The Making of the Pentateuch

The Making of the Pentateuch ("The Making of the Pentateuch: A Methodological Study", JSOT Press, Sheffield, 1987) by R. N. Whybray, Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament Studies at the University of Hull (UK), was a major contribution to the field of Old Testament studies, and specifically to theories on the origins and composition of the Pentateuch. Its originality lay in its detailed critique of the documentary hypothesis, and it remains a standard text on many reading lists.

For almost a century prior to Whybray's book, a scholarly consensus had developed regarding the question of Pentateuchal origins – the composition and dates of the first five books of the Old Testament. In the closing decades of the 19th century Julius Wellhausen published Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, in which he had set out the definitive version of the historical development of the Hebrew bible. According to this hypothesis, the Pentateuch – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy – was originally four separate documents, retelling the same episodes and stories, but with differing emphases designed to further the theological and political agendas of their authors. Their combination by a Redactor (editor) into a single narrative spread over five books had resulted in many inconsistencies and repetitious stories, which could be analysed through the methodology of source criticism to reconstruct the original documents.

Wellhausen had concentrated exclusively on the written text of the Pentateuch, but in the next generation Hermann Gunkel developed form criticism, a methodology which he claimed could identify the various genres which had contributed to the text and thus reconstruct its tradition history. Gunkel and his followers, notably Martin Noth, used this new methodology to discover the oral sagas which formed the basis of the written texts of the Pentateuch.

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