Literary Criticism and Theology of P - Christus Rex

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E. CORTESE
instance, the knowledge of the intrinsic corruption of man and the failure of
the covenant, which the Jews will not grasp, is understandable, if we admit
this dating of H (and P) and if we take it in the context of the exiles, who felt
themselves punished for their sins and for the sins of their fathers.
Conclusion. Coming to the problem of berît in Lev 26, we should now be
in a position to solve it. There is no berît at Sinai in P because the background
is the exile, and no ceremony of covenant was possible there. Moreover, the
meditations of H, following the scheme of the Dtr Code, were originally set
at the border of the land. Therefore P excludes the covenant from the Sinai
event. On the other side P is conscious of the human inability in carrying out
the covenant obligations, as its tragic experience teaches, but it does not
consider this failure as a desperate consequence. Similarly it does not emphasize
the covenant as a mutual obligation, but rather prefers to emphasize
the gracious aspect of the covenant from the part of God; therefore P mentions
the berît in the Noah and Abraham narratives and in the calling of Moses. This
however does not mean that P is skeptical about the observance of the law,
because it places especially at Sinai an enormous quantity of laws. Anyhow
we must distinguish the law from the covenant on the law. As for the law, Pg
has its nucleus on the ark, remembering that it is fundamentally from God and
from His gracious presence that the moral obligations arise and that men
receive the force to observe the commandments.
The recurring of the covenant theme, then, does not surprise us, both in
the sense of a mutual covenant, in the first part of Lev 26, and in the sense of
gracious promise, in the second part. It is not necessary to turn to hypotheses
of different redactions or even of different documents, P and H, mixed here
in any way. Korpel defends a poetical structure and a unitary composition of
all Lev 26 64 , and we can now regard Lev 26 as a unitary text, without being
disturbed by literary or theological prejudices.
Enzo Cortese
Professore invitato
Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Jerusalem
64. M.C.A. Korpel, “The Epilogue of the Holyness Code”, in J.C. de Moor - G.E. Watson
(Eds.), Verse in NE Prose (AOAT 42), Neukirchen 1993, 123-150.