There will be another break for the next two weeks but today I’m going to start on one of three writers who tend to come up in reference to DH. They share one thing with the “four horsemen”: ignorance. Wellhausen names Jean Astruc early in his Prolegomena. He thought he was giving credit where credit is due. What he really did was lead the detectives straight to the smoking gun.
Astruc’s work is available free online.
The first thing you need to know about Astruc is that he only dealt with Genesis. His successors are the ones that used his ideas against the rest of Torah.
Astruc only said that Mosheh must have received written versions of the stories in Genesis. He did not claim that all the material originated after Mosheh died, let alone after the Jewish monarchy came into existence. That more extreme claim is down to his successors.
Astruc admitted that Mosheh wrote the laws as it says in Exodus: he had to write them on the tablets he had to cut from stone after the Golden Calf incident. (That’s all he says about books other than Genesis.)
The reason Astruc says that Mosheh received Genesis as a set of fragmentary written material, is because Astruc says it is impossible to transmit so much material orally without changing it.
We know that Talmud is called Torah she-b’al Peh precisely because, over the course of at least a millennium, it developed as orally transmitted material. If you listen to the audio lectures on Talmud on the Resources page, you realize that both lecturers are repeating some of the information from memory, not from what is actually written on the page in front of them.
The Babylonian Talmud finally amounted to 2700 numbered folio pages when the numbering system was established in the Vilno edition; the Jerusalem Talmud had 1700 numbered pages with different Gemara. What the lecturers say that is not on the printed page developed in the years of transmission since the Vilno edition was printed.
Yes, it changed. It expanded. There are also differences in the material that go beyond having different commentators and different styles. R. Yosef Gabriel Bechhofer discusses them in his audio lectures on Jerusalem Talmud. The fact remains that the material was transmitted orally, from the time that Mishnah began developing, right into the 21st century.
Astruc may have been woefully ignorant about all this, but at least he did not invent the claim of “invention in writing.” We just don’t know where he thinks those bits came from that were passed to Mosheh.
That’s not Astruc’s only problem with facts or even his only problem period. See ya on the other side of High Holy Days!
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved
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