Fact-Checking the Torah -- DH and fatherhood

Cassuto made another argument besides v’hineh…v’atah that I can use in a much more satisfying way to show an SWLT problem with DH that Cassuto did not bring up.

Cassuto discusses DH use of yalad and holid to claim that the genealogies in Genesis 11 and Genesis 5 have different sources from the ones in Genesis 4. Genesis 4 is supposedly from J and uses yalad; Genesis 5 and 11 are from P and use holid. This is discussed by Edwin Cone Bissell in an 1895 paper; he says that the argument rests on a claim that hifil was not used for “sire” until “late” in Jewish history. He doesn’t believe it and there’s no evidence for such a thing. The claim is part of that “language layering” mishegas.

What’s worse is that it’s sampling bias in two ways. One is that Genesis 4 uses yivaled which is nifal, a different verb form (binyan) from the other two verbs. Can anybody tell me what DH says about that?

Cassuto’s argument is that there’s no reason why different sections of text should not each use a different verb, but neither does he address the one verse in chapter 4 that uses yivaled.

What Cassuto and DH both miss is the other sampling bias issue: a third word, based on the same root. It’s pronounced yoled. The “e” is segol, the short “e”, not the tseire long “e” of the progressive aspect. (Qal progressive aspect yoled shows up exactly once in Tannakh, in Proverbs 23:24 in a gerundive use.)

Since both Genesis 5 and Genesis 11 use yoled, both genealogies come from the same source.

What’s more, it’s same source as Judges 11:1 and Chronicles I 1:34 ! In Judges, it admits that Yiftach’s mother was a prostitute, but it says that Gilad yoled Yiftach. In Chronicles I it says that Avraham yoled Yitschaq.

No matter when these parts of Torah came into being, they use the same word the same way, and that is a new slap in the face of the mischsprache mishegas.

In fact what we’re looking at is SWLT Rule 2, grammar expresses the nuances of a language. Yoled is one of a number of examples of verbs conjugated with a segol as the vowel of the second root letter, instead of an expected patach or tseire. It shows up in qal imperfect (or, rather, given the vav prefix, a narrative past); there is also an example of what looks like a piel perfect in the story of Rivqah’s courting. The single most frequent of these forms is the va-yomer throughout Tannakh. I discuss them in Narrating the Torah.

In the genealogies, yoled signs and seals that the given man is the biological son of the man from the preceding generation, creating a solid chain from Shet through Noach to Avraham and Yitschaq and Yaaqov. The chain in chapter 4 has no such guarantees.

DH has never dealt accurately with all the data in Torah, and that fails the test of Occam’s Razor. Again.

Which comes up in Whybray's book.....

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