Fact-Checking the Torah -- Samaritan sources

Samaritan Pentateuch is a beautiful candidate for E due to the timing of Hoshea’s death as well as the geographical situation of the people who preserved it. But that means it should have elohim everywhere and the Tetragrammaton nowhere.

From working with Walton’s version in the Gezer script, and von Gall’s version in the square or Aramaic character set used by modern Hebrew, I can see that almost everywhere (two examples to the contrary) that Torah has the Tetragrammaton, so does Samaritan Pentateuch. Except for places (plural) where SP replaces elohim with the Tetragrammaton, which should NEVER happen in E; it should always go the other way.

SP also imports into Genesis and Exodus material that shouldn’t be there, if DH is correct; Jewish Torah has it in “D”, which only existed in Judea, or it’s part of “P” which “was invented” in Babylon. DH has no way to explain why SP has this material. It could not happen at the time when DH says the material was invented. The original barrier was the Assyrian iron curtain, the later one the enmity between the Jews and Samaritans from the time the Jews returned to the Holy Land. This enmity is expressed in Samaritan “Chronicle,” as well as in Tannakh.

It is possible that the DH scholars of the 1800s did not know about Samaritan Pentateuch. Walton’s work from the 1600s probably disappeared into English university, church, and museum libraries and much of the original work on DH was done in Germany. Bruell did not publish his Aramaic-letter Samaritan Targum until 1875, after Graf ordered DH to isolate itself, and von Gall published his Aramaic-letter collation of Samaritan manuscripts only in 1918.

It’s impossible for two traditions from the BCEs to be invented with features in common, in a climate of political isolation from each other, and yet have the same narratives and 90% of the same words, when one of the populations originated speaking a different language. That’s a figment of somebody’s imagination.

But when a set of story-telling patterns used in oral narratives all over the world, shows up in the literature of two cultures, who also share 100% of the same narratives in what looks like the same language for the most part, and all the ancient literature in both cultures says “we have the same roots”, then the simplest explanation of what happened is that the cultures transmitted their norms orally when they were identical, and the literature changed in oral transmission after they parted ways.

And now back to stating Olrik's principles instead of applying them.