Fact-Checking the Torah -- DH and grammar

When DH splits up Noach’s flood between J and P, and Numbers 16:37 between four different sources, it goes with a claim that some stories in Torah are composites; that is the “fifth pillar”. I’m going to discuss a claim previously examined by Cassuto in the 1940s, but from an SWLT point of view that Cassuto could not have because SWLT developed after Cassuto published his “eight lectures”.

Genesis 27 is the story of Yaaqov obtaining Esav’s blessing by following his mother’s orders to take goat stew to Yitschaq as consideration for the blessing. One of the pivots of the DH claim was that Rivqah used the same phrase to give orders to Yaaqov, that Yitschaq used to tell Esav to go hunting and bring deer stew to him as consideration for the blessing.

The phrase is hineh…v’atah…, “behold…and now…”. DH used to divide each of these phrases before v’atah and then it claimed that the first part of what Yitschaq said came from E and the second part from J, while the reverse is true for what Rivqah said.

There is a really good SWLT reason not to split that clause; it is a standard structure in Hebrew. It appears in Exodus 32:9-10, and in Samuel I 18:22. It’s an idiom.

An idiom may look like separate words to somebody from outside the language, but it’s not, and that’s why using a dictionary to look up the individual words in an idiom always produces a bad translation. Every competent translator knows that, and it’s why the phrase “literal translation” should tell you not to buy a bad translation.

Here, too, splitting up the idiom as if it were just separate words can’t be a successful strategy unless there’s evidence that the same thing works in other languages and other texts. Without that evidence, it becomes another extraordinary claim, etc. etc. etc.

Somebody needs to go back through all of DH, compare all the splits to Biblical Hebrew idioms, and eliminate every split that comes in the middle of an idiom.

BUT they have to examine splits compared to the 21^st century understanding of the grammar of Biblical Hebrew. The following splits have to be eliminated:

·         Between an evidentiary epistemic and the narrative past verb that is its evidence, which sometimes spreads over two verses. Genesis 13:1-3 is an example of this spread.

·         Between the va-y’hi that introduces a time expression and the narrative past which names what happened at that time, which sometimes spreads over multiple verses. The start of Genesis 14 is probably the best example of this type of spread.

Most of all, however, all splits need to be re-examined if they coordinate with the chapters. The chapters are an invention of the 1200s CE. I showed how they disrupt the information flow. There's more coming on that issue ahead, but for now, understand that the understanding of Hebrew available in the 1200s CE is woefully outdated.

Pretending to use Biblical Hebrew for the analysis, but using outdated grammar, is the linguistic version of clinging to archaeological dates that radio-carbon dating does not support.

And then there's more sampling bias...

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