173 THE CONTINUITY OF THE NON-PRIESTLY NARRATIVE deuteronomic) disregard of the promise of progeny after Genesis: because the promise of progeny is fulfilled at the beginning of the exodus account, in both the priestly and non-priestly narratives, only the promise of land is left to be dealt with. Both P and non-P thus perfectly reflect the narrative situation, and neither requires any literary-critical explanation to make sense of its presentation of the promises. We may thus add to the list of non-priestly links be- tween the patriarchs and exodus the references to the promise in Exod 32,13; 33,1; Num 11,12; 14,16.23; Deut 31,23; 34,4, and note again that these links back to the patriarchs are scattered through- out the non-priestly narrative, while in P they are confined to the be- ginning of the exodus account. Comparison of the situation in P with that in non-P reveals a cer- tain irony: the corpus with one single textual unit explicitly linking the patriarchs and exodus is considered to be the first narrative bridg- ing the two into a unified whole, while the text with multiple, di- verse, and frequently quite subtle links, scattered throughout the whole of the narrative, is considered to have originally been two sep- arate pieces. This is not to suggest, of course, that the patriarchs and exodus were originally unconnected in P. As noted above, in a con- tinuous document there is no pressing need to explicitly link the vari- ous textual units, as they are linked merely by virtue of being part of the same continuous story. P’s decision to create a clear verbal link in Exodus 1–6 is a thematic and stylistic choice, one that fits well with P’s style and ideology everywhere. In precisely the same way, non-P’s diverse connections between the patriarchs and the exodus can be seen as elements of non-P’s authorial technique. We have two corpora, describing the same history, but doing so in very different ways — both in the content of their narratives and in the style with which those narratives are presented. III. The concept of the post-priestly redaction In order to maintain the argument that the non-priestly patriarch and exodus narratives were not originally part of a continuous liter- ary work, every one of the aforementioned links between the two must be somehow removed from the original non-priestly text and ascribed to a post-priestly redactional layer — because if the priestly document was the first to connect the patriarchs and the exodus, © Gregorian Biblical Press 2012 - Tutti i diritti riservati