Influential and long debated, the volume is often[quantify] compared for its impact in its field with Charles Darwin's 1859 work, On the Origin of Species.
[1][need quotation to verify] The official English translation by J. Sutherland Black and Allan Menzies, with a preface by Wellhausen's friend and colleague the no less prominent British biblical scholar and orientalist William Robertson Smith, then came in 1885.
Although Wellhausen originally intended the Prolegomena as the first part of a two-volume work on the history of Israel and ancient Judaism, the second volume did not appear until 1894, as Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte.
The middle layer, the Deuteronomist, shows a clear impulse to the centralisation of worship under the control of a dominant priesthood with royal support.
In the Books of Judges, Samuel, and Kings, the fact of the radical difference of the old practice from the Law is not disputed [but] is simply condemned.