ABSTRACT
Israel’s traditions about the promise to the forefathers have been the subject of much discussion and traditio-historical investigation.1 Especially problematic has been the question of the relationship of the patriarchal promises to the exodus-conquest complex of traditions. The method of approach in the past has almost always been to begin with the presupposition that these two streams of tradition were already completely combined in the earliest recorded accounts of the sacred traditions, namely J, and that the discussion must therefore deal with the pre-literary oral strands of the tradition over which we can in fact have little control. This approach, however, has seriously prejudiced any careful consideration of the traditions in the extant biblical texts themselves.
