Fact-Checking the Torah -- Astruc and the Neuchatel

Jean Astruc ignored contradictions to the facts he claimed as the basis for his analysis and the actual contents of the text he chose to support his claims, and he incorporated illogic that survives in DH to this day. What’s not to like?

Well, he also gave a disingenuous reason for using the translation he used.

Astruc used the French Bible translation carried out at Geneva at the same time as the English Geneva Bible was being translated. Astruc claimed he chose the “Neuchatel” because it supported his claims, when in fact it doesn’t. Some of Astruc’s claims ignore what it says.

Why did Astruc really use the Neuchatel? It was a matter of readership.

Astruc could never have gotten an imprimatur, permission to publish, from the Catholic church. It would have claimed he was misusing scripture. Astruc wrote in the middle of a renewed swell of the Counter-Reformation, during which his own father, a Protestant minister, converted to Catholicism.

Without that imprimatur, Astruc could never have developed a readership among good Catholics, except those who felt they could read his work with impunity for one reason or another.

His only other readership would have been Protestants. But Protestants would not have read material incorporating the Vulgate, or maybe they couldn’t. Latin was a requirement of the universities, and the universities to a large extent were still dedicated to turning out clergy.

Astruc’s work would not have made its way into non-clerical circles in Latin. He wrote in the French of the 1700s, familiar to women from the romances of Mademoiselle de Scudery, as well as to men who needed it as the lingua franca of European politics during le grande siecle. He needed material in French to illustrate his writing.

There were other French translations of the Bible. He admits that. But they were all produced under Catholic auspices. Geneva was thoroughly Calvinist.

I found the Neuchatel online and give a link to it in the bibliography. Astruc does not reproduce it accurately. One of the places I cited earlier, Genesis 28:1-4, reads dieu tout puissant in the Neuchatel. Astruc claims it reads dieu fort, tout-puissant. So Astruc is changing the data to support his case – and at the same time this particular set of verses undercuts him even when accurately cited, because it does not contain the right name of Gd for his B (DH’s J).

Astruc’s work does not support DH. It is based on false facts and fallacies. Everything in DH based on his work, whether directly or through subsequent authors, has to be ditched.

And some of them did ditch some of it....

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved