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Summary Of Tanakh's Books Of Genesis And Exodus

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The Tanakh’s Books of Genesis and Exodus both serve as the foundation for Friedrich Nietzsche's ideology of “clerical castes”. However, this idea becomes more profound when one puts these books side by side with The Book of J by J, our Yahwist narrator; this then suggests joint authorship between the Yahwist and Priestly Source in the Torah supporting the documentary hypothesis. Within the Tanakh, we are able to see this mash up and the priests that Nietzsche calls out are seen through literary structural analysis, detail, and the certain choices made by the different authors in order to achieve literary purposes.
Clerical castes are precisely what they sound like: a priestly class system that inherits exclusive privilege in their respective …show more content…

J’s human being creation story in the Book of J. One can suggest that the Priestly Source writing the Book of Genesis added the story of the cosmos in order to provide meaning for the creation of man and woman and in order for their God to have a plan, whereas J isn’t interested in the cosmos because she is merely telling the story of her Yahweh in regards to human interaction. This interweaves with Nietzsche’s entire ideology on master morality because the priests writing Genesis make literary choices where they include details such as, “And God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:10-25) at the end of every one of his creations in order to formulate a general idea of “good”. In doing this the Priestly Source pursues their purpose in redaction: it is a didactic attempt to teach tradition and mold the people’s perception of good by psychologically relating it to their God, they've created a pre-conceived morality for the plebeians to associate “good”, God, and the actual priests …show more content…

The different Gods present in the Tanakh are a result of this hypothesis, evidence of the different purposes present between the different authors such as orthodoxy of rituals in the priests and mere portrayal of tradition in J. In these juxtapositions, we are able to see Nietzsche’s point in the discourse of slave morality and master morality; that the priests express their “quantum of force” l through the “seduction of language” (GM, I, §13), and not only is this inevitable but that the common people must separate the idea that their merely strong from how they actually manifest that strength. The Book of J, and the Books of Genesis and Exodus all correlate with Nietzsche’s ideology that the Torah was created under joint authorship but also that this authorship exposes the substance of master morality, how it is pursued, and the Ethos of the clerical caste in relations to their

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