:This article presents information about the John Van Seters book; for general information about the topic, see Abraham: Historicity and origins and The Bible and history.

Abraham in History and Tradition is a 1975 book by biblical scholar John Van Seters.

The book is divided into two parts, Abraham in History and Abraham in Tradition. In Part I, Van Seters argues that there is no unambiguous evidence pointing to an origin for the stories in the 2nd millennium BC. "Arguments based on reconstructing the patriarch's nomadic way of life, the personal names in Genesis, the social customs reflected in the stories, and correlation of the traditions of Genesis with the archaeological data of the Middle Bronze Age have all been found, in Part One above, to be quite defective in demonstrating an origin for the Abraham tradition in the second millennium B.C.". This finding has implications for certain then-current strands in Biblical criticism: "Consequently, without any such effective historical controls on the tradition one cannot use any part of it in an attempt to reconstruct the primitive period of Israelite history. Furthermore, a vague presupposition about the antiquity of the tradition based upon a consensus approval of such arguments should no longer be used as a warrant for proposing a history of the tradition related to early premonarchic times." Van Seters instead proposed that Genesis was an essentially literary work, but one based on a process of supplementation by successive authors rather on a redactorial process (i.e., on the combination of separate documents by an editor or editors). This in turn amounted to a major challenge to the Documentary Hypothesis, the dominant theory concerning the origins of the Pentateuch.

On the "documentary hypothesis" and the formation of the Torah

At the time Van Seters published "Abraham in History and Tradition" the dominant scholarly theory regarding the composition of the Pentateuch was the Documentary Hypothesis. This held that the books of the Torah, including the Genesis accounts of Abraham and the Patriarchs, were based on four independent sources. Each of these was originally a complete document in itself, dating from between the 10th and 7th centuries BC and combined into the final work by a Redactor (editor) in the Persian period, c.450 BC. Van Seters retained the idea of source documents but dropped the idea of a redactor, which meant dropping the documentary model itself. In its place he adopted a supplemental model, "a successive supplementation of one source or author by another," in which a Yahwist (not identical with Wellhausen's Yahwist) working in the period of the Babylonian exile was the major but not the final author of Genesis. Van Seter's schema is as follows:

See also

  • Biblical criticism
  • Biblical minimalism
  • Source criticism
  • Chedorlaomer
  • Ipuwer Papyrus

Notes

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References

  • Review at JSTOR