In the closing decades of the 19th century Julius Wellhausen published Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, in which he had set out the definitive version of the historical development of the Hebrew Bible.
According to this hypothesis, the Pentateuch – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy – was originally four separate documents, retelling the same episodes and stories, but with differing emphases designed to further the theological and political agendas of their authors.
Their combination by a Redactor (editor) into a single narrative spread over five books had resulted in many inconsistencies and repetitious stories, which could be analysed through the methodology of source criticism to reconstruct the original documents.
Gunkel and his followers, notably Martin Noth, used this new methodology to discover the oral sagas which formed the basis of the written texts of the Pentateuch.
By the middle of the 20th century, Wellhausen's documentary hypothesis, the tradition history of Gunkel and Noth, and the Biblical archaeology of William F. Albright, who claimed to have found physical proof of the 2nd millennium BC origins of Genesis, Exodus, and the other books of the Pentateuch, had merged to form a dominant paradigm, or consensual view, of the origins of the Pentateuch[citation needed].
Similarly, the repetition and stylistic variation which the documentary hypothesis explains as the remains of distinct sources, may be understood quite differently.
"[2] Egyptologist and Bible scholar James K. Hoffmeier has affirmed that although Whybray offers the most comprehensive critique of the documentary hypothesis within recent critical scholarship, he concludes that Whybray's view doesn't actually advance pentateuchal studies but instead revives a late 18th, early 19th century theory held by Alexander Geddes and J.S.