Word.ws English Dictionary

documentary hypothesis

documentary hypothesis proper noun: the hypothesis that the Pentateuch consists of two or more, usually four, originally distinct major documents.

Proper noun

documentary hypothesis

  1. The hypothesis that the Pentateuch consists of two or more, usually four, originally distinct major documents.
    • Out of this rare discovery have sprung the documentary hypothesis, the fragmentary hypothesis, and we know not how many more hypotheses, each of which has been maintained for a time, as self-evidently true, and then exploded.1842, The Princeton Review, volume 14, page 205

Origin of documentary hypothesis

Calque of German Urkundenhypothese.

Questions about documentary hypothesis

What does documentary hypothesis mean?
Documentary hypothesis means the hypothesis that the Pentateuch consists of two or more, usually four, originally distinct major documents.
What part of speech is documentary hypothesis?
Documentary hypothesis is a proper noun.

Words near documentary hypothesis in the dictionary

  1. documentarist
  2. documentarists
  3. documentarization
  4. documentarize
  5. documentary
  6. documentary hypothesis
  7. documentarylike
  8. documentate
  9. documentation
  10. documentational
  11. documentations

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: documentary hypothesis (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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