Fact-Checking the Torah -- The Archaeologist

I’ve hinted over and over again that archaeology might not support DH and now I’ll start giving examples.  But first I want to take care of a related categorical claim made by an author in the field.

In his Bible with Source Revealed, Friedman claims that everybody who disagrees with DH claims that Torah developed later than DH says it did, except traditionalists.

This is false.

Cyrus Gordon, who was “raised on” DH, said that when Gilgamesh was published – or when it was translated in 1936 – it made DH seem improbable to him.  Gordon was looking at the twelve-tablet recension from 1700 BCE, and he saw the resemblances with Noach’s flood, so he decided that Noach’s flood was not invented in the 800s BCE or later.  It must be older than that.

It only takes one data point to defeat a categorical claim, and Gordon is the data point defeating Friedman’s claim. 

Friedman could make that claim if he was talking about living persons, which is not what the claim says, and it is an unworthy quibble.  Gordon died in 2001, and Friedman’s book was published in 2003.  Can anybody tell me for sure that Friedman held back from publishing that claim until he knew Gordon had passed away?  I didn’t think so.

Or Friedman could make that claim if he only meant people inside his discipline.  That means Friedman walks directly in the tracks of Brightman, and we already know that Brightman used the redefinition fallacy, so if this is what Friedman meant, he was relying on a fallacy.

And there is a second data point from people who are still alive, and those are the archaeologists who worked on the Ketef Hinnom amulets.  These amulets contain the priestly blessing, which ought to be part of P.  It’s in Numbers 6:24-26, but as I said, DH attributes parts of Numbers to P.  This ought to be one of them.

Found in 1979, these amulets date before the Babylonian Captivity.  So along with the 1100s BCE hilltop settlements with no pigs, and Amos and Hoshea’s references to Shabbat (and to New Moon as well), some parts of P date not only before the Babylonian Captivity but centuries earlier.

This means that P is either older than claimed, or it is fragmentary, instead of complete at the time when it was supposedly invented.

But what if Friedman changed his mind about P dating before the Captivity?

In fact, that is what he said in his 1970s book.  But the Ketef Hinnom date was firmly established only in the early 2000s, so he can’t base his claim on that.

What does he base his claim on?  A circular argument.  Michael Heiser’s blog specifically says that it’s a circular argument, in a post about DH.  By definition, a circular argument is a fallacy.  Friedman has to prove that claim in some way that doesn’t incorporate a fallacy.

He could appeal to the archaeology.  In an appendix he lists the kind of evidence he used.  None of it is archaeological.  I would appreciate it if, in your DH textbook, you would cite currently accepted results of DH that build on archaeology.  And what about the reverse direction?

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights Reserved