226 B a ruch J. Schwartz
taking up in turn each of the chapters of the Prolegomena), Kaufmann set
forth the preconceived and fallacious nature of the attempt to assign P to
the exile. Israel’s cult — its Temple and sacrifi cial system, its priesthood, its
sabbaths and holy days, and its laws of purifi cation and atonement — are an
integral part of its national life and not an exilic “aft ergrowth.” Kaufmann
demonstrated that the institutionalized worship of the God of Israel and
the legal and literary tradition that its priestly custodians cultivated were
integral, ancient, and pervasive elements in the national culture from earli-
est times. To show that the Priestly document actually precedes the Deu-
teronomic, Kaufmann had recourse to the interesting claim that P does not
even mandate the centralization of sacrifi cial worship in a single Temple,
that the Priestly legislation can be best understood as pertaining to the
time period when local shrines were still legitimate, and that its Taberna-
cle narrative is not a refl ection of the Jerusalem Temple specifi cally — and
certainly not the postexilic Second Temple. Th e remarkable infl uence of
D. Z. Hoff mann on Kaufmann’s argumentation for a preexilic context for
the Priestly Code is undeniable, despite the fact that the two scholars had
quite diff erent agendas.
Th e third pillar on which Kaufmann erected his newly constructed
history of the Pentateuchal tradition is the outcome of the other two: the
claim that the Torah literature precedes the prophetic. Here, too, it was not
a matter simply of asserting which literary fi gures drew on which others
but rather of providing a much-needed corrective for what Kaufmann saw
as a crucial misunderstanding of the nature of biblical prophecy and its
role in Israel’s religious growth. Th e prophets did not invent monotheism;
for Kaufmann they were its advocates and proponents, but their most im-
portant contribution was the new emphasis on the role of the ethical in
determining Israel’s national fate. Th e Torah literature had established the
covenant relationship but had based it primarily on religious — essentially
cultic — loyalty to YHWH; the prophets redefi ned the essential demand
of Israel’s God as being in the moral sphere. Th us, here, too, Kaufmann
did not depart from conventional criticism in seeing classical prophecy as,
in some sense, the high point of Israelite religion; yet he steadfastly main-
tained that the Torah literature was its starting point and progenitor. Here,
too, the infl uence of D. Z. Hoff mann, especially as regards the relationship
of P and Ezekiel, is recognizable.
Paradoxically, though Kaufmann was among the fi rst Jewish schol-
ars to dare to enter the fi eld of Pentateuchal studies without inhibition or
restriction, his work was for many years ignored in the main by biblical