Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Jonathan D. Safren" <yonsaf AT beitberl.beitberl.ac.il>]

Noel O'Riordan wrote:

>
>
> Does it not strike you as strange that in many cases when the author uses
> Elohim he writes with one style and point of view/agenda and that when he
> uses Yahweh he uses another, this is leaving aside any theological imprint.
> And this of course is the most obvious and simple argument for sources.

May I point out that the stylistic differences between the assumed J and E 
sources are
much less pronounced than those between P and, or P, D and these sources 
together.
The stylistic differences between J and E are so few, in fact, that Driver, 
in his
1912 _Introduction to the Literature of the OT_ was hard put to find any, as 
compared
with the many stylistic and linguistic characteristics of P and D which he 
listed; so
few that, ever since Rolf Rendtorff's 1978 book on the Pentateuch it has 
become
customary to speak of the "older sources" or "older strands" or just simply 
JE.
As I have already pointed out, Rofe and Sturdy have argued against any JE 
source
division in the Balaam Narrative, and Redford, in a similar vein, argues in 
his 1970
_A Study of the Joseph Narrative_ that the Joseph story is one unified 
novellat to
which there have been added a number of interpolations (it seems to me that I 
remember
von Rad already on the way to ditching the Documentary Hypothesis regarding 
the Joseph
Narrative, but I can't be sure)
--
Jonathan D. Safren
Dept. of Biblical Studies
Beit Berl College
44905 Beit Berl Post Office
Israel