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"
On the Reliability of the Old Testament On the Reliability of the Old Testament On the Reliability of the Old Testament (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids and Cambridge,2003: ) is a book by British Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen (1932-). The book provides the reader with "the most sweeping scholarly case in a generation for the traditional beliefs held by Orthodox Jews and Christian conservatives", according to Richard Ostling. The book was intended to serve as a counterpart to F.F. Bruce's "Are the New Testament Documents Reliable?" (1943), and in so doing to counter the arguments of Biblical minimalism, which casts doubt upon the historical value of