John Van Seters on the origins of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the bible:Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), arguing, with Martin Noth, that Deuteronomy was the original beginning of a history that extended from Deuteronomy to the end of 2 Kings. However, against Noth and others, he held that the so-called Yahwist, the oldest literary source in Genesis, Exodus and Numbers, was written in the 6th century BCE as a prologue to the older Deuteronomistic History, and that the so-called Priestly Writer of the Pentateuch was a later supplement to this history. This approach represented a revival of the "supplementary hypothesis"
The Book of Genesis (comics) on the work, as would have been expected. Reviewers have called the style "humanizing", with a "human-looking deity" with "enormous, hairy, veiny hands"; unlike much later Christian art, which Europeanized the characters from the Old and New Testaments, the characters in Crumb's book are "plac[ed...] squarely in the Middle East — and populat[ed...] with distinctly Semitic-looking people". The clothing and sets in the book were based on stills from classic Hollywood movies, as "there's not a lot of documentation about how people dressed and lived in ancient Mesopotamia." Crumb originally intended to do a sendup of the Book of Genesis,