The Old Testament: The Hebrew Bible

The Old Testament is the founding document which consists of the history, origin, and civilization of Gods people Israel. It has been and continues to be a sacred scripture for both Jews and Christians and plays an increasingly influential role on their beliefs, practices, art and literature. The Jews consider the Tanak to be the Bible, also referred to as the Hebrew Bible by scholars, while Christians prefer to use the term Old Testament. Jews and Protestants agree on the content of the Tanak and the Old Testament but they arrange that content differently. The Hebrew Bible is not only referred to as the TaNaKh, an acronym made up of the Hebrew letters of words Torah, Nevi’im and Ketuvim that was first assembled and conserved as the divine

This classic model was proposed by a German professor named Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918). Wellhausen had recognized that the biblical narratives weren’t objective eyewitness accounts of what had taken place, but rather were later writings that reflected the views of their authors. Those views, properly dated, were the basis of biblical history. The Documentary Hypothesis rejects the traditional belief that the Torah, also known as the Pentateuch, is a unified work form a single author and consecutively supports the idea that it is made up of four different sources, each a separate, coherent and independent document merged together at various points in time by a collection of editors otherwise known as redactors to form one continuous final text. It essentially attempts to take the supernatural out of the Torah and deny its Mosaic authorship. The four authors that are assigned to the various sections of the Torah are identified by the letters J, E, D and P. The sources or documents are hypothetical meaning they have yet to be proven or discovered. But the Documentary Hypothesis provides the best explanation of the data that careful analysis uncovers, data that include repetitions, similarities, inconsistencies, and

Per the J source, the deity is known as Yahweh by Noah (8.20), Abraham (12.8); 15.7; 24.6), Isaac (25.21), Jacob (27.20; 28.13) and others. Throughout Genesis, the P source titles God as God (Elohim) or by titles such as God