I've recently started jogging, something I actually hate doing. But since discovering Christine Haye's brilliant audio Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible), which I've downloaded to my iPod, I've come to enjoy the mix of bracing winter air, sunrise over the Rhine, and fascinating Jewish introduction to the Tanakh in a cute American accent.She said something today which reminded me of a thread I finished a while back, in which I looked at the nature of the relationship between the different redactional layers that constitute the Bible.
But the question is: what is the relationship between the differnet versions of the legal material? Some of these laws will parallel each other quite closely and others do not. So are Deuternomy's legal traditions a direct response to, or modification of, the laws in Exodus and Numbers, or are they best understood as just different, independent formulations of a common legal tradition? Weinfeld has argued that Deuteronomy is dependent on the previous traditions of the Pentateuch; Deuteronomy revises and reforms them according to new ideas, its new notion of a centralised cultic worship, and secondly its humanitarian spirit. ... Deuteronomy would have been seen as an updated replacement of the old Book of the Covenant, rather than its complement. They exists side by side in our texts now, but I think in his view those who promulgated it were understanding it as a replacement of the laws of the Book of the Covenant.
In a previous post I quoted Childs as saying the following concerning the extension of tradition:
Prophetic authority is related to the function of the biblical text. The text is the tradent of authority in establishing a link with specific prophetic figures. The literature has no life apart from Israel's life, institutions, and offices. The prophet serves as the living voice of God now preserved in a living text of Scripture. The text can certainly be extended beyond the scope of the original prophecy, but the theological link with its origin must be maintained in order to sustain its authority.
(For the full thread go here)
Given Childs' views on the significance of the nature of the relationship between layers of the text, I wonder how he would have responded to Weinfeld here.
NB. Awilum reflects on Hayes' iPod lecture series here.
