Concluding Van Seters' Prologue to History

I finished John Van Seters' Prologue to History. I have two items:

1. Throughout this book, Van Seters has compared the Yahwist to Greek historiographers, who included genealogies in their histories. But many advocates of the Documentary Hypothesis attribute genealogies to P. Does Van Seters ascribe them to J? I'll take a look at Van Seters' discussion of Genesis 10's Table of Nations on pages 174-176. The following translation is the King James' Version. Van Seters presents the source division, which he says is "by now fairly well established." J will be italicized, and P will be in boldface.

Genesis 9

¹⁸And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan.

¹⁹These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread.

Genesis 10

¹Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood.

²The sons of Japheth; Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras.

³And the sons of Gomer; Ashkenaz, and Riphath, and Togarmah.

⁴And the sons of Javan; Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim.

⁵By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations.

⁶And the sons of Ham; Cush, and Mizraim, and Phut, and Canaan.

⁷And the sons of Cush; Seba, and Havilah, and Sabtah, and Raamah, and Sabtechah: and the sons of Raamah; Sheba, and Dedan.

⁸And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth.

⁹He was a mighty hunter before the LORD: wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the LORD.

¹⁰And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.

¹¹Out of that land went forth Asshur, and builded Nineveh, and the city Rehoboth, and Calah,

¹²And Resen between Nineveh and Calah: the same is a great city.

¹³And Mizraim begat Ludim, and Anamim, and Lehabim, and Naphtuhim,

¹⁴And Pathrusim, and Casluhim, (out of whom came Philistim,) and Caphtorim.

¹⁵And Canaan begat Sidon his first born, and Heth,

¹⁶And the Jebusite, and the Amorite, and the Girgasite,

¹⁷And the Hivite, and the Arkite, and the Sinite,

¹⁸And the Arvadite, and the Zemarite, and the Hamathite: and afterward were the families of the Canaanites spread abroad.

¹⁹And the border of the Canaanites was from Sidon, as thou comest to Gerar, unto Gaza; as thou goest, unto Sodom, and Gomorrah, and Admah, and Zeboim, even unto Lasha.

²⁰These are the sons of Ham, after their families, after their tongues, in their countries, and in their nations.

²¹Unto Shem also, the father of all the children of Eber, the brother of Japheth the elder, even to him were children born.

²²The children of Shem; Elam, and Asshur, and Arphaxad, and Lud, and Aram.

²³And the children of Aram; Uz, and Hul, and Gether, and Mash.

²⁴And Arphaxad begat Salah; and Salah begat Eber.

²⁵And unto Eber were born two sons: the name of one was Peleg; for in his days was the earth divided; and his brother's name was Joktan.

²⁶And Joktan begat Almodad, and Sheleph, and Hazarmaveth, and Jerah,

²⁷And Hadoram, and Uzal, and Diklah,

²⁸And Obal, and Abimael, and Sheba,

²⁹And Ophir, and Havilah, and Jobab: all these were the sons of Joktan.

³⁰And their dwelling was from Mesha, as thou goest unto Sephar a mount of the east.

³¹These are the sons of Shem, after their families, after their tongues, in their lands, after their nations.

³²These are the families of the sons of Noah, after their generations, in their nations: and by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood.

I checked Richard Elliott Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible?, and his division of sources is the same as that above, except that Friedman attributes 10:1a to the Redactor.

So it turns out that J does genealogies, too. There's the answer to my question! But I still have things to learn from Van Seters' discussion on pages 174-176, for it can give me insight into how Van Seters interacts with the Documentary Hypothesis.

According to Van Seters, the older Documentary Hypothesis said that "the P version formed the basis of the Table and...a redactor used parts of a J version to fill it out with more detail." That's the view that I read in Martin Noth. And I can see where that view is coming from: it does look like P refers to Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and that J fills out some additional details. But Van Seters' approach is different: Van Seters thinks that J wrote the base narrative, and that P added some additions to J. Why?

First of all, Van Seters says that the Table of Nations "consists of two elements": it names various peoples, and it states where the descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japheth dwelt---"their geographical extension." And v 32, which is from P, refers to those two elements---the families of the sons of Noah, and their nations. But the problem is that P only mentions both of these elements for the line of Japheth, whereas J is the one who refers to the geographical extension of Ham and Shem. Consequently, Van Seters states, "the P source actually requires the J material in order for the concluding statement in v. 32 to be a real summary." P is therefore not independent of J, but it assumed J, and supplemented the J source.

Second, Van Seters attributes v 1a to J, even though many ascribe it to P because it has the word toledoth. But Van Seters says that P imitated J's use of toledoth when he wrote his own genealogies, the same way that P in v 32b imitated J's language of 9:19 and 10:1b. Personally, though, when I look at Genesis 10, my impression is that J does not stand by itself. J does not mention Japheth and Ham, for example. Van Seters' solution to this seems to be that P used J as a source when composing his own supplements to the Table of Nations, and that J had his own genealogy of Japheth, even though we don't see it in the text. Van Seters appears to think that P had the power to include and omit pieces of J. He says that the line of Eber-Peleg in 10:21-31 is "strangely stunted" because "P has deliberately used the rest of J's genealogy to construct his special linear genealogy of Shem in 11:10-26." So, for Van Seters, P must have stunted J's genealogy in Genesis 10, and moved pieces of it to 11:10-26, putting it in his own words to construct his own genealogy. I've seen this sort of approach on different sides: if a source in the Bible appears incomplete by itself, then that's because the text before us does not present us with all of that source! Noth says this when he's supporting the Documentary Hypothesis!

2. On page 328, Van Seters states: "In my earlier treatment of the Abraham tradition I seriously questioned the existence of a parallel E document, and in the present work I find no grounds for such a source in the Jacob traditions. What have sometimes been identified as E fragments are older sources used by the historian J. This historian is also a 'redactor' of materials from a variety of works in the scribal tradition. The imposition of additional redactional layers, Dtr or otherwise, prior to the Priestly Writer is also unwarranted."

How does Van Seters characterize the pre-Yahwist sources that J used? On page 279, he states: "It is not too difficult to see in these pre-Yahwist stories a collection of themes and interests having to do with the genealogical origins of peoples, tribes, and clans, interspersed with anecdotes and short stories about relations between the ancestors and their neighbors and rivals or the original population, the establishment of the territorial claims and settlement, the etiology of ethnic characteristics and ways of life, and so forth. All of these are typical of the antiquarian folk tradition." In the previous paragraph, Van Seters mentions etiologies of "cult sites and place names".

And the source that scholars have called "E" does have etiologies about cult sites or places (i.e., Bethel, Shechem, Beersheba). Van Seters does not consider those to be from an E source, but rather folk traditions that J used. Although Van Seters rips Martin Noth, he resembles Noth in that he identifies folk traditions in part on the basis of place: if a story focuses on a place, then it probably developed in that place---long before it was combined into a larger history. But there are some things that traditional advocates of the Documentary Hypothesis have applied to E, which Van Seters attributes to another author, or to J. Van Seters does not see Genesis 20 as E's wife-sister story, but rather as a writer's imitation of the pre-Yahwist story in Genesis 12. While many have attributed much of the akedah story in Genesis 22 to E, Van Seters ascribes it to J---and, in his eyes, it forms an essential part of J's narrative, for it is about how Abraham became the basis for his descendants' blessing.

I enjoyed many aspects of this book, especially the parallels that Van Seters notes between biblical stories and Mesopotamian and Greek traditions, as well as the theological points that Van Seters makes, i.e., that God's covenant with Israel is unconditional, according to J. But source criticism can get rather tedious!