Biblical Legal Codes Are Not the Result of Successive Redactions

"Many biblical scholars tend to see the Covenant Code as the result of a process of
literary revision and editing. This process, they say, corresponds to the development of law in ancient Israel from a primitive, family-based structure to a more sophisticated legal system in the monarchical period. This approach, however, fails to account for the literary-legal tradition in which the Covenant Code finds its heritage—namely, the cuneiform law-code tradition. When seen within that context, the ostensible discrepancies within the code do not require the kinds of source- and form-critical explanations previously offered. Rather, the Covenant Code presents itself as a coherent document, which scholars should expect to contain clear and understandable laws" (Synopsis of Chapter 4 in Law from the Tigris to the Tiber: The Writings of Raymond Westbrook, vol 1., 97).

Westbrook's observations of the legal material are parallel to my, and others', literary observations of narrative material in the Bible. The more I understand the literary context, the less I am convinced of any successive redactions in books like Genesis (the very text from which source arguments began). An original compilation of material into a unified literary work seems much more plausible given the evidence, rather than the incoherent redacted mess that is often presented as biblical literature to the academic world.