MT does reproduce with substantial accuracy the characteristics of the original autographs. At present that assumption can only be tested by the success or failure of the analysis based on it. It is idle to speculate on what would have happened if Astruc and his successors had been compelled to operate with G instead of MT; but it is a rational surmise that in that case criticism would still have arrived, by a more laborious route, at very much the positions it occupies to-day.
The next great step towards the modern documentary
theory of the Pent. was Hupfeld's[1] demonstration that אלהים
is not peculiar to one document, but to two; so that under
the name Elohist two different writers had previously been
confused. It is obvious, of course, that in this inquiry the
divine names afford no guidance; yet by observing finer
marks of style, and the connexion of the narrative, Hupfeld
succeeded in proving to the ultimate satisfaction of all
critics that there was a second Elohistic source (now called
E), closely parallel and akin to the Yahwistic (J), and that
both J and E had once been independent consecutive
narratives. An important part of the work was a more
accurate delimitation of the first Elohist (now called the
Priestly Code: P), whose outlines were then first drawn
with a clearness to which later investigation has had little
to add.[2]
Though Hupfeld's work was confined to Genesis, it had results of the
utmost consequence for the criticism of the Pent. as a whole. In par
- ↑ Die Quellen der Genesis und die Art ihrer Zusammensetzung (1853). Hupfeld's discovery had partly been anticipated by Ilgen (Urkunden des ersten Buchs von Moses [1798]). Between Eichhorn and Hupfeld, criticism had passed through two well-defined phases: the Fragmentary Hypothesis (see p. xxxii f. above) and the Supplementary Hypothesis, of which the classical exposition is Tuch's fine commentary on Genesis (1858; reissued by Arnold in 1871). The latter theory rested partly on a prejudice—that the framework of the Pent. was necessarily supplied by its oldest source; partly on the misapprehension which Hupfeld dispelled; and partly on the truth that Yahwistic sections are so interlaced with Elohistic that the former could plausibly be regarded as on the whole supplementary to the latter. Though Tuch's commentary did not appear till 1858, the theory had really received its death-blow from Hupfeld five years before.
- ↑ See Nöldeke, Untersuchungen zur Kritik des AT, 1869, pp. 1-144. It is worthy of mention here that this great scholar, after long resisting the theory of the late origin of P, has at last declared his acceptance of the position of We. (see ZA, 1908, 203).
