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Documentary hypothesis
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The documentary hypothesis (DH) is the proposal that the first five books of the Old Testament (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, known collectively as the Torah or Pentateuch) represent a combination of documents from originally independent sources. According to the influential version of the hypothesis formulated by Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918), there were four main sources, and these sources and the approximate dates of their composition were:
The editor who combined the sources into the final Pentateuch is known as R, for Redactor, and might have been Ezra or perhaps even the writer of the Priestly source.
- "Starting from the simple question of how to reconcile inconsistencies in the text, and refusing to accept forced explanations to harmonize them, scholars eventually arrived at the theory that the Torah was composed of selections woven together from several, at times inconsistent, sources dealing with the same and related subjects.
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The documentary hypothesis (DH) is the proposal that the first five books of the Old Testament (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, known collectively as the Torah or Pentateuch) represent a combination of documents from originally independent sources. According to the influential version of the hypothesis formulated by Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918), there were four main sources, and these sources and the approximate dates of their composition were:
- the J, or Jahwist, source; written c. 950 BCE in the southern kingdom of Judah. (The name Yahweh begins with a J in Wellhausen's native German.)
- the E, or Elohist, source; written c. 850 BCE in the northern kingdom of Israel.
- the D, or Deuteronomist, source; written c. 621 BCE in Jerusalem during a period of religious reform.
- the P, or Priestly, source; written c. 450 BCE by Aaronid priests.
The editor who combined the sources into the final Pentateuch is known as R, for Redactor, and might have been Ezra or perhaps even the writer of the Priestly source.
- "Starting from the simple question of how to reconcile inconsistencies in the text, and refusing to accept forced explanations to harmonize them, scholars eventually arrived at the theory that the Torah was composed of selections woven together from several, at times inconsistent, sources dealing with the same and related subjects. The reasoning followed in this kind of analysis is somewhat similar to that of the Talmudic sages and later rabbis who held that inconsistent clauses and terminology in a single paragraph of the Mishna must have originated with different sages, and who recognized that Moses could not have written passages of the Torah that contain information unavailable to him, such as the last chapter of Deuteronomy, which describes his death and its aftermath."
According to Wellhausen, the four sources present a picture of Israel's religious history, which he saw as one of ever-increasing centralization and priestly power. Wellhausen's hypothesis became the dominant view on the origin of the Pentateuch for much of the 20th century. Most contemporary Bible experts accept some form of the documentary hypothesis, and scholars continue to draw on Wellhausen's terminology and insights.
Sources of the Torah (Wellhausen's version)
By the middle of the 19th century scholars had identified four documentary sources within the Torah:
J, Jahwist source
The oldest source, concerned with narratives, making up half of Genesis and half of Exodus, plus fragments of Numbers. J describes a human-like God, called Yahweh (or rather YHWH) throughout, and has a special interest in the territory of the Kingdom of Judah and individuals connected with its history. J has an eloquent style. Originally composed c. 950 BCE.
E, Elohist source
E parallels J, often duplicating the narratives. Makes up a third of Genesis and half of Exodus, plus fragments of Numbers. E describes a human-like God initially called Elohim, and Yahweh subsequent to the incident of the burning bush, at which Elohim reveals himself as Yahweh. E focuses on the Kingdom of Israel and on the Shiloh priesthood, has a moderately eloquent style. Originally composed c. 850 BCE.
D, Deuteronomist source
D takes the form of a series of sermons about the Law, and consists of most of Deuteronomy. Its distinctive term for God is YHWH Elohainu, translated in English as "The Lord our God." Originally composed c. 650-621 BCE.
P, Priestly source
Preoccupied with the centrality of the priesthood, and with lists (especially genealogies), dates, numbers and laws. P describes a distant and unmerciful God, referred to as Elohim. P partly duplicates J and E, but alters details to stress the importance of the priesthood. P consists of about a fifth of Genesis, substantial portions of Exodus and Numbers, and almost all of Leviticus. P has a low level of literary style. Composed c. 550-400 BCE.
R, Redactor
The redaction of the Torah began with the combination of J and E to create JE, c 750. The addition of D created JED. The redactors associated with P put the work into its final form c 400.
Before Wellhausen
Mosaic authorship
Prior to the 17th century both Jews and Christians accepted the traditional view that Moses had written down the Torah under the direct inspiration—even dictation—of God. A few rabbis and philosophers asked how Moses could have described his own death, or given a list of the kings of Edom before those kings ever lived, but none doubted the truth of the tradition, for the purpose of scholarship "was to underline the antiquity and authority of the teaching in the Pentateuch, not to demonstrate who wrote the books."
The beginnings of the documentary hypothesis
In 1651 Thomas Hobbes, in chapter 33 of Leviathan, marshaled a battery of passages such as Deut 34:6 ("no man knoweth of his sepulchre to this day," implying an author living long after Moses' death); Gen 12:6 ("and the Canaanite was then in the land," implying an author living in a time when the Canaanite was no longer in the land); and Num 21:14 (referring to a previous book of Moses' deeds), and concluded that none of these could be by Moses. Others, including Isaac de la Peyrère, Baruch Spinoza, Richard Simon, and John Hampden came to the same conclusion, but their works were condemned, several of them were imprisoned and forced to recant, and an attempt was made on Spinoza's life.
In 1753 Jean Astruc printed (anonymously) Conjectures sur les mémoires originaux, dont il paraît que Moïse s'est servi pour composer le livre de la Genèse ("Conjectures on the original accounts of which it appears Moses availed himself in composing the Book of Genesis"). Astruc's motive was to refute Hobbes and Spinoza - "the sickness of the last century," as he called their work. To do this, he applied to Genesis the tools of literary analysis which scholars were already using with Classical texts such as the Iliad to sift variant traditions and arrive at the most authentic text. He began by identifying two markers which seemed to identify consistent variations, the use of "Elohim" or "YHWH" (Yahweh) as the name for God, and the appearance of duplicated stories, or doublets, such as the two accounts of the creation in the first and second chapters of Genesis and the two accounts of Sarah and a foreign king (Gen.12 and Gen.20). He then ruled columns and assigned verses to these, the "Elohim" verses in one column, the "YHWH" verses in another, and the members of the doublets in their own columns beside these. The four parallel columns thus constructed contained two long narratives and two short ones. Astruc suggested that these were the original documents used by Moses, and that Genesis as written by Moses had looked just like this, four parallel accounts meant to be read separately. According to Astruc, a later editor had combined the four columns into a single narrative, creating the confusions and repetitions noted by Hobbes and Spinoza.
The tools adapted by Astruc for biblical source criticism were vastly developed by subsequent scholars, most of them German. From 1780 onwards Johann Gottfried Eichhorn extended Astruc's analysis beyond Genesis to the entire Pentateuch, and by 1823 he had concluded that Moses had had no part in writing any of it. In 1805 Wilhelm de Wette concluded that Deuteronomy represented a third independent source. About 1822 Friedrich Bleek identified Joshua as a continuation of the Pentateuch via Deuteronomy, while others identified signs of the Deuteronomist in Judges, Samuel, and Kings. In 1853 Hermann Hupfeld suggested that the Elohist was really two sources and should be split, thus isolating the Priestly source; Hupfeld also emphasized the importance of the Redactor, or final editor, in producing the Torah from the four sources. Not all the Pentateuch was traced to one or other of the four sources: numerous smaller sections were identified, such as the Holiness Code contained in Leviticus 17 to 26.
Scholars also attempted to identify the sequence and dates of the four sources, and to propose who might have produced them, and why. De Wette had concluded in 1805 that none of the Pentateuch was composed before the time of David; Since Spinoza, D was connected with the priests of the Temple in Jerusalem during the reign of Josiah in 621 BC; beyond this, scholars argued variously for composition in the order PEJD, or EJDP, or JEDP: the subject was far from settled.
The Wellhausen (or Graf-Wellhausen) hypothesis
In 1876/77 Julius Wellhausen published Die Composition des Hexateuch ("The Composition of the Hexateuch", i.e. including the book of Joshua), in which he set out the four-source hypothesis of Pentateuchal origins; this was followed in 1878 by Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels ("Prolegomena to the History of Israel"), a work which traced the development of the religion of the ancient Israelites from an entirely secular, non-supernatural standpoint. Wellhausen contributed little that was new, but sifted and combined the previous century of scholarship into a coherent, comprehensive theory on the origins of the Torah and of Judaism, one so persuasive that it dominated scholarly debate on the subject for the next hundred years.
Distinguishing the sources
Wellhausen's criteria for distinguishing between sources were those developed by his predecessors over the previous century: style (including but not exclusively the choice of vocabulary); divine names; doublets and occasionally triplets. J was identified with a rich narrative style, E was somewhat less eloquent, P's language was dry and legalistic. Vocabulary items such as the names of God, or the use of Horeb (E and D) or Sinai (J and P) for God's mountain; ritual objects such as the ark, mentioned frequently in J but never in E; the status of judges (never mentioned in P) and prophets (mentioned only in E and D); the means of communication between God and humanity (J's God meets in person with Adam and Abraham, E's God communicates through dreams, P's can only be approached through the priesthood): all these and more formed the toolkit for discriminating between sources and allocating verses to them.
Dating the sources
Wellhausen's starting point for dating the sources was the event described in 2 Kings 22:8–20: a "scroll of Torah" (which can be translated "instruction" or "law") is discovered in the Temple in Jerusalem by the High Priest Hilkiah in the eighteenth year of king Josiah, who had ascended the throne as a child of eight. What Josiah reads there causes him to embark on a campaign of religious reform, destroying all altars except that in the Temple, prohibiting all sacrifice except at the Temple, and insisting on the exclusive worship of Yahweh. In the 4th century Jerome had speculated that the scroll may have been Deuteronomy; de Wette in 1805 suggested that it might have been only the law-code at Deuteronomy 12-26 that Hilkiah found, and that he might have written it himself, alone or in collaboration with Josiah. The Deuteronomistic historian certainly held Josiah in high regard: 1 Kings 13 names him as one who will be sent by Yahweh to slaughter the apostate priests of Beth-el, in a prophecy allegedly made 300 years before his birth.
With D anchored in history, Wellhausen proceeded to place the remaining sources around it. He accepted Karl Heinrich Graf's conclusion that the sources were written in the order J-E-D-P. This was contrary to the general opinion of scholars at the time, who saw P as the earliest of the sources, "the official guide to approved divine worship", and Wellhausen's sustained argument for a late P was the great innovation of the Prolegomena. J and E he ascribed to the early monarchy, approximately 950 BCE for J and 850 BCE for E; P he placed in the early Persian post-Exilic period, around 500 BCE. His argument for these dates was based on what was seen in his day as the natural evolution of religious practice: in the pre-and early monarchic society described in Genesis and Judges and Samuel, altars were erected wherever the Patriarchs or heroes such as Joshua chose, anyone could offer the sacrifice, and portions were offered to priests as the one offering the sacrifice chose; by the late monarchy sacrifice was beginning to be centralized and controlled by the priesthood, while pan-Israelite festivals such as Passover were instituted to tie the people to the monarch in a joint celebration of national history; in post-Exilic times the temple in Jerusalem was firmly established as the only sanctuary, only the descendants of Aaron could offer sacrifices, festivals were linked to the calendar instead of to the seasons, and the schedule of priestly entitlements was strictly mandated.
The four were combined by a series of Redactors (editors), first J with E to form a combined JE, then JE with D to form a JED text, and finally JED with P to form JEDP, the final Torah. Taking up a scholarly tradition stretching back to Spinoza and Hobbes, Wellhausen named Ezra, the post-Exilic leader who re-established the Jewish community in Jerusalem at the behest of the Persian emperor Cyrus in 458 BCE, as the final redactor
After Wellhausen
For much of the 20th century Wellhausen's hypothesis formed the framework within which the origins of the Pentateuch were discussed, and even the Vatican came to urge that "light derived from recent research" not be "neglected", listing specifically "the sources written or oral" and "the forms of expression". Some important modifications were introduced, notably by Albrecht Alt and Martin Noth, who argued for the oral transmission of ancient core beliefs—guidance out of Egypt, conquest of the Promised Land, covenants, revelation at Sinai/Horeb, etc. Simultaneously, the work of the American school of biblical archaeologists such as William F. Albright and Cyrus Gordon seemed to confirm that even if Genesis and Exodus were only given their final form in the first millennium BC, they were still firmly grounded in the material reality of the second millennium. The overall effect of such refinements was to aid the wider acceptance of the basic hypothesis by reassuring believers that even if the final form of the Pentateuch was late and not due to Moses himself, and it was nevertheless possible to recover a credible picture of the period of Moses and of the patriarchal age. Hence opposition to the documentary hypothesis gradually waned, and by the mid-twentieth century it was almost universally accepted.
Mid-century challenges to the hypothesis such as that of the Italian Jewish scholar Umberto Cassuto, had little impact at the time, but R. N. Whybray in the 1970s restated almost identical arguments with far greater consequences. Whybray pointed out, inter alia, that of the various possible models for the composition of the Pentateuch—documentary, supplemental and fragmentary—the documentary was the most difficult to demonstrate, for while the supplemental and fragmentary models propose relatively simple, logical processes and can account for the unevenness of the final text, the process envisaged by the DH is both complex and extremely specific in its assumptions about ancient Israel and the development of its religion. Whybray went on to assert that these assumptions were illogical and contradictory, and did not offer real explanatory power: why, for example, should the authors of the separate sources avoid duplication, while the final redactor accepted it? "Thus the hypothesis can only be maintained on the assumption that, while consistency was the hallmark of the various [source] documents, inconsistency was the hallmark of the redactors!"
Since Whybray there has been a proliferation of theories and models regarding the origins of the Torah, many of them radically different from Wellhausen's model. Thus, to mention some of the major figures from the last decades of the 20th century, H. H. Schmid almost completely eliminated J, allowing only a late Deuteronomical redactor. With the idea of identifiable sources disappearing, the question of dating also changes its terms. Additionally, some scholars have abandoned the Documentary hypothesis entirely in favour of alternative models which see the Pentateuch as the product of a single author, or as the end-point of a process of creation by the entire community. Rolf Rendtorff and Erhard Blum saw the Pentateuch developing from the gradual accretion of small units into larger and larger works, a process which removes both J and E, and, significantly, implied a fragmentary rather than a documentary model for Old Testament origins; and John Van Seters, using a different model, envisaged an ongoing process of supplementation in which later authors modified earlier compositions and changed the focus of the narratives. The most radical contemporary proposal has come from Thomas L. Thompson, who suggests that the final redaction of the Torah occurred as late as the early Hasmonean monarchy.
The documentary hypothesis still has many supporters, especially in the United States, where William H. Propp has completed a two-volume translation and commentary on Exodus for the prestigious Anchor Bible Series from within a DH framework, and Antony F. Campbell and Mark A. O’Brien have published a "Sources of the Pentateuch" presenting the Torah sorted into continuous sources following the divisions of Martin Noth. Richard Elliott Friedman's "Who Wrote the Bible?" (1987) and "The Bible with Sources Revealed" (2003) were in essence an extended response to Whybray, explaining, in terms based on the history of ancient Israel, how the redactors could have tolerated inconsistency, contradiction and repetition, indeed had it forced upon them by the historical setting in which they worked. Friedman's classic four-source division differed from Wellhausen in accepting Yehezkel Kaufmann's dating of P to the reign of Hezekiah; this in itself is no small modification of Wellhausen, for whom a late dating of P was essential to his model of the historical development of Israelite religion. Friedman argued that J appeared a little before 722 BCE, followed by E, and a combined JE soon after that. P was written as a rebuttal of JE (c. 715–687 BCE), and D was the last to appear, at the time of Josiah (c. 622 BCE), before the Redactor, whom Friedman identifies as Ezra, collated the final Torah.
While the terminology and insights of the documentary hypothesis—notably its recognition that the Pentateuch is the work of many hands and many centuries, and that its final form belongs to the middle of the 1st millennium BC—continue to inform scholarly debate about the origins of the Pentateuch, it no longer dominates that debate as it did for the first two thirds of the 20th century. "The verities enshrined in older introductions [to the subject of the origins of the Pentateuch] have disappeared, and in their place scholars are confronted by competing theories which are discouragingly numerous, exceedingly complex, and often couched in an expository style that is (to quote John van Seter's description of one seminal work) 'not for the faint-hearted.'"
See also
Further reading
- Blenkinsopp, Joseph The Pentateuch : an introduction to the first five books of the Bible, Doubleday, NY, USA 1992. ISBN 038541207X
- Bloom, Harold and Rosenberg, David The Book of J, Random House, NY, USA 1990. ISBN 0-8021-4191-9.
- Campbell, Antony F., and O’Brien, Mark A. Sources of the Pentateuch, Fortress, Minneapolis, 1993.
- Friedman, Richard E. Who Wrote The Bible?, Harper and Row, NY, USA, 1987. ISBN 0-06-063035-3. This work does not constitute a standard reference for the documentary hypothesis, as Friedman in part describes his own theory of the origin of one of the sources. Rather, it offers an excellent introduction for the layman.
- Friedman, Richard E. The Bible with Sources Revealed, HarperSanFrancisco, 2003. ISBN 0-06-053069-3.
- Garrett, Duane A. Rethinking Genesis: The Sources and Authorship of the First Book of the Bible, Mentor, 2003. ISBN 1-85792-576-9.
- Kaufmann, Yehezkel, The Religion of Israel, from Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile, University of Chicago Press, 1960. (Translated by Moishe Greenberg)
- Kugel, James L., How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now, Free Press, 2008.
- Mendenhall, George E. The Tenth Generation: The Origins of the Biblical Tradition, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.
- Mendenhall, George E. Ancient Israel's Faith and History: An Introduction to the Bible in Context, Westminster John Knox Press, 2001. ISBN 0-664-22313-3
- Nicholson, Ernest Wilson. The Pentateuch in the Twentieth Century: The Legacy of Julius Wellhausen, Oxford University Press, 2003. ISBN 0198269587
- Rofe, Alexander. Introduction to the Composition of the Pentateuch, Sheffield Academic Press, 1999.
- Rogerson, J. Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany, SPCK/Fortress, 1985.
- Shafer, Kenneth W. Searching for J, Gateway Press, Baltimore, 2003, ISBN 0-9747457-1-5, (Amazon)
- Spinoza, Benedict de A Theologico-Political Treatise Dover, New York, USA, 1951, Chapter 8.
- Tigay, Jeffrey H. "An Empirical Basis for the Documentary Hypothesis" Journal of Biblical Literature Vol.94, No.3 Sept. 1975, pages 329–342.
- Tigay, Jeffrey H., (ed.) Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA, USA 1986. ISBN 081227976X
- Van Seters, John. Abraham in History and Tradition Yale University Press, 1975.
- Van Seters, John. In Search of History: Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical History Yale University Press, 1983.
- Van Seters, John. Prologue to History: The Yahwist as Historian in Genesis Westminster/John Knox, Louisville, Kentucky, 1992. ISBN 0664219675
- Van Seters, John. The Life of Moses: The Yahwist as Historian in Exodus–Numbers Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox, 1994. ISBN 0-664-22363-X
- [ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03/prole10.txt Wellhausen, Julius, "Prolegomena to the History of Israel"], (the first English edition, with William Robertson Smith's Preface, from Project Guttenberg)
- Wenham, Gordon. "", Themelios 22.1 (October 1996): 3–13.
- Whybray, R. N. The Making of the Pentateuch: A Methodological Study JSOTSup 53. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1987.
External links
- Explanation of the DH, based on the Anchor Bible Dictionary entry on source criticism.
- A brief overview of the history of the DH, concentrating on the work of major scholars.
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- — from SimpleToRemember.com Judaism Online website: a conservative Jewish Orthodox analysis of the DH.
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- Smith, Colin: , June 2002. Retrieved from the Alpha and Omega Ministries website on 26 July 2006.
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- on Religioustolerance.org, with the first ten chapters of Genesis color-coded by source
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- . "New Directions in Pooh Stiudies". A humorous look at the pitfalls of various critical methodologies, including source criticism and its most famous offspring, the documentary hypothesis.
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