טֶרֶם

Scholars say that the word טֶרֶם does not appear in P. They are, however, incorrect, as it appears 17 times in the Pentateuch, once in P, 15 times in JE, and once that can be viewed as D or as coming from another source. The 15 occurrences in JE are
Gen 2:5 (twice), 19:4 24:15, 24:45, 27:4, 27:33, 37:18, 41:50, 45:28
Ex. 1:19, 9:30, 10:7, 12:34
Nu. 11:33

The once occurrence in P is Lev 14:36, and the final time, D or other, is Deut 31:21.

Since the word is not common, this whole phenomenon may be chalked up to coincidence. I hope to, in the near future, present my analysis from a statistical standpoint of the coincidental nature of certain words according to the DH. For now, I’ll just note that the odds of flipping a coin 16 times and getting the same result 15 or more times of the 16 times is approximately equal to 1 in 2,000. The relevance of that point will be considered in future posts.

But, coincidence is not needed here. One may make a case that the word טֶרֶם is more frequent in narrative than in law and JE is weighted heavily towards the narrative section of the Bible. That weighting is not complete, as P does have narrative sections, but more on that again in future posts. Moreover, it’s not entirely clear to me that טֶרֶם should be limited to narrative, but I can not offer any hard evidence on that question.