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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,...

divided J, only one of these was early; the other was quite late and exilic in date. Furthermore, these sources are not related to each other as independent documents but as documents that were added to, or which supplemented earlier ones. The same could be said to be the case for P (as Volz also held). It, too, was a supplement to the preceding corpus and not an independent document. Winnett’s published address did not receive much attention at the time. I endeavored to test the proposed scheme
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