Fact-Checking the Torah -- ancient literature and the lies that bigots wrote

This post will let you get your revenge on every Victorian bigot who ever wrote lies about the literature that is the basis of your culture. It will take a lot of work, but it will be worth it. If you post about it online, send me a link. I may already know the answer but, then again, I may not.

Every once in a while it occurs to me to search Internet Archive for great books. Today I found two. One was Judy Brittain's book on needle crafts, which I bought decades ago and learned crochet and knitting from.

The other is Axel Olrik's Principles for Oral Narrative Research in English.

https://archive.org/details/principles-for-oral-narrative-research

If you are part of a culture with a fundamental ancient literature, it will pay you big-time to read Olrik slowly and then compare it to your texts or scriptures. If you find examples of what Olrik says in your literature, you can be pretty sure the material originated orally, because before he wrote his work, nobody analyzed oral literature for its fundamental qualities. Even the Grimm brothers merely collected oral narratives, they did not analyze them. 

Then you can do what I did: go back through every academic work that ever pissed you off because it took a bigoted Victorian attitude toward non-Christian literature. Write up how wrong the authors were -- and mind you, NAME NAMES -- and post a thread on your blog, or on substack, or whereever you publish. 

You should also read Dr. John Cook's dissertation on Biblical Hebrew. When I found that he had identified a grammatical equivalent of one of the features Olrik describes, THAT made me buy in to what Cook wrote and THAT is why I said all over my blog that you will never know what Torah really says unless you understand Biblical Hebrew as a different animal than Mishnaic or Modern Hebrew.

https://ancienthebrewgrammar.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/cook-2002_bhvs_uwdiss.pdf

If you want the short version, you can start reading my blog here.

http://pajheil.blogspot.com/2018/03/fact-checking-torah-beyond-dh.html

and the verse by verse analysis here.

https://pajheil.blogspot.com/p/21st-century-bible-hebrew-basic-terms.html

But you will do yourself a huge favor if you do the homework yourself after downloading the book from Internet Archive. If you write a blog thread about it, whether you're examining the Mahabharata (which I have gone through and it does have examples matching Olrik's discussion) or the Popol Vuh (same).