Fact-Checking the Torah -- flow of narrative

One conclusion Olrik drew from the huge disparity in format and content exhibited by oral narratives in contrast to material invented in writing, affects the claim that some archaeological discoveries were the origin of some parts of Torah.

The main evidence for the conclusion comes from work with ballads. The flow of information was that a folk ballad, sung among the non-reading public, would be picked up by people who overheard them. Amateur and professional musicians and scholars would popularize them among the literate. The material would be redeveloped, adding descriptions not in the original, or refrains that introduced a moral element.

These new versions would become popular and be recorded on broadsheets sold for pennies apiece at fairs. Thus they would get back into the hands of the people who sang the original songs.

What happened next was one of two things. Either the new version enjoyed a very short vogue and then disappeared. Or it morphed back into something resembling the original version. All the refrains, moralizations, and descriptions that were missing from the original version were stripped out of the “literate” version, otherwise it didn’t survive back in the original environment. This second fate was more common if the original song was still in vogue.

People who knew the original version knew it in a format that suited oral transmission. The “literate” versions could not duplicate that format because literate people had not yet studied oral traditions to find out how to reproduce the folk format. Literate people had different tastes, and songs only became popular among them by suiting those tastes, prompting redevelopment of the songs to add or substitute the favored material.

Lyrics invented from the ground up in the literate environment never survived in the “folk” environment at all.

Literate and non-literate classes communicate in different ways and the formats differentiate material into what originated orally, and what originated in writing.

This is what I meant when I used the laws of thermodynamics and invented a zeroth law of SWLT. It’s also what I mean by inventing a zeroth addition to Ginsberg’s theorem. You have to play the text as you find it, oral or written. “Drawing a card” from the written environment is as wrong for analyzing oral material, as analyzing a translation and inserting the answer into a discussion of the source document. If you have already agreed with me that DH produces nonsense by analyzing a translation of Torah, then you should agree with me that archaeologists produce nonsense by claiming that a culture with low literacy nevertheless accessed written material and adopted it.

And remember, one of the barriers to adoption was the cuneiform in which the “adopted” text was written, something illiterates would not have read even when they spoke something like the same language either before 2350 BCE or after 580 BCE.

In the interim, the Jews had developed their own language which expressed their own norms. Even if Enuma Elish or Gilgamesh survived into the Babylonian Captivity, the Jews would not have recognized them as stories about “us”. “Us” was the people of the Ingress, the Shiloh period, the hilltop settlements, the Davidic monarchy, and the Jewish culture since then.

And in the interim, a lot of time flowed under the bridge....