There's an old rabbinical saying, "turn it over and over, you never get to the end of it." They were talking about Torah, but when you turn over the rocks of DH you keep finding new ways that they screwed up.
Although to be fair, in this episode I have to point out that at the time DH espoused this concept, they lacked some 150 years of science and other scholarship. Still, when later work proves you screwed up, you can't win back respect by saying "Now, how could I have known that". You have to take your lumps.
The concept is that the tabernacle described in the Pentateuch never existed. That story was invented in P, during the Babylonian Captivity, based on the existence of the temple. You can blame Julius Wellhausen for this one. The Babylonians destroyed the temple, so the tabernacle narrative is an exercise in nostalgia. I'm sorry, a brick and mortar building being destroyed led to making up a story about a mobile enclosure?
Here's the first bit of science we run into: During the Babylonian Captivity, the Jews stopped speaking Biblical Hebrew and started speaking Neo-Babylonian ("Aramaic"). The priests could not have written that narrative during the captivity and had its grammar be identical with that of J, E, and D. Seriously, now: how many of us can write grammatical post-Conquest English used by Layamon, who wrote the first English work that refers to King Arthur, let alone pre-Conquest Anglo-Saxon?
I studied Hebrew for decades but none of the courses or books reflected the grammar in the actual Torah -- and also in Neviim and Ketuvim. Then in 2014 I found Dr. John Cook's 2002 doctoral dissertation. Dr. Cook's grammar, combined with trop as a form of punctuation, reveals in many cases why Mishnah says what it says about Jewish law. That doesn't happen unless Dr. Cook's work is fundamentally correct. I wrote a study of Torah with complete examples of this. His discussion of the verbal grammar in the tabernacle episodes, requires evidence of the tabernacle, though it does not require that the people who said those words lived at the time of its construction.
Second, the priests could not have invented a narrative that uses the same mid-level features as other narratives in Torah -- and Neviim. The features correspond perfectly with what Axel Olrik wrote about before his death in 1921, but Olrik was not part of the textual criticism field that Wellhausen specialized in. When Hermann Gunkel tried to get his DH colleagues to incorporate Olrik's work, they gave him a raspberry.
Olrik's principles require that the tabernacle episodes reached their form after Mosheh and Betsalel and Ahaliav died, but when the tabernacle was visible to the narrators. Those episodes seem fantastic; the audience would razz the narrator if he didn't have a tabernacle to point to. What's more, the grammar as described by Cook also requires evidence; when the same verbs are used to tell narratives for which evidence is not visible, the verbs use different morphology. My Torah study goes over these examples, too.
By the way, Dr. Cook never heard of Axel Olrik until I emailed him about this correspondence. Olrik's work was translated to English ten years before Dr. Cook's dissertation was approved, but it wasn't linguistic in nature so Cook had no reason to access it. (Evidence that just because something is published doesn't mean it immediately affects related disciplines.)
Third, DH argues that a desert can't support the tabernacle cult. This is evidence that they used translations (Astruc freely admits this), and as I keep saying, all translations are strawman arguments. In the 1800s, English writers used "desert" to mean land that is deserted by people, not just a hot sandy waste. "The Great American Desert" referred to the U.S. Great Plains when the term was invented in 1820. Stephen Long did not live to tell the survivors of the Blizzard of 1888 that they lived in a hot sandy waste.
What's more, DH did not have 21st century paleontological data showing that hippos and crocs lived in what you could call "the greater Bitter Lakes region". When you remember that these are fresh-water life forms, you see that a good part of the Sinai had sweet water.
Fourth, 21st century archaeologists such as William Devers categorically reject that peoples invent their ancient histories. The DH position comes from a European fallacy that every people MUST have a history, meaning a written version of their story about their past. They were used to, for example, Gerald of Wales inventing the "Brutus" origin of the Britons for his Norman overlords. You can't write one of these things that incorporates Olrik's principles when Olrik himself will not be born for several millennia. What's more, we know of plenty of peoples who did not write their own history -- the Goths, the Vandals, the Indus Valley Civilization (which Wellhausen knew nothing about). Alexander's Macedonians did not write their own history, Herodotus did that -- and he was not a Macedonian, he lived in what is now Turkey.
Fifth is an argument that absence means non-existence. This is the false argument from silence that every paleontologist, archaeologist, and historian faces because none of them have every piece of evidence that would back up their assertions. They can only argue probabilities that they can back up with hard evidence. If you let DH argue on this basis, then you have every right to say that none of J, E, D, or P existed because they have left zero traces in the archaeological record. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Sixth, DH relies on a misconception of what Jewish scripture was about. Jewish scripture documented cultural behavior, mostly in terms of narratives. Olrik's principles show techniques used by ancient cultures to make their cultural narratives interesting and memorable. But the narratives have to spread within the culture, and not only did DH grow outside the Jewish culture, it was invented by anti-Semites trying to destroy the foundation of the Jewish culture.
And finally, this concept is evidence that the DH scholars knew nothing about Samaritan scripture. Samaritan Pentateuch has every narrative Jewish Torah has, including the tabernacle episodes. You would have to show me that Samaritans closely collaborated with Jewish priests in Babylon to have the P parts of Torah.
No, despite being excellent candidates for the authors of E, who knew nothing about the contemporary J, let alone D or P in the future, the Samaritans invented for themselves the identical history that the Jews supposedly invented, in mostly the identical grammar (there's some evidence that the manuscripts, all written in Arabic speaking locations, have grammatical changes that coordinate with Arabic) -- up to chapter 15 of Joshua. Samaritan Joshua breaks off without describing the lottery for the land, and jumps to a story involving nations that did not exist until the Hasmonean period.
Wellhausen and the others could have read Samaritan Pentateuch and Targum if they had accessed Brian Walton's "London" polyglot, though they would have to have learned the Gezer script to do so. In 1918 they could have used August Freiherr von Gall's critical edition of Samaritan Pentateuch in the "square" or "Aramaic" script. Wellhausen died that year but people were still elaborating DH decades later. Ignoring evidence is a feature of academic practice, not a bug.
If you want my other evidence that DH is a failure, start here.
