I have avoided JZ Smith so far, usually justifying it on the grounds that I am too focused on my actual hypothesis. I am kinds sticking to an inner-Judean concept of how Jesus came to be. Not sure if JZ Smith is my best bet there.

Parallelomania may not be so bad, but it is a quick, effortless, and effective way to dismiss parallels. It does, however, force people to find some sort of frameworks for showing evidence that texts are related.

An influenced text example might be Jeremiah. He is not a great speaker, like Moses. He leads a group in flight, like Moses. He leads them from the promised land to Egypt, inverting Moses. His message is rejected by his own people who threaten his life, like Jesus son of Nun. The vineyards are given over to the people of the land, inverting how the Israelites came into possession of fields not planted by them. Almost all of this can be seen as overarching recognition of a prior narrative, the Moses-Jesus exodus-conquest narrative. The author of Jeremiah need not have had a copy of the prior narrative to create this new narrative.

The Elijah-Elisha narrative is quite different. In writing each chapter of the Elijah narrative, it seems the author of the EEN had to have had the Moses-Jesus narrative right there. The flow of the mostly inverted retelling of the Moses-Jesus narrative is very specific, or at least far more detailed in its reliance than the Jeremiah storyline’s dependance on the Moses-Jesus narrative.

Just a thought. Both these narratives that I see as somewhat reliant of the Moses-Jesus narrative seem to invert the source text. Instead of conquest there is some sort of alternative. In Elisha the powerful prophet can rout armies without killing anyone. In Jeremiah the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, is YHWH’s servant.