The Elohist (E) is one of four sources of the Torah described by the documentary hypothesis. Its name comes from Elohim, the term it uses for God. It is characterised by, among other things, an abstract view of God, using "Horeb" instead of "Sinai" for the mountain where Moses received the laws of Israel and the use of the phrase "fear of God". It habitually locates ancestral stories in the north, especially Ephraim, and the documentary hypothesis holds that it must have been composed in that region, possibly in the second half of the 9th century BCE. Recent reconstructions leave out the Elohist altogether, proposing a Deuteronomist-Jahwist-Priestly source sequence written from the reign of Josiah into post-exilic times.

Modern scholars agree that separate sources and multiple authors underlie the Pentateuch, but there is much disagreement on how these sources were used to write the first five books of the bible. The explanation called the documentary hypothesis dominated much of the 20th century, but the 20th-century consensus surrounding this hypothesis has now broken down. Those who uphold it now tend to do so in a strongly modified form, giving a much larger role to the redactors (editors), who are now seen as adding much material of their own rather than as simply passive combiners of documents. Among those who reject the documentary approach altogether, the most significant revisions have been to combine E with J as a single source, and to see the Priestly source as a series of editorial revisions to that text.