In his most recent monograph, Simeon Chavel (PhD Hebrew University of Jerusalem; currently an Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible at the University of Chicago Divinity School) explores dimensions of the priestly historiography through what he terms “oracular novella”, originally called “oracular responsa” by Micahel Fishbane. These short stories are a combination of legal innovation and short-story and oracular consultation as means for achieving new law. For each of the four oracular novella (Leviticus 25:10-23; Numbers 9:1-14, 15:32-36, 27:1-11), Chavel explores three dimensions to interpret oracular novellas: “(1) its internal coherence and poetics, its compositional history, and its tradition history; (2) its specific location within the Priestly history; and (3) its relationship with other texts in the Priestly history and elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible and lore outside them” (257). In all this, he seeks to discover the common, underlying themes and how fit within the composition of the Priestly history.
The first oracular novella he explores is Leviticus 24:10-23, the account of an Egyptian-Israelite cursing the name of God. Identifying the internal coherence of the story, he determines that the texts complexities arise not from the Egytian-Israelite roots of the one who curses, but serve as an ideological function “to explain the disturbing fact that an Israelite could come to offend the person of his deity in the most direct manner” (48). The crime, argues Chavel, is the explanation of God’s name in the fight. And based on the convergence of several telltale indications of Priestly authorship, he theorizes that the oracular novella was written by a single author who “synthesized them into a single coherent oracular novella” (80). The motive is, therefore, to formally express the relationship divine instruction and narrative form. More contextually, the oracular novella, Chavel theorizes, used to exist as the conclusion to a scroll based on how it synthesizes previous elements of Leviticus.
More here: https://thebiblicalreview.wordpress.com/2015/11/10/oracular-law-and-priestly-historiography-in-the-torah-by-simeon-chavel/
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