Richard Elliot Friedman is a professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature who holds a Chair at the Univ. of Calif. at San Diego. He’s been a visiting scholar at Oxford and Cambridge. (For his books I've read, click on his name.)

I read a Fall 2005 review in Bible Review about book 133 (and therein book 132), which led me to buy them both. This book has much in addition to the 245-pp main text: 10-pp Appendix, 5-pp Notes on Identification of Authors, 16-pp Notes, 7-pp Selected Bibliography, 13- pp Index and 3 pp of Maps. Richard Elliot Friedman calls it “a strange fact that we have never known with certainty who produced the book that has played such a central role in our civilization.” Focusing on the books of the Torah – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy – he draws upon biblical evidence to make convincing arguments of the identities of the authors. His investigation and analysis reads like a great detective story, in which he must paint a vivid picture of the world of the Bible – its politics, history, and personalities. The result is a marvel of scholarship that sheds a new and enriching light on our understanding of the Bible as literature, history, and sacred text. Before writing of his “detective work,” he reviews the history behind the so-called “Documentary Hypothesis.” In short, four documents are identified by alphabetic symbols: J is associated with the divine name Yahweh (Jehovah); E with stories identifying the deity as God (Elohim or El); P (by far the largest) focuses on the Aaronid priests; D appears in the Torah only in Deuteronomy.

Places and periods of their composition are given by Friedman as follows: J in Judah in 922-722 BCE; E in Israel in 922-722 BCE; RJE in Judah post 722 B CE; P in Jerusalem not long after RJE; D in Judah in two parts (Dtr1 640-609 BCE and Dtr2 post 587 BCE); finally, R (the priest Ezra ?) in Jerusalem in mid-fifth century BCE. This book spells out in detail how Friedman arrived at such specificity. In brief, J is the work of the southern kingdom of Judah – its heroes, holy men and holy places are all Judean, with barely any mention of the northern kingdom of Israel, and vice versa for E. RJE melded (or conflated) the two kingdom’s stories after the fall of Israel. P distinguishes the Aaronid priests from the Levites, treating the later as servants of the Aaronid priests. D is part of the long Deuteronomistic History that extends well beyond the Torah, with Dtr1 before (and Dtr2 after) the 587 BCE fall to Babylon. The E, P and D sources were priests. Richard Elliot Friedman's results appear in the Appendix – tables of scriptural segments and columns labeled J, E, P and R. This format may satisfy biblical scholars, but few others, thus he wrote book 133.