Fact-Checking the Torah -- some implications

One more advantage to Olrik’s principles; they apply regardless of how Torah got started.

Based on Olrik’s principles, I say that if the people who first transmitted these stories couldn’t write, or had learned to write but had low literacy, it doesn’t matter whether they developed the narratives themselves or had them handed down by, say, Gd. The same features would show up because they help the human brain transmit narratives for, obviously, millennia.

These people were descendants of the people in Africa who were the first narrators in the world and whose stories “invented” the features Olrik observed, features shared by oral traditions worldwide.  The features cope with human memory, human needs, and how humans are affected by the passage of time and by migrations away from the place where a culture comes together as a unit and develops its characteristic method and content of communication.

Even if Mosheh wrote down Gd’s words about 1628 BCE and read the record to the Israelites, the likelihood of low literacy means that the material transmitted afterwards orally, not in writing. To say nothing of the expense of making a copy of a writing, and the inevitability that errors would creep in. Or the fact that the tablets that Mosheh engraved remained in the ark forever, along with the scroll referred to at the end of Deuteronomy.

The fine structure of Torah is the same one it would have been, had Torah developed out of tales invented by people as far back as 5000 BCE when proto-Semitic arose between the Caucasus and Lake Van. They had to transmit orally back then because the most we could say about creating records at that time is that things could be painted on cave walls and house walls, and clay figurines could represent the quantity of a given product in a shipment, but pictorial representations of abstract concepts were centuries in the future, let alone wedge or linear abstract representations of more or less abstract concepts.

Just like with the timing of creation, I refuse to argue the divine origin of Torah with you, because it’s irrelevant to the structure. The resemblance of Torah to oral narratives worldwide comes from the nature of the human mind.

In his 1987 book, Whybray called for somebody to go through every last bit of Torah to see if Olrik is a worthwhile tool for its study; that’s what I’ve done in Narrating the Torah, with just one more parshah to go in its final comprehensive draft.

There’s more to it than Olrik’s principles, however.