page_title: Composition of the Torah
section_title: Supplementary hypothesis
hierarchical_section_title: Composition of the Torah / Contemporary models / Supplementary hypothesis
caption_attribution_description: English: Diagram of the series of sources of the Pentateuch as proposed by the supplementary hypothesis.
context_page_description: The composition of the Torah was a process that involved multiple authors over an extended period of time. While Jewish tradition holds that all five books were originally written by Moses sometime in the 2nd millennium BCE, by the 17th century leading scholars had rejected Mosaic authorship.
  The precise process by which the Torah was composed, the number of authors involved, and the date of each author remain hotly contested among scholars. Some scholars espouse a fragmentary hypothesis, in which the Pentateuch is seen as a compilation of short, independent narratives, which were gradually brought together into larger units in two editorial phases: the Deuteronomic and the Priestly phases. By contrast, scholars such as John Van Seters advocate a supplementary hypothesis, which posits that the Torah is the result of two major additions—Yahwist and Priestly—to an existing corpus of work.
  Scholars frequently use these newer hypotheses in combination with each other, making it difficult to classify contemporary theories as strictly one or another.
context_section_description: The modern supplementary hypothesis came to a head in the 1970s with the publication of works by John Van Seters and Hans Heinrich Schmid. Van Seters’ summation of the hypothesis accepts "three sources or literary strata within the Pentateuch," which have come to be known as the Deuteronomist (D), the Yahwist (J), and the Priestly Writer (P). Van Seters ordered the sources chronologically as DJP.
  the Deuteronomist source (D) was likely written c. 620 BCE.
  the Yahwist source (J) was likely written c. 540 BCE in the exilic period.
  the Priestly source (P) was likely written c. 400 BCE in the post-exilic period.
  The supplementary hypothesis denies the existence of an extensive Elohist (E) source, one of the four independent sources described in the documentary hypothesis. Instead, it describes the Yahwist as having borrowed from an array of written and oral traditions, combining them into the J source. It proposes that because J is compiled from many earlier traditions and stories, documentarians mistook the compilation as having multiple authors: the Yahwist (J) and the Elohist (E). Instead, the supplementary hypothesis proposes that what documentarians considered J and E are in fact a single source (some use J, some use JE), likely written in the 6th century BCE.
  Notably, in contrast to the traditional documentary hypothesis, the supplementary hypothesis proposes that the Deuteronomist (D) was the earliest Pentateuchal author, writing at the end of the seventh century.
caption: *Independent document, c. 620 BCE. **Response to D, c. 540 BCE. ***Largely a redactor of J, c. 400 BCE.
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