SOURCE: Introduction to Genesis: A Commentary, revised edition, pp. 13-43, The Westminster Press, 1972.

[In the following essay, Von Rad asserts that the book of Genesis should not be viewed as an independent work; rather, it is “significantly related” to the five Biblical books that follow it. Together, these six books—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—are commonly designated as the Hexateuch. Von Rad goes on to discuss the theme of the Hexateuch, and the development of the source materials into their current Biblical form.]

1. GENESIS AS PART OF THE HEXATEUCH

Genesis is not an independent book that can be interpreted by itself. On the contrary, the books Genesis to Joshua (Hexateuch) in their present form constitute an immense connected narrative. It matters little whether one is more interested in the great individual narrative sources that make up the book or in the composition as a whole which arose when a final redactor skillfully combined these individual sources. In either case, whereever he begins, the reader must keep in mind the narrative as a whole and the contexts into which all the individual parts fit and from which they are to be understood. The present, pronounced division of this originally unified material into the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, etc., is merely a subsequent partition of the massive material into single intelligible sections; one must not lose sight of the great unit of which these are only parts.

A work of such dimension and with such remarkable content—it takes us from Creation to the entrance of the tribes into Canaan—must be investigated carefully with regard to its purpose and theological character. Much has already been done with respect to its literary characteristics, and today we understand tolerably the nature and origin of many individual bits of material. But there has been much too little inquiry into what the Hexateuch is as a whole, what its basic theme really is, and therefore the exposition of Genesis has often been somewhat atomistic. Little, if any, attention has been paid to the fact that this book is significantly related to those events reported in the later books of the Hexateuch.

The basic theme of the Hexateuch may be stated as follows: God, the Creator of the world, called the patriarchs and promised them the Land of Canaan. When Israel became numerous in Egypt, God led the people through the wilderness with wonderful demonstrations of grace; then after their lengthy wandering he gave them under Joshua the Promised Land. If we compare this table of contents with the Hexateuch itself, we are struck with the incongruity between the theme and its actual development, with this colossal massing and arranging of the most varied kinds of material around so simple a basic design. From this observation we draw an immediately illuminating conclusion: this way of structuring the material for so simple a theme must represent a final conception, the last and last possible. This baroque fashioning of the basic theme into such gigantic proportions, when considered from the viewpoint of the history of literature, cannot have been a first conception, not even one that blossomed into classic maturity and balance. Rather, it is a final conception that has burgeoned from earlier stages to the limits of the possible and readable.

If we examine the Old Testament with the question of the theme of the Hexateuch in mind, our attention is drawn to a whole series of shorter or longer texts. For example, the prayer to be spoken when the first fruits were delivered to the sanctuary is especially ancient:

A wandering Aramean was my father; and he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number; and there he became a nation, great, mighty, and populous. And the Egyptians treated us harshly, and afflicted us, and laid upon us hard bondage. Then we cried to the Lord the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our voice, and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression; and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror, with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.—Deut. 26.5-9.

There can be no doubt that this is how men really spoke in ancient times, and we see that within the cultic framework it was customary, among other things, to recite a short form of the sacred history as a confession. For what we find here is a kind of credo, not a personal prayer of thanksgiving. There is no divinely addressed Thou. Rather, the speaker recapitulates the great, sacred facts that constitute the community. He abstains from all individual concerns and in this moment identifies himself completely with the community; that is, he makes a confession of faith.

A similar summary of the sacred history in a creed occurs in Deut. 6.20-24. The text, which is now completely imbedded in the great paraenetic context, is easily recognizable as having been originally independent, with regard both to form and to content.

When your son asks you in time to come, “What is the meaning of the testimonies and the statutes and the ordinances which the Lord our God has commanded you?”, then you shall say to your son, “We were Pharaoh's slaves in Egypt; and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand; and the Lord showed signs and wonders, great and grievous, against Egypt and against Pharaoh and all his household, before our eyes; and he brought us out from there, that he might bring us in and give us the land which he swore to give to our fathers. And the Lord commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear the Lord our God, for our good always, that he might preserve us alive, as at this day.”

We may add still a third example, the speech of Joshua before the assembly at Shechem. It is somewhat more extensive because of a few embellishments, but there can be no doubt that basically this historical review is not a distinct literary creation. Here too, apparently, an essentially fixed form is used, a form with which one can take only minor liberties.

Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, “Your fathers lived of old beyond the Euphrates, Terah, the father of Abraham and of Nahor; and they served other gods. Then I took your father Abraham from beyond the River and led him through all the land of Canaan, and made his offspring many. I gave him Isaac; and to Isaac I gave Jacob and Esau. And I gave Esau the hill country of Seir to possess, but Jacob and his children went down to Egypt. And I sent Moses and Aaron, and I plagued Egypt with what I did in the midst of it; and afterwards I brought you out. Then I brought your fathers out of Egypt, and you came to the sea; and the Egyptians pursued your fathers with chariots and horsemen to the Red Sea. And when they cried to the Lord, he put darkness between you and the Egyptians, and made the sea come upon them and cover them; and your eyes saw what I did to Egypt; and you lived in the wilderness a long time. Then I brought you to the land of the Amorites, who lived on the other side of the Jordan; they fought with you, and I gave them into your hand, and you took possession of their land, and I destroyed them before you. Then Balak the son of Zippor, king of Moab, arose and fought against Israel; and he sent and invited Balaam the son of Beor to curse you, but I would not listen to Balaam; therefore he blessed you; so I delivered you out of his hand. And you went over the Jordan and came to Jericho, and the men of Jericho fought against you, and also the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Hivites, and the Jcbusites; and I gave them into your hand. And I sent the hornet before you, which drove them out before you, the two kings of the Amorites; it was not by your sword or by your bow. I gave you a land on which you had not labored, and cities which you had not built, and you dwell therein; you eat the fruit of vineyards and oliveyards which you did not plant.”—Josh. 24.2-13.

None of the three passages mentioned above contains even a parenthetical recollection of anything historical; rather, each one is considered a recitation, elevated in form and in direct discourse. Obviously they are constructed according to a scheme, i.e., they follow a canonical pattern of the sacred history, long established in all its essentials. Though this virtually creed-like recitation of the sacred facts may appear far removed from our Hexateuch in its final form, still the uniformity here and there in thought and theme is often surprising. At bottom there is one and the same extremely simple train of thought, and Josh. 24.2-13 can be characterized as a “Hexateuch” in nuce. If one now surveys the beginning and end of the process, one gains some notion of the persevering power of the essential content of Old Testament faith. For no matter how numerous the additions to it are or how intensive its revision is, still there is always a fixed datum, a basic apprehension of faith, beyond which the Hexateuch in its final form did not and would not go.

The text Deut., ch. 26, bears clear signs of a later revision. So it is hard to say when such historical summaries arose and came into use. In our view there is no difficulty in supposing that they existed as early as the time of the Judges. At the other extreme it would be impossible to take these historical summaries to be later résumés of the great historical outlines of the Hexateuch. Were that the case they would inevitably have a different appearance. This applies above all to the absence of the Sinai event, which must be discussed immediately.

The Yahwist, however, wrote in a period quite different from that of the Deuteronomist. No very great span of years lay between him and the time of the old Israelite amphictyony (we have reason to assume that he wrote at the time of Solomon or a little later), but even so, much had changed culturally and cultically between the time of the amphictyony and his own day.

For a thorough understanding of the first books of the Bible it is crucial that this notation “J” lose its schematic character and that we come to a realistic view about the formation of the literary tradition. For it was the Yahwist who, so far as we can see, gave to the entire Hexateuch its form and compass. The Yahwist marks that decisive line of demarcation in the history of culture which we can observe for so many peoples: he was the collector of the countless old traditions which until then had circulated freely among the people. With him began the writing down of those poetic or cultic narratives which previously had circulated orally and without context among the people. It seems probable that this process was not one in which a great literary work issued at a stroke. Perhaps the Yahwist followed earlier works about which, of course, we know nothing. Such a collecting and refashioning of old material cannot, of course, be ascribed to the initiative of the Yahwist alone; the time must have been ripe for it. Indeed, what is most important is that the presuppositions for this collecting and refashioning must have been present in the ancient material itself. The majority of these old narratives were aetiologies, i.e., their purpose was to explain some facts in tribal history, about a place, or in the cult. Previously the validity of these traditions and the interest in them had been regionally limited to that area in which the question was alive and to which the existing aetiological narrative would give the answer. This is especially easy to comprehend in the case of cult legends.

The old cultic traditions in particular were previously unthinkable outside the sacred framework. Only in the course of the cultic act could one meet and experience them. These sacred traditions were not some kind of ornamental addition to the cult; rather, they were its inmost nerve, by which it lived and from which proceeded the content and form of the festivals.¹ What a profound change occurred when materials from the most dissimilar cult centers became unified and even substantially altered by a superimposed plan, when, in a word, they became available as literature! For that to happen it was necessary, as we have said, for the presuppositions to be present in the material itself. A slackening (harmful to the cult!) must already have occurred in the connection between the materials and their hereditary cultic points of reference. At the time of the first kings a crisis seems to have occurred in the genuine, naïve, ancient cult; its spiritual fundamentals began to change, and in this process those traditions were gradually liberated from their imprisonment in the hereditary sphere of the sacred cult.

This was the great crisis that went hand in hand with the formation of the Israelite state. Connected with the crisis was the decline of the ancient Israelite tribal unity, which took place toward the end of the period of the Judges, and the crisis reached its first high point in the enlightenment of the Solomonic era. No matter where one dates the Yahwist, when he is judged by the age of the traditions on which he worked he signifies a late phase. One must realize, therefore, that becoming literature meant in a sense an end for this material, which until then had already had a varied history behind it.²

But at the same time it meant the beginning of a much longer history! Above all, there occurs at this stage a profound inner shift in the meaning of those narratives. One need only ask how much of the old meaning is still left when a cult legend is deprived of its cultic aetiological point! The same can be said of the old ethnological tribal sagas, which at that time were also bound to a limited area. When they were uprooted they were open to every kind of spiritualized literary application. For what is the content of Gen., ch. 18, if the narrative no longer serves to legitimize the cultic center of Mamre? What is the content of ch. 22 if the narrative no longer legitimizes the abolition of child sacrifice? What is the meaning of ch. 28 if the narrative no longer legitimizes the sacredness of Bethel and its customs? What is the meaning of ch. 16—to take an ethnological saga—if the narrative no longer answers the question of the origin and way of life of the Ishmaelites? (The Yahwist himself probably no longer had any interest in the aetiological question because the Ishmaelites at his time no longer existed as a tribe.) These questions indicate one of the most important tasks that face anyone who interprets the stories in Genesis today. In many narratives he can ascertain with a probability verging on certainty the meaning and purpose which the material once had in an earlier, pre-literary phase. But he must not forget that the narrative has changed by virtue of the context in which the Yahwist has put it. Sometimes he must reckon with profound changes, since when the old aetiological focus of a story is diffused, its whole structure can collapse. Thus once again we face the question of the meaning of the whole of the Yahwist's work.

Suppose we visualize the matter roughly. On the one hand he had one of those summaries of salvation history (from the patriarchs to the conquest). On the other hand he had a very great number of loose compositions, of which a few perhaps had already coalesced into smaller compositions. Most of them, however, were certainly short and without context. The astonishing creative accomplishment was that by means of the simple plan of that credo of sacred history he was successful in forging the immense mass of narrative detail into a supporting and unifying basic tradition, and indeed in such a way that the simple and manifest thought of that credo remained dominant and almost unchanged in its theological outline. It is scarcely possible to determine all the single traditions which the Yahwist incorporated into his work. Perhaps he had earlier models to follow. However, his inclusion of traditions that could not immediately be incorporated into the old pattern is of theological interest. The result of such inclusions and additions was naturally an over-extension of the old plan and a theological diffusion of its original basis. This is particularly striking at three main points: (a) the incorporation of the Sinai tradition, (b) the extension of the patriarchal tradition, and (c) the inclusion of the primeval history.

A. THE INCORPORATION OF THE SINAI TRADITION

If one looks over the data of the sacred history in the short compositions introduced above, one is struck by the complete absence of any mention of the Sinai episode. In Josh., ch. 24 especially, it seems that the greatest event of the desert wandering could well have been mentioned alongside many less important recollections, if its mention were at all demanded by the canonical tradition. The conjecture that this plan of the old tradition about the conquest did not originally contain the Sinai event first becomes a certainty when we examine the free modifications of the credo in poetry (Ps. 78; 105; 135; 136; Ex., ch. 15), and secondly when we notice the remarkable position of the Sinai pericope in its present context. The Sinai tradition, too, probably owes its form (as the exposition of Exodus will show) to a cult festival, but in the history of the cult as in the history of the tradition it must be separated from our conquest tradition. Remarkably, this material, which is without doubt particularly old, had its own history.³ The Yahwist (and perhaps even his predecessor) was the first to unite these widely separated traditions and to incorporate the Sinai tradition into the conquest tradition. Most important, however, is the great theological enlargement that was accomplished by the union of both traditions. The conquest tradition in our credo is a witness to God's gracious leading; it is sacred history. The Sinai tradition celebrates God's coming to his people, and at its center is the demand of Yahweh's lawful will, the revelation of the great sovereign right of God over Israel. Without question the simple, soteriological motif of the credo receives powerful support from the Sinai tradition. In the union of these traditions the two basic elements of all biblical proclamation are outlined: law and gospel.

B. THE EXTENSION OF THE PATRIARCHAL TRADITION

The summaries made only brief mention of the patriarchal period (Deut. 26.5; Josh. 24.2; I Sam. 12.8). In our Genesis the narrative material extends over thirty-eight chapters. How can we analyse such extremely complex material? There is now no fundamental dispute that it is to be assigned to the three source documents J, E, and P, and there is even agreement over detail. But it is equally certain that the narratives incorporated into the source documents already have a long history behind them. So where do they come from, and what is the nature of the information that they give about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? If we examine the geographical area within which they move, the “local points of reference” of the narrative material, we find that they are spread over Palestine in a remarkable way. With their connections with Shechem (Gen. 33.18f.), Bethel (Gen. 28.11 ff.; 35.3 ff.) and Penuel (Gen. 32.22 ff.), the Jacob stories are clearly rooted in central Palestine, whereas the Isaac stories never leave the area of Beersheba in the extreme south (Gen. 26). The Abraham stories cannot all be located so clearly, but they too surely belong in the south (Mamre, Gen. 18). The only explanation of this remarkable position is that as the semi-nomadic ancestors of what later became Israel gradually settled in Palestine, they transferred the traditions which they had brought with them to the sanctuaries there. This transplantation of their traditions to ancient Palestinian sanctuaries meant that their religion, which was probably a cult of an ancestral God,⁴ was mixed with ancient Canaanite traditions. So while we may not doubt that as “recipients of revelation” and “founders of cults” (A. Alt), Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were historical personalities, it is no longer possible to use the narrative material for biographical accounts. It has passed through too many hands. The narratives offer little more than a few indications of the characteristic cultural situation that governed the living conditions of these clans. Nor do they offer any point of reference for even an approximate dating of the patriarchs. The living conditions of these semi-nomadic groups remained the same for hundreds of years, and they never made history. If one assumes (with J. Bright) that they lived early in the second millennium, then something like nine hundred years lay between them and the narratives of the Yahwist!

So it is the Yahwist who tells us of the experiences of the ancestors of Israel. But he does not think in terms of interpreting the old traditions (as a modern historian would do) completely from the conceptions of the “religion of the fathers” held at that early period. Rather, quite “anachronistically,” he incorporated them into the view which he and his time had of the action of Yahweh toward men, and thus almost made them his contemporaries.

To weld the very varied and often unwieldy material of the patriarchal narratives into a great narrative complex required a thoroughgoing redactional technique. These many individual narratives, together with the larger units that had already been formed, the so-called “saga clusters” (e.g. the Lot-Sodom and the Jacob-Laban complexes), did not come together of their own accord to form a continuous narrative that was also governed by a particular theological theme. The internal connection between individual narratives can be seen above all in the way in which they are now all subordinated to the theme of the “promise to the patriarchs”: especially the promise of land, but also the promise of descendants. In some cases this promise was already rooted in the narrative material before it was taken over (Gen. 15.18; 26.4, 24), but elsewhere we can see that it was only woven into the narrative later, by the Yahwist (e.g., Gen. 18.13; 22.17; 50.24). At least the promise of land is an element which goes back to the time of the “religion of the fathers”. This earliest promise in the patriarchal sagas was, of course, at that time an immediate one. It promised possession of cultivated land to those semi-nomadic “patriarchs” who were then living. Thus originally it did not reckon at all with an imminent abandonment of the land and a second conquest (under Joshua). But because of the inclusion of this patriarchal tradition in the great salvation-historical scheme of historical summaries, that first ancient promise appears strangely broken. Now the reader must understand the promise mediately, because it now refers to the conquest under Joshua. Thus the relation of the patriarchs to the land in which they live appears as something temporary; indeed, the entire patriarchal period thus becomes theologically a peculiar intermediate state, a wandering from promise to fulfillment which gives to all events the character of temporariness and at the same time mysterious portent. The Hexateuch was already laid out by the Yahwist around the great theological pragmatic plan: patriarchal period and promise, conquest and fulfillment. Even the covenant with Abraham, as an element of tradition, probably belongs to that ancient religion of the fathers (cf. below on Gen. 15.17 ff.). Now, however, it is obviously related to the covenant at Sinai. The relation of the patriarchs not only to the land, but especially to God, is temporary; it finds its fulfillment in God's revelation at Sinai and in the sequestering of the people who had descended by God's will from the patriarchs.

Finally, the content of the patriarchal narratives was broadened because all events of the patriarchal period were connected with all Israel by being oriented toward the conquest under Joshua. If one remembers that the old cultic traditions of the pre-Mosaic period always belonged only to a very small cultic community and that formerly the numerous aetiological narratives likewise had only a limited regional validity, then one will comprehend the full importance of that broadening and orientation toward the Israel of the twelve tribes.

The Yahwist worked to join the traditional material together in yet another way, by the occasional insertion of “interludes”. These are sections which, as can be seen relatively easily, do not go back to ancient tradition but represent short bridges between early narrative material (thus e.g., Gen. 6.5-8; 12.1-9; 18.17-33). These “interludes” are characterized by a higher degree of theological reflection, and for that very reason they are particularly important to us for determining the religious ideas of the Yahwist himself, which otherwise we can discover only in an indirect way.

C. THE INCLUSION OF PRIMEVAL HISTORY

By including a primeval history (chs. 2.4b to 12.3) the Yahwist shows the greatest independence of that sacred tradition which otherwise supports him. The tradition of the conquest began with the patriarchal stories, and never did it contain anything of the primeval history, creation, etc. But where it left the Yahwist in the lurch he was quite self-reliant and free to unfold his own conceptions. Strict proof that the Yahwist had no precursor in that theological union of primeval history and sacred history is, of course, not available. On the other hand, there are no indications that the Yahwist was here following a received tradition. This view is thus unique, and one may still be able to sense the boldness of the first draft in this loosest part of the whole composition.

The primeval history, which the Yahwist constructed from elements of very different kinds, proclaims first of all with impressive one-sidedness that all corruption, all confusion in the world, comes from sin; but it also testifies that the continually widening cleft between God and man is matched by a secret increasing power of grace. The stories of the Fall, of Cain, and of Noah show God's forgiving and supporting act of salvation. Only in the story of the Tower of Babel, when the nations are scattered and the unity of mankind is lost, does the judgment of God seem to be the last word. But here primeval history dovetails with sacred history: Abraham is called from the multitude of nations, “that in him all generations of the earth should be blessed.” Thus the insertion of sacred history gives the answer to the unsolved question of primeval history, the question about the relation of God to all peoples. This entry of sacred history in ch. 12.1-3 is thus not only the conclusion to primeval history but the actual key to it. In this close union of primeval history and sacred history the Yahwist does justice to the meaning and purpose of the conditions of salvation which Yahweh has granted to Israel. He gives the aetiology of all aetiologies in the Old Testament and becomes at this point a true prohet, for the proclaims the distant goal of the sacred history effected by God in Israel to be the bridging of the cleft between God and all mankind; and he announces it neither as being rationally grounded nor as being already comprehensible in its details. The promise in Gen. 12.1 ff. contains three promises of blessing: (1) Abraham will be blessed and become a great nation, (2) Yahweh will give the land to Abraham's seed (v. 7), (3) in Abraham all nations of the earth will be blessed (v. 3). The first two promises were already known to the Yahwist from the tradition of the patriarchal sagas, the third, however, obviously arose from none of the older traditions but directly from the authority of his prophetic inspiration (commentary on chs. 11.28-30; 12.1-3).

2. THE THREE NARRATIVE SOURCES

The preceding discussion presupposes the recognition of a fact that has become accepted in contemporary Old Testament science after almost 200 years of research: The books Genesis to Joshua consist of several continuous source documents that were woven together more or less skillfully by a redactor. The oldest source documents are known as “Yahwist” (J) and “Elohist” (E) because of their distinctive use of the name for God. The Yahwist may be dated ca. 950, the Elohist perhaps one or two centuries later. Deuteronomy (D) is literarily distinct; we have it in the book of Deuteronomy, but Deuteronomistic additions and revisions occur also in the Book of Joshua. The latest source is the Priestly document (P); its actual composition (without the later additions, of course) falls in the postexilic period, ca. 538-450.

The importance of these dates must not be overestimated, both because they are in every instance only guesses and, above all, because they refer only to the completed literary composition. The question of the age of a single tradition within any one of the source documents is an entirely different matter. The youngest document (P), for example, contains an abundance of ancient and very ancient material.

This is not the place for even a partially exhaustive characterization of the descriptive method of the sources. We shall be content with a few indications. As regards the creative genius of the Yahwist's narrative there is only admiration. Someone has justly called the artistic mastery in this narrative one of the greatest accomplishments of all times in the history of thought. Wonderful clarity and utter simplicity characterize the representation of the individual scenes. The meagerness of his resources is truly amazing, and yet this narrator's view encompasses the whole of human life with all its heights and depths. With unrivalled objectivity he has made man the subject of his presentation—both the riddles and conflicts of his visible acts and ways of behaving as well as the mistakes and muddles in the secret of his heart. He among the biblical writers is the great psychologist. However, he is concerned, not with man who with his desires and despair believes himself to be alone in the world, but rather with man to whom the living God has been revealed and who therefore has become the object of divine address, a divine act, and therefore a divine judgment and divine salvation. Thus in the primeval history he subjects the great problems of humanity to the light of revelation: creation and nature, sin and suffering, man and wife, fraternal quarrels, international confusion, etc. But above all, he investigates God's activities in the beginnings of Israel, both their visible wonders and their hidden mysteries. He sees the complete mystery of the election of the Old Testament community, and in Gen. 12.3 he answers the riddle of this divine act with prophetic authority. “Yahweh is the God of the world, his presence is felt everywhere with profound reverence.” (Pr.) Yet precisely the Yahwistic narrative is full of the boldest anthropomorphisms. Yahweh walks in the garden in the cool of the evening; he himself closes the ark; he descends to inspect the Tower of Babel, etc. This is anything but the bluntness and naïveté of an archaic narrator. It is, rather, the candor and lack of hesitation which is only the mark of a lofty and mature way of thinking. This glasslike, transparent, and fragile way of thinking in the Yahwistic narratives makes of every exposition, which inevitably coarsens the original text, a difficult and almost insoluble task.

The work of the Elohist probably arose one or two centuries later. Soon, it was closely intertwined with the work of the Yahwist by a redactor. Even so, it differs rather distinctly from the work of the Yahwist. As a whole, it does not attain the splendor and brilliant perfection of the Yahwistic account. The fabric is much less finely woven. Thus, for example, the spectacular aspect of the miracles is much more strongly emphasized. The work does not require the same degree of reflection from its readers and expositors; it is more “popular”, i.e., it has taken over the old sacred folk tradition with less modification and spiritualization. This accounts for the fact that the Elohist cannot create so many great, overlapping contextual units. (Compare the singleness of purpose in the Yahwistic stories of Abraham or Jacob!) His dependence on popular tradition is especially recognizable in the total plan. The Elohist begins with Abraham and therefore does not have a primeval history. Thus he stands closer than the Yahwist to the old canonical form of the sacred history. The Yahwist, by including the primeval history, deviated from the old tradition more than the Elohist, who felt more bound to the old form of the credo, which had been hammered into the religious consciousness of the people by the tradition of centuries.

This description would be false, however, if the fact were not mentioned at once that the Elohist has clear statements of theological reflection which go beyond what is simply popular. In many places one can recognize almost a systematic theological revision of the old traditions. We will mention only two peculiarities of the Elohist: (1) The immediacy of God with man, his appearances, his movement on earth is severely limited. The angel of Yahweh calls down from heaven, and is therefore no longer thought of as walking on earth (Gen. 21.17; 22.11, 15). Related to this removal of God from men and from anything earthly is the great significance given to dreams. They are now the spiritual plane on which God's revelation meets men. The more neutral sphere of the dream is to some extent the third place where God meets man. But even here man is given no direct access to God's revelation, for man cannot simply interpret the dream except through the power of special inspiration which comes from God (Gen. 40.8; 41.15 f.).

(2) This loss of immediacy with God and his revealed word in the Elohistic work is matched by the great significance that is given to the prophet and his office. The prophet is the properly qualified mediator between God and men; he is the one who receives God's revelation, and he is the one who brings the concerns of men in supplication before God (Gen. 20.7, 17; Ex. 15.20; 20.19; Num., ch. 11; 12.6 ff.; 21.7). The Elohist's concern for the prophet and his tasks is so strong that much can be said for the conjecture that the entire work arose in old prophetic circles. Our exposition, however, does not conceive as its task a thorough elaboration of this narrative in its original form. The interweaving with the Yahwistic narrative is so thorough that any separation can be made only with great damage to the text. Attention will be given in every instance to the theological distinctiveness of the Elohistic tradition.⁵

The Priestly narrative is quite different from the sources characterized above. Its text can be recognized even by laymen because of its striking peculiarities with regard to form and content. One may not consider this document a narrative at all. It is really a Priestly document, i.e., it contains doctrine throughout. It is the result of intensive, theologically ordering thought. Consequently the manner of presentation is quite different. The language is succinct and ponderous, pedantic and lacking artistry. Only at the points of primary interest does the usual, excessively terse diction become relaxed and more detailed in an effort to paraphrase the matter conceptually (e.g., Gen., chs. 1; 9; 17). If in the Yahwist we found a narration of overpowering simplicity without anything doctrinal (in the narrower sense of the word), in the Priestly document we find a minimum of vivid narration and artistic movement. In this respect the writing is divested of every impressive ornament. To be sure, the greatness of the work lies precisely in that renunciation, for this sober objectivity is in reality the deepest concern, the most intense concentration on what is revealed by God. Here everything is written after reflection; nothing is without theological relevance, for in this work we have the essence of the theological labor of many generations of priests. No effort is given to depicting man as the recipient of revelation or to the circumstances, the conflicts, the spiritual or social uncertainties attending that experience. The figures of the Priestly account are in this respect completely colorless and shadowy. The whole interest is focused exclusively on what comes from God, his words, judgments, commands, and regulations. Thus it describes a course of history only with respect to God's revealed judgments and regulations, with respect to divine regulations which with increasing number establish and assure the salvation of God's people. It presents history, not of men, but of divine regulations on earth, in so far as one can speak of history in this way. The “composition” of such a work with its infinitely slow growth of such sacred traditions cannot be determined in terms of a year or a century. Even though it may really have received its final form only in the postexilic period, still, along with later material and material that has been considerably revised theologically, it also preserves very ancient matter in almost unchanged archaic garb.

The interweaving by the redactor of this document with the previously united Yahwist and Elohist documents (“the Jehovist”) could not, of course, be done organically. The Priestly texts are as a rule simply recorded, each in its place, in the composition of the Hexateuch. In Genesis, apart from minor insertions from the Priestly document, the redactor found himself forced to unite the tradition of P and J to one text only in the story of the Flood.

The Hexateuch in its present form arose by means of redactors who heard the peculiar testimony of faith of each document and considered it binding. There is no doubt that the present Hexateuch in its final form makes great demands on the understanding of every reader. Many ages, many men, many traditions and theologies, have constructed this massive work. Only the one who does not look super-ficially at the Hexateuch but reads it with a knowledge of its deep dimension will arrive at true understanding. Such a one will know that revelations and religious experiences of many ages are speaking from it. For no stage in this work's long period of growth is really obsolete; something of each phase has been conserved and passed on as enduring until the Hexateuch attained its final form.

3. THE THEOLOGICAL PROBLEM OF THE YAHWIST

One further question most be answered if one is to understand the Yahwistic (and also Elohistic) work. A great number of old cultic traditions are included in the Yahwist's work, materials that were created, formed, and preserved by the cult through long periods of time. But now this cultic attachment and orientation, without which these materials were at one time unthinkable, has been absolutely stripped away, as we saw; it is as though they had changed into a chrysalis and now emerged in new, free form. They all have risen high above their sacred, native soil, and now, having grown independent, they move in a partially or even completely “cult-less” atmosphere. The Yahwist's distinctively spiritual method, which, by the way, is almost without parallel in Old Testament religious history, seems to us like a cool breath from the freethinking era of Solomon. The question now is whether this process by which the traditions outgrew their origins was a necessary secularization, or whether the loss that these traditions suffered by being separated from the cult was compensated for by a new but different kind of theological attachment. A witness in the theological sense of the word arises only in relation to a preceding divine act of revelation; and it is really quite unthinkable that the Yahwist spoke to his people without such a backing for his words.

It is surely not unprofitable to inquire after the divine fact which formed the background against which the Yahwist plotted his entire work. Ancient Israel considered God's speaking and acting for man's salvation as confined to the sacred institutions, particularly to the narrower cultic sphere of sacrifice and divine decision mediated by the priest. But men also experienced God's gracious, saving act in the wider cultic sphere, in the holy war, the charisma of a qualified leader, the “terror of God” which fell upon the enemy without human agency, or in other miracles that occurred because of the presence of the sacred Ark. The Yahwist, however, considers God's activity in a fundamentally different way. He does not challenge the possibilities with which his forebears reckoned, but he goes far beyond these notions of faith. He sees God's leading in the facts of history as well as in the quiet course of a human life, in the sacred things, but not less in the profane, in great miracles as well as in the innermost secrets of the human heart. (In the story of Jacob and Joseph we are brought close to the thought that God works even in and through man's sin!) In a word, the chief importance of God's activity suddenly lies outside the sacred institutions. It is thereby perhaps more concealed from the natural eye because the entire profane sphere is also the domain of God's activity; but it is nevertheless looked at more inclusively, not intermittently, but much more continually. The Yahwist presents one story of divine guidance and disposition; God's providence is revealed in all areas of life, the public as well as the private.

This view, which did not consider God's activity as confined to the old sanctified sacred institutions but which ventured to discover it retrospectively in the tortured paths of political as well as personal fortune, was something new when compared to the old conception of the patriarchal cult. But it is in fact connected very closely with the great historical events of the Davidic period especially. The ancient sacred union of tribes (in the period of the Judges) had dissolved, and national life had begun to shed its old forms and to become profane. By the time of Saul the national mind had already become emancipated from the old cultic regulations, and this process certainly made further progress under the much more systematically constructed state apparatus of David, with its newly organized court and military life. Ordinary life in its details became more autonomous and demanding. At all events, the period had ended when sacred regulations on principle took precedence over all other legitimacies of life. Had Israel thus slipped from the hand of its ancient God, the God of the patriarchs and of Moses? Had she thus departed from the domain of his salvation and his leading? That was the great question.

The reader will not find it hard to read the answer from the Yahwist's work. This narrative displays boundless confidence in the nearness of Yahweh, in the immediacy of his rule and in the possibility of speaking of all this, in the simplest possible terms, in the new religious language. Of course, to discover the whole range of the Yahwist's thought it is necessary to add to his stories of the patriarchs the narratives about Moses, the event on Sinai and the wandering in the wilderness, as they are contained in Exodus and Numbers. It then becomes quite clear that the old times, including the period of the Judges, lie far behind him. It can, however, be ascertained that the historical situation presupposed by the Yahwist's work must have arisen in the period immediately following the formation of the state. It is striking that the tribes have given up their political independence, but that we can discover no reference to the deep division of Israel into two kingdoms.⁶

More important than the political changes that can be inferred is, however, the change in religious conceptions which have become more “modern” than those of the archaic period of the Judges. Behind the work of the Yahwist stands a new experience of God. Throughout this work, which is still a unique history of miraculous and hidden guidance and divine providence, one feels able to trace the freshness of the joy of a new discovery. These remarks have to be made to warn the reader of these stories against deceiving himself by his familiarity with them, and to urge him to understand their revolutionary contemporary character against their special background.

4. HERMENEUTICAL PROBLEMS OF THE GENESIS NARRATIVES

At first, knowledge of the long process to which individual traditions were subjected before they received their final and present form in our book of Genesis makes the work of the exegete difficult. Above all, there are two groups of hermeneutic questions that we must wrestle to answer. For a long time Old Testament science has called these traditions “sagas.” Thus one of the first tasks of the exegete is to give an exact account of this term, the possibility and the limits of its use. A second task arises from the fact that the narratives, which formerly began in isolation, are now related to a large overarching context and obviously must be interpreted within this context, from the particular spot that has been assigned to them within the whole. Finally, as a result of putting together the source documents, there have arisen relationships and theological interplay between the individual texts which demand discussion. In connection with this last problem the question about the historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) of these narratives (in their present form) must be raised anew and answered.

It is to the undying credit of H. Gunkel that in his great commentary on Genesis he separated the original narrative units from the larger whole and analyzed them with a distinctive aesthetic charisma. These individual traditions were of very different kinds. As we have seen, a number of them were cultic aetiological narratives. Others arose from the need to explain the origin of certain curiosities in the relationship of the tribes and the nations to one another; these are traditions with an ethnological aetiology. Some narratives are like rather short novellistic poems. Indeed, one may not refuse on principle to accept an originally vacillating character of one or another narrative in its oldest form—we are speaking now of the oldest preliterary form of these single traditions! But that these very old traditions are for the most part sagas is a fact, the background of which we can investigate no further. What does this fact, which today is neither new nor scientifically disputed, and yet concerning which so much lack of clarity still prevails, mean for the exegete?

Suspicion of saga begins as a rule with doubt concerning its “historical” content. It is considered a product of poetic fantasy, and as such it has at best a broken relation to historical reality, or none at all. Consciously or unconsciously this depreciation proceeds from a one-sided overestimation of historical writing, which records exactly and trustworthily everything the saga mentions unclearly and often with distortion.⁷ This way of judging—one could call it historical materialism—contains an extremely crass misunderstanding of the essence of saga; it was, however, by and large a characteristic of the nineteenth century, which was otherwise so well schooled in historical perception.⁸

No, the saga is the result of a kind of intellectual activity quite different from that of history (Historie), and it is advisable to compare history (Historie) with sagas as little as possible. To be sure, there exists one point in common—and it was the cause of all fatal comparisons: both are concerned with history (Geschichte). That is true of the biblical saga even when it is concerned with apparently unhistorical material. Whatever saga we examine, we find with respect to its simplest and most original purpose that it narrates an actual event that occurred once for all in the realm of history. It is therefore to be taken quite seriously (as distinct, for example, from fairy tales, which serve primarily to entertain)—it is to be “believed.”⁹ In all that follows, therefore, let us hold fast to this: by no means is saga merely the product of free-ranging fantasy; it, too, conjures up history. It is the form favoured by a people for depicting its early history. Of course it does not feel bound by the modern demand for exactness. The saga¹⁰ comes from a quite different period of the people. Its roots are in a form of society preceding that of the state, which means that it lives and grows at a time when the power of rational and logical, historical perception is not yet fully liberated, at a time, however, when the powers of instinctive, intuitively interpretative, one could almost say mantic, understanding dominate all the more freely. In its sagas a people is concerned with itself and the realities in which it finds itself. It is, however, a view and interpretation not only of that which once was but of a past event that is secretly present and decisive for the present. Thus, just as for an individual certain events or decisions of the past determine his whole life, so in the life of tribes and peoples past events have a direct influence on the present and mold it. It is the saga, much more than historical writing, that knows this secret contemporary character of apparently past events; it can let things become contemporary in such a way that everyone detects their importance, while the same events would probably have been overlooked by historical writing (if it can be thought to have existed at the time). For there is another history that a people makes besides the externals of wars, victories, migrations, and political catastrophes. It is an inner history, one that takes place on a different level, a story of inner events, experiences, and singular guidance, of working and becoming mature in life's mysteries; and for Israel that meant a history with God. One can see that the subject-matter of saga is quite special; above all, the way in which it describes and re-presents the past has unmistakable characteristics. For example, it is simply a fact—to begin with something general—that the sagas about the patriarchs, in spite of their complexity, preserve a mood, a spiritually religious atmosphere, if one may put it this way, that was obviously a characteristic of the pre-Mosaic period. And one can say that the prerogative of the saga over all “more exact” traditions is just to preserve these imponderable, intimate experiences from a people's youth. Thus occasionally the things of which the saga takes possession are trifling. And yet, even then it is often concerned with facts and events of much greater inner significance than many things that history (Historie) puts down, because they have a longer aftereffect and therefore remain decisive for the existence of posterity. There is often an entire world of events—actual, experienced events!—enclosed in a single saga. The saga, therefore, has a much higher degree of density than has history (Historie).

This is also expressed in the style. Through centuries of being told and heard, that primitive art, which can speak simply of small as well as quite important things without diminishing their substance, grew equal to the task of describing all human experience. Indeed, this art was the first to appear as the only monumental form appropriate for such content. The biblical traditions are characterized by a thorough-going economy of expression on the emotional side. What men thought or felt, what moved them, is subordinate to the objective events. When the narrator does say something about the fright or anxiety that took hold of a man (Gen. 15.12; 32.7), his remark seems all the more primitive precisely because of its rareness.

Anyone who wants to understand such sagas correctly must acquire a broader and more profound conception of “history” (Geschichte) than what is often accepted today. At the beginning, the saga in most cases certainly contained a “historical” fact as its actual crystallizing point. But in addition it reflects a historical experience on the relevant community which extends into the present time of the narrator. This second constructional element is, as a rule, the stronger, often dominating to such an extent that it can expand and elevate the material to a historical type behind which the original historical fact more and more disappears. In other cases the degree of inner revision and fashioning of the material by those who came later is much smaller, as for example in the tradition of God's covenant with Abraham (Gen. 15.7 ff.), a cult saga that in all essential points was obviously left in its archaic form.

Despite the great differences in style and theme which distinguish the individual stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob from each other, they have one common factor: with the exception of Gen. 14 they all move in the same social and political sphere, that of the independent family.¹¹ The family in which so many astounding things happen, the family which has to sustain such severe tensions, is not one partial sphere of communal human life here, set over against other forms. Rather, it is the total sphere of all human communal life; it is the framework of all human activity, politics and economics as well as religion. In this sphere, events like the birth of a child or a quarrel have a special importance which is only attached to them here. The way in which the narrative material is thus rooted in the family or the clan is a sign of its antiquity. Of course, both its form and its content changed a great deal as it was handed down. Thus one may reckon correctly with subsequent expansion of old traditions by means of material, even by means of fairy-tale motifs.¹² This does not endanger the “historicity” of the saga in any way, in so far as with the help of such means it elucidates real events and experiences; for the saga cannot report in abstract formulas, but its manner of communicating is highly figurative. History has therefore not directly merged with saga, so to speak, but rather its form has been changed by long thought and is reflected somewhat brokenly in single images. This peculiar process of symbolization attempts primarily to demonstrate, through the experiences of a single individual, historical facts that originally belonged completely to the group. In Abraham and Jacob, Israel saw, increasingly, simply the need and the promise of its own existence before God. That does not mean, of course, that these figures and the traditions about them are nothing more than subsequent projections of popular faith back into the primeval period. It means, rather, that this material did not lie in the archives untouched but was molded and substantially enlarged by being handed down for centuries. Certainly one would understand the saga of Jacob's nocturnal struggle at the Jabbok, for example, only superficially, and would miss its primary meaning, if one were to suppose that its concern were exhausted in describing the details of an event of the distant past as objectively as possible. No! The saga Gen. 32.22 ff. in its present form, in the garb and style of a narrative of bygone events, tells of things that at the same time are thoroughly present. Israel recognized something of her own relation to God in what Jacob experienced at that time. Thus the saga has a wonderful transparence of its own, and only in this character has it become the witness of a past, and at the same time completely contemporary, act of God.

In ancient Israel the principal power in the forming of saga was faith. In any case, we do not have a single saga that has not received from faith its decisive stamp and orientation. In every instance the degree of this revision, stamp, and orientation is completely different. There are sagas—especially those which formerly were cult sagas—which through many generations, from their beginning until their mature final form, were under the formative influence of faith. Other material existed popularly for a long time in more worldly narratives (perhaps even of doubtful value!) before it was incorporated into the religious realm. One must not think, however, that this religious requisition, even if it changed the content of the saga only at a relatively late period, was therefore only superficial and did not touch its essential content. The opposite is true. The later the version of a saga, the more theologically reflective and less naïve it is. Even if this transformation altered the external form of the text only slightly, even if it is true that on occasion only the name of Yahweh was subsequently added, that change is nevertheless radical, for this inserted name, Yahweh, is something very presumptuous.¹³ When this ancient material was related to Yahweh, when Yahweh loomed above the previous substance of the saga, which was perhaps profane, this meant a complete abrogation of its ancient immanental meaning and a new illumination of all parts of the narrated material. Thus we must reckon with the fact that certain individual characteristics, formerly belonging to the insignificant accessories, have now become extremely significant. This requisition of ancient saga by theological reflection mirrors nothing other than what all Israel experienced by the revelation of Yahweh: the requisition of all areas of life, of all profane spheres, by God's exacting and promising will.

To bring out the point, one might even say that the patriarchal narratives deal more with God than with men. Men are not important in themselves, but only as the objects of divine planning and action. Above all, one must ask where and in what sense Abraham, Jacob, or Joseph are meant by the narrator to be understood as models, by virtue of their own actions or of divine providence. In some cases—e.g., Gen. 13; 15.6; 22.1 ff.—that is probably indeed the case. Such narratives are meant to encourage imitation, “discipleship.” But they are in the minority. The figures of the patriarchs are presented with a matter-of-fact realism which by no means suppresses those things that move and concern mankind, and on some occasions weakness and failure are brought out with unrelieved harshness. One need only think of the three variations on the narrative of the “endangering of the ancestress” (Gen. 12.10 ff.; 20.1 ff.; 26.7 ff.).¹⁴ The patriarchal narratives are remarkably free of that urge to transfigure and idealize the figures of earlier times, which plays such a great role in popular literature. The patriarchal narratives do not fall short of the rest of the Old Testament in drawing a picture of man which Israel only found through a long conversation with Yahweh. It is the picture of a man who is directed to hear the divine address and who is sheltered by the guidance of this God.

Of course, one can now ask whether the designation “saga” is still appropriate for this material which is so permeated through and through by faith. It is certainly misleading if we apply it to the present forms of the Old Testament traditions, for from a literary point of view we have here narratives which have reached a high degree of artistry and which venture to depict God's ways in sacred history by means of constantly new pictures.

The measure of freedom that J, E, or P could exercise in their literary modification of the available material was scarcely great. In any case this freedom was much more limited than any modern Western author would be permitted to claim for himself. The Yahwist, in shaping the individual narrative, probably did not go beyond some trimming of the archaic profiles and making definite fine accents. He could naturally act much more freely when joining originally independent narratives. And even if some attempts at uniting various traditions into a small unit in a few cases have been made, nevertheless the actual composition of the narratives in Genesis is without question his work. And the important thing is this: the individuality of the Yahwist, his basic theological conceptions, are much less apparent within the individual narratives than in the character of the composition as a whole. The Yahwist's theology of history is essentially expressed in the way he has linked together the materials, connected and harmonized them with one another. This theological conception of the Yahwist is important for the exegete because it became the canon to a certain extent for the interpretation of the other source narratives and thereby also became definitive for the final form of Genesis.

The way the Yahwist, from the most varied kinds of building material, formed in the primeval history (chs. 2 to 11) a story of mankind's increasing alienation from God has already been indicated (in the section “The Inclusion of the Primeval History”). He obviously set as the theme of the Abraham narratives the postponement of the promise. The outstanding characteristic of the Yahwistic (also of the Elohistic) narratives in contrast to the Priestly document is that they summarize with particular minuteness of detail the subjective situation of the one who receives the promise. They note the characteristic conflicts, temptations, and errors into which the patriarchs fell precisely in receiving the promise, both because of its increasing expression and because of its delay.

Compare the narratives of ch. 12.10 ff. (Sarah in Egypt) and ch. 16 (Hagar)! In ch. 12.10 ff. immediately after receiving the great, divine promise—enhanced meanwhile by the promise of land in v. 7—Abraham is beset with great difficulties (famine in the Promised Land!). He acts as though God's promise could not be relied upon at all, that is, in complete unbelief. God saves her who is to be the mother of Israel and carries forward his promise over all the chasms of despair regarding the heir of promise. This narrative, which recurs in three forms in Genesis (chs. 20; 26), obviously was especially important to the ancients. It shows something of the confusion and perplexity that the divine promise evoked in men, but more than that, it shows the faithfulness of Yahweh, who stands by his plan of salvation which is often betrayed by men. In ch. 16, judging by human standards, the possibility of receiving the heir of promise from Sarah is past. This dilemma causes those concerned to take matters into their own hands, and men try to force the fulfillment of the promise because they do not trust God for it. But this Ishmael, begotten in defiance and lack of faith, cannot be the child of promise. God will be with him indeed, but he will be a brute (!) fighting against everyone and everyone against him. With respect to the psychology of faith, both narratives illustrate Abraham's extremely different reactions to the promise. Two basic attitudes appear as almost typical: (1) disregard for, and (2) arbitrary wresting of, the divine offer. In both cases a difficulty that has emerged over the bearer of the promise gives rise to an action which works against Yahweh's plan. This conviction of a historical plan conceived by Yahweh and the assurance with which this plan is contrasted with human action is very reminiscent of the authority of the prophets, who in other circumstances claimed to know the long-term divine plan for history. The necessity for psychological uniformity in the human portrait that was being sketched was foreign to these narrators.

Naturally one cannot expect complete thematic consistency in a composition that joins together the most varied preformed materials. Occasionally the narratives are even unyielding toward one another. In the stories of Laban, for instance, one cannot help feeling that the individual traditions to which the Yahwist was bound by the history of tradition had resisted thematic permeation more than others because of their specific weight and particular character. And yet the plan for a thematic synopsis of the whole cannot be misunderstood. The Jacob story in its “Jehovistic” form is like a bridge supported from within by two pillars: by the Bethel story (ch. 28) on the one hand and the Peniel story (ch. 32.22 ff.) on the other. And, what is more, the paradox of the divine act in each of the two incidents is extremely harsh. Where Jacob has experienced bankruptcy, where everything seems done for, blessing turned to curse, there God gives him the promise. And where the narrative shows him prosperous, where he thinks he has only to survive a quarrel with Esau, there God falls on him like a nocturnal ghost. And here again the point is the blessing! (v. 26.) Obviously these striking narrative sections are meant to indicate the leading theological ideas and cause the reader to read the entire story of Jacob with respect to the inscrutability and freedom of God's ways.

Any scholarly commentary must attempt to understand the narrative material of Genesis primarily in the way in which it was understood in the context of the great narrative works J, E, and P, that is, as it was understood in Israel between the ninth and the fifth centuries b.c. This is difficult, because the narrators do not interpret the events directly, but are quite restrained in their judgments. They do not hand over an explanation to the reader, but take him through the events without assessing men's actions and experiences, evidently on the presupposition that these events are able to speak for themselves to the reader or hearer. For this reason, the interpreter has to give up from the start any search for one meaning which is the only meaning that the narrator can have intended. He will have to concede that it could have prompted the reflections of the reader in more than one direction. Equally, however, the exegete must reserve for himself the right to reject interpretations which are inappropriate to the narrative or to the understanding of the reader. If he is to keep on the right lines, he needs to read the material very carefully. The interpreter will find great help in the leading ideas which permeate the narratives, for example the theme of promise, which was discussed above (pp. 22f.). Whatever happened to the patriarchs was part of the divine plan for history, which was directed beyond the life of these men toward a still distant goal.

If the reader of today raises the question of the “historicity” of the events, he must first realize that the ancient narrators were simply not aware of this question that so often troubles modern man. Still less did they see an “either-or” here. So we must attempt to answer the question in an indirect way, i.e., in terms of the very nature of these stories. What we have said so far has already suggested one thing: the old, naïve idea of the historicity of these narratives as being biographically reliable stories from the life of the patriarchs must be abandoned. If the narratives of Gen., chs. 18; 22; 28; 32 were once very early Palestinian cult legends (and therefore pre-Israelite and pre-Canaanite), and if the tradition of the patriarchs was only interwoven with these narratives after the Israelite incursion, we can no longer accept them as documents from the life of the patriarchs. The same is true of most of the patriarchal narratives. (This is not to deny that individual elements—now bound up with these narratives—in fact go back to the “patriarchal period”; but that does not alter the general picture.) The stories are about the past, indeed the distant past, but the God who directs events and speaks to the patriarchs is Yahweh, who was as yet unknown to the pre-Mosaic ancestors of Israel (Exod., 3.13 ff.; 6.6). Similarly, the religious field of tension in which the faith of an Abraham had to make its choice between temptation and faith, is much less that of the ancestors of Israel than that of the narrators and their time. They were not concerned to revive a long past religious situation. On the contrary, these narratives express everything that Israel had learnt from her association with Yahweh right down to the narrator's own time. By the medium of these sagas, the narrators express many of the essentials of what Israel had learnt in her history with Yahweh. In this sense the narratives are deeply rooted in history. So it is no longer possible to discover what historical event lies behind the narrative of the jeopardizing of Sarah; we must, in fact, assume that the transfer of the material to Abraham and Sarah was only made subsequently (see the expositions on chs. 12; 20; 26). Therefore one could say pointedly that this narrative is not “historical”; but the experience that God miraculously preserves the promise beyond human failure was eminently historical (geschichtlich) for the community. These narratives have a very high degree of compactness because they compress experiences that faith brought to the community slowly, perhaps over centuries. And this is primarily what gives the narratives their proper characteristic witness. So much is clear: if the historicity of the patriarchal narratives now rests essentially upon the community's experiences of faith, then that fact has far-reaching consequences for exegesis. No one will deny that dangers threaten this kind of exegesis. Even though we stand for a high degree of spiritualizing—in our opinion the subtle spirituality of these narratives has been greatly underestimated even in their first literary version—nevertheless, this way of exegesis threatens to evaporate into purely allegorical interpretation, a tendency that must nevertheless be resisted. One needs to understand that the communal theological element of which we are speaking may never be declared the sole content of the narrative. It is indeed an important component that again and again must be freshly considered; but with it in individual traditions there have been preserved characteristics of a more ancient, indeed, most ancient, meaning, which the exegete may not overlook. Therefore, it is impossible even for the most carefully thought out hermeneutical rule to mark the middle course which will preserve in these narratives their characteristic uniqueness for sacred history. Under no circumstances may the narratives be deprived of this imponderable element of historical moment.

The long process of tradition which many narratives have undergone has left a number of traces behind in them. Usually it is a matter of some inner unevennesses or dislocations in the structure of a particular narrative. These are nowhere so obvious as in the narrative of Jacob's struggle in Gen. 32.10 ff., where in one and the same story quite different conceptions of the event have been preserved side by side (see the commentary). The question of the nature of the narrative material at a pre-literary stage has been discussed most perceptively by H. Gunkel in his great commentary. It is still largely open, even today, as in the meantime the way of posing the problems it raises has shifted, and Gunkel's explanations are no longer always adequate. Occasionally the question must be posed in an entirely new way. However, one should not investigate the earlier history of the material with the expectation of finding what is really “authentic” at the lowest level attainable, of coming upon the historical tracks of the patriarchs themselves. Quite apart from the fact that this will very rarely be the case, the narrative never for a moment leaves us in doubt that it does not share this interest in its earliest level. Consequently, I feel that it is particularly important today that we should turn once again to exegesis of the texts in their present form, that is, that we should take up the question of the meaning that was gradually attached to them, not least through their incorporation into a great narrative complex with its specific themes.¹⁵ Is there unanimity among exegetes about the meaning of the narrative of the “sacrifice of Isaac” in its present literary (not its preliterary) form? Furthermore, the exegete must take into account the fact that the sources are no longer separate from each other, but have been combined together. Must one not say that the two creation stories are in many respects open to each other? In the exposition it will be pointed out that the Yahwist has an intimate world constructed around man (the garden, the trees, the animals, the wife), while P paces the great cosmos in all dimensions before he treats the creation of man. Genesis, ch. 2, complements ch. 1 by its witness to God's providential, almost fatherly, act toward man, etc. Futhermore, the story of the Fall can no longer be expounded without reference to the “very good” in ch. 1.31. And for the patriarchal stories it must at least be kept in mind that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is also the Yahweh who grants forgiveness in the cultic sacrifice in the Taber-nacle. True, in Genesis, the redactor has in many instances given precedence to the Yahwistic-Elohistic tradition over the Priestly document. But in the book of Exodus the situation is reversed, and since Genesis and Exodus are not two separate “books,” that must be considered in the exegesis.

Franz Rosenzweig once remarked wittily that the sign “R” (for the redactor of the Hexateuch documents, so lowly esteemed in Protestant research) should be interpreted as Rabbenu, “our master,” because basically we are dependent only on him, on his great work of compilation and his theology, and we receive the Hexateuch at all only from his hands.¹⁶ From the standpoint of Judaism, that is consistent. But for us, in respect to hermeneutics, even the redactor is not “our master.” We receive the Old Testament from the hands of Jesus Christ, and therefore all exegesis of the Old Testament depends on whom one thinks Jesus Christ to be. If one sees in him the bringer of a new religion, then one will consistently examine the chief figures of the patriarchal narratives for their inward religious disposition and by, say, drawing religious “pictures from life” will bring into the foreground what comes close to Christianity or even corresponds with it. But this “pious” view is unsatisfactory because the principal subject of the account in the Genesis stories is not the religious characteristics of the patriarchs at all. Any mention of them is almost an aside. Often the details have to be drawn from the reader's imagination. The real subject of the account is everywhere a quite definite act of Yahweh, into which the patriarchs are drawn, often with quite perplexing results. So the first interest of the reader must be in what circumstances and in what way Yahweh's guidance is given, and what consequences result from it. In all the variety of the story, can we perhaps recognize some things that are typical of the action of God towards men? Then we must go on to raise the chief question: can we not recognize a common link even between the revelation of God in the old covenant and that in the new, a “type”? The patriarchal narratives include experiences which Israel had of a God who revealed himself and at the same time on occasions hid himself more deeply. In this very respect we can see a continuity between the Old Testament and the New. In the patriarchal narratives, which know so well how God can conceal himself, we see a revelation of God which precedes his manifestation in Jesus Christ. What we are told here of the trials of a God who hides himself and whose promise is delayed, and yet of his comfort and support, can readily be read into God's revelation of himself in Jesus Christ.

Notes

1. By cult legend or hieros logos we mean a sacred story that tells of a god's appearance and revelation at a place which for that reason became a cultic center. Such traditions were, of course, carefully cultivated at the shrines and passed on, for from them alone derived the legitimacy of a cult center. Everything depended upon this legitimacy. Men did not believe it necessary to pray and offer sacrifice everywhere, of course, but only where God had already revealed himself and where he had prescribed the manner for prayer. (The narrative in Gen., ch. 18, was once the cult legend of Mamre, that in ch. 28, the cult legend of Bethel. See further Judg. 6; 13; II Sam., ch. 24; etc.) The great festivals too were based on a sacred story; by it they were justified and shaped, often to the extent of becoming part of the cult drama

2. It is well to consider what in all probability would have happened to these traditions if they had not been united in a fixed literary form. Without doubt the fact that some traditions were detached from the cultic sphere meant that their content was heavily spiritualized. Nor will it be denied that this liberation from a musty and materialistic cult was a fortunate occurrence, which opened up the possibility of unsuspected development of the subject of this material. But by the same token, the traditions would be more and more subject to inner dissipation. Every such spiritualization is at the same time a dangerous process of dissolution working at the marrow of the material, for every spiritualization is also a rationalization. One no longer finds oneself before the material in the naïve attitude of reverential acceptance, but rather, one begins to stand over it and to interpret and reform it according to one's own reason. Take an example in which this process can be well observed, the Manna story (Ex., ch. 16). The older Manna story (especially vs. 4-5, 13b-15, 27-30) is meant to be understood quite objectively and is full of historical difficulties. The version of the Priestly document is quite different (vs. 2-3, 6-13a, 16-26). The event is apparently described concretely, yet in such a way that no reader is detained by the external details, but rather its secret spiritual meaning becomes clear as day. A miracle, limited in space and time, becomes something universal, almost timelessly valid. Here no storyteller is speaking, but rather a man who is theologian through and through, who has clothed his reflections in the very transparent garb of a historical narrative. But the Deuteronomist has taken a great step even beyond this position.

   “And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know; that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but that man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord.”—Deut. 8.3.

   Where the Priestly document externally preserved the old form of the report throughout—the spiritualization existed only in a certain transparency of the narrative—the Deuteronomist gave up the old meaning altogether. He speaks only indirectly of actual eating to still hunger and substitutes for it feeding on God's word. Bluntly he tells what spiritual meaning actually lay behind the material event at that time. Here too it must be said that the old, simple story has been beautifully and significantly enlarged by that spiritualization; but one cannot deny it was providential that free reign for such progressive spiritualization and religious transformation was not given to all traditions of the Hexateuch. One can only surmise that process of dissolution which was arrested when the traditions were written down. This much in any case can be observed: when the material was written down, it became fixed at a phase of its development in which a certain religious transformation had already occurred, but when, notwithstanding, the historical element was preserved undissipated and with the full import of uniqueness.

3. M. Noth, Überlieferungsgeschichte des Pentateuch, ³1963, pp. 63 ff.

4. A. Alt, “The God of the Fathers” (1929), in: Essays on Old Testament History and Religion, 1966.

5. On the Elohist, see H.-W. Wolff, “Zur Thematik der elohistischen Fragmente im Pentateuch,” Evangelische Theologie 1969, 59 ff.

6. More details in H. W. Wolff, “Das Kerygma des Jahwisten,” Gesammelte Studien zum AT, 1964, 345 ff.

7. “The form which we have provisionally called history (Historie) acts as an enemy of the saga; it threatens it, it waylays it, it slanders it and perverts the words in its mouth. That which was positive in the saga becomes negative in history. That which was truth becomes falsehood. The tyranny of history is in fact able to assert of the saga that it simply does not exist but is only a kind of timid preparation for history itself.” (A. Jolles, Einfache Formen², 1956, 64.)

8. Thus even in Grimm's dictionary this term “saga” is defined as information about events in the past which lack historical verification.

9. A. W. Schlegel, Sämtliche Werke XII, 1847, 387; K. Wehrhan, Sachwörterbuch der Deutschkunde, 2, 1930, s.v. “Sage.”

10. For the saga in ancient Israel, now see K. Koch, The Growth of the Biblical Tradition, 1969, §12.

11. C. Westermann, “Arten der Erzählung in der Genesis”, Forschung am Alten Testament, 1964, 35-39.

12. O. Eissfeldt, “Stammessage und Novelle in den Geschichten von Jakob und seinen Söhnen,” in: Eucharisterion für H. Gunkel, i, 1923, 56 ff.

13. “One need delete only the name of Yahweh to remove almost all the varnish with which Israel covered the strange pictures.” H. Gressmann, ZAW, 1910, 24 f.

14. Delitzsch says of the Tamar story (Gen., ch. 38): “Thus … the beginnings of the tribe of Judah were shaped by the remarkable interaction of human sin and divine guidance. … How simple are the images of Israel's ancestors! They have almost more shadow than light. National ambition did not add to them or change them. No trace of an idealizing myth is noticeable. The nobleness of these figures consists in the fact that they conquer in the strength of the grace granted to them, and when defeated, they arise again and again. Their mistakes are the foils of their greatness for sacred history. By the yardstick of the Old Testament even Tamar, with all her going astray, is a saint because of her wisdom, her tenderness, her nobility.” (451 f.)

15. See now H. W. Wolff, “Kerygma”, cited p. 31 above.

16. M. Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Die Schrift und ihre Verdeutschung, 1936, 322.