SOURCE: "The Pentateuch" in The Hebrew Bible and Its Modern Interpreters, edited by Douglas A. Knight and Gene M. Tucker, Fortress Press, 1985, pp. 263-96.

[In the essay that follows, Knight examines the literary structure and intentions of the author(s) of the Torah through a critical survey of Pentateuchal scholarship.]

It would be difficult to overestimate the role that the Pentateuch has played in the course of biblical scholarship. In all likelihood, these first five books have been subjected to scrutiny more than any other single block of the Bible, with the sole possible exception of the Gospels. It is significant that the Pentateuch has generally served as the staging ground for many if not most of the critical questions and methods that later spread to other areas of the biblical literature. Consider the following examples: Eight centuries ago Ibn Ezra wrote a commentary on the Pentateuch in which he delicately asked whether Moses could in fact have written all parts of the books normally attributed to him; subsequently, of course, such questioning of traditional authorship has extended to all parts of the Pentateuch as well as to, for example, Davidic composition of the psalms, Solomonic responsibility for wisdom literature, the origin of the prophetic writings, the authorship of the Gospels, the writer of various Pauline letters, to say nothing of the source of many of Jesus' sayings. Second, even before source criticism the idea that oral and written traditions might have been transmitted from generation to generation was proposed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the Hexateuchal studies of such scholars as John Calvin, Martin Chemnitz, Andreas Masius, Blaise Pascal, Baruch Spinoza, and Richard Simon; again, this notion has become common fare throughout the range of biblical studies, with the special twentieth-century perception that such traditions would not have been handed down passively but would have actually developed in the course of their transmission. Third, source criticism, as is well known, was first proposed for Genesis in the eighteenth century, initially by Henning Bermhard Witter in 1711 and then by Jean Astruc in 1753; now it is commonplace for scholars to inquire about the unitary or composite character of biblical passages and the authorship, date, and provenance of any sources we may discover. Fourth, the method of Religionsgeschichte seems, as can best be determined, to have emerged from a circle of friends that included Albert Eichhom, Wilhelm Wrede, Hermann Gunkel, Wilhelm Bousset, Hugo Gressmann, and Ernst Troeltsch, but Gunkel's landmark study of 1895, Schöpfung und Chaos, was one of the very first full attempts to study a portion of biblical literature from this perspective. Fifth, form criticism of biblical literature originated with Gunkel's commentary on Genesis in 1901; it is now inconceivable to conduct critical exegesis without attention to form, genre, Sitz im Leben, and intention. In all of these cases—and many more could be added to them—the Pentateuch was the literary material that first invited closer study and presented in the process other problems demanding attention. The majority of biblical criticism holds itself in debt to these five books of the Torah.

However, the vital importance of the Pentateuch extends beyond its role in the development of critical methods, for it has long been used as the primary key to understanding Israel's history, society, religion, and morality. These are all addressed matter-of-factly in these ancient writings. The creation of the world, the origin of the people, the institution of religion, the ordering of family and social life—all are recounted in narratives, genealogies, laws, and speeches. But they were not presented simply out of antiquarian interest, as if merely to record what occurred in earliest times. Rather, this literature seems to be designed to lay out the program for Israel's life in later periods: settlement, monarchy, exile, and reconstruction. This is evident quite explicitly in the Mosaic sermons in Deuteronomy, but it cannot be mistaken elsewhere as well—from the relationship with neighboring peoples implied in eponymous ancestral stories, to the details for the temple building, to the cultic and moral ordinances for a settled agricultural and urban life. Of course, historical criticism has argued persuasively that most of these details stem not from the pre-settlement period as they purport to do, but instead are projected from later centuries back into the ancestral and Mosaic times. Thus the Pentateuch, which ends with the death of Moses (generally thought to have occurred in the thirteenth century B.C.E.), serves actually as a major source for our reconstruction of the cultural and religious life of the people from that point all the way down to the fifth century. This itself could scarcely be accomplished were it not for the division of the literature into documentary sources that could then be dated to successive periods. Such use of the Pentateuch in historiography is nowhere more evident than in the work of Julius Wellhausen (especially 1878).

Given these two factors—that the Pentateuch has so often served as the subject matter for innovative criticism throughout the history of biblical scholarship and that this literature is of crucial importance for our study of Israel's cultural history—it is all the more disconcerting to observe that uncertainties and disputes at very fundamental points are prevalent in current Pentateuchal studies. Not long ago it seemed that real clarity had been achieved, but the state of affairs has now turned. These general problems of method and interpretation deserve attention at this point before we focus on more specific parts of Pentateuchal research.

I. A Synthesis and Its Dissolution

It would be fair to say that Gerhard von Rad and Martin Noth have offered the most significant comprehensive work on the Pentateuch in modern biblical scholarship. Wellhausen's decisive contributions, in comparison, were limited primarily to source criticism (1876-77), in which he amassed the findings of his predecessors and ordered them cogently into the Grafian sequence of JEDP, a structure that in general has held now for a century—no small achievement. However, Wellhausen's work on the Pentateuch included little more than drawing—very extensively, to be sure—on its postulated documents for his reconstruction of the history of Israel and its religion. He produced no commentaries, theologies, or further critical studies of the whole. Gunkel did write a nonpareil commentary on one of its books, Genesis, but his seminal form-critical work on this literature was left to be applied by others to the rest of the Pentateuch. He also presented no in-depth analysis of the whole. In contrast, both von Rad and Noth devoted themselves massively and repeatedly to the Pentateuch. For von Rad, the comprehensive proposal came in 1938 in his Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch. He added to this numerous other studies including commentaries on Genesis (1953) and Deuteronomy (1964) and a major section in his Old Testament Theology (Ist ed. in 1957). Similarly, Noth offered his general study in the form of an even more detailed, intensive analysis, A History of Pentateuchal Traditions, first published in 1948 and several times reprinted and translated. Beyond this seminal study Noth wrote commentaries on Exodus (1959), Numbers (1966), and Leviticus (1962), but these were not as closely related to his 1948 monograph as was his 1950 History of Israel, in which he demonstrated how this history should be understood in the light of his reconstructed development of the Pentateuchal traditions.

Between the two of them, von Rad and Noth managed to put together a critical synthesis that has informed nearly two generations of students and scholars. For all of the critical responses that they have received from the very beginning—and there have always been dissenting voices—their combined view of the origins of the Pentateuch long survived as the ruling hypothesis about how the Pentateuch came to be. What is especially important in this regard is the hermeneutical assumption: that the meaning(s) or intentions which a given text had at its origin and during its subsequent development are relevant for our understanding of the text in its present form. Thus most subsequent commentaries on the books of the Torah have been overwhelmingly concerned with focusing exegetically on this period of formation rather than on the longer postbiblical period in which the church and the synagogue interpreted these texts, often quite differently. So the critical framework that von Rad and Noth provided has had an impact not only in the area of literary history but also in exegetical interpretation and in historiography.

Before saying more about this hypothesis and its subsequent demise, one might well ask whether it is even proper to consider the separate work of von Rad and of Noth as indeed parts of a common synthesis. To be sure, the two did not explicitly collaborate on any specific project, an important exception being the development of the influential series, Biblischer Kommentar. Furthermore, von Rad's primary interest in theological questions was noticeably at variance with Noth's preoccupation with historical matters. However, the two critics themselves viewed their work as complementary to each other. On the second page of his 1948 volume Noth referred favorably to von Rad's earlier study of the "confessions/creeds" which gave a very early order to the series of themes that were essential for the faith of the Israelite tribes, confessions that were recited repeatedly in the early cult (also 1948:48). What Noth then attempted to do beyond this was to determine the nature and origin of these individual themes and to show how they were gradually filled out with innumerable other independent traditions. Von Rad, for his part, emphasized in later editions of his Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch that he wished it to be read in conjunction with Noth's volume. The various differences between the two seem to pale in comparison with the central preoccupation of both: to move the discussion beyond the then prevalent "stalemate" and "boredom" in Pentateuchal work (as von Rad [1938:1] described it at the time) and, in Noth's words, "to understand, in a manner that is historically responsible and proper, the essential content and important concerns of the Pentateuch—which, from its manifold beginnings, variously rooted in cultic situations, to the final stages in the process of its emergence, claims recognition as a great document of faith" (1948:3f.; Eng. tr. 3). Above all, in this the concern—again as Noth three times emphasized it (1948:4, 161, v)—is more to raise the proper questions than to offer definitive solutions.

The main features in this von Rad/Noth synthesis can be described as follows, without attempting to note all of the differences between the two. For both von Rad and Noth the Pentateuch as we have it is decidedly an "Endstadium," the final stage in a long process of development. Their primary task was not to engage in a literary-critical analysis of its smaller elements, but instead to try to recover this history of growth. They pictured this consistently as a living process, often oral; the operative category for it is "Vergegenwartigung," understood in both senses of reinterpretation and actualization—a legitimatizing process in which one generation receives the traditions from the past and then has the opportunity to reaffirm them, adjusting them as they find appropriate, before passing them to the next generation. These traditions thus have to do with matters of vital importance to the Israelites' faith, society, and self-understanding. As a rule, the Pentateuch is based on innumerable traditions that were at first largely independent of one another. Only in the course of time did they become fused together, a process that von Rad and Noth sought to unlock. Noth concentrated much more on the precompositional stage; von Rad, on the compositional period. Noth identified five central themes that served as crystallization points for much that is in the Pentateuch: Promise to the Patriarchs, Guidance out of Egypt, Guidance in the Wilderness, Revelation at Sinai, and Guidance into the Arable Land. Each of these may well rest on some kernel of historical fact involving one or another group, but in no instance did all of Israel experience any one of these. Von Rad dealt also with these five themes, although he linked the exodus and conquest into one complex (hence also his insistence on a Hexateuch) and stressed especially the independence of the Sinai tradition from the others.

Perhaps the main difference between the two scholars, however, lies in how they viewed the merger of these themes. Noth set it in the period prior to the Yahwist, whereas von Rad attributed this decisive change to the compositional work of the Yahwist himself. For Noth, during the settlement period the Israelite tribes became aligned in the form of an amphictyony, with a central cult and several institutional functions in common (1930). It was in this cultic context that the themes merged together and that much of the remaining traditions were introduced into the whole. Von Rad postulated that the faith of Israel in this premonarchic period would have been expressed in a creedal form (the best example is in Deut 26:5b-9) and that such confessional statements would have provided the outline for the later composition. But he attributed to the Yahwist this innovation of creating a linear narrative based on the exodus-wilderness-conquest complex, through the "Einbau" (inclusion) of the Sinai tradition, the "Ausbau" (extension) of the ancestral traditions, and the "Vorbau" (addition at the beginning) of the primeval history. However, neither one considered this merger of the themes to be accidental or arbitrary, even though they tended to give different reasons for it: Noth, the development of the amphictyonic community; von Rad, the theological intentionality of the Yahwist. They agreed on seeing this early period as the formative stage of the faith as well as of the traditions, and wherever possible they tried to attribute these processes to specific groups, cultic celebrations, and geographical locations. They also shared a heuristic dichotomy between tradition and history, that is, between Israel's picture of her history and the historical-critical reconstruction of what actually happened. This discrepancy was not a problem for either of them: von Rad tied the kerygmatic, heilsgeschichtlich theology to Israel's traditional interpretation of her past, and Noth used these traditions themselves as indicators not of presettlement history but of the beliefs and ideas of the settled tribes. And finally, these two scholars were fully persuaded that this early formative period was so important that it must necessarily be penetrated if the structure and contents of the present Pentateuch, both as a whole and in its details, are to be understood properly. Small wonder, then, that von Rad in his commentary on Genesis gave explicit exegetical preference to the Yahwistic and Elohistic levels of the text—even though he clearly admitted that "the question of whether the preacher and teacher are also tied to this hermeneutical point of departure is another question entirely" (1953:31; Eng. tr. 1961:40). While both von Rad and Noth maintained a critical interest in the later Pentateuchal stages as well, for them the early period carried special significance.

A historical hypothesis can be considered valid only if it manages to explain all the evidence better than any other hypothesis can. Seen in this light, it is no wonder that the von Rad/Noth synthesis had the degree of success it has enjoyed since the 1940s. No other rival hypothesis concerning the growth of the Pentateuch has been so comprehensively and cogently developed nor so widely accepted during this period. However, so many specific features of this proposal have gradually fallen victim to attack that the cohesion of the whole has steadily eroded. Some of the most serious criticisms should be mentioned before we move on to the primary dilemma facing Pentateuchal studies today.

1. One of the key items of the synthesis is von Rad's suggestion that there were creedal statements in the pre-Yahwistic period that set the central themes in order and thereby served as the outline according to which the Pentateuch was arranged. The antiquity of these creeds has now been effectively repudiated by Brevard Childs (1967), Wolfgang Richter (1967), J. Philip Hyatt, Leonhard Rost, and others. The confessions cited by von Rad contain too many Deuteronomistic elements to be dated any earlier than probably the seventh century. They are, therefore, in the nature more of theological summaries or systematic recapitulations at the end of the developmental process than of ancient faith statements that from an early point onward affected this process itself.
2. Related to this, the antiquity of covenantal theology itself has been persuasively discounted by Lothar Perlitt. Both von Rad and Noth had, like Albrecht Alt before them, envisioned a covenant-renewal festival at Shechem when the Sinai theme would have been reactualized, and they regarded this as probably the oldest extensive tradition preserved in the Hebrew Bible. But Perlitt has undercut this thoroughly now by tracing the theological concept of covenant no earlier than the seventh century. Of course, this also affects the hypotheses advanced by George Mendenhall and others.
3. Because the "creeds" were unanimous in omitting the Sinai revelation from their concatenation of the heilsgeschichtlich events, von Rad and Noth both concluded that this theme was wholly independent of the others. This has been roundly challenged by A. S. van der Woude, Walter Beyerlin, and others on the grounds of literary and theological affinities or by positing a covenant/treaty model, the latter of course a questionable point.
4. The formative period of the Pentateuchal traditions reputedly occurred during the stage of oral transmission, with several folkloristic characteristics indicating this. John Van Seters (1975), however, has disputed that one can comfortably determine such orality from the written literature.
5. Like Gunkel and Alt before them, von Rad and especially Noth considered many of the cultic, geographical, and popular narratives to be etiologically based. John Bright, Brevard Childs (1963), and Burke O. Long have cautioned, however, against prematurely discounting the authenticity of such traditions, for the etiological elements could in many cases be secondary redactional additions.
6. Although most literary critics before him had normally maintained that the sources J and E were independent of each other, Noth made the interesting suggestion that preceding these two was a G source, a "Grundlage," comprising already in the amphictyonic period the elements common to both J and E (1948:40-44; Eng. tr. 38-41). This proposal has not been convincing to such scholars as Hannelis Schulte in her study of the Joseph story or Van Seters in his work on the Abraham narrative; they attribute such common materials rather to author-editors who succeeded one another and made use of their predecessor's work, in other words through a series of literary dependency and redaction.
7. By elevating the five themes to a position of supremacy in the early formation of the Pentateuch, von Rad and Noth unwittingly reduced all else to secondary or even less importance. Stated differently, the scheme was allowed sometimes to control the data, rather than vice versa. Thus for Noth especially, the traditions that serve merely to fill out the themes or in some way to connect them together include much of the Isaac and Jacob stories, the Joseph narrative, genealogies, itineraries, the plagues account, much of the wilderness tradition, the story of the Midianites in Exodus 18, the golden calf apostasy and covenant renewal in Exodus 32 and 34, and several other traditions as well. However, the element that has produced the most contrary response from scholars is the role assigned to the figure of Moses. According to Noth, the main reliable historical information we have about Moses is the tradition of his marriage to a foreign woman and the tradition about his grave. Just as Moses plays a negligible role outside the Pentateuch in the Hebrew Bible, so also he is not indispensable to any of the five themes—but belongs instead to the narrative elaboration as a linking element among several of the themes (1948:172-91; Eng. tr. 156-75). Noth's thesis regarding Moses has met with a storm of protest—not all of which, however, is argued as carefully or researched as thoroughly as is Noth's initial proposal.
8. For both Noth and von Rad, the primary Sitz im Leben for the pre-Yahwistic developments was the amphictyony in its cultic, political, and military functions. As suggestive as this amphictyonic model seemed to be after Noth first elaborated it in 1930, it has not proved itself resilient to such attacks as those of Harry Orlinsky and Georg Fohrer (1966). Noth had maintained that it was through the amphictyony that the traditions attained their all-Israel orientation, so this matter needs to be reconsidered now also. Add to this the massive sociological proposal by Norman Gottwald and others: that Israel came into existence not through migration into the land but through a peasant uprising against the exploitative Canaanite overlords. What remains for the critic is a welter of hypotheses but no firm consensus regarding institutional, social, or cultic structures that could have aided the growth of the Pentateuchal traditions. For that matter, there seems now to be as little agreement on the emergence of Israel and the origin of Yahwism as there ever has been, although additional material data now coming to light should assist on this question (see the discussion in the chapter by J. M. Miller in this volume).
9. Von Rad's division between scientific history and the theological interpretation of history has come under fire from several sides. Franz Hesse called it "double-tracking" and insisted that the actual course of Israel's history, not simply Israel's interpretation of it, must be the vital arena of God's activity. In line with this, others have attempted—often through an illegitimate use of archaeological finds—to confirm the historical veracity of Pentateuchal events, customs, and other evidences. Thomas Thompson and John Van Seters, in separate monographs, have firmly refuted any such efforts at isolating elements in the ancestral narratives that might point unequivocally to the second millennium B.C.E. Although this would seem to make tradition and history even more distinct from each other than von Rad and Noth maintained, one must admit that the issue is far from settled in many scholars' eyes.
10. The idea of Heilsgeschichte, on the other hand, seems to have gone the way of the Biblical Theology movement (Childs, 1970: Barr: 65ff.). It is too selective in highlighting only major historical junctures as occasions where God acts, as if the regular cultic interaction between God and humans is of much less importance. Second, it becomes too readily a theology of deliverance rather than a theology of justice with moral claims on humanity. Third, it is too facilely turned into a type of kerygmatic theology, in which one attempts to reduce the complexity of the literature and history to a primary kerygma. For example, Hans Walter Wolff (see the articles reprinted in Brueggemann and Wolff) finds the kerygmatic message of the Yahwist in the charge to Israel to be a blessing to the world; for the Elohist, the kerygma is the call to "fear God"; and for the Deuteronomist it is the call to repentance and return. There is little willingness among scholars anymore to bypass the varied nature of the literature in order to arrive at such simple reductions.
11. At the level of the literary sources there has also occurred a serious departure from the Wellhausen/von Rad/Noth schema. Most notably, the Yahwistic source has come under heavy fire. John Van Seters has been insistent on dating this source closer to the exile, and Hans Heinrich Schmid wanted to consider it in terms of a much longer redactional period than the traditional dating in the tenth century would allow. Rolf Rendtorff (1977), in a very thorough criticism, even accused von Rad of departing from the normal source-critical model in arguing so strongly that the Yahwist was a theologian, rather than a literary document. The E material was also seen by Van Seters and others as more of a redactional level than a separate source. There continues to be considerably divided opinion on whether and how much the Deuteronomists laid their hands on the Pentateuch. And finally, several critics remain unconvinced by Noth's provocative proposal (1948:7-19) that P was a separate source document that became the framework into which J and E were incorporated to make the final Pentateuch. Frank Cross, among others, maintained that it is much more likely that P was not a separate source but rather represented the final redaction of the JE material. Further complicating the discussion is the argument by several Jerusalem scholars that P is in fact a document of the preexilic period.
12. To conclude this list we can simply point to the general lack of unanimity on where the Pentateuch ends. That is, in terms of literary history does the book of Deuteronomy belong more with Genesis-Numbers or with Joshua-Kings, the so-called Deuteronomistic History? This question is tied as well to the problem of where the conquest tradition belongs. On these points von Rad and Noth themselves disagreed. While von Rad spoke of a Hexateuch that ended with the conquest narrative, Noth preferred the notion of a Pentateuch—although with the bulk of Deuteronomy excluded he virtually operated with a Tetrateuch (as did Engnell more explicitly). A similar divergence on such a major point as this continues to the present.

    Reference has been made here only to rather general points of contention. It hardly needs to be said that many of von Rad's and Noth's interpretations of specific literary units have also faced substantial and telling criticism. The important point for us is that Pentateuchal studies is hardly in a favorable position at the present point. The synthesis that explained so much about the formative history and meaning of the literature has met with such formidable opposition at individual points that only with multiple reservations can one defend it any longer. Heuristically, it still continues to prompt productive debate—not the least with regard to the determination of the right questions to ask of the text. However, there is no other grand plan, at the present, which promises to take the place of this influential proposal.

II. History of the Pentateuchal Literature

Pentateuchal research has largely followed Gunkel's lead (1906) in reconstructing a history of the literature ("Literaturgeschichte") from the earliest origins on down to the last stages. There has been, in comparison, remarkably little synchronic study of pericopes; examples of the exceptions are R. Polzin and D. Patte. Somewhat more attention has been focused on stylistics, for example, with regard to Hebrew narrative art (see the volume edited in 1975 by R. Culley, as well as other studies). Yet most scholars, like von Rad and Noth, have sought instead to clarify the ways in which the literature came into existence. What specifically comes under scrutiny in any study may be as short as a portion of a verse or as long as an entire book. Similarly, attention can shift variously from oral tradition to genre to documentary source to redaction. There would be few scholars who would not understand their individual analyses to be contributions to the larger program of reconstructing the development of the literature along its full course of growth. There can be both theological and historical motivations for this enterprise, as we noted above to be the case also for von Rad and Noth.

Preliterary Tradition

In the section above we have described in some detail the work of von Rad and Noth and various points of critical reaction to it. It was in regard to the preliterary stage of the development of traditions that these two scholars made some of their most important contributions, not the least in their basic insistence that this period holds vital information for the proper understanding of the text. Most researchers of the Pentateuch have tended to agree with this, even if opinions vary on many specific points. A detailed study of traditio-historical work since its inception is available in Knight, 1975; therefore, our comments here can be limited to a few general aspects of it in Pentateuchal studies.

Especially notable is the increased attention given to oral tradition. Literary materials could not only be remembered but also could actually be created at the oral stage. A tradition could thereby emerge as an expression of anything that was important to the ongoing life of the community. Scholarship has often envisioned an oral stage for almost every one of the various Pentateuchal literary forms: narrative, laws, songs, and even lists; there has also been a similar inquiry for most other literary sections of the Hebrew Bible, particularly the prophetic and psalmic literature. Although such research dates back to Gunkel and his predecessors, Scandinavians such as H. S. Nyberg, I. Engnell, and S. Mowinckel have been especially strong proponents of it in the past forty years—and with a distinctive direction. In several studies they have argued that very much of the Hebrew Bible originated as "oral literature," in part in cultic contexts and in part in other institutional or everyday situations. In contrast to Mowinckel, Nyberg and Engnell maintained that the oral process had a type of "Schmelzofen" effect, causing the tradition leading up to a given text to become so fused within itself that any layers of meaning stemming from various periods could not be distinguished from one another. For Engnell, the methodological implication of this was that scholars must virtually abandon source criticism in favor of tradition history, which is not oriented toward a "book-view" or an "interpretatio europeica moderna" of this ancient Hebrew literature. With respect to the Pentateuch, he adjusted the standard sigla to phrases (e.g., the "Pwork" or the "D-group") or set them in double quotation marks ("J," "E," "P"). There was not actually a Pentateuch but a Tetrateuch (without "D"), and "P" was not a documentary source but the last transmitter and editor of it. Following a debate with Mowinckel over critical method, Engnell seemed to modify his position somewhat about the extent of oral tradition in the Hebrew Bible, but he continued to argue stridently against attempts to stratify the tradition into primary and secondary elements. The influence of Nyberg and Engnell on such matters has steadily decreased over the years among other Scandinavian scholars, while researchers elsewhere have tended to consider it an idiosyncratic turn in scholarship. (For a full discussion of this traditio-historical work, see Knight, 1975:217-399; specifically also Engnell; Nyberg, 1947, 1972.)

However, the emphasis on oral means of transmission and oral devices in the literature has not been lost. Most scholars now recognize that a strict dichotomy between oral and written tradition is probably inappropriate, that both could have continued alongside each other and contributed to each other, that the oral probably preceded the written during the growth of the tradition but that oral interpretation could have continued long after a written text became fixed (note, e.g., the oral law in early Judaism) and that long compositions or cycles of traditions, if not actually created in written form, must have been committed early to writing rather than been retained solely as oral literature. Very often it is difficult or impossible to determine whether a given composition existed first in oral or written form; Noth (1948:41; Eng. tr. 39) acknowledged this for the Pentateuchal "Grundlage," his postulated source for the common elements in J and E. As indicated above concerning the dissolution of the von Rad/Noth synthesis, J. Van Seters (especially 131-48) has even questioned whether oral tradition can be identified on the basis of our present written texts except at a few isolated points where folkloristic criteria point clearly to preliterary genres. Most scholars tend to attribute a greater role to the oral prehistory of the biblical text than this (see, e.g., the various articles in Culley, 1976), with some recognition also of its theological implications (R. Lapointe).

As will be seen in the sections below on source and redaction criticism, F. Winnett, J. Van Seters, H. H. Schmid, R. Rendtorff, and others have sought to shift the emphasis from tradition history to a history of successive literary developments, which would then be studied by redaction criticism. Rendtorff s work (1977) is especially important at this point. Briefly stated, the traditio-historical problem of the Pentateuch in his view does not concern itself with the smaller, independent traditions that arose and circulated at the very earliest period in Israel's history (Gunkel's project), nor does it have to do with the compilation of the bulk of the epic tradition by the Yahwist (von Rad's contribution). Rather, he observed that what has been neglected is the stage in between when the independent, often disparate traditions became gathered together into "larger units," prior to the time when these various units were in turn structured together to make our present Pentateuch. He surveyed the numerous such units identifiable in the Pentateuch, but he spent the bulk of his analysis in an attempt to reconstruct this traditio-historical stage for the ancestral traditions. Here, for example, he dealt with such units as the Abraham cycle, the Isaac traditions, the Jacob traditions, and the Joseph story. In attempting to determine how and why the various traditions came together to form each of these originally separate units, Rendtorff focused especially on literary and thematic elements (such as the types of promise to the ancestors) rather than on geographic, social/political, or cultic circumstances (such as Noth elevated as criteria). This study of literary and thematic elements holding the units together constitutes in fact one of the primary contributions of this book, although Rendtorff failed to relate them adequately to the other factors just mentioned and thereby did not create a plausible setting for these traditio-historical developments. After thus executing his brief analysis of the formation of these larger units, Rendtorff turned to a criticism of recent Pentateuchal research and then to the implications of his study. His basic thesis in this regard was that there were no continuous "sources" in the sense of comprehensive drafts of Pentateuchal materials, such as scholars for a century have seen in J and P. He based this thesis in part on the lack of consensus among scholars about the precise extent and characteristics of J and P, in part on the lack of solid evidence for these source documents in the Pentateuch or even in the preexilic prophetic literature, in part on the lack of continuity among the larger units, and furthermore in part on the simple fact that with the multitude of these larger units in the Pentateuch the sources J and P are no longer really necessary. At most they might represent editorial reworkings of the materials. Rendtorff concluded in fact that only at the level of the Deuteronomistic redaction did any editor have the comprehensive Pentateuch on which to work. Having thus called into serious question the standard results of source criticism, the book concluded with some further observations about how important the origin of the several larger units is for the overall understanding of the Pentateuch and its development.

Rendtorff s critique is suggestive, especially for the attention which he drew to the "larger units" in the Pentateuch, but substantially more analyses of texts and units are needed if his thesis is to be established. In the face of his work and that of the others who prefer to think of the Pentateuchal growth as mainly a literary process of successive redactions, one still cannot lose the sense that more can be said about the developmental process than just this. Very much of the Pentateuchal research in recent decades has focused on the larger cycles of similar materials or on the five themes of Noth, with results that are admittedly hypothetical but nonetheless often plausible (for a brief overview of such studies see, among others, R. Smend, 1978:96-100). To the extent that these forays into the uncharted terrains of preliterary (as well as literary) traditions provide us with reasonable insights, they will continue to be pursued.

Literary Development

Of all the stages in the history of the Pentateuchal literature, the documentary sources have enjoyed the longest and most thorough scrutiny. Indeed, source criticism, which attempts to identify the literary sources that may have served as the basis for the final text, was the first of the historical-critical exegetical methods to develop after the seventeenth-century onset of modern biblical criticism. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw this work produce a succession of different proposals: the older documentary hypothesis, the fragment hypothesis, the supplementary hypothesis, and finally the new documentary hypothesis. It is the latter that has continued to have an impact up to the present, above all because of Julius Wellhausen's cogent presentation of the literary evidence (1876-77) and the relation of these sources to the history of Israel, especially to the history of its religion (1878; for an appraisal of Wellhausen's significance, see the volume edited by D. Knight, 1982). Following the suggestion of Eduard Reuss and Karl Heinrich Graf, Wellhausen envisioned four primary sources set in the following order: J (ca. 850 B.C.E.), E (ca. 700), D (ca. 623), and P (500-450). In the following decades and still to the present this delineation has for most scholars continued to represent the base point of Pentateuchal criticism. Modifications were offered up through the 1930s in primarily two different areas: proposing alternate dates for the sources or subdividing the various sources into multiple strands. However, these were generally intended by the source critics to be little more than adjustments to the established scheme. (For detailed discussions of source criticism during that period, see especially Houtman; Kraus.) It is significant, however, that most of the early source critics assumed that to identify the literary sources was sufficient for explaining the origins of the Pentateuch.

Yet by the 1940s there was a different mood afoot. With attention being turned increasingly to other stages in the history of the Pentateuchal literature—especially to the genres and the traditions—scholars began to sense, as Gunkel had earlier proposed, that much, if not most, of the creative activity had already occurred well before the sources were written. Most critics tended to consider the problem of source delineation to be basically resolved, and they presupposed this Wellhausenian structure for the work which they preferred to conduct. Already in his landmark study of 1938 Gerhard von Rad noted that source criticism had come to a halt—and in the eyes of some had even gone too far. Both in this area and in the study of the smaller units he observed a "Stillstand" and a "Forschungsmüdigkeit" which had regrettably taken hold, especially among younger scholars (1938:1). A mere decade later, however, Martin Noth referred to "the continuing lively debate over the literary-critical analysis of the Pentateuch" (1948:5; Eng. tr. 6). These divergent evaluations are due to several elements. Noth engaged in more explicit source criticism than did von Rad and offered several novel proposals. Noth tended to relate such source investigation to the history of the literature, whereas for von Rad the theological aspects were more important, especially as these related to the final compositions. Noth could also, of course, look back on a decade of increased attack on source criticism from several sides, especially from Scandinavian scholars (see Knight, 1975). Finally, von Rad's own contributions to the relationship between the theologizing Yahwist and the final state of the Pentateuch/Hexateuch reopened questions about the significance of the sources. Actually, the years following 1938 would confirm von Rad's comment only for the specific matter of source division, that is, the assigning of texts to one continuous source document or another. Even Noth (1948:4-44) and most commentators since that time have tended to follow the division elaborated by Wellhausen. Nonetheless, the debate has hardly been stagnant if one considers the fundamental questions that have been and still are raised, issues that have to do with the whole literary development of the Pentateuch from initial written sources on down to final redactions.

The Yahwistic Literature (J)

The liveliness of this discussion can be seen immediately with the source that has traditionally been set as the first: J. Although there is some divergence among scholars on questions of composition, the greatest variance of views—and thereby the most unsettled questions of vital significance for the understanding of J—is to be found on matters of origin and intention.

The literary composition of J, which embraces the largest single narrative block in the Pentateuch, has long been suspect of "Mehrschichtigkeit." Earlier generations of scholars have at times fragmented J into multiple strata. This source-critical tendency has been largely abandoned, except at one specific point. O. Eissfeldt divided J into two sources—the older termed the Lay source (L) and dated ca. 950-850 B.C.E. and the younger simply called J and assigned anywhere between 900 and 721. He first gave graphic portrayal of these sources in his Hexateuch-Synopse (1922, repr. 1962) and continued to argue this division in his influential Introduction. Notably, these sources were traced beyond the Pentateuch into the books of Joshua and Judges. Just as significant, Eissfeldt maintained that the two sources stemmed from opposing circles: L from groups committed to the nomadic ideal and to the unity of Israel despite its division into two kingdoms after 922; and, in direct contrast, J from circles enthusiastically interested in agricultural life and in the national political power and cult. Georg Fohrer's modification of this division (1969:173-79) consisted especially in renaming L with N (= Nomadic source) and setting it not before but after J as a conservative reaction against J's satisfaction with the arable land ("Kulturlandbegeisterung"). Previously, C. A. Simpson (1948), one of the other main proponents of a divided J source during the period since 1945, assigned his JI source to the southern tribes and considered that the J2 source had then, in the period around 900 B.C.E., used and revised JI in the light of additional traditions from the Joseph tribes. Later, around 700 B.C.E., E reworked all the material in a thoroughgoing manner in the light of other northern interests. Simpson furthermore posited a complex subsequent redactional history of these sources. Eissfeldt, Simpson, and Fohrer have not found wide support for their proposals, which to many appear to be rather artificial and improbable divisions of J. By far the dominant inclination has been to account traditio-historically or redaction-critically for any materials in J that seem to deviate from its usual character.

On this point of its character, one can find descriptions of J—with greater or lesser detail but with little substantial deviation from each other—in any number of introductory volumes on the Hebrew Bible. R. Smend (1967:27-87), Peter F. Ellis (225-95), and others have reproduced the text in translation, joining all parts together into a flowing narrative. Henri Cazelles (771-91) provided an overview with source-critical notes about the materials that are assigned to J; commentators, of course, usually do the same for their respective books. A list of Hebrew words and forms that are distinctive to J can be found in Simpson (403-9), and Ellis (113-46) described some of the primary literary techniques used by the Yahwist; Aage Bentzen (2: 45-51) discussed both sets of criteria with reference to the problem of distinguishing between J and E. With few exceptions (especially U. Cassuto and I. Engnell), scholars have tended not to contest these matters to any degree approaching their disputes over how the data are to be interpreted.

The problem of date looms largest—and consequently the questions of audience, place, and intention are necessarily attached to it as well. Few scholars would deny that some or even most of the J material may extend back in time to the premonarchic period of settlement. Noth argued forcefully that "the actual formation of Pentateuchal tradition is to be placed essentially in the period of prestate tribal life" (1948:248; Eng. tr. 229), and for him this included not only the source "G" but also many other narratives that were subsequently used in J, E, and P to fill out the traditional materials in each. Furthermore, it is often maintained by scholars that these pre-J and pre-E traditions were not necessarily still in the form of disparate small units when they were incorporated into J or E, for there could well have existed cycles or collections—for example, stories about the ancestors, early laws, descriptions of the wanderings of the people—in oral or written form before the extensive written sources later emerged. Thus the question of the origin of the various contents of a given source tends to be held separate from the question of when the whole was constituted as a documentary source.

The most common date assigned to the origin of J is the period of the early monarchy. Von Rad associated it with a "Solomonic humanism" (1962:68-69; Eng. tr. 55), a period of enlightenment under Solomon marked by political security, a nationalistic spirit, building programs, new interest in culture and the arts, and an appreciation of human existence. "What else is the Jahwist's wonderful work but one great attempt to make Israel's past relevant to the spirit of a new age by reviewing and, above all, spiritualizing it?" (1962:69; Eng. tr. 55). Even though von Rad's notion of a "Solomonic Enlightenment" may be somewhat excessive (see, e.g., the critique by J. Crenshaw [16-20]), the vast majority of interpreters have followed him in dating J somewhere between the mid tenth and the late ninth century (see, e.g., the seven observations supporting a Solomonic date in H. P. Muiller [52]). This Yahwistic history is thereby associated with the succession narrative and other literary productions of this monarchy, all seen as examples of Israel's initial efforts in historiography (von Rad, 1944; Hölscher; Schulte). Not only did J first emerge as a written source in this period; but also it is seen to represent "Hoftheologie," and its author is considered a "court theologian" (Richter, 1966; Brueggemann, 1968)—although how officially sanctioned is unclear. W. von Soden proposed Nathan or his disciple as the author of J or substantial parts of it, with a certain prophetic-type critique of Solomon to be found in Genesis 3 and 11 (cf. also M.-L. Henry). Adherents to this early dating of J vary in assigning it to the reign of David, Solomon, or Rehoboam, but they quite uniformly agree to its southern provenance. J was thus a collection of old narratives that were gathered together at that point in order to celebrate the new monarchy by recounting God's beneficent dealings in Israel's earlier past history. H. W. Wolff (1964) identified Gen 12:1-3 as the key indicator of J's theological kerygma: YHWH's promise of blessing to Abraham, which was becoming fulfilled in J's period when the early monarchy was established and secured (see also L. Schmidt).

A very different conception of J has emerged in recent years, a view that challenges directly the position held by those scholars who trace their critical heritage back to Noth, von Rad, and Wellhausen. In 1964 Frederick V. Winnett delivered his Presidential Address to the Society of Biblical Literature, which was published in 1965 under the provocative, if not iconoclastic, title "Re-examining the Foundations." The "foundations" he examined were those represented in the foregoing description of the J source. In a word, Winnett disputed the idea of two parallel strands, J and E, running through the book of Genesis, and in its place he proposed a succession of "official revisions," extensive supplementations by later hands. The emphasis on "official" is important because it is improbable that various scribes along the way would have been permitted to "tamper" with the narrative, introducing glosses and interpolations without the sanction of the basically conservative religious body for whom this narrative was so important (1965:12). Winnett posited an early J document, probably cultic in origin, which was composed of Abraham and Jacob stories linked together sequentially. The first official revision was E's work of supplementing—not altering—this J source still in the preexilic period. However, the book of Genesis owes its present form to the major revision done by the author whom Winnett called "Late J" and dated in the postexilic period. This Late J composed the primeval history on the basis of diverse sources ("mainly oral but possibly some written" [1965:18]), incorporated the Abraham-Jacob narrative as revised by E, and drew on the E story of Joseph, recasting it to give Judah a more prominent role. The impetus for this work by the Late J, whose outlook was notably universalistic and monotheistic, was the fall of Jerusalem in 587 B.C.E. There was a later official revision of Late J's Genesis by P about 400 B.C.E. The major achievement by P, however, was the creation of the Pentateuch: prefixing Genesis to the Mosaic tradition in the books of Exodus and Numbers (the latter two books were also significantly revised by P) and detaching the book of Deuteronomy from the Deuteronomistic History in order to append it to the Mosaic tradition. This means, then, that the book of Genesis is later than Exodus and Numbers, and thus that the promises of land in Genesis do not presuppose a JE narrative extending as far as the story of the conquest and settlement of Canaan. In an earlier study (1949) Winnett had also disputed the theory of parallel J and E strands in Exodus and Numbers, so his study challenged the regnant documentary hypothesis not merely for Genesis but for the entire Pentateuch as well.

Winnett's proposal has not won the day among Pentateuchal scholars, but it has had a strong impact on several researchers, particularly some of his own students. These, together with other scholars who have independently reached similar conclusions, have pressed the critical questions to the point where they must be faced directly. To some extent P. Volz and W. Rudolph anticipated part of the argument already in 1933 when they maintained that only J could be considered an authentic "source" and that E was not an independent narrative strand but rather a later redactor and supplementer. S. Sandmel, only four years before Winnett's article, defined the developmental growth of the Pentateuch as a process of midrashic augmentation, that is, one in which subsequent redactors would have been loath to alter their received text in any way other than to add new materials to it—thus a "process of neutralizing by addition" (120). N. Wagner questioned whether one could legitimately assume that what we identify as J or E in Genesis is the same J or E found in Exodus, or even whether there is a common origin for all J (or E) materials in the various parts of the book of Genesis itself.

Three other lengthy studies, from independent contexts yet all within three years of each other, have heightened the issue. J. Van Seters, in a 1975 publication dedicated to his teacher, Winnett, limited his attention to the Abrahamic tradition in Genesis. Methodologically, as we have mentioned above, Van Seters disputed the claims of tradition historians who have attempted to retrace the development of these materials in the realm of oral tradition. Like T. L. Thompson, furthermore, Van Seters found nothing that could reliably be dated in the second millennium B.C.E.; the question of Abraham's historicity is thereby left wholly unanswerable. His literary analysis produced a picture very similar to Winnett's. There was a pre-Yahwistic first stage comprised of only the stories of Abraham in Egypt (Gen 12:10-20), Hagar's flight (16:1-12), and Isaac's birth (18:1a, 10-14; 21:2, 6-7). This was followed by a pre-Yahwistic supplement ("E"), the story of Abraham and Abimelech (20:1-17; 21:25-26, 28-31a). The Yahwist, working in the exilic period and addressing the despair of the exilic community, drew on these sources, added new materials of his own, and thus composed the whole Abrahamic cycle. Later, the Priestly writer added some genealogical and chronological details as well as the episodes found in Genesis 17 and 23. Finally, Genesis 14 was inserted, bringing the literary development to a close. Van Seters thus followed—although without managing to prove them to the satisfaction of most subsequent researchers—Winnett's basic tenets: a series of successive supplements of the previous written tradition; doubt about the existence of E as a separate Pentateuchal source; an exilic or postexilic date for the Yahwist, who was primarily responsible for the composition; and P as a later supplementary revision.

The next monographic study came from the pen of Hans Heinrich Schmid (1976), who acknowledged early in his discussion the contributions of Winnett and Van Seters to the current upheaval in Pentateuchal research. Schmid's analysis focused on J materials in several blocks of literature beyond Genesis: the call of Moses, the Egyptian plagues, the Reed Sea crossing, the wilderness wanderings, the Sinai pericope, as well as the promises to the ancestors. His conclusion coincided with that of Winnett and Van Seters in that he did not find it tenable to date the Yahwist's comprehensive theological redaction and interpretation in the Solomonic period. However, more so than did the other two, Schmid based his argument on evidence about preexilic prophecy and the Deuteronomic-Deuteronomistic tradition. For him, the Yahwist presupposed the preexilic prophets at numerous points, a clear indication of a late date. Significantly, Schmid advocated that the "so-called Yahwist" should not be seen as an individual collector, author, or theologian; rather, the "Yahwist" was a "Redaktions- und Interpretationsprozess" (1967:167) which took place during approximately the same time frame as that of the Deuteronomic-Deuteronomistic group and shared some viewpoints with it. This would conform well to the thesis of L. Perlitt that a full "covenantal theology" was a product of this Deuteronomic-Deuteronomistic movement, for such a theology is also reflected in some of the J pieces of the Pentateuch.

Work by a third scholar has further extended the dilemma. R. Rendtorff's 1977 monograph was discussed above concerning general matters of tradition history. His thesis about the Yahwist was advanced in 1975 and reissued in English translation in 1977 together with brief responses by Van Seters, Schmid, and R. N. Whybray. Rendtorff accused von Rad of turning a literary problem into a theological issue insofar as he considered the Yahwist as a theologian rather than a literary source. This fundamentally changed the type of question being asked of the text, for the emphasis was drawn away from the literary characteristics of the sources. It also led to an interest in determining the role that this Yahwist had in theologically shaping the Pentateuch. Rendtorff, in contrast, understood the Yahwist neither as a personality nor as a comprehensive theological editing of the materials. Even more clearly in 1977 (e.g., 112) he maintained that the Yahwistic work could hardly be understood in the sense of the usual documentary hypothesis, that is, as an extensive narrative running through the Pentateuch. At most J, like P, might represent editorial reworkings of the materials. Only at the level of the Deuteronomistic redaction did an editor have the whole Pentateuch to work on.

The state of research on J is currently in a rather perplexing condition. The majority of scholars quite clearly adhere more to the views of Wellhausen and von Rad, with the earlier date and ideological intention quite in keeping with the early monarchy. However, the critiques by those described above have shaken confidence in the usual hypothesis. Even if the Yahwist does not emerge as an exilic or postexilic source, it will henceforth be much more difficult to disregard the suggestion that there was redactional activity in the Yahwistic vein over the course of several centuries down to and probably including the exilic period.

There has been significantly less fundamental critique of the other three documents—E, D, and P—during the past three decades in comparison with what the J source has had to endure. Some of the substantial questions about these three have already been described above, especially the issue of whether they were comprehensive sources or, rather, supplementary revisions over the long redactional history of the Pentateuch. We will consequently restrict our comments to only a few other distinctive points about each.

The Elohistic Literature (E)

The Elohistic source received a substantial challenge in the 1930s by P. Volz and W. Rudolph, first by both together in a volume on Genesis and then later by Rudolph in a study of Exodus through Joshua. They argued that E could not have existed as an independent narrative with substantial scope, as the traditional form of the documentary hypothesis claimed. Instead, E represented a redactional stage in which additions were made to the Yahwistic source document. Volz (Volz and Rudolph: 135-42) even went on to posit that P was also not an independent narrative source but a redactional level, although Rudolph (1938:253-55) differed with him on this point. The problem regarding E, of course, is its fragmentary character, a point that virtually every writer on the subject makes at the very outset. On the whole, there is less significant disagreement among scholars on the identification and interpretation of E texts, however, than there is on the question of origin.

Noth (1948:36-44, 247ff.; Eng. tr. 33-41, 228ff.) upheld the documentary hypothesis despite the argument of Volz and Rudolph. For him, E constituted a whole narrative parallel to J on which a redactor drew in order to augment J, which served as the literary basis. E must have been much more extensive, but it was primarily the special materials that were taken from it to be added to J. Originally J and E existed independently, although they were both based on the older source G, which contained mainly those traditions that they both had in common. Noth even considered E, taken as a whole, to have been closer to G than was J. Other studies, for example, A. W. Jenks and K. Jaroš as well as most commentaries, have followed this view of E as a narrative source with its own distinctive provenance (usually the north), theological intention (e.g., for Wolff [1969] it is "the fear of God" and the opposition to syncretism), and literary style.

The dissenting position follows closely that of Volz and Rudolph and has been mentioned above in the discussion of J. According to Winnett, Van Seters, and others, E is not a separate source but a redactional supplementation of the old Yahwistic narrative, the latter being indeed sparse at many points. H.-C. Schmitt even carried this argument further in his recent study of the Joseph narrative. Without considering E to be a documentary source, Schmitt proposed that E was a redactor, yet even more than this insofar as E brought together the narrative blocks that had been distinct until then—the ancestral tradition, the Joseph story, and at least the Moses story in Exodus 1-3—thereby producing a new and continuous historical composition. This thesis is suggestive, but like others it serves primarily to emphasize the open questions that still exist about the E materials.

The Deuteronomic Literature (D)

The D source may seem to pose fewer problems because of its supposed confinement to the book of Deuteronomy, thus not being present throughout the whole Pentateuch to the same extent as the other primary sources. This, however, would be to mask the real difficulties that have continued to confront researchers: Is there an older core to the present book of Deuteronomy, and what can be known about its origin? How does this core relate to its literary context? Furthermore, is there a close connection between it and redactional strata outside the book of Deuteronomy?

It has long been held that Deuteronomy 12-26 constituted an "Urdeuteronomium," a core of laws to which the remaining chapters subsequently were added. The roots of this legal corpus normally have been found in the northern kingdom prior to its fall in 722 B.C.E. R. P. Merendino attempted to identify the parts of this old Deuteronomic law through a careful analysis of both form and content, and he concluded that there were several smaller, originally independent series of laws (cultic laws, apodictic laws, abomination laws, marriage laws, humanitarian laws) that were brought together to form this core. G. Seitz focused in his study mainly on the Deuteronomic redaction of these earlier materials, finding especially an emphasis on humanitarian aspects, apostasy, and cultic unity at this level. Although it has often enough been thought that many of the laws themselves date back to very early times and have some affinity to the Book of the Covenant in Exodus 21-23, P. C. Craigie has revived the traditional dating of the whole book to an even earlier period. Arguing on the basis of the covenantal form and significance of the book, he found "it not unreasonable to assume that the book comes from the time of Moses or shortly thereafter" (28). Few would concur with Craigie on this point about the book, although it is clear that there were pre-Deuteronomic laws in the collection. More form-critical and comparative legal study is necessary before we can hope to understand better the relation of such early laws to the first Deuteronomic corpus. As Seitz, Merendino, A. D. H. Mayes, and others have sensed, the proper approach to this is to attempt to determine what the Deuteronomic redactor added to the received legal sources.

Since W. M. L. de Wette in the early nineteenth century it has been common to identify Deuteronomy, or only the Deuteronomic core (chaps. 12-26), with the "book of the law" that was discovered in the Jerusalem temple during Josiah's reign, as recounted in 2 Kings 22-23. As much support as this thesis has found in recent decades, substantial questions have also been raised. Mayes (85-103) presented these in his full review of the issue and concluded that the story in 2 Kings 22-23 was introduced later by the Deuteronomist and that there was thus no immediate relation between Josiah and the Deuteronomic corpus of laws. S. Mittmann, in his study of Deut 1:1-6:3, furthermore concluded that the law preached in Deuteronomy did not exist apart from the historical introduction in these opening chapters. This is quite in contrast to the opinion introduced by M. Noth (1943) that Deuteronomy 1-3(4) was written by the exilic Deuteronomist not so much as a part of the book of Deuteronomy but as an introduction to the whole Deuteronomistic History. However these matters are viewed, one can hardly escape the conclusion that the book of Deuteronomy experienced a rather long and complex series of redactions, perhaps even in the sense of a supplementary hypothesis, until its present form was reached.

The authorship of Deuteronomy, without its latest redactions, has proved difficult to resolve. Von Rad (1947) advocated that the "country Levites," who were in allegiance with the reform-minded "people of the land," were responsible for it, while Mayes attributed it to Levites with priestly prerogatives who were attached to the Jerusalem temple. E. W. Nicholson argued that prophets of the north stood behind it, whereas M. Weinfeld proposed scribes of the Jerusalem court because of the connections that he identified between Deuteronomy and wisdom. Several scholars have maintained that the form of the book of Deuteronomy had some connection with a covenantal form—whether because of a covenant-making or covenant-renewing festival (von Rad, 1938:30-37; Eng. tr. 33-40) or through a covenant formulary based on the form of international treaties (K. Baltzer and others). As with other matters, such questions will likely need different answers depending on the redactional level under consideration.

The Priestly Literature (P)

Issues similar to those facing J, E, and D have confronted the P source in recent decades—with not totally dissimilar results. First, the dating of P has been set in widely divergent periods. J. G. Vink assigned it to the Persian period; most others have dated it in the exilic or post-exilic age. Quite differently, Y. Kaufmann (174-211) considered it pre-exilic, in fact pre-Deuteronomic, before the idea of cultic centralization began to rise under Hezekiah. This early dating has also received some support from A. Hurvitz on the basis of a linguistic comparison of P with Ezekiel, Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles, and the Mishnah; he concluded that P idioms and terminology do not presuppose the exilic or postexilic period as do the others. Yet to whichever period P as a whole is dated, the problem of its sources remains pertinent. There has been a consensus that JE existed before P and that P could not have been unacquainted with such a significant historical narrative. Beyond that, one has looked for such other sources as a "Toledoth-Book" (Noth, 1948:9ff.; Eng. tr. 10ff.; modifying the earlier view of von Rad, 1934), certain narrative blocks, and various legal collections (e.g., Leviticus 1-7; 11-15; and 17-26, the "Holiness Code"; see Rendtorff, 1954; Koch; Reventlow; and Kilian). In virtually all such cases P would have edited the received materials before inserting them into the P history, some stylistic aspects of which process are depicted well by S. E. McEvenue.

The essential critical problem, although not original to this recent period of research, parallels that of the other documents: What, precisely is P—a source or a redaction? Noth (1948:7-19, 228ff.; Eng. tr. 8-19, 228ff.) was unequivocal in identifying P as an intact narrative independent of other sources, and he then posited that this P served as the literary basis into which JE was woven. P was normative for the final Pentateuch, beginning at Genesis I and ending at Deuteronomy 34. Thus for Noth it was not simply an editorial process of combining JE and P together but rather of fitting JE into P. Quite a different view has been proposed by F. M. Cross (293-325). Noting the absence of numerous important Pentateuchal traditions, the presence of various framing devices, the occurrence of archaizing language, and other evidences, Cross argued that P could only be considered a redactional stage and not an independent narrative document. The basis was JE, which the Priestly tradent edited and supplemented with Priestly lore during the latter period of the exile, the purpose being to revive the Sinaitic covenant and to aid the restoration of Israel. Rendtorff (1977:112-42) maintained just as strongly that P was not a continuous narrative but rather a redactional level, comprised especially of chronological and some theological texts that were made to link the previous traditions together. Winnett and Van Seters have taken similar positions, as we have seen above. Also regarding P we find, therefore, a situation in which careful studies and bold argumentation have combined to unsettle old positions in favor of a more redaction-critical view of the development of the Pentateuch.

The Pentateuch as a Whole

Much more scholarly attention has been devoted—as might well be expected given the predominant critical methods—to the meaning and history of parts of the Pentateuch than to the nature of the Pentateuch as a whole. Nonetheless, the latter has been a matter of concern with respect especially to three questions: extent, literary basis, and intention.

We have already indicated that von Rad and Noth themselves disagreed on where the Pentateuch as a literary unity actually ends. The problem involves both the book of Deuteronomy and the conquest tradition. In his 1943 publication Noth tied Deuteronomy as well as the conquest narrative in Joshua to the Deuteronomistic History, which runs through the books of Kings; and thereby he was left with essentially a Tetrateuch plus some P materials at the end of Deuteronomy. Von Rad, for his part, considered the conquest narrative to be the natural conclusion to the creedal affirmation that begins with the promises to the ancestors, including the promise of the land. Scholars have had difficulty in moving the discussion beyond this difference of opinion, even if the word "Pentateuch" is much more frequently used than either "Tetrateuch" or "Hexateuch." Mowinckel (1964b; 1964a) found in the book of Joshua some traces of both J and P concerning a conquest of the land, but above all a Deuteronomistic redaction which made such fragments into a full history of the conquest by "all-Israel." For him, then, there was never a Tetrateuch nor a Hexateuch in the sense of an independent historical work—but only a Pentateuch with the D laws incorporated and the J and P conquest materials included in the Deuteronomistic History (1964b:77). However, the more difficult problem has been associated with the book of Deuteronomy. Ever since Noth's 1943 study scholars have been inclined to see in Deuteronomy the ideologidal basis for the following Deuteronomistic History, and in some cases (e.g., W. Fuss) also to identify a Deuteronomistic redactional layer in the earlier books of the Pentateuch. In all of this, however, it is extremely difficult to move beyond the ancient tradition of a canonical corpus of five books, that is, with Deuteronomy connected with what precedes it more than with what follows it.

On what literary basis was the Pentateuch formed? For Noth (1948:7-19; Eng. tr. 8-19), P was an extensive narrative work and served as the literary framework into which JE was incorporated; however, this was not simply a matter of adding JE to P but rather a process in which P drew on JE to enrich its own narrative. The opposing position of Winnett, Van Seters, Cross, Schmid, and Rendtorff has been detailed above: that P was not a distinct source but rather a redactional layer, a reworking of JE. This point is far from resolution at present, and it will scarcely be adjudicated until more work has been done on the nature of redactional activity itself, the various postulated redactional layers have been compared, and the distinctively P materials (both narrative and laws) have been further examined for internal and stylistic coherence.

Not unrelated to these issues is the question of the Pentateuch's intention or purpose. Noth (1948:267-71; Eng. tr. 248-51) assigned it no greater significance traditio-historically than merely the literary adding together of all of the source materials, even if later synagogue and church have seen in this whole a theological unity that it originally did not have. For Noth, there was such similarity among the separate documentary sources in their narration of the course of Israel's history that their amalgamation did not affect this theological affirmation. Quite a different approach to this question of the meaning of the final compilation of the Pentateuch has more recently emerged, however. J. A. Sanders, J. Blenkinsopp, and B. S. Childs (1979) have all called attention to the role that the formation of the Pentateuch as authoritative or "canonical" literature played for the community. This process, especially in the postexilic period, involved a corporate search for meaning as well as a need to regularize the people's relation to their God. All three of these scholars as well as S. Tengström, R. Rendtorff (1977), and D. J. A. Clines assigned a key role to the theme of promise, especially as articulated to the ancestors. Here and also in the establishment of the law, the Pentateuch constituted a compelling message that helped to shape and preserve the people as much as the people had molded and retained the literature. This reciprocal relationship between community and text, together with the many other suggestive proposals reviewed above, will continue to command further inquiry in future Pentateuchal research.

Bibliography

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Abbreviations

AASF

Annales academiae scientarium fennicae

AB

Anchor Bible

ACOR

American Center for Oriental Research

AfO

Archiv für Orientforschung

AJA

American Journal of Archaeology

AnBib

Analecta biblica

ANET

Ancient Near Eastern Texts, ed. J. B. Pritchard

AnOr

Analecta orientalia

AOAT

Alter Orient und Altes Testament

AOATS

Alter Orient und Altes Testament, Sonderreihe

AOS

American Oriental Series

ARM

Archives royale de Mari

AS

Assyriological Studies

ASOR

American Schools of Oriental Research

ASTI

Annual of the Swedish Theological Institute

ATAbh

Alttestamentliche Abhandlungen

ATANT

Abhandlungen zur Theologie des Alten und Neuen Testaments

ATD

Das Alte Testament deutsch

ATDan

Acta theologica danica

ATR

Anglican Theological Review

BA

Biblical Archaeologist

BARev

Biblical Archaeology Review

BASOR

Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research

BBB

Bonner biblische Beiträge

BCSR

Bulletin of the Council on the Study of Religion

BDB

F. Brown, S. R. Driver, and C. A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament

BETL

Bibliotheca ephemeridum theologicarum lovaniensium

BEvT

Beiträge zur evagelischen Theologie

BHS

Biblia hebraica stuttgartensia

Bib

Biblica

BibB

Biblische Beiträge

BibLeb

Bibel und Leben

BibOr

Biblica et orientalia

BibS(N)

Biblische Studien (Neukirchen-Vluyn)

BJRL

Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester

BKAT

Biblischer Kommentar: Altes Testament

BO

Bibliotheca orientalis

BR

Biblical Research

BSac

Bibliotheca Sacra

BT

The Bible Translator

BWANT

Beiträge zur Wissenschaft vom Alten und Neuen Testament

BZ

Biblische Zeitschrift

BZAW

Beihefte zur ZAW

CAT

Commentaire de l'Ancien Testament

CBC

Cambridge Bible Commentary

CBQ

Catholic Biblical Quarterly

ConBOT

Coniectanea biblica, Old Testament

CRAIBL

Comptes rendus de l'academie des in scriptions et belles-lettres

CRB

Cahiers de la RB

CTM

Concordia Theological Monthly

DBSup

Supplément au Dictionnaire de la Bible

EB

Echter Bibel

EdF

Erträge der Forschung

EKL

Evangelisches Kirchenlexikon

EncJud

Encyclopedia Judaica

EstBib

Estudios biblicos

ETL

Ephemerides theologicae lovanienses

EvT

Evangelische Theologie

ExpTim

Expository Times

FRLANT

Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments

HAT

Handbuch zum Alten Testament

HDR

Harvard Semitic Monographs

HO

Handbuch der Orientalistik

HSM

Harvard Semitic Monographs

HTR

Harvard Theological Review

HUCA

Hebrew Union College Annual

HUCM

Monographs of the Hebrew Union College

IB

The Interpreter's Bible

ICC

International Critical Commentary

IDB

Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible

IDBSup

Supplementary volume to IDB

IEJ

Israel Exploration Journal

Int

Interpretation

IOSCS

International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies

ITQ

Irish Theological Quarterly

JAAR

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

JANESCU

Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society of Columbia University

JAOS

Journal of the American Oriental Society

JBL

Journal of Biblical Literature

JBR

Journal of Bible and Religion

JCS

Journal of Cuneiform Studies

JDT

Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie

JEA

Journal of Egyptian Archaeology

JNES

Journal of Near Eastern Studies

JPOS

Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society

JQR

Jewish Quarterly Review

JR

Journal of Religion

JSOT

Journal for the Study of the Old Testament

JSOTSup

JSOT, Supplement

JSS

Journal of Semitic Studies

JTC

Journal for Theology and the Church

JTS

Journal of Theological Studies

KAT

Kommentar zum Alten Testament

KD

Kerygma und Dogma

Kl. Schr

Kleine Schriften

LUA

Lunds universitets arsskrift

MDOG

Mitteilungen der deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft

MGWJ

Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums

MIO

Mitteilungen des Instituts für Orientforschung

MRS

Mission de Ras Shamra

NCB

New Century Bible

NICOT

New International Commentary on the Old Testament

OBO

Orbis biblicus et orientalis

Or

Orientalia

OrAnt

Oriens antiquus

OTL

Old Testament Library

OTS

Oudtestamentische Studiën

OTWSA

Die Ou Testamentiese Werkgemeenskap in Suid-Afrika

PEQ

Palestine Exploration Quarterly

PRU

Le Palais Royal d'Ugarit

PTMS

Pittsburgh Theological Monograph Series

RA

Revue d'assyriologie et d'archéologie orientale

RAI

Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale

RB

Revue biblique

RGG

Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. K. Galling

RHA

Revue hittite et asianique

RHPR

Revue d'histoire et de philosophie religieuses

RLA

Reallexikon der Assyriologie

RoB

Religion och Bibel

RSO

Rivisti degli studi orientali

RTP

Revue de théologie et de philosophie

SANT

Studien zum Alten und Neuen Testament

SB

Sources bibliques

SBFLA

Studii biblici franciscani liber annuus

SBLDS

Society of Biblical Literature Disser tation Series

SBLMS

Society of Biblical Literature Mono graph Series

SBLSBS

Society of Biblical Literature Sources for Biblical Study

SBS

Stuttgarter Bibelstudien

SBT

Studies in Biblical Theology

SEA

Svensk exegetisk arsbok

Sem

Semitica

SHVL

Skrifter utgivna av Kungl. Humanistiska Vetenskapssamfundet i Lund

SJLA

Studies in Judaism in late Antiquity

SJT

Scottish Journal of Theology

SNTSMS

Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series

SNVAO

Skrifter utgitt av Det Norske Videnskaps-Akademi i Oslo

SOTSMS

Society for Old Testament Studies Monograph Series

SPAW

Sitzungsberichte der preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften

SQAW

Schriften und Quellen der alten Welt

SR

Studies in Religion/Sciences religieuses

SSN

Studia semitica neerlandica

ST

Studia theologica

SUNT

Studien zur Umwelt des Neuen Testaments

TBü

Theologische Bücherei

TD

Theology Digest

TLZ

Theologische Literaturzeitung

TRE

Theologische Real-enzyklopädie

TRu

Theologische Rundschau

TSK

Theologische Studien und Kritiken

TToday

Theology Today

TTZ

Trierer theologische Zeitschrift

TynBul

Tyndale Bulletin

TZ

Theologische Zeitschrift

UF

Ugarit-Forschungen

USQR

Union Seminary Quarterly Review

VD

Verbum Domini

VF

Verkündifung und Forschung

VT

Vetus Testamentum

VTSup

Vetus Testamentum, Supplements

WMANT

Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament

WO

Die Welt des Orients

WTJ

Westminster Theological Journal

WZKM Wiener

Zeitschrift für de Kunde des Morgenlandes

ZA

Zeitschrift für Assyriologie

ZAW

Zeitschrift für die alttestamenliche Wissenschaft

ZDPV

Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins

ZTK

Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche