Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels

The book consists of an author's Introduction and three major sections. Its argument is that the ancient Israelites did not practice a religion recognisable as Judaism: the earliest religion of the Israelites, as depicted in the Yahwist and Elohist sources, was polytheistic and family-based. The middle layer, the Deuteronomist, shows a clear impulse to the centralisation of worship under the control of a dominant priesthood with royal support. Only in the final, post-Exilic, layer, the Priestly source, when the royal authority has vanished and the priesthood has assumed sole authority over the community, is there evidence of the religion that the world knows as Judaism.

Wellhausen announces his intention to demonstrate the hypothesis of Karl Heinrich Graf that the Law is later than the Prophets: that the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy (the torah, or "law", as they are known to the Jewish tradition and immediately precede the history of Israel making up the series from Joshua to Kings, the "prophets", called because they were thought to have been written by the prophet Samuel and others, but they were in fact written after those books). He then sets out some commonly agreed ground:

1. The Pentateuch plus the book of Joshua make up a literary unit of six books, or Hexateuch, tracing the history of the Israelites from the Patriarchal age to the conquest of Canaan; and

2. This hexateuch draws on three sources, the combined Yahwist/Elohist, which consists largely of narratives and dates from the period prior to the destruction of the kingdom of Israel (c.722 BC); the Deuteronomist, responsible for the book of Deuteronomy and dating from the reign of Josiah (c. 620 BC); and the Priestly source, made up largely of the law-code of Leviticus but with connections to all the other books except Deuteronomy.

Wellhausen proposes to fix the dates of each of the sources, especially of the Priestly source, "by reference to an independent standard, namely, the inner development of the history of Israel so far as that is known to us by trustworthy testimonies, from independent sources."

Each of the sources (Yahwist/Elohist, Deuteronomist and Priestly) reflects a different stage in evolution of religious practice in ancient Israel. Thus, to take one of the five elements of this practice, the Yahwist/Elohist "sanctions a multiplicity of altars", allowing sacrifice at any place; the Deuteronomist records the moment in history (the reform of Josiah, c.620 BC), when a single place of worship was demanded by both priesthood and king; and the Priestly law-code does not demand, but presupposes, centralised worship. In the same way, the other elements of ancient Israelite religion (sacrifice, sacred feasts, the position of the priests and Levites, and the "endowment of the clergy", tithes due to the priests and Levites) have a radically different form in the Yahwist/Elohist to that in the Priestly source, with Deuteronomy occupying an intermediate position. The Priestly source consistently attempts to disguise what are in fact innovations with a veneer of antiquity by inventing, for example, a fictional Tabernacle not mentioned anywhere in the oldest sources, to justify its insistence on centralised worship in Jerusalem. "What is brought forward in Deuteronomy as an innovation is assumed in the Priestly Code to be an ancient custom dating as far back as to Noah."

The history of the traditions of Israel, like the history of worship, shows a steady progression from the epic and prophetic age of the Yahwist and the Elohist, to the law-bound world of the Priestly source, with Deuteronomy acting as the bridge. "In Chronicles the past is remodelled on the basis of the Law: transgressions take place now and then, but as exceptions from the rule. In the Books of Judges, Samuel, and Kings, the fact of the radical difference of the old practice from the Law is not disputed [but] is simply condemned. In the Chronicles the pattern according to which the history of ancient Israel is represented is the Pentateuch, i.e. the Priestly Code.... [I]n the older historical books, the revision does not proceed upon the basis of the Priestly Code, which indeed is completely unknown to them, but on the basis of Deuteronomy. Thus in the question of the order of sequence of the two great bodies of laws, the history of the tradition leads us to the same conclusion as the history of the cultus."

In his concluding section Wellhausen restates his argument that the Priestly source is the last to appear, postdating the Deuteronomist. He summarises also his further conclusions:

• There was no written law in ancient Israel, the Torah being held as an oral tradition by priests and prophets.
• Deuteronomy was the first law and gained currency only during the Babylonian exile, when the prophetic tradition ceased.
• Ezekiel and his successors were responsible for the codification and systematisation of worship and Ezra for the introduction of the Priestly code (the laws contained in Leviticus).
• It was that creation of a written Torah which marked the break between the ancient history of Israel and the later history of Judaism.

• Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, at Project Gutenberg

• Nicholson, Ernst (2002). The Pentateuch in the Twentieth Century: The Legacy of Julius Wellhausen. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-925783-6. This book is partially available on Google Books .
• Paul Michael Kurtz, Kaiser, Christ, and Canaan: The Religion of Israel in Protestant Germany, 1871–1918. Forschungen zum Alten Testament I/122. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018.