Brief as the Flood story is, it furnishes us with material enough to
study the characteristic differences between the sources out of
which it is composed. The Jehovist is terse, graphic, and poetic; it
is this source in which occurs the fine description of the sending
forth of the raven and the dove, viii. 6-12. It knows how to make a
singularly effective use of concrete details: witness Noah putting
out his hand and pulling the dove into the ark, and her final return
with an olive leaf in her mouth. A similarly graphic touch,
interesting also for the sidelight it throws on the Jehovist's
theological conceptions is that, when Noah entered the ark, "Jehovah
closed the door behind him," vii. 16. Altogether different is the
other source. It is all but lacking in poetic touches and concrete
detail of this kind, and such an anthropomorphism as vii. 16 would
be to it impossible. It is pedantically precise, giving the exact
year, month, and even day when the Flood came, vii. 11, and when it
ceased, viii. 13, 14. There is a certain legal precision about it
which issues in diffuseness and repetition; over and over again
occur such phrases as "fowl, cattle, creeping things, each after its
kind," vi. 20, vii. 14, and the dimensions of the ark are accurately
given. Where J had simply said, "Thou and all thy house," vii. 1,
this source says, "Thou and thy sons and thy wife and thy sons'
wives with thee," vi. 18. From the identity of interest and style
between this source and the middle part of the Pentateuch, notably
Leviticus, it is characterized as the priestly document and known to
criticism as P.

Thus, though the mainstay of the analysis, or at least the original
point of departure, is the difference in the names of the divine
Being, many other phenomena, of vocabulary, style, and theology, are