Who wrote the Torah? The documentary hypothesis and its critics

The documentary hypothesis is one of the models biblical scholars use to explain the origins and composition of the Torah, and it is a debate, not a settled answer. According to Jewish tradition, the scriptures were dictated by God to Moses. The hypothesis, developed by scholars, holds instead that the Torah is a compilation of four originally independent documents, which are called the Jahwist (J), the Elohist (E), the Deuteronomist (D) and the Priestly (P) sources.

The idea began with attention to detail. In the mid-18th century, scholars started a critical study of doublets (parallel accounts of the same incident), inconsistencies, and changes in style and vocabulary in the Torah. In 1780 Johann Eichhorn, building on Jean Astruc's work, proposed that Genesis was composed by combining two sources. Later a third, the Deuteronomist, was added, and the Elohist was split to make the Priestly source, increasing the number to four.

A version of the hypothesis, frequently identified with Julius Wellhausen, was almost universally accepted for most of the 20th century. Yet it owed little to Wellhausen himself: it was mainly the work of Hupfeld, Reuss, Graf and others. In the classical dating, J belongs to the time of Solomon (c. 950 BCE) and P to Ezra's time in the 5th century BCE.

Today the consensus around the classical version has faltered. In the mid-1970s Van Seters, Schmid and Rendtorff argued that J should be dated no earlier than the Babylonian captivity and rejected a substantial E source. The general trend now is to see the final Torah as a unity based on earlier sources, likely completed in the Persian period.