The documentary hypothesis as defined by Wellhausen, having dominated critical thinking on the origin of the Pentateuch, came into increasing question from the late 1960s onwards as alternative models - supplementary and fragmentary rather than the discrete documents of the DH paradigm - were put forward.

Friedman's book is thus in one sense an answer to these critics, and perhaps especially to R. N. Whybray, whose 1987 The Making of the Pentateuch had concluded that the tools by which the documentary model distinguished its supposed documents were fundamentally faulty: how could they suppose, he asked, that the authors of each of the four so-called source documents had not tolerated inconsistency, but that the two redactors had had no problems with it?

Scholars as eminent as Baruch Halpern and Michael D. Coogan (editor of The New Oxford Annotated Bible) welcomed The Bible with Sources Revealed as an indispensable teaching tool; nevertheless, Friedman's departures from Wellhausen have been criticised by his professional colleagues on several grounds, not least for ignoring all other models and all advances in scholarship outside his preferred documentary model.

Moreover, Friedman was criticised for ignoring evidence that P did not precede Deuteronomy, for an arbitrary approach to his assignment of sources, and for failing to note or argue with scholarship that does not support his argument.

On the other hand, his close examination of R (and RJE) was welcomed as innovative and useful, as was his schematisation of the arguments in favour of the documentary model.