Fact-Checking the Torah -- Wellhausen's other brother

I didn’t mean to send you screaming from the room at the end of the last post, but there was an up side to that. It meant you realized that DH’s current assignments are a conjunction with something like 6,000 terms, and the probability is infinitesimal that they are all correct  because they are based on bad facts and fallacies.

If you go on from here, either you’re not convinced that DH has an insignificant probability of being correct, or you want to see how much more dirt I can dig up, or you want to find the point at which I drop the other shoe.

Edouard Reuss, teacher and colleague of Graf, stated that his role was to advance French Protestant scholarship. He waited until the 1870s, when he was about 70 years old, to publish his History of the Scriptures. Until 1870 Strasbourg, where he taught, was part of France; in the Franco-Prussian war, it changed hands. It was part of Prussia by the time his Bible was published.

Those of us who know something about history think “repression” when we think of Prussia. But it was in Prussian-led Germany of the 1870s that Wellhausen was publishing. Whatever Reuss felt about what happened to France, the political change gave him a new intellectual lease on life.

Reuss claimed that he had been asked to provide a French Protestant version of the Bible. It’s possible that the majority of French Protestants had other things on their minds. They were helping the Republicans disestablish the Catholic church, supporter of the monarchy.

He claimed that the problem was an official Bible that was not a perfect translation. You know that any translation is not going to be perfect, unless the translator knows enough about the culture of the source document to explain terms that the audience of the translation will not understand.

But Reuss did not produce the kind of translation that would improve things. When he translated Leviticus 11, he erased verse divisions so that his translation combined the verses telling what signs to watch out for in kosher animals, with the four verses naming some animals that are not kosher. This is fundamental to an issue I will discuss shortly.

For now, you have to understand that the versification of Torah is well understood despite the fact that Torah scrolls are written without punctuation. The Neuchatel, for example, does not give verse numbers but its punctuation clearly separates these verses.

It seems pretty clear that Reuss did not consult the Neuchatel French translation. If Reuss had access to it, he could not use it in his work because it did not support what he did.

Or Reuss deliberately ignored the Neuchatel because it contradicted his work. Or else Reuss relied on his readers not checking up on him. YMMV.

So fundamentally, Reuss did two things wrong: he used a translation, which means he wasn’t analyzing the Hebrew Bible. That’s a strawman argument, pretending that Torah says things it doesn’t say, and a strawman argument is a fallacy.

And he performed sampling bias, another fallacy and a rejected practice in any scientific or scholarly study. Everything Reuss wrote has to be ditched because it relies on fallacies.

Including his  work with the third pillar, repetitions...

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved