The Pentateuch Document Analysis

Throughout the entire course of history, the Bible and its contents have been contested. In the past people believed in different gods, and today many people believe that there is no God. Once someone has denied what the Bible says, they are forced to believe in something else. Many scholars have attacked the Bible itself and claimed that it is false. One way that they do that is by denying that Moses wrote the Pentateuch and that the stories found within are fiction. This accusation that Moses did not write the Pentateuch has come about relatively recently. The Bible itself claims that Moses wrote the Bible and the Church has believed this to be true since the beginning. It wasn’t until the Enlightenment and the Reformation that people began to question these things. The first person to question this was Jean Astruc. He believed that the different usage of the names of God Yahweh and Elohim was proof that there were different sources for the authorship of the Pentateuch. Then Julius Wellenhausen expanded upon this idea and formed the basis of what we know today as the JEDP document hypothesis. The J is for Yahweh, E is for …show more content…
According to this theory, the J document came about around the ninth century B.C. and preferred to use the term Yahweh for God while also referring to him using humanlike terms. Angels do and other various messengers do appear sometimes in the J document, however, God tended to interact with his chosen people face to face. Then later on, sometime around 750 B.C., the E document came about in order to correct the J document. The E document preferred not to use anthropomorphic terms; it used instead the name Elohim. This term was much more reverent and less intimate than Yahweh. The E document also used a different literary style than the J document. It was more formal and tended to use