Umberto Cassuto

Umberto Cassuto - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "The Documentary Hypothesis and the Composition of the Pentateuch offers itself as an elegantly phrased examination of the 'five pillars' of the Documentary Hypothesis: 1, the claim that the use of the divine names Yahweh and Elohim testified to at least two different authors and two entirely distinct source documents; 2, the claim that each literary style and distinctive grammatical usage found in the Pentateuch must be viewed as the product of a different writer and distinct 'document'; 3, the claim that there were different world-views, theologies and ethics in each of the hypothesized documents, each independent and not complementary to each other, proving their different authorship and provenance; 4, the claim that the existence of repetitions and even seeming contradictions proved there were different documents cut-and-pasted into the text, sometimes even as bits and pieces within single sentences; and 5, the claim that descriptive passages can be analyzed into composite narratives drawing upon overlapping but different documents. Cassuto's refutations above all rather devastatingly demonstrated that the supposed terminological, grammatical and stylistic traits indicative of separate documents actually were common in Hebrew language and literature and were shared with other Biblical and post-Biblical Jewish literature whose unity no-one supposed to be multiple, including liturgical, midrashic, medieval and even modern Jewish religious writing, and even more strongly that precisely the supposed divergencies, stylistic, grammatical, theoretical and theological, within the narrative, when analyzed in context and in connection not only with cognate literatures in the ancient Near East but especially with similar passages elsewhere in Biblical literature, all served an easily demonstrated and cons"