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The Documentary Hypothesis - Development

The Bible is not - and was never intended to be - a historical document. A work of theology, law, ethics and literature, it does contain historical information; but to evaluate this information it is essential to consider when, how and why the Bible was compiled. Until comparatively recently, the Bible was accepted as the word of God by most Jews and Christians. It is fair to say that, outside fundamentalist circles, modern consensus suggests that the assembling and editing of the documents that came to constitute the Bible began in the seventh century BC. The earliest actual material, part of the Dead Sea Scrolls, dates to the second century bce at the earliest.

Daniel Gordis notes that "... though the biblical text may reflect a variety of viewpoints from a multiplicity of authors, it has still undergone a rigorous editing process. The result is a coherent whole imbued with a distinct ideological intent. Indeed, a panoramic examination of the biblical corpus reveals a magnificently elaborate structure, one that a fashionably microscopic reading could easily miss.... somewhere in the course of redaction, the biblical text was endowed with a structure meant to transform the call for national heterogeneity from the isolated lesson of a particular story to the overarching message of the Bible at large."

The history of the evolving relationship between God and the Jewish people set forth in the Hebrew Bible -- the five books of the Torah, neviim (prophets), and ketuvim (writings) -- known to Christians as the Old Testament, begins with myths. The stories of creation, the temptation and sin of the first humans, their expulsion from an idyllic sanctuary, the flood, and other folkloric events have analogies with other early societies. Jewish history is often told not as a narrative of real people with human problems and interests but as an idealized national myth. The saga of the Israelites, as told in the Bible, was designed as a morality tale to prove the importance of faith in the One God. The stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses and Joshua demonstrate that the Israelites were rewarded when they obeyed God, but were punished when they strayed.

The first known references to the Israelites outside the Bible was an Egyptian inscription commemorating the victory in 1220 BC of the pharaoh Marniptah over the wandering tribe. The earliest extant records universally attribute the book to Moses. Deuteronomy 1:8; 2 Kings 13:23 and 1 Chronicles 1:1 allude to Genesis as part of the Law of Moses. The process of investigation was slow, and men continued to accept the stories of William Tell, Romulus and Remus, and the like on the authority of the past.

Previous to the Christian era there are few traces of a second opinion concerning the authorship of the Pentateuch: it was universally ascribed to Moses. In sixteen different passages, including parallels, Moses is referred to by the Master. In two of them (John iii. 14; vi. 32) he is connected with important events in the history of the exodus. In two others he is referred to as lawgiver (Matt, xxiii. 2; John viL 19), and in the second in a manner too explicit to escape attention: "Did not Moses give you the law?" Different New Testament writers in numerous instances — not less than a score and a half altogether — follow the example thus set them by the Master and that there is not a single case of deviation from the rule of ascribing the Pentateuch to Moses, or, in other words, of connecting him with larger or smaller portions of it in a way to imply his literary responsibility for its contents as a whole.

The rise of anything that might properly be called criticism in the department of the Pentateuch seems to have been with Aben Ezra. His active life falls within the first half of the twelfth century. He was an ardent scholar, but a neo-Platonist in philosophy. His attitude toward the Scriptures is much in dispute. When Aben Ezra elsewhere (in his comments on Deut. i. 2) indicates a number of passages in the Pentateuch as, in his view, of doubtful origin or doubtful meaning, it is scarcely fair to go behind the record and charge him with holding some other opinion concerning them.

Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan was published in 1651. In spirit and methods Thomas Hobbes was the forerunner of the modern scientific sceptic. He vigorously applied to history and revelation the principles that govern in the study of physics. Yet, in his criticisms of the Pentateuch, Hobbes was no inconoclast. Compared with Wellhausen's Geschichte, there is little in his book of portentous title that would now attract unusual attention, although at that time it cost him his position at court. He denied the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch as a whole, mainly on the ground of scattered expressions supposed to be inconsistent with such a theory. What is directly ascribed to Moses in the Pentateuch itself, as, for example, the fourteen chapters of legislation in the Book of Deuteronomy, even so much of a theological outlaw as Hobbes had not the hardihood to pronounce post-Mosaic.

A contemporaneous ally of the English critic was the Frenchman, Isaac Peyrere (1594-1676). His work on the Praeadamites 2 provided him the opportunity for discoursing on the composition of the Pentateuch. He denied, for much the same reasons as Hobbes, that in its present form it is a work of Moses; but, like Hobbes, he conceded the participation of Moses in the composition. The leader of the exodus had kept a journal of principal events, including the giving of the law, and had prefaced the same with a history of the world from the beginning, not excepting the Praeadamites. If these precious autographs had not been lost — Peyrere does not tell how they were so soon lost, notwithstanding the evident care that was taken of them — there whould not be the anachronisms, confused arrangement, and obscurities of the present narrative.

The critical methods questioning the historical reliability of the Bible can be traced to the 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza who dismantled the Old Testament. The rationalists of the 18th century and the New Testament scholars in the following centuries perfected the art. As early as the year 1671, Spinoza, with trenchant pen, discussed the chronological difficulties of the Pentateuch and the historical books. Both in his drastic method of treating the subject, and also in his conclusions, he went much further than any of his predecessors. Moses, according to him, had composed a book of commentaries on the Law, but that book was no longer extant. Deuteronomy was the law book promulgated by Ezra, as narrated in Nehemiah viii. 9, and it was Ezra who had written the "history of the Hebrew nation, from the creation of the world to the destruction of Jerusalem."

The anonymously published work of Le Clerc in 1685 airs a theory that in temerity would do credit to later days. A variety of internal signs, he avers, disprove the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch (Gen. xii. 6; xiv. 14; xxxv. 21 ; xxxvi. 31; xxxvii. 14; xL 15). It must have come into its present form at a much later period. Who so likely to have put his shaping hand upon it as that priest who in the Book of Kings (2 Kings xvii. 27 f.) is said to have been sent from Babylon to teach the Samaritan colonists the Jewish faith. still another Dutch scholar, the Mennonite Anton van Dale, hazarded, in connection with a 1696 work on idolatry, the conjecture that the Pentateuch is a compilation at the hand of the exilian Ezra, the pandects of Moses and writings of the earlier historians and prophets furnishing him the material.

The French Roman Catholic physician, Jean Astruc, furnished a clue to the analysis of the documents in an anonymous work, published at Brussels in 1753. He observed that in the Book of Genesis the name Elohim was used for God in one set of narratives and Yahaweh in another, and that the difference in the use of the name of God corresponded with a difference in style. Accordingly, on the basis primarily of the differences of the Divine Name, he divided Genesis into two main narratives, A and B. Besides these two main narratives he found a small number of passages, apparently not belonging to either narrative.

A new discovery by Astruc this was not. The same singularity had been observed by Simon, Vitringa, and others. But it was Astruc who first called particular attention to the fact, showed its extent, and sought to draw important conclusions from it. Such an employment of the divine names indicated, in his view, the use of documents in the preparation of the work, two leading ones and others of minor importance. Of these original records Moses, in his narrative of events which had occurred ages before his day, had made faithful and proper use. In fact, he had simply copied them literally and placed them, each by itself, in its related order. And it was due wholly to the careless hands of Moses' successors that in recasting them for the purpose of a connected narrative there had arisen the repetitions and other irregularities of Genesis as it now appears.

Of this original theory of Astruc, Eichhorn had availed himself; but by no means as a servile imitator. To the former's argument derived from the peculiar recurrence of the divine names, he added another, of which quite too confident and unrestricted an application has since been made, based on differences of style. The entire contents of the first fifty-two chapters of the Pentateuch he carefully divided up between these two documents, holding, however, that, in some rare cases, other authorities had been made use of. From beginning to end, as it has been remarked, Eichhorn, like Astruc, was loyal to the prevailing, and almost universal, sentiment of his time, that, bating certain trifling additions by later editors, Moses was the responsible author of the Pentateuch.

It noteworthy that so reverent a scholar as Astruc and so sharp a critic as Eichhorn did not see the necessity of discriminating between the fact that original documents were most likely used in the composition of Genesis1 and the capacity of modern scholars clearly to distinguish and separate them from one another, even to closely connected phrases and single words. It is singular that numerous marked exceptions to the alleged methodical recurrence of the one or other divine name did not awaken a suspicion that something besides a diversity of documents was at the basis of such an interchange of titles; as, for example, a change of topic or of point of view.

Beginning in the 19th Century, scholars studying the texts of the Pentateuch [Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus and Deuteronomy] noticed stark differences in phraseology between texts. In some places these books speak of "Yaweh" while in others the term "Lord" is sued. In some instances there are two different versions of the same story. There are two different creation accounts - in one creation took seven days while the other speaks of "the day" on which creation took place. In one flood story, Noah took two pairs of all animals while in the other, Noah took seven pairs of all clean animals but two pair of others. In some places the Hebrew itself is so archaic as to suggest authorship by an earlier writer. The Song of the Sea at Exodus 15 is an example of perhaps the earliest writing in the entire Bible.

The 1878 History of Israel by Julius Wellhausen produced a great impression throughout Europe, and its main thesis, that "the Mosaic history is not the starting-point for the history of ancient Israel, but for the history of Judaism," was felt to be so powerfully maintained that many of the leading Hebrew teachers of Germany who had till then stood aloof from the so-called "Grafian hypothesis" — the idea that the Levitical Law and connected parts of the Pentateuch were not written until after the fall of the kingdom of Judah, and that the Pentateuch in its present compass was not publicly accepted as authoritative till the reformation of Ezra — declared themselves convinced by Wellhausen's arguments. Before 1878 the Grafian hypothesis was neglected or treated as a paradox, although some individual scholars of great name were known to have reached by independent inquiry similar views to those for which Graf was the recognised sponsor, and although in Holland the writings of Professor Kuenen had shown in an admirable and conclusive manner that the objections usually taken to Graf's arguments did not touch the substance of the thesis for which he contended. Since 1878, partly through the growing influence of Kuenen, but mainly through the impression produced by Wellhausen's book, all this changed. Almost every younger scholar of mark was on the side of Vatke and Reuss, Lagarde and Graf, Kuenen and Wellhausen, and the renewed interest in Old Testament study which was making itself felt throughout all the schools of Europe must be traced almost entirely to the stimulus derived from a new view of the history of the Law which sets all Old Testament problems in a new light.

As set forth chiefly in the work of Wellhausen on "the History of Israel," and Kuenen on "the Hexateuch", it is obvious to remark that it revolutionizes the received views of Holy Scripture as "given by Inspiration of God," and degrades the books of the Old Testament not only to the level of fallible human writings, but to that of wilfully false and misleading history. This idea, was first proposed in late eighteenth century France and developed by Julius Wellhausen in the nineteenth century. Julius Wellhausen's Documentary Hypothesis states that the Torah and Early Prophets (Genesis through Kings) is a patchwork of collected traditions. Wellhausen synthesized the idea that Torah was a conflation of four separate documents from various stages of the Israelites' invention of their religion.