For the sake of this post, I’ll assume the reader is basically familiar with the contents of the Pentateuch.

It is when I come to topics like this one that I am most acutely aware of my status as an amateur. I am in no position to speak definitively about a topic as complex as the origins of the Pentateuch, but if I’m going to try to read and understand the Pentateuch, I must have at least some concept of how it was written. Is it, for example, the product of a man named Moses, writing directly about his own experiences for the benefit of people who are following him about in the wilderness? Or is the product of much later authors, whose various works were in some way edited and combined over time to produce the thing we now recognize as the Pentateuch?

Think of what follows not so much as an argument for a particular view of the Pentateuch, but as a simple disclosure of how I am reading the Pentateuch, as of 2025. I think I am on very firm ground in agreeing with the overwhelming consensus of modern scholarship that the Pentateuch was written long after when Moses lived, if there was a Moses who in any way resembled the primary human character in the Pentateuch. It is equally safe to say that the text of Genesis is the product of multiple human hands, borrowing from the stories common in their cultural world, compiled together over a long period of time.

Matters become more contentious when we try to speak in more detail about who these authors were, when they lived, what they individually wrote, and how the whole thing came together to create the Pentateuch we know today.

Although it is immensely controversial, so far it seems to me that the most reasonable explanation for how the Pentateuch came into existence is something like the Documentary Hypothesis, especially as understood in a book like Joel Baden’s The Composition of the Pentateuch or Friedman’s Who Wrote the Bible? I won’t try here to make the case for this — it seems to be one among several viable options, and I’m not here to convince people that the Documentary Hypothesis is correct. Indeed, I’m not sure that it is.

But here’s how it looks to me. If you look across the Pentateuch, Deuteronomy stands out. It has a distinctive viewpoint, distinctive vocabulary, and a distinctive style. It makes sense to think of this as a distinctive self-contained work, and we might call it source D. There doesn’t seem to be much if any D stuff in Genesis through Numbers.

Then if we take the remaining four books, Leviticus stands out quite a bit. It has a certain outlook, where it’s concerned with the priesthood, ritual performance, ritual cleanliness, and lists. It delights in a certain repetitive style that any reader of the Pentateuch will have noticed. Let’s use P to denote this sort of material.

As you look around through the rest of the Pentateuch, there seems to be a lot of other P stuff. In fact, even folks who do not subscribe to the Documentary Hypothesis itself generally recognize the existence of discernible P-stuff in the Pentateuch, and they tend to view it as an issue of different authorship from the non-P stuff.

So let’s tentatively think of D as an “author” or “source” — even if it might contain materials from multiple hands, it would seem that those materials have been pulled together into a strongly coherent whole with what seems like a singular point of view. We may think of the P-stuff in the same way.

So now we’re left with the non-D, non-P material. The further subdivision of this material is more controversial than the identification of D and P.

Purveyors of the Documentary Hypothesis believe that it is indeed possible to divide this remaining material into two broad swaths, which one might call J and E. To my eye, the division of Genesis 37 performed at the beginning of Baden’s The Composition of the Pentateuch seems to provide a fairly convincing demonstration that such a thing can be done, even independent of the differing names of God used in the sources.

However, I haven’t gone all the way down the rabbithole — I have not followed all the dissections of passages to see whether this stuff really does seem to be as convincing all the way throughout the Bible. I would not be surprised if it turns out that one or more major details of the Documentary Hypothesis are incorrect.

Nevertheless, the DH is the most convincing way of looking at the authorship of the Pentateuch that I have come across yet. I say this not as someone who has immersed himself fully into the required literature — I say this as an amateur simply describing what he has seen so far. It is quite possible that somewhere out there, someone has demonstrated that the Documentary Hypothesis is dead. Perhaps I’ll find them.

But for now, although I am skeptical on any number of minute details, it broadly appears to me that the DH does a pretty good job of explaining many otherwise puzzling features of the Pentateuch.