Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

George:

On Tue, Apr 9, 2013 at 6:45 PM, George Athas <George.Athas AT moore.edu.au> wrote:

But then, Karl, your argument depends on the patriarchal narratives being written by the patriarchs, who wrote about themselves in the third person. I'd love for us to be able to confirm this, but again, what is the evidence you have for this? Not even the texts themselves claim this. Do you have anything other than speculation?

In looking at the ancient literary style where the writer and title were at the end of the document rather than at the beginning, then lining that up with Genesis, then the story of Abraham was told through his son Ishmael, most of the story of Noah through his three sons, the story of Joseph has no attributed authorship. Further, I have been very careful all along to say that we don’t know how much Moses may have edited the documents that he included in Genesis—he may have merely indicated which documents he used as the basis of his history, while updating the language and putting all references to individuals in third person.

We don’t have any of those older documents from before Moses, all that we have is the form that he preserved in Genesis. Yet he left clues that he used older documents, but those older documents haven’t survived as independent works.

Karl W. Randolph.