Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels

Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (German: [pʁoleˈɡoːmɛna tsuːɐ̯ ɡəˈʃɪçtə ˈɪsʁaɛls], to the History of Israel) is a book by German biblical scholar and orientalist Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) that formulated but did not found the documentary hypothesis, a theory on the composition history of the Torah or Pentateuch. Influential and long debated, the volume is often compared for its impact in its field with Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

First published as Geschichte Israels ("History of Israel") in 1878, the work had a second edition in 1883, under the title Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels. The official English translation by J. Sutherland Black and Allan Menzies, with a preface by Wellhausen's friend and colleague the no less prominent British biblical scholar and orientalist William Robertson Smith, then came in 1885. Between the original publication and translation, Wellhausen composed an 1881 article, originally called "Jewish History" but published as "Israel" for Smith's ninth edition of Encyclopædia Britannica, a piece published repeatedly in English and in German.

Although the Prolegomena was originally intended as the first part of a two-volume work on the history of Israel and ancient Judaism, the second volume did not appear until 1894, as Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte.

(All references are to the Project Gutenberg e-text of Wellhausen's "Prolegomena")

The subject of the Prolegomena is the origins of the Pentateuch. It reviews all the major advances of the preceding century by Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, Wilhelm de Wette, Karl Heinrich Graf, Kuenen, Noldeke, Colenso and others, and puts forward the author's view, which is that the Priestly source was the last of the four sources, written during the Babylonian exile c.550 BC. The implication to be drawn from this was that the Mosaic Law contained in Leviticus, which is largely by the Priestly author, as well as the substantial amounts of material from the Priestly source to be found in Genesis, Exodus and the Book of Numbers, did not exist in the age of Joshua, Samuel, David and Solomon.

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