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The Documentary Hypothesis is a theory about how the Pentateuch came to be in its present form. The classical version of the DH holds that what is now known as the Pentateuch came about as the result of editorial activities which combined texts from four written sources: J (Yahwist), E (Elohist), P (Priestly), and D (Deuteronomist). For a time it was a consensus belief of biblical scholars, but in the past few decades the picture has become more complicated.
In its classic form, the DH holds that first, there was the J source, a document by an author we might call J. The E source, by E, of course, is written some time later. Some editor comes along and joins the two into a composite which, cleverly, we can call JE. This largely contains material that is now found in Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers. D (for Deuteronomy) has another author. Last of all a fourth author, P, comes along and produces a document that contains the bulk of what we now know as Leviticus, along with other materials later incorporated into what is now Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers. Put them all together, as one or more editors did, and you have the Pentateuch.
The arguments in favor of the Documentary Hypothesis have been discussed at great length elsewhere. A good popular introduction is Richard Elliot Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible? A good summary, a bit shorter, can be found in Friedman's article "Torah" in the Anchor Bible Dictionary.
Let's briefly summarize that Torah article's outline of the evidence for DH. "The primary evidence for multiple authorship and for identification of the respective works of the Torah is the convergence of several large categories of data."
First, Friedman mentions the doubets: over two-dozen stories in Pentateuch that are told more in more than one version. These versions, once divided up fall neatly into categories (J, E, P, D), which are remarkably consistent in terms of the other "categories of data."
Second, these categories are consistently different in terminology. The most famous difference is the different names used for God. The Yahweh calls the deity "Yahweh", while E and P use only elohim ("God") in stories prior to Moses. Elliot Friedman lists twenty-four types of terminology differences that are consistent throughout the Pentateuch, such as a particular Hebrew word for death being used only in P, a word for "congregation" being used only in P, a particular term for sadness being used only in J, and so on.
Third, there are contradictions between the sources. P will tell a story one way; E another, and so on.
Fourth, there are "consistent characteristics of each group of texts." P lacks angels, talking animals, dreams, strong anthropomorphisms of God, and various terms. The sources differ on how Miriam and Aaron are related to Moses, whether the tabernacle is a central concern, and so on. J and E make extensive use of puns; P and D do not.
Fifth, "narrative flow." Once composite stories are divided into their sources, the sources often each individually contain a smoothly flowing story, which no longer flows smoothly in the Pentateuch.
Sixth, "historical referents." "Each of the four component texts of the Torah contains a number of elements that reflect the place and time in history in which it was composed." Friedman goes quite a bit into detail on this.
Seventh, "linguistic classification." Though Friedman doesn't go into the details, he points to studies that find the sources to have been composed at different stages in the evolution of biblical Hebrew.
Eighth, "identifiable relationships among sources." Friedman argues that P was composed by someone who had knowledge of a combined J/E account, though departing from it in various intentional and systematic ways. D, the last source, is written in a manner that suggests D had knowledge of J/E and P, though siding with J/E against P.
Ninth, "references in other biblical books." Jeremiah and Ezekiel interact repeatedly with P.
Tenth, "marks of editorial work." The editors who combined J, E, P, and D show various traces of their work. When they interrupt material from one source with material from another, they will repeat themselves when returning to the first source. They insert phrases here and there to clean up inconsistencies created by putting the various sources together. They add "framing devices" to chronologically combine the JEPD materials.
It is not any one of these ten, but the way that the ten fit neatly together, that have convinced Friedman and proponents of the DH more generally that the theory is correct.
It was traditionally believed, prior to modern biblical scholarship, that the Pentateuch was written by Moses. Despite recent controversy over some tenants of the classical DH, the evidences for multiple authorship, and for authorship much later than Moses, are still persuasive enough that outside of the usual suspects[1] there has been no return to the idea of Mosaic authorship.
I will admit that I am far from being able to give an adequate account of how the breakdown in the consensus over the DH has occurred. I have read enough in favor of the DH that I can see how it could seem to be obviously correct. I have not read enough against the DH to be able to give a fair evaluation of the case against the DH, nor to give a very fair evaluation of how much of the DH scheme is still in good shape and how much has fallen apart.
I suppose I can tell you this much. I've read, here and there, that there has been a strong challenge to the idea that J, E, D, and P, are each products of a single author. Now it's fashionable to talk about them as products of particular "schools" of authors, whatever exactly that may mean. This kind of critique of DH is in a way an intensification of it: it's multiple authors all the way down, you might say.
There's skepticism about how well J and E can be divided from each other, especially after the Exodus, when E starts using the term "Yahweh." There are divisions about when, exactly, each of the particular sources were written. There's disagreements about the editing process. I think, if I'm seeing things right, that many of the editorial seams are still clear, that many of the doublets are still to be divided in the traditional way, but that the details of the process are greatly in doubt.
This makes sense. If there was a long history of mixing documents that are in many ways similar, and if editors specifically added things to harmonize and smooth out the rough spots causes by combining the texts, we would not expect to be able to reconstruct the original documents any more than we could unscramble an egg. When you look at a scrambled egg, though, you can still tell it's scrambled.
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