1979

The current standard interpretation of the conflict themes in the Jacob narratives understands the stories as more or less historiographic traditions that reflect real historical or sociological conflicts between ancient Israel and neighboring or related groups of people, or, as in the Joseph narratives, conflicts within Israel itself. This interpretation took its initial impetus from two form-critical articles of Hermann Gunkel, published in 1919 and 1922. In the first of these articles, Gunkel argued that the earliest pre-literary form of the Jacob tradition – from which he understood the rest of the tradition to have been a family tale (about the good man and his evil brothers, without any historiographie connotation). In a very early secondary development, Gunkel understood the Joseph narrative to have been reinterpreted in terms of the twelve tribes of Israel, adding to the narrative not only the names of Joseph and his brothers, but also a historiographie level of meaning heretofore absent in the narrative. Consequently, the story comes to serve as a means of expressing the conflicts and inter-relationships of the tribes of Israel. Whether the historiographie intent is etiological or historical is irrelevant to our discussion here, though it is by no means irrelevant in scholarly discussions following Gunkel.

Otto Eissfeldt, while chiding Gunkel for his conscious bypassing of the results of source criticism, nevertheless takes up and develops Gunkel's recognition of possible historiographic elements in the patriarchal narratives, which, following Gunkel, he classified under the type: tribal tale (Stammessage).