Documentary Hypothesis

History

Roots

Jewish and Christian tradition read the five books of the Torah as the work of Moses. Jesus speaks of “the book of Moses” (Mark 12:26), and the Talmud allowed only that Joshua wrote the last verses, which narrate Moses’ death (Deuteronomy 34:5–10). Medieval readers noticed other lines that seemed to look back on Moses’ time from later on. One was “At that time the Canaanites were in the land” (Genesis 12:6). The Jewish commentator Abraham ibn Ezra hinted at the problem and left it there.

In the seventeenth century, writers outside the scholarly guild drew the conclusion openly. Thomas Hobbes argued in Leviathan (1651) that “the five Books of Moses were written after his time, though how long after it be not so manifest,” while holding that Moses wrote the law the books say he wrote (ch. 33, Gutenberg). Baruch Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise (1670) went further: chapter 8 is headed “The Pentateuch not written by Moses” and proposes Ezra as the likely compiler (Gutenberg).

Causes

The method of dividing sources began with a defender of Moses. Jean Astruc, a French Catholic physician, published his Conjectures sur les mémoires originaux dont il paroit que Moyse s’est servi pour composer le livre de la Genèse in 1753 (Archive.org). His title states his aim: to identify the “original memoirs” Moses used in writing Genesis. His main clue was the way Genesis alternates between two names for God, Elohim (“God”) and Jehovah (“the LORD”). He assigned the passages using one name to one memoir and those using the other to another. He also used repetitions in the narrative, and a puzzling verse where God tells Moses he was not known to the patriarchs by the name of the LORD (Exodus 6:2–3).

German scholars took the method further and dropped Moses. Johann Gottfried Eichhorn’s Einleitung ins Alte Testament (4th ed., 1823, Archive.org) carried the source analysis through Genesis. Wilhelm de Wette’s dissertation of 1805 and his Beiträge zur Einleitung in das Alte Testament (1806–07, Archive.org) supplied the fixed point the theory would later rely on. He argued that Deuteronomy, with its demand for a single place of worship, was the “book of the law” found in the Temple under King Josiah in the late seventh century BC, and so did not come from Moses. Through the nineteenth century, scholars debated whether the Pentateuch was built from continuous documents, from many fragments, or from one base text that later writers supplemented. Hermann Hupfeld (1853) argued that what had been taken as one Elohim source was really two, which gave the four-source scheme its raw material.

The decisive shift was about dates, not sources. Karl Heinrich Graf’s Die geschichtlichen Bücher des Alten Testaments (1866, Archive.org) argued that the priestly ritual law, long assumed to be the oldest layer, was in fact the youngest, later than the prophets and close to the time of Ezra. Abraham Kuenen in the Netherlands developed the same case.

Julius Wellhausen gave the theory its classic form in 1878, in a book first titled History of Israel, Volume I and from 1883 called Prolegomena to the History of Israel (English translation, 1885, Gutenberg). He identified “three strata of the Pentateuch: Deuteronomy, Priestly Code, Jehovist,” the Jehovist being the combined J and E. He ordered them J, E, D, P. He tied D to Josiah’s reform of 621 BC and P to the period after the exile. He argued the point from the history of worship: sacrifice at many local altars in the earliest narratives, a single sanctuary demanded by Deuteronomy, and a single sanctuary simply assumed by the Priestly Code. The law, he concluded, was “the starting-point” for the history of Judaism, not of ancient Israel. W. Robertson Smith’s preface to the English edition says that before 1878 Graf’s view “was neglected or treated as a paradox in most German universities,” and that afterward “almost every younger scholar of mark” had come over to it. That turning point is why this note dates the hypothesis to 1878 and not to Astruc in 1753. Astruc was dividing sources for Moses; the Graf–Wellhausen synthesis is the theory that took the Pentateuch away from him.

Influence

For most of the twentieth century the hypothesis was the standard account in university and mainline seminary teaching, in Protestant and later Catholic scholarship. Commentaries labelled verses J, E, D or P. Introductions to the Old Testament were organised around it. Its late dating of the law reshaped the history of Israel’s religion: the prophets came before the law, and the priestly system became a product of the exile.

It also drove the modern fight over Scripture. The Old Princeton defence of Biblical Inerrancy took shape in the 1880s against “higher criticism” of this kind. For Rome, the hypothesis was one of the issues behind the Modernist crisis of the early 1900s.

Key ideas and contributors

Four documents. In its classic form the Pentateuch is built from four once-independent sources. J (the Yahwist, from the German Jahwe) uses the divine name from the start and is usually placed in Judah in the early monarchy. E (the Elohist) uses “God” until the name is revealed to Moses and is linked to the northern kingdom. D is the core of Deuteronomy, tied to Josiah. P (the Priestly source) supplies genealogies, dates, ritual law and the first creation account, and comes from the exile or after it. Editors combined them in stages, ending with a final redaction in the Persian period.

Criteria. Scholars used the alternation of divine names; doublets, such as two creation accounts (Genesis 1 and 2) and two interwoven flood narratives; contradictions in detail; and differences in vocabulary, style and theology. Christine Hayes’s Yale lecture “Doublets and Contradictions, Seams and Sources” walks through these criteria on Genesis (see Audio and video below).

Law after the prophets. The most consequential claim came from Graf and Wellhausen. On this account the Priestly Code describes a religion that did not exist in early Israel. Its tabernacle and centralised cult are projections of the Second Temple back into the wilderness.

Popular restatements. Richard Elliott Friedman’s Who Wrote the Bible? (1987, Archive.org) brought the classic scheme to a general readership. Joel S. Baden’s The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis (Yale University Press, 2012) is the main statement of the “Neo-Documentarian” school. That school drops most dating claims and defends the four sources on literary grounds alone.

Key controversies

The Catholic response, then and now. On 27 June 1906 the Pontifical Biblical Commission answered that the critics’ arguments did not justify holding that the Pentateuch was “compiled from sources for the greatest part later than the Mosaic age” (text in the Catholic Encyclopedia, “Pentateuch”). The same answers conceded a good deal. Moses might have entrusted the writing to secretaries. He might have used written or oral sources. The text might contain “post-Mosaic additions” and updated language. Pius XII’s encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943) opened the door further. It told exegetes to work out “what modes of writing” the ancient authors “would be likely to use, and in fact did use,” since the ancient peoples of the East “did not always employ those forms or kinds of speech which we use today.” The Second Vatican Council’s Dei Verbum (1965) holds that Scripture teaches “without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation” (§11). It tells interpreters to attend to “literary forms” (§12). It does not rule on who wrote the Pentateuch. In practice, Roman Catholic scholarship now works with critical models of composition, and the 1906 answers are treated as belonging to their time.

The evangelical response. Conservative Protestants answered on two fronts. William Henry Green of Princeton, in The Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch (1895, Archive.org), took the critics’ criteria one by one and argued that they did not hold. Oswald T. Allis’s The Five Books of Moses (1943, Archive.org) renewed the case. Its subtitle calls the theory a claim that the Pentateuch is “a late compilation from diverse and conflicting sources by authors and editors whose identity is completely unknown.” The theological objection was that Jesus and the apostles cite the Law as Moses’ writing. If they were wrong about that, critics argued, their authority as teachers is at stake. The Chicago Statement on Inerrancy (1978) did not name the hypothesis. Its Article XVIII affirms that interpreters should take “account of its literary forms and devices,” but denies “the legitimacy of any treatment of the text or quest for sources lying behind it that leads to relativizing, dehistoricizing, or discounting its teaching, or rejecting its claims to authorship” (text). Many Evangelical scholars today hold to “essential” Mosaic authorship. They allow that Moses used earlier sources and that later inspired editors added material such as the account of his death and modernised place names. This is close to what the 1906 Commission itself allowed. Others, often holding Limited Inerrancy, accept a long compositional history and argue that the texts never claimed Mosaic authorship for every line.

Jewish critics of the method. Umberto Cassuto, an Italian-Jewish scholar teaching in Jerusalem, gave eight lectures against the theory. They were published in English as The Documentary Hypothesis and the Composition of the Pentateuch (1961, Archive.org). He argued that the divine names change with the subject matter, not the source, and that the alleged doublets are deliberate literary repetition. More recently, Joshua Berman’s Inconsistency in the Torah has argued from ancient Near Eastern law and treaty texts that ancient writers tolerated tensions that modern source critics read as seams.

The breakdown of the consensus. The sharpest challenge since the 1970s has come from inside critical scholarship. John Van Seters, in Abraham in History and Tradition (1975, Archive.org), argued that the patriarchal stories reflect the first millennium BC and that the Yahwist wrote late, during the exile. On his account, J supplemented older material rather than standing as an early document; this was a return to the “supplementary” model. Rolf Rendtorff’s Das überlieferungsgeschichtliche Problem des Pentateuch (1977) went further. It denied that continuous J and E documents ever existed. In their place he proposed larger blocks of tradition (primeval history, patriarchs, exodus, Sinai) that grew separately and were joined late. R. N. Whybray’s The Making of the Pentateuch (1987) concluded that a single author after the exile might best explain the whole, a return in effect to a fragmentary model.

Since then the field has split roughly along geographical lines. Much of German-speaking and European scholarship has abandoned J and E as documents. It keeps P, still widely accepted as a distinct layer, and calls the rest “non-Priestly” material, much of it rejecting E as fragmentary or non-existent (overview, secondary). The 2006 volume A Farewell to the Yahwist?, edited by Thomas Dozeman and Konrad Schmid, put the question in its title. North American Neo-Documentarians such as Baden reply that the four-source model still explains the narrative breaks better than any rival, once it is freed from Wellhausen’s history of religion. There is no new consensus. Most critical scholars still agree that the Pentateuch had a long history of composition and that P can be identified, but agree on little else.

What remains unresolved

The question splits into two. The literary question is whether the Pentateuch’s tensions are best explained by sources, by supplements, by large blocks, or by ancient conventions that tolerated repetition. That question is open even among critics. The theological question is what follows for the authority of Scripture if Moses did not write most of the Torah. Catholic teaching and much mainline Protestant teaching locate inspiration in the final text, however it was composed. Conservative evangelicals hold that the New Testament’s references to Moses as author settle more than literary convention. Both sides now agree that Moses’ own role cannot be proved or disproved from the text alone, and that the classic JEDP scheme is no longer the consensus it was in 1900.