Fact-Checking the Torah -- Astruc and logic

Astruc’s next problem is logical. He is the originator of the circular arguments endemic in DH.

All right, that’s a little unfair. Circular arguments exist in Aristotle. Circular arguments existed throughout medieval thought.

What we should really give Astruc credit for is being the basis for use of circular arguments in DH. Scholars who could not detect this circularity swallowed Astruc’s work, and their students had the same deficiency, and so on through Wellhausen to today’s DH supporters.

Astruc’s real reason for claiming that the names of Gd distinguish between sources rests on a claim that no good writer uses more than one name for the same entity in the same place in a work. Then, without supporting data, he says that Mosheh could not be considered a bad writer. He concludes that the parts of Torah that use both names of Gd exist only in Genesis, and therefore Genesis could not have been written by Mosheh. Mosheh had to have received them from others, and then since (through ignorance) Astruc claims that such material cannot be transmitted for centuries by word of mouth, Mosheh had to receive them in writing.

There are two problems with this.

One is Exodus 3:16. When Gd reveals His name to Mosheh with orders to use it to validate his position as Gd’s messenger, the phrase is “tell them **** elohey...sent you.” The word elohey is the masculine construct state (a common usage in Hebrew grammar) of elohim.  So the names do appear together, in material that Mosheh could reasonably have written, because he was an eyewitness.

This is another case of sampling bias that Astruc commits. Restricting most of his claims to Genesis avoids having to deal with it – but he does make a claim here that refers to the rest of Torah and so he really is dealing with the entire Pentateuch.

Astruc is pulling a fast one. He may have hoped that readers would ignore that one tiny sentence in his work. Alternatively, he could hope what actually happened, that the readers of the Enlightenment had already been exposed to Spinoza’s work and would see Astruc as the next in line. Or that his readers would be so overwhelmed by the rest of what he said that they wouldn’t call him out on one tiny thing. Or that they would not check his work.

People did check his work. They knew Spinoza had stopped his formal education in Judaism when he was 17 and that he probably didn’t know what he was talking about, while Astruc had no Jewish education at all and had made some blatant mistakes. That’s why thousands of people turned a deaf ear from the beginning of the formulation of DH; they knew better.

But I’m still not done with Astruc.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved