Page:A critical and exegetical commentary on Genesis (1910).djvu/91

 § 11. The Priestly Code and the Final Redaction.

It is fortunately not necessary to discuss in this place all the intricate questions connected with the history and structure of the Priests' Code. The Code as a whole is, even more obviously than J or E, the production of a school,—in this case a school of juristic writers, whose main task was to systematise the mass of ritual regulations which had accumulated in the hands of the Jerusalem priesthood, and to develop a theory of religion which grew out of them. Evidence of stratification appears chiefly in the legislative portions of the middle Pent., where several minor codes are amalgamated, and overlaid with considerable accretions of later material. Here, however, we have to do only with the great historical work which forms at once the kernel of the Code and the framework of the Pent., the document distinguished by We. as Q (Quatuor foederum liber), by Kue. as P$2$, by others as P$g$. Although this groundwork shows traces of compilation from pre-existing material (see pp. 8, 35, 40, 130, 169, 428 f., etc.), it nevertheless bears the impress of a single mind, and must be treated as a unity.

No critical operation is easier or more certain than the separation of this work, down even to very small fragments, from the context in which it is embedded. When this is done, and the fragments pieced together, we have before us, almost in its original integrity, an independent document, which is a source, as well as the framework, of Genesis. We have seen (p. xli) that the opposite opinion is maintained by Klostermann and Orr, who hold that P is merely a supplementing redactor of, or 'collaborator' with, JE. But two facts combine to render this hypothesis absolutely untenable. (1) The fragments form a consecutive history, in which the lacunæ are very few and unimportant, and those which occur are easily explicable as the result of the redactional process. The precise state of the case is as follows: In the primæval history no hiatus whatever can be detected. Dr. Orr's assertion (POT, 348 f.) that P's account of the Flood must have contained the episodes of the birds and the sacrifice, because both are in the Babylonian version, will be worth considering when he has made it probable either that P had ever read the Babylonian story, or that, if he had, he would have wished to reproduce it intact. As matter of