Fact-Checking the Torah -- walling in DH

Karl Heinrich Graf gets credit from Wellhausen for fundamental work in DH, although neither called it that at the time.  Graf’s introduction to his Historical Books of the Old Testament suggests a number of reasons why DH has gone so wrong.

While claiming to extract Biblical study from monocular shackles of both Judaism and Catholicism, Graf claims his Protestant perspective is the only way to find the truth.  He claims the other two have been stymied; this is an example of the general ignorance of Judaism previously demonstrated by Astruc.  In the 1860s, when Graf wrote, two trends were continuing.  One was migration of Jews to America, the forerunner of migrations which brought challah and bagels to the American kitchen.  Another was purchases of parcels of the Holy Land from the Ottomans, the foundation of the modern State of Israel.  At this time conflict between Orthodoxy and Chassidism died down, allowing both of the more traditional movements to use their energy in other ways. 

Graf’s standpoint marks a written version of DH’s isolationism.  Whybray credits Wellhausen for thickening the walls around DH. This is one more thing that locks DH into its conjunction, without the mutual support of which real sciences, soft or hard, take advantage.  Perhaps DH proponents intended it to become a monolithic empire of religious thought, which  is borne out in  the 1918 work of Edgar Brightman. He performs the redefinition fallacy to say that “scholar” only applies to those who agree with DH.  Using a fallacy discredits Brightman. 

Graf was relying on an ancient connotation of “science” as meaning study.  Herodotus called his work archaeologos, but there’s no way that in the 400s BCE, he meant the kind of work done by Cyrus Gordon or William Dever in the 20^th century CE.  What Herodotus meant was studying the history of nations.  He did it from his armchair, through the reports of others.

Graf views his work as study and that’s why he says Wissenschaft.  Unfortunately, as with “hypothesis,” he was crashing into a new world where ambiguity in the understanding of Wissenschaft misled his successors to believe that they were building on a scientific foundation.

This is an SWLT issue.  The people who think DH is a science, or that it is a proven theory, don’t understand how science works and that they are failing the test of Occam’s Razor or using fallacies at every turn, on top of rejecting the support of other fields.

The problem is not that Graf was a product of his times.  The problem is that he could not see outside his own times, that he was blind to the implications of what he said, that he didn’t even have the wisdom to see that everything he criticized in other scholars, he was about to impose on his own branch of studies.  The problem with Graf is that he was a product of his prejudices.

But he did say one thing that could have made DH less of a problem – if his successors had recognized him as the authority he thought he was.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved