 Their combination by a Redactor (editor) into a single narrative spread over five books had resulted in many inconsistencies and repetitious stories, which could be analysed through the methodology of source criticism to reconstruct the original documents.Wellhausen had concentrated exclusively on the written text of the Pentateuch, but in the next generation Hermann Gunkel developed form criticism, a methodology which he claimed could identify the various genres which had contributed to the text and thus reconstruct its tradition history.Gunkel and his followers, notably Martin Noth, used this new methodology to discover the oral sagas which formed the basis of the written texts of the Pentateuch.