171 THE CONTINUITY OF THE NON-PRIESTLY NARRATIVE departure from Egypt, in the episode at the mountain, and in the wilderness. Some of these ties are verbally explicit — references to the patriarchs by name, for example — while some simply exhibit what we might term casual dependence on the historical claims es- tablished in the preceding patriarchal narrative, such as the dwelling of the Israelites in Goshen. All, however, link the patriarchal and exodus narratives in the non-priestly text. The call of Moses in Exodus 3 is, of course, the textual unit with the clearest and densest links to the patriarchal narratives in non-P, just as the functionally equivalent priestly passages in Exodus 1–6 contain the clearest and densest links to the priestly patriarchal nar- ratives. Yet the ease with which the priestly text in Exodus 1–6 is held up as the supposedly original means of connecting the patri- archs and the exodus masks a rather remarkable facet of the priestly narrative. Outside of the connections in Exodus 1–6 described above, P nowhere explicitly links the patriarchs and the exodus. In none of the patriarchal narratives is there even so much as a single mention of Egypt in any context, much less any anticipatory allu- sion to the notion that the Israelites will some day find themselves there. In the priestly promise texts (just as in those classically as- signed to non-P), the assignment of Canaan to the patriarchs is pre- sented not as something to be fulfilled upon the Israelites’ return from Egypt, but as something fulfilled in the lifetimes of the patri- archs: “I will give the land to you” (Gen 17,8); “that you may pos- sess the land in which you are sojourning, which God gave to Abraham” (Gen 28,4); “the land that I gave to Abraham and Isaac I will give to you” (Gen 35,12). Unlike non-P, in which the patri- archs move from town to town, building altars but not ever putting down any permanent roots, P repeatedly emphasizes that Abraham established a permanent holding in Canaan, the burial plot in the cave of Machpelah where he and the other patriarchs and matri- archs (with the exception of Rachel) are buried. While the non- priestly Joseph story ends with Jacob’s family back in Egypt after the death and burial of Jacob (Gen 50,14.22.26), in the priestly nar- rative, the Joseph story ends with all of Jacob’s family in Canaan, having laid Jacob to rest in the family plot at Machpelah (50,12-13). Read independently, one might be forgiven for concluding that it is actually the priestly narrative in Genesis that has no knowledge at all of the exodus to come; it neither prepares for it with explicit or implicit foreshadowing nor does it even narratively set the stage © Gregorian Biblical Press 2012 - Tutti i diritti riservati