Whybray has two fundamental objections to the documentary hypothesis. The first is that it is illogical and self-contradictory and fails to explain what it professes to explain. The Pentateuch is split up into sources, because the present text contains redundant repetition and contradiction. The original sources, it is held, were non-contradictory and not repetitious, and the documentary hypothesis labours to reconstruct them. But then, when the sources were linked together, a repetitious and contradictory