what is the documentary hypothesis quizlet

A New Challenge to the Documentary Hypothesis

Have modern scholars failed to appreciate the overall structure in genesis 1–11.

By P. Kyle McCarter, Jr.

The documentary hypothesis states that the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, is a compilation of several originally independent documents. Ancient editors or redactors collected these documents, which had been composed at various points in the history of the ancient community, and combined them in a single extended narrative. In this way the Pentateuch as we know it came into being. This hypothesis is one of the fundamental assumptions of modern biblical scholarship. In one form or another, it has been accepted by most scholars since the 18th century, when the traditional view that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible was widely questioned for the first time.

A recent book by Isaac M. Kikawada and Arthur Quinn a offers a thorough-going challenge to the documentary hypothesis. Kikawada is a Japanese biblical scholar who holds the position of visiting lecturer in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where Quinn is a professor of rhetoric. They believe that the documentary hypothesis has outlived its usefulness and, indeed, that a case can be made for viewing the Pentateuch as the work of a single author. Their book introduces this case by presenting a new analysis of the biblical primeval history, Genesis 1–11 , a section chosen because of the central role it played in the development of the documentary hypothesis.

To attempt to demonstrate the unity of the primeval history is a formidable undertaking, not only because so many generations of scholars have labored to demonstrate its disunity, but also because it impresses the reader as anything but a unified composition. In Genesis 2:4 there is a marked change in style in the Creation story, and the story that follows seems to repeat some of the things that happened in the preceding story and to contradict others. In Genesis 1:27 , for example, human beings are created, both male and female, after the creation of the animals in earlier verses. In Genesis 2:7 , however, there is another creation of man, this time before the animals (cf. verse 19 ) and without woman, who is not created until verse 22 . Such disjunctions led scholars who formulated the documentary hypothesis to conclude that two distinct accounts of Creation are preserved in Genesis 1–2 , the second beginning at Genesis 2:4 . The same pattern, moreover, persists throughout Genesis 1–11 , which seems to break down into two groups of passages with contrasting styles and several thematic inconsistencies between them. The two groups also display differences in theology. In one the deity 035 is referred to as ’ elohim , “God,” and presented as a transcendent lawgiver; in the other he is called yahweh , “Yahweh” (usually rendered “the Lord”), and depicted as an anthropomorphic god actively consorting with human beings. According to proponents of the documentary hypothesis, therefore, the biblical primeval history is a composite narrative, embracing two originally distinct accounts of primordial times.

Kikawada and Quinn admit that Genesis 1–11 has a heterogeneous, rather than a homogeneous, appearance to the modern reader. As they put it (p. 36), “It seems to be a number of loosely collected tales, with genealogies intruding here and there. We can find certain overlapping themes and styles. But the primeval history as a whole appears to be more a collection of narratives than a single narrative.”

But is this impression a valid one? Kikawada and Quinn argue that it is not. They attribute it to the modern reader’s inability to perceive the subtleties of an ancient composition. Indeed, the central assumption of their book is that an ancient Near Eastern reader or listener would have seen unity where we see disunity. They test this assumption by comparing Genesis 1–11 to several other ancient compositions, and the comparison leads to two assertions. First, many of the peculiarities of Genesis 1–11 , which modern scholarship has interpreted as evidence for multiple authorship, are in fact present in other ancient literature. Second, ancient primeval histories share a comprehensive pattern or structure, which is also recognizable in Genesis 1–11 .

Their first assertion is not presented systematically, but examples are scattered here and there throughout the book. On pages 39–40, for instance, Kikawada and Quinn compare the fact that man seems to be created twice in Genesis 1–2 to the situation in a Sumerian myth in which there is a general creation of man followed by a contest in which the god Enki and the goddess Ninmah fashion some new human creatures with special characteristics. This comparison suggests to Kikawada and Quinn that there may have been a double-creation motif in the tradition with which a single author of Genesis 1–2 was working.

At this point, however, it is not clear how Kikawada and Quinn want us to understand the story. Are we to suppose that other men and women already exist when the man in Genesis 2:7 is created? The comparison with the Sumerian myth, in which Enki and Ninmah form new creatures after the world is already populated with human beings, seems to imply such an interpretation. It is difficult to believe, however, that any biblical writer thought of Adam as something other than the first man, the progenitor of all mankind (’ adam ), and the genealogy at the beginning of Genesis 5 seems to identify him as such unambiguously. But if the man created in Genesis 2:7 is the first man, then the contradictions between Genesis 1 and 2 remain regardless of the influence of a double-creation tradition. If, as Kikawada and Quinn suggest, a single Israelite author composed both of these chapters in conformity to an ancient pattern, why would he introduce these problems? No such contradictions exist in the myth of Enki and Ninmah.

Elsewhere (pp. 90–92) Kikawada and Quinn consider the variation between the two divine names. They give particular attention to this phenomenon in the Noah story, where the names alternate frequently. In comparison they adduce several examples of the “doubling of divine names within a single passage” from Akkadian and Ugaritic literature. The implication is that the alternation of divine names in the Noah story is a Hebrew example of a widespread literary phenomenon and not, as proponents of the documentary hypothesis suppose, a consequence of the combination of two different accounts. It is troubling, however, that the parallels offered are all poetic. Name alternation is a familiar characteristic of ancient Semitic poetries, and the alternation of divine names in Hebrew poetry not taken by scholars as evidence for multiple authorship. The Noah story, however, is prose, and the divine name alternation there corresponds generally to a number of other varied items (duration of the Flood—40 days and 40 nights in one account [ Genesis 7:17 ], more than a year in the other [ Genesis 7:24 ]; number of animals taken aboard—two of each animal in one account [ Genesis 6:19 ], seven pairs of clean and one pair of unclean in the other [ Genesis 7:2 ], etc.).

On the basis of their discussion of the double creation of man, the alternation of divine names in the Noah story and other peculiarities of Genesis 1–11 , therefore, Kikawada and Quinn cannot be said to have made a compelling case for their first assertion, that the heterogeneous appearance of the biblical primeval history can be explained by appeal to ancient Near Eastern literary conventions. Nevertheless, it is the second assertion, that Genesis 1–11 shares a common structure with other ancient primeval histories, that turns out to be the more important for their case. Much of the book is devoted to supporting this assertion.

The argument begins in chapter II, where 036 Kikawada and Quinn call our attention to the Atrahasis epic, a Mesopotamian account of primordial events. Drawing upon the work of previous scholars, they suggest that the structure of this epic can be described according to a five-point outline: Creation, First Threat, Second Threat, Final Threat and Resolution. They then proceed quickly to identify the same five-part structure in the biblical primeval history. They outline the two stories as follows:

A. Creation (I. 1–351)

Summary of work of gods; creation of man

B. First Threat (I. 352–415)

Man’s numerical increase; plague; Enki’s help

C. Second Threat (II. i. 1–11––v. 21)

Man’s numerical increase

1. Drought; numerical increase

2. Intensified drought; Enki’s help

D. Final Threat (II. v. 22–III. vi. 4)

Numerical increase; Atrahasis’ flood; salvation in boat

E. Resolution (III. vi. 5–viii. 18)

Numerical increase; compromise between Enlil and Enki; “birth control”

A. Creation ( 1:1–2:3 )

Summary of work of God; creation of man

B. First Threat ( 2:4–3:24 )

Genealogy of heaven and earth; Adam and Eve

C. Second Threat ( 4:1–4:26 )

Cain and Abel

1. Cain and Abel; genealogy

2. Lamech’s taunt (in genealogy)

D. Final Threat ( 5:1–9:29 )

Genealogy; Noah’s Flood; salvation in ark

E. Resolution ( 10:1–11:32 )

Genealogy; Tower of Babel and dispersion genealogy; Abram leaves Ur

Further examination reveals the presence of the same structure in a Greek primeval history, which includes the story of the Trojan War, and an Iranian primeval history, the Zoroastrian tale of Yima and the vessel of salvation.

In other words, Kikawada and Quinn are saying that in ancient times there was a conventional pattern according to which primordial events were described. This pattern was widespread, exerting its influence as far west as the Aegean Sea and as far east as the Iranian Plateau. It is reflected, therefore, in several ancient primeval histories, including the one in the Bible. Moreover (and here we come to the main point), the conventional five-part structure is displayed by Genesis 1–11 as a whole , not by one of its alleged documentary sources. Since such a sophisticated structure could hardly have arisen accidentally from a loose combination of independent documents, the biblical primeval history must be the work of a single author. In their next two chapters Kikawada and Quinn reinforce this conclusion with detailed internal analyses of Genesis 1–11 as a whole (chapter III) and of the Flood story in particular (chapter IV).

In chapter III they attempt to demonstrate the unity of the larger story in terms of their five-part scheme. In Part A, the story of Creation, mankind is blessed with the words “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” ( Genesis 1:28 ). This looks ahead to the resolution of the story in Part E, in which human beings are dispersed into various lands, thus “realizing this blessing/ command concretely” ( p. 69). In between are the three central stories about Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and Noah. These exhibit symmetry and progressive repetition, according to a subtle structure discerned by Kikawada and Quinn. The whole is held together by a series of genealogies, which, far from being extraneous interruptions of the narrative, provide the links that hold the stories together, while at the same time serving as reminders of the effectiveness of the blessing.

In chapter IV the Noah story receives special attention because of its peculiar place in the documentary analysis of Genesis 1–11 . Whereas other major episodes seem to be drawn almost entirely from one source or another, the Flood story is apparently an intricate interweaving of two documents. Or so proponents of the documentary hypothesis believe. Kikawada and Quinn disagree. They offer a detailed unitary reading of Genesis 6–9 , in which they refute many of the standard arguments of source analysis. They note, for example, that in Genesis 6:19 Noah is told to bring two of every living thing on the ark, while 037 in Genesis 7:2 he is told to bring “seven pairs of all clean animals…and a pair of animals that are not clean.” This is not, however, an internal contradiction arising from the combination of divergent accounts. In Genesis 7:2 Noah is told to bring more animals onboard. Why? Kikawada and Quinn explain ( p. 88): “As soon as Noah’s voyage is over, he sacrifices in thanksgiving clean animals and birds. Without the extras, Noah’s sacrifice would have rendered these species extinct.” The purpose of the several repetitions the story—such as the fact that Noah, his family and the animals are twice said to have entered the ark ( 7:7–9 and 7:13–16 )—is emphasis, a rhetorical device for clarity and reinforcement The overall unity of the Flood story is most clearly demonstrated, furthermore, by its internal structure, an intricate pattern carefully worked out by Kikawada and Quinn.

How, then, are we to evaluate this structural argument for the unity of Genesis 1–11 ? We can only agree, in the first place, that the biblical primeval history and the Mesopotamian Atrahasis story have many structural and thematic features in common. This, however, is not conceding much, since the relationship of the stories in Genesis 1–11 to Mesopotamian parallels has been generally recognized for more than a century. In fairness to Kikawada and Quinn, we must grant that they have succeeded in bringing this relationship into better focus. Their approach requires us to concentrate on the structural features the two traditions share, and their extension of the comparison to Greek and Iranian parallels helps us to distinguish the essential components of the shared pattern from the structural peculiarities of one tradition or the other. They have, in short, accomplished one of their objectives: To demonstrate the existence of a common pattern or structure that is shared by various ancient accounts of primordial events, including the biblical primeval history.

The pattern common to these ancient stories seems to be approximately as follows: After the creation of human beings, their population increases steadily to the point that it causes a problem. As a result, the gods send some kind of calamity in order to reduce the population tolerable limits. b The problem caused by the increase of the human population is expressed in various ways in the different traditions. In Iranian tradition it is apparently a simple lack of room, while in Mesopotamia it is noise, a constant din that keeps the old gods from being able to sleep. In Greece the problem is in part the sheer number by of people, which overburdens Mother Earth, and in part the impiety of the people, which is offensive to the gods. In Israel the problem is human wickedness, in consequence of which the biblical earth is corrupted. The divine solution to the problem also takes various forms. In Iran it is a bitter winter sent by Ahura Mazda, in Greece it is war sent by Zeus and in Mesopotamia and Israel it is a deluge sent by Enlil and Yahweh, respectively.

Note that the biblical story differs from the grant others in that population growth itself is not a part of the problem. On the contrary, human reproduction is presented in a wholly positive light, as expressed in the blessing of creation, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth…” ( Genesis 1:28 ). In the early chapters of Genesis it is human behavior, not human increase , that provokes the divine imposition of checks and limits. This difference suggests to Kikawada and Quinn that the Hebrew author was making an ironic use of the tradition. This, in fact, is their understanding of the purpose for which he wrote. He was speaking in conscious opposition to the Atrahasis tradition. That tradition, which was the literary achievement of the urbanized culture of Mesopotamia, presented population increase as a serious threat to society. In contrast, the author of Genesis 1–11 offers “the nomadic or pastoral life as a means to unlimited human reproduction” ( p. 52). In his work, population increase is a blessing, and agriculture, city-building and other forms of “the old sedentary sin” ( p. 102) are doomed to failure. To inherit the blessing of creation, human society must be nomadic: “To have progeny as numerous as the sands we must be willing to move over those sands…” ( p. 80). The story of Adam and Eve shows us the failure of agriculture. The story Cain, the first city-builder ( Genesis 4:17 ), 038 demonstrates the failure of urban civilization. Things go well for Noah until he plants a vineyard ( Genesis 9:20 ), but at that point the curse enters his family. A final statement on city-building is made in the story of the Tower of Babel, and the solution to the problems that arise there—and, in fact, the continuing problems arising throughout the primeval history—is a scattering of human beings over the surface of the earth. Kikawada and Quinn explain that this dispersion represents a return to a nomadic way of life.

One wonders how many readers will be persuaded by this interpretation of Genesis 1–11 . Certainly there seem to be easier and better ways to understand the various episodes. It is difficult to see how Adam’s agricultural lifestyle is responsible for his trouble. The story of the garden is not intended to show the failure of agriculture but to explain (among other things) why farming is so difficult (cf. Genesis 3:17–19 ). Perhaps Cain was the first city-builder (although most modern scholars have thought it was his son, Enoch), but he was also “a wanderer upon the earth” ( 4:14 ), a nomad, indeed the Bible’s quintessential nomad, whom the Israelites probably thought of as the ancestor of the Kenites (“the Cain-ites”!), the Bible’s quintessential nomadic tribe. To speak of the indictment of Cain as an indictment of urban civilization is extraordinarily bold, to say the least. Even the family history in Genesis 4:17ff depicts Cain as the ancestor of nomads. His descendant Jabal was “the father of those who live in tents and have cattle” ( Genesis 4:20 ). To be sure, Kikawada and Quinn argue that “cattle” means “property” here, including slaves, so that Jabal becomes the father of “the flesh trade” (pp. 56–57). But even if this is correct (which seems unlikely), his descendants bought and sold their slaves while living “in tents.”

Nor can we agree that Noah’s vineyard is mentioned to show that the righteous man has finally fallen into “the old sedentary sin.” On the contrary, it shows that agriculture is possible again after the cleansing of the earth by the Flood. There is no suggestion in the biblical narrative of any wrongdoing on Noah’s part in planting a vineyard (or in becoming drunk, for that matter, as, we are told, in Genesis 9:21 he became). The curse on Canaan of Genesis 9:25 was provoked by Ham, whose crime, whatever exactly it was, had nothing to do with agriculture or urban civilization. Finally, there seems to be little basis for an association of the dispersion of human families at the end of the story of the Tower of Babel with the nomadic way of life. As the so-called Table of Nations in Genesis 10 shows, the people are scattered into different lands where they will speak different languages and lead different lifestyles, a few nomadic but many more urban and agricultural.

Returning to the structural argument offered by Kikawada and Quinn, we must ask whether their five-part scheme is a useful device for displaying and comparing the structures of the various primeval histories they discuss. The scheme does seem to fit the stories fairly well, at least as Kikawada and Quinn analyze them. Some readers may wonder, however, whether it is so flexible and generalized that it could be applied to almost any story. The first part of the scheme is called “Creation,” but creation takes place only in the Israelite and Mesopotamian examples, and only the creation of human beings in the latter case. “Introduction” or “Initialization” would be a better designation than “Creation.” In the case of the “Threats” it may be too precise to speak of three as a conventional number. In the Atraharsis story the flood is Enlil’s fourth attempt to reduce mankind, although Kikawada and Quinn, following the analysis of other scholars, describe the third attempt as an intensification of the second. There are only two threats in the Greek story, but Zeus does contemplate a third at one point. As it turns out, then, the “unifying five-part structure” discovered by Kikawada and Quinn is a scheme in which a situation is introduced (Creation), a series of approximately three complications is described (First, Second and Final Threats), and the outcome of the situation is reported (Resolution). It is difficult to think of a story to which such a scheme, with sufficient ingenuity, could not be applied. Kikawada and Quinn themselves apply it not only to the primeval histories, but (in chapter V) to numerous other narratives as well. They find it to be ubiquitous in the Bible, underlying not only Genesis 1–11 , but also the so-called Court History of David in Samuel and Kings, the story of the 039 exodus, Genesis as a whole, and the Pentateuch as a whole!

Let us suppose, however, that Kikawada and Quinn are correct about the five-part scheme. Let us suppose that the biblical primeval history does share such a structure with other ancient compositions. Would this constitute evidence for the unity of Genesis 1–11 ? Unfortunately, it would not. The scheme could have been introduced at the earliest or the latest stage of the growth of the narrative as described by the documentary hypothesis. All five elements are already present in the oldest of the sources according to the analysis of most contemporary critics. Alternatively, one could argue that the scheme was imposed on the story by its last editor or redactor. In any case, it would not be necessary to conclude that Genesis 1–11 was the work of a single author.

In short, Kikawada and Quinn have not succeeded, at least in the opinion of this reviewer, in casting doubt on the validity of the documentary hypothesis as it applies to Genesis 1–11 . This is not to say, however, that their book is not valuable. It is. It is interesting, provocative and filled with acute and insightful observations. Biblical scholars will find many things in the book to interest them and at least a few things that are new—and that seems quite enough to expect from any book. And Before Abraham Was is not a book for scholars alone. It is written in clear, nontechnical and very informal English. The authors develop their position against the backdrop of a sympathetic presentation of the documentary hypothesis. As a result their case is accessible to almost any reader, and it is reasonable to expect that their views will be evaluated not only by biblical scholars, who will be predisposed to be skeptical, but many others as well.

Perhaps it is fitting to conclude this review with a few words on behalf of the documentary hypothesis. Many people today, including a few able scholars like Kikawada and Quinn, seem to believe that this old theory about the origin of the Pentateuchal narrative is no longer tenable. These people are mistaken. It is true that many of the traditional components of the hypothesis are under close examination at present, and it is reasonable to expect that the hypothesis will undergo substantial revisions in the future, as it has in the past. But the fundamental theory that the Pentateuch contains within it diverse sources joined together by editors seems as sound today as it did a century ago. In fact it seems more sound, because we can now cite both biblical and extra-biblical evidence that shows that it was precisely in this manner—by the combination and editing of documentary sources—that sacred literature was composed in biblical times. A careful reading of 1 and 2 Chronicles, for example, will show that the composer of those books drew heavily upon the narrative of Samuel and Kings, selecting long passages to be included in his own work within its distinctive editorial framework. In this case, where both the source document (Samuel-Kings) and the final product (Chronicles) are preserved, the validity of a documentary hypothesis is established beyond dispute.

Another type of documentary composition can be demonstrated by a comparison of the Greek and Hebrew texts of the story of David and Goliath. c The Hebrew Bible contains two different accounts of the story, which have been carefully woven together, much in the fashion the two flood stories were combined in Genesis 6–9 . The Greek version is a translation of a much shorter Hebrew text that contained only one of these stories. In the case of the Flood story we have only the composite account, but in the case of the story of David and Goliath we have both the composite account (in the Hebrew text) and one of the two source accounts (underlying the Greek text).

Consider finally the Samaritan Pentateuch, the form of the Five Books of Moses handed down within the Samaritan community. Here we often find a part-of the text expanded by the addition of materials drawn from other passages. Where Exodus and Deuteronomy contain information on the same subject, for example, we often find the text of Exodus expanded by materials drawn from Deuteronomy. So by studying the Samaritan Pentateuch and other literature like it from Qumran and elsewhere, we can observe at first hand the editorial combination of documentary sources.

The documentary hypothesis states that the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, is a compilation of several originally independent documents. Ancient editors or redactors collected these documents, which had been composed at various points in the history of the ancient community, and combined them in a single extended narrative. In this way the Pentateuch as we know it came into being. This hypothesis is one of the fundamental assumptions of modern biblical scholarship. In one form or another, it has been accepted by most scholars since the 18th century, when the traditional view that Moses wrote the […]

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Before Abraham Was. The Unity of Genesis 1–11 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1985) 144 pp., $9.95 paperback

See Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “What the Babylonian Flood Stories Can and Cannot Teach Us About the Genesis Flood,” BAR 04:04.

See “The David and Goliath Saga,” BR 02:04, by Emanuel Tov.

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10 The Documentary Hypothesis

Baruch J. Schwartz holds the J. L. Magnes Chair in Biblical Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

• Published: 12 May 2021
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The Documentary Hypothesis was the most influential and widespread theory of the composition of the Pentateuch for most of the twentieth century. This essay examines the literary indicators that underlie the Documentary Hypothesis, the development of the theory, and its salient claims and features.

This chapter deals with the theory that four pre-existing, independent literary works, referred to as sources or documents, were combined to form the canonical Torah: the theory known as the Documentary Hypothesis. The discussion is confined to the literary evidence leading to the realization that the Torah is the work of more than one author, the grounds for the four-source hypothesis, the overall character of the sources themselves, and the manner in which they appear to have been combined. How the sources came into existence and the historical circumstances that gave rise to their ultimately being combined are not discussed, nor is a detailed description of each source provided. The role of the Documentary Hypothesis within Biblical scholarship and the different forms it has assumed over the centuries are also beyond the scope of the discussion. 1

The Documentary Hypothesis, long considered to be the standard explanation for the formation of the Torah and still accepted by many scholars, is grounded not in any scholarly desire to discover multiple sources in the text, but on the existence of literary phenomena for which the most economical and convincing explanation is that the Torah is not a unified text, but is rather the product of multiple authorial and editorial hands. The indications that the Torah is a composite literary work may be classified into four types: redundancy, contradiction, discontinuity, and inconsistency of terminology and style. Three of these—redundancy, contradiction and linguistic inconsistency—are found both in the narrative and in the legal portions of the Torah; the fourth, discontinuity, is found principally in the narrative sections. As one might expect, there is some overlap between these categories, and in many cases a single discrepancy may fall into more than one of them. Still it is essential to distinguish the four phenomena from one another in order to gain a proper understanding of their contours and their import.

A case of redundancy in the Torah is essentially an instance of unexplained and unwarranted repetition of what has already been said. In the narrative portions of the Torah, redundancy is present whenever each of two or more passages purports to provide the one and only account of an event that can logically have occurred only once. In the legal sections of the Torah, redundancy is a case in which two or more passages purport to provide the legal stipulation that is to be fulfilled in a given, uniquely defined situation.

This phenomenon is extremely widespread. The creation of the cosmos, of humans, and of animals is described twice (Gen 1:1–2:4a and 2:4b–25); the establishment of the covenant with Abraham is recounted twice (Gen 15:1–21 and 17:1–27); the changing of Jacob’s name to Israel is related twice (Gen 32:28–29 and 35:9–10); the divine name, Yahweh, is revealed to Moses twice (Exod 3:13–15 and 6:2–9), among many others. Redundancy is also rife within individual narratives. For example, in the course of the story of the flood (Gen 6:5–9:17), the narrator twice describes the evil that spurred Yahweh’s decision to bring about the flood (Gen 6:5–6 and 6:11–12); we read twice that Yahweh informed Noah of his decision (6:17 and 7:4); twice we learn that he conveyed his instructions to Noah (6:18–21 and 7:1–3), and more. In the course of the account of Moses’s commissioning (Exod 3:1–4:17), Yahweh twice mentions that he has seen the affliction of his people and has decided to act (3:7–8 and 3:9); Moses twice expresses his objections to having the task imposed upon him (3:11, 13 and 4:1, 10, 13); twice Yahweh responds to his reservations (3:12, 14–15 and 4:2–9, 11–12, 14–16), and so forth. In all these cases and innumerable others, the individual passages provide no recognition that the event itself has already transpired or that it might not be the only such event. Every such narrative, and every similarly duplicated subsection of a repetitive narrative text, presents itself as the one and only account of the event described, as does its counterpart.

Turning to the legal portions of the Torah: twice the Israelites are commanded with regard to permitted and forbidden foods (Lev 11 and Deut 14:3–21), the prohibition of usury (Lev 25:35–37 and Deut 23:20–21), the sustenance of the poor from the produce of one’s field and vineyard (Lev 19:9–10 and Deut 24:19–21), the sabbatical year (Exod 23:10–11 and Lev 25:1–7, 20–22), and more. Three times they are given the laws pertaining to the manumission of slaves (Exod 21:1–11, Lev 25:39–46 and Deut 15:12–18), talionic restitution (Exod 21:22–25, Lev 24:17–22, and Deut 19:21), murder, manslaughter and asylum (Exod 21:12–13, Num 35:9–34, and Deut 19:1–13), and more. They are commanded with regard to the annual festivals four times (Exod 23:14–19, Exod 34:18–26, Lev 23:1–44, Deut 16:1–17; an additional section in Num 28–29, dedicated to the unique sacrifices offered on each festival day, complements the law in Lev 23). Just as in the narrative portions of the Torah, each of these passages is always presented as the sole and complete account of the legislation that it claims to convey, never as an addendum, continuation, or even emphatic reiteration of one or more of its counterparts. They thus compete with one another for the status of the authoritative promulgation of the command in question (see Deut 4:2, 13:1). Furthermore, these competing passages appear in completely different places in the Torah—a fact that cannot be explained reasonably under the assumption that the Torah is a unified work.

Not every case of formal or substantive similarity should be mistaken for redundancy. A single storyteller may recount two similar episodes, if he maintains that they both occurred and there is no categorical impossibility for this to have been so. For example, even if Abram’s wife Sarai was abducted by Pharaoh (Gen 12:10–20), she may also have been abducted later by Abimelech (Gen 20:1–18), and Isaac’s wife Rebecca may have subsequently been abducted by Abimelech as well (26:6–11) since, despite the similarity, the three accounts do not purport to be reports of a single event. Only mutually exclusive competition between two accounts constitutes redundancy.

The most conspicuous and serious instance of redundancy is not limited to two or three competing passages but is woven through the entire Torah. This is the account of how Israel received its laws. The story of the proclamation of the Decalogue and the establishment of a covenant at Horeb (Exod 19:2b–9a, 16aα2–17, 19; 20—23; 24:3–8, 11bβ–15a; 32:1–8, 10–25, 30–35; 33:6–11; 34:1, 4, 28) relates that the laws were written down and that the covenant that Yahweh made with the Israelites was concluded “on the basis of these words” (Exod 24:8), i.e. the written text of the laws. With regard to these laws the people said: “All that Yahweh has spoken (i.e. Exod 20:19–23:33) we will faithfully do” (Exod 24:7), and the story concludes with no expectation of additional laws to be given at some future time. This account thus purports to be the sole report of the lawgiving. Nonetheless, the reader is also presented with a second story of a covenant made at the same time, in the course of which Moses ascended a mountain—Sinai, according to this account—to hear the attributes of Yahweh’s mercy (Exod 19:9b–16aα1, 18, 20–25; 24:1–2, 9–11bα; 32:9, 26–29; 33:1–5, 12–23; 34:2–3, 5–27). Here too, a corpus of laws is given to Moses (Exod 34:11–26), he is commanded to record them in writing, and it is they that are referred to in the statement: “In accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel” (Exod 34:27). This second account shows no signs of continuing, adding to, affirming, replacing, or denying the first; it too is presented as the one and only story of the conclusion of a covenant between Yahweh and Israel, in the course of which Yahweh conveyed his laws to Moses.

Interspersed between these two stories and extending over the long text that follows, a third account emerges, according to which Moses is told that the lawgiving will commence only after Yahweh’s portable dwelling, the tabernacle, has been constructed at the foot of Mount Sinai. Only then, by means of divine speech emanating from between the cherubim on the cover of the ark, will Yahweh communicate to Moses “all that I will command you concerning the Israelite people” (Exod 25:22). This plan too is then carried out exactly as promised (see Schwartz 1996a ). Just as neither of the other two stories offers any intimation that the legislation it contains is only part of a larger body of laws and that more legislation will follow, this third story contains no indication that the legislation it contains (which extends throughout Leviticus and Numbers) is intended to supplement what preceded. All three accounts ignore each other’s existence entirely, and the author of one cannot be the author of either of the other two.

The same goes for the account of the lawgiving given in Moses’s second valedictory oration. Moses affirms (Deut 5:19–6:3) that the full body of Yahweh’s commandments was given to him at Horeb “on the day of the Assembly” (Deut 9:10; 10:4; 18:16), that is, on the same day that the Decalogue was proclaimed for the entire Israelite people to hear, but he goes on to relate that he did not convey this legislation to the people at the time but has rather kept it to himself until the present, four decades later (see Weinfeld 1991 , 236–327; Nelson 2002 , 73–85; Vogt 2006 , 113–159). This thus constitutes a fourth independent and complete report of how and when Yahweh’s laws were conveyed to the Israelites.

Not only do we possess four independent accounts of the time, manner, and location of the lawgiving, each alleging to be the only such account, but each of the four also includes its own version of the laws themselves, each version purporting to be the laws and statutes commanded by Yahweh through the agency of Moses. The existence of four mutually ignorant legal corpora on the one hand, and of four mutually exclusive stories functioning as distinct narrative frameworks for them on the other, is incontrovertible evidence that the writings of several authors have been incorporated in the Torah.

Contradictions

Competing reports of a single event that cannot logically be deemed to have occurred more than once should not be understood as the work of a single author precisely because they are set side by side in a single literary work without explanation; so too the numerous contradictions that appear in the Torah cannot be the work of a single hand. Defined precisely, a contradiction in the narrative portion of the Torah is an instance in which incompatible factual claims are made with regard to an event that can only have occurred once. For instance, it emerges from several passages in the story of Abraham that the patriarch’s birthplace is Aram-naharaim (Gen 24:4, 10). Yet in other equally explicit passages, it is asserted that he originated from Ur of the Chaldeans (e.g. Gen 15:7). These are not two names for one place, and one person cannot have two countries of origin; this is therefore a blatant contradiction. Similarly, in the story of the men sent by Moses to explore the land of Canaan (Num 13–14), it is expressly stated that Caleb was the only one of the scouts to dissent from the negative report given by the rest of the delegation (13:30; cf. 14:24), but it is stated no less explicitly that both Caleb and Joshua dissented (14:6–9). These two claims are irreconcilable. Was Noah commanded to take two of each animal aboard the ark, or only two of each impure animal and seven pairs of each pure species? Taken at its word, the Torah provides no unequivocal answer to this question, since both claims are made unambiguously (Gen 6:19–20; 7:9 vs. 7:2–3, 8; see Schwartz 2007 , 147).

In a certain sense, all instances of redundancy in the Torah are also contradictions, since whenever we encounter two or more reports of a single event there are also irreconcilable discrepancies between them. Was the human race created “male and female” simultaneously and at the end of the process of creation, as stated in the first account of Creation (Gen 1:27; 5:2), or was woman created after man, from one of his ribs, at the beginning of the process, as related in the second story (2:21–25)? Here too the Torah relates two contradictory events and makes no effort to resolve them. Another example: when Moses received the laws from Yahweh, did he present them to the people immediately, as stated in the account of the covenant at Horeb (Exod 24:3)? Or did he keep them to himself for forty years and disclose them to the Israelites only just prior to his death, as he claims in Deuteronomy (Deut 4:14; 5:19–6:3; 11:32–12:1)? In these instances and in many others (see e.g. Schwartz 2012 ), repetition and contradiction intersect. The contradictions are to be found in the particulars of the repeated accounts, so that two competing narratives serving only one narrative purpose contradict each other at every turn.

One particularly well-known example of contradiction in the narrative portion of the Torah is that concerning the name of Israel’s deity, Yahweh. When biblical scholarship was still in its infancy, early critics noticed that among the many events that are inexplicably reported twice are several in which the two reports refer to the deity differently, both in the quoted speech of the characters and in the narrator’s own words, with one version using the generic noun Elohim (“god” or “God”), with or without the definite article, and the other using the tetragrammaton, Yahweh. At first, some critics imagined that this issue was simply a matter of differing style, and as such could be used, like other stylistic peculiarities, to distinguish between two different narrators, with each presumed to have had a preference for one or another of the two divine appellations. Occasionally even later critics have continued, erroneously, to assume this. However, as has become abundantly clear over time, these separate sets of narratives differ not on a matter of nomenclature or terminology but rather on a point of historical fact : the twofold question of when in history the tetragrammaton was revealed and to whom. One set of stories maintains unambiguously that the name Yahweh was known to all of humanity and was in common use throughout humankind since the beginning of time (Gen 4:1, 26), while according to another it is equally undisputed that this name was completely unknown until the lifetime of Moses, when it was first revealed, and even then only to him, and through him, to the Israelites (Exod 3:13–15; 6:1–3). This is no stylistic inconsistency; it too, like the examples above, is a substantive contradiction in the storyline itself. In this case, the contradiction is not localized within two identifiable, conflicting passages, but is rather spread out over numerous episodes, where entire narrative threads reflect conflicting historical assumptions.

The contradictions in the legal portion of the Torah are just as numerous and just as irreconcilable. The following are but a few examples. The command in Exodus states emphatically that the pesaḥ ritual must be performed with a sheep or a goat and that the animal’s flesh must be roasted rather than boiled or eaten uncooked (Exod 12:3–5, 8–9), but the corresponding command in Deuteronomy includes cattle among the animals that may be sacrificed and specifies that the flesh is in fact to be boiled (Deut 16:2, 7). Two legal passages mandate that Hebrew slaves be freed after six years of service (Exod 21:2; Deut 15:12–18), while a third stipulates that they be freed only in the Jubilee year (Lev 25:39–43). In Deuteronomy we read that the harvest pilgrimage, sukkôt , lasts only seven days (Deut 16:13–15); Leviticus and Numbers mandate an eighth day (Lev 23:33–36; Num 29:35–38). The law in Leviticus permits the slaughter of sheep and cattle for sacrificial offerings only, ruling out the non-sacrificial consumption of the flesh of these quadrupeds as an eternal, unchanging statute (Lev 17:3–7); Deuteronomy stipulates that after reaching Canaan, the Israelites will be permitted to slaughter sheep and cattle non-sacrificially and consume their flesh with impunity (Deut 12:15, 20–22; see Schwartz 1996b ; Chavel 2012).

In the most blatant case of contradiction in the narrative portion of the Torah, which is of course the aforementioned existence of mutually exclusive and conflicting accounts of how Israel received Yahweh’s laws, with each account enumerating the laws that its author maintains were given, narrative and legal inconsistency reach their crucial point of intersection. Each narrator claims that the laws that he cites, and they alone, constitute the legislation imparted by Yahweh to Israel through Moses. It follows that every case of contradiction between laws is also a narrative contradiction , with one narrator claiming that, in the course of historical time, Yahweh commanded something, with another claiming that he commanded precisely the opposite.

Discontinuity

Although the question of literary flow is at times significant even in legal passages, discontinuity is most apparent in the narrative portions of the Torah. Yet it should be stressed from the outset that even in narrative, not every digression from the main plotline constitutes evidence of multiple authorship. Literary techniques such as parenthesis, flashback, tangential expansion, internal monologue, simultaneity, summary, recapitulation, editorializing, cross-reference, elaboration, and resumptive repetition (Kuhl 1952 ; Talmon 1978 ), which can be found in all literature, are among the recognized hallmarks of biblical prose and do not serve as indications of multiple authorship or strata of redaction. In fact, as the most basic tools of the biblical narrator, they can and should be seen as evidence of literary unity. They embody authorial planning, logic, and intentionality; they can be discerned with common literary-critical tools and their function in crafting the story’s form and meaning is apparent to the trained reader. The discontinuities that serve as evidence for the composite nature of the Torah are of an entirely different sort. They are cases in which the thread of narration is first cut off, as if in mid-air, and what follows appears to be unconnected, often contradicting or needlessly repeating what preceded it, reporting another event whose relationship to the first is unclear, drawing on assumptions that are at odds with those of the initial story and incomprehensible as its natural continuation, and then, at some later point in the text, the thread of the first narrative picks up exactly where it left off.

The phenomenon can be illustrated through an attempt to make sense of the account of the plague of blood reported to have struck the Egyptians (Exod 7:14–25; for the analysis, cf. Greenberg 1972 , 65–75). The story begins with Yahweh’s instructions to Moses:

14 And Yahweh said to Moses, “Pharaoh’s heart is heavy; he has refused to let the people go. 15 Go to Pharaoh in the morning, as he is coming out to the water, and station yourself before him at the edge of the Nile, taking with you the rod that turned into a snake. 16 Say to him, ‘Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews, sent me to you to say, “Let My people go that they may worship Me in the wilderness,” but you have paid no heed until now. 17 Thus says Yahweh, “By this you shall know that I am Yahweh.” See, I shall strike the water in the Nile with the rod that is in my hand, and it will be turned into blood, 18 and the fish in the Nile will die. The Nile will stink so that the Egyptians will find it impossible to drink the water of the Nile.’”

With these instructions given clearly and unambiguously, it stands to reason that the reader will next be informed of their prompt implementation. However, at this point, inexplicably, we are met by another set of instructions, clearly and unambiguously contradicting the first:

19 And Yahweh said to Moses, “Say to Aaron: Take your rod and hold out your arm over the waters of Egypt—its rivers, its canals, its ponds, all its bodies of water—that they may become blood; there shall be blood throughout the land of Egypt, even in vessels of wood and stone.”

According to these new instructions, Moses is not to confront Pharaoh or to threaten him with the approaching plague. Rather, Aaron is to be ordered to bring about the plague with his own rod, not Moses with his, whereupon not only the water in the Nile but all of the water in Egypt, including that stored in vessels (see Targum Onqelos, Rashi, and ibn Ezra), will become blood. Did Yahweh change his mind? If so, why? If not, what is the purpose of the second set of instructions, and why is it not stated in the text? The Torah passes over these questions in silence.

After the two sets of instructions, we read of their implementation:

21aα1 Moses and Aaron did so, just as Yahweh commanded.

But Yahweh issued two contradictory commands. Which did they follow?

21aα2–b He lifted up the rod and struck the water in the Nile in the sight of Pharaoh and his courtiers, and all the water in the Nile was turned into blood, 21a and the fish in the Nile died. The Nile stank so that the Egyptians could not drink water from the Nile.

How is one to explain the transition from the first part of verse 20, which speaks in the plural of Moses and Aaron, and the remainder, which speaks in the singular (“he lifted up”)? Who is the subject of the second part of the verse, carrying out the instructions? Apparently Moses, because it seems to be the initial instructions, in which he was told to lift his own rod, that are being carried out. The precise phrasing of the initial instructions is even echoed in this report of what transpired. But if so, what of the second instructions? Why were they issued? Furthermore, how did Moses and Aaron know which of the two sets of directives to carry out?

The text of the Torah answers none of these questions, but it does state the outcome of the event:

21b The blood was throughout the land of Egypt.

This statement conforms to the second set of instructions, but has nothing to do with the first. If there was indeed blood “throughout the land of Egypt,” exactly as predicted in the second set of instructions, why does the beginning of the verse single out the water in the Nile? Here is a case of discontinuity within a single verse. This problem too is left unaddressed.

The Torah describes Pharaoh’s reaction to the plague thus:

22b Pharaoh’s heart stiffened and he did not heed them, as Yahweh had spoken.

As set forth in the prologue to the plague story (Exod 7:1–7), Yahweh resolved in advance that, in order to maximize the number of signs and wonders in his impending display of might, he would “harden Pharaoh’s heart” (7:3), that is, embolden him, so that he would overcome his dread (cf. Deut 2:30) and refuse to submit to Moses’s and Aaron’s demand to free the Israelites. As the story develops, and as is repeated in its concluding summary (11:9–10), this intent is carried out to the letter, and the description of Pharaoh’s reaction to the blood here is fully consistent with the plan. Pharaoh becomes over-confident, his impaired judgment inducing him to pay no heed to Moses and Aaron, precisely as was announced in advance and just as he does repeatedly throughout the story (8:15; 9:12, 35; 10:20, 27).

However, immediately following this statement, we hear of another response to the plague of blood, first on the part of Pharaoh and then on the part of the populace.

23 Pharaoh turned and went into his palace, paying no regard even to this. 24 And all the Egyptians had to dig round about the Nile for drinking water, because they could not drink the water of the Nile.

This passage proceeds from the assumption that only in the Nile has the water turned to blood while the water found elsewhere in Egypt has remained potable. The Egyptians therefore dig in surrounding areas, where they indeed find drinking water. As for Pharaoh himself, he is utterly unaffected; he simply returns home where, presumably, he has drinking water stored away or will have it brought to him by his courtiers from locations other than the Nile. This clearly reflects the plague of blood as it was foretold in vv. 17–18 and as it is said to have transpired in vv. 20aα2–21a: only the water in the Nile has turned to blood. But it is quite the opposite of what was announced in v. 19 and described in v. 21b, according to which all of the water in Egypt—including any water one may have stored away—was turned to blood. Moreover it is incompatible with the preceding v. 22b—yet another example of discontinuity between immediately adjacent verses—since it relates that Pharaoh’s behavior, rather than being the work of Yahweh, is the result of conscious, deliberate, and impeccable reasoning on his own part. Pharaoh here is sovereign, autonomous, and eminently logical; it is he who decides to pay no mind to what has occurred, since there is other potable water nearby and his servants will surely obtain it for him. How can one harmonize these two mutually exclusive reactions to the bloodied waters? The text, again, is silent.

Finally, how did the plague of blood finally come to an end? The first answer is implied in what precedes the notice of Pharaoh’s reaction:

22a The Egyptian magicians did the same with their spells.

If Pharaoh’s magicians were able precisely to replicate the action performed by Moses and Aaron, that is, to turn the water to blood, it follows that the blood must have turned back to water in the meantime. The miraculous event was of momentary duration: Moses and Aaron transformed the water to blood; it soon became water again. Afterward, the magicians performed exactly the same feat, and the water again returned to its normal state.

This picture is belied, however, by the concluding verse of the passage, which leads directly to the account of the next plague, that of frogs:

25 When seven days had passed after Yahweh struck the Nile…

Here it would seem that after a week had elapsed from the moment the Nile—and only the Nile—was turned to blood, the next plague simply commenced, without any specific action being taken to repair the state of the Nile. Evidently the natural flow of the great waterway gradually replaced all the blood with fresh water, and this brought the episode to its close. After a week, all was forgotten, necessitating the infliction of another plague.

The contradiction between these two distinct denouements is unmistakable; one or the other may be said to have occurred, but not both. More important, each separate denouement aligns with the assumptions of one or another description of the plague itself. The narrator who confined the blood to the Nile relates that the bloody water was gradually washed away and that meanwhile it was necessary, and possible, to obtain water elsewhere, and the narrator who maintained that all the water in Egypt became undrinkable indicates that the plague lasted only a short while, which is why the Egyptians did not perish of thirst.

Terminology and Style

These twelve verses illustrate all of the three phenomena discussed above: repetition, contradiction, and discontinuity. In the course of examining them, a fourth phenomenon surfaces as well: unexplained variations in vocabulary and usage. Two different verbs are used to express what was done with the rod: “stretch out” (נטה—v. 19) and “lift up” (וירם—v. 20a1b); two distinct phrases refer to the action of turning the water into blood: “strike” (מכה, ויך, הכות—vv. 17, 20a1b, 25) and “do so” (ויעשו כן—vv. 20a1a, 22); two separate idioms express Pharaoh’s intransigence: his heart was “stiffened” (ויחזק—v. 22), which means he recklessly imperiled himself and his people, and his heart was “heavy” (כבד—v. 14), i.e. he willfully refused; two different terms are used for what actually happened to the water: it “turned into” blood (ויהפכו, ונהפכו—vv. 17, 20) and it “became” blood (והיה—v. 19); there are two different uses of the word יאור: to refer to the Nile (vv. 15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 24, 25) and to refer to any one of an unspecified number of streams or channels (v. 19). These stylistic inconsistencies do not render the text unintelligible as do the others, but their existence calls for explanation.

The Solution

The brief but baffling account of the plague of blood was introduced as a convenient means of illustrating the phenomenon of narrative discontinuity, but it has shown itself to exhibit each of the other literary indications of multiple authorship as well: competing, functionally equivalent components; mutually exclusive, contradictory reports of events and seemingly random terminological variation. A closer look at these irreconcilable discrepancies reveals precisely how they have arisen. The explanation emerges when the passages that compete with and contradict each other are viewed in separate columns.

First, the two sets of instructions:

On one side, in roman, we have Moses alone, who is told to threaten Pharaoh that he will strike the Nile only, with his own rod, and to accuse him of having paid no heed thus far. On the other side, in italics, we have Moses and Aaron, who are told to issue no threat but simply to act, using Aaron’s rod and affecting Egypt’s entire water supply.

Next, the two reports of the implementation of the instructions:

It is immediately apparent that the roman section not only corresponds to the roman section that precedes it; it is in fact its direct continuation. Moses lifts his rod and strikes the Nile only—note the verbal correspondences between command and fulfillment. And the same is true on the italic side: the implementation section is the direct continuation of the command section, echoing it fully.

Placing side by side the two competing reports of Pharaoh’s reaction to the blood and of the eventual outcome of the episode, we obtain identical results:

On the roman side, where Pharaoh is said simply to have withdrawn to his palace and both he and his subjects obtain water from sources other than the Nile, after which the plague gradually disappears, the text is without any doubt the direct sequel to the two roman sections preceding. On the italic side as well, where the magicians replicate Yahweh’s ominous act but Pharaoh is unable to respond rationally because Yahweh has instilled him with false courage, the words of the text follow directly upon the preceding italic section.

The moment the competing and contradicting passages are disentangled in their entirety, we have before us not one but two self-contained narratives:

Each of the two is a complete, continuous, internally consistent and literarily smooth account. Each is also consistent in its style and usage. While both tell of the miraculous transformation of the water to blood in the course of Moses’s confrontation with Pharaoh, and are therefore essentially two accounts of a single event, they differ greatly, not only in their form but in the specifics of the occurrences that they relate and in their theological and thematic content as well.

The conclusion is inescapable. The reason the account of the blood appearing in the canonical Torah is rife with contradictions, redundancies, and discontinuities is that it is in fact a combination of two accounts, a passage compiled from two texts that were originally independent and were ultimately fused into one—in the following manner:

14 Yahweh said to Moses, “Pharaoh’s heart is heavy; he refuses to let the people go. 15 Go to Pharaoh in the morning, as he is coming out to the water, and station yourself before him at the edge of the Nile, taking with you the rod that turned into a snake. 16 Say to him, ‘Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews, sent me to you to say, “Let My people go that they may worship Me in the wilderness,” but you have paid no heed until now. 17 Thus says Yahweh, “By this you shall know that I am Yahweh.” See, I shall strike the water in the Nile with the rod that is in my hand, and it will be turned into blood; 18 and the fish in the Nile will die. The Nile will stink so that the Egyptians will find it impossible to drink the water of the Nile.’” 19 Yahweh said to Moses, “Say to Aaron: Take your rod and hold out your arm over the waters of Egypt—its rivers, its canals, its ponds, all its bodies of water—that they may become blood; there shall be blood throughout the land of Egypt, even in vessels of wood and stone.”   20 Moses and Aaron did just as Yahweh commanded ; he lifted up the rod and struck the water in the Nile in the sight of Pharaoh and his courtiers, and all the water in the Nile was turned into blood, 21 and the fish in the Nile died. The Nile stank so that the Egyptians could not drink water from the Nile. The blood was throughout the land of Egypt . 22 But when the Egyptian magicians did the same with their spells, Pharaoh’s heart stiffened and he did not heed them, as Yahweh had spoken . 23 Pharaoh turned and went into his palace, paying no regard even to this. 24 And all the Egyptians had to dig round about the Nile for drinking water, because they could not drink the water of the Nile. 25 When seven days had passed after Yahweh struck the Nile…

The two have been woven together meticulously, strictly according to the dictates of chronology and logic. For instance, not only are the two sets of instructions placed first and only thereafter the two accounts of their implementation, the instructions that include the order that Moses “go to Pharaoh” and announce the impending plague before its onset precede those that begin with the command to instruct Aaron to perform the act immediately.

Most important, it appears that the compiled text rigidly preserves all of the words of each of the two accounts, in their original order, and without addition.

The Documentary Hypothesis

The results of this analysis of the account of the plague of blood are not the exception but the rule. When the same method is applied throughout the narrative portion of the Torah, time and again similar results are obtained. Whether within relatively brief passages such as this one or in passages extending over many chapters, it repeatedly becomes clear that independent narrative texts—not oral traditions, but complete written documents—have intentionally and ingeniously been woven together. This discovery is the key to understanding how the Torah was compiled, for pursuant to these findings it emerges that the same narrative threads are present over the course of the entire Torah ; that is, the threads that may be detected within a given passage are in fact the continuations of threads that are already intertwined prior to it. Each of the two accounts of the plague of blood, to return to the example presented above, is the continuation of a narrative thread that earlier told of the enslavement and oppression of the Israelites in Egypt, each of which in turn continues a narrative thread that recounted the descent of Jacob and his family into Egypt. Each of these is the continuation of one of the threads discernible in the accounts of creation, the flood, the lives of the patriarchs, and the exploits of Jacob and his children. After telling its version of the plague of blood, each thread continues immediately to tell of the remaining plagues inflicted on the Egyptians, each according to its own version of the story, and each of these in turn continues with its own account of the exodus from Egypt, the miracle at the sea, and the journey through the wilderness. These narrative threads thus once constituted separate, continuous, and coherent literary sources , which were subsequently combined, from beginning to end, in the way demonstrated by the brief example above: by painstakingly alternating from one document to another, faithfully preserving the precise text and order of each source to the fullest extent achievable, and with as little interference on the part of the compiler as possible.

While the text examined above resolved itself into precisely two narrative threads, the total number of sources interwoven throughout the Torah is not two or even three but four. Not all four are detectable at every point in the Torah, however, because the four sources do not relate all of the same events . A large number of events are told by one source only (e.g. the Tower of Babel, Gen 11:1–9, from J; the near-sacrifice of Isaac, Gen 22:1–13, from E; the building of the tabernacle, Exod 35–40, from P); when this is the case, the passage appearing in the Torah is remarkably coherent, free of internal contradiction, redundancy, and discontinuity. This is not surprising, since it is composed entirely of the words of a single narrator. Other events, described by two of the four sources, result either in doublets or in unintelligible passages like the one above, in which two differing accounts of a single event have been combined and in which literary chaos consequently reigns. There are also instances in which accounts from three of the sources have been combined in a single passage. These, however, are rare, since relatively few events are related by more than two of the Torah’s sources. The lengthier the section of text being examined, the more likely it is that a third source will eventually come into view. There are almost no passages that include all four sources, for the simple reason that one source, unlike the other three, does not appear intermittently throughout the Torah but is entirely contiguous, introduced in its entirety near the end of the other three interwoven threads, as we shall see.

This realization enables us to formulate a host of other questions. What is the nature of these four sources? When did they come into existence, and who created them? Exactly how, when, and why were they combined? Biblical scholarship has devoted itself to the study of these issues since they first presented themselves. The discovery of the precise number of sources—four, their disentanglement from one another and the concomitant reconstruction of each source or what remains of it, the appreciation of the unique version of Israel’s pre-history told by each one, and the characterization of each source’s unique content, language, worldview, and historical background has been a complex process. It began toward the end of the eighteenth century, reached a peak at the end of the nineteenth, and became increasingly refined in the first half of the twentieth. The stages of this process and its central findings and accomplishments have been studied by many scholars and have been presented in great detail numerous times, and for that reason we will not review them again here (see Nicholson 1998 ; Arnold 2003 ; Baker 2003 ). Nevertheless, two factors that played a central role in the discovery process do require elaboration. The first is the question of the use of the name Yahweh, the tetragrammaton, to refer to the Israelite deity. As noted, according to one entire group of narratives in the Torah, the name Yahweh was known to all of humankind from the very beginning of time, while according to another group of narratives, it was revealed only in the time of Moses, and even then, at first, only to the Israelites. When, with the advent of modern scholarship, it was first suggested that the texts in each of the two groups combine to form separate narrative sequences (Astruc 1753 ), this was one of the first intimations that the Torah in its entirety might have been compiled from preexisting literary sources of considerable scope and completeness. But biblical scholarship did not arrive at this conclusion in one leap. At first, critics assumed that since the Torah reflects two opposing views regarding the tetragrammaton, the Torah must be comprised of two sources, one “Yahwistic,” after its widespread use of the name Yahweh when referring to Israel’s deity, and thus designated by scholars as “J” in keeping with the German spelling “ Jahwe ,” and one “Elohistic” for its use of the general term for God, Elohim , when relating events that occurred, according to this source’s reconstruction of history, before the name Yahweh was disclosed, and designated in scholarship as “E.” Only much later was it realized that while the Yahwistic stories do indeed merge into what appears to have been a generally coherent, sequential narrative, all of the rest, the narratives that refrain from using the tetragrammaton before the time of Moses and their logical sequels that continue the same plot lines, still exhibit the features that indicate multiple authorship: redundancies (most notably two separate accounts of the revelation of the name Yahweh to Moses! Exod 3:11–15; 6:2–9), contradictions, discontinuities, and stylistic and conceptual inconsistencies beyond what would be expected in a work by a single author. Only at this stage was it discovered that the many passages initially classified as E actually comprise two interwoven narrative threads, one of them long, exquisitely structured, intricately detailed, and literarily and conceptually consistent beyond any other narrative source in the Bible, and the other modest in its scope, fragmentary in several places, and literarily and conceptually less complex (see Seidel 1993 ; Baden 2009 , 11–19). One cannot overestimate the importance of this discovery: it enabled scholarship to recognize the existence of the three separate narrative sources that compose the greater part of Torah, three sources distinct from one another in numerous and readily apparent ways.

This discovery also led to the realization that the fact that two of the sources share a single historical assumption with regard to the revelation of the tetragrammaton was essentially a coincidence of minor import. The disclosure of the name Yahweh, for all its significance, is not the central question on which the sources differ with one another; indeed very few of the differences between the sources stem from this issue. Still, this feature was canonized in scholarly terminology, and to this day biblical scholarship has retained the designations J and E. For a time, the two seemingly Elohistic sources were even designated as E1 and E2, but this classification fell out of favor, as the larger, more structured and consistent of the two (E1) began increasingly to be viewed as a sort of infrastructure for the other sources. It was hypothesized that this source, so broad in its scope and so detailed in all its particulars—including a precise and consistent chronology—must have served as the Torah’s framework, a literary receptacle into which the other sources were inserted. In keeping with the evolutionary approach to historical phenomena that dominated the humanities during the period that these discoveries were made, many claimed—with a certain naiveté, as it turned out—that this was also the most ancient of the four sources. It was therefore termed the Grundschrift or Foundational Text, and it received the designation G (Ewald 1831 )—but this too was not to last.

The role played by the Torah’s legal passages in the process of identifying the sources was no less important than that played by its narratives. In fact, even before biblical scholarship discovered that the narrative portion of the Torah was woven from separate threads that can be disentangled, earlier critics had noted that the legislation in the Torah readily divides into distinct, self-contained legal corpora. When the Enlightenment dawned in Western Europe and commentators began to abandon midrashic, homiletic, and allegorical methods of reconciling the interminable discrepancies between one law in the Torah and another, they realized that when each text is taken at its word rather than being forced into artificial harmony with the others, these inconsistencies indicate that each legal corpus is the work of a different legislator. Here too, owing to the impact of the newly ascendant historical sciences, the differences between the separate legal codes were viewed as evidence of different stages in ancient Israel’s legal and cultic development. It became only natural to regard each code of legislation as a link in the chain of historical progress in Israelite belief and religious practice.

The attempt to reconstruct the history of ancient Israelite religion by comparing and contrasting the different codes of law in the Torah was originally undertaken completely apart from the dissection of the threads that comprise the Torah’s narrative. For the most part, attention was initially focused on the laws of the Sabbath and festivals, as well as those of the sacrificial cult, the temple, and the priesthood, both because commands pertaining to these matters appear in each of the codes, providing an abundance of material for comparison, and because the development of these laws, which deal with the main practical manifestations of Israel’s religious faith, were thought to provide the best indication of the development of Israel’s faith itself.

A truly epoch-making finding in this connection concerned the unique character of the corpus of laws appearing within the framework of Moses’s parting orations, all of which are contained in the canonical book of Deuteronomy (Deut 12–26). The distinctive character of these laws enabled early critics to posit with rare unanimity that at least the greater part of the book of Deuteronomy constitutes an independent literary source and is not the continuation of the four preceding books. A number of unique characteristics typify this “Deuteronomic” law code. Its quintessential feature is the repeated demand to centralize Israel’s religious life, as well as aspects of its monarchic regime and the administration of justice, around a sacrificial cult practiced in a single, central temple—“the site that Yahweh will choose,” in the language of Deuteronomy (Deut 12:5 and passim)—and utterly to eradicate all localized places of worship, along with anything that might facilitate the practice of sacrificial worship “inside your gates” (Deut 12:17, et al.), which Deuteronomy’s law code views as tantamount to idolatry (Deut 11:31–12:8, 29–13:1). To this unique characteristic of Deuteronomy may be added two more. Firstly, of all the law codes in the Torah, only the code appearing in Deuteronomy is said to have been written down in the form of a sēfer or “book,” that is, a scroll, to be transmitted for use by later generations; secondly, only in Deuteronomy is there any mention of such a thing as sēfer ha-tôrâ —“the scroll of the torah ,” which is the term used by Deuteronomy to refer to the book in which the laws were written (Deut 28:61; 29:20; 30:10; 31:24, 26; see Haran 2003 , 35).

These realizations regarding Deuteronomy inevitably led scholars to address the question of a possible connection between the Deuteronomic legislation and the events reported to have taken place during the reign of King Josiah of Judah. According to the account in the book of Kings (2 Kgs 22–23), in the eighteenth year of Josiah’s reign, 622 bce , a scroll referred to as “the scroll of the torah ” was found in the house of Yahweh—the Jerusalem temple—the contents of which impelled Josiah immediately to initiate a comprehensive religious reform throughout the entire kingdom of Judah. The main objective of the reform, implemented by royal decree, was to rid Judah of all local cultic installations, repeatedly referred to in the book of Kings as the “high places”—במות—along with their cultic functionaries and furnishings, and to centralize the worship of Yahweh, thoroughly cleansed of all foreign influences, in the Jerusalem temple. The fact that the three components of Josiah’s reform—a long-lost scroll of legislation said to be from the time of Moses suddenly discovered in the temple, the name of this scroll, sēfer ha-tôrâ , and the nature of the religious reform carried out in accordance with its contents, namely the purification of worship and its centralization in the royal temple city—correspond fully to the three outstanding characteristics of the Deuteronomic law code cannot be mere coincidence. Already in late antiquity, a few of the church fathers held the opinion that the scroll found in the temple during the reign of Josiah was none other than the book of Deuteronomy. In the Middle Ages, an anonymous Jewish commentator whose commentary on Chronicles came erroneously to be attributed to Rashi arrived at the same conclusion (Viezel 2007 ). These early speculations were forgotten over time, however, and only in 1805 did the German scholar Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette raise the possibility anew. De Wette went beyond his premodern predecessors, arriving at the inescapable historical implication of their suggestion, so inconceivable to them, namely that the scroll of Torah said to have been found in the temple during the reign of Josiah was in fact written at that time, in order to provide Mosaic—i.e. divine—authority for the religious reform undertaken by Josiah and his followers.

The distinctive character of the Deuteronomic source, which was thenceforth labeled “D” even though its contents do not comprise the whole of the book of Deuteronomy, was thus first recognized in its unique laws, specifically its cultic legislation. This new awareness led directly to an appreciation of the decisive role that this document played in Israelite history, as the “scroll of torah ” whose provisions the religious reform undertaken in the latter days of the kingdom of Judah sought to implement. These findings soon became axiomatic within critical scholarship. For over two centuries they have served as the basis for dating the other documents of the Torah and other biblical texts as well, and they remain the starting point for all discussion of the history of Israelite religion and the literary components of the Torah.

The second corpus of legislation whose unique character became apparent in the early days of biblical criticism, once again independently of the analysis of the narrative portion of the Torah, is the detailed series of commands occupying most of the central portion of the Torah and said to have been communicated orally to Moses in the tabernacle during the Israelites’ stay at Mount Sinai and thereafter. These laws deal at length and in precise detail with the sacrificial cult, the tabernacle and its accoutrements, the uninterrupted regimen of statutory worship conducted within its confines, the types of ritual impurity and the means of their eradication, permitted and forbidden foods, priests, Levites, and their respective functions, the Sabbath and festivals, the Sabbatical Year, the Jubilee, and related topics. Moreover even those laws said to have been given to Moses in the tabernacle and appearing to address secular issues such as sexual behavior, slavery, theft, jurisprudence, land tenure, and homicide do so from a decidedly sacral perspective, viewing all such matters through the lens of their impact on the cult and ritual purity. It became self-evident that this corpus of legislation, all of which displays a unique and readily identifiable style and all of whose provisions express a cult-focused ideology, is the work of a priestly school of scribal activity, most likely the priesthood of the Jerusalem temple. Scholarly recognition of the priestly provenance of this legislation began to coalesce well before its place among the narrative threads was recognized, and it was unanimously assigned the title Priesterkodex or “Priestly Code.”

Classical pentateuchal criticism reached its maturity when it finally arrived at an appreciation of the nature of the relationship between the separate legal corpora contained in the Torah and the independent threads interwoven in the narrative. This awareness too proceeded in stages. Early critics, heavily influenced both by the specific evolutionary model of Israel’s religious history prevalent at the time and by the dominant Protestant theology widespread among so many of them, assumed that the relationship between law and narrative is a chronological one. It seemed obvious that the authentic, ancient biblical tradition must have consisted of the tales of the Israelites and their ancestors, while the interminable lists of commandments, laws, and statutes presumably reflected a later development, wherein Israel’s natural, popular faith was transformed into an orderly, established religion, decaying into a pedantic, “Jewish” legalism (Baden 2009 , 19–43). This bipartite classification of the Torah literature became untenable, however, when it was realized that the Priestly law code was of a single piece with the detailed narrative thread then known as G. For once these two components had been discerned and isolated, it was impossible to ignore the thoroughgoing literary correlation between the two. Everything in the “G” narrative, from the first creation story on, is directed toward the erection of the tabernacle in the wilderness, the establishment of the sacrificial cult of Yahweh practiced therein, and the series of meetings between Yahweh and Moses that took place there, in the course of which all of Yahweh’s commands—the contents of the Priestly Code, all focused on the worship of Yahweh in the tabernacle and prescribing the measures needed to ensure his continued presence in his earthly abode—were imparted to Moses. A single literary style, a single terminology, a single religious outlook, a single chronology, and a single set of concepts and historical assumptions characterize both the continuous “G” narrative and the corpus of “Priestly” legislation, and the legislation is smoothly and flawlessly incorporated within G’s narrative thread. Once it was acknowledged that a single literary source clearly contained both a complete, sustained narrative thread and a detailed, comprehensive corpus of laws, it became impossible to uphold the theory of an “original,” early narrative to which the laws were a late accretion. Moreover, the two components not only exist side by side within a single literary source; they are entirely interdependent. The Priestly legislation is part of the historical narrative of G, while G’s narrative exists for the sake of the laws it relates and for their sake alone. The designations E1 and G were thus consigned to the dustbin of history, and scholars came to refer to this literary source as a whole—with both its components, the narrative and the laws, comprising one continuous strand—as the Priestly document, or P.

It also became apparent that the basic format observable in the Priestly document, that of a continuous historical narrative containing a legal corpus, is observable in the other sources as well. Like P, each of the two non-priestly narrative strands, one of which retained its original designation, J, and the other called simply E (the designation E2 having become superfluous as E1 came to be known first as G and finally as P), tells of the patriarchs and their descendants, of the oppression in Egypt and the Exodus. Similarly, each narrative, again like P, goes on to tell of a defining, transformational encounter with Yahweh that occurred shortly after the Exodus at the foot of a certain mountain in the wilderness—Mount Sinai in J, Mount Horeb in E—at which time Yahweh made a covenant with the Israelite people, stipulating its terms in the form of laws and commandments imparted to them through the agency of Moses. When each of these two narratives arrives, in the course of its account, at the moment at which Yahweh actually speaks his laws to Moses, it provides, just as P does, its own version of the laws themselves, one self-contained legal corpus appearing in each of the two narratives. Finally, just as with P, internal connections between the narrative and the code of laws in both J and E seem to indicate that in both cases, the two components, narrative and law, are authentic and integral parts of a single literary work.

The narrative threads in these three sources, J, E, and P, after alternating and intersecting throughout the entire length of the Torah, ultimately reach the period toward the end of Moses’s lifetime when, after years of journeying in the wilderness, the Israelites are finally encamped on the Jordan in preparation for their conquest of Canaan. At this point, and before the events of Moses’s final days and his death in Moab are recounted, J, E, and P break off, and the fourth literary source appears. This source—D, the existence of which was originally established, as explained above, through its distinctive laws—also consists of two elements, a self-contained code of legislation and a narrative expressly designed to provide a historical context for the laws. The main narrative of D is actually very brief. It reports only that shortly before his death, Moses assembled the Israelites, delivered to them a series of parting orations, committed them to writing, and entrusted “this scroll of the torah ” (Deut 31:26) to “the priests, sons of Levi” (v. 9)—after which he took his leave of them and died. Almost all of the rest of D consists of the orations themselves, presented verbatim as the direct speech of Moses. These discourses are often referred to as historical surveys, but this is not strictly the case. While Moses does make frequent reference to past events, the orations attributed to him in D are essentially words of reproach and castigation, exhortation and encouragement, blessing and curse. No comprehensive and continuous historical account of the patriarchal period and the Exodus, analogous to those found in J, E, and P, can be detected, nor does D’s conception of Moses’s parting words call for one. Just as the laws are the raison d’être of the narrative in the other sources, so too in D; the entire function of the orations is to impress upon the listener the dire necessity of adhering to all the commands of the torah contained within them. Thus, D’s code of laws on the one hand, and the rhetorical setting in which it is presented, together with the external narrative framework, on the other, comprise a single literary unity; the Deuteronomic source is inconceivable without its two interrelated, interacting components.

We noted above that the most glaring contradictions in the Torah occur in the account of the lawgiving and in the specific provisions of the laws themselves. The Torah presents four different stories, each of which professes to provide the sole and exclusive account of the events surrounding the promulgation of Yahweh’s commands to Israel, and each of which ignores and contradicts the other three. The Torah also contains four bodies of legislation, each of which is an inseparable part of one of these four stories, each of which claims to be the sole and unique formulation of Yahweh’s commands given to Israel through Moses, and each of which ignores and contradicts the other three. The moment the literary problem of the Torah is formulated in this manner, it becomes evident that the problem holds the key to its own solution. The number of independent narrative threads that make up the Torah is equal to the number of law codes it contains—four—with each narrative thread containing its own independent code of legislation. The problem of the composition of the Torah is thus solved comprehensively and economically.

The theory that gradually evolved in biblical scholarship on the basis of all of the above is that the canonical Torah is a compilation of four literary sources. The three sources with lengthy narrative portions, J, E, and P, each of which tells its own version of Israel’s prehistory from its origins until the death of Moses, and each of which includes the laws that, in its view, Israel was commanded to obey, appear first, interwoven strictly according to chronological lines from the beginning of the Torah until the end of Numbers. Near the end of this composition, the fourth source, D, is inserted—in its entirety, since D’s frame narrative begins just prior to the end of Moses’s life and tells only of his parting convocation of the Israelites and of his valedictory addresses to them, one of which contains the Deuteronomic code of laws. Following this, the three other sources resurface, intertwined and alternating as before, and reach their accounts of Moses’s final actions and his death, and with this the Torah concludes.

When the four interwoven threads are disentangled and considered separately, all of them exhibit—albeit to varying degrees—remarkable narrative contiguity, legislative completeness, and internal consistency. It is readily apparent that each was, at least originally, a work of considerable scope, having its own distinctive structure, historical content, religious and conceptual outlook, and style. It is equally apparent that the combination of these four sources was undertaken with the express aim of preserving intact the precise verbal form of each one to the greatest extent possible and intervening—altering, adding, deleting, or rearranging (see Baden 2010 )—only when absolutely unavoidable.

This theory is known as the Documentary Hypothesis. The term “documentary” is intended to convey that the Torah was created through the amalgamation of independent written texts, each of which was already a complete and self-contained work, a document , by the time it was incorporated in the Torah. Each document, the theory claims, already included both an account of the prehistory of Israel and a version of Yahweh’s laws. The term “documentary” is also employed to the exclusion of competing hypotheses offered before and even after this one was formulated. It implies that the Torah is neither an anthology of oral traditions nor a patchwork of unrelated written passages sewn together associatively. Nor is it a collection of fragments of lore and information assembled either randomly or by design. The theory of interwoven documents rejects as well the idea that there was once an “original” Torah into which other texts were interpolated or to which they were appended, and it similarly denies that the Torah underwent a long and gradual process of editorial stratification. It also diverges entirely from the notion that the Torah is a systematic reworking of existing texts, be they few or many, in order to stamp the whole with a consistent ideological or theological imprint. The Documentary Hypothesis proffers an alternative explanation to all of the above, claiming that the Torah was compiled from three preexisting, written narrative works which extend throughout its entire length, and a fourth preexisting, written narrative work inserted near the end of the composition, and it seeks to demonstrate that in this conception lies the resolution of the contradictions, redundancies, discontinuities, and differences of terminology, style, and outlook that make the canonical Torah unintelligible.

Suggested Reading

Baden, J. S.   2012 . The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis . New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Baden, J. S.   2013 . The Promise to the Patriarchs . Oxford: University Press.

Campbell, A. F. and O’Brien, M. A.   1993 . Sources of the Pentateuch . Minneapolis: Fortress.

Friedman, R. E.   1992 . “ Torah (Pentateuch), ” ABD 6:605–621.

Friedman, R. E.   2003 . The Bible With Sources Revealed . San Francisco: Harper.

Friedman, R. E. and Dolansky Overton, S.   2007 . “ Pentateuch, ” EJ2 15:730–751.

Rofé, A.   1999 . Introduction to the Composition of the Pentateuch . Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.

Rogerson, J. W.   1985 . Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany . London: SPCK.

Schwartz, B.J.   2011 . “Does Recent Scholarship’s Critique of the Documentary Hypothesis Constitute Grounds for its Rejection?” In The Pentateuch: International Perspectives on Current Research , edited by T. B. Dozeman et al., 3–16. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

Schwartz, B. J.   2016 . “The Pentateuchal Sources and the Former Prophets: A Neo-Documentarian’s Perspective.” In The Formation of the Pentateuch: Bridging the Academic Discourses of Europe, Israel, and North America , edited by J. C. Gertz , et. al., 783–793. FAT 111. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

Stackert, J.   2014 . A Prophet Like Moses: Prophecy, Law, and Israelite Religion . Oxford: University Press.

Yoreh, T. L.   2010 . The First Book of God . BZAW 402. New York: De Gruyter.

Works Cited

Arnold, W. T.   2003 . “Pentateuchal Criticism, History of.” In Dictionary of the Old Testament: Pentateuch , edited by T. D. Alexander and D. W. Baker , 622–631. Downers Grove: InterVarsity.

Astruc, J.   1753 . Conjectures sur les mémoires originaux dont il paroit que Moyse s’est servi pour composer le livre de la Genèse: Avec des remarques qui appuient ou qui éclaircissent ces conjectures . Brussels: Fricx.

Baden, J. S.   2009 . J, E, and the Redaction of the Pentateuch . FAT 68. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

Baden, J. S.   2010 . “ The Original Place of the Priestly Manna Story in Exodus 16. ” ZAW 122: 491–504.

Baker, D. W.   2003 . “Source Criticism.” In Dictionary of the Old Testament: Pentateuch , edited by T. D. Alexander and D. W. Baker , 798–805. Downers Grove: InterVarsity.

Chavel, S.   2011 . “The Literary Development of Deuteronomy 12: Between Religious Ideal and Social Reality.” In The Pentateuch: International Perspectives on Current Research , edited by T. B. Dozeman , et al., 303–326. FAT 78. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

Ewald, H.   1831 . “Review of J. Stähelin, Kritische Untersuchungen über die Genesis .” TSK 4:596–606.

Greenberg, M.   1972 . “Narrative and Redactional Art in the Plagues Pericope (Exod 7–11).” In Bible and Jewish History , edited by B. Uffenheimer , 65–75. Tel Aviv: University Press (Hebrew).

Haran, M.   2003 . The Biblical Collection . Vol. 2. Jerusalem: Magnes (Hebrew).

Kuhl, C.   1952 . “ Die Wiederaufnahme: Ein literarkritisches Prinzip? ” ZAW 64: 1–11.

Nelson, R. D.   2002 . Deuteronomy: A Commentary . Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox.

Nicholson, E.   1998 . The Pentateuch in the Twentieth Century: The Legacy of Julius Wellhausen . Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Paran, M.   1989 . The Forms of the Priestly Style in the Pentateuch: Patterns, Linguistic Usages, Syntactic Structures . Jerusalem: Magnes (Hebrew).

Schwartz, B. J.   1996 a. “The Priestly Account of the Theophany and Lawgiving at Sinai.” In Texts, Temples, and Traditions: A Tribute to Menahem Haran , edited by M. V. Fox et al., 103–134. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.

Schwartz, B. J.   1996 b. “‘ Profane’ Slaughter and the Integrity of the Priestly Code. ” HUCA 67: 15–42.

Schwartz, B. J.   2007 . “The Flood Narratives in the Torah and the Question of Where History Begins.” In Shai le-Sara Japhet: Studies in the Bible, Its Exegesis and Its Language , edited by M. Bar Asher et al., 139–154. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute (Hebrew).

Schwartz, B. J.   2012 . “How the Compiler of the Pentateuch Worked: The Composition of Genesis 37.” In The Book of Genesis: Composition, Reception, and Interpretation , edited by C. A. Evans et al., 263–278. Leiden: Brill.

Seidel, B.   1993 . Karl David Ilgen und die Pentateuchforschung im Umkreis der sogenannten älteren Urkundenhypothese: Studien zur Geschichte der exegetischen Hermeneutik in der Späten Aufklärung . Berlin: de Gruyter.

Talmon, S.   1978 . “The Presentation of Synchroneity and Simultaneity in Biblical Narrative.” In Studies in Hebrew Narrative Art Throughout the Ages , edited by J. Heinemann and S. Werses , 9–26. Jerusalem: Magnes.

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Vogt, P. T.   2006 . Deuteronomic Theology and the Significance of Torah: A Reappraisal . Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.

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Weinfeld, M.   1991 . Deuteronomy 1–11 . AB 5. New York: Doubleday.

It is a pleasure to thank Yedidya Naveh for his diligent efforts in producing the English text of this chapter and Maya Rosen for her expert editing and proofreading, and to acknowledge the kind assistance provided by the editors of this volume. This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 1838/14).

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Chapter 1. The Documentary Hypothesis

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The Documentary Hypothesis

The Documentary Hypothesis was the most influential and widespread theory of the composition of the Pentateuch for most of the twentieth century. This essay examines the literary indicators that underlie the Documentary Hypothesis, the development of the theory, and its salient claims and features.

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