Documentary hypothesis

Basic approaches: documentary, fragmentary and supplementary hypotheses

The Torah (or Pentateuch) is the collective name for 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, Jean Astrid applied to the biblical texts the method of Source criticism – the critical study of doublets (parallel accounts of the same incidents), inconsistencies, and changes in style and vocabulary – and in 1780 Johann Eichhorn, building on the work of Astruc 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 Deuteronomist as 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, and 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 documentary hypothesis

In 1878 Julius Wellhausen published Geschichte Israels, Bd 1 ("History of Israel, Vol 1"; the second volume, a synthetic history titled Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte ["Israelite and Jewish History"], did not appear until 1894 and remains untranslated); the second edition he printed as Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels ("Prolegomena to the History of Israel") in 1883, and it is better known under that title. 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 Reuss, Graf, and others, who in turn had built on earlier scholarship. He accepted Hupfield'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 800s and 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 700s and the court of King Josiah; P was a product of the priest-and-temple dominated world of the 500s; and the final redaction, when P was combined with JED to produce the Torah as we now know it, took place in the mid-400s, possible under the aegis of Ezra.

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 newer documentary hypothesis as the dominant explanation of Pentateuchal origins from the late 19th to the late 20th centuries.

Contemporary approaches: end of the documentary consensus and revival of supplementary and fragmentary models

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), although some would place it somewhat later, in the Hellenistic (333-164 BCE) or even Hasmonean (140-37 BCE) periods – the latter 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 version of the documentary hypothesis still has adherents, especially in North America and Israel. The revised or neo-documentary hypothesis 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 single element most often criticised by other scholars, as European scholars have largely rejected it as fragmentary or non-existent (it is rarely distinguishable from the classical J source).

The Torah and the history of Israel's religion

Julius Wellhausen, the father of the documentary hypothesis that dominated scholarship for much of the 20th century, used the sources of the Torah as evidence of changes in the history of Israelite religion as it moved from free, simple and natural to fixed, formal and institutional. Modern reconstructions of Israel's religion have become much more circumspect in how they use the Old Testament, not least because comparative data (i.e., the comparison of ancient Israel with other cultures) and archaeology have led to the realisation that the Bible is not a reliable witness to the religion of ancient Israel and Judah. It represents the beliefs of only a small segment of the ancient Israelite community, the members of a late Judean religious tradition centered in Jerusalem and devoted to the exclusive worship of the god Yahweh.