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.
196 KONRAD SCHMID
Of course, there are anticipatory references to the exodus in Gen-
esis 37–50, such as Gen 48,21 or 50,22, as Baden correctly main-
tains. The question is just whether they are pre- or post-priestly.
Baden states only that they are non-priestly (166, n. 9) which is true,
but does not help further with the problem we are dealing with.
Because Baden discusses only textual elements that speak for the
continuity of Genesis and Exodus, the final comment in his section
“continuity in non-P†is easily understood: “As noted above, in a
continuous document there is no pressing need to explicitly link the
various textual units, as they are linked merely by virtue of being part
of the same continuous story. P’s decision to create a clear verbal link
in Exodus 1–6 is a thematic and stylistic choice, one that fits well
with P’s style and ideology everywhere†(173). This would be a con-
vincing conclusion if there would be no evidence that runs contrary
to this assumption. But there is. To put it bluntly, the difference be-
tween Baden’s and my evaluation regarding textual continuity or dis-
continuity between Genesis and Exodus is, at least from my own
perspective, not that Baden is arguing for the former and I am argu-
ing for the latter, but that I am assuming elements both of continuity
and discontinuity, and I am organizing them in a literary-historical
order. Narrative continuity between Genesis and Exodus materials
seems to be extant only in P and post-P texts. Baden, on the other
hand, holds that there is a logical and sufficient continuity from the
very beginning of the literary history of Genesis and Exodus. Ac-
cording to him, there never, not even in the earliest literary layers,
was a Genesis story of the patriarchs independent from the Moses
story and vice versa. Or, put in another way, the basic literary layer
in Genesis and Exodus is a continuous one. Baden argues for the in-
tegrity of J in the narrative flow from Genesis to Exodus. My posi-
tion is that J in Genesis and J in Exodus should be held apart from
each other and thus should not be named J.
It is important to see how this position of Baden’s relates to the
history of scholarship. His assumptions in this respect comply nei-
ther fully with the beliefs of Wellhausen, nor of Gunkel, nor of Noth,
all of whom allowed for literary precursors of their “J†that eventu-
ally linked the pentateuchal traditions into their commonly known
literary order 16. Baden, therefore, is not a documentarian in the clas-
See K. SCHMID, “Has European Scholarship Abandoned the Documentary
16
Hypothesis? Some Reminders on Its History and Remarks on Its Current Sta-
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