Documentary Theory

The Documentary theory is the dominant view of most modern scholars on the formation of the books of the Old Testament.
The tradition that one person, Moses, alone wrote the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy presented problems. People observed contradictions in the text. It would report events in a particular order, and later it would say that those same events happened in a different order. It would say that there were two of something, and elsewhere it would say that there were fourteen of that same thing. It would say that the Moabites did something, and later it would say that it was the Midianites who did it. It would describe Moses as going to a Tabernacle in a chapter before Moses builds the Tabernacle. People also noticed that the Five Books of Moses included things that Moses could not have known or was not likely to have said. The text, after all, gave an account of Moses’ death. It also said that Moses was the humblest man on earth; and normally one would not expect the humblest man on earth to point out that he is the humblest man on earth.
Early investigators found that in most cases one of the two versions of a doublet story would refer to the deity by the divine name, Yahweh (formerly mispronounced Jehovah), and the other version of the story would refer to the deity simply as “God.” That is, the doublets lined up into two groups of parallel versions of stories. Each group was almost always consistent about the name of the deity that it used. Moreover, the investigators found that it was not only the names of the deity that lined up. They found various other terms and characteristics that regularly appeared in one or the other group. This tended to support the hypothesis that someone had taken two different old source documents, cut them up, and woven them together to form the continuous story in the Five Books of Moses.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the two-source hypothesis was expanded. Scholars found evidence that there were not two major source documents in the Pentateuch after all — there were four! Two scholars found that in the first four books of the Bible there were not only doublets, but a number of trivets of stories. This converged with other evidence, involving contradictions and characteristic language, that persuaded them that they had found another source within the Pentateuch. And then a young- German scholar, W. M . L. De Wette, observed in his doctoral dissertation that the fifth of the Five Books of Moses, the book of Deuteronomy, was strikingly different in its language from the four books that preceded it. None of the three old source documents appeared to continue into this book. De Wette hypothesized that Deuteronomy was a separate, fourth source.
For working purposes, the four documents were identified by alphabetic symbols. The document that was associated with the divine name Yahweh/Jehovah was called J. The document that was identified as referring to the deity as God (in Hebrew, Elohim) was called E. The third document, by far the largest, included most of the legal sections and concentrated a great deal on matters having to do with priests, and so it was called P. And the source that was found only in the book of Deuteronomy was called D. The question was how to uncover the history of these four documents— not only who wrote them, but why four different versions of the story were written, what their relationship to each other was, whether any of the authors were aware of the existence of the others’ texts, when in history each was produced, how they were preserved and combined, and a host of other questions.
Two nineteenth-century figures stand out. They approached the problem in very different ways, but they arrived at complementary findings. One of them, Karl Heinrich Graf, worked on deducing from references in the various biblical texts which of the texts logically must have preceded or followed others. The other investigator, Wilhelm Vatke, sought to trace the history of the development of ancient Israelite religion by examining texts for clues as to whether they reflected early or late stages of the religion. Graf concluded that the J and E documents were the oldest versions of the biblical stories, for they (and other early biblical writings) were unaware of matters that were treated in other documents. D was later than j and E, for it showed acquaintance with developments in a later period of history. And P, the priestly version of the story, was the latest of all, for it referred to a variety of matters that were unknown in all of the earlier portions of the Bible such as the books of the prophets. Vatke meanwhile concluded that J and E reflected a very early stage in the development of Israelite religion, when it was essentially a nature/fertility religion. He concluded that D reflected a middle stage of religious development, when the faith of Israel was a spiritual/ethical religion; in short, the age of the great Israelite prophets. And he regarded the P document as reflecting the latest stage of Israelite religion, the stage of priestly religion, based on priests, sacrifices, ritual, and law. Vatke’s attempt to reconstruct the development of the religion of Israel and Graf’s attempt to reconstruct the development of the sources of the Pentateuch pointed in the same direction. Namely, the great majority of the laws and much of the narrative of the Pentateuch were not a part of life in the days of Moses — much less were they written by Moses—nor even of life in the days of the kings and prophets of Israel. Rather, they were written by someone who lived toward the end of the biblical period. These ideas came to dominate the field of biblical studies for a hundred years primarily because of the work of one man: Wellhausen.
As Freud is to psychology or Weber to sociology, Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) stands out as a powerful figure in the investigation into the authorship of the Bible and in the history of biblical scholarship in general. His books were extremely influential. Across Europe and England, people who had not accepted the critical investigation into who wrote the Bible began to be persuaded. Wellhausen’s reputation was tremendous. It is difficult to pinpoint any one person as the “founder,” “father,” or “first to” of this enterprise, because a number of persons made contributions that brought the search to some new stage. Indeed, books and articles on the field of biblical scholarship attribute these titles variously to Hobbes, Spinoza, Simon, Astruc, Eichhorn, Graf, or Wellhausen. Wellhausen himself applies such a term to De Wette. But Wellhausen occupies a special place in the history of this enterprise. His contribution does not so much constitute a beginning as a culmination in that history. Much of what Wellhausen had to say was taken from those who preceded him, but Wellhausen’s contribution was to bring all of these components together, along with considerable research and argumentation of his own, into a clear, organized synthesis.
Wellhausen accepted Vatke’s picture of the religion of Israel as having developed in three stages, and he accepted Graf’s picture of the documents as having been written in three distinct periods. He then simply put the two pictures together. He examined the biblical stories and laws that appear in J and E, and he argued that they reflected the way of life of the nature/fertility stage of religion. He argued that the stories and laws of Deuteronomy (D) reflected the life of the spiritual/ethical stage. And he argued that P derived from the priestly/legal stage. He traced the characteristics of each stage and period meticulously through the text of each document, examining the way in which the document reflected each of several fundamental aspects of religion: the character of the clergy, the types of sacrifices, the places of worship, and the religious holidays. He drew on both the legal and the narrative sections, through all five books of the Pentateuch, and through other historical and prophetic books of the Bible. His presentation was sensible, articulate, and extremely influential. His was a powerful construction, above all, because it did more than just divide the sources by the usual criteria (doublets, contradictions, etc.). It tied the source documents to history. It provided a believable framework in which they could have developed.
Wellhausen accepted an earlier claim that the law was later than the prophets, and he accepted Graf’s claim that the Tabernacle was nothing more than a symbol of the Temple, so the scene was set. Wellhausen took the case one step further. For him, the Tabernacle was the key to the whole puzzle. The history of the centralization of the religion around the Tabernacle (meaning around the Temple) was the clue to the history of the writers: In the stories and laws of J and E, there was no idea of centralization. Why? Because they were written in the early days of Israel, when anyone could sacrifice anywhere. In D, centralization was strictly demanded: “You must only sacrifice at the place where Yahweh causes his name to dwell.” Why? Because it was from the time of King Josiah, a time when centralization was first introduced and needed firm insistence. In P, Wellhausen said, centralization was not demanded. It was assumed. Over and over in the laws and stories of P, it was simply understood that there was only one place on earth where one could sacrifice, and that one place was the Tabernacle (meaning the Temple). Why? Because it came from the time of the second Temple, a time when it was an accepted fact that people were supposed to sacrifice only at the Temple. The laws and stories of P take centralisation for granted.
There was one more piece of evidence for looking for the writer of P in the days of the second Temple. That evidence was the book of the prophet Ezekiel. Like the prophet Jeremiah, Ezekiel was a priest. Unlike Jeremiah, Ezekiel was an Aaronid priest. Like Jeremiah, Ezekiel went into exile. Unlike Jeremiah, Ezekiel was exiled in Babylonia. There he produced his book. That book, the book of Ezekiel, is written in a style and language remarkably similar to P’s. It is almost as much like P as Jeremiah is like D; there are whole passages in Ezekiel that are nearly word-for-word like passages in P. For Wellhausen, one passage in Ezekiel was particularly important. Ezekiel declares that, in the future, only certain Levites may be priests. Al l others are disqualified from the priesthood because of their past transgressions. The only Levites who may function as priests are those who are descendants of Zadok.1 Zadok was David’s Aaronid priest. And so, according to Ezekiel, only Aaronid priests are legitimate. All others are excluded. A nd this, Wellhausen said, is just the point of view in P. It is quite clear in P that only Aaronids are priests. Several P stories and many P laws make this point crystal clear. P simply does not recognize Moses’ descendants or anyone else as legitimate priests. Wellhausen concluded that P was written in the 167 days of the second Temple, when the Aaronid priests came to power. They took Ezekiel’s prophecy as their inspiration, and, once and for all, the competition between the priestly families was over. The Aaronids had won, and one of them wrote a “torah of Moses” that reflected their victory.
Thus the Wellhausen model began to answer the question of why the different sources existed. The first real acceptance of this field of study, then, came when historical and literary analyses were first successfully merged. This model of the combination of the source documents came to be known as the Documentary Hypothesis. It has dominated the field ever since. To this day, if you want to disagree, you disagree with Wellhausen. If you want to pose a new model, you compare its merits with those of Wellhausen’s model.
Richard Elliott Friedman in Who Wrote the Bible? (1997)