Fact-Checking the Torah -- analyzing narrative relationships

So how would you, an archaeologist, demonstrate a strong analogy between a newly discovered text and a narrative in Torah?  Olrik's principle: by doing multi-variate analysis on a top-down basis. At each level, if the comparison fails, you bail because a failure means you have a weak analogy.   Remember, any claims you make based on a weak analogy are based on a fallacy.  And remember to deal with all the facts, or you fail the test of Occam’s Razor.

First you start with the goals.  If those are different, forget about deciding the stories resemble each other.  There’s a fundamental difference between putting a king on a throne or getting him a wife unless they are episodes in a saga – in that case each one is the goal of the episode, not necessarily of the saga overall. Remember that the goal has to be some concept or feature specific to the culture transmitting the narrative, not just something convenient for the researcher to hang a thesis on.

Next examine the characters.  Not their names but the actions they perform and what that says about their natures, how those actions contribute to achieving the goal and how they express cultural values.

Third, look at the motifs involved.  What are they and how are they used?  Yosef’s divining goblet is a motif for restoring the unity of scene by bringing his brothers back into his presence the last time (Law of Unity), leading to the recognition scene.  A narrative that sets up a recognition scene using a goblet might be reminiscent of, but may not actually be similar to Yosef’s saga depending on whether the higher-level details match. A motif has to be relevant to the culture: I'll show in a future post how motifs can be out of place.

We’re getting toward the bottom.  Examine the sequence of the actions.  If they are identical, the stories probably are related.  Differences in sequence don't mean the narratives aren't related, but one might be languishing relative to the other.  If you have three narratives with similar goals and characters, and the events of one of them come in a different sequence than the others, this one might be a languishing narrative.  It has fallen out of favor, is no longer being told as often, is being forgotten, and the narrators no longer keep the events in sequence.

Look at the horizons or the localizations and the distance between the ones that differ in the different narratives. Utnapishtim's ark landing in the Zagros mountains is pretty close to Noach landing on Ararat, but not as near as Tendurek Dagi from the Song of Coming Forth.

Names of characters have no place in the analysis. If Atra-Hasis and Gilgamesh’s floods originated as oral narratives, they are the same story regardless of the difference in names.

This also applies to “The Song of Coming Forth” and Hesiod’s Theogony, despite the difference of names, if both originated as oral narratives.  All the more so because we can point to the region where they likely originated, and that the ancestors of the Greeks lived there, as shown by linguistic research, as did the ancestors of the Hittites and their empire.

The name Balaam, on the other hand, does not mean the Balaam inscription at Deir ‘Alla is a version of the Balaam narrative in Torah. The events in the two narratives are not the same.  On the other other hand, the likeness of events between the Balaam at Deir ‘Alla, and Marduk receiving information about Tiamat from the council of the gods, shows that if both of these episodes originated as oral narratives, possibly they were related.

I'd like to hear from archaeologists who know anything about Olrik's principles aside from the Epic Laws. The report about the Deir 'Alla text makes me think that author, for one, would not be able to answer up. But don't take it badly; people who publish in Oral Traditions Journal also seem to know nothing but the Epic Laws 25 years after the translation came out.

And now let's practice this on a narrative I haven't discussed before.