Fact-Checking the Torah -- completeness

So we know that DH is not necessarily a hypothesis intended to be turned into real science. It might have just been a talking point to start with, which is the number 1 definition of hypothesis. Now we’ll look at its base claim of “completeness” in each of the four putative documents.

What does “complete” mean?

•           All four documents covered Jewish history from beginning to end, and therefore covered all the same historical issues. The final redactor(s) chose among them: eliminated the entire discussion from a given document; kept more than one version (pillar four); combined parts of the versions from multiple documents (pillar five).  

•           The four documents didn’t necessarily address all the same historical situations, but when they did, they did so completely. So if D didn’t have a creation story, the redactor had to choose between the ones in E, J, or P, each of which had complete information on the situations it addressed. Unfortunately the genealogies, which supposedly come from P, are not complete. Genesis 11 supposedly addresses the death and age at death of each of Avraham’s progenitors, BUT the “editor” had to add that information for Avraham’s father Terach because P didn’t have it.

•           Each document addressed its material according to the document’s individual characteristics, and they had some topics in common, and repetitions represent those common topics, but "completeness" only means that the redactor received an unfragmented document.

The word “complete” obviously has ambiguities. If they have been resolved and DH has a technical definition of “complete” that all its researchers accept, give me a link to the online article so that all my readers can examine it. 

But there’s a problem with the “completeness” doctrine besides the ambiguity of the term. Issues 1 and 3 above beg the question: if the redactor received complete copies, why would he pick them apart and enfilade them?

You might think that we have a historical example of enfiladement in what Rev. Brian Walton did when he reproduced Samaritan Pentateuch in his London Polyglot Bible. The evidence is not in his edition; it's in August Freiherr von Gall’s critical edition of the manuscripts.  Von Gall tagged most of the material in SP with designators for more than one of each of dozens of manuscripts of Samaritan Pentateuch that survive from medieval times and the Renaissance. Except for A and B, these manuscripts are all in fragments. However, this does not mean that A and B are the result of enfilading multiple manuscripts.  So Samaritan Pentateuch is a weak analogy for DH.

What I said about option 2 shows that P did not have all the information that should have been in it. That argues against option 1 as well as option 2, and I’ll have another argument against completeness later.

We are left with option 3. Notice that my statement of option 3 is a conjunction, any term in which may be false. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that option 3 might be a strawman argument, a claim that DH says something it doesn’t. We’ll know it IS a strawman argument, when somebody comes up with a standard definition for “completeness” that everybody in DH agrees on, and it’s different from option 3. Go for it.

On the other side of New Year I'll start discussing three authors who get favorable mention from Wellhausen.

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