A Farewell to the Yahwist? the Composition of the Pentateuch in Recent European Interpretation (Society of Biblical Literature Symposium) by Thomas B. Dozeman (Editor), Konrad Schmid (Editor) (30-Jun-2006) Paperback

by Thomas B. Dozeman

Since the assured results of scholarship are rarely certain, it should come as no surprise that the classical formulation of the Documentary Hypothesis has yet again been called into question. However, many North American scholars are unfamiliar with the work of a new generation of European scholars who are advancing an alternate view of the compositional history of the Pentateuch. A growing consensus in Europe argues that the larger blocks of pentateuchal tradition, especially the stories of the patriarchs and Moses, were not redactionally linked before the Priestly Code, as the J hypothesis suggests, but existed side by side as two independent, rival myths of Israel s origins. This volume makes available both the most recent European scholarship on the Pentateuch and its critical discussion, providing a helpful resource and fostering further dialogue between North American and European interpreters. The contributors are Erhard Blum, David M. Carr, Thomas B. Dozeman, Jan Christian Gertz, Christoph Levin, Albert de Pury, Thomas Christian Roemer, Konrad Schmid, and John Van Seters.

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First published July 1, 2006

Reviews

[Ahmed A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

The main section of essays in this book propounds a varied form of “redaction-criticism” in European scholarship of the Old Testament’s Pentateuch. Beneath all the fat, the main thing being attacked here is the theory of the Yahwist as an author and historian in the Tetrateuch, in an attempt to reduce him/her to a mere editor/redactor. With regard to the title of the book and content of most of the essays, I agree with Van Seters’s response that it makes no sense to vilify the term “Yahwist” while continuing to use the term “Priestly”. Due to the notable difference between the patriarchal/ancestral narratives and the exodus tradition, most authors here try to establish the Priestly Writer as having joined these two traditions, thereby accrediting him/her as the first to give form to the Pentateuch. Van Seters’s response seeks to expose what he considers some gaping holes in this “recent” method, and Thomas Dozeman and David Carr do their best to present objective critiques of this method in defense of some pre-Priestly / Yahwist connection within the Pentateuch. It’s unfortunate that Albert de Pury’s essay was not discussed in any of the responses, but almost all the essays in this volume enrich the reader with different scholarly views. The conclusion by Carr calls attention to the important point of concord among all authors in the main section and response section: that the connection between the patriarchal and exodus traditions was formed rather late, the earliest being the exilic period.