The idea of the human as a body-soul composite suffuses our culture. Semantics aside, soul is most commonly associated with sentience, animation and moral capacity. These are the same human properties that we think of as religion's province. Thus, it may take some acclimatizing to the priestly harping on the body. Perhaps priestly religion is distrustful of the inner man (see Num 15:39) – so will-o'-the-wispy compared with tangible, quantifiable, weighable and dissectable anatomy. In any event, there is no getting away from P's use of body as a prime socio-religious definer of people. If we find the body-religion nexus incongruous, it may be time to adjust our slant on priestly religion.

But we are straying from gender. Inevitably, gender will rear its head where there is heightened awareness of body. Still, it does not follow that women have to wind up as a caste apart, which is virtually what happens to them from P onwards. Lest the word ‘caste’ misfire, it must be stressed that P's legislation is no less humane to women than its biblical counterparts. If P promotes monogamy (a sustainable hypothesis as we saw), it would be salutary to women. Moreover, it is P that immortalizes “the ministering women who ministered at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting” (Ex 38:8); P that grants Zelophehad's daughters the right to inherit (Num 27:1–4) and, within limits, to choose their husbands (Num 36:6).