The republication of Moberly’s 1992 study in an accessible paperback provides a further look at this textually-focussed work of Old Testament theology at a time when the reconfiguration within Pentateuchal studies has had another decade to run it course. The ‘revelations of the divine name’ in Exodus chapters three and six are key texts for classical Pentateuchal criticism. It is there that such an approach to the text finds one of the most notorious disjunctions between the ‘Yahwist’ source, on the one hand, and the ‘Elohist’ and ‘Priestly’ sources, on the other.
Moberly argues, against the most common critical construction of Pentateuchal sources, that all the identifiable Pentateuchal traditions assume a ‘cleavage’ between the time of the Patriarchs and that of Mosaic religion. For the narrator of the Exodus stories, the fathers did not know the deity as ‘YHWH’. Far from a mere peculiarity of E and, more formally, of P, this affirmation is presupposed by J as well.
In ‘God’s Self-Disclosure as YHWH’ (pp. 5-35), Moberly argues that due attention to the `context of the storyteller’ shows the narratives to be developed from the perspective of ‘Mosaic Yahwism’, thus the language employed is ‘redolent with presupposition and overtone.’ If Sinai is ‘the mount of God’, this statement ought not to be historicized in the direction of theories of prior divine presence (e.g. the Kenite hypothesis) but rather read as the descriptive accent of a narrator who spoke from within a full-blown Yahwism for which Sinai and Zion had become, quintessentially, God’s mountains. Even if Moses does not initially know that it is YHWH who is calling him, the narrator does, and he expects that his readers will be similarly apprised. Moberly links this name revelation directly to the issues and objections occasioned by the call of Moses. It was not so much a revelation to Israel, but rather a response to the reluctant Moses, the archetypal prophet, who urgently needed to know. For Moberly, the whole of Exodus 3 (and later chapter 6) is narrative theology; attention to the narrator’s theology is thus appropriate and, perhaps, a sine qua non of productive interpretation. Chapter six tells a story similar to chapter three, this time in the light of Moses’ initial disappointment following his first encounter with Pharaoh. We are not reading P’s version of what E placed before us in ch. 3. Rather, this is the second instalment of a sequence, a position that is perhaps less remarkable than it was at first writing, when Cross, Van Seters, and Rendtorff could be presented without further ado as exponents of a ‘minority view’. Here, Moberly finds Moses treated as archetypal priest, alongside his clearer prophetic role. Chapter six presumes chapter three, and complements it. The emphasis in both lies on continuity with God’s activity among the patriarchs, but the revelation of his precise name is a novelty.
For Moberly, the crux regarding the pervasive use of the name YHWH throughout Genesis is resolved by the simple fact of Yahwistic story-tellers narrating pre-Yahwistic tales from within their own religious context. The critical consensus needlessly complicates matters by presuming that the Pentateuch sources are in conflict regarding the revelation of that name. The persistence of `Elohim’ in patriarchal stories shows that the Yahwistic narrator took seriously the origin of those tales in an earlier time; conversely, the intrusion of ‘YHWH’ in those same tales highlights the perspective of the narrator. In his discussion of alternative approaches, Moberly stands by the reality of lengthy tradition-history, while doubting-with Whybray et al.-that we are in a position to produce detailed reconstruction of that history. At a minimum, we have grounds to suppose that the Pentateuchal storytellers employed their craft according to ‘the practice common to many cultures of retelling stories the content and wording of which were not yet fixed but were open to molding and development by the storyteller.’
In ‘The Religion of the Patriarchs’ (pp. 79-104), Moberly looks to patriarchal religion to confirm or refute what he takes as the view, consistent in the Pentateuchal sources, that pre-Mosaic religion was of a distinct order from its successor. Confirmation ensues, because Moberly finds that a coherent view of patriarchal practice commingles with the diverse nature of the literature. Its features are briefly described, resulting in a sketch of pre-Mosaic religion characterised by its ‘open, unstructured, and nonlocated unagressive nature, its “ecumenical bonhomie”.’
Moberly’s principal theological contribution takes shape in a lengthy fourth chapter (‘The Old Testament of the Old Testament’, pp. 105-146), the title of which does double duty for the book itself. A survey of those reconstructions of religious history on the basis of Exodus 3 and 6 that were carried out by Wellhausen, Alt, Gottwald, Cross, et al., alleges a dismissive attitude towards ‘the theological concerns of Exodus 3 and 6 (which) may actually represent the common tradition of all pentateuchal writers’. Moberly argues that the texts speak most coherently when they are allowed to assume two distinct periods when God spoke in different ways, in analogy with the distinctives and commonalities found in the Old and New Testaments. As Christians ‘approach’ the Old Testament from the New, so one may ‘approach’ patriarchal religion from Mosaic Yahwism. The notion of ‘dispensations’ allows a later reader (or biblical writer) to view the behaviour and presentation of a previous dispensation from within a conviction that his later view has become normative, while not requiring of earlier characters the same behaviours that have become commandments in his own day.
Two final chapters (‘The Old Testament and Jewish-Christian Dialogue’, 147-175, and ‘Paradigms for Pentateuchal Criticism’, 176-202) draw out some implications of Moberly’s thesis for the topics to which they refer. Particularly in the case of criticism of the Pentateuch, a decade of intense scholarly activity since the original publication of Moberly’s book has barely sufficed for ‘dissatisfied scholars’ to make a start in offering alternatives to ‘the burden of the documentary hypothesis’, either along Moberly’s provocative lines or alternatives to them.
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