There has been an effort over the last few centuries to say that Moses was not the author of Deuteronomy, an effort that has been called the “Documentary Hypothesis”, or “Graf-Wellhausen Hypothesis” or JEDP (Jahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, Priestly source). To summarize these sources,
J documents are the sections, verses, or in some cases parts of verses that were written by one or more authors who preferred to use the Hebrew name Jahweh (Jehovah) to refer to God. It is proposed that this author wrote about 900–850 B.C.
E documents are the texts that use the name Elohim for God and were supposedly written around 750–700 B.C.
D stands for Deuteronomy, most of which was written by a different author or group of authors, perhaps around the time of King Josiah’s reforms in 621 B.C.
P stands for Priest and identifies the texts in Leviticus and elsewhere in the Pentateuch that were written by a priest or priests during the exile in Babylon after 586 B.C.
This hypothesis claims that Moses did not pen this or even the other books of the Pentateuch (some add the book of Joshua to the Pentateuch to make what is called the Hexateuch), but that these were written and compiled by later authors, and these documents were combined or redacted to the form we have now. A book by Julius Wellhausen entitled the “Prolegomena to the History of Israel” first advanced this idea:
At last I took courage and made my way through Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and even through Knobel’s Commentary to these books. But it was in vain that I looked for the light which was to be shed from this source on the historical and prophetical books. On the contrary, my enjoyment of the latter was marred by the Law; it did not bring them any nearer me, but intruded itself uneasily, like a ghost that makes a noise indeed, but is not visible and really effects nothing. Even where there were points of contact between it and them, differences also made themselves felt, and I found it impossible to give a candid decision in favour of the priority of the Law. Dimly I began to perceive that throughout there was between them all the difference that separates two wholly distinct worlds. Yet, so far from attaining clear conceptions, I only fell into deeper confusion, which was worse confounded by the explanations of Ewald in the second volume of history of Israel. At last, in the course of a casual visit in G€ttingen in the summer of 1867, I learned through Ritschl that Karl Heinrich Graf placed the law later than the Prophets, and, almost without knowing his reasons for the hypothesis, I was prepared to accept it; I readily acknowledged to myself the possibility of understanding Hebrew antiquity without the book of the Torah.
(“Prolegomena to the History of Israel”, quoted at https://www.aomin.org/aoblog/reformed-apologetics/a-critical-assessment-of-the-graf-wellhausen-documentary-hypothesis/)
The form of the Documentary Hypothesis we have today was first introduced by Wellhausen and K.H. Graf in 1895, although this is merely the latest in the evolution of this hypothesis. It actually began with Jewish scholar Abraham Ibn Ezra in the 1200’s, who noted that some verses seemed out of place but did not pursue a study of them. This was picked up by a pantheist named Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza:
About five hundred years later, the famous Jewish philosopher Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (1632–1677) picked up on what Ibn Ezra had stated and asserted that Ibn Ezra did not believe Moses wrote the Pentateuch. Others disagreed, pointing to other statements by Ibn Ezra that contradicted Spinoza’s conclusion. In his book Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), Spinoza, who was a pantheist and was subsequently excommunicated from the Jewish community and denounced by Christians, argued that Moses did not write the Pentateuch. Besides using the verses noted by Ibn Ezra, Spinoza offered a few other brief arguments against Mosaic authorship, which were easily answered by Christian writers in the following few decades.
(ibid.)
Later, a man named Jean Astruc in 1753 formulated a hypothesis based on the two different names for God used in the Pentateuch (Elohim and Jahveh (YHVH)). He surmised that, based on this, different authors must have penned different parts of the Pentateuch. Based off this he wrote a book entitled “Conjectures sure les memories originauz dont il paroit que Moyse s'est servi pour composer le livre de la Génèse. Avec des remarques qui appuient ou qui éclairscissent ses conjectures” (English, “Conjectures on the original memories which Moses apparently used to compose the book of Genesis. With remarks which support or clarify his conjectures”). He questioned how Moses could have known the events we have recorded in Genesis such as the creation, the flood, the call of Abram, the events pertaining to Jacob and his sons, etc. Of course, this is easily explained by the fact that Moses was on Mount Sinai for forty days and forty nights, hearing from God Himself, during which time these things could have easily been communicated to him by God. Nevertheless, Astruc’s book led a man named Johann Eichhorn who, in his work entitled “Introduction to the Study of the Old Testament”, while still credited Moses as the author, claimed that Moses copied various parts of Genesis from various fragments of previously written Semitic histories:
The German scholar Johann Eichhorn took the next step by applying Astruc’s idea to the whole of Genesis. Initially, in his 1780 Introduction to the Old Testament, Eichhorn said that Moses copied previous texts. But in later editions he apparently conceded the view of others that the J–E division could be applied to the whole of the Pentateuch, which was written after Moses. Following Eichhorn, other ideas were advanced in denial of the Mosaic authorship of the first five books of the Old Testament. In 1802, Johann Vater insisted that Genesis was made from at least 39 fragments. In 1805, Wilhelm De Wette contended that none of the Pentateuch was written before King David and that Deuteronomy was written at the time of King Josiah.
(ibid.)
And from here the doors were flung open wide to many more doubts of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, from which the Graf-Wellhausen Hypothesis was born. And these doubts continue even to this day. Even the New American Bible (A Roman Catholic translation not to be confused with the New American Standard Bible) feeds into this corruption in its introduction to the Pentateuch:
Despite its unity of plan and purpose, the book is a complex work, not to be attributed to a single original author. Several sources, or literary traditions, that the final redactor used in his composition are discernible. These are the Yahwist (J), Elohist (E), and Priestly (P) sources which in turn reflect older oral traditions.
The process of transmission advanced by this hypothesis is summed up in the following diagram:
(https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jtreat/rs/002/Judaism/jepd.html)
Nevertheless, this hypothesis has been refuted by many biblical scholars. For example, James Orr (author of the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia) wrote:
If Deuteronomy is a work of the age of Josiah, then, necessarily, everything in the other Old Testament books which depends on Deuteronomy–the Deuteronomic revisions of Joshua and Judges, the Deuteronomic allusions and speeches in the Books of Kings, narratives of fact based on Deuteronomy–e.g., the blessings and cursings, and writing of the law on stones, at Ebal, all must be put later than that age.
James White:
It would surely be no strange thing for Hilkiah the priest to have recovered the book of Deuteronomy. As is evident from 2 Kings, both kingdoms had slipped more than once into apostasy, and it would not be surprising to learn that the Mosaic law had been lost at that time. The problem comes with then hypothesizing that this book of the law was a recent creation by the hands of the prophets to force Josiah’s hand toward reformation. This is to read more into the text than the text itself permits, and the subjective nature of such an assertion is even more obvious when the presupposition of the evolutionary nature of religion is stripped away. If the high moral nature of the Deuteronomic legislation does not necessarily place it at a late date, then there is no reason to suppose that Deuteronomy cannot be Mosaic.
(ibid.)
We read in 2nd Kings 22:8 and 2nd Chronicles 34:15 that the High Priest Hilkiah found a copy of the Book of the Law while Josiah was king of Judah. If it was written after the exile of the Jews to Babylon, how could it have been found while Josiah was priest, years before the exile? To believe the Documentary Hypothesis is to disregard the hand of God in leading Moses to write the Pentateuch, and can lead one into discounting anything contained in the Old Testament and, in toto, the entire Bible. It clouds one’s mind to the supernatural nature of the Scriptures, and has led many to believe that the Bible is nothing more than a bunch of stories invented by some uneducated Middle Eastern goat herders and in the end has led them away from God.
Now, there are some difficulties which we need to address before we move on. The first elephant in the room is Deuteronomy 34:1-12, which detail the last days and the death of Moses. How could Moses chronicle his own death and the events that followed? One possibility is this chapter was written by Joshua, and added to this final book of the Pentateuch. “But why does it say that no one knew where his grave was?” Simple. As Keil and Delitzsch write, it was God who buried Moses: “The subject in this sentence [Deuteronomy 34:5-6—5 So Moses the servant of the LORD died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the LORD. 6 And He buried him in a valley in the land of Moab, opposite Beth Peor; but no one knows his grave to this day.] is Jehovah. Though the third person singular would allow of the verb being taken as impersonal (ἔθαψαν αὐτόν, lxx: they buried him), such a rendering is precluded by the statement which follows, “no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.” This theory may explain why Deuteronomy 34:6 says And He buried him in a valley in the land of Moab, opposite Beth Peor; but no one knows his grave to this day. If God Himself indeed buried him, this could explain why no one knew where he was buried. Of course, as Jamieson-Fausset-Brown theorize, he could have been buried by angels, specifically Michael. This could explain why Jude says Yet Michael the archangel, in contending with the devil, when he disputed about the body of Moses (Jude 1:9).
That Joshua was the author of chapter 34 could explain Deuteronomy 34:1-2—1Then Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is across from Jericho. And the LORD showed him all the land of Gilead as far as Dan, 2 all Naphtali and the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah as far as the Western Sea. As the land of Canaan had not yet been conquered, and the land not partitioned to the several tribes of Israel, how could Moses have known where the land of Dan was? Or Manasseh (the half-tribe that did not remain in Gilead) or Naphtali or Ephraim or Judah? That Joshua was (possibly) the author of this last chapter in Deuteronomy is thus evident. He may have even added the last phrase into Genesis 14:14, which says Now when Abram heard that his brother was taken captive, he armed his three hundred and eighteen trained servants who were born in his own house, and went in pursuit as far as Dan.
Part 3 next week
