Criticisms of Wellhausen

Wellhausen’s influence was great, but not universal. For example:

• Sayce, Keil, Delitzsch, Cassuto, Harrison, Archer, Kikawada, Quinn, and Wenham have argued against the theory Wellhausen laid out in Prolegomena.

• Those in the archaeologically oriented “Albright school” accepted its general outline, but contended that the various documents contained major amounts of well-preserved Mosaic-era traditions, so that they were not wholly the creations of their supposed authors.

• Eissfeldt, Schmid, Kaufmann, and Friedman have also published modifications of the Wellhausen approach.

Each reaction questions some aspect of the “Documentary Hypothesis”; taken together, they also call into question a large proportion of its specific contentions. Propp’s commentary on Exodus details how even firm advocates of the Documentary Hypothesis vigorously disagree on source identifications throughout the book.

In his 1987 The Making of the Pentateuch, Whybray reviewed the history of the Documentary Hypothesis and the two most popular major opposing views:

1. The “fragmentary hypothesis”—the Pentateuch arose from many individual sources rather than a few major documents (Rendtdorff, Blum).

2. The “supplementary hypothesis”—the Pentateuch is, at its core, a single work to which a variety of later modifications were made, mostly via relatively small additions (Van Seters).

Whybray argues that the Documentary Hypothesis is the least convincing of the three options. He claims—on the basis of what is understood about documents, sources, and authors elsewhere in the ancient world—that the Documentary Hypothesis is improbable because of its complexity, including its elaborate evolutionary trajectory. He also attacks it for its adherence to the idea that the individual sources do not duplicate each other (indeed, carefully avoid duplication) while the eventual redactors revel in duplication. He asserts that “the hypothesis can only be maintained on the assumption that, while consistency was the hallmark of the various documents, inconsistency was the hallmark of the redactors.”