As with the legend of the beginnings of things, so with the legend of the patriarchs:  what is essential and original is the individual element in the several stories; the connection is a secondary matter, and only introduced on the stories being collected and reduced to writing.  But in the Priestly Code the individuality of the several stories is simply destroyed:  to such an extent is the connection dwelt on.  What meaning is there in the statement that Jacob was all at once called Israel, i.e., Fight-God (xxxv. 10), if no mention is made of his wrestling with El, which was the occasion of his change of name?  Have we anything like the true history of Joseph in the Priestly Code?  Can we regard it as the original history, when the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is dismissed in a subordinate clause, as is done in xix. 29 ?  The remarkable admission has been made, 1 that it is plain from the summary

***************************************** 1.  Riehm, op.. cit. p. 292. ****************************************

manner of reporting of the Priestly Code, that the author could have told his story at much greater length, had it been consistent with the plan of his work to do so, and that this certainly points to sources where greater detail was used.  The more detailed source, however, which is thus taken for granted, need by no means, it is said, have been a written one, and least of all the Jehovistic narrative before us; on the contrary, we are told, the state of the case is best satisfied by the assumption that the author held a more detailed narrative to be unnecessary, because the oral tradition, living in the mouth of the people, was quite able to fill in the colours in his outlines and to convert his chronistic notices into living pictures.  But this is merely an attempt to elude the necessity for exactly comparing the Priestly Code and the Jehovist.  The question is, which of the two writings stands nearest to the starting-point?  Is it the one which attaches most importance to elements which are foreign to the nature of oral tradition altogether and only added in literary composition?  It would be a curious thing if the writing down of the tradition began with writing down what the legend did not contain.  What is set before us in the Priestly Code is the quintessence not of the oral tradition, but of the tradition when already written down.  And the written account of the primitive history which it employs is the Jehovistic narrative.  The order in which the popular legends are there placed here becomes the very kernel of the narrative.  There the plan was hidden behind the execution, but here it comes forward not indeed essentially changed, but sharp and accentuated, as the principal feature of the whole.