Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Elohist Narrative in Exodus 3: 1 15
E narratives, particularly the latter; or, perhaps more correctly, that the J and E narra tives are based directly upon the narrative Of the suppressed portions Of the older K document.
At first I called this document, for Obvious reasons, The Little Book of the Cove nant, and designated it by the label 02. But owing to the resultant confusion of both name and label with those of the Book of the Covenant proper, and the additional con fusion that this document, labeled 02, was in fact considerably Older than the Book Of the Covenant, labeled C or Cl, I have come to think it best to call this the Kenite docu ment, for reasons easily perceived, and to label it K. (perhaps Qenite and Q would have been scientifically more accurate, and would have been employed had not Well hausen formerly used the letter Q to designate the Priestly Code; cf. His Die Composition des Hexateuchs.) The original independence as a document of the Book of the Covenant and its later incorporation into E have long. Been recognized by biblical scholars. In the con tinuation of the aforecited article on Biblical Theophanies (z eitschrift far Assyriologie XXVIII 15 - 25) I have set forth additional grounds for regarding Num. As belonging to this document. Since the publication of that article further investiga tion has brought to light additional information about the literary history of the 0 document also. It is now clear that the original code of laws in C, upon the basis of which, according to the narrative there, the covenant between Yahwe and Israel was established, contained only those laws which are designated as debarim, as Exod. 24, 4 and 8 explicitly state. All the other laws now found in the C document were inserted later, and probably not all at one time. It is possible to distinguish between four different kinds of laws in the present C document, to classify them, and determine in a general way their origin and the order in which they were incorporated into the C code. Of the original C docu ment only the following verses are preserved, Exod. - 26 (expanded somewhat); - 30; 23 10 - 19 (considerably emended and expanded); - 8; Num. 10 33. The original document, however, it is clear from ample evidence, must have contained also quite an extensive narrative introduction and conclusion, paralleling in most details the narrative of the K document. The greater portion of this also was suppressed by the E2 editors, who incorporated merely these few fragments into E. The close relationship of C to K, and in fact its marked dependence upon K, both in the laws and in the narra tive introduction and conclusion, make it very probable, if not practically certain, that the C document constituted the basis Of the bloody revolution and reformation Of Elisha and Jehu, supported by Jehonadab ben Rekab in the Northern Kingdom in the year 842 b.c. The participation of the Rekabites in this movement reveals the medium of transmission of the code of laws of the K document, the basis of the somewhat similar reformation in the Southern Kingdom fifty-seven years before. To the prophetic circles of the Northern Kingdom.
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