Abstract:

While there have been numerous challenges to the Documentary Hypothesis, this explanation for Pentateuchal origins continues to be taught in seminaries and religious studies departments, and remains cemented in the popular imagination through slick animations and color-coded texts. One outspoken proponent has suggested that practitioners of the so-called European approach are methodologically unrestrained with the number of layers restricted only by the scholar’s imagination. In this paper, I will present a concise and methodologically rigorous model for the Supplementary Hypothesis beginning with the common ground of a Priestly source, illustrating overlap between supplement- and document-based theories. For the purposes of an essay this size, this demonstration will be confined to the Primeval History (Genesis 1-11) and utilize the aforementioned imaging techniques as an aid to public-facing scholarship, helping viewers envision an editorial process by which the Pentateuch came to its present shape through four successive stages of literary supplementation.