Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (German: [pʁoleˈɡoːmena tsuːɐ̯ ɡəˈʃɪçtə ˈʔɪsʁaɛls]; Prologue to the History of Israel) is a book by German biblical scholar and orientalist Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) that formulated but did not found the documentary hypothesis, a theory on the composition history of the Torah or Pentateuch. Influential and long debated, the volume is often[quantify] compared for its impact in its field with Charles Darwin's 1859 work, On the Origin of Species.[citation needed]
First published as Geschichte Israels ("History of Israel") in 1878, the work had a second edition in 1883 under the title Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels.[1][need quotation to verify] The official English translation by J. Sutherland Black and Allan Menzies, with a preface by Wellhausen's friend and colleague the no less prominent British biblical scholar and orientalist William Robertson Smith, then came in 1885. Between the original publication and the translation, Wellhausen composed an 1881 article - originally called "Jewish History" but published as "Israel" - for Smith's ninth edition of Encyclopædia Britannica, a piece published repeatedly in English and in German.
Although Wellhausen originally intended the Prolegomena as the first part of a two-volume work on the history of Israel and ancient Judaism, the second volume did not appear until 1894, as Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte.