Endnote 8 – Acting Like Apes

Richard Elliott Friedman (The Hidden Book in the Bible [New York: HarperCollins, 1998]) argues for a continuous source embedded in the Bible’s historical books, stretching intermittently from Genesis 2:4b through 1 Kings 2:46. In the Torah, this document corresponds to previous scholarship’s J source. All the stories I have discussed appear in Friedman’s extended J. The sex-and-violence preoccupation thus may be specific to a particular author, and indeed it is noted by Friedman.