01_Biblica_Hong_Layout 1 08/07/13 12:54 Pagina 338 338 KOOG P. HONG The foregoing discussion reveals a critical flaw in the source model’s categorical claim for E’s northern provenance. It is true that most of the Elohistic tradition has northern roots, but not all of it has. We found little basis for assigning the Elohistic Abraham section to a northern origin. To be sure, this does not mean that source criticism must be rejected entirely. What is challenged is a claim for the Elohist document’s northern origin. Any source model that assumes that the E document was written down in the northern kingdom of Israel has to face the question of how the Abraham tra- dition, which is tradition-historically of southern origin and later than the northern kingdom as a political entity, happened to be in- cluded in E before it was adopted by Judeans. This problem is most apparent, of course, in the traditional source model, like that of Friedman, in which the northern orientation of E is not only assumed but also used as one of the main criteria for identifying E. This applies also to Yoreh’s tradition-historically compromised source model (northern base tradition with southern revision). In iden- tifying the northern base tradition, Yoreh simply returns to and relies on the traditional source-critical criteria, in which E’s northern prove- nance is, as demonstrated above, not critically justified but only sec- ondarily imposed 69. As a result, he has to deal with the presence of the Abraham tradition (southern) in the middle of his northern Elohistic corpus, which resulted in an unnecessarily complex explanation for the role of Abraham in relation to Jacob in E 70. On the other hand, Neo- Documentarians, in theory, do escape most of the present criticism, in- sofar as the notion of E’s northern orientation belongs to the elements secondary to the Documentary Hypothesis — the elements that are also dismissed by Neo-Documentarians 71. But in practice Baden accepts the traditional identification of Genesis 20–22* as E 72. He also appears to accept E’s northern origin when he implies that E came down to Jerusalem and somehow retained its independent form until it was fi- nally compiled by the one and only post-exilic redactor that he posits73. YOREH, The First Book of God, 10, 91, 157, 228. 69 YOREH, The First Book of God, 69-72. He argues that in E’s presenta- 70 tion, Isaac was actually killed and sacrificed. In E, therefore, Abraham’s line is annexed from Israelite history at this point. BADEN, J, E, and the Redaction, 313; SCHWARTZ, “Recent Scholarship’s 71 Critique”, 13. BADEN, J, E, and the Redaction, 215, n. 13. 72 BADEN, J, E, and the Redaction, 255-286, 309-310. 73 © Gregorian Biblical Press 2013 - Tutti i diritti riservati