The Documentary Hypothesis, commonly known as JEDP, is the modern critical approach that says the Old Testament was written, edited, and collected from several authors: a Yahwist, an Elohist, a Deuteronomist, and a Priestly writer. Scholars who cut their teeth on it see no structure in Numbers and call it a hodge-podge of unrelated acts, events, lists, and instructions. They speculate that the priests, after returning from the Babylonian exile, needed something between Leviticus and Deuteronomy and so cut and pasted Numbers together from leftover materials. That is not how the book came to be. God supervised it and is its true Author, and since God is not the author of confusion, an underlying structure exists even where the book looks scattered. One way to see it is through the three camps of Sinai, Kadesh, and the plains of Moab, joined by two journeys between them. The variety in Numbers also has a purpose: as people walk through life toward God's Kingdom, anything can happen, and God supplied detailed instruction, examples, conflicts, and narratives to teach from along the way.

The Documentary Hypothesis is scholarly imagination run amok. Critical scholars claim Genesis 2:4 begins a second, contradictory creation account written by someone other than Moses, a "Jehovist" who used YHWH, while Genesis 1 came from an "Elohist." They later added a Priestly author and a Deuteronomist, giving the JEPD theory. Though it prevails among scholars today, no Hebrew manuscript contains any of these supposed separate sources. Every copy of Genesis is intact, and the theory rests entirely on critics' own deductions. Tradition unanimously holds that Moses wrote Genesis, with later editors such as Samuel and Ezra only updating place names like Laish for Dan and Luz for Bethel. The truth is the opposite of the hypothesis: the Bible has one divine author, and Genesis one human author, Moses. Jesus settles the matter in Matthew 19:4-5, where He quotes Genesis 1:27, the supposed Elohist text, and Genesis 2:24, the supposed Jehovist text, in the same breath, approving both as divinely inspired and written by Moses. The two chapters are complementary, not contradictory. Scripture often gives repeated accounts from different angles, as in the Flood narrative, the Gospels, and Judges 4 and 5. Genesis 1 is a map of the whole world, while Genesis 2 is a close-up flashback to the sixth day. The shift from Elohim, the all-powerful Creator, to YHWH Elohim, the personal God, is deliberate. One author moves from the macro view to the personal one.

The Documentary Hypothesis is the idea, held by most theologians, that the Pentateuch was written by different people at different times and compiled later. It originated with liberal German Higher Critics of the last century, who set out to deconstruct and humanize the Bible and explain it away. They assigned various acronyms to supposed groups of writers, including a priestly source called P. Because Leviticus 17 through 26 concentrates on sanctification, they labeled it the "holiness code," abbreviated H, a subset of P. They claimed it was a separate section written long after the earlier chapters, after the Babylonian exile, by returning priests who wanted to control the people and keep them from Sabbath-breaking and idolatry, the sins that had brought on captivity. All of this is hogwash. God gave these laws directly to Moses, probably in the fifteenth century BC. The critics, thinking they know more than God, coined a name that stuck, though it was never a biblical term. Their boundaries are even arbitrary, since chapter 27 is also about sanctification yet is excluded. The label "holiness code" does fit the subject matter, because holiness is the theme of these chapters, but it carries no legitimate claim of separate, late authorship.