ABSTRACT
Central to the Abraham stories is the pivotal and wide-ranging discourse on the ethical righteousness of Yahweh in his royal role as judge of this world, a discourse which ultimately succeeds in giving both a critical and comprehensive closure to Genesis as a coherent literary whole. Key to this discourse on justice are three variations of a story, which begin in exile and the motif of abuse of the generous host and close in the reconciliation of shepherds quarrelling. The richness of the motif of tohu wa bohu and its variants exposes an intriguing compositional technique, which is employed in countless scenes of divine destruction, not least those related to themes and motifs of exile in both narrative and prophetic literature. This chapter shows that literary techniques mark a structural polarity imbedded in the symbol-system that is so ubiquitously apparent throughout biblical literature.
