Fact-Checking the Torah -- Reuss and the Third Pillar

Edouard Reuss, teacher and colleague of Graf, clarified that his role in the process of “higher criticism” was to advance French Protestant scholarship. He waited until the 1870s, possibly assuming that the Catholic church and French monarchy would not allow him to publish. But after the Franco-Prussian war, when his home of Strasbourg became part of Prussia, he began to publish his History of the Scriptures, about the same time as Wellhausen published.

Reuss, like Graf, operated on the premise that a science is a study; he did not at all pretend that he practiced Cartesian science, he admitted he was pursuing theological studies. His avowed purpose was to let the French public in on what the theologues had been discussing amongst themselves for about 30 years. This jumps his readers over Astruc and into the heat of battle. Which could have been a good thing but…

Reuss adopted the Names of Gd criterion, which you know is false.

One of his specialties was the third pillar, repetitions, which he said was a sign of differing documents.

Reuss betrayed his own principle, however. He uses the first repetition of the concept of sefer toldot in Genesis 2:4 as a conclusion of text from E, while assigning the next part to J. He uses the repetition sefer toldot in Genesis 5:1 as an introduction to a part of E, after material that comes from J. They are dividing marks, but they divide differently.

He uses the eleh toldot of Genesis 6:9, 11:10 and 27 as introductions for material from E.

But he says Genesis 25:19 is an interpolation to E by an editor who realized that such a thing was missing.  That redefines this repetition as NOT marking a changeover from E to J or anything else – it’s inside a section from P.

He also makes a different claim for Genesis 37:1-2. He claims that it is an interpolation, “Yaaqov lived in …K’naan, this is the history of Yaaqov”. (This is not the modern assignment.)

What’s more, Reuss does not see eleh toldot in Genesis 25:12 as a change in documents. (It does change documents in modern assignment.)

It’s obvious that Reuss believed in repetition as a signal of a change of documents only when he believed that a particular part of Torah is a different document from what preceded it. It is a sign that Reuss split out the documents, then went back and decided that certain phrases have significance for splitting. This is the same bad methodology used by Astruc.

Since Reuss did not apply the “repetitions” axiom consistently, these claims have to be ditched. I don’t say that DH has to adopt the definitions and descriptions I will give later. I say that there’s a doctoral dissertation in examining DH claims about other repetitions to see if they are based on fallacies, outdated information, or inconsistent application of axioms. If so, they have to be ditched.

But bad methodology isn't Reuss' only problem. I'll discuss another one next week.

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