Parsha Insights Vayichi 2006
Reading through the parsha, it just jumps at you that Yaakov is buried twice. First, we read (in chapter 50)
ד וַיַּעַבְרוּ, יְמֵי בְכִיתוֹ, וַיְדַבֵּר יוֹסֵף, אֶל-בֵּית פַּרְעֹה לֵאמֹר: אִם-נָא מָצָאתִי חֵן, בְּעֵינֵיכֶם--דַּבְּרוּ-נָא, בְּאָזְנֵי פַרְעֹה לֵאמֹר. ה אָבִי הִשְׁבִּיעַנִי לֵאמֹר, הִנֵּה אָנֹכִי מֵת--בְּקִבְרִי אֲשֶׁר כָּרִיתִי לִי בְּאֶרֶץ כְּנַעַן, שָׁמָּה תִּקְבְּרֵנִי; וְעַתָּה, אֶעֱלֶה-נָּא וְאֶקְבְּרָה אֶת-אָבִי--וְאָשׁוּבָה. ו וַיֹּאמֶר, פַּרְעֹה: עֲלֵה וּקְבֹר אֶת-אָבִיךָ, כַּאֲשֶׁר הִשְׁבִּיעֶךָ. ז וַיַּעַל יוֹסֵף, לִקְבֹּר אֶת-אָבִיו; וַיַּעֲלוּ אִתּוֹ כָּל-עַבְדֵי פַרְעֹה, זִקְנֵי בֵיתוֹ, וְכֹל, זִקְנֵי אֶרֶץ-מִצְרָיִם. ח וְכֹל בֵּית יוֹסֵף, וְאֶחָיו וּבֵית אָבִיו: רַק, טַפָּם וְצֹאנָם וּבְקָרָם--עָזְבוּ, בְּאֶרֶץ גֹּשֶׁן. ט וַיַּעַל עִמּוֹ, גַּם-רֶכֶב גַּם-פָּרָשִׁים; וַיְהִי הַמַּחֲנֶה, כָּבֵד מְאֹד. י וַיָּבֹאוּ עַד-גֹּרֶן הָאָטָד, אֲשֶׁר בְּעֵבֶר הַיַּרְדֵּן, וַיִּסְפְּדוּ-שָׁם, מִסְפֵּד גָּדוֹל וְכָבֵד מְאֹד; וַיַּעַשׂ לְאָבִיו אֵבֶל, שִׁבְעַת יָמִים. יא וַיַּרְא יוֹשֵׁב הָאָרֶץ הַכְּנַעֲנִי אֶת-הָאֵבֶל, בְּגֹרֶן הָאָטָד, וַיֹּאמְרוּ, אֵבֶל-כָּבֵד זֶה לְמִצְרָיִם; עַל-כֵּן קָרָא שְׁמָהּ, אָבֵל מִצְרַיִם, אֲשֶׁר, בְּעֵבֶר הַיַּרְדֵּן
Immediately following this, also in chapter 50, we read of the whole story a second time.
יב וַיַּעֲשׂוּ בָנָיו, לוֹ--כֵּן, כַּאֲשֶׁר צִוָּם. יג וַיִּשְׂאוּ אֹתוֹ בָנָיו, אַרְצָה כְּנַעַן, וַיִּקְבְּרוּ אֹתוֹ, בִּמְעָרַת שְׂדֵה
הַמַּכְפֵּלָה: אֲשֶׁר קָנָה אַבְרָהָם אֶת-הַשָּׂדֶה לַאֲחֻזַּת-קֶבֶר, מֵאֵת עֶפְרֹן הַחִתִּי--עַל-פְּנֵי מַמְרֵא
With a superficial reading, we get the impression that this is all one long saga. There was
fist a ceremony in גֹרֶן הָאָטָד, followed by a ceremony in me’rat hamachpela. However, on further inspection, that is not the case, for the following reasons:
1. Goren Ha’atad is in Kinaan (50:11), and yet, the story in verse 13 implies that when they departed, they were not yet in Canaan. If the departure was from Goren Ha’atad, that would not be accurate.
2. In verse 4-11, Yosef takes the lead. In verse 12-13, the brothers take the lead. Why the switch?
3. If the Yaakov was not buried in Goren Ha’atad, what was the purpose of the ceremony?
Before I continue bringing support for the DH here, I will mention a vort I heard from Rav Binyamin Tabori attempting to answer this question from a traditional point of view. He suggested (from the S’fas Emes?) that Yosef had only permission to go to the edge of Israel. Once they got to Goren Ha’atad, which was on the border, Yosef had to return to Egypt, and so the brothers continued the job. Not very convincing, but cute.
In any event, DH would suggest that verses 4-11 are JE and 12 – 13 are P. This fits in very well in the following ways:
1. The command of burial from Jacob to his sons is also repeated twice (which is also a support for the DH). Once in P (49:29-33) in which the brothers are commanded and once in JE (47:29-31), in which Yosef alone is commanded. Thus, in the execution of the command, the JE account contains only Yosef, but the P account contains the brothers as a unit.
2. The following P words in the P sections.
1. A circular inclusio in verse 49:28
2. מְּעָרָה אֲשֶׁר בִּשְׂדֵה הַמַּכְפֵּלָה (49:29, 49:30) (50:13)
3. גְוַע (49:33)
4. וַיֵּאָסֶף (49:33)
5. אֲחֻזַּ (49:30, 50:13)
6. קָנָה (49:30, 49:32, 50:13)
Numbers 5 & 6 are somewhat weaker than the others, as to be discussed in other posts. Some might argue that the term “b’nei chet” is also unique to P. I’m not so sure about that. I’ll have to do a post on that question as well. In any event, note that there are 11 P words in just 6.5 P p’sukim compared to zero P words in the eleven JE p’sukim concerning this matter. Coincidence?
3. The following JE words in the JE sections
1. מָצָאתִי חֵן בְּעֵינֶיךָ (47:29)
2. אָנֹכִי (47:30) (50:5)
3. אִם-נָא מָצָאתִי חֵן, בְּעֵינֵיכֶם (50:4)
With this, I conclude, temporarily, my analysis of Genesis. I will now commence with an analysis of Exodus. I will return to my analysis of Genesis when we return to laining Genesis next year, if my blog is still around then.
A gut shabbos to all
posted by littlefoxlings at 10:04 PM
95 Comments:
The only problem I have with this kind of analysis is the general methodological issue - the "idiot redactor" problem identified by the philosopher Walter Kaufmann. Only an idiot would splice together two stories that obviously don't mesh.
A simpler interpretation might be that there are two issues being discussed. One is the mourning for Yaaqov, something that even the Egyptians participated in. The other is the fulfillment of the promise to bury Yaaqov in Maarat Hamachpela, which wasn't mentioned previously. This is uniquely Jewish, not something that the Egyptians can understand or participate in. It has to do with Jewish history and destiny.
I am saying this off the cuff, so no need to skewer me if the interpretation doesn't exactly work.
1/01/2007 10:20 PM
The only problem I have with this kind of analysis is the general methodological issue - the "idiot redactor" problem identified by the philosopher Walter Kaufmann. Only an idiot would splice together two stories that obviously don't mesh.
In theory I would agree with you. However, our hands are tired. Whether we like it or not, the fact is that these sort of problems exist on nearly every page. The evidence seems to be that the redactor just simply did not care. In any event, what else would you prefer to say? There is one author? Then the problem is even worse, what you would call the “idiot author” problem. Only an idiot would write a story that obviously doesn’t mesh. However you will explain for 1 author, can also be used to explain according to the redactor.
One is the mourning for Yaaqov, something that even the Egyptians participated in. The other is the fulfillment of the promise to bury Yaaqov in Maarat Hamachpela, which wasn't mentioned previously.
1. The fact that the P words are turned on and off like a switch, concentrated all in several verses, and not spread evenly throughout suggests a different author.
2. If these are two separate events, why, when leaving goren ha’atad does the Torah revert to saying they were going to Canaan? They were already there!
3. Why is the command of burial repeated twice?
4. Why did the Egyptians do the ceremony in goren Ha’atad and not in Egypt?
I am saying this off the cuff, so no need to skewer me if the interpretation doesn't exactly work.
Who, me, skewer someone? :-)
1/01/2007 10:35 PM
In terms of the DH, what is your opinion of the many critiques written against it, particularly those that have discounted its relevance to Beresheet? Powerful challenges have been made, many available on the Net.
In reply to your "idiot author" idea, I would say this - to me, the DH is often used as a way out of having to understand the text on a deeper level.
Yet many people, and this is becoming a trend among Biblical scholars who are taking a literary approach, are discovering that the supposed discrepancies in the text reveal deep insights. And I'm not talking about rabbis or midrashim, just secular students of the bible on its own terms. Take Kass or Alter for example.
I find the DH useful for identifying questions but disappointing when it comes to answers. And the way that verses and stories are sliced and diced is bizarre. If the redactor was going to cut stuff up so wildly, why not just create a uniform text already...
I am interested in your response to my first two questions the most.
Good night!
1/01/2007 11:31 PM
Take Kass or Alter for example.
But Kass isn't a bible scholar and Alter accepts the DH (or at least the 90% that matter to this discussion)!
1/01/2007 11:59 PM
In terms of the DH, what is your opinion of the many critiques written against it, particularly those that have discounted its relevance to Beresheet? Powerful challenges have been made, many available on the Net.
I am not sure specifically, which arguments you are referring to so I can not respond. I have read much, both on the net and in books, attempting to discredit the DH, but without knowing which specific arguments you refer to, I can not comment more.
In general, whenever I discuss an issue in this blog, I try to present both points of view and thereby end up discussing the arguments I have heard, which is by no means exhaustive of all that is written. As I have told you before, I am not, nor do I claim to be, very well. I think about things and this blog reflects my thoughts, not the current leading view of scholars.
Let me also note, that I am still undecided about DH. The main purpose of starting this blog was to review all the arguments I had heard on the topic. In a previous post
(http://littlefoxling.blogspot.com/2006/11/vort-blog-and-wikipedia.html)
I discussed why I thought a blog would be an ideal place for such a project.
Of course, even when I am done, I see no reason to make up my mind on the matter. DH is one of the weakest problems with orthodox Judaism and is unlikely to influence me one way or another on that issue so my opinion on it has little effect on my life and I therefore see no reason to reach a definitive conclusion.
In reply to your "idiot author" idea, I would say this - to me, the DH is often used as a way out of having to understand the text on a deeper level.
Yet many people and this is becoming a trend among Biblical scholars who are taking a literary approach, are discovering that the supposed discrepancies in the text reveal deep insights. And I'm not talking about rabbis or midrashim, just secular students of the bible on its own terms. Take Kass or Alter for example.
i guess the point is just that I am usually skeptical of the deeper meaning.
I find the DH useful for identifying questions but disappointing when it comes to answers. And the way that verses and stories are sliced and diced is bizarre. If the redactor was going to cut stuff up so wildly, why not just create a uniform text already...
I agree with you about the questions. I feel DH is a must study for everyone who learns Tanach. Even if you don't agree with it, the insights it has will enrich your understanding of Tanach however you choose to study it.
I don't agree with you about the answers. I think the DH's answers are the simplest out there. Just saying it's two different authors.
I also don't believe the cutting up is that wild. When it comes to J vs. E that is probably an accurate description, but I have always been a little wary of the whole J vs. E distinction. However, when you consider the JE vs. D vs. P distinction, MOST of the time, the chunks are pretty big. There are certainly instances, such as parshas Noach, were that is not the case. But, in many instances it is. For example, all of Vayikra is P. Most of Divorim is D. etc.
1/02/2007 12:08 AM
Anon,
Welcome
But Kass isn't a bible scholar and Alter accepts the DH (or at least the 90% that matter to this discussion)!
He wasn't saying that Alter denies the DH, he was just saying that you could use Alter's methodology to argue against DH. Below I’ve put an excerpt from an interview with Alter where the guy asked him about the fact that he has become a poster boy for fighting the DH (from here: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_n37_v113/ai_18997235/pg_3)
Q : Your insistence on paying careful attention to the literary character of the Bible has led to the charge that you are a kind of neofundamentalist. How do you respond to this charge? More important, how does your narrative approach relate to text-critical and historical approaches to the Bible? Can we forget everything we had to learn about J, E and P?
A: I have been accused a couple of times of being a neofundamentalist, which I think is nonsense. just because I want to take seriously the unity of the text hardly qualifies me as any kind of fundamentalist. I don't close my mind to, history. The documentary hypothesis is pretty well in place with regard to the first four books of the Pentateuch, and attempts that have been made over the years to overturn it are not very convincing.
But, having said that, what do you do math these strands of tradition? The documentary hypothesis is useful if you are trying to reconstruct the evolving ideological strata of ancient Israel and when you are entertaining hypotheses about the evolution of the text that we have before us. Of course, there is no single documentary hypothesis that everyone agrees on. There is no total agreement about when and where each of these sources comes from, and scholars disagree sharply about the exact borderlines between J, E, P and so forth. Those disagreements aside, the next question is what one does with the documentary hypothesis if one wants to take the biblical text as what I call the finished product - as an integrated literary artifact that speaks to us.
In answer to this question I stress heavily the importance of redaction. The redaction of the biblical text seems to me not in the least mechanical or haphazard. There are uneven joints here and there, but the redactor's work is very purposeful and gives us in the end a book that we can read as a continuum... (go there if you want to read the rest)
1/02/2007 12:41 AM
Two points I neglected to mention in the original post:
1. If we assume that 50:12-13 is a continuation of 50:4-11, then verse 13, וַיַּעֲשׂוּ בָנָיו, לוֹ--כֵּן, כַּאֲשֶׁר צִוָּם is quite odd. According to DH, this is easily understood as the introduction to the burial procedure. But, if it the text is a unity, why would this come in the middle of the passage?
2. An argument for unity can be made on the basis of 48:7
וַאֲנִי בְּבֹאִי מִפַּדָּן, מֵתָה עָלַי רָחֵל בְּאֶרֶץ כְּנַעַן בַּדֶּרֶךְ, בְּעוֹד כִּבְרַת-אֶרֶץ, לָבֹא אֶפְרָתָה; וָאֶקְבְּרֶהָ שָּׁם בְּדֶרֶךְ אֶפְרָת, הִוא בֵּית לָחֶם
This is a weird out of place of passuk. Why is Yaakov telling us this here? If we view the text as a unity, it can be understood as relating to 47:29-30 that relate to the burial of Yaakov. However, according to DH this is not possible since 47:29-30 is J and 48:7 is P.
However, the truth is that the passuk is out of place even if the text is a unity. Firstly, it is unclear what the relevance of the burial of Rachel is to the burial of Yaakov. Moreover, if it does relate to the burial of Yaakov, why does it appear here and not in the original passage about Yaakov's burial. It's just a weird passuk, anyway you slice it.
1/02/2007 2:02 AM
>The only problem I have with this kind of analysis is the general methodological issue - the "idiot redactor" problem identified by the philosopher Walter Kaufmann. Only an idiot would splice together two stories that obviously don't mesh.
R' Maroof. I'm slipping my toes into a subject that has begun to interest me but I know very little about this, even less than my usual lack of knowledge.
But I'd like to offer this perspective. If the redactor is such an idiot, why did it take till the 19th century for people to even begin to question single authorship? Apparently, the redactor didn't do so bad.
You might want to claim that it has never been analyzed from a critical perspective before. If such is the case, then I believe it will weaken your Kuzari argument.
1/02/2007 11:55 AM
>why did it take till the 19th century for people to even begin to question single authorship?
correction. Spinoza in the 17th Century questioned it (perhaps others before him too). He speculated that perhaps the redactor didn't get a chance to smooth out all of the bumps before he died. But that was only a speculative theory.
That's why we told you to read his book :)
1/02/2007 12:27 PM
BHB,
despite my minor correction, your observation is still valid. I was being a little pedantic :)
1/02/2007 12:31 PM
Baruch, I'm impressed. But the book I'm reading show's Spinoza questioning anachronism's and statements such as "till this day". That still points to single authorship, but of a later date. It's a little unclear in "Who wrote the Bible", but apparently doublets were first noticed in the 18th century and in the 19th century "the two source hypothesis was expanded" to four sources.
(BTW, I remember as a small child, thinking how remarkable it was that Avimelech was involved twice with married women).
Either way, point taken, I will get to that book. It's on my "Blockbuster queue".
1/02/2007 1:46 PM
R' Maroof. I'm slipping my toes into a subject that has begun to interest me but I know very little about this, even less than my usual lack of knowledge.
Come on, when did that stop anyone before?
But I'd like to offer this perspective. If the redactor is such an idiot, why did it take till the 19th century for people to even begin to question single authorship? Apparently, the redactor didn't do so bad.
People did not begin to question single authorship because the possibility did not occur to them. Most studying the Bible assumed it was Divine, the idea of two authors would never have even crossed their mind.
Take this example: In the beginning of peirush hamishnayos, the Rambam gives a lengthy description of why the tractates are ordered as they are. Anyone who thinks about it will note that in fact they are ordered (with the exception of the 1st half of z'ruim and some other minor exceptions) by size. Why then, did the Rambam need to give the order?
The answer is that the size order possibility just never occurred to him. The same is true here.
I happen to think R did a very bad job. There are numerous problems with the texts. Sometimes I wonder if he was even trying to cover it up (though, in some cases, he clearly is), but as I said, I see this as a support for the DH, not a problem with it.
1/02/2007 2:00 PM
>But the book I'm reading show's Spinoza questioning anachronism's and statements such as "till this day". That still points to single authorship, but of a later date.
Who wrote this book? He is not correct. Spinoza noticed the doublets and that is why he suggested multiple authorship.
1/02/2007 2:12 PM
>I happen to think R did a very bad job. There are numerous problems with the texts.
LF, you may say that out of hindsight. I know, you mentioned to me that you indeed discovered a doublet yourself, so maybe you've got some kind of gift.
>Who wrote this book? He is not correct. Spinoza noticed the doublets and that is why he suggested multiple authorship
This is Richard Elliot Friedman in "who wrote the Bible". I don't doubt you, but Friedman does not attribute observation of doublets nor multiple authorship to Spinoza.
Likewise, Wikipedia, in it's articles on DH & Spinoza, seems to credit him onle with general skepticism of the Bible.
Try modifying Wiki and see if it sticks.
1/02/2007 3:13 PM
BHB,
I think it's an interesting question as to what R was aiming for? In certain instances, it seems as though you have a cover-up situation. In other words, he takes verses from source A and verses from source B and intends to modify them ever so slightly so as to weld them together. Other times, though, it doesn't even seem like he is trying to do that. It almost seems like he was just writing a compellation, the way today someone might create a compellation of theology articles, just combining different traditions, never intending to fool anyone.
The problem I've always had with the 1st model is why would anyone ever do that? Why would someone want to fool people? Why would he deliberately do that? The second approach is much easier to understand. There were different books out about Moses. Someone felt like combining them, so he just took pieces from here and pieces from here and combined them.
The only way I can make sense of the 1st approach is to assume that R viewed himself as trying to write his own book, just he made heavy use of older material in his writings, but he was cognizant of that and attempted to smooth them.
1/02/2007 3:27 PM
LF, I really can't begin to comment. And you're right REF does not make an attempt to explain the real mechanics of DH, just identify the basic players in the game. It's a good overview for me though, especially since I never really even learnt Nach. We were too busy with Tosfos and the Maharsha.
One thing I like about the book is a table at the end that putative author of section of the Chumash.
It would be nice if someone would publish a Chumash that would identify each possuk with some sort of code, like different color ink. (you know, like some newer Hoshana Pamphlets where the days are color coded).
It would really be nice if we could do it in a way that only skeptics knew what it meant! Like that I could take it to shul on Shabbos......
It would be really nice if we could do it in a way that only
1/02/2007 3:44 PM
And you're right REF does not make an attempt to explain the real mechanics of DH, just identify the basic players in the game.
Exactly the problem! Instead of spending time on DH, he spends time trying to figure out who J, E, P, D etc are. The problem is that we can never answer that question as we really don't have enough evidence, nor does he do a good job of presenting any. Much of what he says is highly speculative. Appropriate for advanced scholars, not for an intro book.
It's a good overview for me though, especially since I never really even learnt Nach. We were too busy with Tosfos and the Maharsha.
LOL!
One thing I like about the book is a table at the end that putative author of section of the Chumash.
My favorite part.
It would be nice if someone would publish a Chumash that would identify each possuk with some sort of code, like different color ink. (you know, like some newer Hoshana Pamphlets where the days are color coded).
I have heard legends that such a chumash, but I have never seen it myself. Let me know if you can track it down, I'd love to have one as well.
Another great idea is a chumash that has all the P phrases underlined. It would be wonderful for you would really see how P sections would have 2-3 underlines per verse and JE section have 1-2 per chapter maximum, often none. You could do the same for D.
It would really be nice if we could do it in a way that only skeptics knew what it meant! Like that I could take it to shul on Shabbos......
BHB,
I highly recommend becoming familiar enough with the theory that you can essentially see the colors even if it not there, for the simple reason that it makes laining and shul a lot more bearable. It’s really not that hard and just takes a drop of study. On shabbosim that my friends are out of town and I have no one to talk to, I would not be able to sit through shul without being able to study DH and pretend I am just learning chumash.
1/02/2007 3:58 PM
BHB,
I highly recommend becoming familiar enough with the theory that you can essentially see the colors even if it not there, for the simple reason that it makes laining and shul a lot more bearable. It’s really not that hard and just takes a drop of study.
Let me clarify. I am not talking about memorizing REF’s whole table which would be tedious, boring and take you forever. I mean the following: You more or less know that D = (more or less) Devorim. You also know all of P is Vayikrah, so it’s just a question of JE vs. P in the other 3 books. If you memorize the 50 or so most frequently used P words (which is easy to do since many of them are very similar to each other), that should probably give you enough to recognize over 90% of the P sections on your own. And, you’d have the added bonus of knowing the 50 most important P words by heart.
1/02/2007 4:14 PM
LF, ach, the computer ate my lengthy reply.
>I highly recommend becoming familiar enough with the theory that you can essentially see the colors even if it not there, for the simple reason that it makes laining and shul a lot more bearable.
LOL, I tried exactly that without any knowledge of the subject at all (just based on WIKI DH).
My sole criteria was - Elohim as E. I thought only Yayikra is P, which is why REF"s book is not so bad for me. Anyhow, I'll try it your way. What are the Nifty Fifty?
1/02/2007 4:43 PM
The DH is irrelevant to the Kuzari argument, because the Kuzari argument has nothing to do with the specific contents of the text. Only with the major historical events it describes.
The truth is that every problem identified by the DH people was noticed and accounted for by mefarshim without the DH. Some people find the DH explanations more convincing, at least for many of the problems. It depends what you are looking for from the text.
I don't think it is parsimonious to assume multiple sources in a document that was understood as unitary from its inception, especially when there is no manuscript evidence to back this assumption up at all. The speculative nature of the enterprise is made obvious by the limitless theories about the number of sources and their precise boundaries.
Of course, there are problems and apparent inconsistencies in many other kinds of texts, especially philosophical and literary ones, and we don't usually resort to such wild conjecture to resolve them. (Although many scholars, at the time DH and other "evolutionary" theories were first gaining popularity, did try this kind of thing with Homer, Shakespeare, etc., leading to what I understand were some amusing results).
The DH makes the claim that there are easily discernible multiple sources, and then claims that every place where it seems unified, it is in fact the work of a redactor. It is an unfalsifiable hypothesis because every question against it is turned into proof of the brilliant (or sloppy) redactor's work. It is not scientific because it doesn't subject itself to disproof.
And yes, I would apply the same critique to any study of literature using these methods without any manuscript to back it up. Even New Testament source criticism is suspect to me. The methods aren't reliable. Even liberal critics like Whybray, who date the Torah very late, have recognized this problem and moved away from DH-based approaches.
You should definitely read Walter Kaufmann's piece on this in Critique of Religion and Philosophy, entitled "two mosaic theories". You might also look at On The Reliability of the Old Testament, which I've mentioned before - Kitchen presents some challenges to the DH as well.
1/02/2007 6:01 PM
>You should definitely read Walter Kaufmann's piece on this in Critique of Religion and Philosophy, entitled "two mosaic theories". You might also look at On The Reliability of the Old Testament, which I've mentioned before - Kitchen presents some challenges to the DH as well.
R' Marood, that is good advice, which I hope to follow as well. Not necessarily those specific books, but rather some critique of DH, depending on what I can get my hands on. (I repeat this though, DH had no bearing on my turning skeptical. But I admit that it is of great interest to me now, probably for validation of my thought processes).
1/02/2007 6:19 PM
Then you are in good hands. DH is wonderful for validating just about any skeptical thought process.
Of all of the arguments out there against Orthodoxy, it is the most ridiculous. It has no solid basis at all, and was developed by people who most definitely had agendas, either anti-religious or antisemitic.
The only problem is that once somebody puts forth a position against the Torah, no matter how unfounded it is, anyone who responds is branded an apologist. So my hands are tied.
1/02/2007 7:32 PM
RJM,
I do not wish to be rude, but your response to DH in your comment unfortunately resembles much of the literature out there in the anti DH camp. With much fanfare, you accuse the DH of many things it is not guilty of, but offer no substance to rebut its claims.
Because of my personal story, I am much frustrated with your comment. I studied the DH. I was largely convinced by it, though I concede I still do have some doubts. I then went on the net and in anti DH books and read much about how, it could be shown that the DH was BS and how it could be shown that the DH was wrong. But, for all the books that accused the DH of stupidity, I did not see one that actually substantively responded to its arguments! This lead me to a great deal of frustration. I’ll add your books to my “to read” list, but I’ll respond below based on what you have said. Please recognize that my remarks come from a place of frustration and do not feel slighted by them.
The DH is irrelevant to the Kuzari argument, because the Kuzari argument has nothing to do with the specific contents of the text. Only with the major historical events it describes.
Not true. DH suggests that the tradition developed, with the details slowly being filled in. As such, the original tradition could have contained no miracles with those being subsequently added.
The truth is that every problem identified by the DH people was noticed and accounted for by mefarshim without the DH.
Not true. The clumpiness of the Torah’s style, the fact that P words and style are limited to P, which, in this blogger’s opinion is the one of the strongest supports of DH was not noticed till later. This is also true regarding some of the duplicates. The contradictions were generally noticed earlier.
Some people find the DH explanations more convincing, at least for many of the problems.
Like this blogger.
especially when there is no manuscript evidence to back this assumption up at all.
Again, not true. The Vatican’s version of the Septuagint in one chapter of Joshua has only the text from one of the authors according to the DH. In any case, since DH suggests the text was a unity several centuries before the first archeological Biblical finds, archeology sheds no light on this.
The speculative nature of the enterprise is made obvious by the limitless theories about the number of sources and their precise boundaries.
Again, not true. The center of the theory is the P/D/JE divide whose borders are to a great extent, agreed upon by all, though there are a few verses in dispute.
The DH makes the claim that there are easily discernible multiple sources, and then claims that every place where it seems unified, it is in fact the work of a redactor.
Again, not true. There are really very very few arguments of unity in the text regarding the JE/P/D divide. Those arguments are usually dispensed with by noting that all 3 books are based off of a common mutual heritage.
It is an unfalsifiable hypothesis because every question against it is turned into proof of the brilliant (or sloppy) redactor's work. It is not scientific because it doesn't subject itself to disproof.
With that kind of argument, you could throw out ½ of the humanities and social sciences.
R' Marood, that is good advice, which I hope to follow as well. Not necessarily those specific books, but rather some critique of DH, depending on what I can get my hands on.
I have not read these specific books, but from what I have read, I have not been impressed. Most critiques of the DH really seem to not actually know the DH. Instead of actually responding to the claims of DH, they merely state, DH does this, DH does that, when in reality their accusations are generally unfounded. The fact is that there is much evidence to support DH.
Of all of the arguments out there against Orthodoxy, it is the most ridiculous. It has no solid basis at all, and was developed by people who most definitely had agendas, either anti-religious or antisemitic.
I will agree with you that many of the other problems with orthodoxy are far greater than this one, but your characterization of DH, in my opinion, is quite off. I have read much, in books and on the net, attempting to discredit the DH. However, most of it, unfortunately, fails to answer anything. Do they attempt to answer any of the contradictions of the DH? Do they explain why a single author uses numerous duplicates? Do they explain the fact that often several stories in the Bible are so similar, the chance of them both happening by coincidence is essentially zero? Did they explain why you can divide the Bible in half such that one side contains several P words in a passuk and one side contains several P words in the entire half? Did they explain why the law code in Deut not only contradicts the law code in P, but on several issue, states the same law, again and again, although in P the opposite is stated again, and again, and again?
No, no, no, no and no. Or else, in some cases, they try but do a poor job.
Instead of responding to any of the substance, they respond with drama and baseless accusations. In many cases, one even wonders if they are familiar with the DH at all.
1/02/2007 8:56 PM
BHB,
What are the Nifty Fifty?
I am hesitant to reply since I do not know the frequency of all the P words by heart. Moreover, in some cases, there is room to debate if something is a P word. How about this? As I’ve been going through the Torah, I’ve been doing posts on P words. I’ll do a post which has a list of all the P words I’ve done thus far sorted by their frequency of occurrence in chumash. I’ll continue to update this post every time a do a P word. I’ll also put a link to it on my side bar for easy access. Look for the post sometime in the next week or so. I certainly have not done enough P words yet for you to be able to divide up chumash on your own based on those words, but I assume that I’ll hit that critical mass in the not too distant future. In the mean time, to hold you over, the following list might help
1. Koban
2. Chatat
3. circular inclusion
4. lidorosam, lidoroseichim, lidoros olam
5. Toldot
6. Holid
7. Eidah
8. Min (species)
9. Nasi
10. Beit Avotam
11. Limishpichotam, limishpicoteichem
12. Guva
13. Asaf (to die)
14. P’ru ur’vu
Again, this is not a complete list, nor am I claiming they are all that common. But, you’d be surprised how much of chumash is covered just by these 14. Look for continually updated list soon.
1/02/2007 9:13 PM
I am wondering which sources you feel misrepresent the DH as described. Do you include David Tzvi Hoffman's work in your dismissal? What about Umberto Cassuto? You might also want to look at Hoffmeier and Kitchen's books for more recent scholarly discussions.
I don't claim that the DH fails to answer good questions. What I claim is this:
1 - The fact that there is not the slightest mention of the existence of multiple sources anytime before the 17th century is suspect, especially since the Jewish tradition was quite open about Ezra correcting errors, marking doubtful words and changing the script of the Torah.
2 - Many of the problems - especially doublets and similar stories that repeat - are intrinsic problems that were not just "discovered" yesterday. There are good explanations for all of them. In fact, the similar stories are more likely to be intentional for the purpose of emphasizing commonalities and themes than accidental sloppiness. The Torah is documenting the unfolding of the Divine plan and that these patterns and repetitions serve to highlight the purposefulness of the events. In other words, the whole point is that it's not chance!
3 - The whole idea of an incompetent redactor producing a work that has been hailed for millenia as the greatest book ever written is implausible. I mean, it seems patently absurd that the individual cut and pasted sections of books without noticing glaring contradictions and then presented his work as devar Hashem. Sometimes half a verse is assigned to one source and half to another, and yet whole passages conflict. What kind of editing is this?
4 - The linguistic and stylistic patterns associated with P or D for example may show different thematic trends or emphases rather than different authors. The fact that certain words appear in one place more than another in a text doesn't necessarily mean anything about authorship. Especially since there is a circularity to the argument - we identify sources based on variations, those variations then become indications of the presence of different sources.
I don't know anything about the Vatican text you mentioned, but I don't know what the significance of a Septuagint copy would be. No pro-DH source I have read has spoken about the existence of any actual documents that support the theory.
1/02/2007 9:23 PM
Your word list seems to support my #4 above. There are good reasons why several of these words would be used systematically in some contexts and be entirely absent from others.
1/02/2007 9:25 PM
BHB,
Without actually counting, I'd estimate that the 14 words I put above probably appear around 800 times in Chumash. Since there's around 100 P Perukim, that's around 8 per perek just from these 14. Much of Chumush is chunks that are a perek or bigger for a given author, so that's more than enough for those sizes. As the passages get smaller and smaller, it'd get harder and harder with just this list.
1/02/2007 9:31 PM
"The fact that there is not the slightest mention of the existence of multiple sources anytime before the 17th century is suspect, especially since the Jewish tradition was quite open about Ezra correcting errors, marking doubtful words and changing the script of the Torah."
Completely untrue. First of all, the tradition has always ascribed a different author for Deuteronomy--you just never really though of it that way. Whether YHWH approved of including Moshe's words in the Torah doesn't change that the mind behind the words was always thought to be different for the 5th book. Furthermore, all those who held it was Moshe's words did so based on the shift in voice! You're just not used to thinking about what they held in this way, but there it is.
Even more importantly, there are many traditional positions that include multiple authors for the Torah. For example, some held that the Avot wrote Bereishit and Moshe just included it.
1/02/2007 10:00 PM
Instead of responding to any of the substance, they respond with drama and baseless accusations. In many cases, one even wonders if they are familiar with the DH at all.
I am wondering which sources you feel misrepresent the DH as described. Do you include David Tzvi Hoffman's work in your dismissal? What about Umberto Cassuto? You might also want to look at Hoffmeier and Kitchen's books for more recent scholarly discussions.
DZ Hoffman's work is exactly as LF describes: drama and the genetic fallacy: "Oy, it's anti-semites out to kill the Torah so therefore it's not true." and never addresses the teeth of the argument.
Cassuto is much betteron that count, but that's because he's not stuck defending the indefensible Orthodox position. He can and does posit multiple, late authors--just differently from the DH! And his arguments are not strong, certainly when compared to the DH. It's no help to posit the standard anti-religion conspiracy for why his anti-DH positions weren't accepted by the mainstream; after all, his position may be even more "heretical." No, they simply failed to convince anyone, even his own students.
1/02/2007 10:08 PM
I am wondering which sources you feel misrepresent the DH as described. Do you include David Tzvi Hoffman's work in your dismissal? What about Umberto Cassuto? You might also want to look at Hoffmeier and Kitchen's books for more recent scholarly discussions.
I have read both Cassuto and Hoffman. As I said, I’ll add your books to my to read list (between you and Spinoza, I think I’ll no longer have a life)
Let me put it this way, I liked Hoffman a lot more than Cassuto. Re: Cassuto, i feel there is very little value in what he has to say. Attacking
every point in the book well, is too time consuming so my options are
to limit my scope or to dilute the force and I chose the former. For an example, I’ve done a post devoted to attacking Cassuto on one issue over here:
http://littlefoxling.blogspot.com/2006/12/anianoki.html (the attack is actually in the comment)
While Cassuto waxes eloquent in the book about how he has destroyed the DH on the point in question, by the time I had concluded my analysis of the situation, I felt as though what he said actually was complete BS. As I noted in that post, the sever extent to which Cassuto is senseless by the time I am finished with him, makes me doubt that I am even understating him properly, as I know he is highly regarded. Alas, I am limited to the powers of my intellect and to that of my friends with whom I conversed about this matter, none of which could explain it to me. Similar problems plague the rest of the work. In pomp, he greatly excels, but in substance he is lacking.
A to Hoffman, I actually liked the book very much. I came out more skeptical of DH when I was done than before I had started. He convinced me to some degree. However, he was not successful in turning me. He made some good arguments, but the weight of his were weaker than the weight made by the proponents of the theory.
1 – OK, and people also thought the world was flat for much of the same period.
2 – OK, well said and a good response (worthy of Hoffman), but I still think multiple authorship is a simpler answer. Moreover, in many cases, as in this post, it is not so much two stories that are similar, but the same story twice. In those cases, your answer would not work. This really must be considered on a case by case basis.
3 – Clearly, those who say that were biased. They would have said that irrelevant of how good the book actually was.
I mean, it seems patently absurd that the individual cut and pasted sections of books without noticing glaring contradictions and then presented his work as devar Hashem. Sometimes half a verse is assigned to one source and half to another, and yet whole passages conflict. What kind of editing is this?
Yes, it does seem quite absurd. But, what can we do? The evidence is there.
4 – Yes, that is quite possible and one of the two possibilities you raised (circular reasoning and thematic differences) would need to be the answer to the question if DH is wrong. In both cases, it is difficult to comment on this without actually considering all of the P and D words and their distribution throughout the Bible. Before doing beginning this blog, I was attempting to do exactly this with in pen and paper but found that the project was to difficult and I did not have enough rigor to complete it satisfactory. It is particularly to answer those questions that this blog was founded and those two possibilities will continue to be the leitmotif of this blog. I will attempt to analyze whether or not those arguments are in fact valid born out in the text itself. More on that in future posts.
I don't know anything about the Vatican text you mentioned, but I don't know what the significance of a Septuagint copy would be. No pro-DH source I have read has spoken about the existence of any actual documents that support the theory.
The relevance is that the text clearly was not attempting to match the DH since it was written before the DH was developed. Obviously, then, it is merely a variant version. How might this come about? One possibility is that someone edited out the verses DH assigns to a given author in that chapter. This would be odd for two reasons. Firstly, why would someone do that? Secondly, it is most unlikely that the editor would coincidently choose the DH verses (again, he did not know about DH). Thus, it seems more logical that originally, the Vatican’s version was the actual text and someone added verses. This is exactly the process DH suggests happened. The fact that the Vatican’s source is along the DH’s lines further strengthens the claim. It is generally not spoken of since it is only one chapter and thought to be insignificant, and, moreover, as I mentioned, the DH places the date of unity before the Greek era so it actually doesn’t fit in exactly. But, to be honest, if I was writing a book about DH, I would definitely include it and I don’t know why many books leave it out. For more info, see Alexander Rofe, "Introduction to the Composition of the Pentateuch," 1998, which, is, by the way, an excellent book, who discuses both pros and cons of DH quite well (but of course, that the Torah is not written in its entirely by Moses is for him obvious, and he shows it quite well).
Your word list seems to support my #4 above. There are good reasons why several of these words would be used systematically in some contexts and be entirely absent from others.
Again, possible but one would need to do a detailed analysis of things to conclude that. For example, you are probably thinking that the word Korban is limited to P because korbanot are spoken of in P. Yet, much material outside of P discuses korbanot and does not use the word korban. I’m not saying you can’t explain that, but you really need to consider every word by itself, which is exactly the purpose of this blog. Korban was already discussed here:
http://littlefoxling.blogspot.com/2006/11/on-sacrifice_01.html
1/02/2007 10:14 PM
That was me, littlefoxling. I don;t know why it says little.
1/02/2007 10:16 PM
Anon,
It is interesting that you liked Cassuto better and I Hoffman. However, I think it may be explainable. I will agree with what you said that Cassuto has more substance then Hoffman. Unlike Hoffman, he really does take the DH’s questions by the horns, and responds to the with strength. Hoffman does so, but to a much lesser extent than Cassuto. My problem is that while Cassuto does respond to the arguments, what he says is nonsense, as I showed about Ani/Anoki in the post I referenced before. Yes, he uses ink to make letters and combines the letters to make words, but the arguments just make no sense. At least Hoffman makes sense. True, as we both noted, he is weaker than the DH, but he is sensible, and he helps the opposing position.
Again, it really scares me to what degree Cassuto makes no sense. If someone can find the flaw in the post I referenced above, I would be very grateful.
1/02/2007 10:21 PM
I will agree with what you said that Cassuto has more substance then Hoffman. Unlike Hoffman, he really does take the DH’s questions by the horns, and responds to the with strength. Hoffman does so, but to a much lesser extent than Cassuto. My problem is that while Cassuto does respond to the arguments, what he says is nonsense, as I showed about Ani/Anoki in the post I referenced before.
We are in substantial agreement (Though I wouldn't call what Cassuto wrote "nonsense," just weak arguments. He did play by the rules.)
1/02/2007 10:53 PM
Again, it really scares me to what degree Cassuto makes no sense.
You know, there's a reason why the DH is so widely accepted, and it's not because of a conspiracy, or that no ones ever read Cassuto, or that they can't think of something else. It's because it's a compelling argument; it compells belief.
1/02/2007 10:55 PM
it's amazing to me that people get so worked up about DH. If the theory was that Ezra wrote the whole thing would people get as worked up about it? Is it the multiple sources or the fact that Moshe didn't write the whole thing?
1/02/2007 11:04 PM
it's amazing to me that people get so worked up about DH. If the theory was that Ezra wrote the whole thing would people get as worked up about it?
No, it's not the particular author, but how compelling it is. The fear is that people who know about it will believe it. It wouldn't matter who the evidence says really wrote it, just so long as informed people are convinced.
1/02/2007 11:07 PM
Anon,
Yes, we are in substantive agreement, but you seem more knowledgeable than I. I thank you for your insights and hope you will continue to comment. Are you the same person who wrote in above regarding Alter? I am curious, what’s your deal? Do you believe DH? Any doubt? Are you OJ? How do you reconcile?
Spinoza,
1. It is just more interesting. The question of when it was written is a Boolean one with little depth. DH is a beautiful striking theory which aside from its own beauty is helpful for understanding the development of the religion. In fact, I would think it of interest even to the frum people.
2. DH is more successfully prone to censorship than other problems. You can’t really censor the problem about humans being more than 6,000 years old because everyone knows about the remains that were found and the problem is obvious. People try to answer it, but there is never an attempt made to pretend it does not exist. DH, on the other hand, is not compelling unless someone invests serious time to study it and therefore it is possible to censor it. I was essentially unaware of any of DH arguments until approximately 2.5 years ago, and that despite having read many biblical critics on a wide variety of topics, but the yeshiva system succeeded in censoring this topic from me. That bothers me.
3. Much has been said in this thread about the fact that DH is one of the weaker arguments against OJ. This is true. However, accepting OJ does not require that one reject some or the more compelling arguments against it, but that one rejects every single disproof against it. As someone who is an OJ, I get worked up about every single argument against OJ, irrespective of how it stands on the scale. The arguments that the Torah was written after Moses do not overlap much with the arguments for multiple authorship. These are separate independent arguments and there is reason to get worked over each. But, BHB was right in his last post, I get too worked up about things. Thanks for trying to calm it down.
1/02/2007 11:30 PM
Are you the same person who wrote in above regarding Alter?
Yes.
I am curious, what’s your deal?
Recovering from Orthodox Judaism.
Do you believe DH?
Tentatively, and only mostly.
Any doubt?
Yes.
Are you OJ?
Ex.
How do you reconcile?
Same way I reconcile other religions' holy books and attendant claims with reality: they're fiction. Truly conflict-free reconciliation. Ahhh.
1/02/2007 11:40 PM
I'm guessing based on his style that Anonymous is Mis-nagid (am I right?)
1/02/2007 11:42 PM
Same way I reconcile other religions' holy books and attendant claims with reality: they're fiction. Truly conflict-free reconciliation. Ahhh.
Well, that was a follow up assuming the answer was you are OJ. If you are not, the follow up is, what's your motivation to read OJ blogs like this one.
I'm guessing based on his style that Anonymous is Mis-nagid (am I right?)
If you are right, we have living evidence that DH methodology works :-)
1/02/2007 11:45 PM
as essentially unaware of any of DH arguments until approximately 2.5 years ago, and that despite having read many biblical critics on a wide variety of topics, but the yeshiva system succeeded in censoring this topic from me.
And I was an atheist before I'd even heard of it.
The truth is that Orthodox Jews don't not believe in the DH, they've never heard of it. The amount of ignorance required to achieve a reliable chance of keeping someone Orthodox has gone up and up, which is why post-Emancipation only sects with more cult-like techniques are surviving. It's not planned, it's just natural selection in action, with ignorance as the fitness function.
1/02/2007 11:45 PM
>It is just more interesting.
not to the average person. Do you think most people are going to count how many times it says Korban?
1/02/2007 11:46 PM
Yes, Spinoza, but that was very rude of you. If I had wanted to post with a name I would have.
1/02/2007 11:48 PM
not to the average person. Do you think most people are going to count how many times it says Korban?
It's only not interesting till you've seen the beauty. I used to think it was boring as Hell, but once I started to see the patterns, I had an awe of the brilliance of it I had not experienced since I studied math and physics.
1/02/2007 11:49 PM
If you are not, the follow up is, what's your motivation to read OJ blogs like this one.
Long story.
1/02/2007 11:49 PM
Yes, Spinoza, but that was very rude of you. If I had wanted to post with a name I would have.
Shucks, I hate it when skeptics end up being the same people. It diminished our numbers and everyone knows that the right philosophy is the one held by the most people.
1/02/2007 11:50 PM
I'm sorry. I just couldn't resist with all this talk about DH. You should try using words like "korban" to throw people off
1/02/2007 11:53 PM
>I used to think it was boring as Hell, but once I started to see the patterns, I had an awe of the brilliance of it I had not experienced since I studied math and physics.
LOL. How many people find math or physics interesting? You support my point
1/02/2007 11:57 PM
DH is more successfully prone to censorship than other problems.
How do you think the Internet will affect that? Ever look at what Google searches brought people here? What pages link to here? Think about who would hear your thoughts pre-Internet?
1/03/2007 12:01 AM
Do you think most people are going to count how many times it says Korban?
LOL! Yea, I have no life. It was either that or yahoo chess.
1/03/2007 12:04 AM
no, you're just smarter than the average person
1/03/2007 12:09 AM
How do you think the Internet will affect that? Ever look at what Google searches brought people here? What pages link to here? Think about who would hear your thoughts pre-Internet?
I doubt it will have much of an effect.
1. As I noted, in the case, of DH, it's not merely the challenge of censorship, but the fact that one needs to invest serious time in it. As Spinoza notes, most will not find it interesting. It's interesting that this website was getting very few hits when it was just talking about DH, but had a spike in hits as soon as I branched out to include other issues as well (in the last post). All the links here are from other Jewish blogs.
2. From my googling experience, most of the material on the web is actually anti DH. You've got the frum Jews (Dovid Gotlieb) and Christians with lots of stuff, but in my googling days, I found very few pro stuff of any substance.
3. Much of the censorship goes on in the minds of the faithful who convince themselves not to study these things. The books have been around for a while, but they choose not to read them. Most choose not to blog as well.
1/03/2007 12:12 AM
If I am smart, why am I spending all this time bloging instead of doing something productive?
1/03/2007 12:19 AM
because your addicted just like the rest of us :)
what would you rather be doing?
1/03/2007 12:22 AM
it's not merely the challenge of censorship, but the fact that one needs to invest serious time in it.
That's mostly beside the point. To truly grasp the depth of evolutionary theory requires a serious investment of time and effort, but it's still a threat. Most frum people don't even know that there exists a large alternative body of scholarship on the topic of the Torah!
From my googling experience, most of the material on the web is actually anti DH.
Very interesting observation. However, even anti-DH acknowledges the existence of the DH! Remember, it's not that they don't believe in it, they've never heard of it.
Much of the censorship goes on in the minds of the faithful who convince themselves not to study these things.
Very true. I once remarked to a friend how many times I had read the translation of raqia as firmament and never thought to look into what that meant. Some subconscious part of me (and others) just picks up the vibes and knows to not think about it.
1/03/2007 12:27 AM
That's mostly beside the point. To truly grasp the depth of evolutionary theory requires a serious investment of time and effort, but it's still a threat.
yes, but people are much more trusting of scientists than social scientists. The fact that scientists believe in evolution is enough for people, the same could not be said for DH. Also, there is more debate within scholars about DH than there is about evolution. Also, many frum Jews do not believe in evolution. Case in point.
Some subconscious part of me (and others) just picks up the vibes and knows to not think about it.
What changed for me 2.5 years ago was not censorship, but that part of my brain. As I mentioned, I was reading biblical criticism well before then, but I always knew to stay away from it if it got to kefirahdick. I would limit my reading to safe stuff like Kugel and Alter. Many of my friends will still refuse to discuss any keriah with me.
1/03/2007 12:49 AM
LF,
Your analogy to the flatness of the Earth is not legitimate. The natural world is not a human artifact or book such that we would expect to know its origins and nature. By contrast, the Tanach was a set of books presented to people by neviim or leaders. The same leaders maintained traditions about, for example, the change in the script of the Torah - something we have archaeological evidence for - but said nothing about different documents needing to be reconciled.
In the end, I guess it is a matter of intellectual intuition. The basic idea of the theory doesn't seem convincing to me.
What is your opinion of the Tanach people in Israel like R. Bin-Nun and Leibtag who, without directly mentioning anything about DH per se, develop broad sweeping explanations of Torah passages that resolve many of the apparent discrepancies?
1/03/2007 9:26 AM
RJM,
>>I mean, it seems patently absurd that the individual cut and pasted sections of books without noticing glaring contradictions and then presented his work as devar Hashem.
Right. But contradiction's in Devar Hashem do make sense? So of course, a whole industry (my Fits like a glove post) was created to explain it all away.
Little Foxling,
As I get more into it, this stuff is fascinating. Take for e.g. the story of Korach. I was always troubled by the presentation. By splitting it into JE & P it now really does fit like a glove. What I'm getting out of REF is not the J, P & E words but rather the historical concepts and possible motivations for the different texts, with themes such as Israel/Judah, Cohen/Levi, etc . It really does fit very well into the text. Of course, I come back to my circular reason question, a piece is identified as P (for example) and then we say, "oh that's a P story, see how it fit's". Well sure it fits, we made it fit. The acid test may be whether there are "kashyes" to this split, for e.g. How could this be a P story if it shows sacrafice by a non Cohen. (Maybe that's what R' Maroof is talking about.)
It's too early and I'm guessing, perhaps that's where the linguistics of assigning words comes into play, to backup and corroborate the splitting of the text based on political & historical motivation. Or do I have it wrong? Was the original assigment made based on words?
Anyhow, this is one of those rare books that I plan on reading again as soon as I finish it.
1/03/2007 10:34 AM
LF,
>Again, not true. The Vatican’s version of the Septuagint in one chapter of Joshua has only the text from one of the authors according to the DH.
Wouldn't that be checkmate? Can you expound on this?
1/03/2007 10:40 AM
>Wouldn't that be checkmate? Can you expound on this?
Never mind, I see you did.
1/03/2007 10:46 AM
>it's amazing to me that people get so worked up about DH. If the theory was that Ezra wrote the whole thing would people get as worked up about it?
Baruch, I find it fascinating because it's a model of the Torah that *may not* not require shakla v'tarya (as in the Gemara) to make sense of it. By assigning different author's and time periods, the questions seem to fall away.
1/03/2007 10:52 AM
>Anonymous said...
Yes, Spinoza, but that was very rude of you. If I had wanted to post with a name I would have.
Anon, it was pretty obvious, I'll send you an email (tonight) how I knew. LF, it really is proof of DH!
1/03/2007 10:58 AM
>It's only not interesting till you've seen the beauty.
Maybe it depends where you started. With "Who wrote the Bible", it's immediately captivating and beautiful. The best word I can use so far is that I find it elegant.
> I had an awe of the brilliance of it I had not experienced since I studied math and physics.
It's funny, the last time I felt this way, was when I read A brief History of time.
1/03/2007 11:02 AM
>LOL. How many people find math or physics interesting? You support my point
Count me in. I'm not a physicist or mathemitician, but I like when disciples come together in a rigid fashion.
1/03/2007 11:03 AM
>How do you think the Internet will affect that? Ever look at what Google searches brought people here? What pages link to here?
Anon, it's funny you should say that. I put up a post about Moshe Finkel and at one point that was the single biggest Google Search to my Blog. (LF, get ready for more traffic now that I mentioned these words in a comment).
1/03/2007 11:06 AM
>Count me in. I'm not a physicist or mathemitician, but I like when disciples come together in a rigid fashion.
are you a computer geek by any chance?
1/03/2007 11:10 AM
>are you a computer geek by any chance?
I'll email you off-line, tonight.
1/03/2007 11:19 AM
BHB,
I don't mean that there are contradictions in Devar Hashem. What I mean is that the DH suggests that instead of looking to unify and harmonize phenomena, which is what most disciplines seek to do with the data in their fields, we should instead conjecture that there are many different systems operating in a hodgepodge before us.
The kind of circular reasoning you allude to, and the kind of problems you allude to, are the kinds I am speaking of. There is clearly a P text here, we can identify it by its signature features. But what about this element, that contradicts the P pattern? Of course, no problem! The redactor did it. Now it all makes sense.
Not to mention that the kind of conspiracy theories suggested by REF are, in addition to being wildly speculative, implausible and almost unimaginably fanciful.
Your claim that this makes for a simpler view of Torah, one without shakla v'tarya, would be correct if DH theorists agreed on any specifics. But the quantity of disagreement, even on some basic issues, is plentiful because there is basically no way to prove or disprove any assertion in the field. So shakla v'tarya still inevitably comes into play.
Welcome to the wonderful world of the social sciences, where disputes are resolved either through ad hominem attacks OR through indoctrinating more students than the other theorist so your view becomes the view of "most scholars" a generation from now! I can say this because I was in psychology for a long time.
The dating of the Septuagint makes the Vatican text irrelevant to the DH, since the DH would have a unified text long before the time of the Septuagint. I believe LF confirmed this in a previous comment.
I am shocked that you can compare this elegance to the elegance of science or mathematics. It seems quite messy to me, and does violence to the message of the text, which is what books are all about. As Kitchen writes, DH theorists speak about strata in texts as if they are as unambiguous as the strata of archaeological digs. But in reality, it is the overall method that gives the appearance of smoothness, not the product of the analysis. The method tells you that disarray and apparent contradiction, even of the theory itself, are to be expected. So everything works out beautifully.
I think Walter Kaufmann's observation here is most poignant. He points out that no book or work of literature in the history of mankind has ever evolved in the way that the DH alleges the Tanach did. That itself should give us pause.
1/03/2007 12:08 PM
RJM,
In the end, I guess it is a matter of intellectual intuition. Very true. I’m trying to decide if I think it can be solved mathematically or if you need intuition. I am not sure, but think you are probably right. More on that in future posts.
What is your opinion of the Tanach people in Israel like R. Bin-Nun and Leibtag who, without directly mentioning anything about DH per se, develop broad sweeping explanations of Torah passages that resolve many of the apparent discrepancies?
Very low.
1. Many of the concerns, such as language, are not even addressed.
2. Generaly speaking, the answers they give are a hard sell. They usually require buying into elaborate theories like Shtei bichenot which have no evidence in the text and sound like apologetics and BS
3. Frequently, even after one buys into the elaborate theories, it is not clear why the theories succsesfuly anwer the problems in the text.
4. Sometimes, there are problems in the text that are answered by DH. Sometimes, it is not so much a problem that DH answers, but just that when you analyze a given verse in a vacuum, it really actuay does sound like it has a different meaning from the one that it has in the place in the text it occupies. BHB’s example of Korach is an excellent such example. That being so, the view that understands the verse per its seeming intent (DH) is better.
BHB,
Take for e.g. the story of Korach. I was always troubled by the presentation. By splitting it into JE & P it now really does fit like a glove.
Yes, that is a beautify example of DH. As I mentioned, in that case, it’s not just an answer explained, but that in a fair reading of the text, it actually sounds like there are two stories being told.
What I'm getting out of REF is not the J, P & E words but rather the historical concepts and possible motivations for the different texts, with themes such as Israel/Judah, Cohen/Levi, etc .
Yes, that’s his strong point, which I suppose is good for an intro book. My only concern is that he takes the theories too far and makes claims that can not be (as far as I’ve seen) substantiated.
Of course, I come back to my circular reason question, a piece is identified as P (for example) and then we say, "oh that's a P story, see how it fit's". Well sure it fits, we made it fit.
The question is, how much wiggle room do you have? How many reasons forced you to assign that to P. But, generally, a given P passage will have dozens, if not hundreds of reasons to be assigned to P. OF course, the amount will depend on the size of the passage. They would usually include
1. Factual or legal contradictions
2. P words with a frequency of around 1 or 2 a passuk
3. theological orientation
4. Writing style (sentence, paragraph structure)
And more. One thing I’m thinking about now is if it possible to quantify this problem mathematically or, if, as RJM said, it is not possible to that and it must be done with intuition. I plan to do a post on this soon.
How could this be a P story if it shows sacrifice by a non Cohen.
There are very few such examples.
It's too early and I'm guessing, perhaps that's where the linguistics of assigning words comes into play, to backup and corroborate the splitting of the text based on political & historical motivation. Or do I have it wrong? Was the original assignment made based on words?
No, you have it exactly right. The strength of the theory lies in the fact that the same theory is supported by such a wide variety of evidence. Generally, in the case of JE/P, the exact borders are set based on the linguistics since P verses are so saturated with P words that it is possible to set the border very completely based on this. The J vs. E divide is more based on contradictions and duplicates since the language of J and E are very similar. It is for this reason that there is so much debate amongst scholars about the J vs. E divide. Well, that’s how I see it anyway. I don’t actually know what causes what.
Maybe it depends where you started. With "Who wrote the Bible", it's immediately captivating and beautiful.
I started there too. I guess the reason I didn’t feel that way is because since I am skeptical by nature, I did not buy it when I read REF and so I just thought it was beautiful BS.
(LF, get ready for more traffic now that I mentioned these words in a comment).
LOL!
Got to go back to work. IY”H, I’ll try to respond to the rest later. (I’m afraid that this blogging thing is going to cost me my job)
1/03/2007 1:02 PM
What is your opinion of the Tanach people in Israel like R. Bin-Nun and Leibtag who, without directly mentioning anything about DH per se, develop broad sweeping explanations of Torah passages that resolve many of the apparent discrepancies?
Very low.
Let me clarify. I have a very high opion of the as people. I just don't agree what they say about DH.
1/03/2007 1:08 PM
LF,
How do we know that Goren Haatad was in Canaan? I had been wondering about that when going over the parasha, it seemed obscure to me.
Also, regarding this statement:
In any event, note that there are 11 P words in just 6.5 P p’sukim compared to zero P words in the eleven JE p’sukim concerning this matter. Coincidence?
Statistically, the sample size is too low to make an inference. This is especially true because the sample is not random; you have arbitrarily isolated pesukim and compared their stylistic features. But does language really work that consistently? I'm not sure.
1/03/2007 1:48 PM
1. Many of the concerns, such as language, are not even addressed.
Some aspects are, especially repetitions and changes in divine name use.
2. Generaly speaking, the answers they give are a hard sell. They usually require buying into elaborate theories like Shtei bichenot which have no evidence in the text and sound like apologetics and BS
I haven't found this to be the case, but you may be correct about some examples.
3. Frequently, even after one buys into the elaborate theories, it is not clear why the theories succsesfuly anwer the problems in the text.
Again, I'm not sure. I haven't seen enough examples to say, I suppose.
4. Sometimes, there are problems in the text that are answered by DH. Sometimes, it is not so much a problem that DH answers, but just that when you analyze a given verse in a vacuum, it really actuay does sound like it has a different meaning from the one that it has in the place in the text it occupies. BHB’s example of Korach is an excellent such example. That being so, the view that understands the verse per its seeming intent (DH) is better.
Ah, but your understanding of the verse's seeming intent abstracted from it's context is your own subjective impression. That's not the way we understand literature, splicing it verse by verse. We examine pieces in the context of the whole. It seems methodologically unsound to say "my intuition about the real meaning of the pasuk, independent of its context, is X; therefore, it is from a different source than the rest of the story."
In your answers to BHB, one of my main questions keeps jumping out at me - maybe the patterns, theological, linguistic, emphasis, etc., associated with the "sources" are really a reflection of thematic undercurrents rather than different persons. The P, D, JE divisions may be very real distinctions but may be tools in the hands of a single author rather than contradictory expressions of multiple authors woven together into a mess.
And regarding Alter's insistence on not being a neofundamentalist - that's fine, LF was right, I never claimed that he was. But the point is that if you can read the text as a unified (though complex) piece of literature that "speaks to you" and conveys a deeper literary message, then you have undermined the whole basis of the DH.
And I have listened to many shiurim by R. Bin-Nun and Leibtag in which they have explained passages that are thought to reflect multiple authors in an exquisitely elegant and convincing way. There may be cases where the interpretations are forced.
So you may take as an ideological premise that the Torah cannot be as deep or nuanced as they present it, and so therefore it is better to look at it as a conglomeration of different pieces. But then you are begging the question.
BTW, LF, I am working on a post in honor of you at my blog, hopefully to be completed soon.
1/03/2007 2:02 PM
Not to mention that the kind of conspiracy theories suggested by REF are, in addition to being wildly speculative, implausible and almost unimaginably fanciful
Those parts of REF's works are not the DH. They're peculiar to him, so attacking them is pointless. This is something I see a lot of in anti-DH works: attacking ancillary issues, often not even really the DH!
The dating of the Septuagint makes the Vatican text irrelevant to the DH
Not irrelevant, just not as strong as it could be.
since the DH would have a unified text long before the time of the Septuagint.
You have an incorrect understanding of how texts become fixed over time. Many variants last for quite a long time, sputtering out before "disappearing." For example, the missing nun line in Ashrei was still extant in a few medieval manuscripts, but it was when they found that same line in the Dead Sea Scrolls that the deal was sealed. A early Septuagint manuscript is witness to a variant that may be a remnant from much earlier, just as the medieval Kennicot 145 has the nun line from much earlier. While it would be nicer to have found it in an earlier witness, it's still a very important piece of evidence.
I am shocked that you can compare this elegance to the elegance of science or mathematics.
I actually agree---up to a point. The DH is scientific, it's just not as strongly supported as many other fields in science are. My belief in the findings of evolutionary biology are much stronger and less tentative than my belief in the finding of Bible scholarship, because the evidence and arguments are so much better and more numerous. However, it's a matter of degree, not kind.
He points out that no book or work of literature in the history of mankind has ever evolved in the way that the DH alleges the Tanach did.
Completely false. There are numerous examples, the most spectacular of which is the Diatesseron. It's a redactor's attempt to merge the synoptic gospels into one text, and the tools of higher criticism work very well on it, showing the way back to the gospels that we actually have to compare to. It's exactly what you claim Kaufmann said doesn't exist. Other examples include the Samaritan Pentateuch, whose larger changes also show that the tools of HC work to accurately discern the merging of two texts.
That itself should give us pause.
What should give you pause is that the anti-DH people constantly make these sort of false claims, weak arguments, straw men, and poor polemics. In fact, I found that reading the anti-DH stuff did more to bolster my belief in he DH than it did to weaken it, much the same way that reading creationist literature gave me a sense of the sides of evolution debates strongly in favor of evolution.
1/03/2007 2:07 PM
One more point: I have never seen an anti-DH argument address the one piece of support that I find most compelling: convergence. That is, that the disparate lines of evidence all point to the same splits.
Take a simple example: there's no good reason why splitting the text up by divine name should also solve the contradictions. And duplications. And the linguistics. The same goes when starting from any of the lines of evidence. Why should this very impressive convergence be so? Why should the split that solves one set of problems "coincidentaly" also line up along the other problems? I have never seen that dealt with by the anti-DH crowd. Offering alternate spot solutions for each and every problem doesn't explain why the DH solution solves them all so bizarrely convergently.
1/03/2007 2:21 PM
R. Maroof,
> don't mean that there are contradictions in Devar Hashem.
But whatever contradictions you are referring to that the terrible redactor had are inherent in the Devar Hashem.
>Not to mention that the kind of conspiracy theories suggested by REF are, in addition to being wildly speculative, implausible and almost unimaginably fanciful.
Conspiracy theory? You see a Koran and NT developed to support political and religious goals; why is that so outrageous? It's certainly more plausible than a God given document written in the third person.
>Your claim that this makes for a simpler view of Torah, one without shakla v'tarya, would be correct if DH theorists agreed on any specifics. But the quantity of disagreement, even on some basic issues, is plentiful because there is basically no way to prove or disprove any assertion in the field. So shakla v'tarya still inevitably comes into play.
I can't address this yet. I'm kust learning Aleph Bais.
>The dating of the Septuagint makes the Vatican text irrelevant to the DH, since the DH would have a unified text long before the time of the Septuagint. I believe LF confirmed this in a previous comment.
Irrelevant only in practice, but it does underscore the viability of the theory, no?
>I am shocked that you can compare this elegance to the elegance of science or mathematics.
Totally taken out of context. Please go back to my two separate statements at 1/03/2007 11:02 AM. What you just did is a little redaction of your own. You took two statements and put them together.I never compared the two.
1/03/2007 2:49 PM
Anonymous, I am aware of the difference between REF's conjectures and the DH itself.
The reason why convergence isn't a compelling proof for the DH is:
1 - It is possible to find alternative explanations to account for the patterns observed without cutting up the text. The properties identified may indeed cluster together into P,D,JE,etc., formations but this can itself be due to thematic shifts not different sources. Making the inference of multiple authors is the leap of faith you are taking.
Newtonian physics solved lots of problems but it was only when Einstein came along that physicists realized that the many forces and phenomena they thought miraculously converged were really due to multiple effects from a single cause.
Contrary to what you suggest, the DH is not more parsimonious than explaining the examples from a literary perspective. Because, by definition, DH has to posit multiple authors ad hoc in order to solve the problems.
2 - The division of sources is not exactly smooth or clearly defined to begin with, so the claim that it is elegant is more a product of human ingenuity than any quality of the text. Without the handy anonymous "redactor" answer there is no way to explain the intermingling of the sources, including the periodic division of sentences into two parts and the assignment of each to a different source.
Your references to other cases in which we have composite texts is not convincing because
1 - In those cases, we HAVE manuscripts that we know were merged by someone later in order to harmonize them. We even have an idea of when and where. So we are at a distinct ADVANTAGE.
2 - You are speaking about works that were independent and complete being combined. Where is the independent complete E, J, JE, P or D? Only fragments remain that have been woven into a new text which is the ONLY thing we have evidence for. And we have no idea when this supposed process took place or by whom or for what purpose.
1/03/2007 2:54 PM
BHB,
It was LF who made the comparison, my comment was directed to him. Sorry.
I don't see the Koran or NT as the results of conspiracy anymore than I see any other ancient religious text that way.
The point is that what REF tries to do is reductionistic in the extreme. He wants to present the evolution of the Tanach as a convergence of conflicting, petty political aspirations. To me, this shows an inability to accept that some people, and their literary productions, are genuinely motivated by higher values than material gain.
He also fails to explain why a reconciliation would need to be effected among these different forces, when ultimately one "faction" one out anyway.
I can understand an academic interest in DH but this conspiracy theory stuff is not scientific at all.
1/03/2007 2:59 PM
Let me clarify - by conspiracy theory I mean that REF would have us belief that basically NONE of the actual motivations of the authors of Tanach are on the table. They are all pretexts for the hidden machinations going on behind the scenes. This is what I find silly.
1/03/2007 3:01 PM
R. Maroof,
>Offering alternate spot solutions for each and every problem doesn't explain why the DH solution solves them all so bizarrely convergently.
As Anon states, "offering alternate spot..." is what I am referring to as elegance. A single set of rules, based upon a few political, historical & linguistic principasl answers *so* much without the "Shakla Vtarya"
LF did not spell out the "political" underpinnings of the two versions of Yaakov's burial, but maybe, and I say maybe because I'm very new to this, but maybe it falls in line with what little I know about DH. In "P", Joseph (from the North)is not the big hero,it falls in more in line with Judah, so P takes the emphasis off of Joseph and at the same times puts in a plug for Chevron/Machpela and it's purchase both being another P construct.
The pieces just seem to fall into place. And that's not elegant?
1/03/2007 3:13 PM
LF,
I posted something on the Parasha in your honor on my blog.
BHB,
I just cannot find a theory that butchers a smooth literary composition, identifying every sentence as a derivative of another source and the totality a compromise between secret political agendas, very elegant or convincing.
1/03/2007 5:13 PM
Oy, very. So much to respond say, so little time. I guess I’ll just skip the highlights
Some general replies:
About REF:
RJM, as much as it pains me to say it, I pretty much agree with everything you said about the bizarreness and lack of evidence to support his theories. They are an interesting intellectually curiosity, but not anything I would view as a challenge to my emunah. Unfortunately, as anonymous pointed out, that does not undercut DH at all. Even if his political theories about J & E are wrong, it doesn’t mean they didn’t exist.
About thematic divisions within the text and the circular reasoning of DH:
RJM, you raise some fair critiques. As I mentioned, if DH is wrong, one of those possibilities is most certainly right. And, it is because of those considerations that my mind is not yet made up. Here’s my problem though with the anti – DH camp. I’ve read many many people argue that because it is possible to argue circular text and thematic division, this disproves DH. This is completely fallacious. Just because it may be possible that thematic divisions could cause clumpiness in the text does not mean all clumpiness is successfully explained by it. You actually have to do an analysis of the issues and see. This is what bothers me about the anti – DH camp. Instead of actually showing on a case by case basis HOW things might be driven by thematic divisions, it is merely stated that they do. However, in many cases these arguments will simply not work. The same goes for the circular reasoning argument. Of course it’s possible to divide things up via circular reasoning, but that does not preclude the possibility of a statistically significant correlation between certain words. Instead of actually addressing the issues, most critiques merely wave their hands.
The purpose of this blog is to do exactly such an analysis of things and anyone who is interested in joining me is welcome to.
Some specific replies:
Thanks for the hat tip. There’s many stories about people of haskalah inclinations using DH to generate divrei Torah and sharing them with their frum friends without telling them where it came from, but you’ve taken it a step further with that link. I would reply on your blog, but I feel bad as I don’t want to pollute the mind of the maaminim.
Take a simple example: there's no good reason why splitting the text up by divine name should also solve the contradictions. And duplications. And the linguistics. The same goes when starting from any of the lines of evidence. Why should this very impressive convergence be so?
True, but sometimes they do not converge. Sometimes P contradicts himself. Still, most of the time you are right.
How do we know that Goren Haatad was in Canaan? I had been wondering about that when going over the parasha, it seemed obscure to me.
Just based on the fact that the people living there are described as Knaani. I guess that’s not conclusive, but it strongly suggests it.
1/03/2007 7:18 PM
LF,
I included the link because I don't believe in sheltering myself or anyone else from reality, especially not readily accessible theories and concepts that are not necessarily damaging or problematic in and of themselves.
First of all, knowledge is knowledge. It can only be good when understood and contextualized properly. We must differentiate between speculation and observation, reasoning and conjecture. But to expose ourselves to various theories and methods is a MUST. Most importantly because we will grow from it, no matter what. But also because it prepares us for life.
(Of course, things must be introduced at the proper point in a person's development. But the DH is an absolute required study before High School is over. Real study, not 5 point simplistic refutation.)
The opposite kind of attitude is what causes so many people to go off the derech later in life when they discover that they have been lied to or misled for decades by rebbes and teachers. Judaism is about knowledge and honesty and realism. We shouldn't be afraid of any learning; on the contrary, we should love it.
This is why I am not hesitant to link to your blog, or to discuss Spinoza (the original or the blogger) or to cite secular philosophers and thinkers of all stripes.
Believe me, I plan on teaching my children about the DH, but of course I will inform them of the different ways of looking at it, including the way I believe is correct. I won't wait until they are 18 and take their first course in Bible at a secular college.
So please feel free to comment if you have feedback to share, and I hope you enjoyed the devar Torah anyway.
I wasn't sure about Goren Haatad because "b'ever hayarden" is ambiguous, but after a little searching it does seem that the consensus is that it is in Canaan.
Good evening to all.
1/03/2007 10:24 PM
I included the link because I don't believe in sheltering myself or anyone else from reality, especially not readily accessible theories and concepts that are not necessarily damaging or problematic in and of themselves.
Very commendable of you! Many would not rise to that level.
The opposite kind of attitude is what causes so many people to go off the derech later in life when they discover that they have been lied to or misled for decades by rebbes and teachers.
There's pros and cons to that. On the one hand you are right. On the other hand, there's risk involved in being exposed. There was a post on this in lookjed a while back.
1/03/2007 10:37 PM
I think it depends on the context of the exposure, the competency of the exposer, and the readiness of the exposee. All of these elements have to be calibrated for the process to be meaningful and successful.
But this is true for all subjects. How many people have been turned off to math or physics by horrible teachers, or because they weren't ready for it? How many despise literature for the same reason?
Your point is well taken, but I think most people who read my blog will be very receptive to any serious discussion of interesting ideas. As they should be, I might add. :)
1/03/2007 10:42 PM
R. Maroof,
>I just cannot find a theory that butchers a smooth literary composition, identifying every sentence as a derivative of another source and the totality a compromise between secret political agendas, very elegant or convincing.
You presented a nice vort, but once again, it does not answer everything and it is independant, it answers no other kashyes, i.e. it is not a unifying statement that creates some general rule that can be checked for it's veracity. As nice as it is, it's just another Vort.
I refer to elegance in the way that many questions are resolved with as little as three or four suppositions of DH. You cannot deny that.
Fine, so the mechanics are not elegant and may be counter-intuitive. But that does not render it false. Many counter-intuitive theories eventually are recognized as truth. And I'm not giving an opinion on yeah or neah for DH; I may never have enough expertise to do so.
And finally, I fully agree with your statement about tackling these issues at a younger age. In agreeing with you about this point, I'm not suggesting there is any truth behind Torah. I remain convinced otherwise. I'm merely suggesting the more indoctrination at a younger age the better chance of it sticking. Of course, you take the risk that you'll lose some along the way.
I remain, BHB.
1/04/2007 1:04 PM
it is not a unifying statement that creates some general rule that can be checked for it's veracity.
I think the question can reasonably be asked: Is that really what we should expect to find in a literary work, Divinely written or otherwise? Is understanding the text really about finding a quasi-scientific theory of four "forces" that are operating in some hidden way beneath the surface? That reduces a book, which is obviously designed to communicate a message, into a set of physical "pieces" that are randomly strung together and can be separated. It loses the forest for the trees.
The DH, and you, through your attraction to the DH, are looking for a certain type of key to resolve the problems in Tanach. But it seems more reasonable to assume that the Tanach, like other great works of literature, is meant to be understood in the way that my "nice vort" tried to understand it.
I wouldn't claim to have one principle by which to explain away the complexity of any other rich, engaging book, whether it be philosophical or literary. Instead, I would seek to discover the message that the final product, with all its complexity, is trying to send me. Why should I expect something different with Tanach, especially when we see with our own eyes that many, many parts of it can be understood in that way, with great insight and profit?
Trying to understand a book the way the DH does is like trying to understand a person's personality by running tests on his body chemistry or reflecting on the evolution of his biological systems. It moves in the direction of breaking down rather than attempting to understand holistically. The whole objective is off.
I'm not suggesting there is any truth behind Torah. I remain convinced otherwise
I hope this is hyperbole. Although you may deny its Divine origin, you must admit that there is much insight and truth to be found in Torah, and that if we lived in the ideal world that Mishle or Yeshayahu describe, we'd be a lot better off.
Certainly, children being educated without the influence of Tanach are at a disadvantage in today's society morally and spiritually, even if you don't believe in its "absolute" truth, it is hard not to acknowledge that.
Good evening!
1/04/2007 9:25 PM
> wouldn't claim to have one principle by which to explain away the complexity of any other rich, engaging book, whether it be philosophical or literary.
RJM, These principles don't explain the whole book, they explain a large set of the problems that are associated with the book.
>Instead, I would seek to discover the message that the final product, with all its complexity, is trying to send me.
True, but the message is now somewhat different. It is not necessarily timeless.
>>I'm not suggesting there is any truth behind Torah. I remain convinced otherwise
>I hope this is hyperbole. Although you may deny its Divine origin, you must admit that there is much insight and truth to be found in Torah, and that if we lived in the ideal world that Mishle or Yeshayahu describe, we'd be a lot better off.
Certainly, certainly. I would not classify myself as anti-torah or anti-judaism.
>Certainly, children being educated without the influence of Tanach are at a disadvantage in today's society morally and spiritually, even if you don't believe in its "absolute" truth, it is hard not to acknowledge that.
Well, that's a whole different conversation, more along the lines of XGH's post about morality. I'll leave all that philosophising to him.
1/04/2007 11:28 PM
These principles don't explain the whole book, they explain a large set of the problems that are associated with the book.
But they explain them in a way that, rather than clarifying the book's overall meaning - like a commentary or interpretation of any other work - they dissect the book and "remove" the problem.
My argument is not that the DH cannot account for problems. The difficulty is that it doesn't account for them by explaining them. It accounts for them by denying them and assigning contradictions to different sources.
Many very rewarding books of all genres contain conflicts and complexity, and interpretations/commentaries that are good are those that explain the message of the book in such a way as to account for them. There may be many such contradictions in a book, each of which may deserve separate consideration and reflection. Sometimes they are purposeful ways of highlighting deeper ideas. Other times the contradictions may only appear as such, when it is a superficial reading that is in fact creating them.
I would apply the same rule to the study of Tanach.
but the message is now somewhat different. It is not necessarily timeless.
Ultimately though, it is irrelevant whether you assume the message is timeless or not. The question is - is a more subtle idea being communicated here? What is it?
Biblical scholars like R. Y. Bin-Nun as well as secular scholars like Alter and even thinkers inclined to study philophy and literature like Kass and Sacks have all found rich meaning and significance in the text as a final product with a message.
The fact that Alter still upholds the DH is not my concern. The fact is that, in his studies, he effectively ignores it, and discovers meaning in the complexity and "bumpiness" of the text. This itself calls the premises of the DH into question.
You may answer that the Bin-Nun/Alter/Kass approach doesn't explain every problem. But neither does the DH.
And the case is worse for the DH, because it claims to be scientific and systematic, counting words, identifying the number of occurrences of grammatical forms, etc (I am leaving aside the circularity of the assumptions here). If some details don't fit, that's a major issue.
By contrast, the literary approach simply says - we haven't figured it out yet.
1/05/2007 10:59 AM
one can hold of multiple sources and also understand that the contradictions and doublets were intentionally left there for people to derive more meaning from it. Because we have to ask the obvious question why the redactor left them in? Perhaps it was haphazard, but the other way to look at it was that it was intentional
1/05/2007 11:26 AM
Baruch, I agree...But once we make this assumption and observe that it does produce convincing and meaningful results, we are left hard pressed to substantiate the DH view altogether. Because maybe it was all orchestrated by one author (Author).
1/05/2007 12:07 PM
Concerning the discussion about when to broach topics of emunah. Here’s my story:
Most emunah issues were thrown at me in HS. In HS, because I was in a insular environment, I was not ready to consider kefirah as a real possibility and so I bought the apologetics answers to most questions (if warily).
However, DH was not known to me until I was 21 and by then I was more open minded and refused to accept apologetics. Interestingly, though, at that age, I was not bothered by the other emunah killers for the simple reason that I had already bought the apologetics in HS and since I had accepted them in the past, they stuck. For a significant amount of time, DH was to me the biggest emunah problem because it had not been addressed in HS. Of course, eventually, I rethought the positions I accepted in HS and rejected the apologetics, but the exposure in HS definitely helped. In truth, I can not even be certain that I would have ever become a skeptic had DH not rocked my world and caused me to rethink things. So, you may say, had I studied DH in HS, I meant not be a skeptic today.
On the other hand, had I never studied DH at all, I also might not be a skeptic today. I guess that’s the trade off. No exposure is best, but what if exposure is going to happen? There’s an advantage to early exposure. But, there’s also an advantage to late exposure cause married people aren’t going to go off the derech. It’s medium exposure, like what guys like I have had, post HS, pre marriage that kills people.
Solution: get married when you are 17.
1/05/2007 4:17 PM
It is always a bad idea to rely upon no exposure. That is like not receiving vaccinations and relying on no infection.
For me, the DH is so far-fetched and riddled with problems that it would never really challenge me at all. The truth is that there are so many positions within the DH, arguments about how many sources there are, what the defining features of the sources are, the dating and chronology of the sources, etc., etc., that there is nothing "hard" to go on. It's not as if DH is presenting a clear, indisputable scholarly consensus that we are asked to ignore. Using the tools of literary criticism and historical speculation, you can argue almost anything about the sources and dating and get away with it.
So I'll take the Mosaic authorship view of Kitchen and Hoffmeier, and be done with it...
1/06/2007 8:44 PM
, you can argue almost anything about the … dating and get away with it.
This is fallacious logic. There is much evidence suggesting a post Mosaic date. Once you’ve established post Mosaic, there’s very little evidence so anything goes. But, everyone accepts that it wasn’t written by Moses. There’s no two ways about it. I fail to see how arguments about how many years after Moses the text was written should impact out thoughts regarding the evidence that suggests the text was never meant to be interpreted as something written much time after the events therein occurred.
you can argue almost anything about the sources …and get away with it.
Again. Fallacious. And this time for 2 reasons. Firstly, there is evidence of multiple authorship, such as contradictions. Now, in some cases it may not be possible to fix exactly who wrote what, but that’s not the point. Just because there may be disagreement as to who wrote what does not mean that the basic premise of compositeness is not based on solid evidence. Secondly, while there is debate about authorship, most of that revolves around the specifics, like the E vs J split, or the H vs P divide. From what I have read, there is widespread agreement on the role of D and also on the basic premise that there are some Priestly sections and some non Priestly sections in the other 4 books, and even about the division of those two texts. Just because there are some specifics that are not solid does not mean you can throw out the baby with the water.
As to the general point about DH not being compelling, I have already conceded that there are some problems with it and that there is a possibility that it is wrong, but I believe you overstate your case to the extreme. The situation is far from the way you portray it. I see no point to continue rehashing the arguments in this general forum, as we have each already articulated our position. A conclusion can only be reached through an analysis of details. I will continue to post about DH and you are welcome to respond to my concerns in those posts if you wish to continue the discussion. I realize that you will not be able to respond to my linguistic arguments in that forum, since your concern is not so much with the specific case by cases arguments of DH but with the broader sense of circular reasoning, and so, in your honor I hope to soon put up a post that will deal with that question in great detail.
And as always, thanks for reading. Thanks for posting.
1/06/2007 9:34 PM
My thoughts were stimulated by rereading some of Whybray's Introduction to the Pentateuch. It reminded me of the broad range of disagreement even regarding basic DH issues, especially vis a vis dating but also regarding number of sources and editors. He cites several scholars who hold of only two sources, or even unitary authorship plus some add-ons (of course, all authors assumed to be post-Mosaic and many very, very late indeed).
The point that occurred to me is that if non-religious scholars, including legitimate published ones, are not in agreement even about the basic phenomenon of multiple authorship, why should I feel compelled to accept it?
The other thing I would point out is that although there are some elements in the Torah that people have taken as post-Mosaic:
1 - The linguistic ones have been given satisfying answers, and were not "discovered" by DH.
2 - Some of the alleged historical ones were later found to be incorrect, suggesting that the remaining ones may also be byproducts of our ignorance about the past.
3 - We must account for the numerous elements of the text that testify to its antiquity and point to Moses as author.
For example, the fact that the Torah speaks to people without firsthand knowledge of Israel, using references to Egypt to describe the land. Or the extreme antiquity of the language and spelling in the Torah. Or the presence of Egyptian words in the description of things like the Mishkan. Or the awareness of states-of-affairs in Egypt during Mosaic times that were no longer in effect during the times of the Monarchy. Or the failure to address many issues that would have been of tremendous concern to later authors, such as the location of Miqdash, etc. Or the presence of many laws and ordinances that would be obsolete by the time of a later writing. Or the fact that the Torah's style of covenant exactly matches that of Hittite covenants during the 14-13th century perod, not earlier and not later. There are similarities to earlier and later forms, but it EXACTLY matches the ones in vogue during Mosaic times. (These and more are discussed in detail by Kitchen).
My point here is that if I must explain apparent anachronisms, everyone else must account for these elements. So again, we are at an impasse.
I understand you want to move the discussion along. I eagerly await your upcoming post!
Shavua Tov.
1/06/2007 11:31 PM
One last point: Please don't get me wrong, I am not a virulently anti-DH pundit. I actually find the observations of the DH enlightening and helpful to my further study of the text. I just set aside the ideological aspects of it and focus on the data it identifies.
Your observation about the Parasha last week, for example, opened up a dimension of the narrative for me that I hadn't noticed before.
1/06/2007 11:33 PM
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