Fact-Checking the Torah -- Beyond DH

You thought I was done?

Anybody can tear something down. The real mavens can build something up. Here’s where I try to be a real maven.

Is there any way to understand why Torah reads the way it does, now that we know DH is neither scientific nor logical, and only infinitesimally likely to be true?

There are two answers.  I’ll give you the long one first.  The other I am still studying in Narrating the Torah to make sure I’ve connected all the dots and I’ll discuss it briefly later.

For over a century, there has been a schema for describing orally transmitted narratives called the Epic Laws.  Its features appear in Danish tales and ballads, in Grimm, it has examples in the Mwindo epic of Africa, in the tale of Enki and Ninmah from Sumeria where they spoke an isolate ergative language, in the first chapters of China’s Romance of Three Kingdoms, and in Popol Vuh from the Americas.  Hermann Gunkel, a DH scholar, heard of it in the early 1900s and corresponded with the professor lecturing on it, a Dane named Axel Olrik.

What’s more, it’s part of an analysis schema that few have heard of.  While the Epic Laws were published in German in 1908, the rest of Olrik’s notes existed only in Danish until 1992 when a complete English translation was done.  I read it in my nearby university library, all 200 pages in one afternoon of 2003, and decided I had to buy it so I could study it carefully.

The Epic Laws cropped up in 2013 when I was translating the Mendel Beilis trial transcript.  In the Beilis trial transcript, I found that the woman actually responsible for the murder of Andrey Yushchinsky, had to give her carpet to her landlord to pay part of a debt. Two years later it was rumored that she kept the boy’s bloody corpse, rolled up in the carpet, in her house for three days, despite the fact that she had been subjected to a search two days before the murder and sent her gang to Moscow to avoid arrest for a robbery carried out within 24 hours of the murder.  At trial this evidence about the carpet turned out to be gossip, a classic form of oral narrative, and “three days” is a classic example of one of the Epic Laws.

We know that Torah has high level features in common with Talmud, which everybody (except Astruc) knows developed in oral transmission.  At a lower level, we find numerous examples of Olrik’s principles.  My third description provides a mid-level structure.

I will also show that Olrik’s work coordinates with features identified in Dr. Cook’s 2002 dissertation, and with SWLT.  And it reinforces the relationship between Torah and archaeology when archaeological claims avoid fallacies like weak analogy or false argument from silence.  This is the opposite from what I demonstrated for DH.

Here we go.

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