The Consuming Fire

Liane M. Feldman’s The Consuming Fire: The Complete Priestly Source from Creation to the Promised Land is a new English translation, with comments, of the “priestly narrative” (“P”) of the Pentateuch, in isolation from the rest of the Pentateuch. Here, the reader can follow the flow of the narrative, its theology, and how itt differs from other biblical sources. The translation is outstanding. Feldman skillfully substitutes standard translations:  “dwelling place” for  “Tabernacle,” “decontamination offering” for “sin offering,” and “whole burnt offering” for “holocaust sacrifice,” for examples. The comments are also extremely informative and helpful.

For Feldman, P is optimistic about “the Israelites desire and ability to fulfill God’s commands” (6), because God has a  dwelling place with the people,  so is  accessible as in no other source in the Pentateuch. Accordingly, Feldman translates “cavod” as “the presence” of God, as that which appears to the people (96, referencing Leviticus 28:2). This in place of the usual translation as the “glory” of God, which Feldman rejects as an illicit attempt to avoid anthropomorphism.

The priestly narrative is thin, missing many of the favorite stories of the Pentateuch. There is no Adam and Eve, no Cain and Abel, no tower of Babel, no animosity between Jacob and Esau, no Jacob stealing Esau’s blessing, no sale of Joseph to Egypt by his brothers, no Ten Commandments, no Golden Calf, and so on. Rather, the priestly narrative focuses on constructing a “dwelling place” for God, and on offering sacrifices. According to Feldman, this signifies, the optimistic outlook of this narrative: God is close and that the people can expiate themselves before God.

The introduction is superb. Feldman shows modesty about her scholarly decisions and the nature of the enterprise, always considering opposing views. She writes that this book is only a start and invites further scholarship. And she tells us from the beginning that the priestly narrative is a “hypothetical document.” Feldman accepts the neo-documentary hypothesis, acknowledging that it is controversial, and maintains that P existed as a stand-alone document before being redacted into the Bible. Feldman also informs us that there are some differences between scholars about just what goes into P.

Alas, there is a methodological problem with determining just what was in P.  Feldman is committed to P having stood alone as a document prior to being in the Pentateuch. Others hold that P never existed as a document and is no more than what appears spliced on top of the other Pentateuchal sources. By general agreement, P was incorporated into Bible after the other sources were already in place.

Now, suppose P existed as a standalone document. The most we can know is that parts of P made their way into the Bible. But we cannot know what never made it into the Bible. P may have had material that the redactor(s) did not include in the Pentateuch. This is especially so since P is thin about history.

Since we cannot know what parts of P were left out of the Pentateuch, the theology of P might have been broader than Feldman makes out, closer in selected points to some of the text already there. This is even more plausible if P existed only as redacted directly into the biblical text, not beholden to any separate P document. We cannot assume the redactor(s) inserted everything they could think of, or that they did not sympathize with content already included in the Pentateuchal text, and so refrained from adding to it.

For this reason, Feldman cannot easily provide instances, which she does, whre P fails to add its own text into to the Pentateuch, “most likely” because depending on what was already present in the biblical text. If this is true, the scope of P widens, perhaps even considerably. On page 68, Feldman adds on to the priestly narrative a simple verse announcing Rebekah giving birth to Esau and Jacob. As is, P has no record of the birth and yet begins to refer to the two sons. To this a footnote reads:

The announcement of the births of Esau and Jacob is missing from the priestly narrative, most likely because the non-priestly version of this story is quite detailed and dramatic. The priestly version, if it followed the pattern of other birth announcements would have been terse and to the point…(68) 

We should ask ourselves whether there might not be additional, perhaps more important, content in P that did not make its way into the Pentateuch because P was agreeing with material already in the text. And if so, there might well be more to say of P’s theology.

In P there is no record of Joseph having gone down to Egypt. Abruptly, P starts telling of Pharoah and Joseph. Here too, (p. 73) Feldman inserts into P a verse telling us s that Joseph descended to Egypt. The reason is that:

There is certainly something missing here in the priestly narrative, likely notice of Joseph’s decision to migrate to Egypt.  In the non-priestly story this is famously the tale of his brothers selling him to passing traders. There is no such priestly story, and it appears as though joseph goes to Egypt of his own accord.

Again, given that P does not mention Joseph coming to Egypt, we  do not know what might be missing here in P and why. Perhaps P found what was already there congenial and so refrained from adding to it. Or perhaps P is not missing only a single verse announcing Joseph coming to Egypt, but has its own story, a different one from the other sources, that the redactors omitted for one reason or another.

This worry pertains to the example of the Ten Commandments not appearing in P as it is currently hypothetically reconstructed. Instead, in P at Sinai God reveals only the blueprint for the dwelling place of God. But perhaps P did have some version of the Ten Commandments or the like that is not in the Bible because P depended on the Ten Commandments of the other sources for their Ten Commandments.

Feldman notes that her work is only a beginning. Let’s hope that in future she will address this problem with the same acuity, knowledge, and modesty that marks this arresting book.

Jerome Gellman is professor emeritus at Ben-Gurion University, Israel.

Jerome Yehuda Gellman

Date Of Review:

September 29, 2023