Christine Hayes, in this Yale Open Course lecture from Introduction to the Old Testament (RLST 145), lays out the modern critical methods scholars use to study the Hebrew Bible. She walks through Wellhausen's Documentary Hypothesis, explaining the proposed J, E, P, and D sources and what marks each one stylistically and theologically, then turns to form criticism and tradition criticism as complementary tools. The lecture explains why literary, source, and historical criticism developed as separate scholarly projects with different aims. Hayes moves into the patriarchal and matriarchal narratives of Genesis 12-50, using them to raise the harder question of how much historical reality lies behind these stories and what archaeology can and cannot confirm about the biblical record. The result is a grounding in the toolkit biblical scholars actually use, rather than a devotional reading of the text.