Graf has the credit of having, after a considerable interval,
awakened it again. In doing so, indeed, he in turn laboured under
the disadvantage of not knowing what success had been achieved in
separating the sources, and thereby he became involved in a
desperate and utterly untenable assumption. This assumption,
however, had no necessary connection with his own hypothesis, and
at once fell to the ground when the level to which Hupfeld brought
the criticism of the text had been reached. Graf originally
followed the older view, espoused by Tuch in particular, that in
Genesis the Priestly Code, with its so obtrusively bare skeleton,
is the "main stock," and that it is the Jehovist who supplements,
and is therefore of course the later. But since, on the other
hand, he regarded the ritual legislature of the middle books as
much more recent than the work of the Jehovist, he was compelled to
tear it asunder as best he could from its introduction in Genesis,
and to separate the two halves of the Priestly Code by half a
millennium. But Hupfeld had long before made it quite clear that
the Jehovist is no mere supplementer, but the author of a perfectly
independent work, and that the passages, such as Gen. xx.-xxii.,
usually cited as examples of the way in which the Jehovist worked
over the "main stock," really proceed from quite another
source,--the Elohist. Thus the stumbling-block of Graf had already
been taken out of the way, and his path had been made clear by an
unlooked-for ally. Following Kuenen's suggestion, he did not
hesitate to take the helping-hand extended to him; he gave up his
violent division of the Priestly Code, and then had no difficulty
in deducing from the results which he had obtained with respect to
the main legal portion similar consequences with regard to the
narrative part in Genesis. /1/