Fact-Checking the Torah -- why "hypothesis"?

I’m not going to bother with the other three pillars at this point because they fit better in later posts. What I will do now is show that people who support DH may not understand what it means by describing itself as a hypothesis or by the completeness of the putative four documents.

I don’t know who developed the name “documentary hypothesis” but I do know what the word hypothesis means. And that begs the question why Graf-Wellhausen is called a hypothesis.

According to the dictionary, “hypothesis” doesn’t always mean “unproven scientific concept.”

The top definition of “hypothesis” in the dictionary means an idea proposed for discussion. The third and last meaning is “the ‘if’ clause in an if-then.”

Most of the academic papers ever written were hypotheses in the first sense of the word, and most of them include a list of sources. As a result, the peers reviewing the work could verify that the author quoted the sources correctly or didn’t take things out of context and use them with a meaning opposite to that indicated by the rest of the material in the source. That’s necessary to turn a hypothesis into a theory; it’s part of the on-paper test. When it passes that, you can go on to examining the mathematical or experimental or observational testing.

Wellhausen’s work doesn’t have a source list. He doesn’t even cite to book chapter and verse when he is supposedly referring to Biblical material. He simply declares by fiat that Amos is trustworthy when Wellhausen uses him for support, and untrustworthy when what Amos says conflicts with the point Wellhausen wants to make. To get Amos to agree with him, Wellhausen has to quote out of context and claim that the text means the opposite of what it means while in context. You know that quoting out of context is a fallacy and a classic tactic for getting something out of, not only nothing, but something that disagrees with you. Movie reviews and book reviews do it all the time.

Bad for a real theory.

But fine if you’re just running it up the flagpole to see who salutes.

It’s entirely possible that Wellhausen expected people to come back and make him show the support for his claims. But his Composition des Hexateuchs, which went through 3 editions, and his Israelitische und Judische Geschichte, which went through 4 editions, do the same thing as Prolegomena.

So Wellhausen’s work might have been a proposal to spur discussion, and it worked. But at some point the discussion has to produce results or we’re right back into that environment that led Descartes to write his Discours.

In which Descartes said you can’t rely on your own or anybody else’s claims unless everybody understands how they were made.

At this point I’ve shown that outdated information underpins some DH claims and at least one other involves a fallacy. When you run that up a flagpole, it’s not worth saluting.

There’s another source of ambiguity in DH that is even more important and that’s next week’s post.

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