In His Own Words - The BAS Library
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In His Own Words

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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Footnotes

1.

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.