Fact-Checking the Torah -- Timing is meaningless

Timing is everything. At least in written material. We expect the events of a novel to take a reasonable period to come to completion, and we expect events depending on other events to proceed accordingly. There’s something annoying about a novel that has everything happen with split-second timing when our normal experience says it doesn’t work like that. The novel might “yadda yadda” what happens in the interim, but that interim period has to be there.

With oral material it’s different. It may leave out any timing indicators.

Some narratives, especially those originating with a historical event, may state how long events lasted, or the intervals between them will compare reasonably to actual history. But after the goal is reached, timing issues become irrelevant. Olrik gives the example of an oral narrative about a historical event which closes with the death of the protagonist soon after the event is completed, when historical records show he lived for years or decades after that.

When people object to claims that events in Torah occurred at certain historical periods, on the basis of the stated ages and genealogy of the patriarchs, this demonstrates the disconnect between the oral culture that gives those ages, and literate cultures which demand that events occur in realtime.

When the description of events or cultural environment resemble a known period of history, that is the situation that affected the ancestors of the Jews enough for transmission as a narrative. It is a chronological equivalent to a horizon. The fact that the named individuals involved couldn’t have lived “back then” because when you add up the ages of their ancestors, it doesn’t come out right, is the response of a literate culture to an oral narrative.

It’s irrelevant that calculating Jewish history back from historically recorded times produces an anno mundi on the order of 4000 BCE. Or that calculating backward from the explosion of Thera places the life of Avraham after the destruction of the cities of the plain. Or that the patriarchs are stated as living to impossible ages. The chronology in Torah is that of an oral narrative, which doesn’t necessarily relate to realtime.

Literate people don’t like to be told that timing is irrelevant, but in oral narratives it sometimes is so.

Now let’s take on the ancient question of whether the world was created in six days as Genesis says. As an oral narrative, the creation story doesn’t necessarily need timing. The issue of timing in that story is the occurrence of Shabbat.  Shabbat occurs every seven days. So of course the first Shabbat occurred on the seventh day after creation began. If Shabbat happened every three months, I have every confidence that creation would have taken three months. The timing depends on the needs of the narrative and is inseparably linked to the cultural issue that the narrative expresses.

That’s besides the fact that arguments over the age of the universe are totally human, as somebody once pointed out on a Google discussion group. Gd is infinite in time as well as space, so that it’s all one to Him whether six days or 600 billion years go by. I’ll give you an analogy: if you’re on the moon, the size of a Queen of England as compared to the size of a queen ant is irrelevant. You can’t see either of them. In the same way, six days or 600 billion years are indistinguishable to Gd – except that He is also omniscient.

It’s nothing to do with Gd if you argue the age of the universe until you’re blue in the face. The seven days of creation have to do with an oral narrative about the origin of Shabbat. The 14 billion years of the universe have to do with scientific studies that have practical effects in every facet of our lives. You pick the one that’s important to the situation you’re in – whether it’s time to go to weekly synagogue sessions, or whether you’re using GPS which has to deal with relativistic time dilation in communicating with a satellite way out in earth’s gravitational well.

But timing clues have nothing to do with the relationships between narratives.