Endnote 22 – Ideology in Stone

There is almost a consensus regarding the dating of some of the Biblical laws (including purity laws) to the Iron Age. Many of the laws that are attributed to the Deuteronomist (“D”) are thought to have been written during the late part of that period. The dating of other laws, including the majority of the purity laws, however, is debatable. Most purity laws are attributed to the Priestly source (“P”), and while most scholars have dated P to the Persian period (e.g., Otto Eissfeldt, The Old Testament—An Introduction [Oxford: Blackwell, 1965], pp. 207–208; Alexander Rofe, Introduction to the Composition of the Pentateuch, [Jerusalem: Academon, 1994] [Hebrew]; see also Gordon J. Wenham, The Book of Leviticus, The New International Commentary on the Old Testament [London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1979], pp. 9–11), there is a recent tendency to date it to the Exilic period and to date some, or even most, of its content even earlier (e.g., David J.A. Clines, “Pentateuch,” in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, eds. Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan [Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1993], p. 580). Moreover, a growing number of influential scholars date P on various grounds to the Iron Age (e.g., Avi Hurvitz, “The Evidence of Language in Dating the Priestly Code,” Revue Biblique 81 (1974), pp. 24–56; Moshe Weinfeld, “Literary Creativity,” in The World History of the Jewish People, The Age of the Monarchies: Culture and Society, ed. Avraham Malamat (Jerusalem: Massada, 1979), pp. 28–33; Wenham, The Book of Leviticus, p. 13; Richard E. Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible (New York: Summit, 1987); Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, vol. 3 of the Anchor Bible Series (New York: Doubleday, 1991), pp. 12–13; Baruch J. Schwartz, The Holiness Legislation, Studies in the Priestly Code (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1999) pp. 32–33 (in Hebrew).