Documentary hypothesis

The documentary hypothesis is a theory proposed by many historians and academics in the field of linguistics and source criticism that the Five Books of Moses (the Torah) are in fact a combination of documents from different sources rather than authored by one individual. Although the hypothesis is widely accepted, it has a substantial number of critics—especially conservative Bible scholars such as Kenneth Kitchen and Gleason Archer, but also among critical scholars such as R. N. Whybray.

Opponents of the hypothesis

Fundamentalist Jews and Christians reject the documentary theory entirely and accept the traditional view that the whole Torah is essentially the work of Moses. 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 the documentary hypothesis in particular.

Related Topics:
Fundamentalist - Moses - Higher biblical criticism

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For most Orthodox Jews and many conservative Christians, the divine origins of the five books of Moses in its entirety is accepted as a given. To them the documentary hypothesis is usually rejected 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 hypotheisis allow for considerable post-Mosaic editing of the Pentateuch, though not along J.E.D.P. lines. Many conserative scholars argue for the literary unity of the bookshttp://www.hkbts.edu.hk/Common/Reader/News/ShowNews.jsp?Nid=193&Pid=16&Version=0&Cid=43&Charset=iso-8859-1&p=1.

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In recent years a greater number of critical scholars have also questioned the theory. R. N. Whybray The Making of the Pentateuch offers a thorough-going critique of the hypothesis from a critical (liberal) perspective. Biblical archaeologist W.F. Albright stated that even the most ardent proponents of the documentary hypothesis must admit that there is no tangible, external evidence for the existence the hypothesized J, E, D, P sources that the documentary hypothesis supposes to have once existed. 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.http://www.simpletoremember.com/vitals/Biblical_Criticism.htm

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Others critical of the original documentary hypothesis are Form and Tradition History critics who think that the Wellhausen School over emphasized the use of written sources to the neglect of the oral traditions that were behind the sources. The oral traditionalists, the first of whom was 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 is not necessarily incompatible with the documentary hypothesis; one could using these methods simply try to reconstruct the oral history behind Wellhausen's written sources. On the other hand, oral tradition could be taken 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 theory.

Related Topics:
Hermann Gunkel - Form criticism - Ivan Engnell

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Others want to modify the Wellhausen's version of the documentary hypothesis without wholesale rejection of the theory. The view of Heidelberg professor Rolf Rendtorff is that larger chunks of narrative within the texts the documentary theory calls J and E evolved independently of other parts of each of these texts, and were not 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.

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A more critical analysis that rejects the partitioning scheme of Wellhausen includes that of Hans Heinrich Schmid, whose 1976 work, Der sogenannte Jahwist or translated, The So-called Yahwist, almost completely eliminates the J document and, according to Blenkinsopp, if taken to its logical extreme, eliminates all narrative sources other than the Deuteronomic author.

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Furthermore, some studies have showed literary consistency throughout the Pentateuch, such as a 1980 computer study at Hebrew University in Israel which concluded that the Pentateuch was most likely written by a single author.http://www.simpletoremember.com/vitals/Biblical_Criticism.htm

Related Topics:
Pentateuch - Hebrew University - Israel

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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 B.C.E.), 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.

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The modifications to the Documentary hypothesis suggested by Van Seters and others has not been without challenge among biblical scholars, particularly in the U.S. Many see the supplementary model as incompatible with the established views of the documentary models of composition. In this they are correct insofar as they see the 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.

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