story, 23-29.
The literary “Wiederaufnahmen†at the book’s fringes attest to a proto-book
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