What is the “black stele” and how does it relate to the document hypothesis?
The best I can get out of google is some second/third hand references to it being a tablet found 300 years before Moses that mentions Moses (perhaps I read it wrong though).
Supposedly it refutes the document hypothesis, but at this point I don’t see how.
The document hypothesis is an old, discredited notion that Moses couldn’t have written the Pentateuch because there was no writing in those days; the Black Stele is a pre-Mosaic stone featuring the Code of Hammurabi. Which, obviously, puts paid to the documentary hypothesis, although it’s still possible that he didn’t write the Pentateuch.
Perhaps I’m confused then; as I understood it, the document hypothesis was that there were several different sources for the books in the Pentateuch and that they were later ‘edited’ together.
Am I thinking of a different hypothesis?
Sorry, for some reason, “document hypothesis” didn’t ring the bell in my mind of “Documentary Hypothesis.” This is the proper name of the theory that Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch. The notion first popped up a couple of centuries ago, and at that time, they thought writing was a post-mosaic development, so it was all part of the same theory. The discovery of the black stele undermined this leg of the Documentary Hypothesis, but it’s still supported by textual analysis.