I started John Van Seters' Life of Moses.
John Van Seters is not a fan of the Documentary Hypothesis. So far, I have read his views about the story of Moses from his birth through the plagues, and Van Seters' argument is that J wrote that story (as he drew in some cases from folklore), and that P later added some things. Van Seters does not believe in an E source. In many cases, when a story that Van Seters attributes to J has bumps---such as an interruption, or duplicates---Van Seters does not believe that they indicate the existence of more than one source behind the text, J and E. Rather, he says that J in Exodus 1 is making a necessary interruption in his attempt to take the story in a certain direction (page 20), or that J is following a literary pattern in Exodus 4. (Three signs of confirmation occur so frequently, Van Seters argues, so why assume that there are multiple hands behind the three signs in Exodus 4:1-17?)
Van Seters dates J later than do many advocates of the Documentary Hypothesis, who date J to Judah's pre-exilic period. Van Seters dates J to the sixth century B.C.E., the time of Judah's exile. He says that there are late characteristics of J---Pithom (Exodus 1:11) was not built until 600 B.C.E. (page 24), plus J’s Moses story resembles Western (Greek) historiography, which has "the theme of migration from a realm of high culture...to another region that is made the object of conquest and settlement" (page 1). (Van Seters' also says that J resembles Eastern, or Mesopotamian, historiography, in its focus on the "life and deeds of the national leader", page 2). Van Seters also contends that J draws from the prophets and the exilic Deuteronomistic History, which is why there are similarities between the story of Moses and, say, the flight of Hadad to Egypt, or the call of reluctant Saul and Jeremiah.
"Well, why couldn't similarities be due to the prophets and the Deuteronomistic History drawing from J, rather than the other way around?", one could ask. On page 60, Van Seters discusses what he considers to be a development. In Isaiah 6, a heavenly figure touches Isaiah's lips with a coal to cleanse them, then God commissions Isaiah. In Jeremiah 1, the LORD commissions Jeremiah and then touches Jeremiah's mouth. According to Van Seters, "send" and "go" in Jeremiah 1:7 is "derived from" Isaiah 6:8, but Jeremiah 1 has reversed Isaiah 6's order of God impacting the prophet's lips then commissioning him. In Exodus 4, Van Seters argues, J follows Jeremiah's order, but J adds in vv 15-16 that Moses as God to Aaron is to put God's words in Aaron's mouth. Van Seters notes that "Nothing is said about touching the mouth any longer." Van Seters concludes from the development from Isaiah to J that "The progression of dependence, from Isaiah to Jeremiah to the Yahwist, is thus indisputable." Van Seters may believe that there is development here because God is less anthropomorphic in J than he is in Isaiah and Jeremiah: in J, God does not need to touch the prophet's lips to teach him what to say, which is an advancement from Isaiah and Jeremiah.
On the Documentary Hypothesis, Exodus 3:13-15 has been attributed to E, for, there, God appears to reveal the name of YHWH for the first time. J, however, thinks otherwise, for he presents the patriarchs using the name of YHWH, long before the time of Moses. So how does Van Seters explain Exodus 3:13-15, when he does not believe in E? On page 47, Van Seters states the following:
"The answer to this conundrum lies in the prophetic tradition, in Ezek. 20:5-6. This text specifically indicates that God appeared to the Israelites in Egypt as Yahweh. For Ezekiel this is the true beginning of Israel. He does not recognize the patriarchal traditions of origin. The Yahwist of the exile was faced with this text and therefore has God through Moses reveal anew to the Israelites the name of Yahweh. But at the same time he affirms in the strongest way that the deity, Yahweh, is in fact the God of the patriarchs, so that in his account the two traditions become merged. The significance of the statement in 3:15 is the inclusion of the reference to the three patriarchs, which is lacking in Ezekiel, and the affirmation that Yahweh’s name is to be used culticly in future generations with the epithet ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.’ What the Yahwist intends to suggest, therefore, is not that Yahweh revealed himself for the first time to the Israelites in the exodus event but that the God of the exodus is also the God of the patriarchs.”
What I get from this is that J is somewhat constrained by one of his sources: He wants to be faithful to Ezekiel 20:5-6, which stresses that God appeared to Israel at the Exodus under the name of YHWH. But J also wants to connect the Exodus with the patriarchs by affirming that the YHWH of the Exodus was also the patriarchs’ god. Is Van Seters’ point that, for J, both the patriarchs and the Israelites of the Exodus knew God as YHWH, and that God was telling Moses and the Israelites old information that they had forgotten, namely, that God’s name was YHWH? In any case, I wonder why, if J felt constrained by Ezekiel 20, he did not put other details from that chapter into his own story of the exodus, such as Ezekiel 20:7’s statement that the Israelites worshipped idols while they were in Egypt.
Van Seters’ statement on Exodus 3:13-15 highlights another issue: that J connected the exodus with the story of the patriarchs. This confuses me because, on page 21, Van Seters’ disputes Rolf Rendtorff’s thesis that the patriarchal stories were independent from the rest of the Pentateuch, and that someone later forged obviously artificial connections between the two. This is Rendtorff’s argument against the existence of J, for he wonders why, if a J author wrote the patriarchal stories and the stories of Israel in the remainder of the Pentateuch, the two do not share certain themes, such as “the promise of numerous posterity” (Van Seters’ words in summarizing Rendtorff’s position). Van Seters’ argument against Rendtorff is that “The language of Ex. 1:12…suggests that the patriarchal promises, as set forth by J in Genesis [and Van Seters cites Genesis 28:14], are being realized by the multiplication and expansion [of the Israelites] in Egypt.” So Van Seters holds that there is continuity between the patriarchal stories and the rest of the exodus.
And yet, Van Seters believes that the patriarchal stories and the Exodus story were combined, for the patriarchs are mentioned in Exodus 3:6, 15-16, and 4:5. Against Rendtorff, Van Seters says on pages 49-50:
“These are not just some late redactional connectives in an otherwise preexisting exodus account. They belong to the very foundation of the Yahwist’s presentation of the exodus, whereby the two major blocks of origin tradition, that of the exodus and the patriarchs, are being combined for the first time. Just as the Yahwist used the repeated revelation of Yahweh as the ‘God of the fathers’ as a connective between patriarchal traditions, the same device of the divine appearance is used here.”
So Van Seters thinks that the exodus and the patriarchs were combined by J into J’s story. Rendtorff’s argument was that the patriarchs and the exodus were independent and were only artificially connected by a later redactor, and so there wasn’t a J, for, if there were a J whose work permeates Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers, then Genesis would mention the exodus more, and the rest of the Pentateuch would mention God’s promises to the patriarchs more. Van Seters concedes that the patriarchs and the exodus were separate blocks before a certain point, for he observes, after all, that Ezekiel 20 mentions the exodus but not the patriarchs. But he thinks that J brought them together and connected them. For Van Seters, an author of the Hebrew Bible, not a mere redactor, connected these themes, and that connection was vital to his conception of the exodus, which he conveyed in his story.
I’ll close with a cool point that Van Seters makes: On page 40-41, Van Seters offers an explanation for the burning bush in Exodus 3---that it related to the menorah of the cult:
“The bush that burns but is not consumed seems to me to represent a reference to a many-branched menorah. It is a way of associating an object of the cult with a most important moment in the history of God’s revelation to his people. It thus serves as an etiology for a cult symbol and as a way of representing the divine presence in the cult beyond the taboos of idolatry.”