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In general, the authorship of all the books of the Bible -- perhaps with the exception some of Paul 's letters -- remains very much an open topic of research. Historians show interest in learning who wrote the books of the Bible and when; modern studies on this subject began in the 19th Century , and they have constituted a lively field of activity ever since. Assigning a solid date to any book of the Bible poses difficulties: see Dating The Bible . THE HYPOTHESIS ITSELF Background to the hypothesis Major areas considered by scholars supporting the documentary hypothesis include: # The variations in the Divine Names in Genesis ; # The secondary variations in diction and in style; # The parallel or duplicate accounts (doublets); # The continuity of the various sources; # The political assumptions implicit in the text; # The interests of the author(s). Doublets and triplets repeat stories with different points of view. Famous doublets include ''Genesis'''s creation accounts; the stories of the covenant between God and Abraham ; the naming of Isaac ; the two stories in which Abraham represents his wife as his sister to a king; and the two stories of the revelation to Jacob at Bet-El . A famed triplet tells three different versions of how the town of Be'ersheba got its name. Many portions of the Torah seem to imply more than one author. Some examples include:
There exist Classical Rabbinical interpretations accounting for all of these differences, but those who support the documentary hypothesis regard these explanations as Apologetic or incomplete. The modern hypothesis The hypothesis proposes that a Redactor (referred To As R) composed the Torah by combining four earlier source texts, specifically:
The hypothesis postulates that various collections of remembered traditions took written form both in biblical Israel (producing E) and in Judah (producing J) shortly after their separation. Rival priesthoods allegedly wrote these collections: the priests of Shiloh (in Israel) wrote E; while the Aaronid priests (in Judah) wrote J. Many have proposed that the author of J was female, and some have hence argued that this was not a priest(ess) but a mere member of the tribe of Judah; there are many small details in the J source that are alleged to be typical female perspectives from the era, not those of males. The priests of Shiloh (who were Levite as were the Aaronids) had been removed from power by the king of Israel, who instead set up an alternate religion, and as such, it is thought that E also reflects this by describing stories appearing to condemn the change (such as referring to a Golden Calf—the symbol of the new version of the religion). The hypothesis then goes on to state that after the fall of Israel to the Assyrians, the refugees from Israel brought E to Judah, and in the interests of assimilating those refugees into the general population, an unknown scribe combined the text with J to produce JE . Producing JE, in preference to keeping the texts separate, had the presumed goal of assimilating the refugees rather than having them form a separate subversive nation within Judah. As such, it is thought that the creator of JE thought it necessary to retain as much as possible of both J and E, in order to avoid readers and listeners complaining that a text was missing or different, and thus create a schism. The hypothesis suggests that, because of the centralising religious reform instituted by King Hezekiah , the Aaronid priests created a text (P) which rewrote JE in a light favourable to them and to the changes. In addition to performing this change, they removed a few intolerable stories (such as that of the Golden Calf ), and added a few stories. Within the text the author also added a body of laws (constituting most of Lev) supported by the Aaronids. A few generations later, scholars believe, the Shiloh priesthood wrote a law code more favourable to themselves and conspired with King Josiah to have it "found" in the Temple, so that he could base reforms on it (Hezekiah's descendants had previously undone Hezekiah's reforms). A scribe connected to the Shiloh group subsequently created a text (Dtr1) describing the span of time intervening between Moses and Josiah's rule, embedding the law code at the start in the framework of Moses' dying words. Dtr1 presented Josiah as a parallel to Moses, an ideal king whose reforms would save Judah. But Josiah died in battle with the Egyptian army, and subsequent kings undid his reforms, and shortly afterward Babylon destroyed Judah, burnt the Temple, and killed the royal family. The scribe who created Dtr1 made minor additions (Dtr2) to the text to reflect the additional history, and to iron out the flaws in their original presentation of Josiah and the permanence of Judah (by implying that the destruction came as a result of the undoing of Josiah's reforms). The subsequent text became known as D. When Persia conquered Babylon, the Persian king sent back the exiled elite of Judah, empowering Ezra to dictate the religion. JE and P contained rival histories and rival religious views, and P and D contained rival law codes. The Jews had to keep both sets in order to avoid alienating each group in the new creation of the nation, and thus to avoid a power struggle or setting up a nation within a nation. But they needed to iron out the differences so that people had certainty as to the law code and to their history. Someone joined the texts together, making only minor additions and changes, creating the Torah, and Ezra read it out. Anyone who disagreed had the Persian king to answer to. Secondary hypothesis The secondary hypothesis of the documentary hypothesis suggests that two schools of writers put together the biblical text of the Old Testament: the Priests of Shiloh and the Aaronid priesthood. The Priests of Shiloh have associations with the following texts:
The Aaronid priests have associations with the following texts:
HISTORY OF THE HYPOTHESIS Traditional Jewish and Christian beliefs The traditional Jewish view holds that God revealed his will to Moses at Mount Sinai in a verbal fashion, and that Moses transcribed this dictation exactly. Based on the Talmud (tractate ''Git.'' 60a), some believe that the Torah may have been given piece-by-piece over the 40 years that the Israelites wandered in the desert. The Pentateuch itself does not imply as much. The expression "God said to Moses" shows only the Divine origin of the Mosaic laws, but does not prove that Moses himself codified in the Pentateuch the various laws promulgated by him. It does, on the other hand, ascribe to Moses the literary authorship of at least four sections, partly historical, partly legal, partly poetical. The voice of tradition, however, both Jewish and Christian, proclaimed the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch so unanimously and constantly that down to the 17th Century it did not allow the rise of any serious doubt. {Link without Title} Rabbinical biblical criticism However, classical Judaism notes a number of exceptions. Over the millennia scribal errors have crept into the text of the Torah. The Masoretes ( 7th to 10th Centuries CE) compared all extant variations and attempted to create a definitive text. Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra and Joseph Bonfils observed that some phrases in the Torah present information that people should only have known after the time of Moses. Some classical Rabbi s drew on their observations to postulate that Joshua (or perhaps some later prophet) wrote these sections of the Torah. Other rabbis would not accept this view. The (Moznaim Pub.) Individual Rabbi s and scholars have on occasion pointed out that the Torah showed signs of non-Mosaic origins in some passages:
The Enlightenment A number of Enlightenment Christian writers expressed doubts about the traditional Christian view. For example, in the 16th Century , Carlstadt noticed that the style of the account of the death of Moses matched the style of the preceding portions of Deuteronomy, suggesting that whoever wrote about the death of Moses also wrote larger portions of the Torah. By the , Spinoza , Richard Simon , and John Hampden . Nevertheless, these people found their works condemned and even banned, and de la Peyrère and Hampden were forced to recant, whereas an attempt was made on Spinoza's life. The French scholar and physician Jean Astruc first introduced the terms '' Elohist '' and '' Jehovist '' (or Elohistic and Jehovistic) in a little book titled ''Conjectures sur les memoires originaux, dont il parait que Moses s'est servi pour composer le livre de la Genèse'' ("Conjectures on the original documents that Moses appears to have used in composing the Book of Genesis"), anonymously printed in 1753 . Astruc noted that the first chapter of Genesis uses only the word "Elohim" for God , while other sections use the word "Jehovah". The second and third chapters combine the title and name, giving rise to a new conception of the Deity as ''Jehovah Elohim'' ("Lord-God" as commonly translated in many English Bibles today). He speculated that Moses may have compiled the Genesis account from earlier documents, some perhaps dating back to Abraham, and may have combined these into a single account. So he began to explore the possibility of detecting and separating these documents and assigning them to their original sources. He did this, taking it as axiomatic that one can analyze scriptural documents in the same manner as secular ones, and assuming that the varying use of terms indicated different writers. Using "Elohim" and "Yahweh" as a criterion, Astruc used columns titled respectively "A" and "B", and also set other pieces apart. The A and B narratives he regarded as originally complete and independent narratives. This work gave birth to the practice of Biblical textual criticism that became known as Higher Criticism . J. G. Eichhorn brought Astruc's book to Germany and further differentiated the two chief documents through their linguistic peculiarities in 1787 . However, neither he nor Astruc denied Mosaic authorship, nor analyzed beyond the book of Exodus. H. Ewald recognized that the documents that later came to be known as "P" and "J" could be seen in other books. F. Tuch showed that "P" and "J" also appeared recognizably in Joshua . W. M. L. De Wette ( 1780 — 1849 ) joined this hypothesis to one asserted by 17th-century commentators by stating that the author(s) of the first four books of the Pentateuch did not write the Book of Deuteronomy . In 1805 he attributed Deuteronomy to the time of Josiah (ca. 621 BC ). Soon other writers also began considering the idea. By 1823 Eichhorn abandoned claiming Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. 19th-Century Theories About 1822 F. Bleek commented about the original relationship of Joshua to the Pentateuch in its continuation of the narrative in Deuteronomy, of which it formed the conclusion. The letters "J" for ''Jahwist'' and "E" ''Elohist'' then became associated with the documents. H. Hupfeld followed K. D. Ilgen in identifying two separate documents that used "Elohim". In 1853 Hupfeld set forth Genesis chapters 1 to 19 and 20 to 50 as providing the two separate Elohistic source documents. He also emphasized the importance of the redactor of these documents. He followed the arrangement of the documents as: First Elohist, Second Elohist, Jehovist, Deuteronomist: J, E, and D. K. H. Graf showed that many individual features distinguished Leviticus chapters 17 to 26 from the priestly document. He suggested a fifth document, which A. Klostermann named the " Holiness Code " (because this body of laws was marked by the declaration of God's holiness, and Israel's duty to be holy as his people, and extremely frequent use of the word ''holy''). Julius Wellhausen In 1886 the German historian Julius Wellhausen published ''Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels'' ("Prolegomena to the History of Israel"). In this book he stated: "according to the historical and prophetical books of the Old Testament the priestly legislation of the middle books of the Pentateuch was unknown in pre-exilic time, and that this legislation must therefore be a late development."(2) The letter "P", for ''priestly'', became associated with this view. Wellhausen argued that the Bible provides historians with an important source, but that they cannot take it literally. He argued that a number of people wrote the "hexateuch" (including the Torah or Pentateuch , and the book of Joshua ) over a long period. Specifically, he narrowed the field to four distinct narratives, which he identified by the aforementioned Jahwist, '''E'''lohist, '''D'''euteronomist and '''P'''riestly accounts. He also proposed a '''R'''edactor, who edited the four accounts into one text. (Some argue the redactor was ''Ezra'' the scribe.) Using earlier propositions, he argued that each of these sources has its own vocabulary, its own approach and concerns, and that the passages originally belonging to each account can be distinguished by differences in style (especially, the name used for God, the grammar and word usage, the political assumptions implicit in the text, and the interests of the author).
Wellhausen argued that from the style and point of view of each source one could draw inferences about the times of writing of that source (in other words, the historical value of the Bible lies not in it revealing things about the events it describes, but rather in revealing things about the people who wrote it). He argued that the progression evident in these four sources, from a relatively informal and decentralized relationship between people and God in the J account, to the relatively formal and centralized practices of the P account, one could see the development of institutionalized Israelite religion. Subsequent scholars have questioned (and to a large degree rejected) a number of Wellhausen's specific interpretations, including his reconstruction of the order of the accounts as J-E-D-P. Biblical scholars today suggest that he organized the narrative to culminate with P because he believed that the New Testament followed logically in this progression. In the 1950s the Israeli historian Yehezkel Kaufmann published ''The Religion of Israel, from Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile'', in which he argued for the order of the sources as J, E, P, and D. Wellhausen resigned his post as professor of biblical studies, stating that his hypotheses had started to make his students (trainees for the Evangelical priesthood) unsuitable as ministers. Richard Elliot Friedman In recent years researchers have made attempts to separate the J, E, D, and P portions. Richard Elliott Friedman 's ''Who Wrote The Bible?'' offers a very reader-friendly and yet comprehensive argument explaining Friedman's opinions as to the possible identity of each of those authors and, more important, why they wrote what they wrote. Harold Bloom then wrote ''The Book of J'', in which his co-author, Hebrew translator David Rosenberg , claims to have reconstructed the book that J wrote (though, certainly, some of J's original contribution could have become lost in the consolidation, if one accepts the four-author hypothesis). Bloom (picking up on Friedman's earlier speculation) also indicates a belief indentifying J as a woman, but other scholars do not accept this. More recently, Friedman published ''The Hidden Book in the Bible'', in which he makes a comprehensive argument for his hypothesis that J wrote not only the portions of the Torah commonly attributed to J, but also sections of Judges, Joshua and First and Second Samuel (which Bloom and earlier Biblical scholars attributed to another source, the Court History Of David ), which contained the bulk of the accounts of the life of King David , with a close thematic interrelationship between the earlier and later portions of what Friedman presents as a single united work by one author of Shakespeare an literary ability. Friedman has also published ''The Bible with Sources Revealed'', his own translation of the Torah with the material from each source (as he sees them) in a different color of ink or a different typeface. The modern era Other scholars immediately seized upon the documentary understanding of the origin of the five books of Moses, and within a few years it became the predominant hypothesis. While subsequent scholarship has dismissed many of Wellhausen's specific claims, most Historian s still accept the general idea that the five books of Moses had a composite origin. Note that the term "documentary hypothesis" does not refer to one specific hypothesis. Rather, this name applies to any understanding of the origin of the Torah that recognizes that there are basically four sources that were somehow redacted together into a final version. One could claim that one redactor wove together four specific texts, or one could hold that the entire nation of Israel slowly created a consensus work based on various strands of the Israelite tradition, or anything in between. Gerald A. Larue writes, "Back of each of the four sources lie traditions that may have been both oral and written. Some may have been preserved in the songs, ballads, and folktales of different tribal groups, some in written form in sanctuaries. The so-called 'documents' should not be considered as mutually exclusive writings, completely independent of one another, but rather as a continual stream of literature representing a pattern of progressive interpretation of traditions and history" (''Old Testament Life and Literature'' 1968). OPPONENTS OF THE HYPOTHESIS Fundamentalist Jews and Christians reject the documentary hypothesis entirely and accept the traditional view that Moses essentially produced the whole Torah. Jewish sources predating the DH offer alternative explanations for the stylistic differences and alternative Divine names on which the hypothesis is built. For instance, the Tetragrammaton is regarded as an expression of mercifulness (''middath ha-rachamim'') while Elohim refers to strict judgement (''middath ha-din''); this concept (first found in Mechilta section Beshalach) is cited copiously in the traditional Jewish literature. Most Orthodox Jews and many conservative Christians accept the divine origin of the Pentateuch in its entirety as a given. They usually reject the documentary hypothesis as incompatible with their religious view of the Bible. Some religious conservatives believe that Moses was the author of much of the text and was the editor and compiler of the rest of the text. Others who reject the hypothesis allow for considerable post-Mosaic editing of the Pentateuch, though not along J.E.D.P. lines. Many conservative scholars argue for the literary unity of the books {Link without Title} . Over the last century, an entire literature has developed within conservative scholarship and religious communities dedicated to the refutation of Higher Biblical Criticism in general and of the documentary hypothesis in particular. R. N. Whybray's ''The Making of the Pentateuch'' offers a critique of the hypothesis from a critical perspective. Biblical archaeologist W.F. Albright stated that even the most ardent proponents of the documentary hypothesis must admit that, like the Book Of Jasher , and the Book Of The Wars Of The Lord , no tangible, external evidence for the existence of the hypothesized J, E, D, P sources exists. Dr. Yohanan Aharoni, in his work ''Canaanite Israel during the Period of Israeli Occupation'' states that archaeological discoveries show that later authors or editors could not have put together or invented these stories hundreds of years after they happened. {Link without Title} Some studies claim to show a literary consistency throughout the , if the texts are admitted to speak with a uniform voice, much of the initial plausibility of the hypothesis evaporates. Gleason Archer is perhaps the most well known individual to propose harmonisations of the Torah which allegedly resolve the discrepancies. Debates between non-fundamentalist academics supporting the Documentary Hypothesis The great majority of non-fundamentalist Bible scholars accept the documentary hypothesis as the only possible explanation for how the five books of Moses came to take the form that they exist in today. However, as is common in all fields of archaeology, history and science, debate continues about the specifics. While accepting the documentary hypothesis as correct in outline, some scholars believe that the Wellhausen School overemphasized the use of written sources to the neglect of the oral traditions that underlay the sources. The oral traditionalists, starting with Hermann Gunkel (the "father of Form Criticism "), viewed the narratives of the Torah as originally being handed down orally in the form of sagas, much like the Iliad or Odyssey, passed down by word of mouth by an illiterate people. Eventually these oral traditions were written down. Form and tradition history do not necessarily contradict the documentary hypothesis; one could use these methods to try to reconstruct the oral history behind Wellhausen's written sources. On the other hand, one can take oral tradition as an alternative to written sources. This point of view has been represented by Scandinavian scholar Ivan Engnell who believes the whole of the Torah was transmitted orally into the post-exilic period, at which point it was written down in a single document by an author whose attributes match those ascribed to the Redactor P of the documentary hypothesis. The Heidelberg professor Rolf Rendtorff expresses the view that larger chunks of narrative within the texts which the documentary hypothesis calls J and E evolved independently of other parts of each of these texts, and did not form part of a large text like J or E. This view proposes that the narrative was only combined editorially at a later stage by a Deuteronomic redactor. In this synthesis, he allows for a post-exilic P source, but far reduced from the notions of Wellhausen. More critical analysis rejects the partitioning scheme of Wellhausen. For example Hans Heinrich Schmid, in his 1976 work, ''Der sogenannte Jahwist'' So-called Yahwist" , almost completely eliminates the J document. According to Blenkinsopp, if taken to the logical extreme, this approach eliminates all narrative sources other than the Deuteronomic author. Other modifications to the documentary hypothesis appeared in the mid-1970s in the work of John Van Seters, and continued into the 1980s and 1990s. Dating the J material down to the period of the exile (6th century BCE), but maintaining its focus as identity creation, Van Seters' work continues to use the terminology established in the 18th and 19th centuries, but holds a different view regarding the compositional process. While Schmid and other European scholars continue to think in terms of documents and redactors, Van Seters proposes a process of supplementation in which subsequent groups modify earlier compositions to include their points of view and to change the focus of the narratives. The modifications to the documentary hypothesis suggested by Van Seters and others have provided challenges for biblical scholars, particularly in the United States of America. Many see the supplementary model as incompatible with the established views of the documentary models of composition. They correctly see a challenge to the early dating for composition and the problematic control of documentary materials, for which the literary evidence appears harder and harder to maintain. REFERENCES John Rogerson provides an authoritative and readable overview in ''Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany'' (1985).
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