Genesis Beyond Sources: A New Approach

Antony Campbell, SJ

• Publisher: ATF Press Publishing
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781925643183
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Genesis Beyond Source is a radical and groundbreaking book with a new approach to understading the book of Genesis and the Pentateuch. It has two components. The first touches the whole of Genesis and affects much of biblical narrative text. The second is more scattered and comprises the major observations stemming from close work on Genesis and broader study of parts of the Pentateuch.

Postscript 1

 

Ninety-five per cent of this book (Genesis Beyond Sources) was completed before I left Australia for California early in 2015. After that I did not have access to my text. Regrettably therefore I could not engage with Suzanne Boorer, The Vision of the Priestly Narrative: Its Genre and Hermeneutics of Time (SBL, 2016).

Abbreviations

 

AC	After Christ (following Jawaharlal Nehru; CE makes little sense outside Judaism and Christianity; ‘anno Domini’ being a faith statement is a category mistake)
ATD	Das Alte Testament Deutsch
ATF	Australian Theological Forum, Adelaide, South Australia
BC	Before Christ (following Jawaharlal Nehru; CE makes little sense outside Judaism and Christianity)
BDB	A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (based on the lexicon of William Gesenius; first edition, 1907)
BJ	Bible de Jérusalem (French)
BJS	Brown Judaic Studies
ESV	The English Standard Version Bible
FAT	Forschungen zum Alten Testament
GO	German original
JB (orig.)	Jerusalem Bible (English)
JB (revised.)	The New Jerusalem Bible (English)
JPS	The Holy Scriptures (Jewish Publication Society of America)
MLBS	Mercer Library of Biblical Studies
NAB (orig.)	New American Bible (original edition, Catholic Publishers, 1971)
NAB (rev. ed.)	New American Bible (revised edition, Harper Collins, 2012)
NEB	New English Bible
NIV	New International Version of the Holy Bible
NJBC	The New Jerome Biblical Commentary
NJPS	Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures (New JPS translation, 1985)
NRSV	The Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version
JPS	The Holy Scriptures (JPS translation, 1955)
OTL	Old Testament Library
RSV	Revised Standard Version
WBC	Word Biblical Commentary

Prologue

The New Approach

Dissatisfaction: a radical need for change

This is a radical book, meeting a radical need. Over the centuries, there have been several attempts to make academic sense of the biblical text from Genesis to Deuteronomy, or thereabouts. There are phenomena in this biblical text which demand explanation. Most attempts at explanation have had their day and in due course have been discarded, even forgotten. Over recent years I have reached the alarming conclusion that the drift of these academic studies has in fact been away from reality. What reality can we appeal to where a religious document has been compiled from some four hypothetical source documents (mitigated recently by reduction to two groups responsible for their compositional layers) with gaps, repetitions, and more? What audience can we imagine as real which, while possibly illiterate, was certainly financially challenged by the issue of access to such a compiled document? We can accept stories in the ancient world, but are so-called sources within the realm of the real? Is the biblical text we have, in Genesis for example, to be envisaged in reality as the end-product of ancient literary activity or is it a compilation of the bases from which storytelling and theological reflection began? Is it real to view it as the concern of an elite or directed toward a wider populace? Given the phenomena of the text, is it realistic to think of it as reflecting traditions from the early days of Israel’s faith or does it bear traces of composition toward the end of Israel’s independent story, in or around the time of exile? It is questions such as these that integrity forces us to ask, to step back and reflect, and above all to integrate modern faith and ancient biblical text.

Briefly: what has been

We cannot look at the past couple of hundred years without realizing that there is duplication in the biblical text and it needs to be accounted for. In the pioneering work of Jean Astruc (see below) one of the points of duplication was the use of two names for God: yhwh and elohim. That was a long time ago. In the here and now of this book, there are two cases of clear and sustained duplication, the two flood narratives (Gen 6–9) and the two narratives of the deliverance at the Reed Sea (Exod 14). The first is hard to overlook; the second all too easy to overlook. There is much duplication in other texts in between. Such duplication needs to be accounted for.

The accounting so far has proved unsatisfactory. Biblical text has been mangled unnecessarily. The elephant that has been in the room all these years is the assumption that these biblical texts are the final product, the end-product, of the storytelling process. If this assumption is replaced by another assumption, that these biblical texts are the bases from which storytelling began and begins the duplication issue can be cut down to an acceptable size. Along with the change in assumptions goes another change: that duplication is only presumed when it is necessary, not me...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Postscript 1
• Abbreviations
• Prologue
• Chapter 1. We Humans
• Chapter 2. Abraham and Sarah
• Chapter 3. Isaac
• Chapter 4. Jacob
• Chapter 5. Joseph Story & Genesis 38
• Chapter 6. What Next? Beyond Genesis
• Chapter 7. El Shaddai
• Epilogue
• Postscript 2
• Bibliography of works cited