How, when and by whom were the Pentateuch and the historical books of the Bible written? Many theories have been offered to answer this question—one of the best known being that of the Documentary Hypothesisa first proposed by the German scholar Julius Wellhausen in 1878. Not surprisingly, Wellhausen’s theory has been worked and reworked since its debut more than 130 years ago. Is this hypothesis still relevant? Dr. David Bokovoy of the University of Utah certainly thinks so.1
I’m surprised how often I read online someone making the assertion that the Documentary Hypothesis is dead …
The truth is that the Documentary Hypothesis is far from dead. While there have been some important criticisms of the traditional Documentary Hypothesis presented in recent years, even European critics have not entirely abandoned the idea that the Pentateuch is a compilation of “documents.” P, for example, is now almost universally recognized as an independent source, as is D. Hence, what we call these sources (for example, P [Priestly Code], J [Yahwist], E [Elohist], and D [Deuteronomist]) really doesn’t matter. There will always be some differences in the way scholars divide them up (documents versus fragments, etc.).
To share my own feelings, rather than supplementary fragments, I’m convinced that J and E were also independent narratives. My view is based upon the fact that when these narratives are extracted from P, there is a readability factor that consistently ties the sources thematically and linguistically together as a unified whole. And, as Biblical scholar William Propp has explained, the repetition of duplicative stories throughout the Pentateuch points towards separate, stand alone documents rather than supplemental insertions:
“ … Why should Noah be twice commanded to enter the ark (Genesis 6:18, 7:1), and why must he do so twice (Genesis 7:7, 13)? … Why should Jacob twice receive the name Israel (Genesis 32:29 [28, English], 35:10)? … ”2
The Documentary Hypothesis is not dead. And it’s not going anywhere.
How, when and by whom were the Pentateuch and the historical books of the Bible written? Many theories have been offered to answer this question—one of the best known being that of the Documentary Hypothesisa first proposed by the German scholar Julius Wellhausen in 1878. Not surprisingly, Wellhausen’s theory has been worked and reworked since its debut more than 130 years ago. Is this hypothesis still relevant? Dr. David Bokovoy of the University of Utah certainly thinks so.1 I’m surprised how often I read online someone making the assertion that the Documentary Hypothesis is dead … The truth is that […]
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See Richard Elliott Friedman, “Taking the Biblical Text Apart,” Bible Review 21:05. He explains that the Documentary Hypothesis posits that “the Bible’s first books were formed through a long process. Ancient writers produced documents of poetry, prose and law over a period of many hundreds of years. And then editors used these documents as sources. From them, they fashioned the Bible we have read for some two thousand years.”
Endnotes
1.
David Bokovoy, “The Death of the Documentary Hypothesis,” Patheos (blog), January 26, 2014 (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/davidbokovoy/2014/01/the-death-of-the-documentary-hypothesis/).
2.
William H. Propp, “The Priestly Source Recovered Intact?” Vetus Testamentum 46 (1996), p. 460.
