The Life of Moses: The Yahwist as Historian in Exodus-Numbers

This companion to Prologue to History: The Yahwist as Historian in Genesis continues the argument that the Yahwist was an antiquarian historian concerned with reconstructing the origins of Israel. Here, John Van Seters examines the corpus of the Yahwist in Exodus-Numbers and explores the literary nature of the work, its limits in the text, its relationship to the history of Deuteronomy to 2 Kings, and its dating in the exilic period. He shows how J, the literary work attributed to the Yahwist, integrates a wide diversity of themes and subjects around the biography of Moses. This book will provide a better understanding of the unity and integrity of Exodus-Numbers in the context of other writings and the general history of the exilic period. It disputes the widely held view that J is merely a collection of accumulated traditions. In Van Seters's view, J's portrayal of Moses is heavily influenced by prophetic biography and conventional historiographic forms and models, allowing the Yahwist to express a number of major theological themes that address the religious concerns of the exilic period and the diaspora community.