How the Torah Combined Two Ancient Israelite Origin Myths

The main idea is that the ancient Israelites originally had two separate origin myths, one involving the three patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the other involving Moses and the Exodus story.

According to this new theory, these two literary traditions developed independently from each other and remained separate until they were combined for the first time by the priestly writer.

So D, which is obviously based on the Moses tradition, was written down first during the time of King Josiah.

But at the same time as D, as well as both before and after D, there were other fragments of text floating around, some of which were based on the Moses tradition, but others of which were based on the Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob tradition.

Then, sometime during the Second Temple period, a group of priests living in Jerusalem decided, for the first time ever, to combine the two literary traditions into a single coherent narrative.

They took bits from both the patriarchs story and bits from the Moses story.

These are the sections that were previously labeled J and E. And then they interwove them with their own text, the parts labeled P. Finally, someone at an even later stage, the redactor, or R, added a few final things, tacked Deuteronomy onto the end, and voila,

the final version of the Torah was born.

This third theory makes a lot of sense to me.

It explains why the transition between Genesis and Exodus seems so abrupt, and why there are several chronological problems when it comes to dating how long the Israelites were in Egypt.

In my view, everything prior to the divided monarchy falls into the category of myth and legend anyway, and therefore I see no problem with the idea of two separate sets of legends developing instead of just one.

In fact, considering that the ancient Israelites were originally two separate kingdoms, it actually makes more sense that there would be two separate origin stories, not just one.