Israel Knohl's thesis in The Sanctuary of Silence is that the P source came first, and the Holiness School over-rode it. I have found that the Epistle of Jeremiah largely verifies this claim. But in pp. 204-210, Knohl tries to show that the Holiness redaction occurred in Ahaz's reign before the exile. This I cannot support.
If Knohl and I are both correct, the exiles from Jerusalem brought to Babylon a torah which the authorities had junked centuries before. Meanwhile, someone in the Yehud province snuck out of the burning Temple with the precursor to what we have on our shelves today. I think even Knohl would laugh at this idea. Why would the priests deliberately preserve an old torah, and not burn it or feed it to the mice of a geniza? Why not take the new one with them instead?
My conclusions here align with Wellhausen's (Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels 382-3), who is right about dating the Holiness Code after the exile, if not about the Code's originality. He argued that Lev 26 must refer to the exile of Judah because it cannot refer to Samaria. First, the Assyrian exile is associated with Isaiah, and the Babylonian with Jeremiah and Ezekiel. If Lev 26 predates the exile, it ought to use language closer to that of Isaiah than of Ezekiel. In fact, it (and the rest of the Holiness material) mirrors Ezekiel; and Lev 26, which is (supposedly) concerned with the Isaiah-era exile, knows nothing of Isaiah beyond a remnant returning to God and a mention of hmnym. Second (actually third, but I agree with Knohl that Wellhausen's second argument was ignorant of modern archaeology), Lev 26:42-46 evinces a hope for revival, which requires a past golden age that needs reviving. Wellhausen and I conclude that the Holiness portions of the Torah refer to the Babylonian exile and not the Assyrian.
Knohl refuted one of Wellhausen's arguments decisively, but was unable to knock down the others. In the first case, he points out that ideological links to Isaiah's prophecy are expressed in other parts of the HS (pp. 212-4) and that Lev 26 is inseparable from the rest of HS. I would agree with this, if only because Isaiah was the founder of Judaean prophecy. But we are concerned with Leviticus 26, which ought to be on Isaiah's turf. In that chapter, why did HS cite Ezekiel instead? And while it is true that "Ezekiel may have borrowed... from HS", at this time the books of the prophets were at least as stable as and more authoritative than the books of the law. I say we have the precedent of the D source - Deuteronomy - being dependent on a prophetic book: Jeremiah. The burden of proof is on Knohl: how is Ezekiel dependent on the H source?
As to the second case, Knohl writes: "just as the preexilic prophets Amos and Isaiah foresaw the revival that would take place after the exile, so too the idea of revival arose in the writings of the members of HS". I would ask, to what parts of Amos and Isaiah is Knohl referring, and how can he prove that they foresaw anything, and were not themselves riddled with after-the-fact redaction (as he has just spent 200+ pages proving happened to the Torah!).
Not withstanding his failure to refute Wellhausen, Knohl surveys the Holiness Code (Lev 17-26) and concludes that it came about as a reaction to:
Knohl sees the social polarisation reflected in Isaiah 3:13-15; 5:8 and Micah 2:2,9; 3:1-3; 6:10-12. The amorality of the priesthood is in Isaiah 1:10-27 and Micah 3:9-12; 6:1-8. Of course both had also been attacked years prior, by Amos passim. And, as every Jew and Christian knows, the rich were screwing the poor in the Hellenistic and Roman empires as well. (It's just something they do.) But we all really ought to put Second Isaiah's propaganda aside concerning the Messianic glory of Persian rule. We know from Herodotus that Cambyses was a lunatic and Darius a miser. Ionia rebelled against Persia whenever it got half a chance. So did Egypt. Closer to home Zechariah 9-13 and Malachi have little good to say about life under Persian rule either. Were any of these "Kings of Kings", regents of great Ahura-Mazda, really more enlightened than Antiochus IV, Theos Epiphanes?
Knohl is on similarly dangerous ground concerning Hezekiah's reforms. It is well known that the priests and their Chronicles thought the world of Hezekiah (just as Jeremiah and 2 Kings thought the world of Josiah). Knohl concludes that Hezekiah's court was the optimal environment for HS.
Undercutting his argument, Knohl agrees that "in order to lend legal validity to the cultic innovations, HS anchored them in the period of Moses, which was the founding period of the cult". In other words, history H1 of period P1 has an identifiable bias, including the heroic leader M1. Our source for period P2 - H2 - says its leader M2 was a true disciple of M1 and that P2 itself was a restoration of P1. Therefore period P2 is an excellent time in which to date the composition of history H1.
This is a fallacy. H2 - the books of Chronicles - is far after its own subject in time, and suffers from biases of its own. The books of Kings and Chronicles merely chose (marginally) different heroes. And the redactional history of Kings and Chronicles is yet to be written (especially given the shape the copyists left Kings in our MT... yikes). So did Hezekiah or Josiah actually enact the reforms on the scale their self-proclaimed successors said they did? Since we don't even have a check to the source documents, how do we know who said they did it, and when they wrote it, and why?
All in all, I think the history of the torah(s) is a big mess. I didn't want to get near it when I started doing these websites. The best anyone can do is to work with side issues, like seventy-line deutero-canonical pamphlets. Israel Knohl deserves accolades for untangling one of the worst problems. We are just not ready to solve the whole thing yet.
Any thoughts? e-mail me :^) zimriel@sbcglobal.net
14 Dec 2000: The germ of this essay started then, when I added to the Epistle of Jeremiah project the Epistle's halakhah. In 16-18 Dec I read Knohl and created this as an appendix. I had to move it here on 23 Dec. 17 Dec 2001: fixed up Hezekiah section.