ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION NETWORK EXODUS DR. DAVID ADAMS #36 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> I've been doing my reading, too. But I'm not sure I've understood something I've read for this lesson. What does Durham mean when he says in his commentary that this text is a composite text. >> Josh, this is a common historical critical way of commenting on a text. What Durham means -- and by the way, Durham is generally pretty conservative on most issues. Occasionally he ends up siding with the historical critics as in this case. But generally speaking, he's pretty conservative. But what Durham means here is that this text of the account of the Passover that we're reading in Chapter 12 is compiled from material taken from different sources. And this, you know, is a generally important question to understand how historical critics work. Not so important for this text in particular. But it's more important to understand why historical critical scholars think that a text like this is compiled from different sources. So the details about Exodus 12 are not so important, you know, as our understanding why they think that way. So why don't we take a moment and look at what the historical critics typically do with this particular text in Exodus 12. Because it's a good example for us of what they do with other texts. Now, if we were to look at this text from Exodus 12 Verses 21 to 32, we would see that it begins with some basic narrative material. Verses 21 to 23, basic narrative. And then when we get to Verse 24, there's a little bit of a shift. We now move into the description of a ritual, the ritual celebration of the Passover. And so we have what we might call a liturgical material from Verses 24 to 37. And then at the end again we return to basic narrative events in Verses 28 through 32. So what we have here is narrative material with liturgical material in the middle. Now, whenever you get a text where you get different types of material, different genres, shall we say, in a -- within one narrative work like we have here in this section, historical critical scholars are always going to divide that up into different sources. Because again, they are working with this presupposition that an individual writer can only produce one kind of text. So they will say, you know, if this is J, then J can be the source of a narrative material. But once we get to the liturgical material, that's got to come from some other source. And that's basically what we have happening here. So the traditional documentary hypothesis goes like this: It says Verses 21 to 23, that narrative introduction is a J section. Verses 24 to 27A, that is the first half of Verse 27, is D from the Deuteronomic source. I'll come back to why they think it's Deuteronomic in a minute. The second half of the Verse of 27, 27B, is from J again. Verse 28 is from P. And then Verses 29 to 32 are from J again. So we get a selection of J narrative material at the beginning and the end. And some D and P with a little bit of J in the middle. Now, here is the logic behind their position: The first part of the logic is pretty simple. J provides the narrative. And you can read the text. If you drop out the material from Verse 24 to the beginning of Verse 29, the text would still make sense. You could read it as a narrative that way. And that's basically what they do. They would say that J originally didn't have that material and the verse that followed 23 was actually 29 originally. And so then they see that in this liturgical material, Verses 24 to the first half of 27, since this is liturgical material, you might think shouldn't this be P or shouldn't this be from the priestly source? And often liturgical material is assigned to the priestly source for the very reason that you would think. Because liturgical material is associated with the priests. But in this case, because the Passover is so heavily emphasized in the book of Deuteronomy and because here we also have a reference to observing this ritual for your sons for future generations, this is also a theme that is common in the book of Deuteronomy. So in this case, they would say this liturgical material comes from a D type source. From a Deuteronomic source rather than a priestly source except for the last half of Verse 27. The last half of Verse 27 says, "And the people bowed their heads and worshiped." Now, that's narrative again. You see, that's no longer ritual. That's a description of the narrative. So that's got to go back to J, that little half verse. Because it's narrative rather than material or rather than liturgical. And finally, we get Verse 28, which reads "The people of Israel went and did thus. As Yahweh commanded Moses and Aaron, so they did." And they assigned this to P because this is exactly the kind of thing that critics generally think that P has a lot of. Namely, this idea that the people went and did according to God's commands. They carried out the ritual that was given. So often the verses that tell us that the Israelites did, in fact, do the things that Yahweh commanded them to do are associated with P because critical scholars believe that that was a -- that idea of the faithfulness of the Israelite people to God's commands is a sort of P emphasis. So that's sort of the logic behind why they do what they do with the text. And as I said, it's sort of more important to understand the logic than it is to know the details of Exodus 12 here. The key to understanding this is to realize, as we said, that for historical critical scholars, there's a common presupposition that every author or every source is always or almost always perfectly consistent in the kind of material they produce. So here in this text we've got two or perhaps three types of material. Therefore, from their perspective, we must have two or three types of sources. In this case, because of the specifics of the text, they opted for J instead of E. But we got one that provides the narrative. Another that provides the ritual. And yet a third that provides the sort of summary statement saying how things went. And that's sort of the way that the documentary hypothesis would treat this text. And that's what Durham has in mind when he says that this is compiled from different sources or is a composite text. Oh, by the way, one other thing that we might note about this text in passing just to sort of see how historical critics think about things is that tradition criticism actually takes a different view of this text. Tradition criticism sees the Passover as the merging of two autonomous -- that is two independent -- preIsraelite traditions coming together. Tradition critics would say there are two strands of tradition here: One that deals with the Passover and the other that deals with the unleavened bread. You have two different traditions: One the sacrifice of the Passover lamb, the other the making of the unleavened bread. So critical scholars who follow a more tradition critical approach often will say -- you'll see this in a lot of commentaries. Even fairly recent ones -- that what we have here are different strands of text. Because we have different traditions coming together. One of them would be the tradition that gives rise to the discussion of the sacrifice in the Passover ritual. The other the tradition that -- about the unleavened bread and its role here. One of these following von Rad would come from the Exodus conquest tradition. That would probably be the unleavened bread one. And the other one would come -- the Passover lamb would probably come from the Sinai tradition. And by the way, von Rad would go a step further and many others following him in saying the unleavened bread tradition represents a tradition that would come from a people who are settled and domestic and engaged in agriculture because they can grow grain to make bread. And the Passover lamb tradition would come from a nomadic or semi-nomadic kind of group, at least some people who are engaged in animal husbandry rather than agriculture. So they would also locate these traditions in different types of tribal structures, different lifestyles, as well. So that's another position that some people would take in saying that this is a composite text. But the important thing one way or the other for us is to be able to recognize the reasons behind their arguments. Because once we realize the reasons behind their arguments, then we're in a position to address those concerns. Rather than just saying, "I disagree," we can actually engage their concerns and see if we can respond to them and demonstrate the unity of the text in a way that would address the issues that have caused them to divide the text into supposed sources in the first place. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***