The Origins of Yahwism by Oorschot Jürgen van Witte Markus

Author:Oorschot, Jürgen van,Witte, Markus
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2017-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

3Excursus: The Smallest Literary Unit

As I have acknowledged, the source-critical analysis presupposed by my discussion is highly contested in (primarily) European scholarship. The primary reason is as follows. In Rolf Rendtorff’s programmatic work, particularly in Das überlieferungsgeschichtliche Problem des Pentateuch (1977), he argued that the methodology and presuppositions of source criticism conflict with that of form-criticism and tradition-historical criticism. He maintained that the two approaches “are opposed to each other in their starting point and in their statement of the question.”870 The isolation of the “smallest literary unit” (kleinste literarische Einheit) characteristic of the latter method, he maintained, should be translated into the procedures of source-criticism. Tradition and composition are thereby conflated. I maintain that there are several logical problems with this argument.

First, as Julius Wellhausen and Hermann Gunkel clearly articulated, the composers of the Pentateuchal sources arguably combined disparate narratives that circulated in Israelite oral tradition. As Wellhausen writes: “In themselves, heterogenous components do not exclude the unity and naturalness of a written connection; it is possible that already the first [written] recording of the oral tradition associated all kinds of matter that had no internal connection.”871 Narrative units that may have at one time circulated separately (in oral and/or written traditions) were arguably combined episodically by the written composers.872 Literary texts in the biblical and ancient Near Eastern world are often episodic and internally disparate.873 It is a logical error to infer that the identification of a literary episode entails the identification of a separate literary composition.

Otto Eissfeldt made this point forcefully in an article on “The Smallest Literary Unit in the Narrative Books of the Old Testament.” He writes: “it is not the “individual narrative” which is to be regarded as the smallest independent literary unit in the narrative books, but the larger context, whose extent must be determined by study of the horizon of the individual narratives.”874 He gives numerous examples where the literary horizon of an individual narrative is clearly discernible in the larger composition. This larger literary horizon is not contested nowadays for the P or D source, but it is in the non-P sources, due to Rendtorff’s methodological rule. But the strict equation of “independent narrative” with “smallest independent literary unit” is unwarranted. Intertextual verbal links are evident in the J and E sources, as I have shown above, as they are in the P and D sources. One can have as a starting point the assumption that all intertextual verbal links between individual narratives are late redactional supplements, but in any given instance this assumption must be flexible and corrigible. The large-scale literary horizon of the narratives, in Eissfeldt’s term, is a methodological imperative for identifying a literary composition. The conflation of the aims of form- and source-criticism is arguably a mistaken approach.

On the latter point, Erhard Blum has astutely noted that form criticism is not a single inquiry with a definable method, but an “amalgam of elements of independent lines of questioning.” He concludes: “no specific ‘form-critical method’ exists.”875 If Blum is correct, then there is no specific form-critical method to be transferred into source criticism.

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