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10 The Documentary Hypothesis

Baruch J. Schwartz holds the J. L. Magnes Chair in Biblical Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

• Published: 12 May 2021
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The Documentary Hypothesis was the most influential and widespread theory of the composition of the Pentateuch for most of the twentieth century. This essay examines the literary indicators that underlie the Documentary Hypothesis, the development of the theory, and its salient claims and features.

This chapter deals with the theory that four pre-existing, independent literary works, referred to as sources or documents, were combined to form the canonical Torah: the theory known as the Documentary Hypothesis. The discussion is confined to the literary evidence leading to the realization that the Torah is the work of more than one author, the grounds for the four-source hypothesis, the overall character of the sources themselves, and the manner in which they appear to have been combined. How the sources came into existence and the historical circumstances that gave rise to their ultimately being combined are not discussed, nor is a detailed description of each source provided. The role of the Documentary Hypothesis within Biblical scholarship and the different forms it has assumed over the centuries are also beyond the scope of the discussion. 1

The Documentary Hypothesis, long considered to be the standard explanation for the formation of the Torah and still accepted by many scholars, is grounded not in any scholarly desire to discover multiple sources in the text, but on the existence of literary phenomena for which the most economical and convincing explanation is that the Torah is not a unified text, but is rather the product of multiple authorial and editorial hands. The indications that the Torah is a composite literary work may be classified into four types: redundancy, contradiction, discontinuity, and inconsistency of terminology and style. Three of these—redundancy, contradiction and linguistic inconsistency—are found both in the narrative and in the legal portions of the Torah; the fourth, discontinuity, is found principally in the narrative sections. As one might expect, there is some overlap between these categories, and in many cases a single discrepancy may fall into more than one of them. Still it is essential to distinguish the four phenomena from one another in order to gain a proper understanding of their contours and their import.

A case of redundancy in the Torah is essentially an instance of unexplained and unwarranted repetition of what has already been said. In the narrative portions of the Torah, redundancy is present whenever each of two or more passages purports to provide the one and only account of an event that can logically have occurred only once. In the legal sections of the Torah, redundancy is a case in which two or more passages purport to provide the legal stipulation that is to be fulfilled in a given, uniquely defined situation.

This phenomenon is extremely widespread. The creation of the cosmos, of humans, and of animals is described twice (Gen 1:1–2:4a and 2:4b–25); the establishment of the covenant with Abraham is recounted twice (Gen 15:1–21 and 17:1–27); the changing of Jacob’s name to Israel is related twice (Gen 32:28–29 and 35:9–10); the divine name, Yahweh, is revealed to Moses twice (Exod 3:13–15 and 6:2–9), among many others. Redundancy is also rife within individual narratives. For example, in the course of the story of the flood (Gen 6:5–9:17), the narrator twice describes the evil that spurred Yahweh’s decision to bring about the flood (Gen 6:5–6 and 6:11–12); we read twice that Yahweh informed Noah of his decision (6:17 and 7:4); twice we learn that he conveyed his instructions to Noah (6:18–21 and 7:1–3), and more. In the course of the account of Moses’s commissioning (Exod 3:1–4:17), Yahweh twice mentions that he has seen the affliction of his people and has decided to act (3:7–8 and 3:9); Moses twice expresses his objections to having the task imposed upon him (3:11, 13 and 4:1, 10, 13); twice Yahweh responds to his reservations (3:12, 14–15 and 4:2–9, 11–12, 14–16), and so forth. In all these cases and innumerable others, the individual passages provide no recognition that the event itself has already transpired or that it might not be the only such event. Every such narrative, and every similarly duplicated subsection of a repetitive narrative text, presents itself as the one and only account of the event described, as does its counterpart.

Turning to the legal portions of the Torah: twice the Israelites are commanded with regard to permitted and forbidden foods (Lev 11 and Deut 14:3–21), the prohibition of usury (Lev 25:35–37 and Deut 23:20–21), the sustenance of the poor from the produce of one’s field and vineyard (Lev 19:9–10 and Deut 24:19–21), the sabbatical year (Exod 23:10–11 and Lev 25:1–7, 20–22), and more. Three times they are given the laws pertaining to the manumission of slaves (Exod 21:1–11, Lev 25:39–46 and Deut 15:12–18), talionic restitution (Exod 21:22–25, Lev 24:17–22, and Deut 19:21), murder, manslaughter and asylum (Exod 21:12–13, Num 35:9–34, and Deut 19:1–13), and more. They are commanded with regard to the annual festivals four times (Exod 23:14–19, Exod 34:18–26, Lev 23:1–44, Deut 16:1–17; an additional section in Num 28–29, dedicated to the unique sacrifices offered on each festival day, complements the law in Lev 23). Just as in the narrative portions of the Torah, each of these passages is always presented as the sole and complete account of the legislation that it claims to convey, never as an addendum, continuation, or even emphatic reiteration of one or more of its counterparts. They thus compete with one another for the status of the authoritative promulgation of the command in question (see Deut 4:2, 13:1). Furthermore, these competing passages appear in completely different places in the Torah—a fact that cannot be explained reasonably under the assumption that the Torah is a unified work.

Not every case of formal or substantive similarity should be mistaken for redundancy. A single storyteller may recount two similar episodes, if he maintains that they both occurred and there is no categorical impossibility for this to have been so. For example, even if Abram’s wife Sarai was abducted by Pharaoh (Gen 12:10–20), she may also have been abducted later by Abimelech (Gen 20:1–18), and Isaac’s wife Rebecca may have subsequently been abducted by Abimelech as well (26:6–11) since, despite the similarity, the three accounts do not purport to be reports of a single event. Only mutually exclusive competition between two accounts constitutes redundancy.

The most conspicuous and serious instance of redundancy is not limited to two or three competing passages but is woven through the entire Torah. This is the account of how Israel received its laws. The story of the proclamation of the Decalogue and the establishment of a covenant at Horeb (Exod 19:2b–9a, 16aα2–17, 19; 20—23; 24:3–8, 11bβ–15a; 32:1–8, 10–25, 30–35; 33:6–11; 34:1, 4, 28) relates that the laws were written down and that the covenant that Yahweh made with the Israelites was concluded “on the basis of these words” (Exod 24:8), i.e. the written text of the laws. With regard to these laws the people said: “All that Yahweh has spoken (i.e. Exod 20:19–23:33) we will faithfully do” (Exod 24:7), and the story concludes with no expectation of additional laws to be given at some future time. This account thus purports to be the sole report of the lawgiving. Nonetheless, the reader is also presented with a second story of a covenant made at the same time, in the course of which Moses ascended a mountain—Sinai, according to this account—to hear the attributes of Yahweh’s mercy (Exod 19:9b–16aα1, 18, 20–25; 24:1–2, 9–11bα; 32:9, 26–29; 33:1–5, 12–23; 34:2–3, 5–27). Here too, a corpus of laws is given to Moses (Exod 34:11–26), he is commanded to record them in writing, and it is they that are referred to in the statement: “In accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel” (Exod 34:27). This second account shows no signs of continuing, adding to, affirming, replacing, or denying the first; it too is presented as the one and only story of the conclusion of a covenant between Yahweh and Israel, in the course of which Yahweh conveyed his laws to Moses.

Interspersed between these two stories and extending over the long text that follows, a third account emerges, according to which Moses is told that the lawgiving will commence only after Yahweh’s portable dwelling, the tabernacle, has been constructed at the foot of Mount Sinai. Only then, by means of divine speech emanating from between the cherubim on the cover of the ark, will Yahweh communicate to Moses “all that I will command you concerning the Israelite people” (Exod 25:22). This plan too is then carried out exactly as promised (see Schwartz 1996a ). Just as neither of the other two stories offers any intimation that the legislation it contains is only part of a larger body of laws and that more legislation will follow, this third story contains no indication that the legislation it contains (which extends throughout Leviticus and Numbers) is intended to supplement what preceded. All three accounts ignore each other’s existence entirely, and the author of one cannot be the author of either of the other two.

The same goes for the account of the lawgiving given in Moses’s second valedictory oration. Moses affirms (Deut 5:19–6:3) that the full body of Yahweh’s commandments was given to him at Horeb “on the day of the Assembly” (Deut 9:10; 10:4; 18:16), that is, on the same day that the Decalogue was proclaimed for the entire Israelite people to hear, but he goes on to relate that he did not convey this legislation to the people at the time but has rather kept it to himself until the present, four decades later (see Weinfeld 1991 , 236–327; Nelson 2002 , 73–85; Vogt 2006 , 113–159). This thus constitutes a fourth independent and complete report of how and when Yahweh’s laws were conveyed to the Israelites.

Not only do we possess four independent accounts of the time, manner, and location of the lawgiving, each alleging to be the only such account, but each of the four also includes its own version of the laws themselves, each version purporting to be the laws and statutes commanded by Yahweh through the agency of Moses. The existence of four mutually ignorant legal corpora on the one hand, and of four mutually exclusive stories functioning as distinct narrative frameworks for them on the other, is incontrovertible evidence that the writings of several authors have been incorporated in the Torah.

Contradictions

Competing reports of a single event that cannot logically be deemed to have occurred more than once should not be understood as the work of a single author precisely because they are set side by side in a single literary work without explanation; so too the numerous contradictions that appear in the Torah cannot be the work of a single hand. Defined precisely, a contradiction in the narrative portion of the Torah is an instance in which incompatible factual claims are made with regard to an event that can only have occurred once. For instance, it emerges from several passages in the story of Abraham that the patriarch’s birthplace is Aram-naharaim (Gen 24:4, 10). Yet in other equally explicit passages, it is asserted that he originated from Ur of the Chaldeans (e.g. Gen 15:7). These are not two names for one place, and one person cannot have two countries of origin; this is therefore a blatant contradiction. Similarly, in the story of the men sent by Moses to explore the land of Canaan (Num 13–14), it is expressly stated that Caleb was the only one of the scouts to dissent from the negative report given by the rest of the delegation (13:30; cf. 14:24), but it is stated no less explicitly that both Caleb and Joshua dissented (14:6–9). These two claims are irreconcilable. Was Noah commanded to take two of each animal aboard the ark, or only two of each impure animal and seven pairs of each pure species? Taken at its word, the Torah provides no unequivocal answer to this question, since both claims are made unambiguously (Gen 6:19–20; 7:9 vs. 7:2–3, 8; see Schwartz 2007 , 147).

In a certain sense, all instances of redundancy in the Torah are also contradictions, since whenever we encounter two or more reports of a single event there are also irreconcilable discrepancies between them. Was the human race created “male and female” simultaneously and at the end of the process of creation, as stated in the first account of Creation (Gen 1:27; 5:2), or was woman created after man, from one of his ribs, at the beginning of the process, as related in the second story (2:21–25)? Here too the Torah relates two contradictory events and makes no effort to resolve them. Another example: when Moses received the laws from Yahweh, did he present them to the people immediately, as stated in the account of the covenant at Horeb (Exod 24:3)? Or did he keep them to himself for forty years and disclose them to the Israelites only just prior to his death, as he claims in Deuteronomy (Deut 4:14; 5:19–6:3; 11:32–12:1)? In these instances and in many others (see e.g. Schwartz 2012 ), repetition and contradiction intersect. The contradictions are to be found in the particulars of the repeated accounts, so that two competing narratives serving only one narrative purpose contradict each other at every turn.

One particularly well-known example of contradiction in the narrative portion of the Torah is that concerning the name of Israel’s deity, Yahweh. When biblical scholarship was still in its infancy, early critics noticed that among the many events that are inexplicably reported twice are several in which the two reports refer to the deity differently, both in the quoted speech of the characters and in the narrator’s own words, with one version using the generic noun Elohim (“god” or “God”), with or without the definite article, and the other using the tetragrammaton, Yahweh. At first, some critics imagined that this issue was simply a matter of differing style, and as such could be used, like other stylistic peculiarities, to distinguish between two different narrators, with each presumed to have had a preference for one or another of the two divine appellations. Occasionally even later critics have continued, erroneously, to assume this. However, as has become abundantly clear over time, these separate sets of narratives differ not on a matter of nomenclature or terminology but rather on a point of historical fact : the twofold question of when in history the tetragrammaton was revealed and to whom. One set of stories maintains unambiguously that the name Yahweh was known to all of humanity and was in common use throughout humankind since the beginning of time (Gen 4:1, 26), while according to another it is equally undisputed that this name was completely unknown until the lifetime of Moses, when it was first revealed, and even then only to him, and through him, to the Israelites (Exod 3:13–15; 6:1–3). This is no stylistic inconsistency; it too, like the examples above, is a substantive contradiction in the storyline itself. In this case, the contradiction is not localized within two identifiable, conflicting passages, but is rather spread out over numerous episodes, where entire narrative threads reflect conflicting historical assumptions.

The contradictions in the legal portion of the Torah are just as numerous and just as irreconcilable. The following are but a few examples. The command in Exodus states emphatically that the pesaḥ ritual must be performed with a sheep or a goat and that the animal’s flesh must be roasted rather than boiled or eaten uncooked (Exod 12:3–5, 8–9), but the corresponding command in Deuteronomy includes cattle among the animals that may be sacrificed and specifies that the flesh is in fact to be boiled (Deut 16:2, 7). Two legal passages mandate that Hebrew slaves be freed after six years of service (Exod 21:2; Deut 15:12–18), while a third stipulates that they be freed only in the Jubilee year (Lev 25:39–43). In Deuteronomy we read that the harvest pilgrimage, sukkôt , lasts only seven days (Deut 16:13–15); Leviticus and Numbers mandate an eighth day (Lev 23:33–36; Num 29:35–38). The law in Leviticus permits the slaughter of sheep and cattle for sacrificial offerings only, ruling out the non-sacrificial consumption of the flesh of these quadrupeds as an eternal, unchanging statute (Lev 17:3–7); Deuteronomy stipulates that after reaching Canaan, the Israelites will be permitted to slaughter sheep and cattle non-sacrificially and consume their flesh with impunity (Deut 12:15, 20–22; see Schwartz 1996b ; Chavel 2012).

In the most blatant case of contradiction in the narrative portion of the Torah, which is of course the aforementioned existence of mutually exclusive and conflicting accounts of how Israel received Yahweh’s laws, with each account enumerating the laws that its author maintains were given, narrative and legal inconsistency reach their crucial point of intersection. Each narrator claims that the laws that he cites, and they alone, constitute the legislation imparted by Yahweh to Israel through Moses. It follows that every case of contradiction between laws is also a narrative contradiction , with one narrator claiming that, in the course of historical time, Yahweh commanded something, with another claiming that he commanded precisely the opposite.

Discontinuity

Although the question of literary flow is at times significant even in legal passages, discontinuity is most apparent in the narrative portions of the Torah. Yet it should be stressed from the outset that even in narrative, not every digression from the main plotline constitutes evidence of multiple authorship. Literary techniques such as parenthesis, flashback, tangential expansion, internal monologue, simultaneity, summary, recapitulation, editorializing, cross-reference, elaboration, and resumptive repetition (Kuhl 1952 ; Talmon 1978 ), which can be found in all literature, are among the recognized hallmarks of biblical prose and do not serve as indications of multiple authorship or strata of redaction. In fact, as the most basic tools of the biblical narrator, they can and should be seen as evidence of literary unity. They embody authorial planning, logic, and intentionality; they can be discerned with common literary-critical tools and their function in crafting the story’s form and meaning is apparent to the trained reader. The discontinuities that serve as evidence for the composite nature of the Torah are of an entirely different sort. They are cases in which the thread of narration is first cut off, as if in mid-air, and what follows appears to be unconnected, often contradicting or needlessly repeating what preceded it, reporting another event whose relationship to the first is unclear, drawing on assumptions that are at odds with those of the initial story and incomprehensible as its natural continuation, and then, at some later point in the text, the thread of the first narrative picks up exactly where it left off.

The phenomenon can be illustrated through an attempt to make sense of the account of the plague of blood reported to have struck the Egyptians (Exod 7:14–25; for the analysis, cf. Greenberg 1972 , 65–75). The story begins with Yahweh’s instructions to Moses:

14 And Yahweh said to Moses, “Pharaoh’s heart is heavy; he has refused to let the people go. 15 Go to Pharaoh in the morning, as he is coming out to the water, and station yourself before him at the edge of the Nile, taking with you the rod that turned into a snake. 16 Say to him, ‘Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews, sent me to you to say, “Let My people go that they may worship Me in the wilderness,” but you have paid no heed until now. 17 Thus says Yahweh, “By this you shall know that I am Yahweh.” See, I shall strike the water in the Nile with the rod that is in my hand, and it will be turned into blood, 18 and the fish in the Nile will die. The Nile will stink so that the Egyptians will find it impossible to drink the water of the Nile.’”

With these instructions given clearly and unambiguously, it stands to reason that the reader will next be informed of their prompt implementation. However, at this point, inexplicably, we are met by another set of instructions, clearly and unambiguously contradicting the first:

19 And Yahweh said to Moses, “Say to Aaron: Take your rod and hold out your arm over the waters of Egypt—its rivers, its canals, its ponds, all its bodies of water—that they may become blood; there shall be blood throughout the land of Egypt, even in vessels of wood and stone.”

According to these new instructions, Moses is not to confront Pharaoh or to threaten him with the approaching plague. Rather, Aaron is to be ordered to bring about the plague with his own rod, not Moses with his, whereupon not only the water in the Nile but all of the water in Egypt, including that stored in vessels (see Targum Onqelos, Rashi, and ibn Ezra), will become blood. Did Yahweh change his mind? If so, why? If not, what is the purpose of the second set of instructions, and why is it not stated in the text? The Torah passes over these questions in silence.

After the two sets of instructions, we read of their implementation:

21aα1 Moses and Aaron did so, just as Yahweh commanded.

But Yahweh issued two contradictory commands. Which did they follow?

21aα2–b He lifted up the rod and struck the water in the Nile in the sight of Pharaoh and his courtiers, and all the water in the Nile was turned into blood, 21a and the fish in the Nile died. The Nile stank so that the Egyptians could not drink water from the Nile.

How is one to explain the transition from the first part of verse 20, which speaks in the plural of Moses and Aaron, and the remainder, which speaks in the singular (“he lifted up”)? Who is the subject of the second part of the verse, carrying out the instructions? Apparently Moses, because it seems to be the initial instructions, in which he was told to lift his own rod, that are being carried out. The precise phrasing of the initial instructions is even echoed in this report of what transpired. But if so, what of the second instructions? Why were they issued? Furthermore, how did Moses and Aaron know which of the two sets of directives to carry out?

The text of the Torah answers none of these questions, but it does state the outcome of the event:

21b The blood was throughout the land of Egypt.

This statement conforms to the second set of instructions, but has nothing to do with the first. If there was indeed blood “throughout the land of Egypt,” exactly as predicted in the second set of instructions, why does the beginning of the verse single out the water in the Nile? Here is a case of discontinuity within a single verse. This problem too is left unaddressed.

The Torah describes Pharaoh’s reaction to the plague thus:

22b Pharaoh’s heart stiffened and he did not heed them, as Yahweh had spoken.

As set forth in the prologue to the plague story (Exod 7:1–7), Yahweh resolved in advance that, in order to maximize the number of signs and wonders in his impending display of might, he would “harden Pharaoh’s heart” (7:3), that is, embolden him, so that he would overcome his dread (cf. Deut 2:30) and refuse to submit to Moses’s and Aaron’s demand to free the Israelites. As the story develops, and as is repeated in its concluding summary (11:9–10), this intent is carried out to the letter, and the description of Pharaoh’s reaction to the blood here is fully consistent with the plan. Pharaoh becomes over-confident, his impaired judgment inducing him to pay no heed to Moses and Aaron, precisely as was announced in advance and just as he does repeatedly throughout the story (8:15; 9:12, 35; 10:20, 27).

However, immediately following this statement, we hear of another response to the plague of blood, first on the part of Pharaoh and then on the part of the populace.

23 Pharaoh turned and went into his palace, paying no regard even to this. 24 And all the Egyptians had to dig round about the Nile for drinking water, because they could not drink the water of the Nile.

This passage proceeds from the assumption that only in the Nile has the water turned to blood while the water found elsewhere in Egypt has remained potable. The Egyptians therefore dig in surrounding areas, where they indeed find drinking water. As for Pharaoh himself, he is utterly unaffected; he simply returns home where, presumably, he has drinking water stored away or will have it brought to him by his courtiers from locations other than the Nile. This clearly reflects the plague of blood as it was foretold in vv. 17–18 and as it is said to have transpired in vv. 20aα2–21a: only the water in the Nile has turned to blood. But it is quite the opposite of what was announced in v. 19 and described in v. 21b, according to which all of the water in Egypt—including any water one may have stored away—was turned to blood. Moreover it is incompatible with the preceding v. 22b—yet another example of discontinuity between immediately adjacent verses—since it relates that Pharaoh’s behavior, rather than being the work of Yahweh, is the result of conscious, deliberate, and impeccable reasoning on his own part. Pharaoh here is sovereign, autonomous, and eminently logical; it is he who decides to pay no mind to what has occurred, since there is other potable water nearby and his servants will surely obtain it for him. How can one harmonize these two mutually exclusive reactions to the bloodied waters? The text, again, is silent.

Finally, how did the plague of blood finally come to an end? The first answer is implied in what precedes the notice of Pharaoh’s reaction:

22a The Egyptian magicians did the same with their spells.

If Pharaoh’s magicians were able precisely to replicate the action performed by Moses and Aaron, that is, to turn the water to blood, it follows that the blood must have turned back to water in the meantime. The miraculous event was of momentary duration: Moses and Aaron transformed the water to blood; it soon became water again. Afterward, the magicians performed exactly the same feat, and the water again returned to its normal state.

This picture is belied, however, by the concluding verse of the passage, which leads directly to the account of the next plague, that of frogs:

25 When seven days had passed after Yahweh struck the Nile…

Here it would seem that after a week had elapsed from the moment the Nile—and only the Nile—was turned to blood, the next plague simply commenced, without any specific action being taken to repair the state of the Nile. Evidently the natural flow of the great waterway gradually replaced all the blood with fresh water, and this brought the episode to its close. After a week, all was forgotten, necessitating the infliction of another plague.

The contradiction between these two distinct denouements is unmistakable; one or the other may be said to have occurred, but not both. More important, each separate denouement aligns with the assumptions of one or another description of the plague itself. The narrator who confined the blood to the Nile relates that the bloody water was gradually washed away and that meanwhile it was necessary, and possible, to obtain water elsewhere, and the narrator who maintained that all the water in Egypt became undrinkable indicates that the plague lasted only a short while, which is why the Egyptians did not perish of thirst.

Terminology and Style

These twelve verses illustrate all of the three phenomena discussed above: repetition, contradiction, and discontinuity. In the course of examining them, a fourth phenomenon surfaces as well: unexplained variations in vocabulary and usage. Two different verbs are used to express what was done with the rod: “stretch out” (נטה—v. 19) and “lift up” (וירם—v. 20a1b); two distinct phrases refer to the action of turning the water into blood: “strike” (מכה, ויך, הכות—vv. 17, 20a1b, 25) and “do so” (ויעשו כן—vv. 20a1a, 22); two separate idioms express Pharaoh’s intransigence: his heart was “stiffened” (ויחזק—v. 22), which means he recklessly imperiled himself and his people, and his heart was “heavy” (כבד—v. 14), i.e. he willfully refused; two different terms are used for what actually happened to the water: it “turned into” blood (ויהפכו, ונהפכו—vv. 17, 20) and it “became” blood (והיה—v. 19); there are two different uses of the word יאור: to refer to the Nile (vv. 15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 24, 25) and to refer to any one of an unspecified number of streams or channels (v. 19). These stylistic inconsistencies do not render the text unintelligible as do the others, but their existence calls for explanation.

The Solution

The brief but baffling account of the plague of blood was introduced as a convenient means of illustrating the phenomenon of narrative discontinuity, but it has shown itself to exhibit each of the other literary indications of multiple authorship as well: competing, functionally equivalent components; mutually exclusive, contradictory reports of events and seemingly random terminological variation. A closer look at these irreconcilable discrepancies reveals precisely how they have arisen. The explanation emerges when the passages that compete with and contradict each other are viewed in separate columns.

First, the two sets of instructions:

On one side, in roman, we have Moses alone, who is told to threaten Pharaoh that he will strike the Nile only, with his own rod, and to accuse him of having paid no heed thus far. On the other side, in italics, we have Moses and Aaron, who are told to issue no threat but simply to act, using Aaron’s rod and affecting Egypt’s entire water supply.

Next, the two reports of the implementation of the instructions:

It is immediately apparent that the roman section not only corresponds to the roman section that precedes it; it is in fact its direct continuation. Moses lifts his rod and strikes the Nile only—note the verbal correspondences between command and fulfillment. And the same is true on the italic side: the implementation section is the direct continuation of the command section, echoing it fully.

Placing side by side the two competing reports of Pharaoh’s reaction to the blood and of the eventual outcome of the episode, we obtain identical results:

On the roman side, where Pharaoh is said simply to have withdrawn to his palace and both he and his subjects obtain water from sources other than the Nile, after which the plague gradually disappears, the text is without any doubt the direct sequel to the two roman sections preceding. On the italic side as well, where the magicians replicate Yahweh’s ominous act but Pharaoh is unable to respond rationally because Yahweh has instilled him with false courage, the words of the text follow directly upon the preceding italic section.

The moment the competing and contradicting passages are disentangled in their entirety, we have before us not one but two self-contained narratives:

Each of the two is a complete, continuous, internally consistent and literarily smooth account. Each is also consistent in its style and usage. While both tell of the miraculous transformation of the water to blood in the course of Moses’s confrontation with Pharaoh, and are therefore essentially two accounts of a single event, they differ greatly, not only in their form but in the specifics of the occurrences that they relate and in their theological and thematic content as well.

The conclusion is inescapable. The reason the account of the blood appearing in the canonical Torah is rife with contradictions, redundancies, and discontinuities is that it is in fact a combination of two accounts, a passage compiled from two texts that were originally independent and were ultimately fused into one—in the following manner:

14 Yahweh said to Moses, “Pharaoh’s heart is heavy; he refuses to let the people go. 15 Go to Pharaoh in the morning, as he is coming out to the water, and station yourself before him at the edge of the Nile, taking with you the rod that turned into a snake. 16 Say to him, ‘Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews, sent me to you to say, “Let My people go that they may worship Me in the wilderness,” but you have paid no heed until now. 17 Thus says Yahweh, “By this you shall know that I am Yahweh.” See, I shall strike the water in the Nile with the rod that is in my hand, and it will be turned into blood; 18 and the fish in the Nile will die. The Nile will stink so that the Egyptians will find it impossible to drink the water of the Nile.’” 19 Yahweh said to Moses, “Say to Aaron: Take your rod and hold out your arm over the waters of Egypt—its rivers, its canals, its ponds, all its bodies of water—that they may become blood; there shall be blood throughout the land of Egypt, even in vessels of wood and stone.”   20 Moses and Aaron did just as Yahweh commanded ; he lifted up the rod and struck the water in the Nile in the sight of Pharaoh and his courtiers, and all the water in the Nile was turned into blood, 21 and the fish in the Nile died. The Nile stank so that the Egyptians could not drink water from the Nile. The blood was throughout the land of Egypt . 22 But when the Egyptian magicians did the same with their spells, Pharaoh’s heart stiffened and he did not heed them, as Yahweh had spoken . 23 Pharaoh turned and went into his palace, paying no regard even to this. 24 And all the Egyptians had to dig round about the Nile for drinking water, because they could not drink the water of the Nile. 25 When seven days had passed after Yahweh struck the Nile…

The two have been woven together meticulously, strictly according to the dictates of chronology and logic. For instance, not only are the two sets of instructions placed first and only thereafter the two accounts of their implementation, the instructions that include the order that Moses “go to Pharaoh” and announce the impending plague before its onset precede those that begin with the command to instruct Aaron to perform the act immediately.

Most important, it appears that the compiled text rigidly preserves all of the words of each of the two accounts, in their original order, and without addition.

The Documentary Hypothesis

The results of this analysis of the account of the plague of blood are not the exception but the rule. When the same method is applied throughout the narrative portion of the Torah, time and again similar results are obtained. Whether within relatively brief passages such as this one or in passages extending over many chapters, it repeatedly becomes clear that independent narrative texts—not oral traditions, but complete written documents—have intentionally and ingeniously been woven together. This discovery is the key to understanding how the Torah was compiled, for pursuant to these findings it emerges that the same narrative threads are present over the course of the entire Torah ; that is, the threads that may be detected within a given passage are in fact the continuations of threads that are already intertwined prior to it. Each of the two accounts of the plague of blood, to return to the example presented above, is the continuation of a narrative thread that earlier told of the enslavement and oppression of the Israelites in Egypt, each of which in turn continues a narrative thread that recounted the descent of Jacob and his family into Egypt. Each of these is the continuation of one of the threads discernible in the accounts of creation, the flood, the lives of the patriarchs, and the exploits of Jacob and his children. After telling its version of the plague of blood, each thread continues immediately to tell of the remaining plagues inflicted on the Egyptians, each according to its own version of the story, and each of these in turn continues with its own account of the exodus from Egypt, the miracle at the sea, and the journey through the wilderness. These narrative threads thus once constituted separate, continuous, and coherent literary sources , which were subsequently combined, from beginning to end, in the way demonstrated by the brief example above: by painstakingly alternating from one document to another, faithfully preserving the precise text and order of each source to the fullest extent achievable, and with as little interference on the part of the compiler as possible.

While the text examined above resolved itself into precisely two narrative threads, the total number of sources interwoven throughout the Torah is not two or even three but four. Not all four are detectable at every point in the Torah, however, because the four sources do not relate all of the same events . A large number of events are told by one source only (e.g. the Tower of Babel, Gen 11:1–9, from J; the near-sacrifice of Isaac, Gen 22:1–13, from E; the building of the tabernacle, Exod 35–40, from P); when this is the case, the passage appearing in the Torah is remarkably coherent, free of internal contradiction, redundancy, and discontinuity. This is not surprising, since it is composed entirely of the words of a single narrator. Other events, described by two of the four sources, result either in doublets or in unintelligible passages like the one above, in which two differing accounts of a single event have been combined and in which literary chaos consequently reigns. There are also instances in which accounts from three of the sources have been combined in a single passage. These, however, are rare, since relatively few events are related by more than two of the Torah’s sources. The lengthier the section of text being examined, the more likely it is that a third source will eventually come into view. There are almost no passages that include all four sources, for the simple reason that one source, unlike the other three, does not appear intermittently throughout the Torah but is entirely contiguous, introduced in its entirety near the end of the other three interwoven threads, as we shall see.

This realization enables us to formulate a host of other questions. What is the nature of these four sources? When did they come into existence, and who created them? Exactly how, when, and why were they combined? Biblical scholarship has devoted itself to the study of these issues since they first presented themselves. The discovery of the precise number of sources—four, their disentanglement from one another and the concomitant reconstruction of each source or what remains of it, the appreciation of the unique version of Israel’s pre-history told by each one, and the characterization of each source’s unique content, language, worldview, and historical background has been a complex process. It began toward the end of the eighteenth century, reached a peak at the end of the nineteenth, and became increasingly refined in the first half of the twentieth. The stages of this process and its central findings and accomplishments have been studied by many scholars and have been presented in great detail numerous times, and for that reason we will not review them again here (see Nicholson 1998 ; Arnold 2003 ; Baker 2003 ). Nevertheless, two factors that played a central role in the discovery process do require elaboration. The first is the question of the use of the name Yahweh, the tetragrammaton, to refer to the Israelite deity. As noted, according to one entire group of narratives in the Torah, the name Yahweh was known to all of humankind from the very beginning of time, while according to another group of narratives, it was revealed only in the time of Moses, and even then, at first, only to the Israelites. When, with the advent of modern scholarship, it was first suggested that the texts in each of the two groups combine to form separate narrative sequences (Astruc 1753 ), this was one of the first intimations that the Torah in its entirety might have been compiled from preexisting literary sources of considerable scope and completeness. But biblical scholarship did not arrive at this conclusion in one leap. At first, critics assumed that since the Torah reflects two opposing views regarding the tetragrammaton, the Torah must be comprised of two sources, one “Yahwistic,” after its widespread use of the name Yahweh when referring to Israel’s deity, and thus designated by scholars as “J” in keeping with the German spelling “ Jahwe ,” and one “Elohistic” for its use of the general term for God, Elohim , when relating events that occurred, according to this source’s reconstruction of history, before the name Yahweh was disclosed, and designated in scholarship as “E.” Only much later was it realized that while the Yahwistic stories do indeed merge into what appears to have been a generally coherent, sequential narrative, all of the rest, the narratives that refrain from using the tetragrammaton before the time of Moses and their logical sequels that continue the same plot lines, still exhibit the features that indicate multiple authorship: redundancies (most notably two separate accounts of the revelation of the name Yahweh to Moses! Exod 3:11–15; 6:2–9), contradictions, discontinuities, and stylistic and conceptual inconsistencies beyond what would be expected in a work by a single author. Only at this stage was it discovered that the many passages initially classified as E actually comprise two interwoven narrative threads, one of them long, exquisitely structured, intricately detailed, and literarily and conceptually consistent beyond any other narrative source in the Bible, and the other modest in its scope, fragmentary in several places, and literarily and conceptually less complex (see Seidel 1993 ; Baden 2009 , 11–19). One cannot overestimate the importance of this discovery: it enabled scholarship to recognize the existence of the three separate narrative sources that compose the greater part of Torah, three sources distinct from one another in numerous and readily apparent ways.

This discovery also led to the realization that the fact that two of the sources share a single historical assumption with regard to the revelation of the tetragrammaton was essentially a coincidence of minor import. The disclosure of the name Yahweh, for all its significance, is not the central question on which the sources differ with one another; indeed very few of the differences between the sources stem from this issue. Still, this feature was canonized in scholarly terminology, and to this day biblical scholarship has retained the designations J and E. For a time, the two seemingly Elohistic sources were even designated as E1 and E2, but this classification fell out of favor, as the larger, more structured and consistent of the two (E1) began increasingly to be viewed as a sort of infrastructure for the other sources. It was hypothesized that this source, so broad in its scope and so detailed in all its particulars—including a precise and consistent chronology—must have served as the Torah’s framework, a literary receptacle into which the other sources were inserted. In keeping with the evolutionary approach to historical phenomena that dominated the humanities during the period that these discoveries were made, many claimed—with a certain naiveté, as it turned out—that this was also the most ancient of the four sources. It was therefore termed the Grundschrift or Foundational Text, and it received the designation G (Ewald 1831 )—but this too was not to last.

The role played by the Torah’s legal passages in the process of identifying the sources was no less important than that played by its narratives. In fact, even before biblical scholarship discovered that the narrative portion of the Torah was woven from separate threads that can be disentangled, earlier critics had noted that the legislation in the Torah readily divides into distinct, self-contained legal corpora. When the Enlightenment dawned in Western Europe and commentators began to abandon midrashic, homiletic, and allegorical methods of reconciling the interminable discrepancies between one law in the Torah and another, they realized that when each text is taken at its word rather than being forced into artificial harmony with the others, these inconsistencies indicate that each legal corpus is the work of a different legislator. Here too, owing to the impact of the newly ascendant historical sciences, the differences between the separate legal codes were viewed as evidence of different stages in ancient Israel’s legal and cultic development. It became only natural to regard each code of legislation as a link in the chain of historical progress in Israelite belief and religious practice.

The attempt to reconstruct the history of ancient Israelite religion by comparing and contrasting the different codes of law in the Torah was originally undertaken completely apart from the dissection of the threads that comprise the Torah’s narrative. For the most part, attention was initially focused on the laws of the Sabbath and festivals, as well as those of the sacrificial cult, the temple, and the priesthood, both because commands pertaining to these matters appear in each of the codes, providing an abundance of material for comparison, and because the development of these laws, which deal with the main practical manifestations of Israel’s religious faith, were thought to provide the best indication of the development of Israel’s faith itself.

A truly epoch-making finding in this connection concerned the unique character of the corpus of laws appearing within the framework of Moses’s parting orations, all of which are contained in the canonical book of Deuteronomy (Deut 12–26). The distinctive character of these laws enabled early critics to posit with rare unanimity that at least the greater part of the book of Deuteronomy constitutes an independent literary source and is not the continuation of the four preceding books. A number of unique characteristics typify this “Deuteronomic” law code. Its quintessential feature is the repeated demand to centralize Israel’s religious life, as well as aspects of its monarchic regime and the administration of justice, around a sacrificial cult practiced in a single, central temple—“the site that Yahweh will choose,” in the language of Deuteronomy (Deut 12:5 and passim)—and utterly to eradicate all localized places of worship, along with anything that might facilitate the practice of sacrificial worship “inside your gates” (Deut 12:17, et al.), which Deuteronomy’s law code views as tantamount to idolatry (Deut 11:31–12:8, 29–13:1). To this unique characteristic of Deuteronomy may be added two more. Firstly, of all the law codes in the Torah, only the code appearing in Deuteronomy is said to have been written down in the form of a sēfer or “book,” that is, a scroll, to be transmitted for use by later generations; secondly, only in Deuteronomy is there any mention of such a thing as sēfer ha-tôrâ —“the scroll of the torah ,” which is the term used by Deuteronomy to refer to the book in which the laws were written (Deut 28:61; 29:20; 30:10; 31:24, 26; see Haran 2003 , 35).

These realizations regarding Deuteronomy inevitably led scholars to address the question of a possible connection between the Deuteronomic legislation and the events reported to have taken place during the reign of King Josiah of Judah. According to the account in the book of Kings (2 Kgs 22–23), in the eighteenth year of Josiah’s reign, 622 bce , a scroll referred to as “the scroll of the torah ” was found in the house of Yahweh—the Jerusalem temple—the contents of which impelled Josiah immediately to initiate a comprehensive religious reform throughout the entire kingdom of Judah. The main objective of the reform, implemented by royal decree, was to rid Judah of all local cultic installations, repeatedly referred to in the book of Kings as the “high places”—במות—along with their cultic functionaries and furnishings, and to centralize the worship of Yahweh, thoroughly cleansed of all foreign influences, in the Jerusalem temple. The fact that the three components of Josiah’s reform—a long-lost scroll of legislation said to be from the time of Moses suddenly discovered in the temple, the name of this scroll, sēfer ha-tôrâ , and the nature of the religious reform carried out in accordance with its contents, namely the purification of worship and its centralization in the royal temple city—correspond fully to the three outstanding characteristics of the Deuteronomic law code cannot be mere coincidence. Already in late antiquity, a few of the church fathers held the opinion that the scroll found in the temple during the reign of Josiah was none other than the book of Deuteronomy. In the Middle Ages, an anonymous Jewish commentator whose commentary on Chronicles came erroneously to be attributed to Rashi arrived at the same conclusion (Viezel 2007 ). These early speculations were forgotten over time, however, and only in 1805 did the German scholar Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette raise the possibility anew. De Wette went beyond his premodern predecessors, arriving at the inescapable historical implication of their suggestion, so inconceivable to them, namely that the scroll of Torah said to have been found in the temple during the reign of Josiah was in fact written at that time, in order to provide Mosaic—i.e. divine—authority for the religious reform undertaken by Josiah and his followers.

The distinctive character of the Deuteronomic source, which was thenceforth labeled “D” even though its contents do not comprise the whole of the book of Deuteronomy, was thus first recognized in its unique laws, specifically its cultic legislation. This new awareness led directly to an appreciation of the decisive role that this document played in Israelite history, as the “scroll of torah ” whose provisions the religious reform undertaken in the latter days of the kingdom of Judah sought to implement. These findings soon became axiomatic within critical scholarship. For over two centuries they have served as the basis for dating the other documents of the Torah and other biblical texts as well, and they remain the starting point for all discussion of the history of Israelite religion and the literary components of the Torah.

The second corpus of legislation whose unique character became apparent in the early days of biblical criticism, once again independently of the analysis of the narrative portion of the Torah, is the detailed series of commands occupying most of the central portion of the Torah and said to have been communicated orally to Moses in the tabernacle during the Israelites’ stay at Mount Sinai and thereafter. These laws deal at length and in precise detail with the sacrificial cult, the tabernacle and its accoutrements, the uninterrupted regimen of statutory worship conducted within its confines, the types of ritual impurity and the means of their eradication, permitted and forbidden foods, priests, Levites, and their respective functions, the Sabbath and festivals, the Sabbatical Year, the Jubilee, and related topics. Moreover even those laws said to have been given to Moses in the tabernacle and appearing to address secular issues such as sexual behavior, slavery, theft, jurisprudence, land tenure, and homicide do so from a decidedly sacral perspective, viewing all such matters through the lens of their impact on the cult and ritual purity. It became self-evident that this corpus of legislation, all of which displays a unique and readily identifiable style and all of whose provisions express a cult-focused ideology, is the work of a priestly school of scribal activity, most likely the priesthood of the Jerusalem temple. Scholarly recognition of the priestly provenance of this legislation began to coalesce well before its place among the narrative threads was recognized, and it was unanimously assigned the title Priesterkodex or “Priestly Code.”

Classical pentateuchal criticism reached its maturity when it finally arrived at an appreciation of the nature of the relationship between the separate legal corpora contained in the Torah and the independent threads interwoven in the narrative. This awareness too proceeded in stages. Early critics, heavily influenced both by the specific evolutionary model of Israel’s religious history prevalent at the time and by the dominant Protestant theology widespread among so many of them, assumed that the relationship between law and narrative is a chronological one. It seemed obvious that the authentic, ancient biblical tradition must have consisted of the tales of the Israelites and their ancestors, while the interminable lists of commandments, laws, and statutes presumably reflected a later development, wherein Israel’s natural, popular faith was transformed into an orderly, established religion, decaying into a pedantic, “Jewish” legalism (Baden 2009 , 19–43). This bipartite classification of the Torah literature became untenable, however, when it was realized that the Priestly law code was of a single piece with the detailed narrative thread then known as G. For once these two components had been discerned and isolated, it was impossible to ignore the thoroughgoing literary correlation between the two. Everything in the “G” narrative, from the first creation story on, is directed toward the erection of the tabernacle in the wilderness, the establishment of the sacrificial cult of Yahweh practiced therein, and the series of meetings between Yahweh and Moses that took place there, in the course of which all of Yahweh’s commands—the contents of the Priestly Code, all focused on the worship of Yahweh in the tabernacle and prescribing the measures needed to ensure his continued presence in his earthly abode—were imparted to Moses. A single literary style, a single terminology, a single religious outlook, a single chronology, and a single set of concepts and historical assumptions characterize both the continuous “G” narrative and the corpus of “Priestly” legislation, and the legislation is smoothly and flawlessly incorporated within G’s narrative thread. Once it was acknowledged that a single literary source clearly contained both a complete, sustained narrative thread and a detailed, comprehensive corpus of laws, it became impossible to uphold the theory of an “original,” early narrative to which the laws were a late accretion. Moreover, the two components not only exist side by side within a single literary source; they are entirely interdependent. The Priestly legislation is part of the historical narrative of G, while G’s narrative exists for the sake of the laws it relates and for their sake alone. The designations E1 and G were thus consigned to the dustbin of history, and scholars came to refer to this literary source as a whole—with both its components, the narrative and the laws, comprising one continuous strand—as the Priestly document, or P.

It also became apparent that the basic format observable in the Priestly document, that of a continuous historical narrative containing a legal corpus, is observable in the other sources as well. Like P, each of the two non-priestly narrative strands, one of which retained its original designation, J, and the other called simply E (the designation E2 having become superfluous as E1 came to be known first as G and finally as P), tells of the patriarchs and their descendants, of the oppression in Egypt and the Exodus. Similarly, each narrative, again like P, goes on to tell of a defining, transformational encounter with Yahweh that occurred shortly after the Exodus at the foot of a certain mountain in the wilderness—Mount Sinai in J, Mount Horeb in E—at which time Yahweh made a covenant with the Israelite people, stipulating its terms in the form of laws and commandments imparted to them through the agency of Moses. When each of these two narratives arrives, in the course of its account, at the moment at which Yahweh actually speaks his laws to Moses, it provides, just as P does, its own version of the laws themselves, one self-contained legal corpus appearing in each of the two narratives. Finally, just as with P, internal connections between the narrative and the code of laws in both J and E seem to indicate that in both cases, the two components, narrative and law, are authentic and integral parts of a single literary work.

The narrative threads in these three sources, J, E, and P, after alternating and intersecting throughout the entire length of the Torah, ultimately reach the period toward the end of Moses’s lifetime when, after years of journeying in the wilderness, the Israelites are finally encamped on the Jordan in preparation for their conquest of Canaan. At this point, and before the events of Moses’s final days and his death in Moab are recounted, J, E, and P break off, and the fourth literary source appears. This source—D, the existence of which was originally established, as explained above, through its distinctive laws—also consists of two elements, a self-contained code of legislation and a narrative expressly designed to provide a historical context for the laws. The main narrative of D is actually very brief. It reports only that shortly before his death, Moses assembled the Israelites, delivered to them a series of parting orations, committed them to writing, and entrusted “this scroll of the torah ” (Deut 31:26) to “the priests, sons of Levi” (v. 9)—after which he took his leave of them and died. Almost all of the rest of D consists of the orations themselves, presented verbatim as the direct speech of Moses. These discourses are often referred to as historical surveys, but this is not strictly the case. While Moses does make frequent reference to past events, the orations attributed to him in D are essentially words of reproach and castigation, exhortation and encouragement, blessing and curse. No comprehensive and continuous historical account of the patriarchal period and the Exodus, analogous to those found in J, E, and P, can be detected, nor does D’s conception of Moses’s parting words call for one. Just as the laws are the raison d’être of the narrative in the other sources, so too in D; the entire function of the orations is to impress upon the listener the dire necessity of adhering to all the commands of the torah contained within them. Thus, D’s code of laws on the one hand, and the rhetorical setting in which it is presented, together with the external narrative framework, on the other, comprise a single literary unity; the Deuteronomic source is inconceivable without its two interrelated, interacting components.

We noted above that the most glaring contradictions in the Torah occur in the account of the lawgiving and in the specific provisions of the laws themselves. The Torah presents four different stories, each of which professes to provide the sole and exclusive account of the events surrounding the promulgation of Yahweh’s commands to Israel, and each of which ignores and contradicts the other three. The Torah also contains four bodies of legislation, each of which is an inseparable part of one of these four stories, each of which claims to be the sole and unique formulation of Yahweh’s commands given to Israel through Moses, and each of which ignores and contradicts the other three. The moment the literary problem of the Torah is formulated in this manner, it becomes evident that the problem holds the key to its own solution. The number of independent narrative threads that make up the Torah is equal to the number of law codes it contains—four—with each narrative thread containing its own independent code of legislation. The problem of the composition of the Torah is thus solved comprehensively and economically.

The theory that gradually evolved in biblical scholarship on the basis of all of the above is that the canonical Torah is a compilation of four literary sources. The three sources with lengthy narrative portions, J, E, and P, each of which tells its own version of Israel’s prehistory from its origins until the death of Moses, and each of which includes the laws that, in its view, Israel was commanded to obey, appear first, interwoven strictly according to chronological lines from the beginning of the Torah until the end of Numbers. Near the end of this composition, the fourth source, D, is inserted—in its entirety, since D’s frame narrative begins just prior to the end of Moses’s life and tells only of his parting convocation of the Israelites and of his valedictory addresses to them, one of which contains the Deuteronomic code of laws. Following this, the three other sources resurface, intertwined and alternating as before, and reach their accounts of Moses’s final actions and his death, and with this the Torah concludes.

When the four interwoven threads are disentangled and considered separately, all of them exhibit—albeit to varying degrees—remarkable narrative contiguity, legislative completeness, and internal consistency. It is readily apparent that each was, at least originally, a work of considerable scope, having its own distinctive structure, historical content, religious and conceptual outlook, and style. It is equally apparent that the combination of these four sources was undertaken with the express aim of preserving intact the precise verbal form of each one to the greatest extent possible and intervening—altering, adding, deleting, or rearranging (see Baden 2010 )—only when absolutely unavoidable.

This theory is known as the Documentary Hypothesis. The term “documentary” is intended to convey that the Torah was created through the amalgamation of independent written texts, each of which was already a complete and self-contained work, a document , by the time it was incorporated in the Torah. Each document, the theory claims, already included both an account of the prehistory of Israel and a version of Yahweh’s laws. The term “documentary” is also employed to the exclusion of competing hypotheses offered before and even after this one was formulated. It implies that the Torah is neither an anthology of oral traditions nor a patchwork of unrelated written passages sewn together associatively. Nor is it a collection of fragments of lore and information assembled either randomly or by design. The theory of interwoven documents rejects as well the idea that there was once an “original” Torah into which other texts were interpolated or to which they were appended, and it similarly denies that the Torah underwent a long and gradual process of editorial stratification. It also diverges entirely from the notion that the Torah is a systematic reworking of existing texts, be they few or many, in order to stamp the whole with a consistent ideological or theological imprint. The Documentary Hypothesis proffers an alternative explanation to all of the above, claiming that the Torah was compiled from three preexisting, written narrative works which extend throughout its entire length, and a fourth preexisting, written narrative work inserted near the end of the composition, and it seeks to demonstrate that in this conception lies the resolution of the contradictions, redundancies, discontinuities, and differences of terminology, style, and outlook that make the canonical Torah unintelligible.

Suggested Reading

Baden, J. S.   2012 . The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis . New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Baden, J. S.   2013 . The Promise to the Patriarchs . Oxford: University Press.

Campbell, A. F. and O’Brien, M. A.   1993 . Sources of the Pentateuch . Minneapolis: Fortress.

Friedman, R. E.   1992 . “ Torah (Pentateuch), ” ABD 6:605–621.

Friedman, R. E.   2003 . The Bible With Sources Revealed . San Francisco: Harper.

Friedman, R. E. and Dolansky Overton, S.   2007 . “ Pentateuch, ” EJ2 15:730–751.

Rofé, A.   1999 . Introduction to the Composition of the Pentateuch . Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.

Rogerson, J. W.   1985 . Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany . London: SPCK.

Schwartz, B.J.   2011 . “Does Recent Scholarship’s Critique of the Documentary Hypothesis Constitute Grounds for its Rejection?” In The Pentateuch: International Perspectives on Current Research , edited by T. B. Dozeman et al., 3–16. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

Schwartz, B. J.   2016 . “The Pentateuchal Sources and the Former Prophets: A Neo-Documentarian’s Perspective.” In The Formation of the Pentateuch: Bridging the Academic Discourses of Europe, Israel, and North America , edited by J. C. Gertz , et. al., 783–793. FAT 111. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

Stackert, J.   2014 . A Prophet Like Moses: Prophecy, Law, and Israelite Religion . Oxford: University Press.

Yoreh, T. L.   2010 . The First Book of God . BZAW 402. New York: De Gruyter.

Works Cited

Arnold, W. T.   2003 . “Pentateuchal Criticism, History of.” In Dictionary of the Old Testament: Pentateuch , edited by T. D. Alexander and D. W. Baker , 622–631. Downers Grove: InterVarsity.

Astruc, J.   1753 . Conjectures sur les mémoires originaux dont il paroit que Moyse s’est servi pour composer le livre de la Genèse: Avec des remarques qui appuient ou qui éclaircissent ces conjectures . Brussels: Fricx.

Baden, J. S.   2009 . J, E, and the Redaction of the Pentateuch . FAT 68. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

Baden, J. S.   2010 . “ The Original Place of the Priestly Manna Story in Exodus 16. ” ZAW 122: 491–504.

Baker, D. W.   2003 . “Source Criticism.” In Dictionary of the Old Testament: Pentateuch , edited by T. D. Alexander and D. W. Baker , 798–805. Downers Grove: InterVarsity.

Chavel, S.   2011 . “The Literary Development of Deuteronomy 12: Between Religious Ideal and Social Reality.” In The Pentateuch: International Perspectives on Current Research , edited by T. B. Dozeman , et al., 303–326. FAT 78. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

Ewald, H.   1831 . “Review of J. Stähelin, Kritische Untersuchungen über die Genesis .” TSK 4:596–606.

Greenberg, M.   1972 . “Narrative and Redactional Art in the Plagues Pericope (Exod 7–11).” In Bible and Jewish History , edited by B. Uffenheimer , 65–75. Tel Aviv: University Press (Hebrew).

Haran, M.   2003 . The Biblical Collection . Vol. 2. Jerusalem: Magnes (Hebrew).

Kuhl, C.   1952 . “ Die Wiederaufnahme: Ein literarkritisches Prinzip? ” ZAW 64: 1–11.

Nelson, R. D.   2002 . Deuteronomy: A Commentary . Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox.

Nicholson, E.   1998 . The Pentateuch in the Twentieth Century: The Legacy of Julius Wellhausen . Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Paran, M.   1989 . The Forms of the Priestly Style in the Pentateuch: Patterns, Linguistic Usages, Syntactic Structures . Jerusalem: Magnes (Hebrew).

Schwartz, B. J.   1996 a. “The Priestly Account of the Theophany and Lawgiving at Sinai.” In Texts, Temples, and Traditions: A Tribute to Menahem Haran , edited by M. V. Fox et al., 103–134. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.

Schwartz, B. J.   1996 b. “‘ Profane’ Slaughter and the Integrity of the Priestly Code. ” HUCA 67: 15–42.

Schwartz, B. J.   2007 . “The Flood Narratives in the Torah and the Question of Where History Begins.” In Shai le-Sara Japhet: Studies in the Bible, Its Exegesis and Its Language , edited by M. Bar Asher et al., 139–154. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute (Hebrew).

Schwartz, B. J.   2012 . “How the Compiler of the Pentateuch Worked: The Composition of Genesis 37.” In The Book of Genesis: Composition, Reception, and Interpretation , edited by C. A. Evans et al., 263–278. Leiden: Brill.

Seidel, B.   1993 . Karl David Ilgen und die Pentateuchforschung im Umkreis der sogenannten älteren Urkundenhypothese: Studien zur Geschichte der exegetischen Hermeneutik in der Späten Aufklärung . Berlin: de Gruyter.

Talmon, S.   1978 . “The Presentation of Synchroneity and Simultaneity in Biblical Narrative.” In Studies in Hebrew Narrative Art Throughout the Ages , edited by J. Heinemann and S. Werses , 9–26. Jerusalem: Magnes.

Viezel, E.   2007 . “ A Medieval Jewish Precedent for De Wette: The Scroll Found by Hilkiah in the Temple in Pseudo-Rashi’s Commentary on Chronicles. ” SHNATON 17: 103–112 (Hebrew).

Vogt, P. T.   2006 . Deuteronomic Theology and the Significance of Torah: A Reappraisal . Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.

Weinfeld, M.   1969 . “ Theological Currents in Pentateuchal Literature. ” PAAJR 37: 117–139.

Weinfeld, M.   1991 . Deuteronomy 1–11 . AB 5. New York: Doubleday.

It is a pleasure to thank Yedidya Naveh for his diligent efforts in producing the English text of this chapter and Maya Rosen for her expert editing and proofreading, and to acknowledge the kind assistance provided by the editors of this volume. This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 1838/14).

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The Spiritual Life

“Windows To Spirituality”

Documentary Hypothesis

Page Contents

The documentary hypothesis (DH) is a model used by biblical scholars to explain the origins and composition of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy). Others are the supplementary hypothesis and the fragmentary hypothesis; all agree that the Torah is not a unified work from a single author, but is made up of sources combined over many centuries by many hands. They differ on the nature of these sources and how they were combined. According to the documentary hypothesis there were four sources, each originally a separate and independent book (a “document”), joined together at various points in time by a series of editors (“redactors”). Fragmentary hypotheses see the Torah as a collection of small fragments, and supplementary hypotheses as a single core document supplemented by fragments taken from many sources.

A version of the documentary hypothesis, frequently identified with the German scholar Julius Wellhausen, was almost universally accepted for most of the 20th century, but the consensus has now collapsed. As a result, there has been a revival of interest in fragmentary and supplementary approaches, frequently in combination with each other and with a documentary model, making it difficult to classify contemporary theories as strictly one or another.

Diagram of the generally-accepted documentary hypothesis. J: Jahwist source (7th century BCE or later) E: Elohist source (late 9th century BCE) Dtr1: early (7th century BCE) Deuteronomist historian Dtr2: later (6th century BCE) Deuteronomist historian P*: Priestly source (6th/5th century BCE; includes most of Leviticus) D†: Deuteronomist source (includes most of Deuteronomy) R: redactor DH: Deuteronomistic history (books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings)

Modern scholars increasingly see the completed Torah as a product of the time of the Achaemenid Empire (probably 450–350 BCE), although some would place its production in the Hellenistic period (333–164 BCE) or even the Hasmonean dynasty (140–37 BCE). Of its constituent sources, Deuteronomy is generally dated between the 7th and 5th centuries; there is much discussion of the unity, extent, nature, and date of the Priestly material. Deuteronomy continues to be seen as having had a history separate from the first four books, and that this historigraphic tradition is continued with the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings as Deuteronomistic history. There is a growing recognition that Genesis developed apart from the Exodus stories until joined to it by the Priestly writer.

Basic approaches: documentary, fragmentary and supplementary hypotheses

11th-century manuscript of the Hebrew Bible with Targum

The Torah (or Pentateuch) is collectively the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. According to tradition they were dictated by God to Moses, but when modern critical scholarship began to be applied to the Bible it was discovered that the Pentateuch was not the unified text one would expect from a single author. As a result, the Mosaic authorship of the Torah had been largely rejected by leading scholars by the 17th century, and the modern consensus is that it is the product of a long evolutionary process.

In the mid-18th century, some scholars started a critical study of doublets (parallel accounts of the same incidents), inconsistencies, and changes in style and vocabulary in the Torah. In 1780 Johann Eichhorn, building on the work of the French doctor and exegete Jean Astruc’s “Conjectures” and others, formulated the “older documentary hypothesis”: the idea that Genesis was composed by combining two identifiable sources, the Jehovist (“J”; also called the Yahwist) and the Elohist (“E”). These sources were subsequently found to run through the first four books of the Torah, and the number was later expanded to three when Wilhelm de Wette identified the Deuteronomistas an additional source found only in Deuteronomy (“D”). Later still the Elohist was split into Elohist and Priestly (“P”) sources, increasing the number to four.

These documentary approaches were in competition with two other models, the fragmentary and the supplementary. The fragmentary hypothesis argued that fragments of varying lengths, rather than continuous documents, lay behind the Torah; this approach accounted for the Torah’s diversity but could not account for its structural consistency, particularly regarding chronology. The supplementary hypothesis was better able to explain this unity: it maintained that the Torah was made up of a central core document, the Elohist, supplemented by fragments taken from many sources. The supplementary approach was dominant by the early 1860s, but it was challenged by an important book published by Hermann Hupfeld in 1853, who argued that the Pentateuch was made up of four documentary sources, the Priestly, Yahwist, and Elohist intertwined in Genesis-Exodus-Leviticus-Numbers, and the stand-alone source of Deuteronomy. At around the same period Karl Heinrich Graf argued that the Yahwist and Elohist were the earliest sources and the Priestly source the latest, while Wilhelm Vatke linked the four to an evolutionary framework, the Yahwist and Elohist to a time of primitive nature and fertility cults, the Deuteronomist to the ethical religion of the Hebrew prophets, and the Priestly source to a form of religion dominated by ritual, sacrifice and law.

Table: documentary, fragmentary and supplementary hypotheses

The table is based on that in Walter Houston’s “The Pentateuch”, with expansions as indicated. Note that the three hypotheses are not mutually exclusive.

Julius Wellhausen and the new documentary hypothesis

Julius Wellhausen, one of the originators of the documentary hypothesis

In 1878 Julius Wellhausen published  Geschichte Israels, Bd 1  (“History of Israel, Vol 1”); the second edition he printed as  Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (“Prolegomena to the History of Israel”), in 1883, and the work is better known under that name. (The second volume, a synthetic history titled  Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte  [“Israelite and Jewish History”], did not appear until 1894 and remains untranslated.) Crucially, this historical portrait was based upon two earlier works of his technical analysis: “Die Composition des Hexateuchs” (“The Composition of the Hexateuch”) of 1876/77 and sections on the “historical books” (Judges–Kings) in his 1878 edition of Friedrich Bleek’s  Einleitung in das Alte Testament  (“Introduction to the Old Testament”).

Wellhausen’s documentary hypothesis owed little to Wellhausen himself but was mainly the work of Hupfeld, Eduard Eugène Reuss, Graf, and others, who in turn had built on earlier scholarship. He accepted Hupfeld’s four sources and, in agreement with Graf, placed the Priestly work last. J was the earliest document, a product of the 900s and the court of Solomon; E was from the 8th century BCE in the northern Kingdom of Israel, and had been combined by a redactor (editor) with J to form a document JE; D, the third source, was a product of the 7th century BC, by 620 BCE, during the reign of King Josiah; P (what Wellhausen first named “Q”) was a product of the priest-and-temple dominated world of the 6th century; and the final redaction, when P was combined with JED to produce the Torah as we now know it.

Wellhausen’s explanation of the formation of the Torah was also an explanation of the religious history of Israel. The Yahwist and Elohist described a primitive, spontaneous and personal world, in keeping with the earliest stage of Israel’s history; in Deuteronomy he saw the influence of the prophets and the development of an ethical outlook, which he felt represented the pinnacle of Jewish religion; and the Priestly source reflected the rigid, ritualistic world of the priest-dominated post-exilic period. His work, notable for its detailed and wide-ranging scholarship and close argument, entrenched the “new documentary hypothesis” as the dominant explanation of Pentateuchal origins from the late 19th to the late 20th centuries.

Collapse of the documentary consensus

A torah (Hebrew scripture) reading. The “yod” – a hand-shaped silver pointer – is used by the reader to mark his or her place in the text.

The consensus around the documentary hypothesis collapsed in the last decades of the 20th century. The groundwork was laid with the investigation of the origins of the written sources in oral compositions, implying that the creators of J and E were collectors and editors and not authors and historians. Rolf Rendtorff (1925–2014), building on this insight, argued that the basis of the Pentateuch lay in short, independent narratives, gradually formed into larger units and brought together in two editorial phases, the first Deuteronomic, the second Priestly. This led to the current position which sees only two major sources in the Pentateuch, the Deuteronomist (confined to the Book of Deuteronomy) and the Priestly (confined to the books Genesis-Exodus-Leviticus-Numbers).

The majority of scholars today continue to recognise Deuteronomy as a source, with its origin in the law-code produced at the court of Josiah as described by De Wette, subsequently given a frame during the exile (the speeches and descriptions at the front and back of the code) to identify it as the words of Moses. Most scholars also agree that some form of Priestly source existed, although its extent, especially its end-point, is uncertain. The remainder is called collectively non-Priestly, a grouping which includes both pre-Priestly and post-Priestly material. The final Torah is increasingly seen as a product of the Persian period (539–333 BCE, probably 450–350 BCE), possibly as a product of the Persian imperial practice of authorizing local, autonomous law codes for conquered populations. Some scholars would place the final formation of the Pentateuch somewhat later, in the Hellenistic (333–164 BCE) or even Hasmonean (140–37 BCE) periods. This latter dating remains a minority view, but the Elephantine papyri, the records of a Jewish colony in Egypt dating from the last quarter of the 5th century BCE, show no knowledge of a Torah or of an exodus. There is also a growing recognition that Genesis developed separately from Exodus-Leviticus-Numbers, and was joined to the story of Moses by the Priestly writer.

A revised neo-documentary hypothesis still has adherents, especially in North America and Israel. This distinguishes sources by means of plot and continuity rather than stylistic and linguistic concerns, and does not tie them to stages in the evolution of Israel’s religious history. Its resurrection of an E source is probably the element most often criticised by other scholars, as it is rarely distinguishable from the classical J source and European scholars have largely rejected it as fragmentary or non-existent.

The Torah and the history of Israel’s religion

See also:  History of ancient Israel and Judah  and  Origins of Judaism

Wellhausen used the sources of the Torah as evidence of changes in the history of Israelite religion as it moved (in his opinion) from free, simple and natural to fixed, formal and institutional. Modern scholars of Israel’s religion have become much more circumspect in how they use the Old Testament, not least because many have concluded that the Bible is not a reliable witness to the religion of ancient Israel and Judah, representing instead the beliefs of only a small segment of the ancient Israelite community centred in Jerusalem and devoted to the exclusive worship of the god Yahweh.

Adapted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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News and Interpretations on the Bible and Ancient Near East History.

Mark Elliott

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The Re-Emergence of Source Criticism: The Neo-Documentary Hypothesis

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The Documentary Hypothesis, abandoned in much pentateuchal scholarship of the last 40 years, is making a significant resurgence, although in a new and more precisely argued form. It is once again taking its place as a significant theory of the composition of the Pentateuch.

See Also:  The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis  (Anchor Yale Reference Library; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).

By Joel S. Baden Assistant Professor of Old Testament Yale Divinity School May 2012

It is perhaps overly dramatic to refer to the existence of two competing schools of thought as a "crisis." It is, after all, difficult to think of a single aspect of biblical scholarship in which there are not dissenting opinions, contradictory readings, or diverse historical reconstructions. The various opinions regarding the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance, do not constitute a "crisis" in Qumran studies. Such instances of scholarly disagreement are "points of dispute," or "on which a consensus has yet to be reached." Yet references to current pentateuchal research frequently use the term "crisis" to describe the state of the field.

This is in part because the divide between the two schools of thought in pentateuchal scholarship is particularly wide. Geographically, it is essentially the size of the Atlantic Ocean, with one school located almost entirely in continental Europe, and the other mostly at home in the United States. Theoretically, it is just as large: the fundamental basis for each school's approach is essentially rejected by the other. Moreover, the shift in European scholarship away from the Documentary Hypothesis happened very quickly: one can almost draw a line at the publication of Rendtorff's  Problem of the Process of Transmission in the Pentateuch  in 1977, [1]  with pre-Rendtorff scholarship being largely documentary and post-Rendtorff scholarship being almost entirely non-documentary.

For scholars trained in the Documentary Hypothesis, as most Americans still are, there's a feeling that if you blinked at the wrong moment, you missed the sudden emergence of a radical new wave of scholarship. And given the profusion and depth of European scholarship, it can be hard to catch up. It is also the case that, as there are very few American scholars teaching the current non-documentary view, American scholars have not had a systematic and thorough introduction to the newest pentateuchal research. The result is that, for many, what is known is that the documentary model we learned in school has been discarded, but we have not accepted its ostensible replacement.

Add to this the centrality of the question of the composition of the Pentateuch for all sorts of biblical scholarship, past and present—including, but not limited to, the early history of Israel, the development of Israelite religion, biblical theology, the study of oral traditions, and the dating of biblical texts—and it becomes more apparent why pentateuchal scholarship represents a "crisis." If, as an American scholar, you want to speak or write about any topic that even lightly depends on the analysis of the Pentateuch, you may find yourself at a loss: either you continue using the older scholarship you learned, but which you know is now considered passé, or you have to undo what you learned and fully immerse yourself in the newer European approach. Few are willing to do the latter; we here largely still learn and teach the documentary model, but are subsequently unable to apply it in any productive manner without fear of being labeled "out of date." As a result, scholarly output from America in pentateuchal studies has sharply diminished in the last forty years. This may represent a legitimate crisis.

Today, however, this situation is changing. Serious, thorough, textually and methodologically rigorous documentary scholarship is being produced. In one sense, in the theoretical sense, this deepens the crisis: now there are, indeed, two fundamentally conflicting views on the composition of the Pentateuch. In another sense, however, in the practical sense, the crisis may be improving: those scholars who have been adrift in the great pentateuchal sea may find that their long-held views have a home again. In short, the Documentary Hypothesis is regaining its place as a viable, productive, and current approach to the Pentateuch.

This is not to say, however, that the Documentary Hypothesis of the early twentieth century is simply being restated. On the contrary: one of the main contributions of more recent source-critical work has been the identification and correction of the methodological problems that plagued earlier scholarship—the very problems which, it is fair to say, contributed significantly if not primarily to the move away from the Documentary Hypothesis in Europe in recent generations. Two of these methodological problems are worthy of particular attention: the question of stylistic differences as a means of distinguishing among the sources, and the question of similarity of content among the various sources.

For generations, the most commonly cited basis for differentiating one source from another has been the issue of style and terminology. Lists are produced: lists of words that "belong" to one source or another. I don't mean to suggest that there aren't words or phrases that are unique to a single source, because there certainly are. The problem is that these lists are taken as prescriptive: when you come across a particular word, you check the list to see which source it "belongs" to, and then you know which source you're looking at. Such a procedure seemingly ignores the basic notion that all of the biblical authors knew Hebrew, and were perfectly capable of using any word from the language that they wished. We must therefore be cautious in how style and terminology are used in source-critical work. These features are not prescriptive: they do not tell us which source a passage belongs to. They are, rather, descriptive: once we have isolated the sources in their entirety throughout the Pentateuch, then, and only then, are we at liberty to say what, if any, words or phrases are unique to a given document.

The other major methodological problem with classical source-critical analyses was the implicit belief that the sources must have told the same stories in the same manner. Although there are some episodes that are obviously unique to a single document—the Akedah, for example—in many cases scholars believed that more than one source "must" have told a given story. Even in ostensibly unified passages, scholars went to great lengths to pull verses out and attribute them to another source, solely because they required evidence of another source. There is no a priori reason to think that the sources must be so very similar, however. Indeed, given their theological differences, why should we be surprised by differences in plot as well?

Methodological problems are not the same as theoretical problems, however. The Documentary Hypothesis, it must always be remembered, is precisely that: a hypothesis. It is an attempt to explain the literary phenomena of the Pentateuch: clear narrative contradiction, repetition, and discontinuity. It posits that the best explanation for these features is the existence of four independent documents that were combined into a single text, basically the canonical Pentateuch as we now have it. It is the literary solution to a literary problem, no more and no less. Scholarly claims regarding stylistic criteria or similarity of narratives are not inherent parts of the theory; they are aspects of the methods used to argue for the theory. If they do not succeed, the theory does not of necessity fail; the methods do. The theory may simply need to be argued on different grounds. Thus the very correct criticisms of anti-documentary scholars from the earliest days of the theory until our own time are not necessarily grounds for dismissing the whole hypothesis; they are, rather, a call to refine and revise the methods employed by scholars when describing and applying the hypothesis. When such refinements and revisions are undertaken, as they have been recently, the Documentary Hypothesis regains its place as the most economical, comprehensive explanation for the literary phenomena of the canonical Pentateuch.

David Wright has termed the recent source-critical approach the "Neo-Documentary Hypothesis," a label which is gaining some use among its adherents and others. What, then, is the shape of the Neo-Documentary Hypothesis? How does it differ from its earlier incarnation; how does it take into account the methodological problems of classical documentary scholarship; how does it help us to better understand the composition of the Pentateuch?

First: Whereas classical scholarship more often than not took stylistic and terminological markers as the starting point for the division of the text, the Neo-Documentary Hypothesis recognizes that these elements are valuable only as secondary, supporting criteria. Instead, we place at the forefront of the analysis plot and narrative continuity—the events that occur, the sequence in which they occur, cause, and effect. The mark of an author is his creation of and adherence to a distinctive and definable set of narrative claims: who did what, when, where, and how. Where these claims are contradictory, we must consider that a different author is at work; where they are the same, there is no need to pursue any source division. It is no small irony that in current non-documentary scholarship, style and terminology have re-emerged triumphantly as the fundamental basis for analysis, and with far greater demands for linguistic similarity than classical source-critical scholarship ever required.

Second: The belief that the documents must have all told the same stories in the same way, a hallmark of classical scholarship, is discarded in the Neo-Documentary Hypothesis. In its place is the recognition that there is no reason whatsoever that each source could not and indeed should not tell the stories however it wished. The sources in fact tell very different stories within the same larger framework, with different episodes, in different orders, and with very different viewpoints. This recognition allows for literarily unified passages to remain so, and also allows for simpler source divisions.

Third: For generations now, the Documentary Hypothesis has been considered synonymous with Wellhausen's reconstruction of the evolutionary growth of ancient Israelite religion. The source division and the placement of the sources in a straight line of development from earliest to latest, from naturalistic to legalistic, has been taken as the fundamental claim of the hypothesis. This is demonstrated by the attempts in scholarship to debunk the Documentary Hypothesis by arguing against Wellhausen's view of Israelite religion, as if the former is dependent on the latter. On the contrary, however, it was Wellhausen's source division in his  Composition  that allowed for his historical reconstruction in the Prolegomena. [2]  In the first book, he addressed only the literary evidence; in the second, he addressed only the historical questions. The Neo-Documentary Hypothesis returns to the first stage, and leaves the second unconsidered. The literary question is primary, and is in fact the only question that can be answered by the documentary theory. Even if one disagrees with or disproves the arguments of Wellhausen's Prolegomena, the literary analysis of the Pentateuch stands on its own merits.

Fourth: In the classical model, the sources were understood as representing discrete historical periods, and were therefore dated accordingly. The order J-E-D-P was almost universally accepted, and was made the basis for much of the analysis. In the Neo-Documentary Hypothesis, the absolute dating of the sources is not a topic of investigation. There is little in the sources themselves that allows for any absolute dating. What is possible is relative dating, though only in one particular case. The relationship of D to E and J makes clear that D was written after the other two non-priestly documents. Yet whether J or E came first, or how P fits into this picture, are questions for which the literary data simply do not provide evidence. Nor does the theory rest on any specific dating of the documents: if all four were written within twenty years of each other, the literary evidence would not change; if J were written in the tenth century and P in the Middle Ages, the literary evidence would not change. The dating of the sources has no impact on the Neo-Documentary Hypothesis.

Fifth: The classical source theory was often concerned with identifying the various strata that made up the individual sources, positing J1, J2, etc. Further, the presence of strata in the sources was used to solve supposed internal discrepancies within the sources. The Neo-Documentary Hypothesis is concerned only with the penultimate form of the text: what the compiler had at hand when he put the four documents together. This approach allows for far greater clarity in addressing the question of how the Pentateuch came to be this way, for it goes back only a single step. It is crucial to note, however, that the Neo-Documentary Hypothesis does not deny the internal growth of the sources; it is simply unconcerned with them. Like so much else, how each source came to look as it does is a secondary question. The Neo-Documentary Hypothesis does not deny that each source has a history; nor does it deny that the Pentateuch itself has a history after the compilation of the documents. It is a restricted answer to a restricted question.

Sixth: The classical approach posited at least three redactors for the Pentateuch, each responsible for one stage in the evolutionary growth of the text. The Neo-Documentary Hypothesis posits a single, almost mechanical compiler, who was responsible for the combination of all four sources. The compiler's work was entirely literary: it was no more than the combination of the four documents into a single story, with the rare small adjustments and insertions that contributed to that process. Literary activities that do not participate in the process of combining the source documents—glosses, secondary additions, theological revisions—these are not part of the compiler's work, and are not attributed to the compiler.

Seventh: The classical theory began as a fairly simple proposition: four independent documents, combined into a single Pentateuch. Over time, however, it expanded dramatically, so that even within a generation or two of Wellhausen the analysis of the Pentateuch required innumerable sigla, regular divisions of the text into half-verses and even single words, and highly complex theories about redaction. The unwieldiness of this theory inevitably led in part to opposition, as it could no longer be said that the Documentary Hypothesis was a particularly simple or elegant solution to the problems of the pentateuchal text. Ironically, of course, the newer analyses coming out of Europe are, if anything, even more complex than the most tortuous classical source-critical work. The Neo-Documentary Hypothesis restores the simplicity of the earlier scholarship. It requires precisely four sources and one compiler.

The Documentary Hypothesis, in general and in its particulars, is a literary solution to a literary problem, and no more than that. It does not begin with the search for sources in the text: the sources are the conclusion of the theory, not its beginning. It begins with the canonical text, and the literary problems that require explanation. Why the Pentateuch is incoherent: that is the driving question of all critical enquiries into the composition of the text, and the Neo-Documentary Hypothesis is the most comprehensive and economical answer to that question.

[1]  Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1977.

[2]  Julius Wellhausen,  Die Composition des Hexateuchs und die historischen Bücher des Alten Testaments  (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1885);  Prolegomena to the History of Israel  (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994).

Comments (18)

Where are the Germans? A lot has being going on there in recent years. I hope that the book, when I get hold of it, shows knowledge of the modern discussion in Europe, and that the author can read German. He will get very long without. Here only Rendtorff is mentioned, and Wellhausen. A bit disturbing.

Niels Peter Lemche

#1 - Niels Peter Lemche - 05/08/2012 - 18:29

To Prof. Lemche: Not to worry - the book contains a substantial treatment of the European perspective, both in general and in detailed treatments of specific passages.

#2 - Joel Baden - 05/08/2012 - 19:12

Then I look forward to read it!

#3 - Niels Peter Lemche - 05/08/2012 - 19:25

"now there are, indeed, two fundamentally conflicting views on the composition of the Pentateuch…"

Is this accurate? My impression is that there is a predominantly literary approach to the final state of the text which cares little for the hypothetical sources because many of the criteria originally claimed to be decisive in recognising the extent and nature of those sources have been shown to be spurious (one think also of Whybray's The Making of the Pentateuch) and then the various source hypotheses which not only claim that it is possible to recover sources but that there is also value in doing so.

"we place at the forefront of the analysis plot and narrative continuity—the events that occur, the sequence in which they occur, cause, and effect…"

This is certainly an improvement over the methodology underpinning earlier source theories, but ISTM that it still faces a number of problems. First, the analysis presumes a set of norms against which the text is measured. Whybray demonstrated that the previous methodology placed anachronistic expectations on the biblical text. How can we be certain that the Neo-DH is not guilty of the same error?

Second, the underlying presupposition is that the final editor was an idiot. Rather than combining sources into a coherent narrative, they've produced a rather slapdash conglomeration of material. But if editors can be idiots, can't authors also be idiots? Why attribute narrative features which we think are indicative of disparate sources to editorial incompetence rather than authorial incompetence? Or perhaps, in light of the first point, why not attribute them to the incompetence of the readers?

For some considerable time the DH was treated as a given, but — as you've noted — it fell from grace (and with good reason). I suspect that's the danger with any hypothesis that attempts to define the nature of sources without any physical evidence of the source.

Perhaps the book addresses these issues in full and I should read it, and then perhaps wait for David Clines to update "New Directions in Pooh Studies"!

#4 - Martin Shields - 05/09/2012 - 01:31

I found this article instructive (but where does Van Seters fit in? A 'European' in North America?)However, I do wonder whether any kind of purely literary analysis of texts can deliver a conclusion about composition. Also needed is text-critical analysis, which suggests a quite complicated history not just of textual transmission but also redaction (can the two be entirely separated?) And more fundamentally: what kind of scribal model are we assuming? An 'editor' who has in from of him four complete scrolls from which he compiled a kind of Diatessaron - though without attempting harmonization. Many Europeans now are thinking rather that the Pentateuchal books developed as distinct literary products, and that the present division into 'books' was not the result odf the final editor deciding where to end each volume of the magnum opus.

#5 - philip davies - 05/09/2012 - 08:30

Dr. Baden, thanks for your interesting article. Your approach assumes that the original narrative coherence of Pentateuchal sources is still visible. Relatedly, I have a few questions. How does this perspective align with empirical examples of scribal transmission that we possess? I'm thinking here of the Epic of Gilgamesh, but also biblical and DSS examples, where scribal transmission entailed a process of conflation, expansion, and omission of earlier texts. This would seem to obscure the original coherence of those sources, and frustrate attempts at its recovery, unless we assume that the whole Pentateuch only passed through the hands of ONE redactor who retained the coherence of his sources entirely.

Also, you allow for the internal growth of sources (J1, 2, 3, etc.). But what about mutual influence between sources? Thanks!

#6 - Matt Lynch - 05/09/2012 - 13:44

Dr. Baden, What methodological control do you give to empirical examples of scribal transmission in the ANE lit, DSS, LXX, etc?

#7 - Matt Lynch - 05/09/2012 - 13:58

In response to Martin:

There are, of course, many more theories of pentateuchal composition than just the two I mention in this piece, but it is safe to say that among active pentateuchal critics, at least as evident in conferences, volumes of collected essays, etc., these are the two most prominent theories in play in the field today.

As to the potential for anachronistic expectations of narrative, I think that this is not really a significant concern. We are not importing modern notions of coherence into the biblical text - the Bible itself is replete with examples of narratives, from small to large, that are perfectly readable in what we might consider a "modern" sense - consider the books of Ruth or Esther, for example. What makes the case of the Pentateuch stand out is precisely its deviation from the biblical norm.

I am most interested, however, in responding to your claim that the compiler was an "idiot." Nothing, to my mind, could be further from the truth. That would be the case only if we imagine the compiler was attempting to create a perfect, contradiction-free story; yet it is eminently clear that such is not the case. If, on the other hand, the compiler was trying to preserve his sources as much as possible while still retaining the basic chronological sequence of events, then he did a magnificent job. And since the literary evidence suggests that this is indeed what he was trying to do, then we have no reason to imagine otherwise.

I will conclude this response, at least, by noting that the observation of literary difficulties in the Pentateuch can hardly be attributed to the incompetence of the reader (i.e., the modern scholar) - the classical rabbis and the medieval Jewish commentators, to my mind the best readers of the text ever, responded to and dealt with virtually every single one of the problems that modern scholars see. Indeed, some of the contradictions in the Pentateuch are clearly at issue even for later biblical authors. We are neither inventing nor anachronistically imagining the problems in the Pentateuch.

#8 - Joel Baden - 05/09/2012 - 23:45

To Prof. Davies:

I certainly agree that textual criticism is a necessary step in the analysis of any and all biblical writings. That said, one of the advantages of the narrative-based analysis of the Pentateuch that I am describing here is that minute differences in the text, of the type that commonly creep in during transmission, do not really affect the broad historical claims of the narratives, especially as these claims are evident across multiple texts and are deeply interconnected with other such claims, forming a web that remains strong even if one small link is cut.

The Pentateuch is, of course, one of the least text-critically problematic portions of the Hebrew Bible. But even where there are significant text-critical issues, such as in the Tabernacle chapters in Exodus 25-31, 35-40, the text-critical analysis doesn't affect the source-critical analysis.

As for the scribal model, I should say that, at least from my perspective, no model is "assumed" - when the Pentateuch is analyzed as I am describing, the four documents emerge, and their very presence in the Pentateuch, in the manner that they are present, requires at the minimum one person to have combined them. That is to say, the scribal model develops from the literary evidence, rather than the other way around, as I think is indeed proper.

#9 - Joel Baden - 05/09/2012 - 23:53

The examples of scribal transmission and textual growth in other ANE, biblical, and post-biblical books are undoubtedly of great interest, but I do not think it proper to import those models into the Pentateuch, any more than it would be to import the pentateuchal model into other texts. The model of transmission and growth must be derived from the literary evidence on a case-by-case basis.

That said, I think that there may be at least one reasonable parallel to the model of pentateuchal composition that I am describing here: the Samaritan Pentateuch. As is well known, Sam will occasionally conflate multiple versions of a single event that is narrated differently in different places; for example, in Exod 18:13-27, Sam takes the MT story of Moses appointing judges in Exod 18:13-27 and combines it with Deuteronomy's version of the same, from Deut 1:9-18. The scribal impulse here is clear enough: these two descriptions of the same event should be brought together into a single account. Yet the newly-created version in Sam has narrative difficulties that result, understandably enough, from its conflation of two distinct versions of a single story.

The same phenomenon, it should be observed, occurs also in the DSS and elsewhere in post-biblical literature. For details, I recommend the article by Jeffrey Tigay, "Conflation as a Redactional Technique," in idem, Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 53-95.

Now to your question about mutual influence between sources: quite simply, I think that there is influence when the literary evidence demands it - when there is clear dependence or citation. Thus I think it indisputable that D was heavily influenced by E, and to a lesser extent by J. I do not see any evidence at all that either J or E knew the other, or that P knew any other source or that any other source knew P. (This is slightly complicated by what seems to be a good case that H, a later stratum of P, was indeed familiar with both D and E, but here we may be getting a little ahead of ourselves.) In any case, the mutual relationship of the sources, like their processes of internal growth, dating, social location, etc., is a question that can be answered only after the sources have been isolated and identified. Fundamentally, if it were somehow to be proven that P knew every other source, or vice versa, it shouldn't affect the division of the sources in the text, as that division emerges from internal literary analysis.

My thanks to you and to everyone I just responded to seriatim for interesting and engaging questions, and especially for the unusually and very welcome civil and respectful manner of discussion - may it always be thus!

#10 - Joel Baden - 05/10/2012 - 00:15

Dr. Baden, Thanks for these helpful replies. As a follow-up to the SamP example above. Does the resulting conflation leave enough of the original material from EACH story in tact so as to preserve the narrative coherence/semblence and distinctive profile of each earlier source in the proto-MT (esp. if we didn't have those texts)? If so, then I feel that the analogy holds for what you describe going on in the Pentateuch. But if not, then on analogy, how can we use narrative coherence as a criterion for determining earlier sources whose original coherence was lost in a process of conflation?

#11 - Matt Lynch - 05/11/2012 - 04:14

Word for word, simply interwoven at the most appropriate chronological point, resulting in a text that both preserves the distinctive profile of its sources and, though chronologically plausible, is internally contradictory on a number of substantive narrative grounds.

#12 - Joel Baden - 05/11/2012 - 23:08

What qualities in a hypothesis are needed for us to classify it as 'documentary' - is it that it claims that there was a final editor and that that person made, for whatever reason, no attempt at all to harmonise? Do we face 'non-documentarism' as soon as anyone says that, though there may have been multiple sources for the text we have, there were attempts to harmonise them before they were finally compiled? Are these hypotheses falsifiable? What, if anything, would qualify as showing that the earlier documents did not exist?

#13 - Martin - 05/14/2012 - 16:58

From my perspective, a hypothesis is "documentary" if it posits that the text was formed from the combination of previously independent documents, that is, essentially complete and self-contained sources. It doesn't matter, I don't think, how those documents were combined (classically they were combined by accretion, while I think otherwise, but both theories are documentary). I think it would be difficult to demonstrate that sources had been harmonized before compilation, as that harmonization would, theoretically at least, prevent us from identifying the sources in the first place. The question of falsifiability is an interesting one. I think of it less in terms of proof - since, barring the discovery of a pentateuchal source in a cave somewhere, we can't expect to have anything that can bear the burden of proof - rather, I think of it more in terms of which of the various hypotheses on the table best explains the form of the text as we have it.

#14 - Joel Baden - 05/16/2012 - 19:26

Hard to call any of this a crisis. What if academia never studied the Bible ever again? What would be lost to humanity? It's very hard for me to understand why someone who is not religious would care about this stuff so much... Then again, I don't suppose I can understand spending years of one's life on Homer (reading it to appreciate art, absolutely, but to make it the focus of one's life?). Anyway, the word "crisis" is overwrought. All these hypotheses are conjectures. We don't know the past. If there was a unitary Author we don't know why He wrote it the way He did. Until and if archaeology tells us something concrete, it appears to be a colossal waste of time, whatever one's beliefs.

#15 - David Z - 09/10/2013 - 23:46

Thanks for the excellent essay. I look forward to reading The Composition of the Pentateuch.

#16 - Edward Mills - 09/17/2013 - 22:32

Dr Baden, Thanks again for a helpful update on the subject. I was wondering whether you have considered the 'structured Torah' work of Moshe Kline (chaver.com)? Your last sentence could have another answer. 'Why the Pentateuch is incoherent: that is the driving question of all critical enquiries into the composition of the text, and the Neo-Documentary Hypothesis is the most comprehensive and economical answer to that question'. I am not sure - having studied the work of Moshe Kline for the last five years, and most of his 86 units of the text, I am convinced that the woven structuring of the Torah shows that it is anything but 'incoherent', and his analysis is a most comprehensive and economical answer to critical enquiries on why the text is as it is. My conclusion is that the author/final editor was anything but 'an idiot', to quote Martin above. Moshe Kline has also shown that this textual composition was known to the Mishnah author, as this is formed in a similar manner, so probably following on from the ancient tradition. I would like to see many leading biblical studies scholars evaluating this hypothesis rigorously, to see if they come to the same conclusions! I have not seen much in the way of critical review as yet, even though he has published papers in peer reviewed journals. To quote yourself, for me, given the various hypotheses on the table, it 'best explains the form of the text as we have it'.

#17 - Paul Hocking - 10/24/2013 - 11:53

David Z, Are you implying that the academic community is not 'religious?' 'What would be lost to humanity?' Investigation, inquiry, has brought much to the light of day. Ignorance is not 'bliss.' Enquiring minds do want to know, to understand. I have been and will continue 'spending years' of my life reading, studying - and where appropriate - allowing scholarship to increase my understanding of what I read in my Bible - the Word of God.

#18 - Matthew G Zatkalik - 03/04/2015 - 16:03

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'the book of genesis from a….

'The Book of Genesis from a Darwinian Perspective' was published in 2007. The latest post here is 2015. It is now 2020. Academics who have seen my work on Genesis won't talk about it. Lemche told me I'd have to get a master's degree in the field before any academics would look at it or talk about it. A few of you have seen it, but none of you say anything about it, so it is not considered, but the power of a hypothesis is in its explanatory potential. My essay on Genesis explains many things the academics don't even talk about and obviously don't know anything about. I'll have to wait and see if my well reasoned comment is posted. My article on Genesis is at Academia.edu

Regardless of any history…

Regardless of any history the book of Genesis may or may not contain, the book describes the behavioral and material archetypes for the first successful diaspora. Among the proofs for my assertion are the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy which describe the behavioral and material archetypes for the establishment of the nation of Israel. This dichotomy of the Torah into two establishment structures is especially fruitful for understanding the essential Torah's fundamental theology which until the advent of rabbinical Judaism, shifted from the "self-sacrifice" (the Law written on the heart) in diaspora (Abram's faith is credited by God as righteousness), to the national Law written on stone tablets (by Moses, who lacks faith). You have to read the entire paper to appreciate the progress of the narrative. If you don't read it, you won't get it. If you read it, you can't miss it, because it is not a hypothesis. It is a series of observations considered from a Darwinian perspective.

The Torah structure is a loop: "Nonsedentary diaspora life is established by entering Egypt from Canaan. (Genesis) Sedentary national life is established by entering Canaan from Egypt.“ (Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy)

For further discussion of the Torah's establishment structures, continue with: The Fundamental Structure and Systematic Theology of the Torah (the next paper on this page)

Does Gordon Wenham believe…

Does Gordon Wenham believe in the Documentary Hypothesis? Andrew Wolstenholme BTh

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Documentary Hypothesis: The Revelation of YHWH’s Name Continues to Enlighten

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When God reveals the name YHWH to Moses in Exodus, he says that not even the patriarchs knew this name, yet they all use it in Genesis. Critical scholarship’s solution to this problem led to one of the most important academic innovations in biblical studies in the last three hundred years: the Documentary Hypothesis.

Categories:

Source Criticism and the Names of God

The Documentary Hypothesis (also called source criticism) in its classical form proposes that the Torah (or the Hexateuch, the Torah + Joshua) was made up of four sources, called J, E, P, and D. Alternative theories have been proposed (e.g. the supplementary hypothesis, the fragmentary hypothesis, etc.). While documentary scholars each have somewhat different nuanced versions of this hypothesis, most scholars agree on the significance of the observations that form the core of this hypothesis. One of the better-known arguments is the issue of God’s name.

The Torah contains many names for God, but two of them predominate: YHWH and Elohim . The meaning of the first one is traditionally believed to signify “The Eternal One”, but in academic circles the origin and meaning of the name is considered to be unknown. [1] The name is often left unpronounced by religious people and replaced most often with Lord ( Adonai ). [2] The second is a generic word, a common noun, for God or gods, which was also used as the name for the God of Israel.

A Short History of the Four Sources

Although many who are familiar with the Documentary Hypothesis know it to encompass four sources and the entire Torah, nevertheless, it took time and a number of intermediate steps for scholars to reach this conclusion. In the 18th century, a French physician, Jean Astruc, anonymously suggested that the two names of God in Genesis came from two different sources. He believed that these two sources, which he just called A and B, had been combined by Moses to create the book of Genesis. In 1753, he separated out these sources in his Conjectures on the original accounts of which it appears Moses availed himself in composing the Book of Genesis . [3] Over time, Astruc’s “source A” was renamed E, for Elohist, and his source B became J, for Jahwist.

Taking Astruc’s pioneering suggestion a step further, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn applied the source division to the rest of the Pentateuch. [4] This was not just an expansion, but a conceptual revolution. Astruc believed in the Mosaic authorship of the Torah. The title of his (Astruc’s) book makes it clear that he believed that Moses himself was the redactor of Genesis. Eichhorn, however, writing less than twenty years later, dispenses with the entire concept of Mosaic authorship. In his view, the Torah was put together from these two sources years after Moses lived.

The next important step in separating out sources was taken by Wilhelm M. L. de Wette. [5] De Wette showed, among other things, that Deuteronomy should be treated as a third, separate source, D (for Deuteronomist). [6] In other words, whereas the rest of the Pentateuch is made up of sources spliced together, De Wette argued that Deuteronomy should be read as a self-contained work.

Most important for the purposes of this essay, was the contribution of Herman Hupfeld. [7] Hupfeld pointed out that the Elohist source, as identified by earlier scholarship, actually is comprised of two different sources, both of which use Elohim in Genesis. Since one of these sources focuses a great deal on priestly issues, he called it P, retaining the siglum E for the non-Priestly source that uses Elohim . [8] These four sources formed the basis of the now famous Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis, which forms the basis of the various iterations of the Documentary Hypothesis known today. [9]

The Names of God in Genesis and Exodus – The Peshat Problem

Although Astruc was able to solve a number of narrative problems by dividing Genesis into two sources based on the two names of God, the biggest problem that this division solves actually appears in Exodus. In Exodus 6, God speaks to Moses:

שמות ו:ב וַיְדַבֵּר אֱלֹהִים אֶל מֹשֶׁה וַיֹּאמֶר אֵלָיו אֲנִי יְ־הֹוָה. ו:ג וָאֵרָא אֶל אַבְרָהָם אֶל יִצְחָק וְאֶל יַעֲקֹב בְּאֵל שַׁדָּי וּשְׁמִי יְ־הֹוָה לֹא נוֹדַעְתִּי לָהֶם.

Exod 6:2 Elohim spoke to Moses and said to him, “I am YHWH. 6:3 I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai , but I did not make Myself known to them by My name YHWH.

According to the plain meaning of this passage, God is revealing to Moses a secret name, which even the patriarchs did not know. God says to Moses that God has another name, El Shaddai , which the patriarchs did know, but that the name YHWH had remained secret until this moment.

The name El Shaddai does appear in a number of the accounts of the Patriarchs in Genesis. God uses it when speaking with Abraham (17:1) and Jacob (35:11). Isaac (28:3) and Jacob (43:14, 48:3) use it when blessing or passing on messages to their sons. The name YHWH, however, also appears in the ancestral narratives. Moreover, in a number of these appearances, it is clear that the patriarchs know this name and use it.

When Eve names her son Cain (4:1), she does so to express that, “she created a man with YHWH.” [10] In the generation of Enosh, the Torah claims (4:26), the people began to call (or use) the name of YHWH. Abraham calls the name of YHWH multiple times (12:8, 13:4, 21:33), as does Isaac (26:25, 27:7, 27:27). God uses the name YHWH when speaking with Jacob (28:13) and Jacob uses it as well (28:16, 28:21, 32:10, 49:18). Sarah (16:5), Leah (29:32, 33, 35), Rachel (30:24), and Laban (30:27) know the name YHWH.

In short, when looking at all these passages, it seems clear that the name YHWH was hardly a secret and that it was well-known to the ancestors. And yet, Exodus 6:2-3 seems to be saying that they did not know it.

Traditional Solutions

The contradiction between the assertion in Exod. 6:3, that the name YHWH was unknown before this encounter, and the fact that the name is used by multiple characters in Genesis all the time, forced many traditional commentators to devise answers that would ease the tension between this verse and the accounts in Genesis.

1. Moses Anachronistically Wrote YHWH

‍ Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra references the Karaite scholar, Yeshua, [11] who suggests that the verse means what it says: the name YHWH was unknown before Moses. He explains that it was Moses himself, who wrote the name into the stories in Genesis, but it is really an anachronism. [12] Not surprisingly, this out of the box suggestion had little caché among rabbinic commentators.

2. God Revealed Both Names to the Ancestors

‍ Ibn Ezra also refers to the very different answer of Rav Sa’adia Gaon (10th cent.). Sa’adia states that the verse should be read with an implied “only (בלבד).” According to this interpretation, God is saying that God used both the name El Shaddai and YHWH when interacting with the patriarchs, but will use only YHWH with Moses.

Rashbam (1085-1158) and R. Joseph Bechor Shor (12th cent.) also believe that God is telling Moses that God revealed both names to the patriarchs, but they go about reading the verse in a very different manner. They suggest re-punctuating the verse by putting the comma after YHWH. The verse would then read:

Elohim spoke to Moses and said to him, “I am YHWH. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai and by my name YHWH, ( but ) I did not make Myself known to them.”

According to this reading, God tells Moses that God appeared to the Patriarchs as El Shaddai and YHWH. This solves the contradiction, but how is the reader to understand the final clause? Rashbam and Bechor Shor suggest that it means that even though God revealed God’s names, God never fulfilled the promises; “revealed” means “fulfilled” in this reading. What God tells Moses here is that this time it will be different, Moses will not only hear God’s names and God’s promises but will see their fulfillment as well.

Yet another commentator who believes the verse communicates that both names were used in revelation is R. Yehudah ha-Chasid (1140-1217). [13] He claims that the verse does not mean that God never appeared to them with the name YHWH. Of course, God did; it is documented. Instead, it means that God appeared to them with the name El Shaddai, and not YHWH, once they became Patriarchs, i.e. once they had children. Before that, God used the name YHWH.

3. The Ancestors Knew the Name But Did Not Understand It

‍ Ibn Ezra (1089-1164) suggests that the term YHWH has both a nominal and adjectival meaning. In other words, YHWH is both a proper name, and thus designates God, and has a meaning, and can function descriptively, like some nouns do. The ancestors, he claims, were aware of the name (i.e. the proper noun) but they did not know its significance (i.e. its use as an adjectival description of God.) He claims that Moses’ understanding of the name demonstrates Moses’ greater grasp of matters divine; this is the reason that Moses could do miracles and the patriarchs could not. Hence, ibn Ezra writes, the meaning of the verse is that Moses will make the meaning of the name YHWH known to the world by performing miracles and making use of God’s power over the world.

Ramban (1194-c.1270), usually very critical of ibn Ezra, claims that in this case the philosopher hit it right on the money, the only problem being that since ibn Ezra was not a kabbalist, he didn’t truly understand the important truth he uncovered. Hence, Ramban writes, he will fill the readers in on real meaning of what ibn Ezra discovered. God appears to different prophets in distinctive emanations ( specula , from Latin, literally “windows” or “mirrors”). God appeared to the patriarchs in a dim or unclear emanation and to Moses in a bright one. The ancestors may have known the name YHWH, but they could not see God well enough to understand what it signified. Moses, on the other hand, was able to speak with God face to face and gaze upon the bright or clear emanation. Hence, it was to him that the true meaning of the name YHWH was revealed. The approach of ibn Ezra and Ramban was adopted by Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) in his Biur as the correct peshat understanding of the verse.

Rabbi Joseph ibn Kaspi (1279-1340) also interpreted the verse in this way, albeit taking a more philosophical and less kabbalistic spin. He says simply that the ancestors may have known God’s name, but they never really had complete proven understanding of the concept behind it. Moses, on the other hand, understood the concept perfectly. Ibn Kaspi’s only bone of contention with ibn Ezra focuses on what it is that Moses understood—a philosophical debate far beyond the scope of this survey.

4. Different Kinds of YHWH Revelations

‍ A slightly different solution was offered by Maimonides’ son, Rabbi Abraham (1186-1237), in a very long excursus on this issue. Rabbi Abraham surveys a number of the main interpretations discussed here, that of Sa’adia and Rashbam, calling their answers התנצלות, apologetics. [14] He then admits that it would be worthy for him to offer apologetics as well, if he didn’t have a good answer. Luckily, however, he does (at least in his opinion).

Rabbi Abraham says that upon looking at the various revelations to the patriarchs carefully, a pattern emerges. Whenever God uses the name YHWH, God inevitably qualifies the term with a description, like “I am YHWH, who took you out of Ur Kasdim” (Gen. 12:7), or “I am YHWH, the God of Abraham your father” (Gen. 28:13). However, when God uses El Shaddai , God doesn’t qualify the name but moves on to the message, like “I am El Shaddai ; walk before me,” (Gen. 17:1) or “I am El Shaddai ; be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 35:11). However, with Moses, God simply says, “I am YHWH,” and moves on to the message, as God did with the patriarchs when using El Shaddai . The meaning of this change, R. Abraham writes, is an important philosophical secret, the explanation of which occupies the next two pages of commentary. [15]

5. The Patriarchs Never Experienced the Truth of the Revelation

‍ The best-known answer to the contradiction comes from Rashi (1041-1105). Rashi begins by pointing out that the verse uses the niphal form of the verb and not the causative form. (Onkelos translates the verse as if it were in the causative form, but Rashi does not mention this.) The verse does not mean that God didn’t inform them of the name YHWH, Rashi argues. Instead, it means that God did not demonstrate the “truth” of the name YHWH, a name that, according to Rashi, refers to God’s capacity to fulfill God’s promises. Since God intends to fulfill the promises now, God informs Moses that the Israelites will now experience the aspect of God’s being to which the name YHWH refers.

The modern academic biblical scholar, Umberto Cassuto (1883-1951), takes Rashi’s interpretation in a slightly different direction and sharpens it. [16] Gods in the ancient world were known by their particular powers or attributes. Even if the Israelites had only one God, this God had different names. But these names functioned similar to the names of gods in general; each name specifies a particular attribute or function of the one God. Hence, Cassuto argues, from the context of the blessings to the patriarchs, who are always being told to be fruitful and multiply, the name El Shaddai should be understood as referring to God’s capacity to assist with fertility and child producing.

The name YHWH, on the other hand, should be associated with the Promised Land. Since the patriarchs were not destined to live through the conquest of the land, God communicates their blessings through the persona of El Shaddai , the aspect of God that will make them fruitful. In other words, Cassuto believes that the ancestors knew of the name YHWH, but that God never demonstrated the function of that attribute to them. Moses and the generation of the exodus, however, are supposed to be part of the conquest—until the sins in the desert change the plan—so God appears to Moses in the aspect of YHWH, the God of the land.

6. God as the Source of Good and Evil

The eclectic 19th century Italian commentator, Rabbi Samuel David Luzzatto (Shadal), takes an approach somewhere between Rashi and ibn Ezra. He claims that the patriarchs never really understood the name YHWH, because that name signifies that God is the source of everything in this world, all good and all bad. Since the patriarchs never experienced anything bad (Shadal’s words not mine) they could not really digest the significance of that name. However, now that Moses has said to God (5:22): “Why have you done evil to these people?” God now has the opportunity to really explain God’s nature. God does good and bad, everything comes from God. [17]

The Source-Critical Solution

All of the above explanations use resourceful, even ingenious interpretations to solve a very problematic verse within the framework of the Torah being of single authorship. Yet the plain meaning of the verse remains that God never told the patriarchs the name YHWH, and that it was a secret until the moment of this revelation. What is the person who searches for the straightforward explanation to do with the internal biblical evidence that points to the fact that the ancestors all know this name of God starting with Eve herself and continuing all the way through Jacob!

Source criticism although may sound ominous to some, in fact solves this contradiction in an elegant and complete fashion. Exodus 6:2-12 comes from the P source, in which this revelation is the first time the name of YHWH is mentioned. God is informing Moses that he is, in fact, the first human ever to learn this name. [18] According to the J source, however, God was known as YHWH by the ancestors. Thus, the name is used ubiquitously in Genesis; it is not depicted as a once secret name. [19]

In sum, according to the Documentary Hypothesis (in simplified form), the first four books of the Torah are a combination of three sources, J, E, and P. One of the main distinguishing features of these sources is the name the human characters use for God. [20]

In the J source, YHWH was always used, going back even to primordial times. Certainly, the ancestors were well aware of it. In E and P, only Moses is first introduced to this name by God. Although E does not state specifically that the name was unknown before, the primary name of God in the E narratives is Elohim . The P source states unequivocally that before Moses no human knew this secret name of God.

Tying Up Loose Ends: Revelation of YHWH Round Two?

‍ Hupfeld’s division between P and E solves yet another interpretive problem related to God’s name. In Exodus 3:6, God introduces Godself to Moses as the god ( elohei ) of his fathers. Moses then asks God, in v. 13, how he might respond to an Israelite question of what the name of this god is. God responds in v. 15 by telling Moses the name YHWH. Now if Moses learned this name in chapter 3, why would God present it again to Moses as the revelation of a secret name in chapter 6? The answer source criticism provides is that chapter 3 comes from the E source while chapter 6 is from the P source.

A Compelling Hypothesis

The use of different names for God was one of the first tools the early academic Bible scholars came up with to distinguish between these three main sources in Genesis-Numbers. The source distinction was developed to solve certain textual problems, and it remains a powerful tool fulfilling that purpose today as well. It remains a hypothesis—no ancient document from the Dead Sea Scrolls or elsewhere contains, e.g., the separate J or P texts of the Torah. But it is a very powerful hypothesis that offers a single explanation for many contradictions of precisely the type that midrashic texts resolve in disparate fashions.

The division of the Torah into sources is not, however, based only, or even primarily upon the different names used of God. The evidence concerning divine names overlaps with other pieces of evidence, making it a very powerful, and for many, a most-compelling hypothesis.

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January 15, 2014

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[1] Many theories have been suggested, but none has garnered wide approval.

[2] In much of the biblical period, the name YHWH was likely pronounced as written. In the late biblical period, however, it became taboo to pronounce the name, and it was replaced with a surrogate. The literature from the Dead Sea Scrolls already shows this tendency very clearly, though Adonai was only one of several surrogates used.

[3] Conjectures sur les mémoires originaux, dont il paraît que Moïse s’est servi pour composer le livre de la Genèse.

[4] In his five-volume Introduction to the Old Testament ( Einleitung in das Alte Testament ), pub. 1780-1783 .

[5] In his two-volume Contributions towards an Introduction to the Old Testament ( Beiträge zur Einleitung in das Alte Testament ), pub. 1806-7 .

[6] D does not include, however, the very final verses of Deuteronomy.

[7] In his The Sources of Genesis and the Nature of their Composition Re-examined ( Die Quellen der Genesis und die Art ihrer Zusammensetzung. Von neuem untersucht ), pub. 1853.

[8] For a clear analysis of some of Hupfeld’s contributions to source criticism, see the opening chapters of Joel Baden, J, E, and the Redaction of the Pentateuch (FAT 68; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2009).

[9] For a color-coded, graphic display of all four sources in one version of the Documentary Hypothesis (the exact details of the divisions differ from scholar to scholar), see: Richard Elliott Friedman, The Bible with Sources Revealed (New York: Harper Collins, 2003).

[10] This is the text in the Masoretic Text and Samaritan Pentateuch, but the Septuagint has Elohim (θεός).

[11] Presumably, he is referring to Yeshua ben Yehudah (in Arabic: Abu al-Faraj Furqan ibn Asad), the 11th century Karaite biblical exegete.

[12] This method of answering the problem is very similar to some modern attempts to explain the appearance of the term Philistine in the Abraham story.

[13] This interpretation was inspired by Rashi’s gloss of the verse, “I appeared – to the patriarchs,” although it seems quite certain that this was not Rashi’s intention in that comment.

[14] R. Abraham does not reference Rashbam by name and it is possible that he has another commentator in mind, but with the same interpretation. In addition to these two, R. Abraham also references a comment by Yonah ibn Janach (c.990-c.1050), who says that the phrase is an oath, not a statement of fact. Unfortunately, I do not know where R. Abraham gets this from since in ibn Janach’s work, under the root ידע, he interprets the phrase as meaning “revealed” and interprets the verse to mean that God revealed Godself to Moses more fully than he did to the Patriarchs but that, nevertheless, they knew the name YHWH.

[15] This approach seems very close to that of ibn Ezra, Ramban and ibn Kaspi.

[16] Cassuto is famous for being an opponent of the Documentary Hypothesis.

[17] For a modern defense of the traditional view, see Rabbi Yehuda Rock, “Knowing the Name of God.”

[18] The sources referenced above where God uses the name El Shaddai all come from the P source as well.

[19] That P believes the special name was only introduced now represent how the period of the exodus and after was fundamentally differentiated from what preceded it, both because of the uniqueness of Moses and the reality of the looming covenant at Sinai and construction of the Tabernacle, in which YHWH would dwell among the people of Israel.

[20] According to many source critical scholars, in E, while the characters use only the name Elohim when speaking about God, until the revelation of the name YHWH in Exodus 3, the narrator’s voice sometimes uses YHWH even earlier than this. Other scholars debate this point. A unique view is that of Tzemah Yoreh ( The First Book of God, BZAW 402 [Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010], 6), who argues that the revelation of the name YHWH to Moses in Exodus 3 is a Yahwistic redaction of E, and that E uses only Elohim and never YHWH throughout its entire corpus.

Dr. Rabbi Zev Farber is the Senior Editor of TheTorah.com, and a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute's Kogod Center. He holds a Ph.D. from Emory University in Jewish Religious Cultures and Hebrew Bible, an M.A. from Hebrew University in Jewish History (biblical period), as well as ordination ( yoreh yoreh ) and advanced ordination ( yadin yadin ) from Yeshivat Chovevei Torah (YCT) Rabbinical School. He is the author of Images of Joshua in the Bible and their Reception (De Gruyter 2016) and editor (with Jacob L. Wright) of Archaeology and History of Eighth Century Judah (SBL 2018).

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Exploding the J.E.D.P. Theory – The Documentary Hypothesis

Exploding the JEDP Theory or the Documentary Hypothesis: The Documentary Hypothesis

Dr. John Ankerberg: The information in this program was taped live at The Ankerberg Theological Research Institute’s Apologetics Conference in Orlando, Florida.

Our instructor for this session is Dr. Walter Kaiser. Dr. Kaiser is Academic Dean and Professor of Semitic languages and Old Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. Dr. Kaiser received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in Mediterranean studies and he’s the author of numerous books, including The Old Testament in Contemporary Preaching , Toward an Exegetical Theology , Biblical Exegesis for Preaching and Teaching , A Biblical Approach to Suffering , which is a commentary on the Book of Lamentations, Toward Old Testament Ethics , The Uses of the Old Testament in the New , Hard Sayings of the Old Testament , Back Toward the Future: Hints for Interpreting Biblical Prophecy , and “Exodus: A Commentary” in Expositor’s Bible Commentary .

In addition, he has written a number of other titles for both popular and scholarly audiences.

What’s more, Dr. Kaiser has contributed articles to a number of periodicals, including Moody Monthly , The Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society , and Evangelical Quarterly .

Dr. Kaiser is a widely respected conference speaker and an enthusiastic and skilled teacher.

Dr. Kaiser’s topic for this session is: “Exploding the JEDP Theory or the Documentary Hypothesis.”

As you listen to this information, it will be my prayer that God will increase your faith and draw you closer to our Lord Jesus Christ.

[Ed. Note: This biographical information was current as of 1991. Since our conference, Dr. Kaiser has become the Coleman M. Mockler Distinguished Professor of Old Testament, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, MA and PhD, Brandeis University.]>

Dr. Walter Kaiser: Thank you very much. It’s a very special delight to be with you and to share in this time. It’s a special delight to also be speaking on the topic of the theme of the Old Testament. I think too frequently we sometimes think, well, that’s the Old Testament, especially when you hold it for four beats you know that you’re in trouble. But, indeed, this is part of the revelation received by the Christian church and believing community.

Particularly today we want to address the theme of what is called the “Documentary Hypothesis.” Up to the 18 th century the first five books of the Bible──Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy──these first five books were attributed to the writer Moses as the one who wrote them under the inspiration of God. In the middle of the 1700s, a German minister by the name of H. B. Witter and a French medical doctor, Jean Astruc, both suggested that Moses may not have been the one who wrote it, as if it were under any kind of immediate impression or help from God, but that he had used two sources. This was because Genesis had one name for God, usually Elohim , and Genesis 2 had a second name for God, which was a compound name involving the name Yahweh or sometimes mispronounced Jehovah.

Now, he said still that it was under the inspiration of God; both of them said that it was still Moses who wrote it, but that they used sources. This was still, I think, within the ball park of what we had called an evangelical or an orthodox consistent theology. But, then, by the 1880s, so-called “higher criticism,” which sometimes has a negative meaning and sometimes has a positive meaning—“higher criticism,” or more frequently and more accurately a historical critical method of studying the Bible—had gained a foothold in America. And the theological institutions, seminaries, particularly Protestant theological seminaries and churches by now were infiltrated with a number of people who say Jesus may have said, “as Moses said in the Law.” And the quotes from Genesis or Exodus or Leviticus, Numbers or Deuteronomy, or as Ezra, Nehemiah or many of the Old Testament books attributing this to Moses were incorrect; they were not speaking accurately. And out of this thing came a number of heresy trials──professors and pastors who were being tried for not remaining accurate to the biblical claims of what it said.

Thus, by the 1880s this movement of the “Documentary Hypothesis” or the movement of “higher criticism” was in full swing.

Now, I think you’ve got to make a distinction between the historical critical method and what is generally known as a good thing──the grammatical historical interpretation. Those two things are so close together that people confuse them. By the grammatical historical method we don’t mean grammar and history──those are the two words that are involved; but grammar in this case meant the natural, the literal, the plain meaning of the text put in its historical context. Now, that’s legitimate and this we believe in and this has been the accepted means of interpreting the Bible. But now they called it the historical critical method and now I think we had something quite different.

Let’s talk about the definition. What are the elements that go into this definition? First, it seems to me, it was that the Bible must be subjected to the same methods of analysis and interpretation as we use for any other literature. There was growing up now within literary circles an examination of all of Shakespeare’s writings: Did Shakespeare write this or didn’t he? And, of course, the conclusion was he did not write a majority of it. Then Homer’s Iliad and The Odyssey . Some said you can’t have one on peace and the other on war. A man doesn’t write on two different things, he writes on one topic. So give one to him and give the other away.

Now, why this was so, I don’t know. There were assumptions that were made and then these were brought to the literature. Fortunately, the field of English literature got over it, but biblical studies to this day is still inflicted with some of these same problems. So the Bible must be subjected to the same method of analysis.

The second part of the definition is that religion institutions of Israel passed through three Hegelian stages of evolution. Now, there are two things here. There’s Hegel, and Hegel, working off the great German theologian──he himself was German──off Fichte, and it was that society went through a kind of dual process. There was on the one side──you had thesis──you remember, opposed by an antithesis, out of which came a synthesis. It was said that reality moved in this kind of direction. Well, I don’t know that there is any proof for that, but this was a great working hypothesis and that’s how the matter remained for a good number of years.

Well, now, applied to the biblical material, there was a concept that we went from simple, primitive, antique, almost that which was uncivilized, to the grand ethical monotheism of the date of Amos, 8 th century. So we must go through a whole series of progressively evolving things saying that regardless of whether evolution is true or not in the area of biology, it was automatically applied to sociology and anthropology and to the social sciences. Now, how that transfer was made, again, I can’t tell you. But it was. The stuff was in the air and so everyone applied it.

So never mind our great debate, which is an important debate—and one which, by the way, I don’t participate in the conclusions of, that it applies in the area of biology—but now they’ve brought it over into the area of history and social studies. And then it was said that there are three great stages and the three great stages were: pre-prophetic—that is, before the prophets; prophetic—which was the second stage; and then the third stage which followed after the prophets was legal—that is, the Law came last all the way in the 5 th century or the 400s. Well, that was to turn the Bible upside down. That is, here we had the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20 and back in the Pentateuch and now turns out they weren’t written first by Moses, they were written last after they came back from exile. Now, that’s a flip of 180 degrees, which certainly surprised everyone—I would suppose, too, Moses!

So at any rate you have here quite an inversion that’s going on. So the religious institutions passed through a kind of Hegelian dialectic, that is, you had the primitive form of pre-prophetic; that was opposed by an antithesis of the prophetic, out of which came the synthesis: finally, the priestly religion and the Law had its say in the final day.

The third part of our definition is that Israelite monotheism did not originate with Moses. That is, the whole idea of one God, which is so unique to Old Testament and New Testament revelation and part of our Scriptures, didn’t come from the first five books—which we call from the Greek the Pentateuch—but they were the result of a slow process of evolution which finally in the time of the prophets of the 8 th century, the classical prophets of part of Isaiah and Amos and Micah and Hosea. Now, those are the great men. They were saying, “What does God want? He doesn’t want sacrifice. He doesn’t want offerings.” Which, by the way, hadn’t been revealed yet, so I don’t know how you can deny it. But at any rate, he didn’t want those things. What God wanted was justice and mercy and walking humbly with our God, to quote from Micah 6:8, you see. That’s true religion. And so it was taught and so it continues to be taught to this day. If you understand anything about the great forces, that’s the majority opinion out there now in Protestant, Catholic and Jewish biblical scholarship. It still is the majority opinion. A complete sweep within a century, from the 1880s now through to just a little over 100 years later on.

A fourth part of the definition was that the first five books of the Old Testament are the result of four main documents. Four main documents. And here’s the famous alphabet soup: JEDP. Now, I’ve never seen any of these men nor their documents nor has anyone else. You must understand, these are literary fictions; they have been created by opening the Bible, throwing up the criteria, closing the Bible, and then being surprised that it works. It sounds a little bit like sort of hitting the barn door and then drawing circles and saying, “Bull’s eye! We made it!” You’re probably thinking correctly—sorry to be so blunt—but it is reasoning after the fact. That is, it’s not from any external evidence or from archaeological evidence, it’s from internal evidence, allegedly, and then we come back and declare our internal evidence works.

What do you mean by “J”? “J” was all of the cruder stories of the Pentateuch. Here, Jehovah or Yahweh acts like a demon, so it was said. He is ethically and morally reprehensible. But nevertheless, these were stories that were told around the campfires, around Canaanite sanctuaries. As they were out on the hillside, they loved to tell the stories. And it reflected a Judean point of view. This was definitely southern in its point of view with the two southern tribes. That came out about 850. They finally put it in writing, all these stories.

Then the “E” document came out 100 years later. That was northern in viewpoint. These were both written during the times of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, during the divided kingdom, post, that is, after Solomon. And in the “E” document they didn’t use Jehovah of Yahweh, they preferred Elohim for their God. He wasn’t as difficult to get along with as the [God of the] earlier documents was. Now, I don’t agree with this. I’m reporting to you at this point. Some of you are looking serious. But at any rate, that’s the “E” part. And it was Ephraim, it was the northern ten tribes. It was “Yankee” in viewpoint, whereas, the other one was southern in viewpoint. You understand?

But then, finally, in 621, when Josiah was cleaning out the house of God, eureka! What did he find? The “D” document. Now, it doesn’t say that in the text. It said he found the book of the law. But it’s been declared the “D” document. How, I don’t know. Some people have very, very good eyesight. I have strained my eyes on the Hebrew and have not found the “D” document, but they did. They found the “D” document there. And what was this but an answer to the strife that was going on between “J” and “E.” What does God want? And they were giving all sorts of answers but this “D” said, “Love the Lord your God with all of your heart and with all of your soul.” Another Hegelian dialectic thesis/antithesis out of which came synthesis: Love. Love. Make love, not war. And so they had a whole new thesis there at that time.

Well, finally came the “P” document. After they had gone into exile, the temple had burned, goodbye David’s kingdom, goodbye David’s throne, goodbye everything that the Old Testament had been building, finally you come to the dry, dusty, liturgical, tough parts of the biblical text, and these are instructions on how to build the tabernacle. You can tell the style: put in so many boards on this side with so many nails, so many sockets. So he built so many boards on this side with so many nails with so many sockets and he looked and he saw there were so many boards on this side and so many nails and so many sockets, you see? Drives you batty! At least the Westerner. You said, “You’ve already said that twice,” but that’s supposed to be the “P” style. And “the son of somebody; the son of somebody; the son of someone else,” that’s also “P” style. The priestly, liturgical, legal things. Finally, when there wasn’t anything left, they finally got their chance.

Now, that’s supposed to be the theory. And I can’t tell you how many people are taught that today. But I’d like to make a critique of that, if I can. One more part of the definition. Let’s take a fifth part here quickly, and that is that the non-prophetic poetry of the Bible, that is, Psalms, Proverbs, books like that, Job, those books are essentially also post-exilic, that is, they were not written during Solomon’s time as some of us might think, but they came all the way down in the 5 th century or the 400s.

Well, that, I think, is definition. Let’s turn to some of the problems with this definition as set forth now in the latter part of the 18 th but certainly the 19 th and 20 th centuries. First of all, I think we need to say there is a legitimate higher criticism.

Higher criticism, as such, is the reverse of what we call “lower criticism.” Lower criticism deals with the questions of: What is the text? How can we establish the best text using Dead Sea Scrolls and other sorts of things that have carried us back over a thousand years and canon? Be careful how you spell that, by the way. If you put two “n’s” in the middle of that word, you’ll get shot. But I’m thinking of the one that has one “n” in the middle. The canon is the whole basis of what books actually belong to the Bible, and that’s lower criticism.

But then there is higher criticism. James Orr in his famous article on criticism in the older International Standard Bible Encyclopedia , he said higher criticism takes up the question of date —when was the book written; author —who wrote the book; genuineness —did the man who claims to write it actually write that book; and, then, the whole question of sources —does he use sources.

By the way, we’re not against sources in evangelical circles. The Bible is loaded with sources: [e.g.] 1 and 2 Chronicles have 75 sources listed—if you want to see more on this, go to the Book of the Kings of Israel; go to the Book of the Wars of the Lord; want to see anything more on this, go to the Book of Jasher. There are real sources.

What I’m worried about is hypothetical sources! Imaginary sources like J, E, D and P and R and S and L and all these—and R, the redactor—who in the world are these? They’re not mentioned and we’ve never seen them and no one’s ever dug them up. So, it is hypothetical sources.

And also, higher criticism deals with destination —who is the book written to; what was the purpose for writing the book? Now, that technically can and was called higher criticism. It’s too bad that this which is called the documentary theory or historical critical method of studying the Bible took that word to itself and has used it to mean the same thing as the grammatical critical use of the Bible.

The second problem seems to me is that there is no single historical critical method. You would think all these scholars are agreed? Wrong. I have never seen unanimity on any book with regard to what document it belongs, what’s the extent of that document, and under what conditions it was written. There just does not appear to be that kind of thing. So that the historical critical method doesn’t exist. There are many historical critical methods and as many historical critical results almost as there are scholars. Now, some of them will come into the schools, but the truth of the matter is, we’re working now since 1750. You’d think we’d have some kind of so-called assured results. I’m sorry about that, but it’s true. Just take a dozen of these books and put them side by side and color in the verses and you’re going to find that you’re going to need for almost every verse every color represented by all the scholars. It will just be like a little child’s coloring book that went bad.

Well, at any rate, I think we need to say that. What is shared, however, by this method, are a number of assumptions. Let me give you at least three assumptions. That’s the most important thing. That’s what holds this whole group together. And there is the spirit of modernity. The spirit of modernity is in the assumptions and in the place in which they’re introduced into the argument. The place in which they’re introduced into the argument and the set of assumptions.

First of all, the assumption of autonomy , that is, that the biblical scholar is free to make up his or her mind in light of the evidence. It’s alright. I like that. That sounds fine thus far. Fair enough. But behind it is the old German conception from the philosopher Fichte, which is the will to power. We had trouble with that in the Third Reich; we’re having trouble with it in the biblical materials, too, as well. The will to have the text of the Old Testament is the same as to have it say what it will. And that usually is what is meant by autonomy here. My wishing it, which is parent to the thought, makes the thought and, therefore, I can say what I want it to say. I wish I could tell you it’s a lot more so-called scientific than that because that word is prized and I prize it, too. But I’m afraid it’s a false scientism rather than it being scientific. Sorry to be so blunt, but I mean, we’re trading real hard blows here and I think we need to.

The second assumption is analogy , that is, the believability of a past event is directly related to what can and does happen today. If I can see a resurrection today, okay, that’s legitimate. If I’ve never experienced a resurrection, it’s out. Who says so? I say so. My whole culture and advertising is geared to me. I go in to get a hamburger. They say, “Have it your way.” And when I go to study theology, “Have it your way.” I mean, they make the theological burgers the same way that they make the hamburgers. Sorry about that. As a matter of fact, for Old Testament that’s mixing of metaphors but at any rate, you can see what we’re up against here. All events must exceed to being limited to my current range of experience. If I’ve had the experience of seeing someone healed or raised from the dead or of any of these things that are claiming to have happened in the Old Testament. To see an axe head swim—fine; but if I’ve never seen iron float, out she goes, because I am the judge of what is there. And after all, advertising can’t be wrong. So that’s part of my culture.

A third assumption is causality , and that is, the conclusion itself is part of the world of cause and effects. And hence, once again, the supernatural can take place to the degree that I experience it.

So it seems to me that these assumptions: autonomy, analogy, and causality are very, very much a part of the culture. One of the most important men in the beginning of this century, Ernest Troetlsch, I think is the one who has set the pace for all these. We’ll come back and say a little bit about that.

But let’s have a third problem with this definition. The third problem with the liberal historical critical method is that there is an illogical jump from the method of investigation of history to a theory of reality. From a method of saying, “Here’s how I’m going to investigate events,” then I go and I say, “That’s my theory of how things actually are .” Now I describe ontology, that is, I describe being, I describe reality that way. Here’s where Ernest Troetlsch claimed that every event, without exception, must be included in the realm for which my current experience sets the norm. My current experience sets the norm. Well, now I’ve gone from saying I, who am the investigator, a method, I now set the rules, I make the norm. And I think we err very, very drastically when we try to do that.

A fourth problem, just to move on through this more difficult section more quickly—and this is the last one—there’s a methodological blunder made, I think, when our liberal friends introduce their assumptions at the beginning of their investigation of the Bible rather than at the end after having heard the evidence. I wouldn’t even mind their method if they had said, “Let’s take the Bible on the American system of jurisprudence and say the text is innocent until proven guilty.” But I’m afraid it’s the other way around. Today, since it’s a religious document and therefore being religious, it’s probably prejudiced, the text is guilty until proven innocent. That reverses the whole thing. Imagine trying to stand trial as an American under that kind of a system. It would be enormous the weight. The responsibility is then reversed and the evidence doesn’t get its fair shake.

I was trained under a teacher, Cyrus Gordon at Brandeis University, a Jewish University, and his method was: I don’t care whether you’re talking about Herodotus, Xenophon, or any of these people or biblical documents, that the document itself is to be taken on its own terms before you make any judgment about it. Read what the text says. Listen carefully to that text before you make a value judgment about that text. I like that and I was taught that basis and, therefore, we were told you must control the original languages. Don’t tell me you just have English, Greek and Hebrew. What about Egyptian? What about Babylonian that the Akkadian, the Assyriological-Babylonian form? What about Coptic? What about Arabic? What about Ugaritic? What about Moabite? He said, “Listen, there are a lot of diseases in this world, but the one that this class has can be cured.” He said, “It’s ignorance!” And so he said, “Study the languages. I want you to read firsthand. No secondhand, saying, ‘Some scholar says.’ Go read the text yourself and get the evidence yourself.”

And so it seems to me that, rather, we have the reverse. The liberals operate with the assumption that the text is a guilty patchwork of late human sources unless we can spot a few innocent phrases or some early poems like Exodus 15, Judges 5—Deborah’s Song. So you have Deborah’s Song there in Judges 5. Now, those may be early. But on the other hand, the majority of the text is much later and it’s a quilt, a patchwork of sources put together sometimes in each verse, much less each chapter, with just loads of sources. Numerous sources.

Well, let’s go to our third main point. What is the explosive evidence? This lecture is supposed to be about the explosive evidence that destroys the dominant liberal theory of the Documentary Hypothesis.

First of all, it seems to me the most explosive thing that I can give you is that Deuteronomy, the keystone, the “D” document, which is the keystone of the whole system must come, it seems to me, from the middle of the second millennium. Why? Because we have a number of what are called Suzerainty Treaties. These treaties which are made between a great king, like the Hittite king who is over an empire, with lesser kings were called Suzerainty Treaties.

These treaties have, in the second millennium, five basic parts, according to their literary genre and type. First of all, they have a prologue; then they have, secondly, a historical review of relations; thirdly, stipulations; fourthly, they have provisions for curses and blessings—if you do these things, fine; if you don’t, wow, wow, wow, this is what’s going to happen to your little city/state; then, fifthly, provisions for succession.

Now, that happens to be the outline for the book of Deuteronomy as written and claiming to come from the hand of Moses in the middle of the second millennium. Fourteen hundred BC is where Moses is.

But if you go to the Suzerainty Treaties of the first millennium—and we do have some from the time of Amos and Isaiah—what do they look like, the Assyrian treaties made with vassal kings? They delete two of the five parts. In other words, the literary form has been attenuated. It is shortened. It’s briefer. So the point is not a point about inspiration at this juncture, it is a point about the text qua written; that is, the text as written must come from the second millennium, that is, from the approximately 1400 BCs, and not from 400 or even 600, which is the dominant theory of the day.

In other words, using the ground rules of what is “form criticism,” or more technically if you like some sauerkraut, “formgeschichte.” This form criticism, if you use that in and of itself, it shows that Deuteronomy as written had to come from the 1400s and not from the 400s. That’s a “millennial” mistake—it’s off by a thousand years. And I have not seen anyone refer to that. George Mendenhall of the University of Michigan in the 1950s produced this as his doctoral dissertation and still to this day, scholars have been loath to pick it up. So Kenneth Kitchen of the University of Liverpool and Donald J. Wiseman of the British Museum and others have pointed this out repeatedly. And Alan Millard also of the United Kingdom has been another scholar highly regarded. These are top men in their field; they have accepted exactly what I’ve told you. But it hasn’t been picked up by scholarship at large.

So Deuteronomy 1:1-5 has prologue. Verse 6 through the fourth chapter has historical review. Deuteronomy chapters 5 through 26 has stipulations. Deuteronomy 27 and 28 are curses and blessings. Deuteronomy chapter 29 through 34 is provision for succession under Joshua and also provisions for the retention of the Law and putting it even as you will find with the great Hittite kings and the Assyrian kings and others.

But I warn you again, you could not get that literary outline in the first millennium when it is claimed that the books were written under this documentary theory. In other words, it is found deficient, for one thing, by evidence; not inspiration at this point; not by a theological kind of dialog; but by the text itself.

Let’s also pick up a second kind of explosive evidence, it seems to me, that destroys the dominant liberal theory of the Documentary Hypothesis. Here are some questions. I have five questions that I don’t think that theory can answer. Five questions. These are not new. Robert Dick Wilson of Princeton gave these in 1938, so it’s not new. These have been on the deck for a while but no one has picked them up. I would think that they should have been picked up by now.

Number one question: If Deuteronomy and the Law, like Judges 20-24, were written, as this documentary and liberal theory claims, during the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, why is the king not mentioned during the times of the kingdom? When you’ve got all kings of Israel, kings of Judah, through the middle of the classical period of the prophets and on down into the time of the 400s?” Surely by then someone would have thought to put the provision for the king, but he’s only mentioned once—Deuteronomy 16—and that’s by way of looking forward to him. It anticipates the time when Israel would have a king. They said, “Well, they wrote that in there to kind of look like it was an anticipation.” I would have given myself a lot more press, frankly, if I would have wanted to write that thing in. I would have put myself as king in there a couple of times and made sure that my office was well protected. Deuteronomy 16 is meager pickings for being written that late.

The second one is just as bad: If it was written after Jerusalem became the center of worship—and it was. Jerusalem was taken by David in 1000, so you would think that by the 600s and certainly by the 400s somebody would have remembered to put Jerusalem in the text as a good place to go to worship, right? Especially since it was a point of tension between the north and the south. Let’s settle this. If it’s being written so late, put it in. Put it in. Wrong: doesn’t appear. Zion, even—it’s poetic name—and Jerusalem never are mentioned as the place where persons ought to worship. Who bungled that one for being written so late? Rascals. They should have gotten that one.

The third question that needs to be asked here: Why does the temple receive no consideration? Here’s a $2-6 billion monument in the center of Israel! That’s our present estimate. Somewhere between $2-6 billion! Surely someone would have remembered. Why didn’t someone put the temple there? But instead, guess what was put? A mythical tabernacle which never existed, according to this theory. The tabernacle is a myth. There never was a tabernacle. Remember when they went through the wilderness they put this thing up, constructed it? Don’t worry about that, we’re told by this theory; that never existed. That was a hypothesis. That was built off of the second temple, or some say the first temple. But they got the measurements wrong. They got the furniture wrong. They got the names wrong.

These are poor writers, extremely poor. I would have thought that if they’re constructing a case they could have made a better job of it. You have no idea how embarrassing the questions I’m asking about a king, about Jerusalem, about a temple are to this theory. It embarrasses the daylights out of them. They’d rather you not think about it. Well, I’m going to shout it from the housetop all over America. I’m going to let the secret out. And it needs to be let out. As a matter of fact, this mythical tabernacle is elaborated in great detail. Exodus 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33. Would you believe, all the way to chapter 40? That’s a lot of writing for nothing, for something that doesn’t exist. Well, Selah!

At any rate, you can see there’s a real problem there. And so it ought to be.

A fourth question: Why all the emphasis in Leviticus on shedding of blood and sacrifice, especially since they were in exile; there is no sacrifice; and there is no shedding of blood? As a matter of fact, you don’t have it in Babylonian religion either. Now, who got that crazy idea and why? For 400s and for the post-exilic time it’s out of place, it’s out of sequence. And so it seems to me that, again, there’s a fourth question.

A fifth question: Why was the ceremonial law written in a Hebrew so different in dialect from that which the Jews in exile, in Babylon, and those who were in exile at Elephantine, Egypt, which is down near where the Aswan Dam is now? And we have a large literature from them in Aramaic which is difficult and it is a different dialect of Semitic writing than Hebrew. So why did they write this stuff from that period of time in Hebrew? And not only that, instead of writing in Aramaic, are we to suppose, as proposed by this theory, that the alleged exilic writers invented and borrowed names, say, just for the high priest’s breastplate, with all the stones on it? For every one of those stones, the names of them are so difficult that I take it that those who wrote them during this period of time forgot what the names were and no two of four Aramaic versions of the Targum agree as to their Aramaic equivalence. I would think if they were thinking from Aramaic into Hebrew they would have remembered what the Aramaic was. But now we’ve got four Targums and no two agree as to what the Aramaic word is. More than that, one more embarrassment, and no one knows what the stones meant in any of the Aramaic versions. That is a problem. That is a real problem.

Well, you can see it goes on. But let’s raise something else, too. It seems to me a third thing by way of explosive evidence. We’ve said the text as written must be second century. We have said there are five embarrassing questions. Now it seems to me there’s something else, too, and here it seems to me that we must say that the historical critical method and the documentary theory were defined before the advent of archaeology. The theory itself, as now practiced almost in detail, was in place by 1878. And Julius Wellhausen, in his famous Prolegomena —I’ll give you the short title for it—1878. But we had not discovered yet one script nor had we made one scientific excavation of any site archaeologically. So we have now a theory that antedates all the evidence and since especially 1930 on through the present day we have just had on the level of something like, oh, with regard to scripts they would have to go into the hundreds of thousands, even getting up into millions of tablets in terms of inscriptional evidence alone. We have never had that before. Never had that in any of the languages.

So it seems to me that the archaeological and inscriptional data have established over and over again the historicity of innumerable passages. Now, nowhere have we found a particular kind of archaeological document that has the Scripture reference on it and then says, “This is Joseph’s cloak of many colors. Genesis,” and then gives the reference. You understand that. Some say we’re looking for that. No, that’s not true. But on the other hand I’ll tell you how dramatic it is. Let’s take, just within the last decade or two, Numbers 20-24: Baalim, the son of Beor. Baalim, you remember, had quite an experience. Not as wise as his donkey, but certainly he was taught there. Now, most people say there is a myth. There is no historical evidence for Baalim, the son of Beor. Wrong. In the Jordan Valley in 1967 and then published in 1966, what do we find? A Deir Allah . What did we dig up but an inscriptional evidence, by the way, in columns. And four times over, who is mentioned in this, which is apparently a schoolboy’s copy on a plaster wall of a text which he has four times: Baalim the prophet, who is the son of Beor, and mentions the town which he’s from.

Now, I don’t know whether you think that’s impressive or not, but I’m impressed. I’m very impressed. I think that to find the guy turning up like, and it has been in the ground from that period dated by carbon 14 to 800 BC. The inscription therefore comes, I would say, about 600 to 700 years after the event itself. Very, very impressive.

What about the names, the places, the institutions of the patriarchs? They are known to us from the Egyptian execration texts where they would write the name of a city or name of a person in Palestine and then they would take the ostracon and would break the ostracon, that is, that’s where we get our word to “ostracize” someone from. You take this small scrap of pottery, write something on it, and you kind of put like, we say in Pennsylvania where I came from: “Put the hex on them.” This is putting the mojo on them. You say, “There’s you name” and then you break the thing. And so much for Jerusalem; so much for Ashkelon; so much for Gaza. And they go on and on. Guess what? Those are the cities that are being talked about in the biblical evidence. In other words, they were existing at that period of time. And not only that, but I have personally read in the Nuzu Tablets and in the Alalakh Tablets and in the Ugaritic Tablets, I have read of the names of the people—not the same person but, you know, names tend to go into cycles. Right now there are certain names which parents are naming their children. You get a whole spat of them. They go in cycles. So it was in those days. Guess what they were naming them around 2000 to 1800 BC—Abraham, Jacob, Isaac. These are good names. These are very good names. And we find them scattered all through these documents.

So not only the names but the customs, too. You say, “Selling one’s birthright? What corn is that? How can you sell that? I’d like to see how I could sell that today.” You can’t, but you could then. We’ve got documents. I’ve read the things. I’ve read them personally where, indeed, a brother says, “Listen, I am really famished. Give me three sheep and I’ll give you this piece of land my father gave me.” And it comes from the same period of time.

And the same thing with oral blessings. You say, “Where would that hold up in a court: My father told me that I could have everything?” But it did in that day. While it doesn’t hold up in our day, we’ve got literary evidence for it holding up in that day.

And the same thing, too, when the text changes, when you are in the earlier part of Genesis 1-11 it is supposed to be in Sumer, in Babylon, present-day Iraq; southern Babylon there, southern Iraq. And what do you find? Do they have rocks and stones that they can build things out of? No. There’s not a stone in sight. They must make brick. So they make brick. And what do they put them together with? Cement, because there’s lots of limestone there? No, there’s limestone and there are stones in Israel, but not in this section. You must put them together with bituminous material. And if we haven’t learned since 1938 that that’s where oil comes from, they learned then. That’s how they stuck these things together: they tarred them together. And that’s precisely what you expect.

And when it says that they built a tower, you say, “A tower?” Yes, they’ve got pyramid-like things, these ziggurats that go up in the air. And then when you go to Genesis 37 into the beginning of the book of Exodus, you’re in Egyptological material. The background is that Joseph has gone to Egypt. Does it change? It does, again, repeatedly. The titles for Joseph in Genesis 41 and 45, six of those titles are Egyptological: they come straight across. That’s exactly what we’ve found in the texts as I’ve read them. And Potiphar’s wife, when she tries to woo Joseph there, you’ll remember, and what the response was, it’s very, very much like the tale of the two brothers. It rings true; it’s part of the tradition; it’s part of the culture; it’s their problem.

And the same thing again with the investiture scene in Genesis 41:42, a ring and a gold chain and arrayment. Again, that’s Egyptological. And the Egyptian names, not only Pharaoh but Potiphar and Asenath and Merari and Phinehas. Phinehas is a good Egyptological name. Copper boy. And that’s exactly what they’re calling him here.

And the name of the river. The word for river in that section is different than the word for river when you’re dealing with the Euphrates, Purattu, when you’re talking about the Euphrates, which is to be found in that part of the world; but here the same word in Egyptian, Yor and Assir and Zaphenath-paaneah. These are all of the Egyptological bases that you find at that particular time. And the law codes, too. We have six cuneiform law codes and the Mosaic law place it in the context of Moses’ era.

What other the problems? There are problems about a goring of an ox and about the various kinds of situations that can come up. So all in all, it seems to me we’ve got a long line of literary evidence and also archaeological evidence. And when you put this together with also the Suzerainty Treaty of the Book of Deuteronomy, that as written, it must come from the second millennium, I think we have an enormously strong case here.

To put it even more bluntly. Just recently we found two silver kind of amulets from the tomb of the valley of Hinnom just outside Jerusalem on the south side up near the St. Andrews Church there. They were digging and, lo and behold, they came across a tomb that goes back to at least 600 BC. What is written on this thing? Here we find out of that priestly benediction, the Aaronic benedictions from Numbers 6: “May the Lord bless you. May the Lord make his face shine upon you.” You’ll remember that pretty clear phrase there. Lo and behold, it’s written. But there’s a problem. How can they be writing phrases from that prayer in 600 when it hasn’t been composed yet? It’s only going to be composed 200 years later in 400 BC. This is a problem. There’s nothing like evidence to give you a real good problem.

So, at any rate, it seems to me that we need a conclusion, then we’ll take the time for some of your comments. But the conclusion here it seems to me is that the life and times of Moses’ era as revealed by archaeology and illuminated by inscriptions from the past allows what Wellhausen and his documentary theory has denied to Moses and his writing. It’s an amazing thing. Case after case where the scholar has said, “Couldn’t be; couldn’t happen.” This whole thing started out by saying Moses couldn’t have written. That was the basic problem until we found writing in 3400 BC and we decided to let 1400 BC go. But at any rate, that’s how the thing started: He couldn’t have written. Now, some people don’t want to remember those days but they are there.

And when the Bible says, “Moses said to the sons of Israel,” the critics say, “No one could have penned that until seven centuries later, after the death of Moses. Therefore the Bible is wrong and not to be trusted,” say they. But today we conclude the opposite. We say the critics are wrong and their arguments are based on wrong assumptions that began by being too limited and were introduced even before they saw the evidence. Even before they saw the evidence.

Archaeology is teaching us to respect the written records of the past. “Men and their ideas,: says Isaiah 40, “are like the grass; they perish. They come up and flower, but they also perish. But the Word of our God lasts forever.”

There’s the thing, then, that I want to put before you for this session. We have a few minutes. I can take a question or two and if you can be a succinct as possible, I’ll try to also be succinct and see if we can get several of them.

[For the most part the questions were not picked up on the audio recording, where only Dr. Kaiser had a microphone. However, he repeats the questions before answering them in most cases.]

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Thoughts about the documentary hypothesis.

(From the Introduction to  Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism , Jeffrey Tigay, Editor)

Since the nineteenth century, the Documentary Hypothesis has been the best-known, most published, most often criticized, most thoroughly defended, and most widely taught explanation of the development of the first five books of the Bible.  Evidence and arguments in support of it have grown continually more substantial—not just in quantity but in their nature, grounded more in demonstrable, quantifiable data from linguistic, literary, and archaeological products.  Despite this, there have been a plethora of new models and variations proposed in recent years—some with substantial followings—and the number of claims that the Documentary Hypothesis has been overthrown has grown.  Those among our colleagues who assert these claims have never challenged—in fact, have rarely mentioned—the main evidence and arguments for the hypothesis.  They especially do not go near the newest strong evidence, namely: (1) linguistic evidence showing that the Hebrew of the texts corresponds to the stages of development of the Hebrew language in the periods in which the hypothesis says those respective texts were composed; (2) evidence that the main source texts (J, E, P, and D) were continuous, i. e. it is possible to divide the texts and find considerable continuity while keeping the characteristic terms and phrases of each consistent; and (3) as this book shows, evidence that the manner of composition that is pictured in the hypothesis was part of the literary practices of the ancient Near East.

To its earlier critics, the problem with the Documentary Hypothesis was that it was  too hypothetical: a clever construction, perhaps, but without enough solid evidence.  Two things have changed that situation over the years: the first is this acquisition of new evidence, and the second is advances in method.  This book,  Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism , stands out because it features both.  The authors have brought new texts into the picture, which sheds light on what was or was not possible in the literature of the ancient Near East.  And, at the same time, they have exercised a level of methodological sophistication that was not matched in the early stages of the field.

One of the early attacks on the Documentary Hypothesis was that no other works were ever composed in the manner that the hypothesis attributes to the Pentateuch.  The Torah of Moses, this argument went, is being pictured as a “crazy patchwork,” having a literary history that has no parallel in the ancient Near East or in subsequent ages.  Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism responds to this attack.  Jerffrey Tigay and his four colleagues, Mordecai Cogan, Alex Rofé, Emmanuel Tov, and Yair Zakovitch, present what the book’s title promises: empirical models—analogous cases of composition—from the ancient Near East.  They bring parallels to the manner of composition that the Documentary Hypothesis attributes to the Hebrew Bible, including parallels from the  Epic of Gilgamesh , Qumran, the Septuagint, and the Samaritan Pentateuch.  In an appendix, Tigay also includes George Foot Moore’s 1890 essay treating Tatian’s  Diatesseron —the work that combined the New Testament’s four Gospels—as another, manifest parallel to the combining of the four pentateuchal sources in the Hebrew Bible.

Tigay’s own contributions to this volume, in particular, provide a number of cases of demonstrable parallels in works from the ancient Near East.  Notably, he reviews the stages of composition of the  Epic of Gilgamesh. These stages are documented, thanks to the existence of copies from several periods, and so the development of the work can be observed.  Tigay and his fellow contributors also bring examples of conflation of stories in the Qumran scrolls (as in the case of the conflate text of the Decalog in the All Souls Deuteronomy Scroll); in the Septuagint (as in the Bigtan and Teresh episode in the book of Esther); in the Samaritan Pentateuch; in postbiblical literature (as in the Temple Scroll); and even in modern works.  They show where literary conflation in these texts results in inconsistencies and vocabulary variation like those in the Hebrew Bible.

Not only do these ancient works involve doublets and conflation of texts in the manner of the Torah.  They involve the same editorial techniques.  We find, for example, cases of epanalepsis—also known as resumptive repetition or Wiederaufnahme— that is, cases in which an editor inserts material into a text and then resumes the interrupted text by restating the last line before the interruption.  This is a well-known phenomenon in the Hebrew Bible as well.  (See, for example, Exod 6:12 and 30, in which the words, “And Moses spoke in front of YHWH, saying, ‘. . . how will Pharaoh listen to me?  And I’m uncircumcised of lips!’” come both before and after a long text that has signs of having been added to the chapter.)  Also we find different names for the same character in different accounts, differences of vocabulary and style in components of a text stemming from different sources, and cases of incomplete revision of reformulated texts. Tigay demonstrates that literary conflation in these texts produces inconsistencies and vocabulary variation like those in the Hebrew Bible.  Emanuel Tov as well reveals cases of homogenizing additions by editors.  Tigay also observes that “a comparison of [four different] stages [in the evolution of the  Gilgamesh Epic ] reveals a pattern of decreasing degrees of adaptation of earlier sources and versions.”  This, too, parallels the development of the Torah, in which the exilic Deuteronomist (Dtr2) and the final Redactor (R) can now be shown (in my own research and that of others) to practice substantially less adaptation of their sources than did the earlier redactor of the J and E sources (RJE).1     What all of this book’s contributors are doing is uncovering how the editors worked.  We have come a long way in this understanding.  It is now possible to have a sense of the individual editors: their differences, their preferences, their methods.  That is, we have reached a stage of  acquaintance with the editors.

These analyses provide the visible, empirically-documented parallels that the challengers of the Documentary Hypothesis asked.  But a point that we should all note here is that, even before these new analyses came to light, this argument was really no argument at all.  A lack of analogies to the Torah’s literary history was never a case against that history’s reality.  As Tigay puts it, “The reluctance of these writers to contemplate the possibility of something unique in Israelite literary history does not commend itself.”  Indeed it does not.  A vast body of evidence led to the identification of distinct source works and layers of editing in the Five Books of Moses.  Numerous lines of evidence converged to point in the same direction.  This convergence of evidence is what made the hypothesis so compelling a century ago and in our own day.  Tigay and Rofé especially emphasize this convergence of many lines of evidence in establishing the Documentary Hypothesis.   This has been the strongest argument for the hypothesis all along and the one least addressed by its opponents. One cannot challenge such a body of evidence with a simple claim that other works did not get written that way.  And, as the researches in this book show, as a matter of fact other works  did get written that way.  These researches should bring this argument to an end, and it will not be missed.  But really it never was an argument anyway.

What, after all, was the point of demanding to be shown ancient Near Eastern analogues when there was no ancient Near Eastern  prose ?!  The early biblical sources, being the first lengthy prose on earth, were without analogues from the get-go.  If we were to acknowledge the soundness of this demand, then should we also say: the biblical text could not be prose because where is there an analogue?!

Indeed, I have occasionally heard people claim that dual variations of stories—known as doublets, such as the two accounts of Moses bringing water from rock—are a common feature of ancient Near Eastern literary works composed by single authors.  But there is no such feature.  Doublets can hardly be a common feature of Near Eastern prose when there is no Near Eastern prose, either in the form of history-writing or long fiction, prior to the biblical source-works that are treated in the Documentary Hypothesis.  It is not even a common feature of ancient Near Eastern poetry.  Where we do find the same sort of characteristics that we see in the biblical text is the  Epic of Gilgamesh , and Tigay demonstrates in this volume that the  Epic of Gilgamesh is a composite of edited sources very much in the manner of the Hebrew Bible.  This volume thus turns a false claim on its head.  The evidence from the texts of the ancient Near East is a demonstration that composition by combining sources was a known literary activity in that world.

Nonetheless the challenge persists.  The most recent expression of the claim that the Documentary Hypothesis pictures something that was not a literary reality in that world came from an old friend and colleague of mine, Susan Niditch.  Niditch pictures the steps of the process of editing the sources and says, “I suggest that the above imagining comes from our world and not from that of ancient Israel” (Oral World and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature, p. 112).

Tigay and his colleagues had shown that what is pictured in the hypothesis was very much a part of the world of ancient Israel.  But Niditch, seemingly unaware that this had already been demonstrated, made this unfortunate criticism in 1996 with no citation of Tigay et al when  Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism had been out for over ten years.

Even experienced biblical scholars seem not to understand how texts that are composed by more than one author come to be put together according to the hypothesis.  Niditch, for example, writes:

At the heart of the documentary hypothesis. . . is the cut-and-paste image of an individual pictured like Emperor Claudius of the PBS series, having his various written sources laid out before him as he chooses this verse or that, includes this tale not that, edits, elaborates, all in a library setting. If the texts are leather, they may be heavy and need to be enrolled.  Finding the proper passage in each scroll is a bit of a chore.  If texts are papyrus, they are read held in the arm, one hand clasping or “supporting” the “bulk” of the scroll, while the other unrolls.  Did the redactor need three colleagues to hold J, E, and P for him?  Did each read the text out loud, and did he ask them to pause until he jotted down his selections, working like a secretary with three tapes dictated by the boss?   (p. 113)

That is a nicely visual and witty formulation, but it is not what is pictured in the hypothesis.  Precisely what makes the hypothesis seem outlandish in this formulation is what Niditch has gotten wrong.  There is no juggling of multiple large, heavy scrolls.  There is no one redactor who works with J, E, and P at the same time.  Only two large texts are combined at each stage of the editing.  J and E are combined not long after 722 BCE.  P is combined with the already-edited JE some three hundred years later.  I have worked with scrolls.  Laying out two scrolls of the size in question and doing the editing process that actually is pictured in the hypothesis is perfectly feasible.  (Anyone who has ever seen a scroll of the entire Torah in a synagogue knows that scrolls containing just JE or just P would be much smaller and quite manageable to a scribe.)  And Tigay et al have shown that it is more than just feasible.  It is something that was done in that literary world.  Niditch says that “the hypothesized scenario behind the documentary hypothesis is flawed.”  With due respect, it is Niditch’s understanding of what the hypothesis pictures that is flawed.

I do not mean to single out Niditch’s challenge as if it were something unique to her.  It is just a very recent example of a long line of this type of criticism of the hypothesis.  When Niditch uses language like “cut-and-paste” and “dicing and splicing source criticism” (p. 114), much like the old phrase “crazy patchwork,” she and the others who have used these phrases reveal that they have not yet come to terms with the way in which literature was in fact produced in antiquity and that they do not appreciate the artistry that it entailed, an artistry that was a collaboration of authors and editors.

One significant thing about the argument that there are no ancient parallels to the Torah as conceived in the Documentary Hypothesis is that it was of a different type from most previous arguments against the hypothesis.  Traditional responses to the  hypothesis had been to argue the items of evidence one at a time.  Each doublet was interpreted as complimentary rather than repetitious.  Each change in the divine names was explained as reflecting different divine aspects.  Each contradictory datum was defended as not contradictory, or ascribed to prophecy, and so on.  The documentary analysis, on the other hand, explained virtually all of the data with a very few, consistent premises.  The item-by-item approach never came to terms with either the convergence of all this evidence or the economy of the explanation.  The argument concerning the absence of analogous works at least was an argument against the  structure of the hypothesis rather than a one-for-one series of responses that missed the forest for the trees.  That is why the newer, stronger bodies of evidence for the hypothesis are so significant.  They are structural defenses in terms of factors that pervade the text.   The evidence of language, the evidence of continuity of texts, and the evidence regarding the literary practices of the ancient Near East are more persuasive than old claims such as that J and E use two different words for a handmaid.  The force of linguistic evidence is that it is something pervasive and concrete.  The same goes for the evidence in this book.  What these two bodies of evidence offer together is a window into the ancient world that produced the Hebrew Bible.  Works that do not take these two corpora of data into account—either accepting them or responding to them—at this point really cannot be considered to be scholarship of substance.

Among the many failures of method in recent biblical scholarship, one that stands out is the weakness in properly addressing arguments that disagree with one’s own views.  Scholars argue that texts are late without addressing the linguistic evidence that they are early.3   Scholars argue that texts are composite without addressing the evidence that they are part of a single design.  Other scholars argue that particular texts are unities without addressing the evidence that they are composite.   This volume is a lesson to such scholarship.  It faces a classic argument, takes it seriously, and brings the evidence in response to it.

Tigay discusses why it is called the Documentary  Hypothesis in his introduction, referring to its hypothetical methodology (p. 2).  Really, it is long past time for us to stop referring to it as a hypothesis.  The state of the evidence is such that it is now—at the very least—a theory, and a well established one at that.  To my mind, in the absence of any proper refutation of its strongest evidence, it is fact.

What is good about all this: Both the defenders and the critics of the Documentary Hypothesis have benefited from the process of arguing their cases.  In the early days the defenders made questionable arguments based on style, foolish arguments about when a certain idea would be developed, and murky pictures of how redaction takes place.  And the critics (and the defenders as well) misunderstood the “names of God” argument.4   And the critics used the argument: if an author would not include a contradiction, why would an editor?5   And they used arguments based on chiastic literary structures that supposedly could only have been fashioned by a single author.6   And they used absurd computer studies.   Truly, both sides lacked a real literary sense.  We needed to be prodded by non-specialists to develop a better sense of artistry and editing.

This book thus has value even beyond its stated purpose.  As I indicated above, its additional value is in terms of method.  Our field developed like a detective story in its early centuries.  We were simply following clues that surfaced, going wherever they led us.  There was little self-conscious addressing of method.  The argument against the Documetary Hypothesis that “there are no ancient Near Eastern literary parallels” had worth because at least it was a methodological criticism.  The authors of  Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism , in responding to this argument, came to produce a project in methodology, examining our assumptions, our premises.  Their work is both a vindication of the process of the Documentary Hypothesis and a lesson to scholars who come after them.  The lesson is: you must address the methods by which you arrive at your conclusions.  This book is thus a signpost, a contribution to our field’s evolution.  Our field of research has reached a more self-critical, more sophisticated stage.  To be sure, there are still plenty of scholars who have not yet come to terms with the present state of methodology.  But they pay the price for this as their arguments and conclusions are more easily criticized and belied.

Much of the criticism of the Documentary Hypothesis comes from people who are not actively involved in the research.  So the argument that there are no ancient Near Eastern literary parallels was easy for them.  They could just say there are no parallels—without having to produce anything.  But the authors of this book were willing to do the research, and they showed that there are in fact parallels.  Likewise, critics who say that the “names of God” prove nothing and those who say that the presence of doublets proves nothing are persons who do not know the arguments and have not checked the texts themselves.  If they had, they would know that: (1) the actual evidence concerning the name of God in each of the sources proves a great deal; and (2) the divine name argument was not in fact that different sources use the words El, Elohim, or YHWH characteristically, and the doublet argument was not simply that doublets exist.  Everyone knows that a single author can use different names for the same person in a work.  Everyone knows that a single author can use two similar accounts within a work.  The argument was that these two things  converge .  When we divide up the doublets, they fall into identifiable groups in which the right name for God comes in the right place consistently, with hardly an exception in the entire Pentateuch.  (In two thousand occurrences of El, Elohim, and YHWH in the Masoretic Text, there are just three exceptions.)  What’s more, the other categories of evidence line up and converge with these two consistent bodies of evidence as well:  We find the right terms in the right half of the doublets, we find contradictions disappearing as they fall in one group or another, we find the doublets to fall in groups that consistently fit the right stages of the Hebrew language.  These critics simply do not know this evidence.  Likewise they do not take on the linguistic evidence because they simply do not know it.

And then they toss off that phrase “crazy patchwork.”  And they are right.  In the absence of understanding the convergence of the many lines of evidence, and in the absence of awareness of the power of the linguistic evidence, it really does look like a crazy patchwork to them.

Similarly, Emanuel Tov’s chapter shows the actual process, the way this kind of composition works in practice.  For those who say: show us a J text that has been found (or an E or a P), i. e. show us a  source , Tov provides it.  The Greek text contains just one of the two sources that were used to form the David-and-Goliath story.  This criticism (“show us a source”) was another of the arguments that did not require the critics of the hypothesis to produce anything.  These critics rather pressure the supporters of the hypothesis to produce something.  Well, the inability to produce such evidence—viz. finding ancient Near Eastern parallels or finding a source text separately—would not have made the Documentary Hypothesis wrong anyway.  But Tigay and Tov have produced it nonetheless.

Those who oppose the hypothesis are left with arguments like: the critics themselves disagree over the identification of various passages as being from one source or another.  They say this as if disagreements among specialists in any field of learning are proof that the entire field is wrong.  The disagreement of scholars over whether a passage is J or E is part of the normal process of refining that we expect in any healthy, honest field.  Pointing to this professional process and claiming that it proves that all of the disagreeing scholars are wrong is, well, absurd.  And it is an argument from weakness, something to be claimed when other arguments have failed.  The only thing weaker is the claim that we still hear from time to time that “no one believes that anymore.”

As the very existence of the  Diatesseron shows, the impulse to reconcile four sources is not “crazy” or even unique.  What all of the examples in this book show is that editing was a fundamental part of literature well into antiquity.  To state it simply: from the earliest times of the production of written works until the present day, where there are authors there are editors.  The story of the formation of the Hebrew Bible is the story of a great collaboration of authors and editors (very possibly the greatest in all literature).  Those who claim that this was uncommon, unlikely, uncharacteristic, unparalleled, anachronistic, or a crazy patchwork simply do not know the evidence.  So, please, let us never hear the ridiculous phrase “crazy patchwork” again.  If we need metaphors from the world of sewing, then we would do better to say “brilliant embroidery.”

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The Documentary Hypothesis in Trouble

By Joseph Blenkinsopp

The Pentateuch, or the five books of Moses—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy—how was it formed? What is the history of its composition?

The traditional view of both Judaism and Christianity has been that it was written by Moses under divine inspiration.

As early as the 12th century, however, the Jewish commentator Ibn Ezra raised questions about certain references that seemed to point unmistakably to events that occurred or circumstances that existed much later than Moses’ time. Some of the difficulties besetting the traditional dogma—for example, the circumstantial account of Moses’ death and burial at the end of Deuteronomy—are obvious to us today. This was not the case in the early modern period, however. Richard Simon, a French Oratorian priest now regarded as one of the pioneers in the critical study of the Pentateuch, discovered this the hard way when he published his Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (Critical History of the Old Testament) in 1678. Simon tentatively attributed the final form of the Pentateuch to scribes from the time of Moses to the time of Ezra. Simon’s work was placed on the Roman Catholic index, most of the 1,300 copies printed were destroyed and Simon himself was exiled to a remote parish in Normandy.

023 One clue modern source critics still employ to distinguish between different sources or strands in the biblical text is the use of different divine names. This technique was first employed more than 250 years ago. Some biblical passages seem consistently to refer to God by the name Yahweh ; others, by Elohim . The first person to distinguish between different sources on the basis of the divine names used in them was an obscure 024 German pastor named Witter whose work, published in 1711, went unnoticed to such an extent that it was only rediscovered about 60 years ago. The French scholar Adolphe Lods came across the book, written in Latin, while researching the early stages of Pentateuch criticism in 1924. Interestingly enough, Witter did not abandon the dogma of Mosaic authorship but simply suggested that Moses used sources recognizable by the generic divine name Elohim, as distinct from Yahweh. Yahweh was the name revealed to Moses in the wilderness ( Exodus 3:13–15 ; 6:2–3 ).

This idea was developed further, but apparently independently of Witter, by a French physician, Jean Astruc. In 1753 Astruc, on the basis of his study Genesis, identified three sources in the text: the Elohistic source (using the name Elohim ), the Jehovistic source (using the name Yahweh —or Jehovah in its Germanic form) and a remaining source that could not be attributed to either of these sources. These mémoires, as Astruc called the sources, were put together by Moses and resulted in the Pentateuch as we have it.

Astruc’s formulation was taken over and further refined by Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, author of the first scientific Introduction to the Old Testament (1780). Eichhorn maintained that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch, but Eichhorn did so as a child of the Enlightenment—not for dogmatic reasons but because he believed that Moses began life as an Egyptian intellectual and then became the founder of the Israelite nation.

By the beginning of the 19th century, most Bible critics outside of the conservative ecclesiastical mainstream agreed that the Pentateuch was the result of a long process of formation, and that it was made up principally of two types of material indentified in general by their respective use of the divine names Elohim and Yahweh .

Later, the Elohist source (E) was subdivided into the Elohist (E) and another strand designated as the Priestly source (P). In its first formulation the P source was regarded as the product of priestly authors writing sometime after the Babylonian Exile 586 -->B.C. -->), when the priests assumed a dominant role in the religious life of the community. Generally, the E source was thought to be earlier than the J source, largely on the ground that, according to one biblical tradition ( Exodus 6:2–3 ), the personal divine name Yahweh was first revealed to Moses; prior to Moses’ time, God was referred to as Elohim .

One problem—and it is still a problem today—is apparent: the conclusions were drawn primarily on the basis of Genesis. Today we recognize that an explanation that seems to work well with one section of the Bible—for example, the primeval history recounted in Genesis 1–11 —might not work so well with another section—for example, the Exodus story in Exodus 1–15 .

Closer study of key passages, beginning with the work of German theologian Wilhelm de Wette in 1807, led to a reversal of the chronological order in which the sources were arranged, so that J was dated earlier than. E. De Wette also made a significant contribution by recognizing Deuteronomy as a separate source and identifying it with the book discovered, according to the Bible, during repair of the Temple fabric in the 22nd year of the reign of King Josiah (622 -->B.C. -->), the last great king of Judah. King Josiah’s religious reforms, as recounted in 2 Kings 22–23 , included the disestablishment of the “high places” and an insistence on the exclusiveness of the single central sanctuary in Jerusalem. Since this corresponds closely with the legal viewpoint in Deuteronomy (especially 12:1–14 ), de Wette was able to identify the fifth book of the Pentateuch as the book the Bible tells us was discovered in the cleansed Jerusalem Temple or, as de Wette maintained, as the book that was “planted” in the temple by the priests. De Wette’s hypothesis, which won wide acceptance, was to become a pivotal point in the study of the Pentateuch, since it made possible a distinction between earlier legislation not in accord with Deuteronomy and later enactments that presupposed it.

The ground was thus prepared for the classic statement of the documentary hypothesis developed by the Strasbourg professor Eduard Reuss (1804–1891), together with his student and friend Karl Heinrich Graf (1815–1869), and formulated with unsurpassed brilliance and clarity in Julius Wellhausen’s Prolegomena to the History of Israel in 1883. This so-called higher criticism was carried on for the most part in Germany, which has always been the heartland of biblical and theological study in the modern period. In the English-speaking world, where conservative ecclesiastical influences were more in evidence, the documentary hypothesis took root much later. As late as 1880, the vast majority of biblical scholars in Britain and America supported the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch.

The literary analysis embodied in the higher criticism not only attempted to explain the compositional history of the Pentateuch, it also served as the basis for reconstructing the evolution of religious ideas in Israel and early Judaism. The earliest sources, J and E (which Wellhausen wisely did not try to distinguish too systematically), were thought to reflect a more primitive stage of nature religion based on the kinship group. Deuteronomy (D), on he other hand, recapitulated prophetic religion; at same time, Deuteronomy brought the age of 025 prophecy to an end by the issuance of a written law. For most scholars in the 19th century, the prophets, with their elevation of ethics over cult and their unmediated approach to God, represented the apex of religious development. Accordingly, after the age of prophecy came to an end, there was nowhere to go but down. The last stage Israel’s religious development, reflecting a theocratic world view, found expression in the, Priestly source (P) from the Exilic or early post-Exilic period (sixth-fifth century -->B.C. -->).

This kind of evolutionism, which drew heavily on German Romanticism and the philosophy of Hegel, is fortunately no longer in favor. What remains as a task for scholarship today is a more careful evaluation of the arguments on which the documentary hypothesis is based.

Since the publication of Wellhausen’s Prolegomena it has become apparent that all four strands of the Pentateuch—J, E, P and D—are themselves composites. But the attempt to break them down into their components (J 1 , J 2 , for example) has led increasingly to frustration and has contributed to the current widespread disillusionment with the docmentary hypothesis.

There have always been those who either questioned one or another aspect of the documentary hypothesis or, like the Jewish scholars Yehezkel Kaufmann and Umberto Cassuto, have rejected it outright. In the last decade, however, doubts have begun to be raised by biblical scholars standing in the critical mainstream. A more detached investigation of key passages, especially in Genesis, has suggested that the criteria for distinguishing between the “classical” sources (J, E, P, D and their subdivisions) can no longer be taken for granted. The distinction between J and E (J’s ghostly Doppelgänger ) has always been problematic, and there has never been complete consensus on the existence of E as a separate and coherent narrative. In the years shortly after World War II, the Yahwist(J) achieved a high degree of individuality as the great theologian the early monarchy (tenth or ninth century -->B.C. -->), largely due to the influential work of the Heidelberg Old Testament scholar Gerhard von Rad. During the last decade, however, growing doubts have emerged about the date, the extent and even the existence of J as a separate and cohesive source spanning the first five or six books of the Bible. Similar if less insistent doubts have been voiced about the date of the Priestly source (P) and its relation to earlier traditions in the Pentateuch

The net result is that the earlier consensus, which was never absolute, has suffered erosion, while no paradigm capable of replacing the classical documentary hypothesis of J, E, P and D has yet emerged. 026 Some continue to pay it lip service but do not use it, a few—for example, the prominent German Old Testament scholar Rolf Rendtorff—have abandoned it altogether.

In short, the critical study of the sources of the Pentateuch, which has been at the forefront of Old Testament studies since the late 18th century, seems to have lost its sense of direction in recent years. Many Old Testament scholars, especially in the English-speaking world, excited by their discovery of the New Criticism (no longer new after about half a century), have lost interest in investigating sources and original settings of biblical texts. The same goes for those who are applying structuralist theory to biblical narrative, since the essence of structuralist literary theory is to read a text as a closed system. A more traditional approach to the biblical text, which goes under the name of canonical criticism (represented preeminently by Professor Brevard S. Childs of Yale Divinity School), insists on the final canonical form of the Pentateuch, rather than its hypothetical sources, as the proper object of theological exposition. These influences have resulted in a great diminution of interest in the kind of literary archaeology that produced the documentary hypothesis in the 19th century.

Those who are still concerned with the problem are desperately seeking for new answers. For example, many now question the earlier view that J (or Yahwist, as he is often called) was an author with distinctive theology. In reaction against this view, many scholars are now questioning the unitary and cohesive nature of this source and no longer see it as the foundation of the story line in the Pentateuch. As suggested earlier, doubts continue to be entertained both about the existence of the Elohist(E) as a distinct strand, once thought to be a source parallel to J, but originating in the northern kingdom of Israel sometime after the death of Solomon. P has survived recent attacks on the documentary hypothesis best of all, due to its highly distinctive language, and its fondness for genealogies and exact chronological indications. But now scholars recognize that P too is a composite document. It too has gone through a number of compositional stages involving editing (reaction) and expansion of the text. There is even debate as to whether P should be considered an, independent narrative source or a reworking of earlier traditional material.

Moreover, other lines of inquiry have been found to be more promising than refined efforts at source criticism: for example, the study of the literary character and structure of the text and the social origin of small textual units (form criticism), the identification and tracing of the growth of traditions embodied in the texts (tradition history), the identification of editorial procedures in the development of the text and their ideological or theological presuppositions (redaction history).

To obviate any possible misunderstanding, let me emphasize that there is no question of a return to a pre-critical reading of the biblical text. If the documentary hypothesis is in crisis, the question for those still interested in the formation of the Pentateuch, is whether the hypothesis is salvageable and, if not, what might take its place. But it remains clear that we cannot simply jettison a historical-critical approach to the biblical text.

Perhaps we can best illustrate the problems and possibilities that may emerge by examining one section of the Pentateuch, the Flood story ( Genesis 6–9 ). Any conclusions we reach will have to be tentative and will not necessarily apply to other biblical texts. However, we would expect to pick up some things worth pursuing throughout the Pentateuch.

028 With few exceptions, documentary hypothesis scholars are agreed that the Flood story, like the rest the primeval history in Genesis 1–11 , is a combination of two strands: the Yahwist, or J, source from the early Israelite monarchy, (tenth or even ninth century -->B.C. -->) and the Priestly, or P, source from the Exilic or early post-Exilic period, some four centuries later. Again, with few exceptions, they regard the earlier strand, J, as a source for the later strand, P. That is, P incorporated J and, at the same time, gave the narrative its final form, which it still retains.

In the final sidebar to this article, we show the way the primeval history ( Genesis 1–11 ) is generally divided by documentary hypothesis scholars. Although the Flood story is there listed as a composite of the two sources, there are enough repetition in the story to allow us to draw up two roughly parallel versions characterized by distinctive and recurring linguistic and stylistic differences. We shall focus here on one short passage in the Flood story to illustrate how the two strands of the Flood story can be separated. It is the account of Noah’s entry into the ark. The lines in the following chart have been divided so that parallel aspects of each version are opposite one another. Italics are used to identify language that is identical almost identical in both sources.

Note that the P text is about a third longer than J and yet about half of P is verbally identical with J. Repetition does not, of course, in itself prove plurality of authorship. But when the repetitions amount to parallel versions, each with distinctive and recurring linguistic, stylistic and thematic features, and when this phenomenon is found repeatedly throughout the Pentateuch, the likelihood of plurality of authorship is no longer a mere possibility, but a strong probability. Note that the only significant thematic difference between the versions quoted above is that one (J) distinguishes between clean and unclean animals and the other (P) does not. Similarly, after the Flood, J records Noah’s sacrifice on the purified earth ( Genesis 8:20–21 ), but P does not. Assuming the existence of a Priestly source, this is what we would expect, since in Leviticus 1–7 and 11 attributed to P), P is careful to note that the laws governing sacrifice and ritual purity were transmitted only much later, to Moses at Sinai. Therefore they were not incorporated into P’s Flood story in Genesis

It is on the basis of this kind of testing—and demonstration of internal consistency—carried out over the entire Pentateuch, that the existence of parallel versions has been established with a fair degree of probability

At this point, however, problems begin to arise with the classic formulation of the documentary hypothesis, especially with the way it attempts to explain the relationship between different sources and the process by which they were combined to give us the final text. I will illustrate some of these problems in connection with the Flood. (The chart in the sidebar “Disentangling the Sources of the Flood Story” lists the traditional divisions between J and P for the entire Flood story.)

1. P’s Flood story is a complete and logically coherent narrative, beginning with the chapter heading “These are the generations of Noah” ( 6:9 ) and concluding with Noah’s death ( 9:29 ). This is not true of the J version: The ark is introduced suddenly and without explanation ( 7:1 ); the story goes directly from Noah looking out of the ark, to the sacrifice on dry land ( 8:13b , 20 ).

Consider the interesting little detail that after Noah entered the ark, “Yahweh shut him in [the ark]” ( 7:16b ). The documentary critics have assigned this statement to J, but it does not fit there in J’s version; according to J’s version, this statement comes too late because the Flood is already underway ( 7:7–10 , 12 ), so Noah must have been shut in earlier in the P version. The statement that Yahweh shut Naoh in the ark follows after his entry into the ark; and the statement is intelligible only as a footnote explaining how the ark could have remained watertight ( 6:14 ) after Noah and his family 029 had gone aboard. In its generally accepted form, the documentary hypothesis encounters similar difficulties throughout Genesis 1–11 .

2. A much stronger case can be made for P as internally consistent and well organized narrative source than for the balance of the narrative in Flood story. The same is true throughout the primeval history. The non-P material in Genesis 1–11 has nothing like the same consistency.

3. Arguments for a very early date for the non-P material are far from conclusive. In his standard Old Testament, An Introduction (1965), German Bible scholar Otto Eissfeldt, who expounds the documentary hypothesis with his own variations, provides only one argument for putting J in the period the early monarchy. That is its “enthusiastic acceptance of agricultural life and of national-political power and status” (p. 200). Whatever validity this criterion might have for other parts of the Pentateuch, however, it surely does not apply to Genesis 1–11 ; in the passages of the primeval history generally attributed to J, the author emphasizes not the acceptance of agricultural life, but the curse on the soil ( Genesis 3:17 ), banishment from the Garden of, Eden and the divine repudiation of human pretensions (for example, the Tower of Babel story).“National-political power and status” is hardly endorsed.

4. In addition, scholars have begun to notice that some key passages attributed to J—the Garden of Eden story ( Genesis 2:4–3:24 ) and the preface to the Flood story ( Genesis 6:5–8 )—have a strong 030 sapiential flavor; that is, a flavor characteristic of late post-Exilic wisdom literature that reached its flowering in biblical books like Job and certain sections of Proverbs. Moreover, the supposedly J portion of Genesis 1–11 even makes use of the terminology found in late wisdom writings. For example, “the tree of life” ( Genesis 3:22 , 24 ) is mentioned in Proverbs ( 3:18 , etc.) and nowhere else, and the word for the mist or spring that watered the ground ( Genesis 2:6 , ’ed in Hebrew) occurs in Job 37:27 and nowhere else.

5. This brings us to our final question, one not often asked by documentary critics: How did the narrative reach its final form? The general assumption has been that the Priestly author or authors took over, edited and expanded the early material, resulting in the Pentateuch as we have it. But all of this other evidence, including the late reworking of what is supposedly J, seems to point in a different direction. Moreover, if P had been responsible for the final version of the text, it is inconceivable, for example, that P would have left in the distinction between clean and unclean animals in the Flood story because the distinction, as noted earlier, was not introduced until Moses’ time (see Leviticus 11 ). For the same reason, P only uses the divine name Yahweh after it had been revealed to Moses ( Exodus 6:2–3 ). In the Bible as finally transmitted, non-P materials, presumably from an earlier tradition, have Yahweh being venerated under that name from the very beginning ( Genesis 4:26 ). Why would P leave such a reference in the text if he was its final editor? Similar problems can be found throughout the Pentateuch. For example, it is hard to believe that the Priestly source, which understandably venerates Aaron as the ancestor of the priesthood, would have left in the Golden Calf incident ( Exodus 32 ) in which Aaron plays at best a dubious role. We are therefore led to think that there must have been a still later editorial stage in the development of the text that built up the history of early humanity around a basically Priestly work, but supplemented it with other available narrative material. The precise details of the process are obviously obscure. But the point is that the documentary hypothesis in its traditional formulation does not fully explain the 032 development of the biblical text.

On the other hand, you may ask, what difference does it make? Why does it matter? It is obviously possible to read and appreciate the Flood story without all this critical reconstruction of its literary history. People have been doing this for centuries. What is the point of a historical-critical reading of biblical texts? What are its advantages over other methods, e.g., literary, allegorical, midrashic, formalist, structuralist, etc.? People are increasingly asking this question, not only because the academic study of the Bible has had relatively little impact outside the academy (biblical scholars generally write for each other), but also because critical scholarship has tended to assume that this is the only way to read a biblical text.

One answer is that the realization that the Flood story has a literary history will at least eliminate a simplistic approach to the historicity of the text—of a kind that has recently led to yet another expedition to scale Mt. Ararat in search of the ark. To put it differently, we will have to face the literary problem before we can even raise the issue of the story’s possible accuracy as a historical document. Moreover, the literary history of the Flood story is not confined to the Bible. The biblical Flood story is itself rather late version of a narrative theme often copied and much developed in the Near East over an enormous period of time. We know it, for example, in a pre-biblical form from the 11th tablet of the Gilgamesh epic. In 1914 a substantial fragment of a much earlier Sumerian version of the Flood story was published. Essentially the same version appears in a shorter form in a history of Babylon written by Berosus, a Babylonian priest, in the third century -->B.C. --> All of this material must be taken into account in interpreting and reconstructing the literary history of the biblical text. As the philosopher R. G. Collingwood pointed out a long time ago, the first question to ask is not “Did it really happen?” but “What does it mean?”

Admittedly, the object of historical-critical analysis has never been the esthetics of the text. The aim of historical-critical analysis has rather been to get at the historical, social and religious realities that generated the text. In this sense, the text is a point of access to the religious experience of Israel at the time of writing. If, for example, the Priestly core narrative of the Flood comes from the time of the Exile or shortly after, it can be expected to reflect aspects of religious thought in Israel at that time. Only in the P source of the Flood story, for example, does God make a covenant with all humankind in the person of Noah ( Genesis 9:8–17 ). This is a quite remarkable breakthrough in religious thinking, prompted by the entirely new situation created by loss of Israel’s national independence in 586 -->B.C. -->, followed by the Babylonian Exile. We could not understand this breakthrough in the same way if we could not attribute the passage to an Exilic or post-Exilic source.

The point, then, is that there are aspects of religious experience and levels of meaning in biblical texts that cannot easily be understood without a historical-critical approach of some kind. It is not the only way to read the Bible, but it has an important part to play. It is true that the documentary hypothesis has increasingly been shown to have serious flaws, but it is perhaps too early to jettison it entirely. Our task is to find better ways of understanding how the biblical narrative was generated without writing off the real advances of our predecessors.

The Pentateuch, or the five books of Moses—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy—how was it formed? What is the history of its composition? The traditional view of both Judaism and Christianity has been that it was written by Moses under divine inspiration. As early as the 12th century, however, the Jewish commentator Ibn Ezra raised questions about certain references that seemed to point unmistakably to events that occurred or circumstances that existed much later than Moses’ time. Some of the difficulties besetting the traditional dogma—for example, the circumstantial account of Moses’ death and burial at the end of Deuteronomy—are […]

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The Hebrew text adds “every bird, every winged thing,’ but this phrase is not in the Old Greek (Septuagint) and is probably a later gloss

Documentary Hypothesis: Documentary Hypothesis

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"The Documentary Hypothesis is a theory, also known as JEDP, that states that the first five books of the Bible, called the Pentateuch consisting of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, were not written completely by Moses but by different authors."

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JEDP theory

The JEDP theory seeks to understand the authorship of the Pentateuch in light of the Documentary Hypothesis. This view believes that the Pentateuch represents the conflation of four different sources rather than the work of primarily one author, traditionally Moses. The results of Source Criticism first proposed two authors (or sources) for the Pentateuch supposedly distinguishable by the use of the terms Yahweh and Elohim . Two additional sources were later proposed as P for Priestly, and D for Deuteronomic resulting in the JEDP theory of authorship, most notably associated with German scholar Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918).

JEDP are initials representing the four hypothetical sources as follows:

• J awist (or Yahwist, from Yahweh) - describes God as Yahweh , starting in Gen 2:4, it includes much of Genesis and parts of Exodus and Numbers . It is dated around 850 B.C.
• E lohist (from Elohim) - primarily describes God as El or Elohim . Starting with Gen 15, it covers material similar to "J". It is dated around 750 B.C. (J and E are said to be difficult to distinguish).
• D euteronomy - a different source (or author) is associated with Deuteronomy alone, and is usually dated around 621 B.C.
• P riestly - this encompasses writings scattered from Gen 1 through the notice of Moses' death at the end of Deuteronomy. It is supposedly dated around 500 B.C.

Traditionally, Moses is viewed as the author of the Pentateuch , and this has caused proponents of the JEDP theory to question: what role did Moses play? Some have suggested that his role was minimal, with the majority of the Pentateuch having been written after his death. On the other hand, it has been put forth that Moses developed the core of the Pentateuch, or in other words, the basis for which all other material would follow. There are examples in the Pentateuch of other known sources, for instance, "the Book of the Wars of the LORD" (Num 21:14) that may have been used. So although a different writing style or varying language-use may be found, scholars still believe that Moses composed the more essential and theological portions of the Pentateuch.

• Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch
• Biblical Criticism
• Victor P. Hamilton, Handbook on the Pentateuch: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy . Baker Academic, 2005.
• T. Desmond Alexander, From Paradise to the Promised Land: An Introduction to the Pentateuch . Baker Academic, 2002.
• T. Desmond Alexander, Dictionary of the Old Testament: Pentateuch . IVP Bible Dictionaries. IVP Academic, 2002.
• John H. Sailhamer, The Meaning of the Pentateuch: Revelation, Composition and Interpretation . IVP Academic, 2009.

External links

• JEDP Theory (basictheology.com)
• Pentateuchal Studies Today by Gordon Wenham (1996)
• The JEDP Theory from Wikipedia
• Mosaic Authorship of the Pentatuch - Tried and True from Apologetics Press
• Documentary Hypothesis: The Subjective Approach to Biblical Criticism , by Matthew Graham
• The Documentary Hypothesis , by Duane Garrett
• Mosaic Authorship of the Torah: Problems with the Documentary Hypothesis (JEDP) - Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , by Michael Heiser
• Mosaic Authorship of the Pentateuch: Changes in Law in Deuteronomy , by Michael Heiser

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Article Review: JEDP- The Documentary Hypothesis

The article consists of two critical reviews of the JEDP-Documentary Hypothesis which attempts to explain the authorship of the Pentateuch mainly by attributing the writings to four sources: J-Yahwist, Elohist, D-Deuteronomist, and P-Priestly Code. These four sources are separated based on the names of God and are believed to have been written independently, then later compiled or redacted together. Though this hypothesis seems to provide an explanation of authorship it is a debated concept that is believed to cast doubts on the authenticity of the Bible.

Related Papers

Journal of Biblical Literature

Christoph Levin

Gideon Samuel

While the church has, from its earliest days, recognized that the Old Testament is a part of her heritage, there has by no means been a consensus view with regard to its interpretation. It was not until after the Reformation, however, that the level of attack against the fidelity of the Old Testament was raised. While there were, evidently, questions raised concerning the origins of the Old Testament books, many people looked to the church for their interpretation and for guidance in their understanding of these issues. The field of biblical studies is one of the most complex within the humanities disciplines. In the 19th century (or so), some intellectuals had determined that Moses lived during a time when writing was unknown. Therefore, he could not have written the Pentateuch. As a result, one of the most convoluted theories in theological history was developed, known as Documentary Hypothesis or the JEPD Theory. So that there is no confusion, Moses did write Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy; and he may have written down Genesis, which already existed in its completed form when Moses was born. The JEPD theory, which is taught in many seminaries throughout the world, is based upon a false premise (Moses was able to write; people did write during his time and much earlier), and upon that false premise, a false theory was built, but not fully abandoned when the premise for it was determined to be false. There is no reason to think that various sections of Deuteronomy (or other parts of the books of Moses) were just haphazardly and randomly thrown together, from a variety of sources, only to be later woven into a semi-cohesive narrative. It is a misguided theory, originally based upon some faulty premises (that Moses lived during a time when there was no writing in his area). The premise of this theory has been debunked; yet the resulting theory continues on, decades later. This paper aims at exploring the meaning of Documentary Hypothesis also called JEDP Theory and also some other concepts that aid understanding the theory better.

Angela Roskop Erisman

Kairos: Evangelical Journal of Theology

Monika Bajić

This piece is a concise summary of the historical and contemporary development of Pentateuch studies in Old Testament Theology. This article aims to provide information on the possible confirmation of Mosaic authorship. The purpose is to examine how the Documentary Hypothesis, Fragment and Supplemental Hypotheses, Form and Traditio-Historical Criticism, Canonical and Literary Criticism have helped to reveal or identify the identity of the author of the Torah. To better understand the mentioned hypotheses, this article presents a brief description of the J, E, D, and P sources.

Journal of Higher Criticism

Russell Gmirkin

Throughout most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, higher criticism's identification of JEDPH sources provided a then-compelling model for the literary development of the Pentateuch. Since the 1970s, the acknowledgment of serious difficulties in the Documentary Hypothesis have undermined the earlier consensus and led to a number of competing models, several of which deny the viability of separating out distinct JEDPH sources. In the present article, I call into question a central feature of Documentary and Supplementary Hypotheses, namely that the JEDPH sources represent different historical stages in the creation of the Pentateuch. Instead, I propose a new model in which these represent contemporary literary voices in the collaborative creation of the Pentateuch by a team of authors. This new model allows for a new interpretation of the JEDPH sources that overcomes the various objections raised against the Documentary Hypothesis in recent years.

Expository Times

Anselm C Hagedorn

Reinhard G. Kratz

New Oxford Annotated Bible

Marc Brettler

For those who are new to the work of the New Classical Scholarship (NCS), we have discovered that history at least before the 1500's, was an "inside job". What that means is that it was being written only by royals who were either closely related to each other, or had royal ancestors in common with each other. That in turn, meant that in order for that to have been the case, a closed or controlled environment existed (my term is 'Royal Supremacy') that amounted to a royal oligarchy. Everything that was being written was tightly controlled, and no one other than royalty could write anything for publication under penalty of death. There were several reasons for why they had demanded such tight security over the material that was allowed to reach the public. Much of that is explained in many of my other papers. Suffice it to say that all that was being written was being written by this royal oligarchy, and not by just anyone. There was no freedom of speech, only the illusion of it which was created by these royals. In fact, since they were the only ones who were writing for publication, they were writing BOTH the biblical texts and the non-biblical texts. It means that in order to understand history correctly and biblical texts, that we must now consider it in an entirely different context. Before anything can happen to me and/or my notes, I have been trying to save as much of that information as possible, in the form of research papers and compilations. From time to time, people will ask me just who the authors of the Gnostic gospels and other material were. This paper gives the most probable authorship and dates for 20 non-canon and/or Gnostic New Testament texts. The term 'Gnostic' has been used to describe some of the Christian material that was not included in the canon New Testament texts. Since I see that material as having been written by the same individuals as the canon material, I generally refer to it as the 'Apocryphal New Testament' material or non-canon New Testament texts. People have thought of this material or these texts as having been "rejected" from the NT canon for reasons known to those who were compiling what would be included in the "official" New Testament or texts that were ordained by the early Christian Church. But the real reason that much of that material wasn't included was because it either revealed too much, or it contained items that did not represent Jesus or other NT characters in the best light. Over the course of the years in which I had studied this material, at times I had worked with others in order to make more precise determinations regarding not only various component parts, passages, word usage, but several other factors which were involved in the creation of said material. And, one of those whom I had worked with was one of the most knowledgeable individuals on the subject of the New Testament and its authors, Abelard Reuchlin. As a result, I have many notes, some of which were the early opinions or conclusions of Abelard Reuchlin, along with my own notes with opinions and preliminary conclusions. Working together, Reuchlin and I were able to make more, and better determinations. There are various reasons for the conclusions that Reuchlin and I had reached regarding this material, not the least of which is that we knew just who was doing the writing of the canon NT texts and who those individuals were, as well as who they were writing as (i.e., their aliases and pen names).

Approaches to the Bible: The Best of Bible Review, Vol, 1: Composition, Transmission and Language

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