01_VanSeters_copiaaaa_01_25 28/04/15 11:15 Pagina 21 DATING THE YAHWIST’S HISTORY: PRINCIPLES AND PERSPECTIVES 21 “Do not be afraid, for God has come to test you in order that fear of him may always be present to you, so that you may not sin” (Exod 20,19). This scene is built upon the similar one in Deut 5,24- 27, but it has been modified to make it much closer to the language found in the Nabonidus’s inscriptions. Furthermore, once Moses serves as the means of communicating the law code at Sinai to the people, he then takes on a different role throughout the rest of the wilderness experience by serving repeatedly as mediator on the people’s behalf when they sin, just as Nabonidus appears to do on behalf of his subjects and his son 36. To sum up our observations regarding the Babylonian context of J, the very close similarity between the biblical story of Noah and the Flood with its Babylonian counterpart in a late version of this story, together with what looks like a parody of Nebuchadnez- zar’s restoration of the ziggurat of Babylon in the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, all point to a general dating of the Yahwist nar- rative in the Neo-Babylonian Period. This dating may be more closely defined in the story of the migration of the Aramean family of Abraham from Ur of the Chaldeans to Harran and from Harran to Palestine and to its southern region of Hebron, which forms a striking parallel to the migration of Nabonidus the Aramean ruler of Babylonia from Babylon through Syria and the “land of the Hit- tites”, i.e. Canaan and Trans-Jordan, to northern Arabia and Teima. To create such a parallel J had first to place the origin of Abraham, the forefather of the Judeans of southern Judah, in distant Ur and transfer the family of the Aramean Laban from southern Syria to Harran in the far north beyond the Euphrates and make him a de- scendant of the Aramean Terah from Ur of the Chaldeans. This rad- ical reconstruction of the patriarchal “history” only makes sense if J is using Nabonidus the Aramean, with his close family connec- tions to both Ur and Harran and his migration to Teima, as a model. The parallels are so striking and so limited to a very short period of time that dating the J story of Abraham to this period could hardly be otherwise. We may then add to this Nabonidus’s obses- sion with establishing a historical continuity between the rulers of the earliest periods of Mesopotamian civilization and their piety down to his own time and compare it with the Yahwist’s parallel 36 See also the role of Moses in Deut 9,18-21.25-29. However, much of this text has been modified under the influence of the J text.