John Van Seters, «Dating the Yahwist’s History: Principles and Perspectives.», Vol. 96 (2015) 1-25
In order to date the Yahwist, understood as the history of Israelite origins in Genesis to Numbers, comparison is made between J and the treatment of the patriarchs and the exodus-wilderness traditions in the pre-exilic prophets and Ezekiel, all of which prove to be earlier than J. By contrast, Second Isaiah reveals a close verbal association with J’s treatments of creation, the Abraham story and the exodus from Egypt. This suggests that they were contemporaries in Babylon in the late exilic period, which is confirmed by clear allusions in both authors to Babylonian sources dealing with the time of Nabonidus.
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DATING THE YAHWIST’S HISTORY: PRINCIPLES AND PERSPECTIVES 3
Consequently, I will make the case for dating the Yahwist to a
particular time and place in history, i.e. the latter years of the Baby-
lonian Exile, based upon the more easily dated biblical texts, such
as the Prophets, and relevant external historical evidence. This is
not to suggest that the Yahwist’s narrative of the patriarchal migra-
tion from Mesopotamia reflects old traditions of an actual migration
of Amorites in the early second millennium BCE, or that J’s account
of the exodus from Egypt reflects the time of Ramesses II, as was
done by the Albright School and others some decades ago. Rather
our task is to treat the Yahwist’s narrative as a literary work that
can be dated to a quite precise historical period by means of various
clues from the social and cultural environment in which it was writ-
ten. There are therefore two broad fields of comparison that may
be used with some confidence in establishing a date for the Yahwist:
one consists of the evidence derived from the biblical record itself;
the other from comparisons with well-documented historical texts
from the broader Near Eastern environment. In the discussion that
follows I will deal with these two fields of evidence in order.
I. The Yahwist and the Prophets Compared
First let us consider the biblical texts whose dates may be accepted
with some confidence and which are directly relevant to dating the
Yahwist’s composition at some point in the period of the exile in Baby-
lon. These are the prophecies of Ezekiel in the early exilic period and
that of Second Isaiah towards the end of the Babylonian hegemony
and the rise of Cyrus. In addition, comparison may be made with the
older traditions of the patriarchs and the exodus reflected in Hosea and
Amos (8th century BCE), and with Deuteronomy, whose composition
in stages includes primarily the period from the Josiah reform until
the early to mid-exilic period (late 7th to early 6th century BCE), al-
though the dates of some of these later additions may be disputed and
the dating therefore less certain. Nevertheless the course of this devel-
opment of the patriarchal and exodus traditions seems fairly clear 7.
7
In this review I have largely avoided discussing parallels between J and
the historical parallels in Deuteronomy because these have been dealt with
in great detail in J. VAN SETERS, The Life of Moses. The Yahwist as Historian
in Exodus and Numbers (Louisville, KY 1994).