Genesis Vol 3.pdf - College Press

THE GENERATIONS OF TERAH 11 :27-32
an undetermined number of unidentified and unidentifiable
“redactors’) to provide a solution for these problems. The
problems themselves are relatively trivial, of the kind that
usually attach to documents of historical interest extend-
ing into the ancient past. Cornfeld (AtD, 49) comments
on this problem interestingly, as follows: “Hebrew tradi-
tion does not ascribe a written record to Abraham but to
Moses (we use the term ‘tradition’ in the sense of ‘what
was handed down’). It is fairly certain that the patriarchal
narratives, for the most part, derive from oral traditions,
many of which were written after the time of Moses. But
such oral traditions of pre-literary times are not to be
spurned. The reliability of transmission was assured by
the incredible memories of the Orientals. Hermann Gunkel
remarks that these traditions in Genesis break up into
separate tales, each unit characterized by a few participants
and the affairs of a few families, simple descriptions, laconic
speech, all welded into big bold strokes of narration with
artful use of suspense. This colorful and memorable mode
of narration is a vehicle for family and tribal traditions
especially suited to oral transmission. The extraordinary
feature is that Hebrew memory had preserved such pre-
literary traditions for more than a thousand years and set
them down in writing so faithfully.’’ (It will be noted
that any special inspiration of the Spirit of God in the
preservation and presentation of these “traditions” in the
Old Testament Scriptures, is carefully ignored in the fore-
going statements, even though repeatedly affirmed for
these Scriptures by the Bible writers themselves; cf. 1 Pet.
1:lO-12, 2 Pet. 1:21, 2 Sam. 23:2, Acts 3:22-25). The
whole Documentary Theory of the Pentateuch rests upon
the basic assumption that the cultural background disclosed
in the Biblical accounts of the Patriarchal Age reflect a
milieu that would be appropriate only to a much later
period, probably as much later as that of the Exile: as
Wellhausen himself puts it: “We attain to no historical
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