C. Abraham—A Contextual Approach

When the literary criticism of the Old Testament was elaborated in the 19th century in conjunction with theories of the evolution of Israelite society and religion, the ancient Near East was hardly known. With increasing discoveries came the possibility of checking the strength of those hypotheses against the information ancient records and objects provide. Were Genesis a newly recovered ancient manuscript, it is doubtful that these hypotheses would be given priority in evaluating the text. A literary analysis is one approach to understanding the text, but it is an approach that should be followed beside others and deserves no preferential status.

The current analysis is unsatisfactory because it cannot be demonstrated to work for any other ancient composition. Changes can be traced between copies of ancient texts made at different periods only when both the earlier and the later manuscript are physically available (e.g., the Four Gospels and Tatian‘s Diatessaron). Moreover, the presuppositions of the usual literary analysis do not sustain themselves in the light of ancient scribal practices, for they require a very precise consistency on the part of redactors and copyists. Ancient scribes were not so hide-bound. Rather, the Abraham narratives should be judged in their contexts. They have two contexts. The first is the biblical one. Historically this sets Abraham long before Joseph and Moses, in current terms about 2000 B.C. (Bimson 1983: 86). Sociologically it places Abraham in the context of a seminomadic culture not controlled by the Mosaic laws, moving in a Canaan of city-states. Religiously it puts Abraham before the cultic laws of Moses, aware of God‘s uniqueness and righteousness, yet also of others who worshipped him, such as Melchizedek. To an ancient reader, there was no doubt that Abraham, who lived many years before the rise of the Israelite monarchy, was the ancestor of Israel, a position which carried with it the promise of the land of Canaan and of God‘s covenant blessing. That is the biblical context and it should not be disregarded (see Goldingay 1983). The detection of apparently duplicate or contradictory elements in the narratives, and of episodes hard to explain, is not sufficient reason for assuming the presence of variant or disparate traditions, nor are anachronisms necessarily a sign of composition long after the events described took place. These questions can only be considered when the narratives are set in their second context, the ancient Near Eastern world, at the period the biblical context indicates. Only if it proves impossible to fit them into that context should another be sought.