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Document Details : Title: L'échec de Wellhausen Subtitle: Le lien littéraire entre Genèse et Exode dans la recherche biblique, d'Astruc à Hupfeld Author(s): SCHMID, Konrad Journal: Semitica Volume: 65 Date: 2023 Pages: 351-381 DOI: 10.2143/SE.65.0.3293126 Abstract : Pentateuchal scholarship took its beginnings from the analysis of the book of Genesis. In some strands of current scholarship on the Pentateuch, there is still an implicit dogma that states: What is true for Genesis in compositional terms is also true for the Pentateuch. However, this method of extrapolating results from Genesis to the rest of the Pentateuch is not even very old in terms of the history of our discipline: It goes back to Abraham Kuenen and Julius Wellhausen, but it cannot be found in the classical authors from the pre-Wellhausen era, who explicitly limited their analyses and their hypotheses to the book of Genesis as the exclusive object of their study (and not the whole of the Pentateuch). This is true, for instance, for Jean Astruc, Henning Bernhard Witter, Karl David Ilgen and Hermann Hupfeld. In addition, Kuenen and Wellhausen’s arguments for the Pentateuchal and Hexateuchal extension of J and E beyond the book of Genesis are either postulates, mere impressions, or a combination of both. And the main reason why Kuenen’s and Wellhausen’s assumption turned out to be so successful in the 20th century was its underpinning by Gerhard von Rad’s concept of an early concept of salvation history in J and E to which Martin Noth also subscribed – again against his own observations on the original autonomy of the Pentateuch’s major themes he identified in his Überlieferungsgeschichte des Pentateuch. Instead of this method of importing results from the book of Genesis, Pentateuchal research should rely on observations from all of its books and formulate its results based on these analyses – and not on extrapolation from Genesis. |
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