Fact-Checking the Torah -- my parallel doublet candidate?

This post is going to run longer than usual, and you’ll see why if you look at the comments from last week’s post. Mr. Salomon indirectly showed me that I had given no definition for “goal” and I’d better do that, after I go over my candidate for a possible parallel doublet.

Parallel doublets conflate two oral narratives, while they are still being transmitted orally, into a single narrative with more than the usual number of characters and incidents, with multiple geographical settings, and with more than one motive driving the plot. Conflation occurs because the independent narratives have the same goal, which eventually blurs the distinction between the narratives. Olrik insisted on reserving claims of parallel doublets for cases when the researcher could point to an external source giving one of the original narratives without a hint of the other.

So I cannot prove that I have identified any parallel doublets in Torah. I have pointed out parts of Torah that look like a repetition promoting credibility, or emphasizing the importance of an issue, or illustrating the Law of Ascents. But with no ancient versions of Torah lying around with the separate parts of what might be the parallel doublet, what I say in the rest of this post is strictly conjectural. 

In Exodus, a series of episodes has the apparent goal of providing tablets of the Israelite laws from Gd through Mosheh’s mediation. They fall in two parts and hinge around the Golden Calf episode.

In the first part, the elders go part way up Sinai and have dinner there in Gd’s presence, then they go home and Mosheh stays on the mountain 40 days and nights, eventually coming back down with tablets “written with the finger of Gd.” Before he leaves the mountain, Gd promises the Israelites that they will have His angel as a sacred presence among them.

In the second part, Mosheh has broken the tablets in his rage over the Golden Calf episode, Gd is very angry, and Mosheh goes back up the mountain for two reasons. One is to appease Gd, and this results in the statement of the Thirteen Attributes of Gd, all of which have to do with His mercy. This time Mosheh has to cut the tablets out of rock himself and do all the engraving. Gd warns the Israelites that His angel will go among them, and to act carefully, because an enraged angel might destroy them before Gd can exert His mercy. In sorrow, the men stop wearing their ornaments; this all seemingly takes place at Horeb.

The only way you can say that a multitude of characters are involved, is to contrast the elders in the first part with the “mixed multitude” who sparked the Golden Calf incident; and point out the sudden elevation of Yehoshua to the position of Mosheh’s personal assistant, who announces the Golden Calf incident to Mosheh. Before this Yehoshua was the winning commander in the battle with Amaleq.

You don’t have the feature of turning aside from the denouement to start the other narrative in the conflation. Mosheh succeeds in getting the tablets the first time. His breaking them is the excuse for him having to go up the mountain the second time.

What this actually resembles is two versions of a story, the second of which is told to preserve narrator credibility by being more rational. It’s incredible that the elders would all but see the face of Gd. It’s incredible that Mosheh could actually get physical stone tablets with writing on them that Gd put there.

Now, when Mosheh is rehashing Israelite history since the Exodus, in Deuteronomy 10:4 he does say that the second set of tablets also was written by Gd, contrary to what the post-calf part of the Exodus narrative says. But that’s not the confusion of a parallel doublet because he also specifically says that he spent two 40-day periods in the mountain and got two sets of tablets. What he says in Deuteronomy 10 is that touch of the fantastic in every oral narrative, only he has pasted it over top of the rational side of the old narrative.

I can’t prove this is a parallel doublet, but I ain’t even worrying ’bout that.

Now that definition. Olrik does not say this in the same words in his book, but a goal is whatever happens that is immediately followed by the denouement. There’s no sense continuing the narrative once the goal has been reached.

So in the Yehudah-Tamar episode, the goal was for Yehudah to have sons, but righteous ones, unlike Er, Onan and probably Shelah. Getting Yosef to Egypt is crucial to his having sons, but the Yosef narrative doesn’t wrap up at that point, it goes on for quite a long time. The real goal is for him to support his family in Egypt, and then their cushy life is contrasted with the Oppression that immediately follows at the start of Shemot.

There really is an important component in the Yehudah-Tamar story relative to Yosef, and I’ll mention it in about a month.

One more repetition that Olrik didn't discuss...