163 THE CONTINUITY OF THE NON-PRIESTLY NARRATIVE plicit indicators that the narratives of the patriarchs and the exodus are inextricably linked in the P document. We can further agree that the verbal links between the patriarchs and the exodus in this section of P are considerably denser and more explicit than in the equivalent non-P text. It does not follow, however, that because P’s bridge from the patriarchs to the exodus is clearer than in non-P there is no such connection in non-P. Even if the non-priestly text does not contain as explicit a verbal connection at the beginning of the exodus narrative as does P, it has its own set of connections be- tween the two, which will be investigated below — connections that are as distinct from those of P as the non-priestly narrative is distinct from that of P. There is no reason to judge non-P in terms of P (or vice versa). The non-priestly text neither had nor has any obligation to repli- cate, mimic, or approximate the style (or content) of the priestly text. We must, rather, examine each independently. It is prejudicial to take the priestly text of Exodus 1–6 as the model of literary continuity against which other texts should be judged. Not only is the priestly style of verbal linking an illegitimate basis against which to compare the non-priestly narrative, but even fo- cusing on the textual pivot between the patriarchs and the exodus at the beginning of the canonical book of Exodus is methodologically problematic. To search in the beginning of Exodus for the bridge between the patriarchs and the exodus is to assume a priori that the texts were separate. This assumption has its basis in Martin Noth’s classic argument that the tradition complexes of the patriarchs and the exodus were originally independent. As a tradition-historical ar- gument, this claim may well be valid. But contemporary penta- teuchal scholarship has taken the pre-literary tradition units of Noth and turned them into textual units: the independent traditions of Noth are now the independent texts of current scholarship — and the idea of the oral tradition underlying the biblical text has essentially been discarded. This means that the division that is either sought or assumed be- tween the patriarchs and the exodus is a scholarly imposition on the text: it emerges from the development of tradition criticism from Noth to the present. On the textual level, however, in the canonical Penta- teuch, there is no such division. We must not be misled by the sepa- ration of the Pentateuch into books, either in the case of Genesis and Exodus or elsewhere. Before the compilation of the canonical text, there was no such thing as the book of Genesis or the book of Exo- © Gregorian Biblical Press 2012 - Tutti i diritti riservati