Difference between revisions of "Category:Documentary Hypothesis (subject)"

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Documentary Hypothesis

Overview

In the 17th century the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch was openly questioned by Thomas Hobbes (1651) and Baruch Spinoza (1670), based on the many inconsistencies and contradictions in the text.

In 1753, in the attempt of defending the Mosaic authenticity of the Book of Genesis, Jean Astruc identified four documents (or Memoirs) in Genesis which he claimed Moses wrote and were then combined into a single work by a later editor. Astruc was thus the first to argue what would become known as the Documentary Hypothesis.

At the beginning of the 19th century Johann Gottfried Eichhorn and other (mostly German) scholars extended Astruc's analysis beyond Genesis to the entire Pentateuch and concluded that Moses could not have been the author of any part of it.

In the 1870s, Julius Wellhausen gave coherent form to all theses theories, setting out the four-source hypothesis of Pentateuchal origins that took his name. Wellhausen accepted the naming and definition of the four sources as they had emerged in previous scholarship--the Jahwish, the Elohist, the Deuteronomist, and the Priestly Author. Contrary to the common opinion of his time, he gave a late (exilic or post-exilic) dating to the Priestly Author and identified in Ezra the final editor of the Pentateuch.

Wellhausen's theory dominated scholarship for most of the 20th century. The idea however that the four sources existed as autonomous documents has lost support in the last twenty years, being replaced by more complex theories on the composition and transmission of the text. The lasting legacy of the Documentary Hypothesis remains in the idea that the Pentateuch does not go back to a single author (Moses or else) but was the work of many hands and many centuries, and that its final form belongs to the post-exilic period.

External links

• [Wikipedia]