Martin Noth - Influence

Influence

Noth first attracted widespread attention with "Das System der zwölf Stämme Israels" (“The Scheme of the Twelve Tribes of Israel”, 1930), positing that the Twelve Tribes of Israel did not exist prior to the covenant assembly at Shechem described in the book of Joshua.

"A History of Pentateuchal Traditions," (1948, English translation 1972) set out a new model for the composition of the Pentateuch, or Torah. Noth supplemented the dominant model of the time, the documentary hypothesis, seeing the Pentateuch as composed of blocks of traditional material accreted round some key historical experiences. He identified these experiences as "Guidance out of Egypt," "Guidance into the Arable Land," "Promise to the Patriarchs," "Guidance in the Wilderness" and "Revelation at Sinai," the details of the narrative serving to fill out the thematic outline. Later, Robert Polzin showed that some of his main conclusions were consistent with arbitrary or inconsistent use of the rules that he proposed.

Even more revolutionary and influential, quite reorienting the emphasis of modern scholarship, was "The Deuteronomistic History". In this work Noth argued that the earlier theory of several Deuteronomist redactions of the books from Joshua to Kings did not explain the facts, and instead proposed that they formed a unified "Deuteronomic history", the product of a single author working in the late 7th century.

Noth also published commentaries on all the five books of the Pentateuch: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Following Wellhausen's hypothesis, Noth proposed that the book of Joshua plus the Pentateuch originally formed a six-book work, the Hexateuch.