Prologue to History: The Yahwist as Historian in Genesis (review)

Hebrew Studies 35 (1994) 211 Reviews lent with an additional 10% having a transliterated form along with another Hebrew form. According to Even-Shoshan, approximately 7% of the lexical entries in his dictionary are "international" (Hamilon Hexadash [Jerusalem: Kiryat Sepher. 1982] p. 3110). Thus, there are more than three times as many borrowings in the specialized area of the vocabulary given in the present work as in the Hebrew vocabulary at large. Perhaps this should not be so surprising. given the (Euro-)American origins of scholarship in contemporary linguistics. A comment about two specific entries in the dictionary is in order. The English translation of the dictionary's Hebrew title contains the word "philology" for dikduk, while in the body of the dictionary. we find dikduk used for "grammar." In addition, under "philology" we find filologia and balshanut. Such a discrepancy is curious. Clearly, a dictionary of this size cannot include everything from all approaches and methodologies used in the field; however, there is a noticeable lack of any entry involving the term "cognitive." Greater explicit attention in recent years to cognitive issues among linguists of different theoretical persuasions makes this particular absence stand out sharply. Anyone interested in Hebrew linguistics or more general Hebrew language studies is bound to find the dictionary helpful. Although designed for the Hebrew speaker who must read foreign language material, the Hebrew alphabetical index facilitates its use for speakers of other languages (with knowledge of English) reading Hebrew. In spite of the issues raised here. it is clear that this dictionary fills a gap and provides the speaker of Hebrew with a useful and useable tool. Perhaps in future editions of the work, it will be possible for the authors to address some of the above-mentioned concerns. Miriam R. L. Petruck University o/California Berkeley, California 94720 PROLOGUE TO HISTORY: THE YAHWIST AS HISTORIAN IN GENESIS. By John Van Seters. Pp. xiii + 367. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992. Cloth, $27.99. Building upon his earlier studies of ancient historiography (Abraham in History and Tradition [New Haven: Yale, 1975] and In Search 0/ History Hebrew Studies 35 (1994) 212 Reviews [New Haven: Yale, 1983]), John Van Seters urges in this new book that we take the "Yahwist" writing, both in fonn and original intent, as a "prologue" to the Dtr history work. Moreover, on grounds of comparative study of extant modes of historiographic composition in the ancient Near East, including classical Greece, he extends his argument from In Search ofHistory to claim that the authors of both works deserve to be called historians, not because they meet modern standards of historical reportage, but because they worked according to accepted practices within an ancient tradition of historiographic composition. The detailed support for these claims emerges in Van Seters's investigation of the pre-priestly, or Yahwistic, materials in the book of Genesis (he does not recognize an "Elohistic" Pentateuchal source). Van Seters concentrates on the activity of the "Yahwist" as an "antiquarian historian" who selectively shaped older materials according to existing models of historiographic writing, drew upon elements from both eastern (Mesopotamian) and western (Greek) traditions, and created an "archaiologia," a prologue dealing with ancient times that in various societies typically introduced national traditions. As Van Seters argued earlier, in ancient Israel this national history was first set forth by the Dtr historian. Van Seters views the "Yahwist" as another of Israel's exilic historians, necessarily later than the DtrH, whose literary models and methods of composition were not fundamentally different from those evident in the composition that spans Deuteronomy through 2 Kings. It was not a question of simply transmitting received tradition, whether oral or written, but of actually sifting available materials, selecting from among them that which was useful to the historian's purposes, composing literary frameworks and narrative structures, inventing plausible material to fill gaps, and finally composing a unified narrative that spoke to the needs of the historian's own times. Van Seters's treatment of the ancestral wanderings in Genesis illustrates his approach well. He resists the Gunkel-like assumptions about independently existing oral traditions of genealogy, which have done little to explain the peculiar combination of genealogy with...