01_VanSeters_copiaaaa_01_25 28/04/15 11:15 Pagina 5 DATING THE YAHWIST’S HISTORY: PRINCIPLES AND PERSPECTIVES 5 “house of Jacob” in Egypt and promised them that he would bring them out of Egypt and give to them “a land flowing with milk and honey” if they would give up their worship of the idols of Egypt (Ezek 20,7). At the same time Ezekiel disparages the rival tradition about Abraham the forefather of the people having already inherited the land in which they are now located (Ezek 33,24) 10. There is no suggestion anywhere in Ezekiel that a prior promise was made by the deity to the patriarchs about some future inheritance, only that a conditional promise of a new land that God had chosen for them was made to the Israelites in Egypt for the first time, quite distinct from the Abraham tradition. By contrast, in the Yahwist the promise of land that is made to Abraham and repeated to Isaac and Jacob is presented as being the same promise that is made to Moses and the Israelites in Egypt, so that it is most unlikely that Ezekiel was aware of this later revised version of the land promise theme. Moreover, we may compare Ezekiel with Deut 26,5-9, which suggests that Jacob was a landless “Aramean” nomad who went to Egypt where the family sojourned until they became a large group which was subsequently used by the Egyptians as a labour force. When subjected to hard labour, they appealed to YHWH, the God of their forefathers, who rescued them and gave them a land flow- ing with milk and honey. This bears a close resemblance to the Ezekiel version in what it includes and what it omits. It begins by accounting for how the Israelites got into Egypt in the first place, which is omitted in Ezekiel but perhaps implied by his reference to the “house of Jacob” in Egypt, but Deuteronomy shares with Ezekiel the promise of the “land flowing with milk and honey”. Deuteronomy, in this “credo”, says nothing about the role of Moses or the disobedience of the people, and nothing about any prior prom- ise of land to Jacob, the landless Aramean 11. It seems to me that Ezekiel has made use of the D tradition in this form and expanded 10 See also the remarks about Jerusalem’s origins in Ezekiel 16 as derived from the aboriginal population of the region, the “Amorites” and the “Hittites”. 11 The references to the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, in conjunc- tion with the gift of the land are entirely secondary in Deuteronomy. See J. VAN SETERS, “Confessional Reformulation in the Exilic Period”, VT 22 (1972) 182-197; T. RÖMER, Israels Väter. Untersuchungen zur Väterthematik im Deuteronomium und in der deuteronomistischen Tradition (OBO 99; Fri- bourg, CH – Göttingen 1990).