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The documentary hypothesis (DH) is one of the models used by biblical scholars to explain the origins and composition of the Torah (or
Pentateuch The Torah ( , "Instruction", "Teaching" or "Law") is the compilation of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, namely the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The Torah is also known as the Pentateuch () o ...
, the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus,
Numbers A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The most basic examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers can ...
, and
Deuteronomy Deuteronomy (; ) is the fifth book of the Torah (in Judaism), where it is called () which makes it the fifth book of the Hebrew Bible and Christian Old Testament. Chapters 1–30 of the book consist of three sermons or speeches delivered to ...
). A version of the documentary hypothesis, frequently identified with the German scholar
Julius Wellhausen Julius Wellhausen (17 May 1844 – 7 January 1918) was a German biblical scholar and orientalist. In the course of his career, his research interest moved from Old Testament research through Islamic studies to New Testament scholarship. Wellhau ...
, was almost universally accepted for most of the 20th century. It posited that the Pentateuch is a compilation of four originally independent documents: the Jahwist,
Elohist According to the documentary hypothesis, the Elohist (or simply E) is one of four source documents underlying the Torah, together with the Jahwist (or Yahwist), the Deuteronomist and the Priestly source. The Elohist is so named because of its ...
, Deuteronomist, and Priestly sources, frequently referred to by their initials.hence the alternative name ''JEDP'' for the documentary hypothesis The first of these, J, was dated to the Solomonic period (c. 950 BCE). E was dated somewhat later, in the 9th century BCE, and D was dated just before the reign of King Josiah, in the 7th or 8th century BCE. Finally, P was generally dated to the time of
Ezra Ezra ( fl. fifth or fourth century BCE) is the main character of the Book of Ezra. According to the Hebrew Bible, he was an important Jewish scribe (''sofer'') and priest (''kohen'') in the early Second Temple period. In the Greek Septuagint, t ...
in the 5th century BCE. The sources would have been joined at various points in time by a series of editors or "redactors". The consensus around the classical documentary hypothesis has now collapsed. This was triggered in large part by the influential publications of
John Van Seters John Van Seters (May 2, 1935 – April 9, 2025) was a Canadian scholar of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and the Ancient Near East. He was a University Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina, and James A. Gray Professor of Bi ...
,
Hans Heinrich Schmid Hans Heinrich Schmid (22 October 1937 in Winterthur, Canton of Zürich – 4 October 2014) was a Swiss Protestant Reformed theologian, university professor and university rector. Life He was the son of the Zurich pastor Gotthard Schmid (1909–196 ...
, and
Rolf Rendtorff Rolf Rendtorff (1925–2014) was Professor of Old Testament at the University of Heidelberg from 1963 to 1990. He was one of the more significant German Old Testament scholars from the latter half of the twentieth-century and published extensive ...
in the mid-1970s, who argued that J was to be dated no earlier than the time of the
Babylonian captivity The Babylonian captivity or Babylonian exile was the period in Jewish history during which a large number of Judeans from the ancient Kingdom of Judah were forcibly relocated to Babylonia by the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The deportations occurred ...
(597–539 BCE), and rejected the existence of a substantial E source. They also called into question the nature and extent of the three other sources. Van Seters, Schmid, and Rendtorff shared many of the same criticisms of the documentary hypothesis, but were not in complete agreement about what paradigm ought to replace it. As a result, there has been a revival of interest in "fragmentary" and " supplementary" models, frequently in combination with each other and with a documentary model, making it difficult to classify contemporary theories as strictly one or another. Modern scholars also have given up the classical Wellhausian dating of the sources, and generally see the completed Torah as a product of the Achaemenid period (probably 450–350 BCE), although some would place its production as late as the
Hellenistic period In classical antiquity, the Hellenistic period covers the time in Greek history after Classical Greece, between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the death of Cleopatra VII in 30 BC, which was followed by the ascendancy of the R ...
(333–164 BCE), after the conquests of
Alexander the Great Alexander III of Macedon (; 20/21 July 356 BC – 10/11 June 323 BC), most commonly known as Alexander the Great, was a king of the Ancient Greece, ancient Greek kingdom of Macedonia (ancient kingdom), Macedon. He succeeded his father Philip ...
.


History of the documentary hypothesis

The
Torah The Torah ( , "Instruction", "Teaching" or "Law") is the compilation of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, namely the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The Torah is also known as the Pentateuch () ...
(or Pentateuch) is collectively the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus,
Numbers A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The most basic examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers can ...
, and
Deuteronomy Deuteronomy (; ) is the fifth book of the Torah (in Judaism), where it is called () which makes it the fifth book of the Hebrew Bible and Christian Old Testament. Chapters 1–30 of the book consist of three sermons or speeches delivered to ...
. 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 Mosaic authorship is the Judeo-Christian tradition that the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, were dictated by God to Moses. The tradition probably began with the Deuteronomic Code, legalistic code of the Book of Deut ...
of the Torah had been largely rejected by leading scholars by the 17th century, with many modern scholars viewing it as a product of a long evolutionary process.The reasons behind the rejection are covered in more detail in the article on
Mosaic authorship Mosaic authorship is the Judeo-Christian tradition that the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, were dictated by God to Moses. The tradition probably began with the Deuteronomic Code, legalistic code of the Book of Deut ...
.
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 Exegesis ( ; from the Greek , from , "to lead out") is a critical explanation or interpretation of a text. The term is traditionally applied to the interpretation of Biblical works. In modern usage, exegesis can involve critical interpretation ...
Jean Astruc Jean Astruc (19 March 1684, in Sauve, France – 5 May 1766, in Paris) was a professor of medicine in France at Montpellier and Paris, who wrote the first great treatise on syphilis and venereal diseases, and also, with a small anonymously publ ...
'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 According to the documentary hypothesis, the Elohist (or simply E) is one of four source documents underlying the Torah, together with the Jahwist (or Yahwist), the Deuteronomist and the Priestly source. The Elohist is so named because of its ...
("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 Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette (12 January 1780 – 16 June 1849) was a German theologian and biblical scholar. Life and education Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette was born 12 January 1780 in Ulla (now part of the municipality of Nohra), Thu ...
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, 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.


Wellhausen and the new documentary hypothesis

In 1878,
Julius Wellhausen Julius Wellhausen (17 May 1844 – 7 January 1918) was a German biblical scholar and orientalist. In the course of his career, his research interest moved from Old Testament research through Islamic studies to New Testament scholarship. Wellhau ...
published ''Geschichte Israels, Bd 1'' ('History of Israel, Vol 1'). The second edition was 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 10th century BCE and the court of
Solomon Solomon (), also called Jedidiah, was the fourth monarch of the Kingdom of Israel (united monarchy), Kingdom of Israel and Judah, according to the Hebrew Bible. The successor of his father David, he is described as having been the penultimate ...
; E was from the 9th 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 BCE, 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 BCE; 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.The two-source hypothesis of Eichhorn was the "older" documentary hypothesis, and the four-source hypothesis adopted by Wellhausen was the "newer".


Critical reassessment

In the mid to late 20th century, new criticism of the documentary hypothesis formed. Three major publications of the 1970s caused scholars to reevaluate the assumptions of the documentary hypothesis: '' Abraham in History and Tradition'' by
John Van Seters John Van Seters (May 2, 1935 – April 9, 2025) was a Canadian scholar of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and the Ancient Near East. He was a University Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina, and James A. Gray Professor of Bi ...
, ''Der sogenannte Jahwist'' ("The So-Called Yahwist") by
Hans Heinrich Schmid Hans Heinrich Schmid (22 October 1937 in Winterthur, Canton of Zürich – 4 October 2014) was a Swiss Protestant Reformed theologian, university professor and university rector. Life He was the son of the Zurich pastor Gotthard Schmid (1909–196 ...
, and ''Das überlieferungsgeschichtliche Problem des Pentateuch'' ("The Tradition-Historical Problem of the Pentateuch") by
Rolf Rendtorff Rolf Rendtorff (1925–2014) was Professor of Old Testament at the University of Heidelberg from 1963 to 1990. He was one of the more significant German Old Testament scholars from the latter half of the twentieth-century and published extensive ...
. These three authors shared many of the same criticisms of the documentary hypothesis, but were not in agreement about what paradigm ought to replace it. Van Seters and Schmid both forcefully argued that the Yahwist source could not be dated to the Solomonic period (c. 950 BCE) as posited by the documentary hypothesis. They instead dated J to the period of the
Babylonian captivity The Babylonian captivity or Babylonian exile was the period in Jewish history during which a large number of Judeans from the ancient Kingdom of Judah were forcibly relocated to Babylonia by the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The deportations occurred ...
(597–539 BCE), or the late monarchic period at the earliest. Van Seters also sharply criticized the idea of a substantial Elohist source, arguing that E extends at most to two short passages in Genesis. Some scholars, following Rendtorff, have come to espouse a fragmentary hypothesis, in which the Pentateuch is seen as a compilation of short, independent narratives, which were gradually brought together into larger units in two editorial phases: the Deuteronomic and the Priestly phases. By contrast, scholars such as John Van Seters advocate a
supplementary hypothesis In biblical studies, the supplementary hypothesis proposes that the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) was derived from a series of direct additions to an existing corpus of work. It serves as a revision to the earlier documentary hy ...
, which posits that the Torah is the result of two major additions—Yahwist and Priestly—to an existing corpus of work. Some scholars use these newer hypotheses in combination with each other and with a documentary model, making it difficult to classify contemporary theories as strictly one or another. 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 Josiah () or Yoshiyahu was the 16th king of Judah (–609 BCE). According to the Hebrew Bible, he instituted major religious reforms by removing official worship of gods other than Yahweh. Until the 1990s, the biblical description of Josiah’s ...
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 general trend in recent scholarship is to recognize the final form of the Torah as a literary and ideological unity, based on earlier sources, likely completed during the
Persian period The Achaemenid Empire or Achaemenian Empire, also known as the Persian Empire or First Persian Empire (; , , ), was an Iranian peoples, Iranian empire founded by Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid dynasty in 550 BC. Based in modern-day Iran, i ...
(539–333 BCE). A minority of scholars would place its final compilation somewhat later, however, in the
Hellenistic period In classical antiquity, the Hellenistic period covers the time in Greek history after Classical Greece, between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the death of Cleopatra VII in 30 BC, which was followed by the ascendancy of the R ...
(333–164 BCE). 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

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 more circumspect in how they use the Hebrew Bible, not least because many have concluded that the Hebrew Bible is not a reliable witness to the religion of ancient Israel and Judah, representing instead the beliefs of only a segment of the ancient Israelite community centered in
Jerusalem Jerusalem is a city in the Southern Levant, on a plateau in the Judaean Mountains between the Mediterranean Sea, Mediterranean and the Dead Sea. It is one of the List of oldest continuously inhabited cities, oldest cities in the world, and ...
and devoted to the exclusive worship of
Yahweh Yahweh was an Ancient Semitic religion, ancient Semitic deity of Weather god, weather and List of war deities, war in the History of the ancient Levant, ancient Levant, the national god of the kingdoms of Kingdom of Judah, Judah and Kingdom ...
.


See also

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Authorship of the Bible The books of the Bible are the work of multiple authors and have been edited to produce the works known today. The following article outlines the conclusions of the majority of contemporary scholars, along with the traditional views, both Jewi ...
*
Biblical criticism Modern Biblical criticism (as opposed to pre-Modern criticism) is the use of critical analysis to understand and explain the Bible without appealing to the supernatural. During the eighteenth century, when it began as ''historical-biblical c ...
*
Books of the Bible A biblical canon is a set of texts (also called "books") which a particular Jewish or Christian religious community regards as part of the Bible. The English word ''canon'' comes from the Greek , meaning ' rule' or ' measuring stick'. The us ...
*
Dating the Bible The oldest surviving Hebrew Bible manuscripts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, date to . Some of these scrolls are presently stored at the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem. The oldest text of the entire Christian Bible, including the New Testament, is th ...
*
Mosaic authorship Mosaic authorship is the Judeo-Christian tradition that the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, were dictated by God to Moses. The tradition probably began with the Deuteronomic Code, legalistic code of the Book of Deut ...
*
Umberto Cassuto Umberto Cassuto, also known as Moshe David Cassuto (16 September 1883 – 19 December 1951), was an Italian historian, a rabbi, and a scholar of the Hebrew Bible and Ugaritic literature, in the University of Florence, then at the University ...
, Jewish scholar who was critical of the documentary hypothesis *
Q Source The Q source (also called The Sayings Gospel, Q Gospel, Q document(s), or Q; from , meaning "source") is a hypothesized written collection of primarily Jesus' sayings (, ). Q is part of the common material found in the Gospels of Matthew and ...
, a similar theory for the construction of the
Synoptic Gospels The gospels of Gospel of Matthew, Matthew, Gospel of Mark, Mark, and Gospel of Luke, Luke are referred to as the synoptic Gospels because they include many of the same stories, often in a similar sequence and in similar or sometimes identical ...


Notes


References


Bibliography

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Project Gutenberg edition
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External links

* * Wikiversity – The King James Version according to the documentary hypothesis {{Authority control Hypotheses Biblical criticism Torah