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The Documentary Hypothesis is a specific model proposed to account for the what its proponents consider evidence of multiple authorship in the Torah.
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The Orthodox Jewish view holds that God revealed his will to Moses at Mount Sinai in a verbal fashion.
According to Jewish tradition, this dictation is said to have been exactly transcribed by Moses. The Torah was then exactly copied by scribes, from one generation to the next. Based on the Talmud (Tractate Gittin 60a) some believe that the Torah may have been given piece-by-piece, over the 40 years that the Israelites wandered in the desert. In either case, the Torah is considered a direct quote from God. However, there are a number of exceptions to this belief within classical Judaism.
The modern, critical view of the origin of the Torah was anticipated by earlier scholars. Within Jewish tradition, individual rabbis and scholars have on occasion pointed out that the Torah showed signs of not being written entirely by Moses.
The traditional view among Christians was that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, apart from a number of passages, such as the death of Moses, written by his successor Joshua. However, a number of Enlightenment Christian writers expressed doubts about this traditional view. For example, in the 16th century, Carlstadt noticed that the style of the account of the death of Moses was the same as that of the preceding portions of Deuteronomy, suggesting that whoever wrote about the death of Moses also wrote larger portions of the Torah.
By the 17th century, some commentators argued outright that Moses did not write most of the Pentateuch. For instance, in 1651, Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, ch. 33, argued that the Pentateuch was written after Moses's day on account of Deut. 34:6 ("no man knoweth of his sepulchre to this day"), Gen. 12:6 ("and the Canaanite was then in the land"), and Num. 21:12 (referring to a previous book of Moses's deeds). Others include Isaac de la Peyrère, Spinoza, Richard Simon, and John Hampden. Nevertheless, these people found their works condemned and even banned, and de la Peyrère and Hampden were forced to recant.
Doublets and triplets are stories that are repeated with different points of view. Famous doublets include Genesis's creation accounts; the stories of the covenant between God and Abraham; the naming of Isaac; the two stories in which Abraham claims to a King that his wife is really his sister; the two stories of the revelation to Jacob at Bet-El. A famed triplet is the three different versions of how the town of Be'ersheba got its name.
There are many portions of the Torah which seem to imply more than one author. Some examples include:
In 1886 the German historian Julius Wellhausen published Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (Prolegomena to the History of Israel). Wellhausen argued that the Bible is an important source for historians, but cannot be taken literally. He argued that the "hexateuch," (including the Torah or Pentateuch, and the book of Joshua) was written by a number of people over a long period. Specifically, he identified four distinct narratives, which he identified as Jahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist and Priestly accounts. He also identified a Redactor, who edited the four accounts into one text. (Some argue the redactor was Ezra the scribe). He argued that each of these sources has its own vocabulary, its own approach and concerns, and that the passages originally belonging to each account can be distinguished by differences in style (especially the name used for God, the grammar and word usage, the political assumptions implicit in the text, and the interests of the author).
Wellhausen argued that from the style and point of view of each source, one could draw inferences about the times in which the source was written (in other words, the historical value of the Bible is not that it reveals things about the events it describes, but rather that it reveals things about the people who wrote it). Moreover, Wellhausen argued that the progression evident in these four sources, from a relatively informal and decentralized relationship between people and God in the J account, to the relatively formal and centralized practices of the P account, one could see the development of institutionalized Israelite religion.
The documentary understanding of the origin of the five books of Moses was immediately seized upon by other scholars, and within a few years became the predominant theory. While many of Wellhausen's specific claims have since been dismissed, we must note that the documentary hypothesis is not one specific theory. Rather, this name is given to any understanding of the origin of the Torah that recognizes that there are basically four sources that were somehow redacted together into a final version. One could claim that one redactor wove together four specific texts, or one could hold that entire nation of Israel slowly created a consensus work based on various strands of the Israelite tradition, or anything in between. Gerald A. Larue writes "Back of each of the four sources lie traditions that may have been both oral and written. Some may have been preserved in the songs, ballads, and folktales of different tribal groups, some in written form in sanctuaries. The so-called 'documents' should not be considered as mutually exclusive writings, completely independent of one another, but rather as a continual stream of literature representing a pattern of progressive interpretation of traditions and history." ("Old Testament Life and Literature" 1968)
Some Jews and Christians reject the documentary theory entirely, and accept the traditional view that the whole Torah is the work of Moses. For most Orthodox Jews and traditional Christians, the divine origins of the five books of Moses in its entirety is accepted as a given. Other Christians, such as the translators of the New International Version of the Bible, take what they see as a middle ground, believing that Moses was the author of much of the text, and editor and compiler of the majority of the rest.
By contrast, today mostly all historians and critical Bible scholars accept the principle of multiple authorship in the Torah, and many also accept Wellhausen's identification of four basic accounts, although some do not believe that E was ever a distinct document. On the other hand, some scholars disagree with the Documentary hypothesis from another angle, arguing that the Torah is a composite of many different oral and written traditions composed in the post-Exilic period.
Furthermore, many have questioned his interpretation of Israelite religion, including his reconstruction of the order of the accounts as J-E-D-P. Many scholars have questioned Wellhausen's assumption that history follows a linear progression. They suggest that he organized the narrative to culminate with P because he believed that the New Testament followed logically in this progression. In the 1950s the Israeli historian, Yehezkel Kaufmann, published The Religion of Israel, from Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile, in which he argued that the order of the sources would be J, E, P, and D.
In recent years attempts have been made to separate the J, E, D, and P portions. Harold Bloom wrote "The Book of J", in which he claims to have reconstructed the book that J wrote (though, certainly, much of J's original contribution must have been lost in the consolidation, if one believes the four-author theory). Bloom also indicates that he believes that J was a woman, but this is not accepted by other scholars.
Regardless of the different understandings of the composition of the Torah by modern, critical scholars, a return to the pre-critical understanding that the Torah was composed by or dictated to Moses is unlikely. Some scholars assert that the Documentary Hypothesis does make testable predictions that have been verified. For an illustration of this, please see the following:
"An Empirical Basis for the Documentary Hypothesis" Jeffrey H. Tigay Journal of Biblical Literature Vol.94, No.3 Sept. 1975, pages 329-342.
Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism Ed. Jeffrey Tigay. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986
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