I'm reading David Aaron's Etched in Stone: The Emergence of the Decalogue. In my reading today, two points stood out to me:
1. The first point concerns the historicity of Moses and the Sinai revelation. On pages 2-3, Dr. Aaron wonders why the grand epiphany (God's revelation of the Decalogue to Israel) in the Torah's narrative did not occur in Canaan---the Israelite possession of which was the fulfillment of God's covenant with Abraham---but rather at Sinai, a place that had no cultic significance and "whose location was ostensibly 'lost' to history". Dr. Aaron acknowledges that such a question probably won't occur to those who view the Torah as a transcript of what actually happened in history. For people who believe that way, the Torah says that the revelation occurred at Sinai because that's what happened, period. At the same time, Dr. Aaron holds that---even if one accepts the historicity of Moses or the Sinai revelation---one has to account for how they are portrayed in the text. On page 66, he states that, "Even if there was a historical Moses, we are still left with the task of understanding why he was depicted as he was in a literature that was written eight hundred years after he would have lived." Why, for example, does Moses shine before the Israelites---as kings in the ancient Near East shone before gods and human beings? Why does the text refer to that detail?
On page 9, Dr. Aaron refers to the view of such classic scholars as Julius Wellhausen and Gerhard von Rad that the Sinai story was an independent tradition that was added to the wilderness story. Von Rad's reasoning is that "various poetic elaborations of the Old Credo" do not mention Sinai.
I know from having read the book what Dr. Aaron's argument will be: that the Sinai revelation is not mentioned throughout the Hebrew Bible because it is a late construction, formulated in the Jewish diaspora (or exile), among a people seeking to construct their national identity with the absence of land, temple, and king---which were essentials for nationhood in the ancient world. (This is my understanding of his argument, and I'm open to correction.) The revelation was placed in a no man's land because Israel was in exile, where her land and its cultic centers did not make a difference. Dr. Aaron's argument may be that the revelation is presented as having occurred at Sinai to signal to Israel that she could be God's people outside of the Promised Land, since that was where she received her constitution---in a no man's land.
But I was intrigued by what Dr. Aaron said on pages 2-3, 9, and 66 because it made me think about other ways to conceptualize the data. Many scholars have argued that---if a text presents a detail that is puzzling or embarrassing---then that's evidence that it's historical, for why would an author make up something that's puzzling or embarrassing? For example, in the synoptic Gospels, John baptizes Jesus; many New Testament scholars consider that to be historical, for the very reason that it baffles how Christians thought it should have been (John baptizing Jesus, or Jesus not receiving baptism). In the case of Sinai, couldn't the story's puzzling nature---of God revealing his commandments on a mountain that had no future cultic significance---attest to its historicity? Maybe not, for Dr. Aaron presents a reason that the Sinai tradition could have developed: to place Israel's constitution in a no-man's land, assuring her that she could be God's people in exile.
On the independence of the Sinai story, this stood out to me because it appears that other scholars have noted the absence of Sinai in so much of the Hebrew Bible---or at least in ancient Israel's creed. But they don't necessarily treat the Sinai story as late---they just say it's independent. I wonder if they believed that the independent story goes back to a real historical event. Can a tradition be independent and yet historical? Many New Testament scholars have contended that the virgin birth story is unhistorical because Paul did not know about it. But could the story have been historical, even though Paul did not know about it? Could it have been preserved in circles in the church that were outside of Paul's circle? Does all of a community need to know about stuff for it to be historical, or could different sections of the community hold on to different historical details? I think that Ben Witherington made this sort of argument at some point, but I'm not entirely sure that he did so, so I don't want to be dogmatic here.
2. Dr. Aaron talks about Genesis 32-33. In Genesis 32, Jacob sees God and lives. This is surprising because people are not supposed to survive an encounter with the divine. In Genesis 33, Jacob survives an encounter with Esau, even though Jacob expected Esau to kill him. And so there's a parallel between Genesis 32 and Genesis 33, which Dr. Aaron notes. I wonder if the parallel is there to demonstrate a point that's in Genesis 32---that Jacob is called Israel because he prevails with God and with man. In my opinion, in Genesis 32, God was reminding Jacob that he had prevailed with men, such as Laban. Jacob was prevailing with God at that very moment. And God would be with Jacob, enabling him to prevail with Esau---to survive his encounter with his brother. This whole wrestling match with God was designed to assure Jacob of his special role as God's chosen one, meaning that God would protect Jacob from Esau.