01_VanSeters_copiaaaa_01_25 28/04/15 11:15 Pagina 11 DATING THE YAHWIST’S HISTORY: PRINCIPLES AND PERSPECTIVES 11 the task of kingship 16. It should also be noted that in Second Isaiah, in speaking about the creation of heaven and earth, there is no fixed rule concerning the order of these two realms, so that Second Isaiah can have the deity say: “My hand laid the earth’s foundation and my right hand stretched out the heavens” (48,13). When we compare Second Isaiah with the Yahwist, the correspon- dences are numerous and significant. The latter begins his account of creation by speaking of the “day that YHWH God made the earth and the heavens”, which seems strange when it follows the consistent use by P of the creation of “the heavens and the earth”, but as we have seen in Second Isaiah, before the time of P’s treatment of creation, no such consistency was necessary. J’s use of the verb rcy “to form” (Gen 2,7.19) in his description of the creation of man is the direct equivalent of the verb arb “to create” in 6,7 in which YHWH speaks of wiping out “humanity whom I have created”. As we have seen above, this matches completely the usage of these terms in Second Isaiah. By contrast, the term rcy is never used in the sense of “to create” in P. To these close correspondences between Second Isaiah and J we may add two more references in Second Isaiah to J’s account of the primeval history. In Isa 51,3 there is a reference to “Eden,” as “the garden of YHWH” that clearly depends upon Genesis 3, and in Isa 54,9 there is a reference to the story of Noah and the flood and the divine oath that the flood waters would never again cover the earth, which depends on Gen 8,21. Furthermore, the references to creation and the primeval history in Second Isaiah, along with the appeals to Abraham and the patriarch Jacob and the implicit promises of land and progeny, together with the many allusions to the exodus from Egypt and the wilderness wanderings, all these point to a Yahwistic history that includes everything from the creation story to the end of the wilder- ness wanderings and triumphal entrance into the promised land. There is simply no justification for scholars to split this non-P narrative up into so many different pieces and distribute them to widely separate periods of time as it suits their “redaction” theories. 16 See the opening paragraph of Assurbanipal’s Rassam Cylinder, which states: “I am Assurbanipal, offspring of Assur and Belit, the oldest prince of the royal harem whose name Assur and Sin, the lord of the tiara, have named for the kingship from earliest days, whom they formed in his mother’s womb, for the rulership of Assyria”, D.D. LUCKENBILL, Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia (Chicago, IL 1927) II, 291. See also H. FRANKFORT, Kingship and the Gods (Chicago, IL 1948) 300-301.