01_VanSeters_copiaaaa_01_25 28/04/15 11:15 Pagina 13 DATING THE YAHWIST’S HISTORY: PRINCIPLES AND PERSPECTIVES 13 name as being equivalent to the personal pronoun, so that just as Exod 3,14 provides us with the interpretation hyha (I am), Deutero- Isaiah appears to understand the divine name YHWH as meaning ‘He’, i.e. ‘The one’ or ‘He who is’” 19. These remarkable and quite distinctive literary and ideological correspondences between the Yahwist and Second Isaiah can only point to a direct literary connection between the two as contempo- raries belonging to the same Jewish community in Babylonia. And since Second Isaiah clearly suggests that the community whom he is addressing is familiar with the details about the primeval history, the stories of the Patriarchs, especially Abraham, and the exodus and wilderness wanderings, he must be directly dependent upon the entire J text as set forth in Genesis, Exodus and Numbers. There is no other corpus of literary texts belonging to the pre- or early ex- ilic period, such as the prophetic texts from Amos to Ezekiel, nor any post-exilic text, that can provide such a compelling compara- tive context than the late exilic period reflected in Second Isaiah. II. The Larger Social Context of the Babylonian Exile It has long been recognized that there are a number of obvious interconnections between the J corpus of texts in the Pentateuch and the social culture of Mesopotamia, but with the early pre-exilic dating of the Yahwist, all of these references have been attributed to a rather nebulous body of old traditions stretching back into the second millennium BCE. Even though much of this approach to accounting for these Mesopotamian parallels has been discredited, the idea that the biblical authors made use of old traditions trans- mitted over a long period of time has persisted as an excuse for not taking these interconnections seriously as a way of dating the bib- lical text. The fact of the matter is that if one accepts the strong pos- sibility that the Yahwist belongs to the exilic period, based on the evidence presented above, then an entirely different light is cast upon these frequent references to Babylonia in J as the most ap- propriate context in which this composition was written. In this sur- vey I will restrict myself to the most obvious parallels to the 19 P. ACKROYD, Exile and Restoration (London 1968) 133. See also his re- marks in P. ACKROYD, Israel under Babylon and Persia (Oxford 1970) 110-111.