SOURCE: “Introduction: The Documentary Hypothesis and Family Romance,” in The Voice of Jacob: On the Composition of Genesis, pp. ix-xviii, Indiana University Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Brisman highlights the method by which Biblical scholars study the composition of Genesis, and suggests that literary motivations, rather than sociological ones, guided the development of the source material of Genesis into its final form.

In the King James translation, the Decalogue begins (or almost begins) with the injunction “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.” Although the Hebrew ‘al pānaî (as opposed to lěpānaî) clearly means “to my face” rather than “before my time,” there is a familiar truth represented in the English “before Me”: God's insistence on unrivaled priority of importance seems to require also a denial of antecedents. Christians and Jews may differ about whether the command is the first or the second in...