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 191
Exodus material, and the uncertainty of the dating of these prophetic
texts make it almost impossible to reach a convincing result.
Most striking, however, is Ezek 33,24 because this text is late
enough to presume a written Abraham tradition. It shows that the
patriarchal story could be used as the basis for an independent ar-
gument by those who remained in the land after 597 and 587 BCE.
In addition, Ezek 20,5-6 demonstrates that the same book can start
its recounting of Israel’s history in Egypt, starting with the exodus.
Baden states: “In a variety of contexts, with a variety of references,
the book of Ezekiel makes evident its familiarity with the patriar-
chal story in addition to its evident reliance on the exodus†(180).
Ezek 20,5-6 and 33,24 could of course be interpreted as alluding to
the themes within the allegedly already existent literary complex of
Genesis-Exodus (and following), as the prophetic books were not
necessarily beholden to any fixed textual corpuses when alluding to
biblical topics. But in the case of Ezek 33,24, the specific contours
in the way Abraham is referred to seem especially to highlight the
land promises in the Abraham cycle. Of course, the question of the
historical origins of the promises to the patriarchs is a contested
one. In my opinion, one of the earliest promises in Genesis 12–50
can be found in the Abraham stories, in Genesis 18. The promise of
a son belongs to the core of the story of the three strangers visiting
Abraham, because this genre of anonymously visiting deities, well
known also from the Greek and Latin world, necessarily includes
the presentation of a gift, which in the case of Genesis 18 is the
promise of a son. Nevertheless, the promise of the land is a differ-
ent issue. It is, first of all, never an indissoluble constituent of the
narratives where it is found. It instead belongs to the redactional
links between the individual stories and cycles in Genesis 12–50.
Secondly, in historical terms, it probably presumes the loss of the
land, i.e., at least the fall of Samaria in 720 B.C.E., but probably also
that of Jerusalem in 587 B.C.E. In other words, the promises of the
land are not an original part of the individual patriarchal narratives,
but these promises instead bring about their literary coherence as a
unit. For our purposes most important is the following aspect: their
conceptual horizon does not extend beyond the book of Genesis,
except for the specific version of the land promise as an oath that
is present in nearly every book of the Pentateuch (Gen 50,24; Exod
32,13; 33,1; Num 32,11; Deut 34,4) but does not occur afterwards.
It is therefore probably best to understand the motif of the land
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