Page:A critical and exegetical commentary on Genesis (1910).djvu/78

 much more remarkable, and indeed surprising, is that the manner of narration changes in the two documents pari passu. Thus the transition from the loose connexion of the Abraham legends to the more consecutive biography of Jacob, and then to the artistic unity of the Joseph-stories (see p. xxviii f.), is equally noticeable in J and in E. It is this extraordinarily close parallelism, both in matter and form, which proves that both documents drew from a common body of tradition, and even suggests that that tradition had already been partly reduced to writing.

Here we come back, from the side of analysis, to a question which was left unsettled in § 5; the question, namely, of the process by which the oral tradition was consolidated and reduced to writing. It has been shown with great probability that both J and E are composite documents, in which minor legendary cycles have been incorporated, and different strata of tradition are embedded. This presupposes a development of the tradition within the circle represented by each document, and leads eventually to the theory advocated by most recent critics, that the symbols J and E must be taken to express, not two individual writers but two schools, i.e., two series of narrators, animated by common conceptions, following a common literary method, and transmitting a common form of the tradition from one generation to another.

The phenomena which suggest this hypothesis are fully described in the body of the commentary, and need only be recapitulated here. In J, composite structure has been most clearly made out in the Primæval History (chs. 1-11), where at least two, and probably more, strands of narrative can be distinguished (pp. 1-4). Gu. seems to have shown that in 12-25 two cycles of Abraham-legends have been interwoven (p. 240); also that in 25 ff. the Jacob-Esau and the Jacob-Laban legends were originally independent of each other: this last, however, applies to J and E alike, so that the fusion had probably taken place in the common tradition which lies behind both. Further, chs. 34 and 38