Stories

What is the difference between the account of the priestly and Yahwist story of creation?

What is the difference between the account of the priestly and Yahwist story of creation?

The Priestly account corresponds roughly to Genesis, Chapter 1, while the Yahwist account corresponds to Genesis, Chapters 2. The Priestly account emphasizes man’s role as dominator and master of the earth. It places mankind far above the other created beings.

What is the Yahwist account?

Yahwist source, abbreviated as J, (labeled J after the German transliteration of YHWH), an early source that provides a strand of the Pentateuchal narrative. There are other places in which the biblical narrative covers the same ground two or more times.

What is Yahwist and priestly?

The Jahwist, or Yahwist, often abbreviated J, is one of the most widely recognized sources of the Pentateuch (Torah), together with the Deuteronomist and the Priestly source. The Jahwist is so named because of its characteristic use of the term Yahweh (German: Jahwe; Hebrew: יהוה) for God.

What is the priestly account of creation?

For in the Priestly source, creation begins with God’s unique power to construct a physical world and populate it with animate beings. It also demonstrates God’s triumphant force that controls and quiets restive rivals. But this ‘work’ does not end.

What’s the difference between the Yahwist and priestly accounts?

The Priestly account corresponds roughly to Genesis, Chapter 1, while the Yahwist account corresponds to Genesis, Chapters 2.

Why was the Priestly version inserted into the Yahwist text?

At a later point in time, this Priestly version, which was written to replace the early Yahwist text, was nevertheless inserted into the Yahwist text by a redactor. In other words, in a later interpretive endeavor to safeguard both traditions, a redactor strategically inserted the Priestly version into the Yahwist text.

What does the creation account of the Bible say?

This creation account is immediately followed by the Priestly writer’s genealogy from Adam to Noah (Gen 5:1-32) which emphasizes, in drastically contradictory terms to the Yahwist’s genealogy of increased violence, how the creation of humanity’s earliest generations all proceed from the original creation in “likeness and image.”

What was the purpose of the Yahwist creation story?

They are narratives whose purpose was to explain the origins and identity of a people as perceived through the writer’s own worldview or the particular elitist guild to which he belonged.

Share via: