Genesis 14 and the E source (original) (raw)

Since the last decades of the twentieth century, the once-dominant Documentary Hypothesis of the redaction of the Pentateuch has increasingly come under fire. The strongest objections have been raised against the existence of an Elohist ‘E’ source as a coherent document that can be separated from the Yahwist ‘J’ parts of the non-‘P(riestly)’ texts of Genesis (Gen), Exodus, and Numbers. Today, only a minority of scholars continue to posit the existence of E as a separate Pentateuchal source. A major argument against the existence of E as a documentary source is its fragmentary nature. Perhaps most saliently, it appears to lack a beginning. While proponents of an E source have argued that this beginning was removed as part of the redaction process or perhaps even accidentally lost during written transmission of the text, these explanations remain hypothetical of necessity. A seemingly unrelated problem is the origin of Gen 14. This narrative of the Levantine campaign of four Eastern kings clashes with the surrounding texts in both tone and content and has the formal hallmarks of the beginning of an independent work, not the continuation of a story in progress. Accordingly, it is today nearly universally regarded as a sui generis interpolation which cannot be connected with any of the more widely recognized Pentateuchal sources. There are, indeed, compelling arguments to separate Gen 14 from the J and P corpora. The relationship between Gen 14 and the postulated E source, however, is less clear-cut. In this talk, we will critically reassess the arguments against assigning Gen 14 to E and consider some in favour. By connecting Gen 14’s beginning-without-a-continuation and E’s source-without-a-beginning, we may simultaneously shed light on the enigmatic history of Gen 14 and remove a major objection against the existence of E as a stand-alone source document.