ABSTRACT
We can see this confusion at work in one of the most prominent biblical scholars of the late nineteenth century, Julius Wellhausen, when he writes in the introduction to his Prolegomena to the History ofAncient Israel) "It is necessary to trace the succession of the three elements [he is referring to the Jehovist, the Deuteronomic, and the Priestly] in detail, and at once to test and to fix each by reference to an independent standard, namely, the inner development of the history of Israel" (12). With this commitment to charting such "inner development," he cannot help but find it. The metaphors he uses to discuss his theory of the literary composition of the books of Judges, Samuel, and IZings are symptomatic:
In this description of the text, he shifts from the metaphor of a plant with a new branch to a plant that has only parasitic growths, next it is overgrown with accretions, and then he dresses it (the plant wears "minor and dependent" clothes), only to proceed to drop the plant altogether to opt for geologic history; now the biblical text is comprised oflayers of alluvial deposits, and presumably scholars can take out their spades and dig right through it. Whether as the growth of an organism or the accretion of geologic deposits, this is the picture of history that he quicldy not only to the development of the text, but to its plot, that is, to the biblical narrative's own account of history. Deftly, almost without our noticing, the structure of the story of Germany becomes the structure of the story of Israel. According to Wellhausen, the history spanning Deuteronomy to 2 IZings offers "a connected view of large periods of time, a continuous survey of the connection and succession of race after race, the detailed particulars of the occurrences being disregarded; the historical factors with which the religious pragmatism here has to do are so uniform that the individual periods in reality need only to be filled up with the numbers of the years" (231).
