Notes

¹ Punning occurs frequently, for example, in the texts known in scholarship as the sources J and E, but it is rare in the texts known as the sources P and D.

 

² I first translated J, then E. Then I pursued the editing of J and E together by the redactor known as RJE. Then I translated P, then D (in its stages). Then I translated the remaining small texts (such as Genesis 14). And then I pursued the editing of all these together by the redactor known as R.

 

³ This is discussed below. I have also brought evidence for the earlier date for P in The Exile and Biblical Narrative, in Who Wrote the Bible?, and in “Torah” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1992), vol. 6, pp. 605-622.

 

⁴ One difference: italics for emphasis in the Commentary on the Torah are eliminated here because they might be misunderstood to be a source marker.

 

⁵ R. E. Friedman, The Hidden Book in the Bible (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998).

 

¹ Robert Polzin, Late Biblical Hebrew: Toward an Historical Typology of Biblical Hebrew Prose (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1976); Gary Rendsburg, “Late Biblical Hebrew and the Date of P,” Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 12 (1980): 65-80; Ziony Zevit, “Converging Lines of Evidence Bearing on the Date of P,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 94 (1982): 502-509; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16, Anchor Bible 3 (New York: Doubleday, 1991), pp. 3-13; Milgrom, “Numbers, Book of,” Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 4, pp. 1148-1149; Avi Hurvitz, “The Evidence of Language in Dating the Priestly Code,” Revue Biblique 81 (1974): 24-56; Hurvitz, A Linguistic Study of the Relationship Between the Priestly Source and the Book of Ezekiel (Paris: Gabalda, 1982); Hurvitz, (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1972); Hurvitz, “Continuity and Innovation in Biblical Hebrew—The Case of ‘Semantic Change’ in Post-Exilic Writings,” Abr-Naharaim Supp. 4 (1995), pp. 1-10; Hurvitz, “The Usage of in the Bible and Its Implication for the Date of P,” Harvard Theological Review 60 (1967): 117-121; Ronald Hendel, “‘Begetting’ and ‘Being Born’ in the Pentateuch: Notes on Historical Linguistics and Source Criticism,” Vetus Testamentum 50 (2000): 38-46.

 

² I have limited the cases here to terminology within the Torah itself. For fifty cases of terms that occur disproportionately or entirely in J or in texts related to J that are found in Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, see R. E. Friedman, The Hidden Book in the Bible, Appendix 4, pp. 379-389.

 

³ In the Torah, outside of P, they are mentioned only in the old poem “The Blessing of Moses” in Deut 33:8.

 

⁴ The sole possible exception is the P episode of the Red Sea, in which Moses holds his staff as he raises his hand (the same hand or the other one?) over the sea as it splits.

 

⁵ See William H. C. Propp, “The Priestly Source Recovered Intact?” Vetus Testamentum 46 (1996): 458-478, for bibliography and treatment of the arguments on this matter. To my mind, Propp’s arguments and evidence weigh definitively against supplementary hypotheses.

 

⁶ For discussion, history of scholarship, and bibliography on the relationship between Jeremiah and the Deuteronomistic history, see Jack R. Lundbom, “Jeremiah, Book of,” Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 3, pp. 706-721; R. E. Friedman, “The Deuteronomistic School,” in Fortunate the Eyes That See: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman in Celebration of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. A. Beck et al. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), pp. 70-80; L. G. Perdue and B. W. Kovacs, eds., A Prophet to the Nations: Essays in Jeremiah Studies (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1984); Louis Stulman, The Prose Sermons of the Book of Jeremiah (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986); S. Mowinckel, Zur Komposition des BuchesJeremia (Oslo, 1914); and Mowinckel, Prophecy and Tradition (Oslo,1946).

 

⁷ For a lengthier treatment of these texts, even limiting the cases to language that occurs only in Jeremiah and Dtr and nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, and further limiting these cases strictly to occurrences of such language that are integral to their poetic contexts and not suspect of having been added secondarily, see Friedman, “The Deuteronomistic School,” pp. 76-78.

 

⁸ See Note 5.

 

⁹ The poetic parallel between its being a fight with God and, at the same time, with an angel corresponds to the E text in Genesis, in which Jacob fights with “a man,” but then is named Israel, which is explained as meaning “fights with God.” And Jacob names the place Peni-El, which is explained as meaning “face of God,” because, he says, “I’ve seen God face-to-face.” The hypostasis of God through the form of a man is an angel. See my Commentary on the Torah, pp. 63 and 112; and The Hidden Face of God, pp. 9-13.

 

¹⁰ Alan Jenks argues that this passage in Hosea does not refer specifically to J or E, but rather to common epic traditions behind those two sources. Jenks, The Elohist and North Israelite Traditions (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1977), p. 133. He bases this argument on differences of detail: he says that Jacob “heeled” his brother outside the womb, not “in the womb” in J; and the mention of crying has no referent in the J story. In the first place, in J Jacob does in fact come out of the womb already holding Esau’s heel—that is, he was already grasping it from “in” the womb. But more to the point, the text in Hosea is poetry, and we cannot read it with the specificity of the prose accounts in Genesis. A poet’s images need not be restricted to the prose text that is their source. Nonetheless, the details that are included in this text do point to J and E as being its sources, and they do not point to P or D.

 

¹¹ “A chart in part 4 of the Appendix lists twenty words and phrases that occur only in these texts and nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, plus over twenty more that occur disproportionately in these texts; pp. 379-387.

 

¹² bat and bat are so similar that the two names are confused with each other in 1 Chr 3:5.

 

¹³ See Baruch Halpern, “Sacred History and Ideology: Chronicles’ Thematic Structure—Indications of an Earlier Source,” in The Creation of Sacred Literature, ed. R. E. Friedman (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), pp. 35-54; H. G. M. Williamson, Israel in the Books of Chronicles (Cambridge, England, 1977), pp. 120-125.

 

¹⁴ See note 1 above, especially Hurvitz, “Evidence of Language in Dating the Priestly Code,”) pp. 24-56; Hurvitz, Linguistic Study of the Relationship Between the Priestly Source and the Book of Ezekiel. For additional evidence that P had to precede Ezekiel, see Propp, “The Priestly Source Recovered Intact?” in which he shows that a passage in Ezekiel quotes a passage from P that is divided in the combined text of the Torah; Risa Levitt- Kohn, “A Prophet Like Moses? Rethinking Ezekiel’s Relationship to the Torah,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 114 (2002): 236-254, showing that the parallels of terms and phrases in P and Ezekiel reflect Ezekiel’s dependence on P and not the reverse; R. E. Friedman, The Exile and Biblical Narrative (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1981), pp. 61-64; Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? pp. 168-270.

 

¹⁵ Frank Moore Cross, “The Priestly Tabernacle,” Biblical Archaeologist 10 (1947): 45-68; Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973); Cross, From Epic to Canon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 84-95; Y. Aharoni, “The Solomonic Temple, the Tabernacle, and the Arad Sanctuary,” in Orient and Occident: Essays Presented to Cyrus H. Gordon on the Occasion of His Sixty-fifth Birthday, ed. H. A. Hoffner Jr. (Neukirchen: Neukirchener, 1973); Menahem Haran, “Shiloh and Jerusalem: The Origin of the Priestly Tradition in the Pentateuch,” Journal of Biblical Literature 81 (1962): 14-24; Haran, “The Priestly Image of the Tabernacle,” Hebrew Union College Annual 36 (1965): 191-226; Haran, Temples and Temple Service in Ancient Israel (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978); Michael M. Homan, To Your Tents, O Israel! (Leiden: Brill, 2002); and see the citations in the note that follows this one.

 

¹⁶ This evidence, argumentation, and bibliography appear in R. E. Friedman, “The Tabernacle in the Temple,” Biblical Archaeologist 43 (1980): 241-248; The Exile and Biblical Narrative (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1981), pp. 48-61; Who Wrote the Bible?, 2d ed. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), pp. 174-187; “Tabernacle,” Anchor Bible Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1992), vol. 6, pp. 292-300. The only challenge to this position as of this date has come from Victor Hurowitz, “The Form and Fate of the Tabernacle: Reflections on a Recent Proposal,”Jewish Quarterly Review 86 (1995): 127-151. Hurowitz’s arguments (which, unfortunately, were marred by some immature discourtesy) have been criticized by Michael M. Homan, To Your Tents, O Israel! pp. 167-173. See also my comment on one of Hurowitz’s methodological errors in R. E. Friedman, “An Essay on Method,” in Le-David Maskil, ed. R. E. Friedman and William Henry Propp (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003).

 

¹⁷ A text describing Hezekiah as being likewise without parallel uses a different phrase: “there was none like him” (2 Kgs 18:5). As Moshe Weinfeld has pointed out, Hezekiah is described in terms related to P while Josiah is described in terms related to D. Weinfeld, Deuteronomy 1-11, Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1991), p. 65.

 

¹⁸ I learned this from Baruch Halpern.

 

¹⁹ It is mentioned only in Josh 1:8; 8:31,34; 23:6. Two of these are the same passages that refer to turning to right or left.

 

²⁰ °Judg 7:3. Here it derives from a source, not from the Deuteronomistic historian himself, and the idiom has a different meaning from the passages in D and Kings.

 

²¹ The account of Hezekiah’s reign in fact comes from a separate source that the Deuteronomistic historian used, not from the historian himself. This source covers the kings of Judah from Solomon to Hezekiah. See note 13.

 

²² Jeffrey H. Tigay, ed., Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1985); R. E. Friedman, “Some Recent Non-arguments Concerning the Documentary Hypothesis,” in Texts, Temples, and Traditions: A Tribute to Menahem Haran, ed. Michael Fox et al. (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1996), pp. 87-101.

 

^*This is one of the passages in P that is reversed in the book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah says, “I looked at the earth, and here it was shapeless and formless, and to the skies, and their light was gone” (Jer 4:23). He is not simply quoting P; he is playing on it and reversing it. In this case he uses its language of creation to describe a vision of the creation being undone: the earth goes back to be an unformed mass, and the light of day goes out. (See Who Wrote the Bible? p. 167.) This is one small part of the evidence that P was written by the time of Jeremiah. It is also part of the evidence for establishing the relationship between P and the Deuteronomistic literature (which is associated with the book of Jeremiah; see the Collection of Evidence, pp. 14–15).

 

^**The deity is mentioned thirty-five times in the creation account and in every case is called “God” (Hebrew: Elohim), never by the name YHWH.

 

^*Gen 2:4a is the first of ten uses of the phrase “These are the records of…” They introduce both narratives and lists; and they introduce texts that come from several different sources. They are the work of the Redactor as a way of editing the source texts of Genesis into a continuous story. The Redactor derived the formula from a text that was originally an independent work, The Book of Records (), which begins at Gen 5:1.

 

^** The text now changes, always referring to the deity by the proper name: YHWH, eleven times. In Genesis 2 and 3 the word “God” appears each time after the name YHWH. But this double identification, “YHWH God,” occurs only in these introductory chapters and nowhere else in the Pentateuch. It therefore appears to be an effort by the Redactor (R) to soften the transition from the P creation, which uses only “God” (thirty- five times), to the coming J stories, which will use only the name YHWH.

 

^‡The P creation story begins with “the skies and the earth” (1:1) whereas the J story begins here with “earth and skies,” reversing the order. This is not a proof of anything, but it is notable because, from their very first words, the sources each reflect their perspectives. P is more heaven-centered, almost a picture from the sky looking down, while J is more human-centered (and certainly more anthropomorphic), more like a picture from the earth looking up.
This is also an example of the way in which the combining of the sources produced a work that is greater than the sum of its parts. The more transcendent conception of God in P merges with the more personal conception in J, and the result is: the Five Books of Moses in its final form now conveys a picture of God who is both the cosmic God and the “God of your father.” And that combined conception of the deity who is both transcendent and personal has been a central element of Judaism and Christianity ever since.

 

^*All of the sources reflect literary artistry, but the specific nature of their respective artistry differs. In J, the art of wordplay is particularly characteristic. Here there is punning on the names of all four rivers that flow out of Eden. One is Gihon, and in J the snake receives a curse that it will go on its belly (Gen 3:14); “belly” in Hebrew is . Another river is Pishon, and in J the human becomes “a living being” (2:7), Hebrew nephesh, which has the same root letters as Pishon reversed. (Hebrew is written with only consonants, no vowels, so a root reversal, known as methasis, is particularly visible.) Another river is Euphrates, written in Hebrew as prt, which occurs in J in the same verse as in the meeting of two words ‘ (“you shall eat dust,” 3:14). The other river is Tigris, called in Hebrew hdql, which also occurs in a metathesis of two words in the J story: ydw wlqh (“his hand and take,” 3:22). In other wordplay in this J text, the human in Hebrew is ‘, and he is taken from the ground (Hebrew ‘). The woman is called Eve, Hebrew , a Semitic root that can also mean snake. And the snake is the most “sly,” Hebrew , of animals, and later the human is naked, Hebrew .

 

^*The order of creation in Gen 1-2:3 (P) is first plants, then animals, then man and woman; but in the creation account in Gen 2:4b-24 (J) the order is man, then plants, then animals, then woman.

 

³¹ This is a superb example of how the joining of the sources often produced something greater than the sum of the parts, something that perhaps neither of the authors of the sources (in this case J and P) envisioned. In the P creation story, God creates the humans “in the image of God.” Whether that means something physical or spiritual, it means at the very least that humans are pictured as participating in the divine in some way that an animal does not. Humans have a connection to the divine. Now, in the Eden story, which is part of J, the snake tempts the humans precisely with the idea that “you’ll be like God.” This is presumably not an argument that would have worked on an animal, but the humans, who are now understood in the combined text to be connected to the divine image, are attracted by it. P, J, and R all contribute to forming one of the major theological and psychological points of the Bible.

 

^*The J genealogy traces Adam’s line through Cain alone and mentions no other surviving children. The Book of Records genealogy traces Adam’s line through Seth and never mentions Cain or Abel. The Redactor added this line explaining that Seth was born to Adam and Eve as a replacement for Abel, thus rconciling the two sources.

 

^**Here the J narrative declares unequivocally that invoking the divine name YHWH began in this early generation of humans on earth. According to E and P, this does not begin until the time of Moses.

 

^‡The “Book of Records (or: Generations)” is a separate document, used by the Redactor to form a logical framework for the combined sources in Genesis. Within that framework, the stories of J, E, and P now flow through a chronology of the generations from the first humans to the generation of Jacob’s twelve sons.

 

^‡‡The two genealogical lists, one from J and one from the Book of Records, have some names that are the same or similar and others that are different, perhaps indicating a common, more ancient source, thus:

Cain
Enoch
Irad
Mehuya-el
Metusha-el
Lamech
Methuselah
Seth
Enosh
Cainan
Mahalalel
Jared
Enoch
Lamech

 

^*This verse appears to have been added to this Book of Records list. This source’s pattern does not include giving origins of names anywhere else; like P, it never calls the deity by the name YHWH but only uses Elohim in Genesis; and the cursing of the ground comes from J. Either this verse came from J and was moved to this spot by the Redactor, or else it was written by the Redactor as part of the uniting of the sources in the flood story.

 

^*This is the only occurrence of the word God in narration in all of J in the Masoretic Text. It is not part of the issue of the name of God distinction because it is not independent but is rather part of a fixed phrase, , which can mean either “sons of God” or “sons of the gods” (plural), meaning divine beings of some sort.

 

^**YHWH sets the maximum age of humans at 120 here in J; but many persons live longer than this (9:29; 11:10-26,32—which come from a separate source, the Book of Records). In J, no one lives longer than 120 years, and it culminates with the report that Moses lives to the maximum of 120 (Deut 34:7).

 

^‡The deity is always referred to by name in the J flood story, ten times; and is always referred to as “God” in the P flood story, sixteen times.

 

^‡‡The Redactor uses the formula “These are the records of…” here and in subsequent passages to introduce sections of the story. His use of these words, which recall the opening words of the Book of Records, contributes to the chronology that provides the continuity of the combined narrative in Genesis. (See the notes on Gen 2:4 and 5:1.)

 

^*The number of animals on the ark is seven pairs of pure and one pair of impure in Gen 7:2,3 (J); but it is only one pair of each, whether pure or impure, in 6:19-20; 7:8,9,15 (P). This fits with the fact that in J Noah will offer sacrifices at the end of the flood, so he needs more than two of each animal—or else his sacrifice would end a species. But in P, there are no sacrifices in the story until the establishment of the Tabernacle in Exodus 40, so two of each animal are sufficient.

 

^*In the P creation story, God creates a space (firmament) that separates waters that are above it from waters below. The universe in that story is thus a habitable bubble surrounded by water. This same conception is assumed in the P flood story, in which the “apertures of the skies” and the “fountains of the great deep” are broken up so that the waters flow in. The J creation account has no such conception, and in the J flood story it just rains.

 

^*P uses the term “expired.” J uses the term “died.” This is consistent with the rest of P, which uses the term “expired” eleven times, whereas it never occurs in J, E, or D.

 

^*In P Noah sends out a raven. In J he sends out a dove (three times). (In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero of the flood sends out a raven, a dove, and a swallow.)

 

^**In P the flood lasts a year (or a year and ten days). In J it is the more familiar forty days and nights.

 

^*Noah had seven pairs of each of the pure (sacrificeable) animals, so now he is able to sacrifice some. P has no stories involving sacrifices until the establishment of the priesthood and the Tabernacle (Exodus 40), and so the P flood story requires only two of each animal. This explains the distinction in the note on Gen 6:19 above.

 

^*R had to solve the problem that in P Abram comes from Ur while in J he comes from Haran. R’s solution was to have the family start out in Ur and then stop in Haran for a while. The solution works in this passage, but it leaves a contradiction below: In 12:1 (J) God tells Abram in Haran to leave his land and birthplace, but in the redacted text Abram has already left his land and birthplace, which are back in Ur! And later Abram will tell his servant to “go to my land and my birthplace and take a wife for my son, for Isaac,” and the servant goes to Haran, not Ur. Prior to the formation of the Documentary Hypothesis, commentators proposed complicated geographical solutions to deal with this contradiction.

 

^*Abram’s name is changed to Abraham only in P (Gen 17:5), and Sarai’s name is changed to Sarah (17:15). There is no mention of these changes of names in J or E. It may be that their reference to it was eliminated by the Redactor because it was a particularly blatant duplication, or, more probably, the Redactor changed the names Abraham and Sarah to Abram and Sarai wherever they occurred in J and E prior to Gen 17:5 in order to keep the names consistent in the combined narrative.

 

^*There are three stories in Genesis in which a patriarch’s wife is represented to be his sister, a king learns that she is actually the patriarch’s wife, and then the husband and wife leave and prosper: Gen 12:10-20 (J); 20:1-18 (E); and 26:6-14 (J). The first and third are both J. They do not overlap characters: the first story is about Abraham-Sarah-Pharaoh; the second is about Isaac-Rebekah-Abimelek. The second story combines characters from each of the other two: Abraham-Sarah-Abimelek. The first and third stories use the name YHWH. The second story just says “God.”

 

^*This story comes from a separate narrative source. It does not have any of the characteristic signs of J, E, or P.

 

^*If this portion of the text is J, then the text would have said originally “brought you out of Haran.” R would have changed Haran to Ur here to make this consistent with the combined text in Gen 11:31-12:4. See the note on Gen 11:31.

 

^**15:13-17 appears to be an addition to this story because (1) it is enclosed by a resumptive repetition: the sun is about to set in v. 12 and then is reported to set in v. 17; (2) the prediction of the future that God gives Abram has nothing to do with the covenant ceremony that is taking place; and (3) these lines merge terms that are characteristic of each of the sources: the phrase “alien in a land” is reminiscent of J (Exod 2:22), the phrase “will degrade them” is reminiscent of E (Exod 1:11-12), and the word for “property” otherwise occurs only in P (and once in the separate source of Genesis 14). The reference to four hundred years of slavery in Egypt may relate to the “thirty years and four hundred years” in P (Exod 12:40).

 

^*This entire chapter is P, the Priestly version of the Abrahamic covenant. Those who misunderstand the matter of the name of God in the sources mistakenly think that the mention of God’s name, YHWH, in v. 1 is an exception to the hypothesis. On the contrary, this verse is precisely the point. The issue is not that the sources use different names for God. It is that the sources have different ideas of when God’s name was revealed to human beings. In J it is known from the early generations of human beings. In E and P it is not revealed until the generation of Moses. So in P God says to Moses, “I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as El Shadday, and I was not known to them by my name, YHWH” (Exod 6:3). And, completely consistent with that, P says here that “YHWH appeared to Abram and said to him, ‘I am El Shadday.’” That is not an exception to the rule. That is the rule!

 

^*Abram’s name is changed to Abraham here in P, and Sarai’s name is changed to Sarah (v. 15). There is no mention of these changes of names in the other sources, but the Redactor has most probably made the change consistent for the rest of the narrative. From here on, all sources will use Abraham and Sarah, not Abram and Sarai.

 

^*This is the first occurrence of a text from the source E. It certainly does not appear to be the beginning of the source, as Abraham and Sarah come out of nowhere. It appears that RJE favored J for the opening part of the story. We therefore cannot know what originally preceded this in E, and so we do not know if E included a story of creation, flood, genealogy, and so on.

 

^*This must be recognized as one of the rare instances in which the name YHWH occurs in a passage that is identified as P. It is probably a result of the editing process, in which the two halves of verse 1 had extremely similar content and structure to one another. The fact that the Redactor chose to retain both of them is further confirmation that he was trying to retain both of his main sources (P and JE) in their entirety whenever it was possible.

 

^*It is possible that in the original old E story, Abraham actually carries out the sacrifice of Isaac. The evidence that vv. 11-14, in which the sacrifice is stopped, were added by RJE is as follows: (1) This is an E text, referring to the deity as God (Elohim) in narration three times (vv. 1,3,9), but suddenly, as Abraham takes the knife in his hand, the text switches to an angel of YHWH. (2) Verses 11-15, which describe the angel’s instructions to Abraham not to sacrifice his son after all, are enclosed in a resumptive repetition in which the angel calls out two times. (3) Following this resumptive repetition, the angel (or God) says, “because you did this thing and didn’t withhold your son.” (4) The story concludes, “And Abraham went back to his boys.” Isaac is not mentioned—even though Abraham had explicitly told the boys, “We’ll come back to you.” (5) Isaac never again appears in E after this. (6) In the E story of a revelation at Mount Horeb in Exodus 24, there is a chain of eighteen parallels of language with this story of Isaac, but not one of those parallels comes solely from these verses (11-15). See the note on Exod 24:1. (7) There is a group of midrashic sources that say that Isaac was in fact sacrificed.

In light of these factors, it is possible that in the E story Abraham sacrifices Isaac, but that later this idea of a human sacrifice was repugnant, and so RJE added the lines in which Isaac is spared and a ram is substituted. It is not possible to say how the original E version accounted for the introduction of Jacob. Notably, though, it is in E (in the very next passage that is traced to E) that Abraham later has another wife, Keturah, and has more children. (See Who Wrote the Bible? pp. 256-257.)

 

^*In the original E text it is Cod who speaks; but, as the text is edited by RJE, it now appears to be the angel who says this.

 

^*Here the Midianites and Medanites are introduced in E. It is in E that they will figure later, in the story of Joseph. See the note on Gen 37:28.

 

^*P has no report of the births of Jacob and Esau. P jumps from the report of Isaac’s marriage to Rebekah here to the report of Esau’s marriages below (26:34f.) This is one of the very few gaps in P, which otherwise generally flows as an unbroken narrative when it is read separately from J, E, and D.

 

^*This is one of only three occurrences in the Torah in which the name of God appears in a source other than J prior to the revelation of the name to Moses in Exodus.

 

^*J and E each give an etymology of the name Joseph. In E it is based on the root ‘sp, meaning “taken away,” but in J it is based on the similar root ysp, meaning “add.” RJE united the two by adding the word “saying” between them.

 

^*Genesis 32 and 33 offer some of the most difficult problems for distinguishing between J and E. Gen 33:1-17 could be J or E or a combination of both that is now perhaps impossible to separate. When Jacob tells Esau to “Take my blessing” (33:11), it seems to be Jacob’s recompense for having appropriated Esau’s blessing, which happened in J (Genesis 27). But when Jacob tells Esau that seeing Esau’s face is “like seeing God’s face” (33:10), it seems to be a reference back to his having said that “I’ve seen God face- to-face,” which happened in E (32:31). My identifications of J and E in this section are tentative.

 

^*Paddan Aram is used only in P for the place in which Jacob had spent the years with Laban, but it comes here in the middle of the JE story of Jacob’s return. Also, the phrase in which it occurs (“which was in the land of Canaan, when he was coming from Paddan Aram”) is unnecessary in the JE story. This phrase is therefore likely to have been added by the Redactor. The reason for the addition may be that the combination of the sources now made it seem that Jacob’s return to his father, Isaac, was taking an excessive amount of time. P had said that Jacob had set out on his way back in Gen 31:18, but he does not arrive until the P notice in 35:27. This addition identifies his stay at Shechem as just a stop on the way.

 

^*Here it says that Benjamin is born in Paddan Aram (P); but according to Gen 35:16-19 (E) he is born in Canaan, near Bethlehem.

 

^*There are discrepancies between the names of Esau’s wives here and in Gen 26:34-35; 28:9. The differences may be scribal, or there may be a source other than P in this list.

 

^**The sources of the Esau genealogical lists in 36:15-30 are difficult to identify. Grouping them here with the P lists is tentative.

 

^*In vv. 21-22 (E) it is Reuben who saves Joseph from the brothers’ plan to kill him, but in vv. 26-27 (J), it is Judah who saves him from death. This fits with the concentration on and favoritism toward Judah in J in general.

 

^**In J the Ishmaelites bring Joseph to Egypt and sell him to Potiphar; in E it is the Mid- ianites. (They are also referred to as Medanites below. Note that the births of both Midian and Medan come from E, Gen 25:2,4.) RJE combined these by making it appear that the Midianites sell him to the Ishmaelites, who then sell him in Egypt. But this still leaves a contradiction, because v. 36 (E) still says that the Midianites (or Medanites) sell him to Potiphar, but 39:1 (J) says that “Potiphar. … bought him from the hand of the Ishmaelites who had brought him down there.”

 

^‡In J, in order to get the blessing intended for Esau, Jacob deceives their father by using his brother’s cloak and the meat and hide of a goat. Now, in the same source, the brothers deceive their father by using their brother’s coat dipped in the blood of a goat. This is one of a series of paybacks for deception that form a chain in the J narrative.

Second, the brothers here say, “Recognize,” which is what Tamar says to Judah in the next chapter when she shows him the evidence that he is receiving a payback for having deceived her (38:25).

Third, in J the brothers (not the Midianites) sell Joseph for twenty weights of silver. Later, Joseph will arrange to have twenty portions of silver returned to their grain sacks (nine portions on the first return, eleven portions on the second return), again hinting at the ironic payback to the brothers’ deception.

Many scholars still refer to a Joseph “novella,” which they regard as a united work coming from a distinct source. However, the fact that J and E can be identified and distinguished in the Joseph story show this “novella” view to be wrong. The connections between the Jacob and Joseph stories in J, i.e. the chain of paybacks for deceptions, also show that the Joseph story is not independent; it is intricately linked to its context in J. (See The Hidden Book in the Bible, pp. 36–45.)

 

^*This section, 47:5-12, comes in the middle of a J text. But Jacob says here that he is 130 years old and that Abraham and Isaac lived longer, while in J YHWH has decreed that no human will live more than 120 years. It is in P that ages are given and that Abraham and Isaac live longer. Moreover, this section has other characteristics of P: The phrases “the days of the years” and “the years of your life” occur only in P. The terms “residences” and “possession” occur only in P. The phrase “as he commanded” occurs fifty-three other times in Genesis-Numbers, and fifty-two are in P. And it is in P that the people live in Rameses.

Nonetheless, we should recognize that it is possible that the Redactor combined some material from J or E with P to form this section. The reference to Goshen (v. 6) may be in conflict with the reference to Rameses, and P never mentions Goshen elsewhere. The words “Let them live in Goshen” may have originally read “they lived in Goshen,” which would look the same in the consonantal text. And Goshen is what the brothers requested in the J text (v. 4). Further, this matter is complicated by the fact that the Septu- agint text is different, which may be related to the recurrence of the words “let them live in the land of Goshen” in vv. 4 and 6.

 

^**It is difficult to determine whether this section, vv. 13-26, is J or E.

 

^*Verse 7 fits uncomfortably in its context, connecting neither to the preceding nor to the following verses. And it merges elements of two sources: It refers to Paddan Aram, which is characteristic of P, but it says “there was still a span of land to come to Ephrat,” and it refers to Rachel’s being buried on the Ephrat road, which comes from E (Gen 35:16-20). It therefore appears to be an addition that the Redactor made to the text. Perhaps its function was to separate the two conflicting passages about Ephraim and Manasseh that precede and follow it. See the next note.

Alternatively, this verse might after all be P, because it fits with the next P passage (49:29-33). As a unit these two passages could be saying: “As for me: Rachel died and was buried on the road, but when I die I want to be buried back in my ancestral tomb with the other patriarchs and matriarchs.” It is therefore uncertain whether v. 7 is P or R.

 

^**In v. 5 Jacob promotes Ephraim and Manasseh to full status, equal to his own sons. But now in v. 8 he looks at them and asks, “Who are these?”! The former verse is P, and the contradiction developed when this verse was placed in the middle of the E passage about Ephraim and Manasseh.

 

^*The word for a “shoulder” here in the Hebrew is Sekem. That is, it is a pun in which Jacob gives his Joseph an extra “Shechem.” Shechem was Jeroboam’s capital of the northern kingdom of Israel. It was located in one of the Joseph tribes’ territory (1 Kgs 12:25). E, the northern source, thus conveys the favored status of the northern kingdom, just as J favors the status of the southern kingdom of Judah in Jacob’s deathbed blessing of Judah in the following chapter. (See the next two notes.)

 

^**This poem, known as the Blessing of Jacob, is an independent, old composition probably coming from the premonarchic period. See Frank Moore Cross and David Noel Freedman, Studies in Ancient Yahwistic Poetry (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1975), pp. 46-63. The author of J used the poem as a source of information on which to construct part of the history of the tribes of Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah, then included the poem along with the history that he or she based on it. A similar use and inclusion of a poetic source in a prose text may be seen in the case of the Song of the Sea. The poem appears in Exodus 15; the prose account that used it as a source is the J portion of Exodus 14. (Another case of use and inclusion is the Song of Deborah in Judges 5 and the prose account that used it as a source in Judges 4. It is outside the limits of the present volume, but it is an additional demonstration of how ancient Israelite prose authors worked with poetic sources.)

 

^*The poem, here in J, eliminates the first three brothers (Reuben, Simeon, Levi) from the succession and then gives the monarchy to Judah forever (“The scepter won’t depart from Judah”).

 

^*Here in E the taskmasters are termed “commanders of work-companies” (Hebrew misstm). King Solomon instituted work-companies in Israel. This phrase is part of a chain of elements that are critical of Solomon in E. See the Collection of Evidence, pp. 20-21.

 

^*The sister is not identified as Miriam here. Her name is not given. In J, E, and D, Miriam is not identified as Moses’ sister, and Aaron is not identified as Moses’ brother. Only in P are they said to be Moses’ siblings.

 

^*Moses’ father-in-law, priest of Midian, is named Jethro in Exod 3:1,18; 18:1-27 (E) but is named Reuel in Exod 2:16-18; Num 10:29 (J).

 

^*Both J and E are present in the scene at the burning bush, but there are a variety of views of exactly how they are divided. There is duplication; in both 3:7 and 3:9 God states that He has seen and heard the oppression. The statement in 3:7 is attributed to YHWH, indicating J; the statement in 3:9 continues into the instruction in v. 10 and Moses’ response in v. 11, which refers to Elohim in narration, indicating E. Most of the dialogue between God and Moses that continues out of vv. 9-11 is also E because: (1) it has Elohim in narration six more times, and the staff through which the miracles will be performed is identified as “the staff of God (Elohim),” and the mountain is identified as “the mountain of God (Elohim)”; (2) the divine name is revealed in 3:15, which is the mark and turning point of E; (3) Moses returns to Jethro (not Reuel) in 4:19; (4) Moses is told to meet Aaron in 4:14, and Aaron then meets him at “the mountain of Elohim” in 4:27; (5) Moses and Aaron are to “gather the elders” (3:16; 4:29), and this expression, “to gather elders,” occurs elsewhere only in E (Num 11:24), and elders in general are a concern of E (Exod 24:1,9,14; 17:5,6; 18:12; 19:3; Num 11:16,24,25,30), not J (only Num 16:25); (6) the term for dry ground here (4:9) is Hebrew , but J uses a different term for this, Hebrew (Gen 7:22; Exod 14:21); (7) in Exod 4:1-8 the two signs are: the stick becomes a snake, and his hand becomes “leprous like snow.” These foreshadow Miriam’s being “leprous, like snow” (Numbers 12) and Moses’ bronze snake on a pole (Num 21:5-9). These two stories in Numbers are both E, and they are adjacent to each other when we leave out the intervening J and P texts. This is evidence of the correctness of the hypothesis, and it is further evidence that the Exodus burning bush material here is E, not J.

Many scholars claim that E is fragmented or even that it does not exist at all. But that is based on an error in method. See the note on Exod 5:3.

 

^*This is where YHWH first reveals the divine name in E. Hereafter, the presence of the divine name will not be an indicator that a passage need be from J.

 

^*The account of the despoiling of Egypt appears in words very similar to these in Exod 11:1-3; 12:35-36, but those two passages are embedded in E contexts, whereas the present passage is joined to a J context. The identification of these three passages is therefore uncertain.

 

^*In J Moses has only one son, Gershom, and he takes this son and Zipporah with him to Egypt. This is consistent with the fact that only one son is circumcised in the episode at the lodging place. In E there is a second son, Eliezer, and Moses does not take his wife and sons with him to Egypt. See the note on Exod 18:4.

 

^**Verse 21b is the first occurrence of a formula used by R to organize the E and P accounts of the plagues into a united narrative, thus: The E accounts of the plagues of the insect swarm and the livestock epidemic conclude, “And Pharaoh’s heart was heavy, and he did not let the people go” (8:28; 9:7). The P accounts of the plagues of lice and boils and also the P account of the staffs becoming serpents conclude, “And Pharaoh’s heart was strong, and he did not listen to them—as YHWH had spoken” (7:13; 8:15; 9:12). The plague of blood is both E and P, and it concludes with the P formulation: “And Pharaoh’s heart was heavy, and he did not let the people go.” The plague of frogs is also combined E and P, and it ends in 8:11 both with part of the E conclusion (“he made his heart heavy”) and with part of the P conclusion (“he did not listen to them—as YHWH had spoken”). It is not surprising that P accounts have the P conclusion, E accounts have the E conclusion, and combined accounts have either a P or a combined conclusion. But then the E plague of hail has what has been the P conclusion, “And Pharaoh’s heart was strong, and he did not let the children of Israel go—as YHWH had spoken” (9:35). Then the E plagues of locusts and darkness also conclude with a P formula (10:20,27), and the final meeting between Moses and Pharaoh that ensues is likewise an E text followed by a P conclusion. It appears that the Redactor has combined the P and the E accounts of the plagues and has united them by drawing on the P formula and distributing it through the combined version. This is confirmed by the fact that the formula also appears here in 4:21b. It is awkward in this context, and again it is a formula derived from P in the middle of an E text.

The Redactor used the “These are the records” formula from the Book of Records to organize the episodes of the patriarchal age, and he used the “And Israel traveled …” formula from the itinerary list in Numbers 33 to organize the episodes of the wilderness travels. The gap between those two editorial structures is filled by this “strengthening of Pharaoh’s heart” formula, which the Redactor derived from the P plagues account. It is these three structures that give chronology and continuity to the Bible’s first four books. (See the notes on Gen 2:4a and Num 9:23.)

 

^*From this point on, the non-P account of the plagues is largely consistent in terminology and in the development of the story. There is no evidence requiring that it be more than one source. This text has few clues to establish whether it is E or J, but, since it connects to and flows from the E account of the burning bush, it is apparently E as well. It has frequently been thought to be J in the past, in large part because of the conscious or unconscious invocation of “Noth’s law,” which is: when in doubt, it’s J. Since most scholars naturally start with Genesis, and since there is more J than E in Genesis (with no E at all until Genesis 20), scholars have tended to identify difficult passages as J. But there may be specific explanations for the predominance of J in Genesis. For example: the author of J was more interested in the patriarchal period while the author of E was more focused on the Exodus and wilderness age. This would in fact fit with the fact that the J patriarchal stories have visible connections to the stories of David in the Court History (which I have argued may even be by the same author); that is, the J author’s literary interest lay in establishing the patriarchs as reflections or forerunners of the age of the monarchy. And it would also fit with the idea that E is especially focused on Moses because E comes from a Levite milieu, and perhaps even from a priest who traced his ancestry to Moses; and so the E author’s interest lay in the Mosaic age. Indeed, if the non-P plagues account is E, then J and E are of approximately equal length.

 

^*God tells Moses here (P) that He was not known to the patriarchs by the name YHWH. However, the patriarchs did in fact know the name YHWH (Gen 18:14; 24:3; 26:22; 27:20,27; 28:16; and see Gen 4:26—all J). This P passage (Exod 6:2-3) is a doublet of the passage in E in which God first reveals the divine name (Exod 3:15).

The presence of the name YHWH in the text ceases to be an indicator of source identification from this point on. (However, the presence of the word “God” [Elohim] in narration continues to be an indicator that a source is not J.)

 

^**This verse nearly duplicates 6:30 below. This is the Redactor’s epanalepsis (a resumptive repetition) surrounding an insertion of a genealogy of Aaron and Moses in the middle of God’s conversation with Moses. Since Moses says, “the children of Israel didn’t listen to me” here in v. 12, but he has not yet spoken with the children of Israel in P, this first occurrence must be R, and the occurrence in v. 30 is P.

 

^‡God does not speak to Aaron in P until much later (Lev 11:1). This is another sign that this section derives from R, in addition to the epanalepsis and the context-breaking genealogy mentioned in the preceding note.

 

^*This list (6:14-25) comes from the Book of Records or from some other separate source document. The Redactor appears to have used only the first section of it, covering genealogies from Reuben to Levi, and then stopping at Aaron and his successors, thus leaving out the remaining nine tribes of Israel.

 

^**Gershon (v. 17) and Mushi (v. 19). Only in the sources that are traced to Aaronid priests (here in this list and in P) do we find a Mushi and a Gershon. It appears that the Aaronid sources thus deny that the Mushite and Gershonite Levites were actually descendants, respectively, of Moses and his son Gershon.

 

^*The staff becomes a serpent (tannin) here in P. In E it becomes a snake (). Also, it was Moses’ staff that was supposed to be used to perform the miracles in E (Exod 4:17), but it is Aaron’s staff in P.

 

^**The P version develops the role of the Egyptian magicians: They are able to turn staffs into serpents and to perform the plagues of blood and frogs. But then they are unable to perform the plagues of lice, then they themselves are stricken with the plague of boils, and then they do not figure in the plague of death of the firstborn. So there is a directed development, showing God’s defeat of Egypt’s powers of magic. And the magicians appear only in sections that involve Aaron’s staff, never Moses’ staff. The E version has nothing about magicians.

 

^‡In v.13 Pharaoh’s heart is “strong” (P), but in v. 14 it is “heavy” (E). This distinction in expressing the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart is maintained consistently, with the term (or ) used in P (7:13,22; 8:15; 9:12; 14:4,8,17) but the term kbd used in E (8:11,28; 9:7,34; 10:1). Moreover, the use of the term “heavy” in the E version is part of a chain of punning on this term throughout the E account of the exodus, from the burning bush to Mount Horeb. The description of Moses as “heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue” (4:10) initiates a chain of puns on the various shades of meaning of the word “heavy” (Hebrew: kbd, meaning weighty, difficult, or substantial). Pharaoh says, “Let the work be heavy” (5:9). Four of the plagues are described as “heavy”: insects (8:20), pestilence (9:3), hail (9:18,24), and locusts (10:14). The Israelites leave with “a very heavy livestock” (12:38). When Moses holds up his arms as the Israelites fight the Amalekites, “Moses’ hands were heavy” (17:12). Jethro tells Moses to get help in administering the people “because the thing is too heavy for you” (18:18). And E’s chain of puns culminates at Horeb: there is “a heavy cloud on the mountain” during the revelation (19:16).

 

^*This is the first occurrence of the phrase “YHWH God” since Genesis 2. There it appears to be the work of the Redactor, in order to soften the change from the consistent use of “God” in Genesis 1 (P) to the consistent use of “YHWH” in Genesis 2-3 (J). It occurs nowhere else in the Torah except here in Exod 9:30, and it is suspect here because the word “God” does not occur in this verse in the Septuagint.

 

^*Exod 12:24-27 and 13:1-16 are sometimes thought to be insertions by a Deuteronomistic editor. The reason for this is that there are some similarities to Deuteronomistic passages. This is possible but still unlikely. The similarities are few and slight, and they may well owe to the fact that E and D both have apparent connections back to the same circle: the priesthood that is identified as Shilonite or Mushite. Also, there is a question of why, out of all the laws and stories of Genesis through Numbers, this unknown Deuteronomistic editor should have chosen to make only these particular insertions in these two places. (See Who Wrote the Bible? p. 258.) See also the note on Exod 15:26.

 

^*The Redactor used the “And Israel traveled …” formula from the itinerary list in Numbers 33 to organize the episodes of the wilderness travels, just as he had used the “These are the records” formula from the Book of Records to organize the episodes of the patriarchal age. The notice here that “the children of Israel traveled from Rameses to Succoth” is the first use of this formula as an organizing heading. See Num 33:5.

 

^*See the note on Exod 12:24-27.

 

^*The J and P accounts picture two different scenarios of the event at the sea. In J, while the Egyptians pursue the Israelites, God pushes back the sea with a wind. Then God throws the Egyptian camp into tumult, and when the Egyptians try to flee they run right into the dried seabed as God releases the seawaters, which return to swallow the fleeing Egyptians. In P, meanwhile, the sea splits, with a path of dry ground between walls of water, and the Israelites cross through this path. The Egyptians try to cross through this path as well, but the water closes up over them. Both the J and P accounts read as complete stories when the two are separated. The P story repeats details of locations and of the Egyptian forces. P also includes the repeated notation of God’s “strengthening Pharaoh’s heart.”

 

^*The J and P accounts picture two different scenarios of the event at the sea. In J, while the Egyptians pursue the Israelites, God pushes back the sea with a wind. Then God throws the Egyptian camp into tumult, and when the Egyptians try to flee they run right into the dried seabed as God releases the seawaters, which return to swallow the fleeing Egyptians. In P, meanwhile, the sea splits, with a path of dry ground between walls of water, and the Israelites cross through this path. The Egyptians try to cross through this path as well, but the water closes up over them. Both the J and P accounts read as complete stories when the two are separated. The P story repeats details of locations and of the Egyptian forces. P also includes the repeated notation of God’s “strengthening Pharaoh’s heart.”

 

^*This poem, known as the Blessing of Jacob, is an independent, old composition probably coming from the premonarchic period. See Frank Moore Cross and David Noel Freedman, Studies in Ancient Yahwistic Poetry (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1975), pp. 46-63. The author of J used the poem as a source of information on which to construct part of the history of the tribes of Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah, then included the poem along with the history that he or she based on it. A similar use and inclusion of a poetic source in a prose text may be seen in the case of the Song of the Sea. The poem appears in Exodus 15; the prose account that used it as a source is the J portion of Exodus 14. (Another case of use and inclusion is the Song of Deborah in Judges 5 and the prose account that used it as a source in Judges 4. It is outside the limits of the present volume, but it is an additional demonstration of how ancient Israelite prose authors worked with poetic sources.)

 

^*Miriam is identified as Aaron’s sister, but not as the sister of Moses. In E, Miriam and Aaron are not Moses’ siblings. Only in P are Aaron and Moses identified as brothers.

 

^*Exod 15:26 has more phrases that sound Deuteronomistic than any other passage in Genesis through Numbers. Still, it is uncertain and may be E, which has other similarities to Deuteronomistic language. (See the note on Exod 12:24.)

 

^*Joshua is mentioned eleven times in E but never in J. This is consistent with the idea that E is associated with the northern kingdom of Israel and J is associated with the southern kingdom of Judah. Joshua is a northern hero, from the tribe of Ephraim.

 

^*The explanation of the name Gershom here in E is a doublet of Exod 2:22, which is J. The existence of a second son, Eliezer, is reported only here in E, not in J. In J there was only one son. Also, in J Moses took his son and Zipporah with him to Egypt. But now, in E, Jethro shows up bringing Zipporah and their sons, who have been in Midian all along. The words “after her being sent off” appear to have been added by RJE to solve this contradiction.

 

^*The command that Aaron is to go up together with Moses is unexpected here in J. Aaron has never been mentioned up to this point in J. In fact, Aaron is never mentioned at all in J outside of this verse. Moreover, Aaron does not in fact go up with Moses in J. The next time that Moses goes up the mountain in J, God tells him, “No man shall go up with you” (Exod 34:3). It is rather in E that Aaron (and others) will go up with Moses (24:1). Therefore, it appears that a redactor has added here in order to deal with the fact that Moses’ ascent in E along with Aaron and other persons is now inserted before the J account of an ascent that Moses makes alone in Exodus 34. The redactor who made this addition could be either R or RJE.

 

^*The text of the Ten Commandments here does not appear to belong to any of the major sources. It is likely to be an independent document, which was inserted here by the Redactor. A slightly different version was used by the Deuteronomistic historian in Deuteronomy 5.

 

^**The most striking difference between the text of the Decalog as it appears here and as it appears in Deuteronomy 5 is the reason that is given as the basis of the Sabbath command. Here it is “because for six days YHWH made the skies and the earth, the sea, and everything that is in them, and He rested on the seventh day. On account of this, YHWH blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy,” referring to the P creation story. In Deuteronomy it is so “you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and YHWH, your God, brought you out from there with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. On account of this, YHWH, your God, has commanded you to do the Sabbath day.”

 

^*Exod 21:1-23:19 is a law code known as the Covenant Code. It was originally a separate, independent document, but it was used by the author of E as part of the E work.

 

^*Note the curious fact that King Jeroboam’s sons are Nadab and Abiyah (1 Kgs 14:1,20) and Aaron’s sons are Nadab and Abihu. The names of the sons of the two makers of golden calves in the Bible are nearly the same. This is just part of a string of connections between the golden calves of Aaron and of Jeroboam. See the note on Exod 32:4.

Note also: In E only these two sons of Aaron are known: Nadab and Abihu. In P, Nadab and Abihu are killed, and there is a third son, Eleazar, who becomes Aaron’s heir as high priest. See Lev 10:1-2.

 

^**There is an extensive string of connections between this E account of a revelation on Mount Horeb in Exodus 24 and the E account of the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22. The two stories have a chain of ten verbs in common: “and he said,” “and he took … and he set,” “and he got up early,” “and he built an altar,” “and he put out his hand,” “and he/it was,” “and he/they got up,” “and he/they came,” “and he/they saw.” Here in Exodus Moses says to the elders, “Sit here … we’ll come back to you.” There Abraham says the same words to the servant boys. And here servant boys () appear as well. Both accounts use the term “from a distance” (). Both use the term “to bow” (). Both Moses and Abraham come up a mountain. Both have a burnt offering (). In Genesis Abraham is rewarded because “you did this thing”; and the people in Exodus here promise that “We’ll do all the things.” Abraham is rewarded because “you listened to my voice”; and here in Exodus the people “said with one voice,” and they say, “we’ll listen.”

Such a large number of connections is further confirmation of E as an independent source. E is a long work, fashioned with literary connections. Here the author used reminiscences of terms, phrases, and narrative elements to link two great scenes of divine communication.

 

^*Note the resumptive repetition of the words “and he went up into the mountain” in vv. 15 and 18, and the text inside these bookends changes from E’s “Mountain of God” to P’s Mount Sinai, and it refers to the “glory of YHWH,” which is known from P.

 

^*I have presented evidence that the Tabernacle, as described in this chapter, corresponded in size to the space under the wings of the cherubs inside the Holy of Holies inside the Temple of Solomon. This, together with other textual, historical, and archaeological evidence, contributed to the conclusion that the Tabernacle was historical and was located in that Temple—but not in the second, postexilic Jerusalem Temple. This in turn argued that the P texts that require the presence of the Tabernacle for the performance of sacrifices and ceremonies had to have been written while the first Jerusalem Temple was still standing: before the Babylonian exile and destruction of the Temple. For discussion and bibliography, see the Collection of Evidence, pp. 22-24.

 

^*The phrase “finger of God” occurs in another P passage (Exod 8:15) but never in J or E. The reference to the “testimony” also is characteristic of P. Further, the mountain is referred to as Sinai, which occurs only in P and J, never in E or D. This passage connects to the next P passage, Exod 34:29.

 

^**On the string of connections between Aaron’s golden calf and King Jeroboam’s golden calf, see the Collection of Evidence, p. 21 and p. 25, as well as the note on Exod 24:1 above and the note following this one.

 

^‡These are the words that Jeroboam says at his golden calf at Beth-El (1 Kgs 12:28).

 

^*The word for “turned it loose” is , which is spelled the same as the Hebrew for “pharaoh”! This is an example of punning in E. It is also common in J, but not in P or D.

 

^*Moses moves the Tent outside the camp here in Exod 33:7-11 (E), but the Tent is not built until Exodus 36 (P)!

 

^*Here in E Joshua is pictured as being inside the Tent of Meeting. But this is a contradiction of P, where it is forbidden for anyone who is not a priest ever to be in the Tent, the penalty for which is to be put to death (Num 1:51; 3:10,38; 18:5,7).

 

^*The divine revelation to Moses is foretold here in E, but it takes place in J (in the next chapter). RJE may have merged the J and E accounts in 33:12-23 in such a way that it is now difficult, perhaps impossible, to distinguish them.

 

^*The tablets in E are shattered. Now comes the J account of the tablets. In the combined JE text, it would be awkward to picture God just commanding Moses to make some tablets, as if there were no history to this matter, so RJE adds the explanation that these are a replacement for the earlier tablets that were shattered.

In E the tablets that are shattered are never said to be replaced. This suggests that, according to E, the ark that is housed in the Temple in Judah to the south either contains broken tablets or no tablets at all. As in other places, the northern Israel source E has clashing religious symbols from those of the southern kingdom of Judah. See the Collection of Evidence, pp. 19, 21.

 

^**This famous formula in J emphasizes the merciful over the just side of God: mercy, grace, kindness. As noted in the Collection of Evidence (p. 12), P never uses these words or several other words relating to mercy. P rather emphasizes the just side of God. This is an important example of the pervasive way in which the Bible became more than the sum of its parts when the Redactor combined the sources. J (and E and D) emphasized the merciful side of God; P emphasized the just side. The final version of the united Torah now brings the two sides together in a new balance, conveying a picture of God who is torn between His justice and His mercy—which has been a central element of the conception of God in Judaism and Christianity ever since.

 

^*Exod 34:14-26 is the J text of the Ten Commandments. This is made absolutely explicit in vv. 27-28: “‘Write these words for yourself, because I’ve made a covenant with you and with Israel based on these words’ … And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments.” The first two commandments and the Sabbath commandment have parallels in the other versions of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5), though the wording is different. The other seven commandments here are completely different.

 

^*Several marks of P are present in this passage: the reference to the “tablets of Testimony,” the prominence of Aaron, the identification of the mountain as Sinai, the reference to the “congregation” and to its “chiefs.” This P passage picks up where the last P passage left off. It flows as a continuous text when the intervening J and E narrative is removed.

Note that here and in Exod 31:18 P does not speak of the Ten Commandments. The tablets are called the “tablets of the Testimony,” and we are not informed what the “Testimony” is.

 

^*P claims to have the divine instruction (Hebrew torah) sixteen times in Leviticus. But in the book of Jeremiah (which is connected with the Deuteronomistic literature), Jeremiah says, “How do you say, ‘We’re wise, and YHWH’s torah is with us’? In fact, here, it was made for a lie, the lying pen of scribes!” See the next note and Who Wrote the Bible? p. 209.

 

¹²⁸ This conclusion (vv. 37-38) summarizes seven full chapters about offerings and sacrifices that are given “in the day” that Moses was commanded. Like other P passages, this P passage is rejected and reversed in the book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah says, “I did not speak with your fathers and I did not command them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt about matters of offerings and sacrifices” (Jer 7:22). See the note on Gen 1:2 and Who Wrote the Bible? p. 168.

 

^*The author of P traced the Aaronid priesthood through Aaron’s son Eleazar, but the received tradition (still retained in E) was that Aaron’s sons were Nadab and Abihu. P therefore included this story of how Nadab and Abihu came to be replaced by the next two sons, Eleazar and Ithamar. Verse 12 below identifies them as “his sons who were left.” See the note on Exod 24:1.

 

^*The section from Leviticus 17 to 26 is called the Holiness Code, or H. In much of its language it is related to P. There is considerable agreement that it has some sort of distinctiveness in its language but considerable disagreement over what that distinctiveness is, what this means, and what the relationship between H and P is. Also, scholars draw different lines of what is contained in H; some see additional portions of H elsewhere in Leviticus and even in Exodus and Numbers. For many, someone who was associated with P was the redactor of H. For Knohl and Milgrom in recent works, someone who was associated with H was the redactor of P. At minimum, as they stand in the text, P and H are integrally related. Material that is identified as H is thus marked in the typeface that is used for P texts in this book. On the view of Knohl, see the note on Num 30:1.

 

¹³⁰ Three more times in this passage (20:24-26) the P term for “distinguishing” occurs, describing what God does and what the people must do so as to be holy, because their God is holy.

 

¹³¹ The list of holidays appears in this chapter in vv. 4-36 and concludes that “These are YHWH’s appointed times” (v. 37). But then this passage (vv. 39-43) comes as a strange addition, going back to discussing the Festival of Booths (Sukkot), which had already been covered in the list (vv. 33-36). This added text informs the Israelites for the first time that they are actually commanded to live in booths during this holiday and that they are supposed to take certain species of plants. This curious addition is explained by a passage in the book of Nehemiah (8:13-18). There, when Ezra and the people’s leaders study the Torah “they found it written in the Torah that YHWH had commanded by Moses’ hand that the children of Israel should live in booths on the holiday.” And it has a notation of bringing species of plants similar to those in the passage here in Leviticus. (There is a scribal change of the word hadas in Nehemiah for the word hadar here in Leviticus.) And the passage in Nehemiah states that this commandment had never been followed in Israel’s history in the land (“since the days of Joshua”). This indicates that the commandment about booths was not established together with the other laws of the holidays and that this passage was composed separately and then added to the list. This fits with the conclusion that the redaction of the Torah took place by the time of Ezra and that the P text, to which this addition was made, was composed at an earlier stage of Israel’s history.

 

¹³² The last entry of the curse list (v. 39) threatens exile. That does not in itself establish that this passage was written after the Babylonian exile. Exile was a reality in the ancient Near East, and one could imagine it as a curse in any period. The full passage, however, also promises a return from exile, which seems to address an actual community in exile. It is therefore more probably an addition to the list, composed after the Babylonian exile, though we might also consider the possibility that it is original to P and was written with the Assyrian exiles from the northern kingdom of Israel in mind.

 

¹³³ The Tabernacle is erected inside the camp in Numbers 2 (P), but it is still outside the camp in Num 12:4-15 (E). In E the Tabernacle had been moved outside the camp following the golden-calf incident. See Exod 33:7-11 and the note there.

 

¹⁴¹ With this passage the Redactor fashioned the framework for all the coming stories of Israel’s travels through the wilderness. It works together with the itinerary list of Numbers 33 to set the stories in a chronological progression of episodes. It establishes that the people might stay for a long or short time at any given stop on the way, thus making it possible for a single event or a sequence of events to take place at any given location.

 

¹⁴² There is not sufficient evidence in this brief story (11:1-3) to identify it with certainty. The identification here as E is tentative.

 

¹⁴³ This is a triplet of the J and P accounts of the manna that appear in Exodus 16. It contains a reference to the Tent of Meeting, which does not occur in J; and it is linked by puns to the story of Miriam’s leprosy, which is E. It contains no characteristic P terms, and the story of Miriam’s leprosy to which it is linked denigrates Aaron, so it cannot be P. On all these grounds, this passage must be E.

 

¹⁴⁴ The character development of Moses, the increasing strength in the way he speaks first to Pharaoh and then even to God, and the sympathetic treatment of his suffering are marks of E. J and P are not comparable in this respect. This is also consistent with the idea that E comes from the Mushite priesthood; that is, it is written by someone who traces his descent from Moses. Thus, here Moses makes an extraordinary, plaintive speech to God, perhaps the most audacious way that anyone speaks to God in the Hebrew Bible. See likewise Moses’ last words to Pharaoh (Exod 11:4-8), his long exchange with God at the burning bush (Exodus 3-4), and his exchange with God on Mount Horeb (Exodus 32).

 

¹⁴⁵ The identification of Moses as humbler than anyone on earth was one of the early matters that were raised as producing doubts that Moses was the author. It was hard to picture the humblest man on earth writing that he was the humblest man on earth.

 

¹⁴⁶ Only here and in the golden-calf episode does Aaron address Moses as “my lord” (Hebrew ) Both are E episodes, and both picture Aaron as doing something wrong. (And in both cases Aaron suffers no punishment, even when Miriam suffers here when she and Aaron have committed the same offense. This may be because E could not picture Israel’s first high priest as suffering leprosy or any other direct punishment from God.)

 

^*The J story begins without identifying who Moses sends. The original beginning of J may have been removed because it duplicated (or contradicted) the beginning of P. When the Redactor combined the two versions of the episode of the scouts, he opened with the P report that Moses sends them, and then he placed the J account of Moses’ instructions to them next. Note that the phrase that comes here precisely at the juncture between the two is “And Moses sent them” (13:17). This is a verbatim repetition of the report in P a few verses earlier (13:2). Such a resumptive repetition precisely at a juncture between two sources is a frequent sign of redaction. It is also known as an epanalepsis.

 

¹⁴⁷ The Nephilim were last mentioned in a J text (Gen 6:4), which identifies them as giants, the offspring of human women and “the sons of God.” Now they are found living in the land. Later (in a J text in Joshua), Joshua eliminates the giants from all the land except the city of Gath and two other Philistine cities (Josh 11:21-22). And later still, the famous Philistine giant Goliath comes from Gath (in 1 Sam 17:4, a text I identified in The Hidden Book in the Bible as having been written by the same author as J).

 

¹⁴⁹ Only one scout, Caleb, opposes the scouts who give the negative report in 13:30 and 14:24 (J); but it is two scouts, both Caleb and Joshua, in 14:6-9,38 (P). The addition of Joshua in P was necessary because it had to explain why Joshua survived to arrive in the land. In E Joshua’s merit is established: he is the only Israelite to be completely unin- volved in the golden-calf event, and he is the man who remains in the Tabernacle standing guard. But P cannot include these stories because in the golden-calf story Aaron is culpable for making the calf, and according to P a nonpriest such as Joshua cannot be in the Tabernacle. P therefore includes Joshua along with Caleb as the two men who survive to enter the land.

 

¹⁵⁰ The Amalekites live in the land in 14:25,45 (J); but they live in the wilderness in Exod 17:8-16 (E).

 

¹⁵¹ Three points regarding vv. 1-31: (1) The location of this passage of law in the middle of two wilderness stories hints that it may be an insertion, especially since it has little to do with either of these stories in particular. (2) The Priestly sacrificial law was already given in Leviticus 1-7 and 17. Now this new sacrificial law comes, dealing all over again with regular sacrifice, holiday sacrifices, vow sacrifices, and individual and communal sacrifices for sinning by mistake. (3) The earlier sacrificial law repeatedly involves the Tabernacle. This second body of sacrificial law never mentions the Tabernacle. This fits with the evidence that the Tabernacle was kept in the Solomonic Temple and that P was written while the Solomonic Temple was still standing, whereas the Redactor wrote and edited in the time of the postexilic Temple, which did not contain the Tabernacle.

 

¹⁵² The two occurrences of the extraneous word “and” in this verse are partly a product of the Redactor’s arrangement of the combined text and partly a product of the English translation, in which a different word order from the Hebrew is necessary. Separated, the P text would read: “And Korah son of Izhar son of Kohath son of Levi took two hundred fifty people …,” and the J text would read: “And Dathan and Abiram, sons of Eliab, and On, son of Peleth, sons of Reuben, got up in front of Moses.”

 

¹⁵³ The names Dathan and Abiram in vv. 23 and 27 appear in the Masoretic Text but not in the Greek. Either they were added by the Redactor to weave the stories together or they were added by a later scribe who, not knowing there were originally two separate stories, could not understand why the text referred only to Korah without Dathan and Abiram.

 

¹⁵⁴ The original text probably read “And fire went out” () in the perfect tense, and the Redactor changed it to the past perfect tense, “And fire had gone out” (). This was necessary because in the combined text Korah and his company were now being pictured as going down in the earthquake with Dathan and Abiram, but they were also pictured as being burned in the fire, and so R had to clarify that they had already been burned in the fire and now were swallowed along with the live rebels in the earthquake as well.

 

¹⁵⁵ This is a doublet of the E story of the water from the crag at Meribah (Exodus 17). This version of the story shows signs of P. It uses the terms “expire,” “congregation,” and “community,” and refers to the Tent of Meeting. It deals with the question of who is holy, specifically in terms of a challenge to Aaron’s exclusive right to the priesthood by his cousin Korah. Also, it continues from the preceding P story (see the next note).

 

¹⁵⁶ The staff is taken “from in front of YHWH”—which is to say: from inside the Tabernacle. That is where Aaron’s staff was placed, by divine command, after it miraculously blossomed following the Korah rebellion. There God says, “Put back Aaron’s staff in front of the Testimony for watching over, for a sign to rebels.” And now Moses takes that staff and says, “Listen, rebels!” As usual in P, the miraculous staff is Aaron’s. This is apparently why Aaron suffers the same fate as Moses: for the misuse of the staff in this episode. See W. H. Propp, “The Rod of Aaron and the Sin of Moses.”

 

¹⁵⁷ Just as Jacob “sent messengers” to Esau in J (Gen 32:4), Moses “sent messengers” to Edom, who are the descendants of Esau.

 

¹⁵⁸ The place Hormah occurs only here and in the J spies story (Num 14:45), and so this short text (Num 21:1-3) is probably J. Also, this story involves Arad, a location in the Negeb of Judah, which fits with the fact that other J stories are disproportionately focused on the southern kingdom of Judah.

 

¹⁵⁹ This bronze snake, made by Moses, is later called “Nehushtan.” The only prophet to allude to it is Jeremiah (Jer 8:17-22), who is associated with the same priesthood that produced E and D (the Levites of Shiloh/Anathoth). It is destroyed by King Hezekiah (2 Kgs 18:4), the king who represents the interests of the rival priesthood (the Aaronids). See Who Wrote the Bible? pp. 126, 210-211.

 

¹⁶⁰ It is difficult to identify the sources used by the Redactor in vv. 12-20, a passage composed of prose, archaic poetry, travel notices, and an explicit citation of an older source.

 

^*The Balaam episode is perhaps the hardest section in the Torah in which to delineate sources. Most scholars regard this three-chapter story as a composite: first, because they think of the accounts of repeated sets of ambassadors to Balaam as a doublet; and, second, because they think there is a contradiction in the story when God tells Balaam to go with the Moabites but then is angry at him for going. I am not at all certain that these things are evidence of two sources. The several embassies to Balaam, each composed of more distinguished ambassadors, may well be the original progression of the story. And the confusion over God’s sending Balaam and then being angry at him is surprising but still understandable as a single author’s development, and it is not easily resolved by separating this section into two sources in any case. Evidence of language is a stronger marker of sources than these considerations. The vast majority of the terms and phrases here that are identifiable with a particular source are typical of E, while only three are typical of J. And there is a particular cluster of terms and phrases here that are also found in Exodus 10 (E). And the deity is referred to as God (Elohim) in narration here seven times. I therefore have marked the story as wholly E, except that I have marked those three J passages so that one can observe them and make of it what one will.

The first verse of the story (“And Balak, son of Zippor, saw everything that Israel had done to the Amorite”) refers to the defeat of the Amorites, which had occurred only in J, not in E. This verse, therefore, either comes from J or else was added by RJE as a means of connecting the J story of the defeat of the Amorites and the E story of the defeat of the Moabites.

 

^**felt a disgust at the children of Israel.” This is the first of a string of terms in the Balaam story that are also found in the E account of the exodus from Egypt. Cf. Exod 1:12.

 

^‡Midian was not originally in this story. R added references to Midian (vv. 4 and 7) to reconcile a confusion in the texts that will arise later, where the J story of Baal Peor will be merged with the P story of Peor (see the note on Num 25:1). The J story is about Moab while the P story is about Midian. And later still, the P story of the Israelite defeat of Midian will refer to the death of Balaam among the Midianites.

 

^‡‡the plants of a field.” Cf. Exod 10:15 (E).

 

^§“and he sent messengers.” Cf. Gen 32:4; Num 20:14; 21:21 (J).

 

^§§“it has covered the eye of the land.” Cf. Exod 10:5,15 (E).

 

^*“because it’s more powerful than I.” Cf. Exod 3:9 (E).

 

^**“and I’ll drive it out from the land.” Cf. Exod 6:1 (E).

 

^‡“whoever you’ll bless will be blessed, and whoever you’ll curse will be cursed.” Somewhat similar to Gen 12:3 (J), this expression here is uncertain for source identification.

 

^‡‡“covered the eye of the land.” See the second note on 22:5.

 

^§“refused.” Cf. Exod 10:4 and five more times in E.

 

^§§“went on again.” Cf. Gen 18:29; 37:5,8; 38:26 (J), and see The Hidden Book in the Bible, p. 387.

 

^¶“chiefs.” (Hebrew: iartm) The plural occurs in E but never in J. Cf. Exod 1:11; 18:21,25.

 

^¶¶“held back.” Cf. Gen 30:2 (E).

 

^#“everything that you’ll say to me.” Cf. Gen 21:12 (E).

 

^##“stay here” (Hebrew sebu na’ bazeh). Cf. Exod 17:5,6 (E).

 

^*got up in the morning and harnessed his [female] ass.” Cf. Gen 22:3 (E): “He got up early in the morning and harnessed his [male] ass.”

 

^**“his two boys.” Cf. Gen 22:3 (E), and see the preceding note.

 

^‡pressed” (Hebrew Ihs, twice in this verse). Cf. Exod 3:9 (E), “oppression” (Hebrew lahas).

 

^‡‡“to turn right or left.” Cf. Num 20:17 (J).

 

^§“abused.” Cf. Exod 10:2 (E).

 

^§§“a sword in my hand.” Cf. Exod 5:21 (E).

 

^¶“you struck.” Cf. Exod 17:5,6 (E).

 

^*“And he said, ‘I’ve sinned.’” Cf. Exod 9:27; 10:16 (E).

 

^*“God’s spirit.” Cf. Gen 41:38 (E). This expression also occurs in P but never in J.

 

^*“and went to [his] place.” Cf. Gen 22:3 (E).

 

^**“and went his way.” Cf. Gen 32:2 (E).

 

^‡The women who have sexual unions with the Israelites are Moabite in Num 25:1 (J); but they are Midianite in 25:6; 31:1–16 (P). This change is consistent with other cases of polemic in P against the Mushite priesthood. Denigrating Midianite women is a denigration of Moses’ wife, who is Midianite.

 

¹⁶¹ Why are the people mourning? The last verse of P before this was Num 20:29, the conclusion of the account of Aaron’s death. It says “all the congregation saw that Aaron had expired, and all the house of Israel mourned Aaron thirty days.” After a four-chapter hiatus, P now continues where it left off: “all the congregation of the children of Israel were mourning.”

 

¹⁶² The enclosure (Hebrew qubbd) refers to the inner sanctum of the Tent of Meeting. That is why it must be a priest who goes in after them, and that is why he can execute them on the spot, with no trial: this is what is done to a nonpriest who enters the Tent of Meeting. This also explains why there is a plague that has seemingly come from nowhere. P says earlier that a plague came if the people came too close to the holy zone of the Tent of Meeting: “so there will not be a plague in the children of Israel when the children of Israel would come near to the Holy” (Num 8:19).

 

^‡Besides the plague, the Tent of Meeting, and the central role of the priest Phinehas, who is Aaron’s grandson, the Priestly terms “brought forward” and “congregation” also identify this narrative as P.

 

^*This note (vv. 8–11) breaks the pattern of the genealogical list in which it appears. Each tribe is listed by its families, and then its total number of members is given. But here, following the conclusion of the genealogy of the tribe of Reuben, the text stops to identify Dathan and Abiram and connect them with Korah. R apparently added it to support his merger of the Korah episode with the Dathan-Abiram episode in Numbers 16. The structure “That is Dathan and Abiram … who …” occurs only here and in another passage that is identified with R on other grounds as well: “That is Aaron and Moses who …” (Exod 6:26)

 

¹⁶³ Numbers 28-29 is a body of laws of sacrifice. The laws of grain offerings and libations were introduced in Numbers 15, but here they are assumed to exist along with the meat offerings. This passage therefore appears to come from the same source as Numbers 15 and to continue it (or it may be a later addition, but it is not earlier than Numbers 15). It is therefore identified as R, just as Numbers 15 is. This is further confirmed by the absence of any reference to the Tabernacle in this passage, just as there is none in Numbers 15 or in any passage identified as R—because R comes from the time of the post- exilic Temple, which did not contain the Tabernacle. (See the Collection of Evidence, pp. 22-23, and the comment on Exod 26:1.)

Also, in P the law is given at Sinai. Hardly any law is given in P after the departure from Sinai unless it has something to do with a story. (For example, the priestly and Levitical matters in Numbers 18 follow on what has just happened in the Korah rebellion and its aftermath.) The one possible exception is the matter of the red heifer. If these two long chapters (Numbers 28-29) are P, then they are anomalous, the only long independent body of law in P that is not revealed at Sinai.

This two-chapter section is the fulcrum of the view of Israel Knohl that there was a “Holiness School” (H) that came later than P and was responsible for the redaction of P. But for Knohl this section must be P, a view that he never defends. He rather starts with the statement “Scholars generally agree that Numbers 28–29 is wholly P” (The Sanctuary of Silence, p. 9). But neither Noth nor I identified it as P. Although Milgrom holds a similar view to Knohl’s, he notes cautiously, “All arguments from Numbers are precarious” (Leviticus 1–16, Anchor Bible 3, p. 13). Moreover, Milgrom lists thirteen terms that are marks of pre-exilic P language in Numbers, and none of them appears here in Numbers 28–29. Knohl and Milgrom may be right that H was composed later than P, and they may or may not be right that H played a role in the redaction of the Torah. But those things should not be based on this text in Numbers 28–29.

 

^*It is difficult to determine whether this section (30:2–17) is P or R. The identification as P here is tentative.

 

^*Moses is pictured here in P as angry that the Israelites have not killed the Midianite women, who, he says, caused the breach at Peor. Thus, in P, Moses denounces his wife’s people, the Midianites, and he orders all nonvirgin Midianite women to be killed. This might or might not include his own wife, but either way it denigrates Moses’ connection to Midian through his wife, and it possibly denigrates the Mushite priesthood, who are descended from Moses and that Midianite woman. (It is interesting that P never says whether this demand by Moses to kill the Midianite women is carried out.)

 

¹⁶⁴ This chapter appears to be composed of material from both J and P, but it is difficult to separate and identify which verses are from which source. The division here is tentative. It is based on (1) distinguishing sources in light of characteristic terminology of J and P, (2) the presence of Aaron’s son Eleazar in P, and (3) determining if it is possible to identify two complete, consistent accounts in light of the fact that the Redactor’s method elsewhere is visibly to retain both the P and the JE accounts in their entirety whenever possible.

 

¹⁶⁵ The term “possession” (‘ahuzzāh) is characteristic of P.

 

¹⁶⁶ The words of Moses that follow are a combination of J and P dialogue. Presumably the words “And Moses said” preceded each source’s dialogue, but there was no need for the Redactor to retain such a repetition.

 

^‡“to the Wadi Eshcol”; cf. Num 13:23 (J). “see the land”; cf. Num 13:18 (J).

 

^‡‡the land that I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Cf. “the land that I swore to their fathers,” Num 14:23 (J).

 

^§This same report occurs in Num 14:24 (J) and in Josh 14:14, but there only Caleb “went after YHWH completely.” Joshua is not mentioned. It appears that Joshua was added here by the Redactor because he was merging both J and P texts, and in P Joshua had been added alongside Caleb in the scouts story. See the note on Num 14:24.

 

^§§“in the wilderness forty years until the end.” Cf. Num 14:33 (P). Also, this verse begins with a repetition of the words “And YHWH’s anger flared at Israel” (cf. v. 10).

 

¹⁶⁷ This is the itinerary list of Israel’s travels that R used in order to organize the wilderness episodes chronologically. See the note on Num 9:23.

 

¹⁶⁸ The opening verses, composed by the Deuteronomistic historian for the original edition of the history (Dtri), cast the words that follow as the farewell speech of Moses before his death. This speech then takes up thirty chapters: all of Deuteronomy 1-30. This presentation as a farewell address enabled the historian to address broad matters of history and covenant (chapters 1-11) and to introduce a lengthy code of laws (Dtn, chapters 12-26) that now fit into a context of history.

 

¹⁶⁹ The narrator pictures Moses speaking “across the Jordan” many times in Deuteronomy. This was one of the early signs that led people to question whether Moses himself was the author of the Torah. These words reflect the perspective of an author who is in Israel. The author thus refers to Moses’ location in Moab as “across the Jordan.” This would not be the perspective of an author who is in Moab at the time. See also the note on Deut 3:20.

 

^‡The name Horeb here is part of a group of elements that E and D have in common, as opposed to J and P. E and D both refer to the mountain as Horeb, whereas J and P refer to it as Sinai. E and D both downgrade Aaron; both include the golden-calf incident and the incident of Miriam’s leprosy; J and P do not mention these incidents. E and D both use the expression “the place where YHWH will put His name” (or “tent His name” or “commemorate my name”). J and P do not. E and D both develop Moses’ character and importance to a degree far beyond that of J and P. E and D both emphasize the role of prophets. In contrast, P uses the word “prophet” only once (figuratively) and J never uses it at all. E and D both endorse the Levites, regard them as priests, and provide for their maintenance, while in P the Levites are not regarded as priests and are rather lower than the priests, and in J the Levites are condemned to be dispersed as retribution for the acts oftheir ancestor, Levi (Gen 49:5-7). This association of E and D on these elements is consistent with the notion that these two sources derive from the same community, the Levites of Shiloh/Anathoth, sometimes known as Mushite.

 

¹⁷⁰ This is a direct quotation of the words in the episode of the scouts in P: “your infants whom you said would become a spoil!” (Num 14:31). It may be further evidence that P preceded D, as P is quoted here in Dtri; but we must be cautious because this phrase appears here in Deut 1:39 in the Hebrew (Masoretic) text and in the Qumran (Dead Sea Scrolls) text, but it does not appear in the Greek (Septuagint) text.

 

¹⁷¹ As noted above on Deut 1:1, the references to Moses being “across the Jordan” suggest that the text was not by Moses but by someone located in Israel, referring to Moses’ location in Moab as being “across the Jordan.” One might argue that Moses could still have written these words because he was addressing his message to a future audience who would be reading it in Israel. Note, though, that when Moses is quoted in the text he refers to the land of Israel as being across the Jordan, but when the narrator speaks he refers to Moses as being across the Jordan. The distinction between the perspective of the narrator and the perspective of Moses is maintained consistently.

 

¹⁷² Deuteronomy 4 divides into three visible thematic units: verses 1-24, 25-31, and 32-40. The middle unit is a Dtr2 addition. The grounds for this identification are: (1) Verses 32ff. continue sensibly from v. 24. (2) There are repeated references to fire in the first and third units (4:11,12,15,24,33,36 twice). (3) More specifically, God is pictured as a burning fire and as an ‘el qanna’ (jealous God) in these units, but then in the middle unit, breaking the image of the divine consuming fire, comes a different picture of the deity: a promise that even in exile the people can seek God and find Him, a God who “won’t let you down” and “won’t destroy you.” And instead of an ‘el qanna’ He is an ‘el rahum (merciful God). (4) In the middle unit Moses summons the skies and earth as witnesses. This is an element of a passage attributed to Dtr2 in Deuteronomy 31. See the note on Deut 31:30. (5) The references in the middle unit to the “future days” and to the fact that troubles will “find” the people without God’s protection also occur in the Dtr2 sections of Deuteronomy 31. (6) The idea that God will scatter Israel among the peoples also occurs only in passages in the Deuteronomistic history that are identified as Dtr2 on other grounds. (7) The themes of the middle unit are apostasy leading to exile, after which a return to God can lead to restoration. (8) The wording of the middle unit is strikingly similar to a letter that Jeremiah sends to the exiles in Babylon (Deut 4:29; cf. Jer 29:13).

 

¹⁷³ Dtri gives a reason here for the Sabbath commandment that differs from the reason found in the Exodus 20 text of the Decalogue. In Exodus, the reason is that God created the world in seven days and then rested, which is based on the words of Genesis 1. But here the reason is that “you were a slave in the land of Egypt,” which is a repeated premise in D (Deut 15:15; 16:12; 24:18,22).

 

¹⁷⁴ Moses says that he is stating here the words that God spoke at Horeb, but there are a number of large and small differences between the text here and the Horeb text (Exodus 20).

 

¹⁷⁵ 8:i9-20 is Dtr2. The infinitival emphatic here occurs in two other passages that are identified as Dtr2 (4:26; 30:18), and it occurs nowhere else. The expression “I call to witness” also occurs only here and in other passages that are identified as Dtr2. And the subject is the people’s perishing from the land because of going after other gods, which is a common exilic, Dtr2 theme.

 

¹⁷⁶ The notation that God gave Moses tablets of stone written with the finger of God is a reference to P (Exod 31:18). The phrase “finger of God” has occurred only in P (Exod 8:15; 31:18). This is one of the signs that D (in this case Dtri) was written later than P and that the Deuteronomist was familiar with P.

 

¹⁷⁷ Aaron is mentioned in 109 verses in Exodus, 77 in Leviticus, and 97 in Numbers. But here in Deuteronomy, when Moses recounts those forty years, he mentions Aaron only to say that he made the golden calf and that he died. This is not only a striking difference in D; it is consistent with the notion that D is a Mushite source and P is plainly an Aaronid source.

 

¹⁷⁸ Deuteronomy refers back to the rebellion of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram (Numbers 16), but it mentions only Dathan and Abiram, who are the rebels in the J portion of the story. It never mentions Korah and his assembly, who are the rebels in the P portion of the story.

 

¹⁷⁹ Deuteronomy 12-26 is a corpus of law known as the Deuteronomic law code. It is identified by the symbol Dtn. It is an old, independent document that was used by the Deuteronomistic historian in the Dtri edition of the work. There are passages in which the Deuteronomistic historian may have expanded on the text, but it is now difficult to separate such expansions from the core text of laws.

 

¹⁸⁰ On the origin of the Deuteronomic Law of the King as deriving from the time of the inauguration of the first king of Israel, see Baruch Halpern, The Constitution of Monarchy in Israel (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1981).

 

¹⁸¹ The laws of war in Deuteronomy 20 and 21 appear to be directed to the entire people who have been mustered for military service, not to a professional army. Professional armies are claimed for biblical Israel only in the era of the monarchy. These laws therefore (1) do not appear to derive from the court and (2) appear to derive from the period before the monarchy. Thus, even if we trace the Deuteronomistic history to the period of Josiah (and a second edition in the Babylonian exile), portions of these laws in Dtn may come from much earlier sources. (See Who Wrote the Bible? pp. 119-122.)

 

¹⁸² 28:36-37 is Dtr2. The context concerns curses that affect the body and the land. But then these two verses intrude with references to exile of the people and its king. And immediately after this threat of exile, the curses are still referring to things that take place while the people are in their land.

 

¹⁸³ This last section of the curse list (1) shifts from simply listing the curses to describing God’s emotions toward the people’s behavior (“He will have satisfaction over you to destroy you …”); (2) refers to “scattering” with a term (Hebrew hepts) that occurs in two other passages that appear to be Dtr2 on other grounds as well; (3) concerns exile; (4) ends with a curse that Israel will one day return to Egypt, which comes to pass at the very end of the Deuteronomistic history: “And all the people, from youngest to oldest, rose and came to Egypt” (2 Kgs 25:26), which is the Dtr2 conclusion of the work. The last curse of the list thus is fulfilled in the last line of the history.

 

¹⁸⁴ Deut 29:21-27 is Dtr2. The signs of this are: (1) In the preceding verses the subject is what would happen to an individual who would turn to foreign gods, but suddenly in v. 21 it is as if the entire people had been the subject. (2) The fate of the entire people in this section is to be cast into a different land. (3) The wording of vv. 23-25 is nearly identical to 1 Kgs 9:8-9, which is another section of the Deuteronomistic history that is identified as Dtr2 on other grounds.

 

¹⁸⁵ Deut 30:11-4. This section connects back to 29:28, which is where Dtri left off. When reconnected, this is a continuous unit that compares the hidden things, which belong to YHWH, to the commandment, which “is very close to you, in your mouth, and in your heart, to do it.” The text that now breaks in between this unit is Dtr2 (30:1-10). It uses the term for scattering, hepis, that occurs in two other passages identified as Dtr2 on other grounds (Deut 4:27; 28:64). Thematically, it addresses an exiled people: it urges them to come back to God and assures them that God is merciful, and it says that restoration to their land is possible.

 

¹⁸⁶ Deut 30:15-20. This section continues the Dtr2 addition. In it Moses summons the skies and earth as witnesses, as in two other Dtr2 passages (4:26; 31:28; cf. 32:1); Moses uses the infinitival emphatic ‘abod to’bedun, which also appears in one of the skies-and- earth passages (4:26); and the subject of the passage is an exilic, Dtr2 theme: extending or losing residence on the land.

 

¹⁸⁷ 31:9-i3 and 24-27. These two sections of this chapter refer to the Scroll of Instruction (seper hattorah) that Moses writes and directs the Levites to keep as a witness for future times. This scroll then is found and read in the time of Josiah (2 Kgs 22:8-13). The scroll is the witness in Dtri. The text of the Song of Moses is then added as an additional witness in Dtr2. See the next note.

 

¹⁸⁸ The long poem that takes up Deuteronomy 32, known as the Song of Moses, is an independent poem that was inserted by the Deuteronomistic historian in the Dtr2 edition of the work. The Dtr2 sections of this chapter (31:16-22,28-30) refer to the song and derive some of their wording directly from it: the first section refers to the hiding of the face (v. 18) and to “rejecting” God (v. 20), which derive from the words of the song (32:1-20). The second section refers to Moses’ calling the skies and earth as witnesses (v. 28), which corresponds to the opening words of the song: “Listen skies, so I may speak, and let the earth hear what my mouth says,” and it uses the term “corrupted” (v. 29), which comes from the song (32:5), and the word for provoking God’s anger (v. 29), which also occurs in the song (32:21). These sections also refer to God’s leaving the people, and to the people’s becoming a prey to other nations; and these things are stated not as a threat but as a prophecy of an actual situation, which corresponds to the exile rather than to the time of Josiah.

 

¹⁸⁹ This section (32:48-52) repeats the divine command to Moses to ascend Abarim that appears in P in Num 27:12-14. The Redactor thus folds the words and events of Deuteronomy into the context that had been established at the end of Numbers.

 

¹⁹⁰ The long poem that takes up Deuteronomy 33, known as the Blessing of Moses, is an old, separate source that was inserted at the end of Moses’ address, probably by the Deuteronomistic historian in the Dtri edition of the work.

 

¹⁹¹ The first four verses of this chapter refer back to God’s command to Moses to go up Mount Pisgah and not cross into the land in Deut 3:27 (Dtn).

 

¹⁹² This section is J. It notes that Moses lives to be one hundred twenty years old, which is the limit that YHWH sets on human life in J (Gen 6:3). It notes that his eye was not dim; and the expression that it uses for the dimming of the eye occurs only here and in Isaac’s blessing of Jacob in Gen 27:1, which is J, and in the report of Eli’s dim eyes in 1 Sam 3:2 (which, I have argued elsewhere, comes from the same author; see The Hidden Book in the Bible).

 

¹⁹³ This section is P. It notes a thirty-day mourning period for Moses, which is the same that is given for Aaron in P (Num 20:29). And it refers to Moses’ laying hands on Joshua, and also to Joshua’s having spirit in him, which occur in P as well (Num 27:15-23).

 

^‡ This final section is Dtri. It uses the expression “did not rise like him,” which is applied to only two persons in scripture: to Moses here and to King Josiah in the Dtri description of that king. It is part of a series of parallels between Moses and Josiah in Dtri. (See the Collection of Evidence, pp. 24-26.)