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Diagram of the Documentary Hypothesis.
| * | includes most of Leviticus |
| † | includes most of Deuteronomy |
| ‡ | "Deuteronomic history": Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, 1& 2 Kings |
The documentary hypothesis (DH) proposes that the first five books of the Old Testament (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, known collectively as the Torah or Pentateuch), represent a combination of documents from four originally independent sources. According to the influential version of the hypothesis formulated by Julius Wellhausen (1844 - 1918) these sources and the approximate dates of their composition were:
The editor who combined the sources into the final Pentateuch is known as R, for Redactor, and might have been Ezra.
According to Wellhausen, the four sources present a picture of Israel\'s religious history, which he saw as one of ever-increasing centralization and priestly power. Wellhausen\'s hypothesis became the dominant view on the origin of the Pentateuch for much of the 20th century. Most contemporary Bible experts accept some form of the documentary hypothesis,Harris, Stephen L., Understanding the Bible. Palo Alto: Mayfield. 1985. and scholars continue to draw on Wellhausen\'s terminology and insights.Wenham, Gordon. "Pentateuchal Studies Today", Themelios 22.1 (October 1996)
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Following Wellhausen, scholars speak of four major sources for the Torah.
The oldest source, concerned with narratives, making up half of Genesis and the first half of Exodus, plus fragments of Numbers. J describes a human-like God, called Yahweh (or rather YHWH) throughout, and has a special interest in the territory of the Kingdom of Judah and individuals connected with its history. J has an eloquent style. Originally composed c. 950 BC.Harris, Stephen L., Understanding the Bible. Palo Alto: Mayfield. 1985.
E parallels J, often duplicating the narratives. Makes up a third of Genesis and the first half of Exodus, plus fragments of Numbers. E describes a human-like God initially called Elohim, and Yahweh subsequent to the incident of the burning bush, at which Elohim reveals himself as Yahweh. E focuses on the Kingdom of Israel and on the Shiloh priesthood, has a moderately eloquent style. Originally composed c. 850 BC.Harris, Stephen L., Understanding the Bible. Palo Alto: Mayfield. 1985.
D takes the form of a series of sermons about the Law, and consists of most of Deuteronomy. Its distinctive term for God is YHWH Elohainu, translated in English as "The Lord our God." Originally composed c. 650-621 BC.Harris, Stephen L., Understanding the Bible. Palo Alto: Mayfield. 1985.
Preoccupied with the centrality of the priesthood, and with lists (especially genealogies), dates, numbers and laws. P describes a distant and unmerciful God, referred to as Elohim. P partly duplicates J and E, but alters details to stress the importance of the priesthood. P consists of about a fifth of Genesis, substantial portions of Exodus and Numbers, and almost all of Leviticus. P has a low level of literary style. Composed c. 550-400 BC.Harris, Stephen L., Understanding the Bible. Palo Alto: Mayfield. 1985.
The redaction of the Torah began with the combination of J and E to create JE, c 750. The addition of D created JED. The redactors associated with P put the work into its final form c 400.
Prior to the 17th century both Jews and Christians accepted the traditional view that Moses had written down the Torah under the direct inspiration—even dictation—of God. A few rabbis and philosophers asked how Moses could have described his own death, or given a list of the kings of Edom before those kings ever lived, but none doubted the truth of the tradition, for the purpose of scholarship "was to underline the antiquity and authority of the teaching in the Pentateuch, not to demonstrate who wrote the books."Gordon Wenham. "Exploring the Old Testament: Vol. 1, the Pentateuch," p160 (2003).
In 1651 Thomas Hobbes, in chapter 33 of Leviathan, marshaled a battery of evidence that the Pentateuch could not all be by Moses, noting passages such as Deut 34:6 ("no man knoweth of his sepulchre to this day," implying an author living long after Moses\' death); Gen 12:6 ("and the Canaanite was then in the land," implying an author living in a time when the Canaanite was no longer in the land); and Num 21:14 (referring to a previous book of Moses\' deeds), and concluded that none of these could be by Moses. Others, including Isaac de la Peyrère, Baruch Spinoza, Richard Simon, and John Hampden came to the same conclusion, but their works were condemned, several of them were imprisoned and forced to recant, and an attempt was made on Spinoza\'s life.For a brief overview of the Enlightenment struggle between scholarship and authority, see Richard Elliott Friedman, "Who Wrote the Bible?", pp.20-21 (hardback original 1987, paperback HarperCollins edition 1989).
In 1753 Jean Astruc printed (anonymously) Conjectures sur les memoires originaux, dont il parait que Moses s\'est servi pour composer le livre de la Genèse ("Conjectures on the original accounts of which it appears Moses availed himself in composing the Book of Genesis"). Astruc\'s motive was to refute Hobbes and Spinoza - "the sickness of the last century," as he called their work. To do this, he applied to Genesis the tools of literary analysis which scholars were already using with Classical texts such as the Iliad to sift variant traditions and arrive at the most authentic text. He began by identifying two markers which seemed to identify consistent variations, the use of "Elohim" or "YHWH" (Yahweh) as the name for God, and the appearance of duplicated stories, or doublets, such as the two accounts of the creation in the first and second chapters of Genesis and the two accounts of Sarah and a foreign king (Gen.12 and Gen.20). He then ruled columns and assigned verses to these, the "Elohim" verses in one column, the "YHWH" verses in another, and the members of the doublets in their own columns beside these. The four parallel columns thus constructed contained two long narratives and two short ones. Astruc suggested that these were the original documents used by Moses, and that Genesis as written by Moses had looked just like this, four parallel accounts meant to be read separately. According to Astruc, a later editor had combined the four columns into a single narrative, creating the confusions and repetitions noted by Hobbes and Spinoza.Gordon Wenham, "Exploring the Old Testament: Volume 1, the Pentateuch", (2003), PP.162-163.
The tools adapted by Astruc for biblical source criticism were vastly developed by subsequent scholars, most of them German. From 1780 onwards Johann Gottfried Eichhorn extended Astruc\'s analysis beyond Genesis to the entire Pentateuch, and by 1823 he had concluded that Moses had had no part in writing any of it. In 1805 Wilhelm de Wette concluded that Deuteronomy represented a third independent source. About 1822 Friedrich Bleek identified Joshua as a continuation of the Pentateuch via Deuteronomy, while others identified signs of the Deuteronomist in Judges, Samuel, and Kings. In 1853 Hermann Hupfeld suggested that the Elohist was really two sources and should be split, thus isolating the Priestly source; Hupfeld also emphasized the importance of the Redactor, or final editor, in producing the Torah from the four sources. Not all the Pentateuch was traced to one or other of the four sources: numerous smaller sections were identified, such as the Holiness Code contained in Leviticus 17 to 26.Don Closson (Probe Ministries), "Did Moses Write the Pentateuch?", and Richard Elliott Friedman, "Who Wrote the Bible?", pp.22-24.
Scholars also attempted to identify the sequence and dates of the four sources, and to propose who might have produced them, and why. De Wette had concluded in 1805 that none of the Pentateuch was composed before the time of David; Since Spinoza, D was connected with the priests of the Temple in Jerusalem during the reign of Josiah in 621 BC; beyond this, scholars argued variously for composition in the order PEJD, or EJDP, or JEDP: the subject was far from settled.Richard Elliott Friedman, "Who Wrote the Bible?", p.25., and Alexander Rofe, "Introduction to the Composition of the Pentateuch", (1999), ch.2. See also Raymond F. Surberg, "Wellhausianism Evaluated After a Century of Influence", section II, The Contribution of the Prolegomena from a Critical Viewpoint.
In 1876/77 Julius Wellhausen published Die Komposition des Hexateuch ("The Composition of the Hexateuch"), in which he set out the four-source hypothesis of Pentateuchal origins; this was followed in 1878 by Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels ("Prolegomena to the History of Israel"), a work which traced the development of the religion of the ancient Israelites from an entirely secular, non-supernatural standpoint. Wellhausen contributed little that was new,[citation needed] but sifted and combined the previous century of scholarship into a coherent, comprehensive theory on the origins of the Torah and of Judaism, one so persuasive that it dominated scholarly debate on the subject for the next hundred years.[citation needed]
Wellhausen\'s criteria for distinguishing between sources were those developed by his predecessors over the previous century: style (including but not exclusively the choice of vocabulary); divine names; doublets and occasionally triplets. J was identified with a rich narrative style, E was somewhat less eloquent, P\'s language was dry and legalistic. Vocabulary items such as the names of God, or the use of Horeb (E and D) or Sinai (J and P) for God\'s mountain; ritual objects such as the ark, mentioned frequently in J but never in E; the status of judges (never mentioned in P) and prophets (mentioned only in E and D); the means of communication between God and man (J\'s God meets in person with Adam and Abraham, E\'s God communicates through dreams, P\'s can only be approached through the priesthood): all these and more formed the toolkit for discriminating between sources and allocating verses to them.Richard Elliott Friedman, "The Bible with Sources Revealed", 2003; and Reading the Old Testament: Source Criticism.
11th century manuscript of the Hebrew Bible with Targum
Wellhausen\'s starting point for dating the sources was the event described in 2 Kings 22:8-20: a "scroll of Torah" (which can be translated "instruction" or "law") is discovered in the Temple in Jerusalem by the High Priest Hilkiah in the eighteenth year of king Josiah, who had ascended the throne as a child of eight. What Josiah reads there causes him to embark on a campaign of religious reform, destroying all altars except that in the Temple, prohibiting all sacrifice except at the Temple, and insisting on the exclusive worship of Yahweh. In the 4th century Jerome had speculated that the scroll may have been Deuteronomy; de Wette in 1805 suggested that it might have been only the law-code at Deuteronomy 12-26 that Hilkiah found, and that he might have written it himself, alone or in collaboration with Josiah. The Deuteronomistic historian certainly held Josiah in high regard: 1 Kings 13 names him as one who will be sent by Yahweh to slaughter the apostate priests of Beth-el, in a prophecy allegedly made 300 years before his birth. Richard Elliott Friedman, "Who Wrote the Bible?" esp. p.188 ff.
With D anchored in history, Wellhausen proceeded to place the remaining sources around it. He accepted Karl Heinrich Graf\'s conclusion that the sources were written in the order J-E-D-P. This was contrary to the general opinion of scholars at the time, who saw P as the earliest of the sources, "the official guide to approved divine worship", and Wellhausen\'s sustained argument for a late P was the great innovation of the Prolegomena.Gordon Wenham, "Exploring the Old Testament", p.171. J and E he ascribed to the early monarchy, approximately 950 BCE for J and 850 BCE for E; P he placed in the early Persian post-Exilic period, around 500 BCE. His argument for these dates was based on what was seen in his day as the natural evolution of religious practice: in the pre-and early monarchic society described in Genesis and Judges and Samuel, altars were erected wherever the Patriarchs or heroes such as Joshua chose, anyone could offer the sacrifice, and portions were offered to priests as the one offering the sacrifice chose; by the late monarchy sacrifice was beginning to be centralized and controlled by the priesthood, while pan-Israelite festivals such as Passover were instituted to tie the people to the monarch in a joint celebration of national history; in post-Exilic times the temple in Jerusalem was firmly established as the only sanctuary, only the descendants of Aaron could offer sacrifices, festivals were linked to the calendar instead of to the seasons, and the schedule of priestly entitlements was strictly mandated.This is a highly schematised account of a complex argument: see Gordon Wenham, "Exploring the Old Testament", pp.167-171.
The four were combined by a series of Redactors (editors), first J with E to form a combined JE, then JE with D to form a JED text, and finally JED with P to form JEDP, the final Torah. Taking up a scholarly tradition stretching back to Spinoza and Hobbes, Wellhausen named Ezra, the post-Exilic leader who re-established the Jewish community in Jerusalem at the behest of the Persian emperor Cyrus in 458 BC, as the final redactor
For much of the 20th century Wellhausen\'s hypothesis formed the framework within which the origins of the Pentateuch were discussed, and even the Vatican, a staunch critic of secular biblical scholarship in the 19th century, came to accept the methods, if not the findings, of source and form criticism."Let the interpreter then, with all care and without neglecting any light derived from recent research, endeavor to determine the peculiar character and circumstances of the sacred writer, the age in which he lived, the sources written or oral to which he had recourse and the forms of expression he employed." Encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, 1943. Some important modifications were introduced, notably by Albrecht Alt and Martin Noth, who argued for the oral transmission of ancient core beliefs - guidance out of Egypt, conquest of the Promised Land, covenants, revelation at Sinai/Horeb, etc.Albecht Alt, "The God of the Fathers", 1929, and Martin Noth, "A History of Pentateuchal Traditions", 1948. Simultaneously, the work of the American school of biblical archaeologists such as William F. Albright and Cyrus Gordon seemed to confirm that even if Genesis and Exodus were only given their final form in the first millennium BC, they were still firmly grounded in the material reality of the second millennium."Archaeology and the Patriarchs", an overview of archaeology and the Patriarchal period. The overall effect of such refinements was to aid the wider acceptance of the basic hypothesis, by reassuring believers that even if the final form of the Pentateuch was not due to Moses himself, and "despite the late date of the Pentateuch, we can nevertheless recover a credible picture of the period of Moses and even of the patriarchal age. Hence opposition to the documentary hypothesis gradually waned, and by the mid-twentieth century it was almost universally accepted."Gordon Wenham, "Pentateuchal Studies Today", Themelios 22.1 (October 1996)
The collapse of the consensus began in the late 1960s, with the spread of new scholarly tools and a growing recognition of the limitations of Wellhausen\'s analytical framework. The result has been proposals which modify the documentary model so far as to become unrecognizable, or even abandon it entirely in favour of alternative models which see the Pentateuch as the product of a single author, or as the end-point of a process of creation by the entire community. Thus, to mention some of the major figures from the last decades of the 20th century, H. H. Schmid almost completely eliminated J, allowing only a late Deuteronomical redactor;H. H. Schmid, "Der sogenannte Jahwist" ("The So-called Yahwist"), 1976. Rolf Rendtorff and Erhard Blum saw the Pentateuch developing from the gradual accretion of small units into larger and larger works, a process which removes both J and E, and, significantly, implied a supplemental rather than a documentary model for Old Testament origins;Rolf Rendtdorff, The Problem of the Process of Transmission in the Pentateuch, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement 89, 1990. and John Van Seters, using a similar model, envisaged an ongoing process of supplementation in which later authors modified earlier compositions and changed the focus of the narratives.John Van Seters, "Abraham in History and Tradition", 1975. With the idea of identifiable sources disappearing, the question of dating also changes its terms. The most radical contemporary proposal has come from Thomas L. Thompson, who suggests that the final redaction of the Torah occurred as late as the early Hasmonean monarchy.[citation needed]
The challenge to the Wellhausen consensus was perhaps best summed up by R. N. Whybray, who pointed out that of the various possible models for the composition of the Pentateuch - documentary, supplemental and fragmentary - the documentary was the most difficult to demonstrate, for while the supplemental and fragmentary models propose relatively simple, logical processes and can account for the unevenness of the final text, the process envisaged by the DH is both complex and extremely specific in its assumptions about ancient Israel and the development of its religion. Whybray went on to assert that these assumptions were illogical and contradictory, and did not offer real explanatory power: why, for example, should the authors of the separate sources avoid duplication, while the final redactor accepted it? "Thus the hypothesis can only be maintained on the assumption that, while consistency was the hallmark of the various [source] documents, inconsistency was the hallmark of the redactors!"R.N. Whybray, "The Making of the Pentateuch", 1987, quoted in Gordon Wenham, "Exploring the Old Testament", 2003, pp.173-174.
Richard Elliott Friedman\'s "Who Wrote the Bible?" (1987) and "The Bible with Sources Revealed" (2003) were in essence an extended response to Whybray, explaining, in terms based on the history of ancient Israel, how the redactors could have tolerated inconsistency, contradiction and repetition, indeed had it forced upon them by the historical setting in which they worked. Friedman\'s classic four-source division differed from Wellhausen in accepting Yehezkel Kaufmann\'s dating of P to the reign of Hezekiah;Yehezkel Kaufmann, "The Religion of Israel, from Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile", 1961. this in itself is no small modification of Wellhausen, for whom a late dating of P was essential to his model of the historical development of Israelite religion. Friedman argued that J appeared a little before 722 BCE, followed by E, and a combined JE soon after that. P was written as a rebuttal of JE (c. 715-687 BCE), and D was the last to appear, at the time of Josiah (c. 622 BCE), before the Redactor, whom Friedman identifies as Ezra, collated the final Torah.
Antony F. Campbell and Mark A. O’Brien\'s "Sources of the Pentateuch" subsequently presented the Pentateuchal text sorted into continuous sources following the divisions of Martin Noth. But while the terminology and insights of the documentary hypothesis continue to inform scholarly debate about the origins of the Pentateuch, it no longer dominates that debate as it did for the first two thirds of the 20th century.[citation needed]
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