Ulan wrote: ↑Sat Jul 01, 2017 1:28 am
The aforementioned Konrad Schmid has definitely done away with it, and most of his colleagues agree. They consider the "Jahwist" to be a disparate collection of older stories, a collection that never told a comprehensive tale.
I haven't read any substantial work by Konrad Schmidt. How similar is his approach to Reinhard Kratz, whose "
Composition of the Narrative Books of the Old Testament" I
am familiar with.
I
think that the "Yahwist-is-dead" position is, roughly, that there was absolutely no connected Pentateuchal (or Tetrateuchal) narrative as such before P, making P (
inter alia) the literary glue that first stuck all those earlier fragments together. To be honest, I don't buy that, because so much of the material traditionally dated to an earlier pre-P stratum (let's call it, for argument's sake, the Yahwist), is so utterly contrary to P's agenda and surely would not have been included by P at all. Some other editorial process was surely at work. I suspect (it's a while since I read Kratz) that this problem is avoided by, metaphorically, throwing the awkard material over the garden fence and defining it as "post- P". That doesn't convince me either, and I fear that it can becomes a sort of "get-out-of-jail-free" card.
So for me some sort of narrative linkage (perhaps not complete) of earlier material had already happened before P came along... perhaps vaguely analogous to the Documentary Hypothesis "JE Redaction" that preceded P.
Ulan wrote: ↑Sat Jul 01, 2017 1:28 am
Texts like the "Joseph" story are considered very late (I've seen dates of 400 BC). Reasons are the relatively modern style or the casual use of the concept of "money", which did not exist prior to 650 to 600 BC.
I'm interested in the issue of money in the Joseph narrative. We know that coinage didn't existing prior to 600BC. But we know that
silver, in the form of rings, weights, etc was used for commerce (See below), and the question is, what is meant in the Joseph narrative? Silver or silver coinage?
This question isn't an idle quibble by someone desperate to date these passages as early as possible. The crucial point is that in a number of passages in the Joseph story we read of "silver" being put in, or found in the mouth of the brothers' sacks (Gen 42:27-28; 43:12, 18, 21-22; 41:1). However in Gen 42:34-35, (usually recognized as a variant or doublet of Genesis 42:27-28), the term is different, here we read about every man's "
bundle of silver" in his sack. I have often wondered if this different usage doesn't graphically reflect different meanings of the word
qesef (silver). When the silver can be placed "in the mouth of" the sacks - and can be
found there (ie hasn't managed to work its way down to the bottom of the sack), the writer is thinking of largeish lumps of silver (see below) rather than coins, but in Genesis 41:34-35, when the silver is in "bundles", the writer
is now thinking of coins, kept in a little purse within the sacks.
So I am currently toying with the idea that there really is an earlier stratum, pre-coinage, as well as a later "modernisation".
I'm not quite sure how one might put an
absolute date on a "
relatively modern style"...
For Mesopotamian commerce by means of silver see here:
In the early days of shekels, people carried pieces of metal in bags and amounts were measured out on scales with stones as countermeasures on the other side. Between 2800 B.C. and 2500 B.C., pieces of silver were caste a standard weight, usually in the form of rings or coils called har on tablets. These rings, worth between 1 and 60 shekels, were used primarily by the rich to make big purchases. They came in a number of different forms: large ones with triangular ridges, thin coils.
http://www.ancientmesopotamians.com/anc ... rency.html