Prolegomena to the History of Israel

Julius Wellhausen's Prolegomena is the primary formulation of the documentary hypothesis, the theory that the Torah was compiled from four earlier written sources, and this record states its real standing honestly rather than treating it as settled current scholarship: it gives the traditional Mosaic authorship position alongside Wellhausen's own theory, and states plainly that the specific four-source model as Wellhausen formulated it is no longer the consensus it once was. Its documented historical importance is as the theory's most influential formulation, the reason later biblical criticism still engages with it directly. Use it to establish what Wellhausen's own documentary hypothesis actually argued; a claim about the current scholarly consensus on Torah composition needs a more recent source alongside it.