The next problem with Astruc is his failure to absorb the actual contents of the text he worked with.
Astruc originated the claim that there are two names of Gd in Torah.
There are three names that Gd claims for himself, four if you count “**** elohim” separately.
There are two more which are used for him by humans but in reference to which He never says “I am …”. One of them is not found in Torah.
Umberto Cassuto picked up on the fact that there are more than two names of Gd in Torah.
What he missed is the fact that ignoring two of them is a case of sampling bias. If names of Gd are important as divisions, DH has to explain why only two of them are important, or admit that there are as many source documents as there are names. (There’s a third possibility but it’s the fallacy of circular argument, which I’ll get to soon.)
When you hear people talk about “the two names of Gd” in the Bible, you know right away that they have bought into an urban legend and cannot actually see the text that invalidates it. That's called a schotoma. People who buy into lex talionis have the same problem. If you believe in lex talionis, you need to read the start of this blog.
I can give you chapter and verse on the other names and you can use the citations to force people to face up to the facts. But I think you should prove to yourself that you can actually read the text instead of filtering it through polarized brain cells, by finding them for yourself.
Astruc used his claimed names of Gd to identify two of his four divisions of Torah. His A was the precursor to E. His B was the precursor to J but actually included what his successors claimed was the conflation of J and E that retained “both” names of Gd.
Astruc originated the claim that verses in Torah can be assigned to A or B when they don’t actually have the names of Gd in them. I’ll come back to this issue later.
Astruc did not assign text to documents on a verse by verse basis. That remained for his successors.
What he actually did was divide Torah up into fragments, and assign it out. He originated the procedure of excerpting out some verses and assigning them to a different source from that of the text in which they are contained. So his work suffers from the problem that the probability that he was right is the product of a large number of terms, all of which are less than 1, making the product and probability both infinitesimal.
He claimed he identified a third source, C, which contained all the repetitions that came up the third time, and did not have names of Gd in them.
The bits he labeled as C, do not meet the completeness criterion in DH. They are little snippets of things, such as the third time the rains are mentioned in the flood story. How he imagines somebody could pass along a shred of paper that small for centuries before the Exodus is beyond me. Or rather, papyrus. Or what did he think it was?
Astruc lived about a century before discovery of Mesopotamian tablets, he lived about 70 years before the Turin Kings List papyrus was discovered, and he lived about 40 years before the Rosetta Stone was discovered or translated. What physical object did he think the descendants of Abraham carried around that survived for transmission to Mosheh?
At any rate, if the doctrine of “completeness” can be inarguably defined, which it currently isn’t, then Astruc is wrong about C and anything related to C in his current assignments has an infinitesimal probability of being true.
Astruc’s D are stories that he thinks don’t fit Jewish history. Given his ignorance of Talmudic history, we can hardly credit him with accurately knowing the history of times before, say, 80 BCE, the time of Shimon ben Shetach.
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