Jean Astruc

Astruc was the first to propose and hypothesize, by using the techniques of textual analysis that were commonplace in studying the secular classics, the theory that Genesis was composed based on several sources or manuscript traditions, an approach now called the documentary hypothesis.

This book, brought out anonymously in 1753, was entitled Conjectures sur les memoires originaux dont il paroit que Moyse s'est servi pour composer le livre de la Genese.

In the previous century scholars such as Thomas Hobbes,[2] Isaac La Peyrère,[3] and Baruch Spinoza[4] had drawn up long lists of inconsistencies and contradictions and anachronisms in the Torah and used them to argue that Moses could not have been the author of the entire five books.

[5] Using methods already well established in the study of the Classics for sifting and assessing differing manuscripts,[6] he drew up parallel columns and assigned verses to each of them according to what he had noted as the defining features of the text of Genesis: whether a verse used the term "YHWH" (Yahweh) or the term "Elohim" (God) referring to God and whether it had a doublet (another telling of the same incident, as the two accounts of the creation of man and the two accounts of Sarah being taken by a foreign king).

Astruc found four documents in Genesis, which he arranged in four columns, declaring that it was how Moses had originally written his book, in the image of the four Gospels of the New Testament, and a later writer had combined them into a single work, creating the repetitions and inconsistencies which Hobbes, Spinoza and others had noted.