Fact-Checking the Torah -- DH and SWLT

Now I’m ready to discuss SWLT issues for DH and my first point is usage of words to distinguish between component parts of a complex document edited together from separate parts.

SWLT says words are used by cultures to express that culture, its needs, its interests, its activities.

Words used to express the needs and interests of a culture will only be used to identify multiple sources when such a concept becomes a need of the culture. The idea that the Torah-based culture had such a need is a projection by university scholars, who did have to identify their sources. It incorporates the Presentism Fallacy, which says that people had the same attitudes centuries ago that we have now. It’s popular in romantic (AKA historical) fiction because it avoids dealing honestly with attitudes or customs that are now considered disgusting.

But the idea of using words to identify multiple sources assumes (dangerous word!) that there were multiple written sources like the ones university scholars rely on, and that’s a circular argument, another fallacy. Whybray points out the use of this fallacy in multiple parts of DH.

Now, there are researchers who try to determine the origin of a given document, such as by attributing it to a given author. They also test to determine whether a document really was produced by a reputed author.

These researchers start with a known sample of the author’s material and study whether it uses similar language and expresses similar ideas compared to the document they are testing.

The research takes the author as a small subculture that consistently uses words the same way, the same as a larger subculture and the whole over-arching culture do. That’s why this kind of research is valid under the rules of SWLT.

The DH claim of special words identifying P as a source is an attempt at doing the same thing. I’ve already discussed fallacies and factual contradictions behind this claim.

When performing the same task as other researchers, DH has to follow the same procedures in order to prove that they have achieved results that are as true as anybody else’s work. If they have no document for comparison, they can’t follow the same procedures and cannot support the claim.

If they can’t do the work the same way, the DH claim is another example of extraordinary claims without a sufficient quantity of reliable results for support.

For now, DH has no data to test the hypothesis against. The Ketef Hinnom amulets contain the priestly blessing, but there is no corresponding trace of a fragment of J or D without the same words, to confirm that the words on the amulets didn’t exist before the amulets were put in the ground. (However, we know that this is part of the mischsprache mishegas so it’s pretty irrelevant.)

We can’t rely on a false argument from silence to say that prior written records of Torah didn’t exist. What we can say is that the claims DH makes about the contents of their four documents and the way they divide Torah up are based on translations, outdated information and fallacies as well as improper procedures and inconsistent application of axioms. And that the number of terms in the conjunction of claims is so large that the lack of support makes the probability of their truth infinitesimal, or zero due to fallacies.

But the words are only part of SWLT...

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