Richard Elliott

The author of E was almost certainly a male. We have seen how strong its connection is to the Levite priests of Shiloh. In ancient Israel the priesthood was strictly male. It is perhaps possible that a Levite wife or daughter could have shared these interests and written about them, but the dominantly male perspective and the concentration on male characters still suggests the likelihood of male authorship

The possibility of J’s being by a woman is thus much more likely than with E. More important, the J stories are, on the whole, much more concerned with women and much more sensitive to women than are the E stories

The weight of the evidence is still that the scribal profession in ancient Israel was male, true, but that does not exclude the possibility that a woman might have composed a work that came to be loved and valued in that land

This would put the author of J between 848 and 722. The author of E composed in Israel, which stood from 922 to 722 B.C. It is difficult to narrow it much further within this period

The most important point is that both J and E were written before the Assyrians destroyed Israel. At that time, the Assyrians carried out a deportation of the Israelite population

Also, there would of course have been many Israelites who fled south to Judah as refugees. The City of David archeological excavations in Jerusalem confirm that the population of Jerusalem grew substantially in this period

The assimilation of recently arrived Israelites into the Judean population after 722 B.C. need not have presented insurmountable difficulties in itself. The Israelites and the Judeans were kin. They spoke the same language: Hebrew. They worshiped the same God: Yahweh. They shared ancestral traditions of the patriarchs and historical traditions of exodus and wilderness. But what were they to do with two documents, each purporting to recount sacred national traditions, but emphasizing different persons and events—and occasionally contradicting each other? The solution, apparently, was to combine them

One might ask why the person or persons responsible for this did not simply exclude one or the other. Why not just make E, or more probably J, the accepted text and reject or ignore the other version?

The editor(s) clearly were not averse to applying scissors and paste to their received texts. It is therefore difficult to argue that they retained texts that they did not want simply out of reverence for documents that had been passed down

To whatever extent J and E narratives had become known by this time, to that extent it was necessary to preserve both