Source Criticism (Documentary Hypothesis)

Source criticism (Literarkritik) seeks the written documents that lie behind a composite biblical text. Its most famous result is the Documentary Hypothesis, the claim that the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) was woven together from four originally independent sources, conventionally labeled J, E, D, and P. The hypothesis grew over the nineteenth century and received its classic synthesis from Julius Wellhausen, whose 1878 Prolegomena to the History of Israel argued that the sources reflect successive stages in the development of Israelite religion. Richard Elliott Friedman's 1987 Who Wrote the Bible? presented the theory to a wide audience with vivid arguments for who wrote each source and when. Source criticism separates the strands by criteria such as the divine name used, doublets, vocabulary, style, and theology, then reconstructs how a redactor combined them.