Fact-Checking the Torah -- Olrik meets Cook

SWLT rule 2 says grammar communicates nuances. Nuances include what the speaker thinks, believes, or feels. This is the realm of the modality described by Dr. John Cook; it comes in three types: deontic (imperatives and volitive); epistemic (certainty or uncertainty about facts); and oblique, subordinate clauses of cause and effect, purpose and result, and conditions for an action to occur.

Torah’s certainty epistemic form first appears in the creation story, and it also appears in Kings.  In between, it shows up in the material about creating the tabernacle. 

The certainty epistemic is used in situations where the narrator couldn’t possibly have seen what happened.  It happened too long ago.  But the proof that the event actually happened is either a physical or cultural object or concept.  That is the link to Olrik’s term localization. 

A localization has to be a known geographical feature that the narrator points to physically or verbally as evidence that the tale is true, despite its fantastic content. 

The certainty epistemic reflects the fact that the audience’s culture currently has certain features or cult objects that wouldn’t be there if the narrative were false. The certainty epistemic only appears if the narrator has credibility; the audience would laugh him out of countenance for using a certainty epistemic, if the object were not visible or the concept was not part of the culture.

This use of the certainty epistemic appears in Exodus while Mosheh is overseeing the building of the tabernacle and the first sacrifices. There is a string of verses about a particular part of the building or sacrifices, saying “[He] made (va-yaas)….” (The “he” is B’tsalel most of the time.) The narrator did not witness it, but if Mosheh hadn’t done this, the Jewish culture as it exists in the narrator’s times wouldn’t be the way it is. The audience didn’t see these things happen, but the narrator can point to the tabernacle as evidence of the truth of what he is narrating. Without a physically present tabernacle, the audience would laugh the narrator out of countenance.

So the tabernacle had to exist at some time for the oral narratives in Exodus to work; that’s Olrik’s principle that oral narratives always represent some cultural reality. What’s more, the certainty epistemic in the narratives is good grammar only when the tabernacle is present to the audience. Without that visible proof of the truth of the narrator’s words, he would have to use the narrative past.

Biblical Hebrew examples, of narrative past when a certainty epistemic is inappropriate, appear at least twice in Torah. I document examples on the Bible Hebrew page.

In Numbers 32:31 it says that the Gadites and Reubenites “responded” to Mosheh, in the setting of promising to help the rest of the Israelites during the Ingress. The verb root is ayin nun heh and sometimes in Torah it appears as a certainty epistemic. Not here. Here it’s a narrative past.

At the point when the narrator adopted this grammar, there were no Gadites or Reubenites to point to as evidence of the truth of the narrator’s claim. They had taken up residence on the east side of the Yarden. Their next appearance in Israelite consciousness was the 600s BCE, when they fled ahead of the Assyrian invasion – actually, it’s in Jewish consciousness, this is recorded in Jewish Tannakh but not in Samaritan “Chronicle”. Nevertheless, Israelite culture recorded that Mosheh had set up three cities of refuge east of the Yarden. There’s no way for the westerners to enforce such a law. It had to be set up before the Israelites split up into east and west.

Use of the certainty epistemic and the narrative past are features of Biblical Hebrew. They existed in the language when it was the vernacular of the people who transmitted this material orally. Samaritan Pentateuch has the certainty epistemic in all the same verses in Exodus as in Jewish Torah. These are some of those 80% identical uses that I referred to.

Samaritan Pentateuch also has all the same localizations. That may seem like a contradiction to what I said about geographical information in SP a couple of weeks ago but the difference is this. In narratives, SP retains the names of the Cities of the Plain. In geographic information with a practical basis, SP copies known place names and eliminates what the Samaritans didn’t know. This copying shows up in other places in SP and I believe I have an upcoming post about it. I’ll check.

Next post I knock on the head another DH "pillar".