Secret_History

Chapter 10: Who Wrote the Bible and Why? 375
In the P list of holidays, there is a holiday that is known now as the Fall New
Year, or Feast of Tabernacles, followed ten days later by a Day of Atonement.
These holidays are not mentioned in J, E, or D. And, since these two holidays
involve atonement for sin, Wellhausen said that this proved that they were part of
the Second Temple period when Israel was loaded with guilt that their
faithlessness to Yahweh had led to the destruction of the kingdom and their exile
to Babylon.
Another “proof” that was accepted by Wellhausen as demonstration that P was
written after the exile was the “Ezekiel matter”. Ezekiel was an Aaronid priest
who was exiled to Babylon (which we will shortly discuss), and it was there that
he wrote his book that bears his name. The book of Ezekiel is written in a style
and language that is remarkably similar to that of the P document. There are whole
passages in Ezekiel that are nearly word-for word extracts from P. In Ezekiel, the
writer declares that in the future only certain Levites may be priests. All others are
disqualified from the priesthood because of their past sins. The only Levites who
may function as priests are those who are descendants of Zadok. Zadok was
David’s Aaronid priest. And so, according to Ezekiel, only Zadokian Aaronid
priests are legitimate; all others are excluded.
It is also quite clear in the P document that only Aaronids are priests in any
context. P simply does not recognize the descendants of Moses (the Shiloh priests)
as legitimate. So, Wellhausen decided that P had to have been written during the
days of the Second Temple, when the Aaronid priests came to power, taking
Ezekiel’s prophecy as their inspiration. At that point in time, the competition
between the priestly families was over. The Aaronids had won and one of them
wrote a “Torah of Moses” that reflected their victory.
It was a good argument. But as Friedman says, “it was logical, coherent,
persuasive - and wrong”. 263
Reuss was wrong from the beginning of the argument because it is clear that the
prophets do quote P, most notable among them being Jeremiah. The fact is,
Jeremiah seemed to fiendishly enjoy playing with the P document and reversing its
language in clever ways. Jeremiah also can be found to reject the Ark of the
Covenant in a “twist” of the language of the P document. Ezekiel also seems to
know the P document quite well. The reader may wish to refer to Friedman for the
list of comparisons.
In 1982, Avi Hurvitz of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem demonstrated that P
is written in an earlier form of Hebrew than Ezekiel’s work, so Wellhausen’s idea
that it had been written after Ezekiel was dealt another blow. Five other scholars in
recent years have uncovered additional linguistic evidence that most of P is written
in the biblical Hebrew of the days before the exile to Babylon.
263 Ibid., p. 167.