"Arguments based on reconstructing the patriarch's nomadic way of life, the personal names in Genesis, the social customs reflected in the stories, and correlation of the traditions of Genesis with the archaeological data of the Middle Bronze Age have all been found, in Part One above, to be quite defective in demonstrating an origin for the Abraham tradition in the second millennium B.C.".

This finding has implications for certain then-current strands in Biblical criticism: "Consequently, without any such effective historical controls on the tradition one cannot use any part of it in an attempt to reconstruct the primitive period of Israelite history.

"[1] Part II forms a critique of "tradition-history" or "tradition-analysis", the theory current at the time that Genesis retained traces of oral traditions dating from the 2nd millennium.

At the time Van Seters published "Abraham in History and Tradition" the dominant scholarly theory regarding the composition of the Pentateuch was the Documentary Hypothesis.

Van Seters stated his position as follows: It was the Documentary Hypothesis that created the redactor as a literary device, a deus ex machina, to make the whole theory work.