Frank Moore Cross—An Interview
Part I: Israelite Origins
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Footnotes
Professor Cross speaks of the Epic tradition as embodying the JE strand of the Pentateuch. Scholars divide the pentateuch into four principal authorial strands: J for the Yahwist (Jahwist in German) because Yahweh is the customary appellation of God in this strand; E for the Elohist because Elohim or a form of that name is the customary appellation if God in this strand; P for the priestly code and D for the Deuteronomist. J and E were combined at an early time. In addition, Professor Cross and some other scholars have been able to detect a first and second edition of D. Finally, the whole was put together by redactor often referred to as R.—Ed.
B.C.E. (Before the Common Era), used by this author, is the alternate designation corresponding to B.C. often used in scholarly literature.
See the plaintive remarks of Rudolph Cohen, “Did I Excavate Kadesh-Barnea?” BAR 07:03, and his desperate suggestion of locating Mosaic traditions toward the end of the third millennium (sic!): “The Mysterious MBI People,” BAR 09:04.
For more on the Mesha Stele, see Siegfried Horn, “Why the Moabite Stone Was Blown to Pieces,” BAR 12:03.
See Ze’ev Meshel, “Did Yahweh Have a Consort?” BAR 05:02 and André Lemaire, “Who or What Was Yahweh’s Asherah?” BAR 10:06.
See Bernhard W. Anderson, “Mendenhall Disavows Paternity,” BR 02:02.
Norman K. Gottwald, “Were the Early Israelites Pastoral Nomads?” BAR 04:02; see also
Endnotes
Eduard Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums (J.G. Cottäsche Buchhandlung Nachfolger, Stuttgart and Berlin 1921).
See Peter J. Parr et al., “Preliminary Survey in N.W. Arabia, 1968,” Bulletin of the Institute of Archaeology 8–9: 1968–1969 (1970), pp. 193–242; 10 (1972), pp. 23–61; Parr, “Contacts Between Northwest Arabia and Jordan in the Late Bronze and Iron Ages,” Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, ed. A. Hadidi (Amman: Department of Antiquities, 1982), pp. 127–134; M.L. Ingraham, T.J. Johnson, B. Rihani and I. Shatla, “Saudi Arabian Comprehensive Survey Program: Preliminary Report on a Reconnaissance Survey of me Northwestern Province,” Atlal 5 (1981), pp. 59–84.
Located, I have argued near the waterfall, in the present-day valley of ‘Uyun Musa (“the springs of Moses”), the biblical “valley over against Beth Peor.”
Martin Noth, “Die Wallfahrsweg zum Sinai,” PalästinaJahrbuch 36 (1940), pp. 5–28; cf. Frank M. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 308–317.
See Deuteronomy 2:1. The “Red Sea” here and in Numbers 14:25 (as well as in 1 Kings 9:26 and Jeremiah 49:21) is certainly a reference to the Gulf of Aqabah as generally recognized by critical scholars. See, for example, Noth, Numbers: A Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1968), p. 110.
For the linguistic evidence, see Cross, “Reuben, Firstborn of Jacob,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 100 (1988), Supplement: Lebenndige Forschung im Alten Testament, p. 63, n. 54.
For those interested in reading more, there is a new, magisterial edition of these letters by William L. Moran, Les lettres d’El Amarna, transl. Dominique Collon and Henri Cazelles (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1987). See now, The Amarna Letters, ed. Moran (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992).
See Israel Finkelstein, The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1988).
See S.M. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World, transl. J. Crookenden (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), esp. p. 152, who asserts that “confederations” among nomads “in all circumstances…emerge for military-political reasons.”
For the date of early Portions of the hymn, and the translation I quote below, see Theodore Hiebert, God of My Victory: the Ancient Hymn in Habakkuk 3, Harvard Semitic Monographs 38 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986).
For a brief exposition of my analysis of the so-called Epic sources, JE, see Cross, “The Epic Traditions of Early Israel: Epic Narrative and the Reconstruction of Early Israelite Institutions,” in The Poet and the Historian, ed. Richard E. Friedman, Harvard Semitic Studies 26 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983), pp. 13–39.
I have discussed these conflict stories in detail and their origin in the conflict between two priestly houses in the chapter, “The Priestly Houses of Early Israel,” in Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, pp. 193–215.
“The sons of Reuben the first-born of Israel (for he was the first-born; but because he polluted his father’s couch, his birthright was given to the sons of Joseph the son of Israel, so that he is not enrolled in the genealogy according to the birthright; though Judah became strong among his brothers and a prince was from him, yet the birthright belonged to Joseph)…” (1 Chronicles 5:1–2).