Bart Ehrman’s Series of Posts
- Who Wrote the Pentateuch Anyway? May 9, 2021
- Two (Contradictory?) Accounts of Creation in Genesis? May 11, 2021
- More Inconsistencies in the Pentateuch, May 12, 2021
- Who Really Wrote the Pentateuch (if not Moses)? The JEDP Hypothesis, May 13, 2021
- More Recent Scholarship on Who Wrote the Pentateuch, May 15, 2021
Genesis and the Moses Story
By Konrad Schmid, Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Judaism, University of Zurich, Switzerland, October 2010
Genesis and the Moses story were two competing myths of origin for Israel that were literarily and conceptually independent from each other. They both explained in different ways how Israel came to be.
Opening paragraph is:
In the 20th century, the so-called Documentary Hypothesis with its four elements J, E, P, D was a commonly accepted explanation for the literary growth of the Pentateuch. This hypothesis is based on the assumption that there are three similar narrative accounts of Israel’s history of the creation, the ancestors, the exodus, and the conquest of the land: J, E, and P. The story line of the Pentateuch was considered very ancient. J adapted the structure of the narrative from the old creeds of ancient Israel, and the structure of the narrative accounts of E and P were mere epigones or imitations of J. However, in the last thirty years, serious doubts have arisen concerning this model. Only P, because of its clear structure and its specific language, has remained generally uncontested.
