Intro to DH Post I of II

There are two purposes to this series. Firstly, several readers have asked me to do a post which is a general introduction to DH. Secondly, some commenters on this blog, most notably, Hencoop, and Rabbi Maroof, have argued that DH is circular reasoning. In this post, I hope to both give a general background to DH and respond to this circular reasoning argument. I will not actually go through all of the specific arguments that support DH, but will give a general background, stating the sort of arguments out there, without articulating them specifically. The nitty gritty can be found in past and future posts.

The structure of the post will be divided into 4 parts. Parts I and II will appear in this post. Parts III and IV will appear in my next post. Here are the ground rules, in this post, you can only respond to Parts I and II. Any response to III and IV will not be tolerated until I do the next post.
Part I - I will attempt to establish that the Torah is of composite authorship. This does not mean that the DH’s division of sources is accurate, but only that the book did not all come from one hand.
Part II - I will show that the verses described by DH as “D” carry a distinctive color to them. This does not mean they were written by a separate author, but only that they are special. For example, that specialness may be because they have a common theme. Moreover, at this point, it will still be possible to argue that what makes them unique is that they were written by Moshe. But, the point is, they are special.
Part III, I will attempt to show that D is indeed a separate author and the distinction is not merely between God and Moses.
Part IV, I will attempt to show that P is likewise a separate author.

Part I – Multiple authorship of the Torah

There are chiefly three arguments that support this theory.

1. The Torah contradicts itself numerous times. As an example, see this post on Moseirah. There are many more. The contradictions are very numerous. It is not logical one author would contradict himself so many times

2. Duplicates. The Torah repeats many stories more than once. I am not referring to saying the same thing twice, but to submitting two versions of the same story. Why? Those who are skeptic of DH argue that it is not repetition of the same story, but two similar stories. This however can not be for the following three reasons.

a. In some cases, the stories are so similar it is completely impossible for two stories, so similar, to have both happened. See for example, my post on the lineage of Kain.

b. In some cases, it is not possible for two stories that are very similar to happen twice because once it happened once, it could never happen again. As an example, see my post discussing the fact that Avraham was shocked to hear that God predicted the birth of Yitzchak. This could not have happened twice, for the second time, the shock would be uncalled for.

c. In some cases, it is implausible an event took place twice. For example, see my post on creation. It is not possible that God created man twice.

However, these duplicates are easily explained if we assume that the Torah has multiple authors.

3. Many sentences in the Torah are choppy and do not read well. They make abrupt turns that do not make sense. For example, see my post on mechirat Yosef. By dividing the verses into different authors, the choppy turns are better understood.

While each and every example I have cited may not be conclusive in its own right, the important thing to notice is that these issues are ubiquities in the Torah, to an extent that the traditional view can not be accepted. Anyone interested in more examples can peruse my blog. More examples will be forthcoming in the future.

However, I have not yet established what or who the authors are.

Part II – D is a unique section of the Torah.

D is a certain section of the Torah that is localized primarily in Deut 1:4 – 32:47 though it does contain other verses and not all of that section is D. In this section, I will establish that this section is more unified than the rest of the Torah, but I will refrain from commenting on if that unity is a result of it being written by a common author.

The section called D has many characteristics that unite it. It contains a unified purpose, nomenclature, view of the law, view of history, ideology, theology, sociology, political science and more. In short, there are many phenomenon that appear again and again in D but do not appear elsewhere in the Torah, or appear with less frequency. Moreover, there are phenomenon absent in D that are common in the rest of the Torah. I can not go through all of them in this post, but let us take two examples.

1. The word Anoki. The Torah switches off usage between Ani and Anoki, using Ani 182 times and Anoki 141 times. Yet, in D, Anoki is used 53 times and Ani is used twice.

2. The Circular Inclusio. This sentence structure appears once in D and at least 121 times outside of D ( I am aware of 121 times, but I can’t be sure if there are more since there’s no way to check for this in Bar Ilan. .

How convincing is that? Unfortunately, our minds are puny enough that we can not accurately intuit just how unlikely that is to happen. First, let’s assume we already take the division of D as a separate source as a given, what would be the probability of Anoki being used 53 times? The probability of any one occurrence being an Anoki is 44%. The probability of having 53 or more Anoki’s is 55*54* (.44)^53*(.56)^2/2 + 55*(.44)^54*(.56) + (.44)^55 which is equal to 6 times 10 to the negative 17th. Since we would be equally surprised at a consistent use of Ani, we should really double that, so it’s 2 x 10^-16. In any event, that number is very small. It’s 2 out of 10,000,000,000,000,000. It’s 2 out of 10 quadrillion. (That’s 2 out of 10,000 trillion.)

How about for the circular inclusion? If the entire Bible has one author, each CI was the same, each CI would have a 20% chance of appearing in D. The chance that only one or less would appear in D is .8^122 + 122*.8^121*.2. That’s 4 x 10 to the negative eleventh. Again, we should double it, yielding 8 out of 100,000,000,000. that’s 8 out of 100 billion.

But, what is even more remarkable is what happens when we consider the probability of both of these events occurring. The odds of two events, each with a likelihood of one in a billion to occur, is not one in two billion, not one in a trillion, not one in quadrillion, but one in a quintillion because you need to multiply the two numbers. The odds that both of the two events described above would occur is 2 out of 10 to the negative 26. That is equal to 2 out of one hundred septillion, or 2 out of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

What is even more remarkable is that I only have given two examples so far. In S. R. Driver’s Introduction to the Pentateuch, he has around 120 words that are not common to all authors. In JE Carpenter’s book he has over 500. Of course, most of them are not as good as the examples I have presented, but it is quite clear that the case is convincing. And, there are also the unified purpose, view of the law, view of history, ideology, theology, sociology, political science and more. I’ve just touched the tip of nomenclature. Anyone interested in more examples should peruse my blog archives or stay tuned for future blog posts.

Now, the skeptics will say that that is circular reasoning. I’ve just taken every CI and assigned it to someone besides D. But, is that so? There are essentially two components to the circular reasoning arguemnt.

1. There are so many words in the Torah. There’s got to be at least some that are going to do unexpected things.

2. I’ve specifically assigned the chapters in order to make the theory work.

First, to point 1. How many words are there in the Chumash? I don’t actually know, but here’s a rough estimate 189 chapters x 25 verses per chapter, x 20 words per verse. That’s 94,500. However, we don’t want to know how many words there are, but how many unique words. Obviously, many of those are repeats. Moreover, some words, like those appearing only once would not be suitable for the DH. Let’s assume the avg word appears 200 times (because some words, like et, appear many more times) then there’d only be 473 words. That seems low. Maybe it’s 1,000 or 2,000. Since CI is actually a sentence structure, I’ve got to throw those in, but there aren’t too many of those. Let’s pick 2,000 as the magic number. That means if I want to choose 2 examples of words, I have 2 million choices. Now, that’s a big number, but it is hardly relevant compared to the hundred septillion we faced before.

Moreover, it should be clear in that in reality, the correct number to think about is much less than 2 million. While in total there are 2 million sets of words I could have chosen, it should be clear that these sets are not all independent, since each set shares at least one word with 4,000 other sets. Thus, once one set is found to be lacking, it immediately implies that another 4,000 sets will be lacking. I don't have even have the choice to consider all 2,000,000 choices. But, even if I did, we would not be close to our number of one hundred septillion

The next question is, but didn’t I just assign the verses to D in order to make my theory work? That’s harder to answer. But, let’s look at it. The first issue is that I chose Deut, I could have just as easily chosen Gen, Exodus etc. True, but I only had 5 choices and by choosing one of them I wound up with a phenomenon whose probability was on in a hundred septillion. Another argument might be that there are some chapters that don’t follow the Deut = D rule. This is harder to quantify because there is disagreement amongst scholars. But, here is the view I generally use when tabulating tables for D. Ex 20:1-13 is D Deut 1:3, 14:3-20, 32:48-52, 34:1a, 5b, 7-9 is P. Deut 27:5-7a, 31:14-15, 31:23, 34:1b-5a, 6, 10 is JE. Deut 33 is a separate source. Deut 32:1-43 was incorporated by D from a seperat source. Otherwise, the rule generally holds, with a few verses here and there that are exceptions. Now, we have the following exceptions to the rule
1. Ex 20 is an exception
2. Deut 14 is an exception
3. Deut 32:1-34:10 is an exception
4. We have several verses here and there that are exceptions.

Now, how many other equivalent ways could I have divided it up? Given that I can tolerate these 4 exceptions, how many other ways could I have divided it up? First, let’s look at #’s 1-3. This is 3 exceptions. I could choose to put them anywhere in the Torah. It’s sort of hard to quantify exactly how many different places I could put them, but, since there are 189 chapters, the number 189 appeals to me. This means I have around 100,000 choices of how to divide up the Torah. Again, a high number, but very little compared to one hundred septillion. What’s more, that number ignores the fact that I did not randomly choose these chapters as exceptions but was forced into doing so. The only reason I choose to assign Ex 20:1-13 to D is because that section of the Torah is repeated verbatim in Deut 5. The only reason I choose to assign Deut 14 to P is because that section is repeated verbatim in Lev 11. Thus, I did not randomly choose the assignments that helped my case. I choose the assignments I was forced to because I could not possibly maintain any specialness of Deut 14 as compared to Lev 11 since they are the same. In reality, I had only 189 choices regarding Deut 32-34. But, even that is just silly. Clearly, you can not argue that assigning Deut 8-9 to P would be no less damaging to the theory than reassigning Deut 32-34. Deut 32-34 are the last three chapters, so they don’t break up the flow. The only thing that remains to be considered is number 4. The total number of verses included here is just 6.5 This is hardly relevant in the scheme of things. And, they are also not random verses. For example, note that Deut 1:3 is towards the beginning.

The point is, that while I do have some freedom of choice, it doesn’t explain the one in a hundred septillion chance of the phenomenon happening by chance. And, I’ve only used 2 words! Imagine if I used all 500 of Carpenter’s. Or, worse, imagined if I considered contradictions, theological orientation, purpose etc.

Of course, I’ve not proved it’s a different author. It could be that these phenomenon result from a different theme. Or, maybe it is a different author and that author is just Moses. Those arguments will be considered in the next post. In that post, we will also begin to consider P.