semiopen wrote: ↑Sat Jul 01, 2017 12:31 pm
The point of the
Elohist is that the guy was from the north before the Assyrians took over. I suppose that could have happened, and it probably is much more likely than space aliens writing the stuff, but it just doesn't seem like a serious view anymore except in a synagogue.
What makes you say that "it just doesn't seem like a serious view anymore"? Apart from a general desire to down-date the entire literary corpus of the Pentateuch, which is certainly the
zeitgeist of contemporary biblical criticism, what substantively would make the early northern origin of "E" so improbable?
I ask because there are some modern scholars who do entertain the possibility that at least
some Pentateuchal material has a northern pre-722 BCE provenance.
In his essay
"The Deceptive Pen of Scribes: Judean Reworking of the Bethel Tradition as a Program of Assuming Israelite Identity", Koog P Hong examines the famous Jacob in Bethel pericope (Genesis 28:10-22) and, working from Erhard Blum's textual analysis, identifies the core of the Bethel story as northern, dating to before the fall of Samaria, which is subsequently "appropriated" by Judean scribes:
What remains firm despite this modification is his [Blum's] basic scheme in which the northern Israelite Jacob tradition has been re-appropriated by the Judeans after the fall of northern Israel (722 B.C.E.). First, Blum establishes the pre-promise, “pre-Hoseanic”, northern Israelite Bethel account in 28,11-13a*.15*.16-22 25, despite Van Seters’s challenge on the early dating.
Blum’s early dating might sound audacious, particularly in light of the recent minimalist trend that favors later dating. In fact, a number of observations appear to justify, if not favor, this early northern Israelite origin. At Bethel, YHWH appears as a deity unknown to Jacob, in a way quite similar to Exod 3, where Moses first encounters YHWH. Jacob’s vow, “YHWH will be my God” (28,21b), is otherwise difficult to understand. This implies that the Jacob story once existed without the preceding Abraham narrative. Moreover, Jacob’s vow to build a temple and pay tithe (28,22) is probably designed to elicit the reader’s response of support for the cultic function of the Bethel sanctuary. It is, then, most likely that this vow was written at a time when Bethel was functioning as a religious center. Besides, it is difficult to imagine an exilic Judean scribe composing a founding myth of Bethel, a major rival shrine of Jerusalem — and even calling for a continued support for it — without leaving any explicit mention to Jerusalem in the entire book of Genesis.
(my emphasis)
Those strike me as a not unreasonable arguments. And if this passage has northern origins, why not others?
To put that essay in context, and for the avoidance of doubt, Hong is himself critical of the notion that E must be from the north. In
Abraham, Genesis 20-22, and the Northern Elohist he rejects the notion that the chapters in question show any evidence of a northern provenance, despite its clearly "Elohisitc" character. In contrast,
Tsemah Yoreh argues that the core of these chapters is indeed an E narrative, and offers an implicitly critical view of Abraham the "southerner" . That's a novel but interesting viewpoint. While I'm certainly not entirely convinced, I don't think Hong's ciriticism of Yoreh is entirely valid either, so currently I'd argue that the idea of northern texts (notionally definable as "E"), subsequently appropriated and incorporated by southern scribes into their own narratives (roughly definable as "J") might offer a fruitful area of investigation.
Btw,
à propos of nothing much, I think that the notion of "elegant simplicity" is an overrated virtue, so I don't consider complexity a barrier to plausibilty.