Fact-Checking the Torah -- Conflations and DH

Parallel doublets arise from orally transmitted narratives over the history of their transmission. At some point, having identical goals obscures the fact that they are two independent narratives, and narrators begin telling them as separate parts of a single narrative, ignoring that they have different horizons, different sets of characters, and different motives. Multiple locations, a large cast of characters, and incompatible motivations for the numerous incidents, is a clue that it might be a conflation of two narratives as a parallel doublet, but the researcher has to avoid claiming the conflation without an external source giving only one of the narratives without a trace of the other.

A conflation tells one of its component narratives up to a point where the original source narrative had its denouement, then starts over again with the other story and then gets to the goal that both stories independently tended toward in the first place.

This “halfway” feature is missing from DH’s claims about Torah. The opposite is true. Torah has several examples of narratives being bound off by deaths that actually happened later. You can do the math and figure out that a dead character was still alive for decades into the next episode of the saga. Torah records Terach’s death, but do the math and you can tell that Avraham left Charan during Terach’s life. Torah records Yitschaq’s death, but do the math and you can tell that he was alive until the year before Yosef was sold into Egypt.

DH proposes an independent goal for each of the component documents. J has the goal of supporting the southern monotheocracy. D has the goal of legitimizing reforms undertaken upon the discovery and interpretation of the Temple scroll. P has the goal of establishing priestly temple service and perquisites. And E has the goal of… Hey, what is E’s goal anyway?

At the time E was supposedly composed from the ground up, independently of J and in an enemy nation, how did it serve the powers that were? The description of E as agreeing in detail with southern monotheism is out of joint given the immediate descent of the north to idolatry and then adoption, at least by the ruling class, of K’naani pagan worship. The idea that E’s goal was to preserve a tradition invented in the north, that jibed with the tradition invented in the south, requires that there be a shared cultural past before anything was written down – and DH originally denied a prior existence independent of the writing that they appeared in.

If there is no parallel doublet anywhere in Torah, that does not vindicate DH, because the principles DH operates on assumes written sources, not oral ones. Lack of a parallel doublet also does not invalidate Olrik’s principles as a description of Torah, because Olrik does not require that all oral traditions must have at least one parallel doublet. It is something he observed in Danish oral material. He did not pretend to study Torah to the same depth and so, as I said the other week, he missed one kind of repetition that Torah has.

Next: one narrative in Torah that could be dubbed a parallel doublet and in two weeks I’ll solve the mystery of what Olrik missed.