Table Of ContentThe Bible's First History
ROBERT B. COOTE
and
DAVID ROBERT ORD
PHILADELPHIA
FORTRESS PRESS
The Bible's First History
COPYRIGHT © 1989 BY FORTRESS PRESS
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanicaL photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher, Fortress Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Coote, Robert B., 1944-
The Bible's first history.
1. J document (Biblical criticism) I. Ord, David
Robert. II. Title.
BSI225.2.C66 1988 222'.106 88-45234
ISBN 0-8006-0878-X
3468F88 Printed in the United States of America 1-878
-Well, God's a good man.
Dogberry (Much Ado About Nothing, act 3, sc.5)
Contents
Preface ix
I. What Is the Bible's First History? 1
2. Four Different Stories 8
3. A Royal History 13
4. Who Were Israel? 18
5. A Window Opens 24
6. Real People by Another Name 31
7. A Question of Prerogatives 42
8. Of Gods and Humans 65
9. A Royal Way of Thinking 74
10. The Beginning of Rain Agriculture 82
II. East of Eden 91
12. A New Approach 99
13. Two Kinds of Royalty 110
14. A Birth That Meets with Approval 117
15. Make Me a Match" 133
II
16. A Younger Son Prevails 139
17. A Self-Made Man 146
18. The Primacy of Judah 167
19. West of Eden 172
20. It's in the Bag 187
,.
2l. The Bedouin Enslaved 207
22. A Thick Head 231
23. The Great Escape 239
24. Who's in Charge Here? 257
25. Getting There 274
26. The Triumph of the Blessing 285
27. What's Different? 298
28. Implications 304
Preface
This is a book about an ancient writer and his ancient work of political
imagination. It forms the earliest part of the first four books of the Bible.
Because the work usually refers to God as Yahweh (which is spelled with a
J in Europe, where the work first came to notice, and is frequently printed
as Jehovah in English Bibles), historians call both the writer and his work J.
The writer has also been called the Yah wist, especially more recently. We
prefer to retain the classic designation. Although the vast majority of
people have never heard of J, its stories will be familiar to many because
they are among the most popular to be found in Genesis and Exodus.
Indeed, these stories are so embedded in our culture in trivialized,
bowdlerized, and dogmatized versions that many of us have been familiar
with them since childhood. But as originally told, these stories were not
children's stories, and the purpose of this book is to present the whole of J
as it was in the beginning, as a work treating matters of justice and
prosperity which concern us as intensely as they concerned its original
hearers.
This book is the product of collaboration between a historian and a
minister. Although the analysis it is based on is specialized, the results are
of importance to everyone with an interest in the Bible. The communica
tion of these results requires special skill as well. We hope that by joining
the skills of a historian with those of a minister, we may make the results of
our study as widely accessible as possible.
Because J was written three thousand years ago, and in a culture quite
different from our own, some of its assumptions will no longer be shared
by many people in today's world. In particular, J makes God male. For
many people, God as male remains essential to their understanding of God.
For others of us, including the two authors, the maleness of God as
portrayed in the Bible is no longer adequate or acceptable as a way of
ix
x Preface
talking to or about God. Nevertheless, in discussing J we follow his practice
of referring to God as male because, as will become evident, God's male sex
plays an integral role in J's history.
It is our hope that those interested in the Bible will find J's whole story as
it was first heard more engrossing and illuminating than the pieces with
which they may already be familiar. We are about to encounter a story that
may not have been heard as J intended it for almost three thousand years.
It has lost nothing of its greatness for its age.
We would like to express our thanks to Polly Coote, Mary McCormick
Maaga, Derek Taylor, and our book editor, John A. Hollar, who read this
book in typescript and made many valuable suggestions, and to Kristin
Saldine, who helped prepare the genealogical chart.
1
What Is the Bible's First History?
In an era when printing presses and photocopying machines turn out
billions of pages of print each year, literature is commonplace and serves an
endless variety of purposes. In our society almost everyone reads. But in
the ancient world, literacy was extremely limited and the production of
texts was a restricted craft. To know why a certain few people undertook
the laborious and exclusive task of writing texts and to identify who these
people were can be a great help in understanding the meaning of a text.
VJriting as we know it goes back about five thousand years. Until re
cently in human history, however, few people practiced the art in any
particular society. At first,. in order to write a person had to know upward
of several hundred signs. It would have been possible to write quite clearly
with only a hundred signs, but scribes tended to belong to an exclusive
social group who magnified the difficulty of their skill in order to reinforce
their exclusivity. Even after the invention of the alphabet about thirty
seven hundred years ago, which made available a writing system requiring
the knowledge of a mere twenty-five or so simple signs, knowledge of
writing did not spread much beyond the scribal class. The limitation on
literacy had less to do with the complexity of the system than with the
usefulness of the skill. Only a few people within the society had good
reason to make extensive use of the skill.
The population of Palestine was essentially divided into a ruling class
and a lower class. Rulers themselves tended not to be literate, but they
employed a literate and partially literate class-scribes and priests-to
keep records for them. Not surprisingly, writing was first developed for the
purposes of taxation. When the local lord sent men into a nearby village to
see whether the peasants had paid their taxes, he was entirely dependent
on the scribes. In addition to record keeping, writing was useful to the
ruling class for marking ownership. Needless to say, the scribe or recorder
I
