Page:A critical and exegetical commentary on Genesis (1910).djvu/77

 however, legends of all the first three classes!), Yahwe being to the compiler simply one of the gods; and must therefore have originated before the Exile: a lower limit is 700 This collection was soon enlarged by the addition of legends not less ancient than its own; and by the insertion of the Israel-recension, which is as polytheistic in character as the Tôlĕdôth-collection! The monotheistic manipulation of the work set in after Deuteronomy; but how many editions it went through we cannot tell for certain. The last thorough-going reviser was the author of ch. 17; but additions were made even later than that, etc. etc. A more bewildering hypothesis it has never been our lot to examine; and we cannot pretend to believe that it contains the rudiments of a successful analysis. There is much to be learned from Ee.'s work, which is full of acute observations and sound reasoning in detail; but as a theory of the composition of Genesis it seems to us utterly at fault. What with Wi. and Jer., and Che., and now Ee., OT scholars have a good many new eras dawning on them just now. Whether any of them will shine unto the perfect day, time will show. § 8. The collective authorship of J and E.

In J and E we have, according to what has been said above, the two oldest written recensions of a tradition which had at one time existed in the oral form. When we compare the two documents, the first thing that strikes us is their close correspondence in outline and contents. The only important difference is that E's narrative does not seem to have embraced the primitive period, but to have commenced with Abraham. But from the point where E strikes into the current of the history (at ch. 20, with a few earlier traces in ch. 15), there are few incidents in the one document to which the other does not contain a parallel. What is