MOTIVES AND INTENTIONS IN GENESIS I

Abstract

The scholarly discussion of the Priestly creation story (Gen. 1: ι ι -2,4a) has been clouded by imprecise claims about the intentions of its author(s). Hypotheses have tended to range over a number of quite different aspects of P's intentions. There is, perhaps, no reason why there should not be a broad, umbrella concept of authorial intention, but a number of exegetical disputes can be attributed to a failure to recognize the different facets of P's intention. My main concern here is not so much to arbitrate between competing exegetical conclusions as to deal with the prior task of analysing the nature of these diverse conclusions. An analyt ical study of this kind will hopefully provide a framework within which competing arguments about authorial intention may be considered. The paper will, first, attempt to distinguish between motives and communicative intentions, secondly, investigate the problem of indirect communicative intentions, and thirdly, exam ine the extent to which genre is part of communicative intention. Although the main focus of our discussion will be intentionality, we need to begin by recognizing that a concern with P's intention has not always been the primary interest of studies on Gen. 1. Indeed, Hermann Gunkel's influential work Schopfung und Chaos in in Urzeit und Endzeit (1895) set out to show that Gen. 1 contains traces of ideas that Ρ could not have intended. The burden of Gunkel's study was to show that the text contained a great deal of traditional material, and that it was not therefore the free construction of its author.1 In order to draw this distinction between traditional material and authorial intention, Gunkel focused on vestiges of ideas that were inconsistent with Priestly