Page:A critical and exegetical commentary on Genesis (1910).djvu/405

 name a wish; and he, being widowed and childless, asks for a son. 'Pudor est ulteriora loqui'; but at the end of ten months Orion is miraculously born. The resemblance to Gn. 18 is manifest; and since direct borrowing of the Bœotian legend from Jewish sources is improbable, there is a presumption that we have to do with variations of the same tale. The theory is rendered all the more plausible by the fact that a precisely similar origin is suggested by the leading motives of ch. 19 (see below).—Assuming that some such pagan original is the basis of the narrative before us, we find a clue to that confusion between the sing. and plu. which has been already referred to as a perplexing feature of the chapter. It is most natural to suppose that the threefold manifestation is a remnant of the original polytheism, the heathen deities being reduced to the rank of Yahwe's envoys. The introduction of Yahwe Himself as one of them would thus be a later modification, due to progressive Hebraizing of the conception, but never consistently carried through. An opposite view is taken by Fripp (ZATW, xii. 23 ff.), who restores the sing. throughout, and by Kraetzschmar, who, as we have seen, distinguishes between a sing. and a pl. recension, but regards the former as the older. The substitution of angels for Yahwe might seem a later refinement on the anthropomorphic representation of a bodily appearance of Yahwe; but the resolution of the one Yahwe into three angels would be unaccountable, especially in J, who appears never to speak of angels in the plural (see on 19$1$). See Gu. 171, and Che. EB, iv. 4667 f.

'''16-22a. The judgement of Sodom revealed.'''

The soliloquy of Yahwe in $17-19$ breaks the connexion between $16$ and $20$, and is to all appearance a later addition (see p. 298). (a) The insertion assumes that Yahwe is one of the three strangers; but this is hardly the intention of the main narrative, which continues to speak of 'the men' in the pl. ($22a$). (b) In $17$ Yahwe has resolved on the destruction of Sodom, whereas in $20f.$ He proposes to abide by the result of a personal investigation. (c) Both thought and language in $17-19$ show signs of Deuteronomic influence (see Ho. and Gu.). Di.'s assertion (265), that $20f.$ have no motive apart from $17-19$ and $23ff.$, is incomprehensible; the difficulty rather is to assign a reason for the addition of $17ff.$. The idea seems to be that Abraham (as a prophet: cf. Am. 3$7$) must be initiated into the divine purpose, that he may instruct his descendants in the ways of Yahwe.

16. and looked out in view of Sodom (cf. 19$28$)] The Dead Sea not being visible from Hebron, we must understand that a part of the journey has been accomplished. Tradition fixed the spot at a village over 3 m. E of Hebron, called by Jerome Caphar Barucha, now known as Beni Na'im, but

16. ] G +.