Fact-Checking the Torah -- the denouement

So the part of TTB that is like TYMW, is less than half of what the papyrus records, and has differences from TYMW. The other part of TTB reflects Egyptian culture only in the use of magic. Castration was not, as far as I know, a cultural trait in ancient Egypt. It was a trait of Cybele’s attendants. The Sea was not noted for playing trickster in Egyptian tales. The pine tree was not a noted motif in ancient Egyptian tales. The idea of living in a valley is not normal in surviving Egyptian tales. What’s going on here?

Let’s use Olrik’s procedure which starts with the goals. The goals of the two narratives are not the same. TTB has the goal of putting Bata’s son on the throne, a very normal concern in Egyptian culture for carrying on the theocracy – without worrying too much about biological descent. TYMW is part of a saga with the ultimate goal of bringing all the descendants of Israel to Egypt, a prologue to the Exodus, the foundational event of Judaism.

You can stop now. It’s a weak analogy to claim the stories are related, and a weak analogy is a fallacy.

The urban legend that TTB and TYMW relate to, is a dictum from Wellhausen that nothing can prove the ancestors of the Jews ever lived in Egypt. Thus there was never an Exodus from Egypt. We know this is a false argument from silence, a fallacy, and fallacies are a key ingredient of DH and other urban legends. That’s aside from the fact that Wellhausen basically claimed he was omniscient, a sign of insanity.

Let’s have a little sympathy for Wellhausen. He stopped publishing before 1907 when TTB was discovered let alone translated. He died in 1918, long before archaeologists stumbled over the truth about Thera. He had no idea that he was writing bunk.

But just because he was writing bunk does not authorize me to write more bunk by claiming what Olrik’s principles contradict – that there’s a relationship between TYMW and TTB – let alone that it proves the ancestors of the Jews were in Egypt.

The proof lies in the horizon of the Exodus, and to get to the Exodus, the Israelites had to be in Egypt. Something got them there. One of Olrik’s principles is that oral traditions don’t make up backstories (which puts Olrik in line with William Dever’s comment about DH); narratives arise close to and resembling actual events, however much they may change to accommodate themselves to the Epic Laws, and other features Olrik described as facilitating their transmission.

I haven’t written this blog for five years just to pick and choose which urban legends I’m going to bust. It’s an urban legend that the ancestors of the Jews picked up TTB and changed it into TYMW. The reverse is also an urban legend.

The false rape episode in TYMW is important because it fits with Olrik’s principles. It’s part of a Law of Three about sexual behavior, counting R’uven sleeping with Bilhah and the Yehudah/Tamar episode; it’s part of a Law of Cascading Contrast example, between Yosef, R’uven and Yehudah; it’s part of a Law of Ascents that puts Yosef in jail where he can deal with the second of three sets of dreams.

A false rape story also occurs in Greek mythology, attached to the Ionian (Ahiyyawa/Pelishtim) hero Theseus, his Cretan wife Phaedra, and his son from an Amazon. Phaedra commits suicide; Theseus curses his son who dies in an attack from a sea monster. The point of the story seems to be, it’s not smart to offend Aphrodite, which Hippolytus did by vowing to Artemis never to love. With a different goal from the other two, this is a third way a false rape story can be thrown into a mix. It’s a multi-cultural motif, not a sign of a relationship.

The motifs in TYMW and TTB that are similar are narrative equivalents of what I talked about some time ago for languages: “false friends” that doom philological studies. You have to look at how a word is used by the language as a whole – and you have to look at how motifs are used by a narrative as a whole – to do a valid study. And that is what has not happened with these two narratives – until now.

Now let's tie Olrik to archaeological material...