Abraham in History and Tradition
- This article presents information about the John Van Seters book; for general information about the topic, see The Bible and history.
Abraham in History and Tradition is a book by biblical scholar John Van Seters.
The book is divided into two parts, Abraham in History and Abraham in Tradition. In Part I, Van Seters argues that there is no unambiguous evidence pointing to an origin for the stories in the 2nd millennium BC. "Arguments based on reconstructing the patriarch's nomadic way of life, the personal names in Genesis, the social customs reflected in the stories, and correlation of the traditions of Genesis with the archaeological data of the Middle Bronze Age have all been found, in Part One above, to be quite defective in demonstrating an origin for the Abraham tradition in the second millennium B.C.". This finding has implications for certain then-current strands in Biblical criticism: "Consequently, without any such effective historical controls on the tradition one cannot use any part of it in an attempt to reconstruct the primitive period of Israelite history. Furthermore, a vague presupposition about the antiquity of the tradition based upon a consensus approval of such arguments should no longer be used as a warrant for proposing a history of the tradition related to early premonarchic times."[1]
Part II forms a critique of "tradition-history" or "tradition-analysis", the theory current at the time that Genesis retained traces of oral traditions dating from the 2nd millennium. "There is virtually no way of deciding when oral narrative forms or motifs became associated with a particular person such as Abraham, and it could well have happened in every case when the story was first put in written form. The results of the literary examination of the Abraham tradition, in Part Two, would suggest that oral forms and motifs are confined to a rather small part of the tradition."[1]
Impact
On "Biblical archaeology" and the Albright school
The book was a
On "Tradition history"
The book was also a criticism of the school of
On the "documentary hypothesis" and the formation of the Torah
At the time Van Seters published "Abraham in History and Tradition" the dominant scholarly theory regarding the composition of the Pentateuch was the
- i. Pre-Yahwistic first stage: 12:1, 4a, 6a, 7, 10-20; 13:1-2; I6:1-3a, 4-9, IIab, 12; 13:18; 18:1a, 10-14; 21:2, 6-7 (all except the references to Lot). These represent a small unified work with three episodes and a brief framework.
- ii. Pre-Yahwistic second stage ("E"): 20:1-17; 21:25-26, 28-31a. This represents one unified story that originally came after the adventure in Egypt (13:1), to which it was added. It was subsequently transposed to its present position by the Yahwist, who added 20:iii. Ia ("From there ... Negeb") as a transition.
- Yahwist:
- a. brief secondary additions to previous works: 12:2-3, 6b, c8-9; 16:7b, 10, 11c, 13-14; 20:Iaα; 21:I.
- b. larger episodic units: 13:3-5, 7-17; chap. 15; 18:Ib-9, I5-19:38; 21:8-24, 27, 3Ib-34; chap. 22; chap. 24; 25:I-6, II; (chap. 26). All incorporated with some new arrangement of the materials.
- iv. Priestly:
- a. secondary genealogical and chronological additions: 11:26-32; 12:4b-5; 13:6; 16:3b, 15-16; 21:3-5; 25:7-10.
- b. larger episodic units: chaps. 17 and 23.
- v. Post-Priestly: chap. 14 (of which vv. 18-20 are secondary).
A celebrated scholarly argument ensued between Van Seters and Rolf Rendtorff over the role and existence of the redactors, Van Seters arguing that they did not exist, Rendtorff and his followers arguing that they were essential. Van Seters stated his position as follows:
It was the Documentary Hypothesis that created the redactor as a literary device, a deus ex machina, to make the whole theory work. That is the only really distinctive feature of the Documentary Hypothesis and it is this part of the theory that Rendtorff and others have retained. Now we supposedly have editors without any authors, which is absurd ... It is high time that the "redactor" takes his leave and the author is restored to his rightful place in literary criticism.[4]
See also
Notes
- ^ a b Van Seters 1975, p. 309
- ^ "Centre for Studies in Oral Tradition". Archived from the original on 2007-09-28. Retrieved 2007-09-05.
- ^ Van Seters 1975, p. 313
- ^ See Van Seter's reply to Rendtorff's "What Happened to the Yahwist?" in SBL Forum.
References
- Van Seters, John (1975). Abraham in History and Tradition. Echo Point Books and Media. ISBN 978-1-62654-910-4.