The Consuming Fire

Liane Feldman discusses her book The Consuming Fire, which presents a complete translation of the Priestly Source of the Bible, offering a distinctive account of the origins of the people of Israel and their relationship with God.  By presenting the complete translation of the Priestly Source without the other sources that are believed to also be part of the compiled Bible as we have it today, the reader is presented with a story that is oftentimes in stark contrast to the traditional reading. 

Liane is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion and Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. You can purchase a copy of The Consuming Fire here.

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SPEAKER_00 0:04

I'm your host, Alex, and welcome to the Levantine Podcast, a show about Near Eastern history, language, and culture. To learn more about the show and get in touch, you can visit our website at LeventinePod.com. In this episode of the podcast, Leanne Feldman came on the show to discuss her recently released book, The Consuming Fire, which presents a complete translation of the priestly source of the Bible and offers a distinctive account of the origins of the people of Israel and their relationship with God. There's a link in the show notes to where you can purchase the book, and I had a great time talking with her. I hope you enjoyed the show. Okay, we're live. It's great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on. Of course. So I want to start by explaining the documentary hypothesis and describing the general focus points and themes that one finds in J, E, P, and D at a high level.

SPEAKER_01 0:56

Sure. I hesitate to answer that a little because I don't consider myself an expert in J and E and D. I've sort of always said I'm interested in the documentary hypothesis insofar as I do think it's the best explanation for the evidence, the literary evidence that we have, but I've always basically focused on it with its relationship to the priestly text. I can certainly talk a little bit about the high level, but I quite honestly haven't thought about J or E as a sort of systematic text probably since my master's degree. So it's been quite a long time. So I just there are those who are far more expert in those sources than I. But on a high level, the documentary hypothesis is the hypothesis that the Pentateuch, the Torah as we have it today, is made up of basically four sources that have been woven together by one or more compilers at some point in history. Most people think it was probably around the Persian period, the 5th to 4th century BCE. So the idea is that these four sources are basically complete. Some of them are a little bit more complete than others. Notoriously, the e-source lacks most of its beginning and sort of jumps in right with Abraham, and we don't get any of the creation or any of that. But each of these four sources can be reconstructed on the basis of sort of so what we look for are it's a little bit different than what Julius Fellhausen was doing in the 19th century when he was looking for sort of differences in language, you know, Yahweh versus Elohim, being the very famous example, right? Whenever it says Yahweh, it's one source, whenever it says Elohim, it's another source. That works to a point, but it actually misses some really important nuances. So in the late 20th century, there was sort of a revival of the documentary hypothesis called the neo-documentary hypothesis, largely spearheaded by Bark Schwartz and his students. And what the focus there turned from sort of linguistic lexical criteria to more narrative, plot-driven inconsistencies. So somebody dies twice. You know, Moses goes up the mountain twice in a row and doesn't come down. The flood lasts 40 days, or does the flood last 150 days? Is man created on the that was a bad example because now we have to remember what day he was created on, fifth or sixth day, or was he or no, was he created right from the beginning? All of these things that sort of contradict each other. And so when I was learning the documentary hypothesis, one of the fun things was you sort of line up these inconsistencies and you end up with kind of a list of, well, here's one side of the story, here's another side of the story. And you can actually see the seams between these sources. And what was so compelling about this to me is that when you do sort of take the pieces that contradict each other and put them in sort of different columns, so to speak, you get a pretty continuous story without rearranging, adding, or deleting any words. And that's what's really compelling to me about this hypothesis, because you really see if I had to rearrange things, if I had to add things, if I had to subtract things, then I'd kind of be like, okay, we could do this with any text. But the fact that these sources are by and large really preserved in their entirety and just kind of woven together largely on the basis of chronology when something has to happen in a story. You know, you're not going to have a source introduce Moses before the other source introduces Abraham. Chronologically, that doesn't work. So that tends to be the driving principle for how things are put together. Yeah, so this was relatively compelling to me. I think I have minor quibbles with parts of the neo-documentary hypothesis, but by and large, I think it's one of the more compelling arguments for how the Pentateuch was put together. So, on a high level, sort of the four sources, I'll start with Deuteronomy because that's really the most different from all of the others. Deuteronomy does not start at creation, it does not tell the entire story. Some scholars even said Deuteronomy is not a narrative, and it may well not be. Deuteronomy is a speech. It's Moses' final speech at the edge of the Promised Land, from him to the Israelites, recounting what he was told on Sinai at the beginning, sort of a high-level recounting of Israelite history, sort of what happened to that point, where we get some retellings of some of the stories that we know from J and E specifically, not really P, but mostly those retellings are sort of a preface to the chapters 12 through 26, which are really a body of law, the law that Yahweh supposedly gave the Israelites on Sinai. So that's really the bulk of what this text, what the D source is. And I should say D is not just the book of Deuteronomy. There are parts of the book of Deuteronomy, as you'll see in my edition, that can be attributed to J, E, and P also. But the vast majority of Deuteronomy would be considered D. And so that's sort of what that story is about. J and E are much closer in terms of what the story that they tell. And I can almost see some of my teachers who focus more on J and E rolling their eyes at me right now, right? Because I'm just like, oh gosh. So I think the major difference, right, is E starts in Genesis 15. We're missing some of what would have been at the beginning of that story. But it's very focused in the beginning on it's the other source that has like law codes in it. So the covenant code in Exodus, this is E, this is a part of the E story, the story of Jethro and Moses and setting up the sort of court system in Exodus 18. This is also E. So there is sort of a thread throughout E of sort of legal discourse on the social level. Most of that law does not have anything to do or has very little to do with religious practice and has more to do with social organization. So we sort of have that thread throughout E, but it basically goes from Abraham to the edge of the promised land. It ends with the death of Moses. All four sources end with the death of Moses in Deuteronomy 34. So it basically follows that same trajectory, just starts with Abraham rather than creation and sort of Noah and all of that. It is, yeah, missing like the plagues, like the plague story, stuff like that. That's not really in E. So it does have a little bit of a different flavor. It's a little bit more sparse than Jay. Jay starts from creation, the famous Adam and Eve story. It has its own story of the flood, of the 40 days and 40 nights. The hallmark of Jay, to my mind, is that it doesn't have any law codes in it. It doesn't have any sense of Yahweh giving law of Moses as lawgiver. Moses is sort of more of a prophet and leader in Jay than really a lawgiver on Sinai in that regard. And I should say I'll just point to Jeff Stackert's book on a prophet like Moses, where he talks about how Moses is different in all four sources. He does a much better job of that than I will do right now. But yeah, so Jay, you know, has often when we think about the famous Pentateuchal stories, a lot of them are Jay. So the flood, like the plagues is also has a Jay version of this text. The Theophany with the fire and thunder and the light, like these are sort of parts of the Jay stories. So they are a little more familiar. Now I'm gonna step onto the ground that I'm far more comfortable on and say he is the one that is, I think, the most interesting because it is the most unlike literature that according to sort of modern categories of literature. But I actually think it is the most complex and comprehensively literary of all of the sources, in that it just makes use of so many different devices and is so multi-layered in how it creates its story. So P basically starts with creation, that famous six days of creation, seventh day of rest. This is the P story, and very quickly goes into the flood story, which you know, one of my favorite features of this text is that you know, you get this characterization of God at the beginning as this, you know, sort of from a far creator figure who just trying to sort of put the pieces in place and let them exist. And very quickly, I think this is the part of P that I find rather relatable and human, is that very quickly this goes awry and this doesn't work. And this God has to adapt. And this God chooses to adapt, and this God chooses to change the way the world functions in order to create the reality that he wants in it. So, right from the beginning, we see not necessarily a constant divine presence, but sort of a changing one, one who adapts and changes and adjusts to whatever the situation at hand requires. And I think that's one of the things that's really unique about P.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

I thought that was actually really interesting in in the book when um you mentioned in in the like the flood story, for example, that in the P source, it's not just that men are evil and God has to wipe humankind off the face of the planet. It's all creation is kind of like, oh, this was a mistake, it didn't go the way I was I was planning. I thought that was interesting because it's it doesn't work that way with the other sources.

SPEAKER_01 10:57

Yeah, the other sources it really are J in this case, because we only have the flood and J elsewhere. Yeah, in J it really is like the humans have caused the problem, so therefore we're going to get rid of the humans. Everything else is kind of a secondary casualty of getting rid of humans. But in P, the text literally says humans killing humans, animals killing humans, humans killing animals. It can go in all directions. And the problem is there wasn't supposed to be bloodshed. The ideal, per I think it's Genesis 127, 128. I'm gonna get that wrong, but somewhere in there, the ideal is that humans and animals are supposed to be vegetarians. They're supposed to be eating the grasses and the vegetation and not shedding blood. And very quickly, all of the sort of order that was set up, it's not just one group transgression, it's everybody transgressing. And so it sort of sets up the complete annihilation of the entire world as well. Everybody was involved in this problem. So everybody, there is no collateral damage, everybody is equally sort of indicted in the issue.

SPEAKER_00 12:04

Right. So, you know, as you mentioned, that the focus of your book is the peace source, the priestly source, and the emphasis that the peace source has, as you lay out, is on communal practice of religion and then the sacrificial cult around a central location. Um, and one question that I had, and or I guess one point I found interesting was that when I think of a priestly source, I would think that, okay, well, this source's function is probably trying to establish the authority of a priestly class. But as you point out, the source seems to be fostering kind of a democratization of Israelite religion versus trying to consolidate authority. And I I found that really interesting.

SPEAKER_01 12:41

Yeah, this is actually a conversation that I had with my editor when we were figuring out what the title for this book would be, because I have always kind of disliked the fact that it was called the Priestly Source. I feel like that's a misnomer that it's really uh just immediately gives the wrong impression about what this source is about. But it's one of those things that, in deference to the history of scholarship and people actually understanding what it is that I'm talking about, I'm sticking with it because that's just the common terminology for the source at this point. But you're absolutely right, you know, from from the time of the rabbis, Torah Gohanim, right? Like this is the law of the priests. That's what they called Leviticus. I'm not that the rabbis knew P, but that's what they called Leviticus. And it was this sense, like right up through early 20th century scholarship, that what we have in all of these sacrificial instructions is like an instruction manual, a handbook for the priests for how they're supposed to do this work. And this kind of played into the idea that it's not literary, it's a handbook, it's, you know, instructions. Menachem Haran actually argued at one point that Leviticus 1 through 7, at least, maybe some of the later chapters as well, were each individual scrolls that were kept in, I don't know, a you know, a jar at the temple. And when somebody had to do a whole burnt offering, they would pull out the scroll that was Leviticus I and read how to do it and then follow along. That's been pretty thoroughly, you know, argued against at this point. But like the idea that that's what this is for is pretty deeply ingrained because from our modern perspective, we say, why would they write in such detail? Why would they, why would there be such explicit and lengthy instructions on how to perform sacrifice if this isn't for the priests? And this is one of the things that I think was driving me wanting to get this book out, because so often when we read the priestly source, and not so many people are doing that, but we read it, you know, when I was learning this in my master's degree, in my doctoral program, and when I teach it to my students, still, you often have to teach bits and pieces. You don't get to teach the whole thing. And so students aren't seeing the story from beginning to end. People who are reading aren't getting the full perspective of it. And more often than not, the thing that gets skipped over is Leviticus, right? We can skim over it, we can just sort of jump by it because it's boring, it's dry. And a lot of what I tried to do in my first book was to say, actually, this is kind of the heart of the story. This is kind of what makes the whole story hold together and give some real meaning to it. Because what has often been said of P is that it is a, I think Fellhausen famously called it the scarlet thread upon which the pearls of J and E are hung, was his quote there. But really an impoverished story. I think Martin Note called it an impoverished narrative. It's seen as sort of the less good story because it doesn't have quite as much detail. It's much heavier in genealogies. It's much a lot of those famous stories, you know, the birth of Isaac and Esau, the Joseph and his brothers, all these stories that we're so familiar with, the Akeda, Sacrifice of Isaac, these aren't in pee. These aren't priestly stories. And so people look at it and compare to J and E and say, this is a really impoverished narrative. And part of what I wanted to say is it's not an impoverished narrative, it's a narrative with a different purpose. It's just a fundamentally different story. It may have some overlap in some of the points, but it's not using them for the same reason. It's not trying to have the same rhetorical effect as some of these others. It has its own aim. And some of that, as you said, I do think is really trying to make this really inaccessible world of the cult more accessible and more understandable. It's, I in other places have called it sort of a foundation myth for the cult. Why does this exist? Why do we need to do it? And what's going on anyway? Sort of an apology for the cult in the sort of classic sense.

SPEAKER_00 16:52

So what are what are some ways that that you see it doing that where it it really is meant to make Israel like cult and and practices more accessible to the the general population?

SPEAKER_01 17:02

Yeah. So I think, you know, the inclusion of these detailed ritual instructions is one of those, right? Along with the really lengthy instructions on what the tabernacle is supposed to look like, all of its furniture, all of its layout, its dimensions. Because for the most part, as these instructions themselves say, normal Israelites wouldn't have gotten any further than the courtyard of, I keep saying temple, you know, of the tabernacle, of the dwelling place, of the meeting tent. I do think a temple is being imagined in the background, even if it's being retrojected onto a wilderness context. So I probably will just slip into temple language unintentionally here. But normal Israelites wouldn't have ever really gotten past that courtyard. Certainly anybody who wasn't a priest wouldn't have seen the inner sanctuary, certainly not the Holy of Holies. They wouldn't have known what was going on down there, they wouldn't have necessarily had a sense of why things were happening the way they were happening, what different types of sacrifices were, why priests are doing things the way that they're doing them, what happens to the meat after you hand it over to the priest. All of that might not have been incredibly apparent to a normal Israelite who just brings an animal to offer a sacrifice. And what these texts do is really create, and in there's reasons for that, right? There's very stringent purity laws around who can enter a sanctuary and when and how. Some of the mystery of what goes on sort of literally behind the curtain, because there was a curtain that separated these spaces, becomes sort of laid out for people to see, for people to probably not read about because we can talk about levels of literacy, but at least to you know hear about in the telling of the story if somebody's reading it aloud.

SPEAKER_00 19:22

Got it. So, you know, you lay out a number of examples of how the priestly source contains a number of contradictions to the other sources. And I want us to touch on a few of those. So specifically the character and life of Moses, and then the P sources general attitude to the people of Israel and their relationship with God compared to the other sources.

SPEAKER_01 19:43

Yeah. Oh, I love Moses and P because Moses is such an important figure in J and E, and certainly in D. And Moses is a really important figure in P too, but it's very different. He is certainly a singular figure in that nobody ever sort of exists in the same kind of space he does. He's a prophet, he gets a lot of the instructions, but he's also not a prophet who can function on his own. And right from the very beginning, right from Exodus 6, when Yahweh says to him, I want you to be the ones who lead the Israelites out of Egypt. Moses says, But I can't. You know, I have this speech impediment. I can't be sort of your mouthpiece. And, you know, Yahweh works with him. This is another moment of Yahweh's plans, not quite. Yahweh has this plan that Moses is going to be this. Moses kind of refuses. Yahweh adapts and creates a new plan. And so instead we get this moment when Yahweh says, okay, you are still going to be my mouthpiece, and I'll just tell you, and then you tell your brother Aaron, and then Aaron will be sort of the megaphone. And we have to imagine that that's actually happening every time it says Moses spoke to the Israelites. It kind of gets alighted in the background, but that's set up as the sort of the status quo, how Moses' mediation between Yahweh and the Israelites happens is also through Aaron. And so we forget that because the narrator often says, and Moses said to the Israelites, but really Moses said to Aaron, who said to the Israelites. And so we have Moses as this figure who is the one who is most immediately in conversation with Yahweh, but who is also always amplified through Aaron. And that's kind of a microcosm of what the priestly text is setting up, because the moment that Moses, and Moses is the one who does the ordination procedures, Moses is the one who you know actually ordains Aaron and his sons when it becomes time. But the moment that Aaron and his sons are ordained, Moses kind of fades into the background. And the one who's in charge of interpreting laws is not Moses, it's Aaron. As Aaron and his sons, and we're told in Leviticus 10 that you know the job of Aaron and his sons is to teach the laws, to interpret, to decide between pure and impure, holy and ordinary. And so while Moses has this really central role, it's a far more mediated role. And it's one that's he's sharing a stage with Aaron the entire time until Aaron finally sort of takes the platform from him. Or perhaps it's better, it's he's given the platform.

SPEAKER_00 22:28

And the second part was how the peace source has a very different attitude towards the people of Israel versus some of the other sources. And it's much less antagonistic, I would say.

SPEAKER_01 22:39

Yeah, I love this one because you know we're used to the narrative. If you know the Pentateuch as a whole, that the Israelites are a stiff-necked people, that they're stubborn, that they're prone to rebellion. Come on, we know about that golden calf. We know about all of these murmurings in the wilderness against them. And so we expect the Israelites to be sort of disobedient and somewhat antagonistic. And we expect Yahweh to respond kind of in kind, which he does throughout the Pentateuch. But in P, there's a fundamental optimism on the part of Yahweh for despite the what was learned with the flood, there's a fundamental optimism that so long as he's able to live among them and keep an eye on what's going on, they're going to follow the rules. They're going to do what he says, and they they fundamentally want to be good. And I think we see this in you know narrative text, but we also see this, more interestingly for me, in some of the ritual and legal texts, when you can go through and there's all sorts of scenarios for what happens if you do something unintentionally, how do you repair that? What happens if you, you know, all these things that are bishkaga and unintentional. There's no discussion of what, or very little. There's a couple of moments, but there's very little discussion of what if somebody intentionally sins? What if somebody, you know, wants to break this? What if somebody doesn't want to do this? Like these aren't things that are really taken into account for most of P. There's just a baseline assumption that they're gonna do what they're told. They're going to do because they know that that's sort of in their best interests. And that's an interesting contrast for me is the sort of optimism about the fidelity of the Israelites and the enthusiasm of the Israelites. We see it in narrative moments when they're building the tabernacle and the Israelites just keep bringing gifts, keep bringing gold and silver and fabrics and woods and metals to build this more than's even needed. And they just sort of go over the top because it's, you know, they're not mad about being taxed, they're not mad about having, you know, they're not grumbling about having to give offerings. Instead, they're just overly exuberantly like contributing these things far more, so much so that Moses has to tell them to stop because they can't they don't know what to do with all of this stuff. So they're just very enthusiastic and very sort of obedient in a lot of ways. Not to say that there aren't moments when there are little rebellions here and there, but by and large, there's much more of an optimism about sort of the Israelites' behavior in pea than in the other sources.

SPEAKER_00 25:20

I'd also love if you can detail, like you do in the book, how the peace source seems to be much less concerned with family dramas that you find, you know, throughout the Torah, you know, in the story of the patriarchs or even in Exodus, you know, like there's no Miriam in in the Peace Source, but it's really like laser focused on getting the Israelites to Egypt as quickly as possible, if you can touch on why that is.

SPEAKER_01 25:42

So I think some of this is actually related to the fundamental optimism, right? That there's general harmony among most of the families, most of the people. And so what we have in P is, you know, this famous story of Cain and Abel. That's not P. The story of Jacob and Esau, the story of Joseph and his brothers, all of this where we see sort of sibling rivalry, family strife. There's none of that in P. We actually have a Jacob and Esau in P and they get along just fine. We don't have a Cain and Abel, so that's that's not there. But you know, we have Joseph and his brothers, and we don't have that kind of antagonism. Joseph just goes down to Egypt, and when his brothers need help, you know, he's help. There's not that trickery.

SPEAKER_00 26:29

There's like Sarah and and Hagar, right? There's no there's no conflict there.

SPEAKER_01 26:34

There's no like argument or casting out that we don't have that same kind of animosity happening. And so, yeah, I mean, some of this is in part related to the general idea that that human beings are, you know, obedient, well-behaved. I think this reinforces some of that. But I do also think that I said this in the introduction of the book, the focus of P is not really on creation and the patriarchal period at all. It's incredibly short. I think it's like less than 10 pages in my book when it comes down to it when I translate those sections. P really zips through about 2,000 years of history, maybe 3,000. There's a chart in the back. I don't quite remember the numbers. Two or three thousand years of history in a very short period of time, because what this story wants to tell is the story of Yahweh living among his people. Like that's the story, and that can't happen until there's a people to live among. So what we have in Genesis, what we have in sort of all of the patriarchal stories, is a very small family, even in J and E. At most, there's 70 people who go down to Egypt. Um, at the beginning of Exodus one, we're told there's Jacob and his family, 70 people, maybe 72 if you count Joseph. And the numbers don't quite add up correctly. And then early while they're in Egypt, then they grow and multiply, and then Pharaoh becomes afraid of them, and that's the catalyst for what follows. But what we have, what Yahweh needs in order to live among the people, is one land and two people to sustain this sanctuary that he wants to build in the wilderness. And 70 people is not going to sustain that. So we need to get to the point where they go from 70 to 600,000. And that point when they go in, and we're told when they're counting, you know, that the censuses as they're leaving is around 600,000. And so what P wants is to get to that point as quickly as possible because that's where the stories focus. You know, we need the through line from creation. A lot of what's established in creation and in the creation and flood stories tells us a lot for about how this deity works, how the worldview is set up. These things are all very important for how the story unfolds. But the patriarchal period really in P is kind of a narrative bridge just to get us to Egypt. What's the minimum we can do to get us to Egypt? You know, the moments that get the most attention are the circumcision passage in Genesis 17 and the burial of Sarah in Genesis 23, both of which have significant impacts on parts of the story later. So these moments are really just to set up where P wants to get and the story P wants to tell. And this is where it differs a lot from J and E, because J and E really focuses a lot of time on the patriarchal period and a little bit less time on Egypt. And P is exactly the opposite.

SPEAKER_00 29:35

One of the major differences, and just to go back into the you know, the differences that are in P versus the other sources, that really caught my eye that you call out was that there aren't any Ten Commandments. Yeah. But Moses comes down from Mount Sinai with something called the Edut, which it seems like no one really understands what that was. Could you talk about that a bit?

SPEAKER_01 29:53

Yeah, so I'm not going to tell you what the edut is because I don't know. And, you know, I can talk about that it comes from the root that usually means something like witness or testimony. It's a, you know, an abstract noun, so it probably means something of witness or testimony. But what's on that, what that actually means, whether it's a you know a physical tablet, whether it's the blueprints of the tabernacle, whether it's something else entirely, I have no idea. And you know, scholars really don't know what it is. It's often been connected with the tablets because when the sources are woven together, you get the tablets and the edute in the same moment. And so, you know, we even have moments where the person or people compiling together say, you know, the tablets of the edut, you know, and sort of bring them together in that way to try to make them more tightly connected. But the truth is it has something to do with memorializing what happened on Sinai. And what happened on Sinai and P is the giving of the instructions for building the tabernacle. That's all that happens on Sinai and P is those instructions for how to build the sanctuary space. All of the ritual instructions, those happen after the sanctuary space is built, and it's from Yahweh once he lives in that sanctuary space. It's not what Moses is getting on Sinai. So in the translation, I chose not to translate it. And there's a few different moments where I chose not to translate things, and I chose to transliterate them instead, in part because I didn't want to assert what it was when we don't actually know. You know, I did want to preserve, you know, and I footnoted this in the when the first time it showed up, but I didn't want to preserve sort of what it could be without giving a definite identification, because it's just one of those things that we've kind of lost what it might be. There is a practice in P that happens over and over and over again throughout the story that at key points in the story there is some object that becomes a kind of memorial. So we get this with a jar of the mana from that is kept in the sanctuary as sort of a reminder. We get this with Aaron's staff that flowers that's supposed to be kept in the sanctuary as a reminder. So there's these moments where things are kept to memorialize in pee. And so this is the Edut is something like that, but what exactly it is, I wish I knew, but I have no idea.

SPEAKER_00 32:21

It's so puzzling, right? Because obviously the Ten Commandments are such a focal point of the tradition and the story and and its lawgiving. So you would think for for a priestly source that just like they have their own versions of like the patriarchal stories and these other stories, that they would have had their own version of something as central as this, right? It's just so puzzling.

SPEAKER_01 32:43

You know, I don't actually find it that puzzling because we think of the Ten Commandments as central, right? We think of them and culturally they have become very central. But even in the story of E in Exodus, those Ten Commandments aren't actually the substance of what Yahweh is giving to Moses. They're kind of a demonstration. Because in that story in Exodus, I believe it's 20, Exodus 20. Don't quote me on that, but pretty sure. But in that story in Exodus 20, basically what happens is Yahweh starts talking to the, you know, starts speaking to Moses in the hearing of the people. Like the people are overhearing. And that's what the Ten Commandments are. And the people kind of freak out and they say, whoa, whoa, whoa, we don't want to hear this. We don't want to hear. This is too much for us. Moses, you go and talk to him and just tell us what he says. And then that's the moment at which the people sort of cut themselves off from direct divine revelation. But what the Ten Commandments do is sort of show in that moment that what Yahweh speaks to Moses is law. Like the genre that Yahweh's speaking in is law. And so what Moses comes back and shares with the people is law, but that's the law that they're, you know, like that's the bulk of what the law is. The Ten Commandments, not that those aren't things that are followed, but it's there, they don't have any special importance over and above the rest of the law in the story. They just become that first thing that's sort of short and pithy and can show the genre in a way that the Israelites are like, I get it, I get the point. Okay, Moses, you go handle this because we don't want to. So that's a very different characterization of the Israelites. And one that fits in the E story is that they're sort of standoffish, they're sort of scared, they're sort of a little bit more skittish, a little bit more doubtful, and they need Moses as a stronger intermediary. That's not what it is in P. That's not how the Israelites are in P, that's not how Yahweh is, and that's not Moses' role in P. So it's actually not odd to me that there wouldn't be something like the Ten Commandments in P, because that's not the type of law giving that P is talking about. And for the record, in Leviticus 19, there's something amongst a whole bunch of other laws about sort of social interactions. There are a series of laws that look similar to, but not exactly the same as the Ten Commandments. So there's a lot of those laws are part of P's laws, just not in the same performative kind of way at this crucial moment in the story.

SPEAKER_00 35:22

That's interesting. So the last point I want us to touch on, and I think it's fit in because I want to come back to, I guess I would call like the P narrative pattern of it seems like you know, the way you describe it as a beginning, middle, and an end, and why, because of that, you think that there are parts of the book of Joshua that have to contain priestly elements. So can you talk about that story structure of P and then why you believe that parts of the book of Joshua come from P?

SPEAKER_01 35:46

Yeah. So this is probably one of the more controversial parts of the book. Not probably it certainly is. And it's also why I put the Joshua material in an appendix, because I'm probably one of the few people out there who's, you know, going to make this argument. So I decided to put the Joshua stuff out there as in a way to start a conversation, to say, look, this is how I understand what the P narrative is. If I'm right, then we have to seriously consider the possibility that some of this stuff might have, in some form, been part of P or adapted from it. Basically, what I see in P in terms of its narrative structure is a very strong command and fulfillment pattern. When Yahweh commands something, the people fulfill it, like to a letter. This is in, you know, at one point when I was a graduate student, I literally made like an Excel spreadsheet of every command and then every fulfillment and somewhere that still exists on my computer. I don't know where it is, but it's it's in one of those deep files somewhere. Every single command has a fulfillment, the with very, very few exceptions. And those exceptions start to come near the end of the Pentateuchal Peace story. So, for example, in Numbers 32, the story of the Reubenites and the Gadites wanting in this story, the Reubenites and the Gadites, two of the 12 tribes, want to have their inherited portion of land in the Transjordan, so like in what's now Jordan, and not with the rest of the tribes on the other side of the river. And this goes against Yahweh's plans. Yahweh wants all 12 tribes together, so he's not super happy about this. But again, in a story where it's a God who adapts to what's going on, he says, okay, you can have this if and when, and only if and when, you cross the Jordan, help all of your fellow Israelites conquer the land, make sure they're settled in it, and then you can go back and then you can inherit this land. And then there's a series after that, like there's a speech after that that Yahweh commands Moses, and Moses passes on and says, Okay, Joshua, Elizar, like, and sort of tells the next generation, right? Because Aaron will be dead, Moses isn't going to cross the Jordan. I think Aaron's already dead at that point, and Moses won't be crossing. So he says, Joshua, Elizabeth, and the leaders, once they do this, then you can apportion the land to them. Yahweh's commanded it. We don't have that fulfillment because there's no conquest of the land in P. And there's also, you know, so to speak, there's a plenty of moments in P where it says, you will conquer the land, you will inherit this land, you will come back. That doesn't happen in P. These are the main things that don't happen. And there are points in Joshua where there are contradictions. So we have the story of the Reubenites and Gadites getting the land apportioned to them twice in Joshua. Once they've already inherited it and they're just returning to it. And once Joshua, Elizar, and the leaders are giving it to them, just like it says in the priestly strand of Numbers 32. We also have contradictions in Joshua where it says the entire land is subdued, or most of it's subdued except for these few little pockets where we didn't quite finish conquering. And P is very clear in the Pentateuchal parts that all of the land must be subdued. And, you know, there's very significant contradictions in terms of how like battles are played out, like how what's the word that I'm looking at? Spoils of war are taken, how the Israelite army marches into battle. This is very different. This is nitty-gritty now, but this is very different between priestly and non-priestly sources. And in Joshua, we see both. And so what I wanted to be careful about is not saying I don't want to go back to like a Velhausen model where his decomposition just goes straight through Joshua and says this is this is straight P or Carpenter and Harford Sbattersby, who do the same thing. I think it's more complicated than that. I think at some point there probably was a priestly story that also included the conquest of the land. It's hard for me to imagine that there wasn't, especially given how important this is for the whole story and how the premise of the sanctuary is that it should be settled on, you know, in the land. But I don't think we can reconstruct that. Like I don't want people to read this appendix as this is the full original thing, because I think the mode of editing, of putting together, of composing the book of Joshua is very, very different than how the Pentateuch was put together. And there's a lot stronger of an editorial hand. There's stuff that's been overwritten, there's stuff that's been adapted. And I don't think you can pull out a very clean, neat P the same way you can in Genesis through Deuteronomy.

SPEAKER_00 40:47

But in your analysis, you do see P in the book of Joshua, where any of those sections where there seems to be a fulfillment of something that was in the P source.

SPEAKER_01 40:55

What I wanted to include in the appendix is I think these parts of the story in Joshua were probably like coming from or developed within conversation with this priestly story, because what we know of ancient composition is that they reuse, you know, you take what already exists and you reuse it and you weave it together in different ways. So I think there's some kernel of these that's, and I don't want to say kernel in a way that we can actually recover the exact words, but I think, you know, the story in Joshua 6 of the conquest of Jericho, the story in Joshua, what is it, 21 of the Elizar and Joshua giving the Reubenites and the Gadites their land after they had fulfilled their promise, uh, that these things probably were in an original P in some form. The only form we have them right now is this form that's been edited into Joshua, but these parts of the story really do accord with in terms of for various different reasons. And I try in that appendix to sort of in the footnotes, it's the limitations of this particular type of thing is I couldn't give the full arguments that I wanted to, but I try in the footnotes at each point to explain a little bit what parts of P I see this connecting to, what parts of the story it's fulfilling, to say this looks like it probably was part of a peace story or could have been part of a peace story. It's fulfilling things that remain unfulfilled in Genesis through Deuteronomy that also really have a very specific worldview and a specific ideology that matches P. So yeah, that's sort of what I was trying to do with the without saying the appendix is exactly what it looked like when it was your disclaimer is loud and clear.

SPEAKER_00 42:46

But it made sense to me. Like I I thought that was really interesting part of the book and you know, and I appreciate it. You you go to great lengths in the book as well to you know explain your you know how you came to this conclusion and and you know and and how it's not also a generally accepted thing, or there's a lot of a lot of discourse about it. So you know that's really clear. Well, look, there's there's so much more that that we can cover from your book, but we just don't have enough time. I really enjoyed the book. I liked how you know there's that first portion where you really do like your analysis and then afterwards you provide the full translation of of the different sections, which I thought was a really clean way to do it. But I really enjoyed it. And for people interested in purchasing a copy of the book, there's gonna be a link in the show notes, and I highly recommend it. You know, thanks so much for coming on and and I look forward to following your work.

SPEAKER_01 43:30

Thanks for having me.