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.