Fact-Checkng the Torah -- What IS DH

Now, did you notice what I did in the last post?

Here’s the question some of you have been sitting on the edge of your seats waiting to ask.

I said for three whole sections of this blog that Jewish literature has to be discussed within its context as an expression of Jewish culture.

Your objection should be why doesn’t DH have to be discussed in ITS context?

Well, what is that context?

What does DH claim its context is?

The truth about Jewish scripture?

But we’ve come across more than one example that DH does not speak the truth about Jewish scripture.

And in the last post I showed that within the context of DH, some people realize there’s something wrong with it.

They say it might violate Occam’s Razor by proposing the E text; it’s too much complexity.

There’s no sense dragging in Occam’s Razor unless DH is supposed to be scientific or at least logical. You don’t need Occam’s Razor if you’re an art critic, something I’ll come back to at the end of the blog. You don’t need Occam’s Razor when you discuss religion as a matter of belief. If Occam’s Razor is an important test for DH to pass, it’s because of an impression or claim that DH is scientific or logical.

Israel Abrahams, who translated Cassuto’s work for its 1961 publication, certainly uses “science” with reference to DH, even if the Hebrew word Cassuto used in 1941 doesn’t strictly mean science.

Even if fans of DH would agree it’s not a science, they probably think it’s logical. But I’ve identified that it incorporates fallacies so that even if its basis wasn’t false or outdated information, it cannot be true. At all.

An objection strictly to complexity is not what Occam’s Razor is about. It also requires covering all the facts accurately. The complexity of DH is only a problem if it has also committed sampling bias or misrepresented some of the material.

We know it has misrepresented some of the material and committed sampling bias.

So its results are invalid for a science.  And it’s not logical.

DH can say anything it wants and still be relevant to its fans. But if it pretends to be a science or even just logical, it’s a colossal failure.

There are plenty of fans of colossal failures. There are websites and books out there by a fan of cosmic ether, a concept that Michelson and Morley showed 130 years ago did not live up to its own predictions. Failure of predictions is a classic way that science discredits concepts. DH can be construed to predict that its documents can be found by archaeology – but isolating itself from archaeology prevents it from making any such claims.

We’re not talking a science here. I’ll say more about this at the end of the blog. In the mean time...

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