This important and challenging book opens with a vigorous and comprehensive critique of the assumptions and methods of the Documentary Hypothesis. Whybray argues that the criteria used by proponents of the hypothesis were unrealistic, and flawed either in themselves or in the way they were applied.

The second part casts doubt upon the applicability of Oirik's Sage and Jolles' Icelandic saga studies to the Old Testament, and rejects the assumption that oral traditions can be transmitted in a recognizable form over a long period of time That being the assumption of tradition historians like Noth, Engnell, Fohrer, and Rendtorff, their work is subjected to a searching critique

Finally, Whybray argues that the Pentateuchal narrative is the work of a single sixth-century historian, who compiled a history of his nation's origins, drawing upon his own literary imagination or upon folklore current in his own time but not of great antiquity