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.
192 KONRAD SCHMID
promise as oath as part of the final redaction of the Pentateuch 10. I
am aware that Baden thinks otherwise about the promises, but if
one is willing to follow the road sketched above, then Ezek 33,24
is a valuable candidate for a witness to the literary independence of
the patriarchal story as a textual unit because Ezek 33,24 uses the
precise theological argument of the, in my mind, originally (and
still at the time of Ezek 33,24) literary independent patriarchal
story.
To be sure, these texts from outside the Pentateuch do not con-
stitute compelling evidence regarding the original independence of
Genesis and Exodus, but such evidence should not be expected for
a problem like the formation of the Hebrew Bible. Rather, it in-
creases the probability that the material now found in the books of
Genesis and Exodus presupposes earlier literary stages that were
not yet connected as a continuous narrative.
It is crucial to maintain that there is no “a priori distinction be-
tween the patriarchs and the exodus†in my argument, as Baden puts
it. On the contrary, this distinction is a posteriori and is founded on
several observations such as, just to summarize a few, the evidence
of the links between those two textual bodies, on the nature of the
promises of land in Genesis which do not seem to envision a detour
to Egypt and a time span of several hundred years in order to be ful-
filled 11, and the extra-pentateuchal evidence that some Psalms and
some passages in the Prophets refer to themes of Genesis and Exodus.
This is what I have argued at length in my Genesis and the Moses Story,
which starts with a description of the present canonical narrative from
Genesis through Kings! This is the starting point, and the differentiation
between Genesis and Exodus is a result, not a presupposition.
See in more detail K. SCHMID “The Late Persian Formation of the Torah:
10
Observations on Deuteronomy 34â€, Judah and the Judeans in the Fourth
Century B.C.E. (eds. O. LIPSCHITS – G.N. KNOPPERS – R. ALBERTZ) (Winona
Lake, IN 2007) 236-245.
Cf. the formulations “to you†(Gen 13,17) or “to you and to your de-
11
scendants†(13,15; 28,13). Baden correctly points out that the P promises in
Gen 17,8; 28,4; 35,12 exhibit the same feature. However, P has a different un-
derstanding of the possession of the land, as P’s terminology ‫ ×חוזה‬shows.
The land is not given to the patriarchs as a property, it rather remains God’s
own property, which can be used by the patriarchs, see M. BAUKS, “Die Be-
griffe ‫ מורשה‬und ‫ ××—×– ָה‬in Pg. Ãœberlegungen zur Landkonzeption der Prie-
Ö¸ Ö¹ Ö¸× Ö»Ö²
stergrundschriftâ€, ZAW 116 (2004) 171-188.
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