Liane Feldman, The Consuming Fire: The Complete Priestly Source, from Creation to the Promised Land (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023).
Nobody likes to say this (or maybe everybody likes to say this and pretend that it’s mostly a joke), but if you look closely, the Pentateuch is unreadable. The text is replete with contradictions, non sequiturs, repetitions, and chronological inconsistencies. This fact is the entire premise of twentieth-century pentateuchal criticism. It is the foundation of source criticism and the pursuit of original sources, redactions, and other editorial interventions in the text, an effort to strip away the problems by explaining their origins through multiple hands across multiple centuries. Julius Wellhausen’s tidy explanation enjoyed the luxury of not actually being applied systematically, and when his successors attempted to do so, the whole project deteriorated into squabbling pretty quickly. The impossibility of separating out independent sources or even identifying coherent layers that everyone agrees on is what has kept us in business for decades.
Nevertheless, scholars have achieved a pretty steady consensus when it comes to identifying one of the Pentateuch’s layers, the so-called Priestly material, even when its nature as source or redaction remains a matter of debate. And so it is a logical place for a first attempt to isolate a pentateuchal source in its entirety, to present it free and clear of the confusing context of the canonical version. Yet most attempts to separate P out as a source, a redaction, or anything in between still result in a text that is largely unreadable. Liane Feldman has accomplished something remarkable by producing a refreshingly readable translation of P. More than just identifying and translating P, she has a clear sense of what exactly P is and has conveyed that through her discussion and the translation itself. The book is an extension of Feldman’s first book, The Story of Sacrifice, the conclusions of her argument put into practice in the isolation and translation of the source. And of course, this works in the other direction: the coherence she reveals in her translation of the Priestly source supports her argument about it as well. This is not to say that her reasoning is circular, only that both are part of one larger project.
The necessity of Feldman’s project springs from a methodological issue that was already present in the original formulation of the Documentary Hypothesis, which made a number of problematic historical assumptions. In particular, it took an evolutionary view of religion, seeing law as early, legalistic, and primitive and prophecy (culminating in Jesus, of course) as later and more advanced. For this and other reasons, the hypothesis has been open to charges of antisemitism. It also made assumptions about the early history and historical accuracy of the biblical period that have since been called into question. However, as Feldman points out, many of the scholars who now cite these historiographical problems in order to reject the Documentary Hypothesis and other documentary approaches nevertheless make similar assumptions, minus the overt anti-Judaism, especially about law being nonliterary and therefore less valuable (10). These assumptions lead such scholars to strip the law from the narrative and assign each to a different layer. Feldman argues that this rejection of the documentary approach is premised on a fundamental literary misunderstanding of P, for which the law and the narrative are both essential parts.
In other words, Feldman returns attention to the Priestly source as a literary reality. Feldman’s starting point is the idea that P as a whole is “a work of literature in its own right” (xv) and that it must be read and analyzed as such. The work of pulling apart the pentateuchal sources tends to force a focus on the small literary unit, in addition to the staple argument that the law and the narrative once existed as two separate entities, or were in some other way not originally related to one another. Feldman argues that these efforts to pull apart the text obscure the most important thing about it: it existed as a unified literary whole in antiquity (xv). In this way, she squarely positions herself as a proponent of the neodocumentary hypothesis and insists on the importance of plot-based analysis (13) in order to formulate a “literary solution to a literary problem.” (Of course, the premise that the problem of the Pentateuch is a literary one or that the solution must be literary is not one that everyone agrees with, another reason why we find ourselves in the position we are in.)
While she argues for a literary solution, importantly, Feldman notes that we don’t have to expect P to follow the same plot as the nonpriestly material. She allows P to tell a different story (9). This frees her from the constraints of previous approaches to penateuchal composition and strengthens her argument that P was an independent source—you don’t have to argue P is dependent on other pentateuchal material if it’s allowed to tell a different story. Freeing P in this way works well if you manage to then isolate a coherent story, which Feldman does. This is not to argue that the work is the output of a single author. Feldman acknowledges that P had many authors who worked on it over centuries (see xvi, 4–5, 14), and she acknowledges that her treatment of it leaves aside P’s own literary history in favor of treating the final biblical version of the source.
This, in the end, is part of what makes Feldman’s treatment so successful. In other words, one of the greatest benefits of separating P out is that it forces you to read it on its own, something that is virtually impossible if you’re looking at the whole canonical text. You can know in theory what P does and does not contain, but it’s different when you read it seamlessly in one go. Then you really see that in P there’s no law given at Sinai, there’s no Miriam, and the Israelites do not begin their conquest while they are in the wilderness. You see the continuity of the wilderness itineraries, and you see the theme of promise and fulfillment performed over and over again. Admittedly, there are still bumps here and there, where the seams between the sources are particularly difficult to pull apart and where redactors have made changes. But Feldman generally acknowledges these problems and offers convincing arguments as to what specifically was lost or changed and why, as for example with the beginning of the Joseph story, where she notes that a Priestly account of Joseph’s descent to Egypt has likely been lost. Rather than try to smooth out the awkward transition between the end of P’s Jacob narrative and the elevation of Joseph in Egypt, she notes that there is an otherwise coherent narrative with the birth accounts of Jacob’s sons before and the accounting of the tribes in Egypt after.
As Feldman notes, one of the most striking features in the endeavor of listening to P’s voice in isolation is extricating P from D’s theology, which is “the predominant voice of the Hebrew Bible, . . . one that focuses on the failure of the Israelites to keep God’s commandments and the punishments they face for those failures” (6). P, in contrast, “presents a fundamentally different perspective, one that is wholly optimistic about Israel’s desire and ability to fulfill God’s commands” (6) and about God’s fulfillment of every promise made to the people of Israel. Identifying these literary features and themes works particularly well as a rationale for identifying a limited amount of P material in Joshua, which Feldman does and does well.
Ultimately, Feldman is doing two things in this book: she is making a source-critical argument about the Pentateuch, and she is translating P. These are two separate, and significant, tasks. They’re interrelated, but not the same thing. Her audience is nonspecialists, people who may not know or really need to know all the detailed arguments that have occupied pentateuchal criticism for the last century or so but who nonetheless will be interested in P as a source, and particularly in reading P in isolation. This book has a lengthy and fairly hefty introduction, but it is not the primary articulation of her argument about P, which appears in The Story of Sacrifice. The translation itself aims to avoid “Bible-ese” (xix) and translate into idiomatic modern American English. As a result, Feldman is often fairly literal, as in her translation of mishkan as Dwelling Place. But at the same time, she captures the essence of the Hebrew and also highlights the strangeness of P. Her articulation of Moses’s reception of the “blueprints” for the Dwelling Place and his execution of the blueprints for the Dwelling Place in order to create a cozy home for Yahweh (e.g., 119) is just one example of how she brings the narrative into a context that speaks to readers and makes it relatable and comprehensible at the same time that it remains utterly weird. She makes numerous similar observations that clarify and sharpen her articulation of P’s vision. Her timeline of P’s story (39) is incredibly useful, showing how P telescopes time. She also provides an insightful discussion of how P’s literary presentation of divine revelation opens up the otherwise closed world of the priests to all Israel—the instructions are given to Moses, and the Israelites have to wait for Moses to tell them. But P is “self-consciously textual” (51), telling a story that is ostensibly oral but that is clearly intended to be read, thereby opening this world up to the reader.
Feldman’s clear vision of what P is, is the greatest strength of this translation. She has a clear understanding of P that doesn’t feel forced, that doesn’t want to make P something that it struggles against. If the neodocumentary approach advocates a literary solution to a literary problem, then she has succeeded in a highly coherent literary reading of the text, tracing its plot, style, and ideology consistently through the whole work without trying to dismiss the rough spots, and letting the texture of P’s thought and language come through.
Sarah Shectman is the managing editor at the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization. She is the author of Women in the Pentateuch (2009) and the co-editor of the forthcoming Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion, Gender, and Sexuality in the Ancient Near East. She lives in San Francisco.