What is the documentary theory?

"Starting with Spinoza in the 17th cent, and flourishing with German scholarship in the mid-19th century, analysis grew to the point where, as E. Speiser says in his introduction to the Anchor Bible Genesis, "the conclusion which virtually all modern scholars are willing to accept, is that the Pentateuch was in reality a composite work, the product of many hands and periods." As with any theory, its acceptance rests on its ability to explain various problems and discrepancies in the text. Although today many points remain in dispute within this school of thought, those disputes are about which source is responsible for a given passage and what were the influences on that source, and are not about whether or not there were different sources or what were the principal characteristics and concerns of each source. As a gross over-simplification of that perspective, analysis of the Torah reveals four separate strands or sources, each with its own vocabulary, its own approach and concerns." These four sources are known as J, E, P and D. (7)

How was this determined? First, it was noted that the Torah used different names for God. From this one can easily unwind much of the Torah into basic sources. That by itself is not considered proof of anything. However, it turns out that each of these sources tells an entirely separate and self-sufficient sets of stories.

Further, it is what was discovered after this was done that was so shocking: Once the sources were separated, historians were amazed to find that each one of them exactly aligned with a specific set of political and theological views, all contrasting sharply with each other. All of the 'E' writings make perfect sense from the viewpoint of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. All of the 'J' writings make perfect sense from the viewpoint of people on the southern kingdom, Judea. The 'P' sources clearly emerge as being the point of view of the priestly administration in biblical Israel, etc. This is explained in detail in Richard Friedman's "Who Wrote the Bible".

Orthodox Jews and similarly minded Christians question the role of the redactor. Why, they ask, would a redactor leave any trace of the sources? They assume that a redactor must have wished to erase all traces of the sources. Since this clearly is not so, they conclude that either the redactor must have been incompetent, or that there was no redactor (i.e. that God dictated every word of the Torah to Moses). However, these are false assumptions; there is simply no need to assume them. At the time that the Torah was redacted, people knew that there were multiple sources, so hiding this would be impossible. Further, there was no reason to do this - at that time people did not believe that Moses wrote every word of the Torah. In other words, fundamentalist Jews and Christians make the mistake of projecting later views backwards on the Israelites of 2,400 years ago. This is a historical anachronism.

From the standpoint of the ancient Israelites, it was important to retain their sacred literature. The Torah's final redaction was never a project to erase any trace of its original literary sources. The redactor was simply a way to unify the religious and cultural heritage of the Jewish people

Note that the documentary hypothesis is not one specific theory. This name is given to any understanding of the origin of the Torah that recognizes that there are basically four sources that were somehow redacted together into a final version. One could claim that one redactor wove together four specific texts, or one could hold that entire nation of Israel slowly created a consensus work based on various strands of the Israelite tradition, or anything in between. Gerald A. Larue writes:

"Back of each of the four sources lie traditions that may have been both oral and written. Some may have been preserved in the songs, ballads, and folktales of different tribal groups, some in written form in sanctuaries. The so-called 'documents' should not be considered as mutually exclusive writings, completely independent of one another, but rather as a continual stream of literature representing a pattern of progressive interpretation of traditions and history." (8)

In fact, one can say that the beginning of higher criticism of Jewish religious texts began as far back as the Talmudic era. Consider the following.

"Starting from the simple question of how to reconcile inconsistencies in the text, and refusing to accept forced explanations to harmonize them, scholars eventually arrived at the theory that the Torah was composed of selections woven together from several, at times inconsistent, sources dealing with the same and related subjects. The reasoning followed in this kind of analysis is somewhat similar to that of the Talmudic sages and later rabbis who held that inconsistent clauses and terminology in a single paragraph of the Mishna must have originated with different sages, and who recognized that Moses could not have written passages of the Torah that contain information unavailable to him, such as the last chapter of Deuteronomy, which describes his death and its aftermath." (9)