Page:A critical and exegetical commentary on Genesis (1910).djvu/87

 tion of the name Issachar, with its story of the love-apples (30$14-16$), is more primitive than that of E (30$17$); J (30$28-43$) attributes the increase of Jacob's flocks to his own cunning, whereas E (31$4-13$) attributes it to the divine blessing. On the other hand, E's recension of the Bethel-theophany (28$11f. 17ff.$) is obviously more antique than J's ($13-16$); and in the Joseph narratives the leadership of Reuben (E) is an element of the original tradition which J has altered in favour of Judah. A peculiarly instructive case is 12$10ff.$ (J) || 20 (E) || 26$7ff.$ (J), where it seems to us (though Kuenen and others take a different view) that Gunkel is clearly right in holding that J has preserved both the oldest and the youngest form of the legend, and that E represents an intermediate stage.

This result is not surprising when we understand that J and E are not individual writers, but guilds or schools, whose literary activity may have extended over several generations, and who drew on a store of unwritten tradition which had been in process of codification for generations before that. This consideration forbids us also to argue too confidently from observed differences of theological standpoint between the two documents. It is beyond doubt that E, with its comparative freedom from anthropomorphisms and sensible theophanies, with its more spiritual conception of revelation, and its greater sensitiveness to ethical blemishes on the character of the patriarchs (p. xlviii), occupies, on the whole, a higher level of reflexion than J; but we cannot tell how far such differences are due to the general social milieu in which the writers lived, and how far to esoteric tendencies of the circles to which they belonged. All that can safely be affirmed is that, while E has occasionally preserved the more ancient form of the tradition, there is a strong presumption that J as a whole is the earlier document.

In attempting to determine the absolute dates of J and E, we have a fixed point of departure in the fact that both are earlier than the age of written prophecy (p. li f.); in other words, 750 is the terminus ad quem for the composition of either. If it be the case that 37$8$ in E presupposes the monarchy of the house of Joseph, the terminus a quo for that document would be the disruption of the kingdom, c. 930