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The Pentateuch: A Social-Science Commentary is unavailable, but you can change that!

This overview of the Pentateuch reviews the various historical-critical attempts to read it based on ideas about the social evolution of Israel’s religion and culture. Among the questions it addresses are: Is the Pentateuch an accumulation of folk traditions?; Is it a work of ancient historiography?; And is it a document legitimizing religious reform? Van Seters, in dialogue with competing views,...

I think that it is incorrect to suggest that the Persian administration authorized the composition of the P corpus or the Pentateuch. They were primarily concerned with the establishment and maintenance of order in religious and civil matters, and if the documents that the reforming priests brought to Jerusalem contained the law, that was all that mattered. I also think it unlikely that the whole of P was written for this single occasion. Yet the P narrative (Pg) is a single unified composition written
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