164 JOEL S. BADEN dus. The division of the Pentateuch into its five “books” is a function of the material capacity of the ancient scroll: the single literary work of the Pentateuch was too large to fit on a single scroll, and so was bro- ken up into five scrolls, our present pentateuchal books. The book of Genesis was never understood to be a literary work separate from the book of Exodus: there is no inner- or extra-biblical reference to Gen- esis or Exodus as an independent text — nor is there any inner- or extra-biblical reference to any part of Genesis or Exodus as an inde- pendent text 3. Genesis and Exodus exist only as the first two volumes of a five-volume work, the Pentateuch. This is all to say that the a priori distinction between the patri- archs and the exodus does not emerge from the canonical Pentateuch itself, which is where the inquiry must begin. In the canonical Pen- tateuch, the patriarchs and the exodus are part of the same narrative. To push the issue one step further: it is only if we begin with the assumption that the patriarchs and exodus were originally separate that we can even inquire as to how the non-priestly text marks the continuity between the two. For if we begin instead with the as- sumption that non-P was in fact a continuous narrative, then we may understand that it need not explicitly signal its own continuity in any particularly demonstrative way at all. A history of Israel’s origins, or any work that is meant to be read continuously from start to finish, is not required to intricately link any of its various episodes or epochs with explicit verbal cross-references. The reader does not require markers linking the middle of the story to the be- ginning; the reader has, after all, read them in sequence. If non-P were originally continuous, no explicit references back to the pa- triarchs would be necessary to show that the exodus was part of the same narrative; it would be part of the same narrative because it followed on it in the continuous history. Of course, explicit verbal links between parts of a continuous history are frequently employed for structural, thematic, or theo- logical reasons. The point is that such links are not necessary; they are, rather, part of the individual author’s stylistic toolkit. Thus even if there were no verbal links at all in the non-priestly patriarch and exodus narratives, it would not mean that they were not part of a It is clear that in the early post-biblical period Genesis and Exodus were 3 not considered separate works: we may note the examples of Jubilees, which concludes not at the end of the Joseph story as in Genesis but rather at Sinai, and the Genesis-Exodus scrolls from Qumran. © Gregorian Biblical Press 2012 - Tutti i diritti riservati