Part II
While the four sources were being identified by nineteenth-century biblical scholars, the question naturally arose as to their order in time. Unless we know this or have a good hypothesis about it, we are at a dead end, for the Pentateuch remains just as mysteriously cut off from the stream of human history as it was when Moses was believed to be its author. The key to solving this problem was the realization that P, the first document encountered and the source of Genesis I, was actually the last one to have been composed.
It is interesting that the Priestly writers did not, apparently, attempt to avoid inconsistencies and duplications in their revision and completion of the history of Israel. They created some for themselves by their determination to retell theologically important episodes in their own way (such as the story of creation, the covenant with Noah, and the revelation of Yahweh's name at Sinai) and then to retain both versions of their text. We have difficulty understanding the psychology of this procedure because a modern writer would, above all, want to produce a harmonious and internally consistent text. But we must be careful not to impose our won literary values on texts composed over two thousand years ago.
Of the two sources that the Priestly writers worked with, J is thought to be the older. In fact, many scholars believed that the Yahwist writing was the basic document and that it once stood independently. When we say "document" we mean written record.
Many of the Yahwist stories, like the epics of Homer, are older than their written forms. In all cultures in the earliest legends and histories circulated in oral form for generations before being written down. Hence, there may once have been an epic poem that recounted the patriarchal history of the Israelites (beginning with the creation of the world) that is now lost as such and survives only in prose fragments in the J document. There is evidence that J originated in the souther part of Palestine, in the area that later became the kingdom of Judah. Separate parts of it undoubtedly continued to circulate by word of mouth (perhaps in storytelling sessions by professional entertainers) for some time after scribes committed it to writing. We must remember that the ancient Israelites had no Bible.
Although the influence of the oral tradition is not absent from the other sources, it seems to be particularly prominent in J. The Yahwist author makes artful use of humor, irony, suspense, hyperbole and concrete detail: all devices for appealing to an immediate audience.
The Elohist material is not quite so easy to identify or to characterize. The usual theory is that the Elohist material originated in the north, in what became the kingdom of Israel, also called "Ephraim" after the split with Judah. The E material is thought to be slightly more recent than the J material. It enters the Pentateuch late, its first substantial contribution being Genesis 20, and it is responsible for the story of testing Abraham with the sacrifice of Isaac, portions of the story of Jacob and Esau, and about half of the story of Joseph.
It is marked by a certain tact or reserve in the portrayal of the deity, who does not appear to humans in person but communicates through reams and angels, and by interest in prophet and seers.
The D document is the one we can speak about with most confidence as a document, for almost all scholars agree that the "Book of the Law" discovered in the Temple and brought to King Josiah in 622 B.C.E. forms its basis. In contrast to J and E, the Deuteronomic document stimulated a school of like-mined writers to begin producing further material with the same tone and religious outlook, and thus to extend its influence widely over the early books of the Hebrew Bible.
Deuteronomy is notable for its style, and on that ground alone it could easily be separated from the other documents. It does this, of course, in what are supposedly the words of Moses. Who would pay attention to any laws that did not appear to come from Moses? There was simply no other authority.
What the Deuteronomist did was to reinterpret Israel's covenant relationship with Yahweh according to his own vision of it--- which he sincerely believed to be carrying out the authentic Mosaic tradition---and then leave his document to be added to the existing ones.
The oral material that is though to be the basis of J, is the oldest document, probably originated in the period of the Judges and a product of the growing sense of national identity among the Israelite tribes. In the tenth century B.C.E., during the early years of the Monarchy, some unknown individual wrote these stories down in coherent narrative form to make the document.
About a hundred years after this time, in the ninth to eighth centuries B.C.E. somewhere in the north, a writer collected stories then circulating in his area about these same heroes of the past and created the E document. It may well have been less extensive and less complete than the J one.
After the Assyrians conquered the north, refugees from Israel brought the E document down to Judah, where the redactor, himself a southerner, wove the two documents together into something that we call "JE." The J document was the basic one in the blend, E being used mainly to flesh out the story at certain points. This took place in the early seventh century.
During or after the period of reform instituted by King Josiah in 622, the recently discovered Deuteronomic book was added to JE by another redactor to make what is called "JED."
The final document, the Priestly one (P), was written during or very shortly after the Babylonian Exile and clearly reflects the dire need of the people to salvage what they could of their national past from this disaster. Substantial additions were therefore made to JED, including the whole book of Leviticus: and the result is called "JEDP."
Bits and pieces of old material, such as the strange story of the proxy circumcision of Moses in Exodus 4:24-26, seem to have been inserted into the narratives by writers or redactors who knew them from an existing source and wished to preserve them even if they did not quite understand what to make of them.
-Taken from The Bible as Literature