Page:A critical and exegetical commentary on Genesis (1910).djvu/100

 verba of his sources as far as was consistent with the production of a complete and harmonious narrative; but he appears to have made it a rule to find a place for every fragment of P that could possibly be retained. It is not improbable that this rule was uniformly observed by him, and that the slight lacunæ which occur in P after ch. 25 are due to the activity of later scribes in smoothing away redundancies and unevennesses from the narrative. That such changes might take place after the completion of the Pent. we see from 47$5ff.$, where G has preserved a text in which the dovetailing of sources is much more obvious than in MT.—If the lawbook read by Ezra before the congregation as the basis of the covenant (Neh. 8$1ff.$) was the entire Pent. (excepting late additions), the redaction must have been effected before 444, and in all probability the redactor was Ezra himself. On the other hand, if (as seems to the present writer more probable) Ezra's lawbook was only the Priestly Code, or part of it (P$g$ + P$h$), then the final redaction is brought down to a later period, the terminus ad quem being the borrowing of the Jewish Pent. by the Samaritan community. That event is usually assigned, though on somewhat precarious grounds, to Nehemiah's second term of office in Judæa (c. 432 ).

Of far greater interest and significance than the date or manner of this final redaction, is the fact that it was called for by the religious feeling of post-Exilic Judaism. Nothing else would have brought about the combination of elements so discordant as the naïve legendary narratives of JE and the systematised history of the Priestly Code. We can hardly doubt that the spirit of the Priestly theology is antipathetic to the older recension of the tradition, or that, if the tendencies represented by the Code had prevailed, the stories which are to us the most precious and edifying parts of the Book of Genesis would have found no place in an authoritative record of God's revelation of Himself to the fathers. But this is not the only instance