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The Growth of the Pentateuch, by Immanuel Lewy
- Abstract
This is a scholarly and closely argued attempt to provide an alternative to the documentary analysis of the Pentateuch associated with the name of the German critic of the last century, Julius Wellhausen, whose theory has been the orthodox view among Old Testament scholars. The Wellhausen school holds, in essence, that the first five books of the Bible as we now have them are not the unitary work of a single hand, but a combination of four distinct documentary sources, spanning a period of nearly five centuries and fitted together by several different redactors. The oldest of the four sources, J (dated from around 850 B.C.E.), is identified mainly by a preference for the name Jahweh as a designation of God, while those passages in which the epithet Elohim was preferred, Wellhausen attributed to source E (c. 750).
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