ÒBy its taste for barren names and numbers and technical descriptions, the
Priestly Code [P] comes to stand on the same line with Chronicles and the other
literature of Judaism which labors at an artificial revival of the old
tradition. Of a piece with this
tendency is an indescribable pedantry, belonging to the very being of the author of
the Priestly Code. He has a very
passion for classifying and drawing plans; if he has once dissected a genus into
different species, we get all the species named to us one by one every time he has occasion to
mention the genus.Ó – Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 350.