Why Fallacies are False -- 23, What Olrik's Principles CAN'T Do

There’s one more point to make about Olrik’s principles. You can’t use them to analyze anything but narratives.

Olrik defines a narrative as something with a plot and action, and a character to perform the action. It may be only one episode long and have only one character, but the narrative expresses some historical or cultural truth about the people who transmit the oral narrative.

This is why Olrik cannot be used to analyze anything in Torah except the narratives. You cannot use his principles to analyze the legalistic material, except in two cases.

One is circumcision, which has a narrative built around it, showing that it was an ancient practice. Timing it as contemporary with the destruction of Ebla’s trading partners S’dom and Admah, shows how ancient. In it, the grammar of Biblical Hebrew entwines with the examples of Olrik’s principles.

The other is punishment for slander.

1/ Numbers has multiple narratives about slander because it was such an important cultural issue. Oral traditions never say “this is important”, they have multiple narratives on the same issue. The three (!) wife-stealing stories in Genesis are another example.

2/ The three slander narratives are grouped together in the text, because in the oral environment they obeyed what I call the association principle. However, internal clues show that they happened at different times after the Exodus. Olrik says that timing within a narrative may match real-time, but once you get outside the narrative, all bets about timing are off. The Jewish aphorism that has the same thrust is “There is no earlier or later in Torah.” (Talmud Bavli Pesachim 6b)

3/ They incorporate a number of the Epic Laws, especially the Law of Three, the Law of Ascents, and the Law of Last Stress.

Slander is addressed strictly as narrative, unlike circumcision, where the laws are stated in the narrative.

This use of narratives as legal instruction is not confined to Judaism. Both Olrik and Roger Abrahams discussed the Fjoort people of Africa. The Fjoort have an oral tradition, and Abrahams figured out that they tell their stories when they are dealing with a legal case. He didn’t know why, but as part of an oral tradition, the stories tell of tribal custom and help the judges render a verdict that fits in with their culture.

The hadith of Islam are the same thing; when an issue came up that the Quran does not address directly, the judges appealed to Muhammad’s own practices, which eventually were recorded.

The same is true for Talmud. The Gemara analyzes possible legal decisions quoting various rabbis and appealing back to material from the Tanakh. At the very start, when trying to nail down the earliest time that the Shema can be said at night, they appeal to Nehemiah’s narrative about building the Second Temple.

While humans transitioned from a species that genetically adapted to environmental change, to one that used culture to shield it from environmental change, speech developed. Not communication; all primates communicate. Speech developed along with hand-eye coordination and ever-more precise tools. Over the last 500,000 years, language developed as the Broca region elaborated in Neanderthals, probably in Denisovans, and in modern humans. This came along with cultural complexities like funerary practices and art. As parents raised children in their culture, they doubtless said things like “This is how my parent did it.” Over time, the narrative became “this is how my grandparent did it” and then “this is how our ancestors did it.” Oral traditions had survival value, because they taught survival skills; they ended up helping cultures survive, and then some of them survived their cultures. Examples of the last are writings found by archaeology, which contain examples of Olrik’s principles.

But there’s a sharp divide between how an oral tradition expresses laws, and how we express them today. You can’t analyze modern laws using Olrik’s principles; they contain no narratives. There’s no oral tradition in western culture that grooms its members into obeying local, regional, or national laws. Quite the contrary in America, where the rebellious loner is the protagonist of so many movies which, as I recently said, are a form of oral literature. Burt Lancaster's movie Lawman contains many examples of Olrik's principles -- but is by no means a paradigm for promoting lawful behavior.

People usually view the legal system the way they view religion. In the words of an old song, “We sit outside and argue all night long/About a God we've never seen/But never fails to side with me”. Another name for it is casting God in our own image.

We cast the law in our own image, too, and then get a shock when the actual system levies sanctions on us. The legal system is a different culture from the one we operate in every day, and it takes work to understand it, just like it takes work, as I know from experience, to understand a Talmud which is the record of an oral tradition. While oral arguments in court are crucial to the legal system, only the participants engage in that part of law. About half of all Americans are involved with lawsuits or law enforcement in their lives, but 90% of the cases are settled out of court. Only a small fraction of Americans get in-court learning experience. The rest get a crash course from their lawyers.

An oral tradition of law would have to tell, briefly and in terms of action by episodic characters, what to do in recurring situations, appealing to the past and using Olrik’s principles so as to be sure of transmitting with a minimum of change. You can’t get there if the culture has a contrary narrative, like the law-breaking loner. I had a class in organized and white collar crime, and the instructor made the mistake of wondering out loud in the first class why we idolize, for example, Bonnie and Clyde. I couldn’t let it pass, raised my hand and reminded him that our Founding Fathers, as Benjamin Franklin said, had to hang together or they would surely hang separately. In the sight of the British, they were criminals. In the US, it’s an uphill battle to then teach that people have to be law abiding.

Likewise, though science texts sometimes go into the backstory of how we know what we know, there is no oral tradition of science. If you tried to come up with narratives, in Olrik's sense, for how people's phones use GPS, you would founder on the rocky banks of the fact that GPS satellites are not visible to the people you're telling the narratives to. 

One of Olrik's principles says if you narrate a story that sounds fantastic, you have to have something visible to point to as evidence for what you're saying or your audience won't believe you. The salt pillars around the south end of the Dead Sea are one example, and it is no coincidence that the fantastic tale of the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, ends in an episode that points to those pillars. In Exodus, the grammar of the last chapters with construction of the tabernacle gives us evidence that the narrators who passed this information along, had a physical tabernacle as evidence that they were right. Torah uses different grammar for something the narrator has no evidence for, like the split that put the two and a half tribes on the east bank of the Jordan. (This is one of many ways that Dr. John Cook's work with Biblical Hebrew complements Olrik's.)

You can only do that with science on a very limited basis, such as graphics; at the point where you need the equations to explain things accurately, people's eyes glaze over, and always will. There has to be a point to learning the equations, and that has to come after learning the math that shows what the equations mean.

The divide between what can transmit orally and what can’t, takes a lot of work to overcome. MAGA isn’t going to do that work; they have their oral tradition and they won’t adopt that of a different culture. The rest of us won’t overcome the divide, so as to propagate a law-abiding scientific culture, until we learn first, the deep facts and second, the techniques for getting them to propagate. Which are the same ones our ancestors used a hundred thousand years ago.

Why Fallacies are False will be on hiatus until April 27

Fact-Checking the Torah -- just in time

Just in time for Passover, Sefaria has almost completed its vowelled edition of Babylonian Talmud, with complete English translation. Its vowelling is based on the famous Steinsaltz edition.

https://www.sefaria.org/texts/Talmud

Everything is done and posted except Menachot and Chullin, and those will probably be posted sometime between now and Shavuot, Z'man Matan Toratenu. Chazaq!

If you ever wanted to read Talmud, let me manage your expectations. You can't just run your eyes over the translation and profit from it, any more than you could run your eyes over Einstein's paper on special relativity and profit from it. You need to do a lot of advance preparation. With relativity, it's calculus and linear operators and the fundamentals of physics.

With Talmud, it's Mishnah. But even Mishnah you can't just run your eyes over, you have to study it carefully before you have half an idea of what the Gemara in Talmud is telling you.

And you won't understand Mishnah if you haven't studied Torah, or Gemara if you haven't studied the entire Tanakh. The whole Jewish Bible is background to understanding Talmud because Talmud refers to lots of places in Tanakh as examples of what the rabbis are thinking.

That's because everything in Prophets and Writings was preserved for their examples or evidence of what Torah meant. They were preserved because they agree with Torah. Don't let anybody cite that verse in Jeremiah to you; they will cite a translation and the translation is wrong.

And as I have said over and over on this thread and as I also said on my Fallacies thread, every translation is a strawman argument.

So you will not understand Tanakh if you don't know Biblical Hebrew, which I also have a thread on.

I had to go through Torah twenty times before I memorized all the catchphrases that Mishnah uses, showing that they are not just words, they are legal terminology. 

I had to go through Mishnah ten times before I could appreciate the Gemara -- and Mishnaic Hebrew is different from Biblical Hebrew. And then there are other things.

For one, Mishnah and Talmud are organized associatively. My guru R. Bechhoffer literally said this in his recordings of lectures on Jerusalem Talmud. I have a post about it on this thread. It's one reason that just running your eyes over the translation won't help you understand Talmud. There are many digressions that come up due to an association of ideas, and when they are over the discussion will return to some earlier subject. 

For another thing, Mishnah and Talmud -- and Tanakh itself -- are all about JUDAISM. They are records of its oral tradition from before 4000 BCE to about 600 CE when the last parts of Talmud were recorded in writing. Oral traditions by nature are associative, not linear by subject the way we write things nowadays. They also reflect their own culture; trying to understand them based on some other culture is disrespectful at best and won't get you anywhere because no two cultures have enough points of similarity to interpret one in terms of the other. The same is true for language, and you need to learn Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew and Biblical and Talmudic Neo-Babylonian (once called Aramaic) or you will never get the full effect of the material.

And for a third thing, Mishnah and Talmud are legalistic material. Yes, they contain narratives and even poetry, and they refer to narratives and poetry in Tanakh. But every reference is related to Jewish law and if you know nothing about how any legal system works, you won't understand what Tanakh, Mishnah and Gemara are getting at. Also, you can't interpret Jewish law in terms of another legal system any more than you can get the most out of these works without understanding the language in which they were recorded.

The Sefaria edition of Talmud has careful citations to Tanakh and you can call up all the best commentaries from Jewish history; the most useful is probably Rashi, still the premiere explanation about what Tanakh and Talmud are getting at. (And a fellow language geek of mine.)

Yes. It's a lot of work. We all have limited time in our lives. The time I spent on Jewish studies got me two things. One is, I know when people are lying to me about what Jewish literature says. 

The other is, I'm learning how close the Talmudic rabbis were to the lives of working people and to the ecology of their environment. They knew how to destroy an ant colony. They knew that peaches and almonds were closely related. They knew that a cow's spots resemble those of her parents, centuries before Gregor Mendel's genetic experiments. They knew that people came in at least four types of gender and covered all four in their discussions. 

And they originally kept all this knowledge in their heads. It was prohibited to write Talmud down except as reminders. A messenger from one school to another could carry a note with a written version of a discussion, to get the opinions of people who weren't there at the time and might have something to contribute. What went into the ark of the covenant could have been just the Ten Commandments, or it could have been all 613 commandments, but it stayed in the ark; the people judging legal disputes had to do it from memory. The tradition recorded in Tanakh was passed along orally until the Babylonian Captivity. When Jews stopped talking Biblical Hebrew, they realized they were losing comprehension of the material on which their legal system relied. So they wrote Torah down first, no doubt, and then Prophets, and the Writings last, with some portions in Biblical Neo-Babylonian, their current street language. 

And then they suffered persecution at the hands of Christians, forbidding them to use any scripture that wasn't in Greek or Latin. But the Hebrew version survived because Jews already lived outside the Roman Empire, or in places where the Romans would have to catch them first. And by the time the Theodosian Code came out, Theodosius had bigger problems than enforcing it, the Huns being just one example. A Papal bull intended to gut the Talmud was irrelevant almost as soon as it came out, thanks to his writ not running in Protestant countries -- and Jews already migrating to the Americas.

If you're a Jew, don't let ignoramuses lie you into ignoring your classic literature. Do the work. Feel the pride. 

Why Fallacies are False -- 22, where they fit together

Now I’m going to go back to some old information and give you a diagnostic.

When you talk about people you know, that’s gossip. The standard for gossip is that everybody in the chain changes the story a little bit. When you receive gossip, NEVER believe it unless you can get back to the first person who said it. You will be astonished at the difference between what they said and what you heard. 

1/ Gossip, like oral narratives, begins with reality and changes to suit the culture that transmits it.

2/ If it survives long enough, examples of Olrik’s Epic Laws begin to populate it.

3/ People will shape their behavior in accordance with gossip, sometimes with extreme results like the Beilis blood libel trial. Beilis was chosen as the scapegoat due to gossip, not evidence; the government manufactured all the evidence they used via forgeries, suborned perjury, and planting objects.

Urban legends have a different set of features.

1/ they spread person to person like gossip, although often the medium is email.

2/ they name a vague or false authority, if any. If the urban legend is detailed enough, you can check with the supposed authority and, 100% of the time, they debunk the legend. Either they never said anything on the subject, or they never said anything like what’s in the urban legend, or it distorts something they said, which would be our strawman argument again.

3/ an urban legend is always about some group to which the person spreading it does NOT belong. So an urban legend about people flashing their car lights, saying that they are gang members, does NOT spread among gang members but only among outsiders.

4/ all urban legends are false because their data is false or their logic is false.

The authority issue /2/ in urban legends, has an analog in oral traditions; Olrik states it specifically. He says an oral tradition is defined as a narrative or set of narratives for which you can’t turn to the originator for verification, due to the passage of time. This is not, however, a fallacious appeal to misleading authority, it is inability to validate with the originator.

So the broad characteristics of an oral tradition are these:

1/ They transmit person to person until they are put into writing. Some of them continue to transmit orally in the originating culture after being recorded.

2/ It is impossible to appeal to the originator for authentication.

3/ And this is a big difference between an urban legend and an oral tradition: an oral tradition transmits inside the culture that it expresses, and the behavior of which it shapes. When outsiders get hold of it, not being part of the transmitting culture, they always distort it.

4/ An oral tradition always contains truths, but they are disguised by changes that mold the original narrative to conform to the Epic Laws and Olrik’s other principles, or to keep the tradition relevant to the culture as it changes from within, or because details drop out over the passage of time.

The problem of translating and commenting on oral narratives from outside the culture, /3/, underlies why Jews and Muslims do not trust translations they don’t have control over, and why commentaries and interpretations of Judaism from outsiders are failures. Yes, I said it: failures.

And it’s also a problem with Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed. Maimonides didn’t get to teach Maaseh Breshit or Maaseh Merkavah to his student Joseph, so he wrote it down. That was problematic anyway, given what the rabbis say about teaching these subjects. What’s worse is that Maimonides told Joseph, “You’ll never get this because you won’t let me explain it face to face, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that you have to use Aristotelian teachings to understand it.”

What? Wait, what?

Aristotle didn’t know anything about Judaism. How could he explain two subjects so drenched in Jewish philosophy?

Well, the answer is that Maimonides was arguing against a group called the Mutakallim. They differed from Aristotle on fundamental points, including atomism and whether a vacuum can exist. But kalam is also inappropriate because it derives from Islamic philosophy.

My pet whipping boy, DH, has the same problem. Not only was it invented by non-Jews (don’t cite Spinoza to me, he stopped his Jewish education at age 18), it was invented by anti-Semites. It relies on translations. It incorporates fallacies. It deliberately divorces itself from Jewish culture.

You cannot “read while running” the record of any oral tradition, and hope to write anything useful about it. You have to study it in its cultural context. You can’t say anything worthwhile about it unless your claims fit back into that cultural context; this is the analog of fitting your limited clinical trial into the big picture of medical science and the world demographic. But academe has divorced oral traditions from their cultures for millennia now, as well as failing to realize they may be dealing with fallacies. I found one paper on Talmud that committed four different fallacies – and the writer now teaches at a university. I discuss it on my blog. It's an extreme example of why my view of academe is so jaundiced.

If you start by agreeing that Jewish scripture is a record of an oral tradition, you can say “Linda is X” instead of “Linda is X and Y”. When you say “oral tradition”, it means that Jewish scripture was shaped by Jewish culture to express its customs and history, as well as by the human brain being all but hard-wired to transmit material using the Epic Laws. It doesn’t matter if the original source was my proposed NE Anatolian mother culture, or the Semitic cultural subset that developed into Judaism, or the original source was Gd. The human brains, transmitting the material over the millennia, would have shaped it into what we have now. Every culture does that with its oral tradition.

Olrik’s principles mirror SWLT and expand on it. They coordinate with the 21^st century description of Biblical Hebrew in Dr. Cook’s dissertation, which blew my mind when I realized it. Dr. Cook, whose work was pipelined by academe, got his first information about Olrik from an email I sent.

Modern results in archaeology and its cross-fertilization with the Human Genome Project and Oxford Project radiocarbon studies, coordinate with what Jewish scripture says – Shem WAS Yefet’s older brother.

When disparate subjects that develop in different environments, among researchers who knew nothing of each other’s work, reinforce each other like this, you have a dose of reality.

At the end of Olrik’s book, there’s an appendix that applies his principles to the Bible. It has several problems. It’s based on a translation. It’s the work of a proponent of DH. He’s trying to preserve DH (“save the phaenomena”) and express Olrik in those terms. That fails the simplicity canon of the Test of Occam’s Razor.

As long as you use all the data that fits your dataset description, and you represent the material accurately, the simplest explanation is likely to be the correct one.

And that explanation is Olrik’s principles, not DH. I’ve done the work. Part of it is on my blog. Contact me if you’re interested in the rest of the analysis.