The Book of Genesis Exile, when, torn
from the land of
19
and
birth
its
settled in a
foreign country and in a strange environment, Israel never-
continued
theless
What more
to
as
exist
a
unique,
religious
people.
natural than that in such times and Imder such
conditions, Israel's spiritual leaders should evolve a positive,
conception
universalistic
own
Israel's
drama
destined
Similar
God and
of role
in
the
mankind and of
of
great,
eternal,
human
and concepts are discernible in the prophetic writings of this same period witness such passages as Jeremiah XVIII, 7ff. XXV, 15fif. XXVII, 2ff. XXIX, 4ff., and above all the writings of the ?
universalistic
thoughts
unknown prophet of the Babylonian Exile, commonly known as Deutero-Isaiah, Isaiah XL-LV. The procedure of the authors of these hrst eleven chapters of Genesis is readily comprehended. They took a numgreat,
ber of ancient legends and folk-tales, which had been curin Israel for many generations. They also borrowed from Babylonian literature, with which the dominant Babylonian culture had acquainted them, such myths as those of creation (Genesis I) and of the flood. And they reinterpreted these stories from the standpoint of Judaism, as they had come to understand it, and wove them together and wrote them down in their present, connected, literary form.
rent
Thus they
Abraham
led
in
up,
naturally and logically,
chapters
XII-XXV,
18, with
the
to
its
story
of
central tliought
of God's selection of Israel.
Here
only incidentally do
Abraham was
sons.
really
we hear
to
virtues
God and
and
faults,
Israel's lived,
life.
his trials
and
The
life
disci])line.
his consciousness of divine selection
were recounted only
to
is
of other per-
represented by these authors as
the prototype of the people of Israel. his
Abraham
the interest of the authors narrowed.
the main figure
mirror
Not impossibly
these
the man,
of
Abraham,
his
relation
and mission,
same conditions in Abraham, may have
and may have been the actual progenitor of
Israel, or
