162 JOEL S. BADEN post-priestly redactor. These links were further elaborated in the later redaction history of the Pentateuch. In my essay, I will address this argument from a number of perspectives, and try to show why I think that the textual evidence suggests that the non-priestly narrative was in fact continuous. I. Methods in discerning continuity At the heart of the debate regarding the continuity of the non- priestly 2 patriarch and exodus narratives is a central methodologi- cal question: how is literary continuity marked? What indicators do we require in order to conclude that two textual units are in fact one literary whole? We may begin on a note of agreement: the priestly document (Schmid and I agree that P was originally an independent document) demonstrates clear and marked literary continuity be- tween its narratives of the patriarchs and the exodus. This is espe- cially so in the very beginning of the priestly account of the exodus, which by broad scholarly consensus comprises Exod 1,1-5.7.13-14; 2,23aβ-25; 6,2-13. The list of Jacob’s sons and the enumeration of Jacob’s descendants who went down to Egypt in Exod 1,1-5, which recapitulates the fuller description in Gen 46,8-27; the notice of the increase of the Israelites in Exod 1,7 which in its content, couched in the pluperfect (“the Israelites had been fertile and prolific and had multiplied [...] and the land had been filled with them”), refers back to the first priestly announcement of the increase in Gen 47,27, and in its wording harks back directly to the priestly promises to the pa- triarchs in Gen 17,6; 28,3; 35,11; 48,4 (and even further to 1,28); God’s recollection in Exod 2,24 and 6,4-5.8 of the covenant with the patriarchs in Genesis 17; the divine statement in Exod 6,3 that Yahweh had revealed himself to the patriarchs as El Shaddai, as was indeed the case in Gen 17,1; 28,3; 35,11; 48,3 — all of these are ex- I will refer throughout to the non-priestly narrative and text as if it were 2 the work of a single author rather than as the combination of J and E. This is not to imply that the non-priestly narrative is a unity, which neither I nor any- one else (with a few idiosyncratic exceptions such as John Van Seters) hold it to be. It is rather to avoid needlessly complicating the discussion with fur- ther divisions of the non-priestly text, and to keep the discourse on a single plane, that is, focused on the question of continuity in P versus non-P. © Gregorian Biblical Press 2012 - Tutti i diritti riservati