The Historical Exodus

Who Wrote the Bible?, pp. 70-80, 119-129, 188ff.

A second mistake that people make is that they imagine that we just circularly call any verse with the name YHWH in it J and any verse with El or Elohim in it E or P, and then we claim, “See: it’s consistent.” But that isn’t how it works. The passages in which the words YHWH, El, and Elohim occur have to come out consistent with all of the other evidence for identifying passages as J or E or P. These include:

• The unbroken continuity of narrative texts;
• The consistent use of other characteristic terms (at least 20 of them, through over 460 occurrences in the Torah);
• The division of twice-told stories (doublets, like the two stories of Abraham telling a king that his wife Sarah is his sister) with the terms YHWH or Elohim appearing consistently in one or the other of the two stories;
• The links between the stories in each account with the era in history that each reflects;
• The connections between these respective sources with other parts of the Bible (J with the Court History of David, P with Ezekiel);
• The many connections of the source J to the southern kingdom of Judah, and the source E to the northern kingdom of Israel.  

No scholar is clever enough to make all of that work consistently and still have the name of God always in the right place.

There are differences in the Septuagint, which is no surprise since, as we just saw, a translator from Hebrew to Greek can easily have kurios or theos for Hebrew YHWH or Elohim. But in the Dead Sea scrolls, which are Hebrew texts, the picture is the same as the Masoretic Text, equally consistent with regard to the name of God. Only two verses have Elohim at Qumran where it is YHWH in the Masoretic Text, and, as it happens, they are verses that do not contradict the hypothesis in any case. Gen 22:14 has E-lohim yir’eh (4QGen-Exoda) for MT YHWH yir’eh. But we attribute this verse to RJE, which can use either term. Num 23:3 has Elohim (so does Greek) for MT YHWH (4QNumb). But we attribute this verse to E, which could use either word at this point in any case.

The evidence for this distinction and the gap in J (and the relative weakness of arguments attributing the non-P plagues text to J) is presented in my The Hidden Book in the Bible, and in The Bible with Sources Revealed, pp. 123-131. William Propp arrived at similar identifications independently in his commentary on Exodus 1-18 in the Anchor Bible.

Homan, To Your Tents O Israel, pp. 111-115.

Noegel, “The Ark of the Covenant and Egyptian Sacred Barks: A Comparative Study,” paper presented at the San Diego conference on the Exodus “Out of Egypt.”