Fact-Checking the Torah -- Splitting Graf

Graf said one thing which ought to have been a warning to Wellhausen and his successors. Graf did not believe in verse by verse assignment.

He said this could never end in a satisfying and convincing delineation of the sources, and that the criteria for it were often subjective.

Nobody listened. Why should they? Graf himself split Torah up in other ways than by the Jewish aliyot, and also without regard to the chapters. Splitting one verse of a chapter from another authorizes everybody to do so and you can’t exactly influence people after you’re dead unless they let you.

What Graf thought of as subjective was meat and drink to his successors. Without relying on physical finds, without basis in logic, without facts that turned up in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, DH could give itself a pass as being descriptive, an issue I’ll come back to later. In fact there are no objective grounds for Graf’s conclusions. There are only the claims he feels like making.

His successors went further. And so we get things like this in the online assignment of Numbers 16:27. Note that the assignment is based on the KJV, another bad translation which copies errors made in the Septuagint. This translation implies that Qorach had his own tabernacle, which is false and a classic sign of a bad translation.

27 So they gat up from the tabernacle of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, on every side: and Dathan and Abiram came out, and stood in the door of their tents, and their wives, and their sons, and their little children.

The sky blue and dark blue text (from “and Dathan” to “their tents”, the dark blue picking up at “and their wives”) is from E and J respectively; notice that no name of Gd appears in this verse. No worries, since we know that the “name” axiom is based on bad facts and sampling bias. Somebody needs to dig up the other reasons for those assignments.

The red (the first occurrence of “Dathan, and Abiram”) is supposed to have been added by a redactor who is superfluous unless DH is true, and we have evidence that it isn’t.

The purported source is called “the book of generations”, first proposed by Frank Moore Cross in 1973, about the same time as other writers were realizing that DH had serious problems. The “book of generations” is also the source that the redactor used to fill in his fragmentary P. Cross dates this “book” to the Captivity, but his argument is based on the “repetitions” pillar similar to the work of Graf’s student Reuss, whom I will discuss next.

The olive green (everything else) is supposedly from P, some claims for which are based on the invalid mischsprache concept.

So despite getting his name on the concept, Graf did not affect DH for the better. Where he was right, later writers ignored him. Where he was wrong, he doomed DH to fail in an environment of active scientific inquiry.

By the way, this is the worst-case scenario I told you about some time back. The probability that the above verse has been correctly analyzed is the probability of correctness of every split, multiplied together. DH also has to justify keeping verses together since Graf allows splits between them (though not turn and turn about). There are 5,888 verses (that’s the worst-case, some say 5,845) in Torah.

Do you dare go further?

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved