those parts of J and E with which we have to do. These are: the presentiment of the impending overthrow of the Israelitish nationality, together with the perception of its moral necessity, the polemic against foreign deities, the denunciation of prevalent oppression and social wrong, and the absolute repudiation of cultus as a means of recovering Yahwe's favour. Not only are these conceptions absent from our documents, but it is difficult to conceive that they should have been in the air in the age when the documents were composed. For, though it is true that very different religious ideas may exist side by side in the same community, it is scarcely credible that J and E could have maintained their confident hope for the future of the nation intact against the tremendous arraignment of prophecy. This consideration gains in force from the fact that the secondary strata of E, and the redactional additions to JE, which do come within the sweep of the later prophetic movement, clearly show that the circles from which these writings emanated were sensitively responsive to the sterner message of the prophets.
§ 10. Date and place of origin—Redaction of JE.
On the relative age of J and E, there exists at present no consensus of critical opinion. Down to the appearance of Wellhausen's Geschichte Israels in 1878, scholars were practically unanimous in assigning the priority to E.[1] Since then, the opposite view has been strongly maintained by the leading exponents of the Grafian theory,[2] although a number of critics still adhere to the older position.[3] The reason for this divergence of opinion lies not in the paucity of points of comparison, but partly in the subjective nature of the evidence, and partly in the fact that such indications as exist point in opposite directions.
To take a few examples from Genesis: Ch. 161-14 (J) produces an
impression of greater antiquity than the parallel 219-19 (E); J's explana-
