Fact-Checking the Torah -- the repetition the Danes didn't use

There is one more reason for repetition that Olrik never addressed. Section 58 (Epic Law #1) about clarity refers to spinning off episodes in something I call sidebars, but he didn’t discuss what happens when you come back from the sidebar.

After some sidebars, Torah uses repetition for re-orientation. The Lot and Avimelekh incidents are sidebars after the annunciation of Yitschaq’s birth that emphasizes Avraham’s and Sarah’s elderliness. When we come back from them, Avraham’s exact age is given to remind us what a miracle Yitschaq was. Then begins the story of throwing away Yishmael.

Even more obviously, the Yosef saga is interrupted by the sidebar of Yehudah and Tamar. It’s an important narrative because it sets up what Olrik called the Law of Cascading Contrast, as well as establishing yibum as an ancient practice to make sure that a man had heirs to his property.

But then it has to go back to Yosef, and it re-orients the audience by repeating the line from right before the Yehudah-Tamar incident, about Yosef being sold into Egypt. This is one reason why, unlike Mr. Salomon, I never considered this part of the saga as a parallel doublet – but at the point when I discussed doublets, I hadn’t talked about this kind of repetition so props to Mr. Salomon for inventive thinking.

So some repetitions cope with re-orienting the audience, something Olrik never had to deal with.

Now let’s go back to Samaritan Pentateuch. It has a return-from-sidebar repetition in Numbers 21:12-13. The start of verse 13 copies part of verse 12, that is, it’s a repetition. Why? Because the text has a sidebar copied from Deuteronomy 2:17-19. Why?

The copy of the Deuteronomy verses is one of several examples. In several places in Deuteronomy, where Mosheh is recapitulating Israelite history, he says that X happened. X is an incident from some time back in the 40 years since the Exodus. Most of the time, X is referred to in the book of Exodus. And Samaritan Torah copies what Mosheh says in Deuteronomy into the book of Exodus at the point where X is referred to.

Repetitions after sidebars occur in sequence with the narratives; they are not copied from outside that book or from far-distant points in the oral tradition. The SP Numbers repetition has this feature; the sidebar itself was copied from elsewhere.

Most of the copying from Deuteronomy has the common feature of not making a liar out of Mosheh. If he said it in Deuteronomy, Samaritan Pentateuch makes sure that nobody can say he is lying.

Oral narratives support narrator credibility in-line with the narratives that disturb it. The disturbances are fantastic incidents. The support mechanisms are localization, rationalizing repetitions, and use of the certainty epistemic with something culturally or visibly present. That’s not what the statements in Deuteronomy are, and the X’s in Exodus are either not incredible, or else they carry their validation with them without the copying from Deuteronomy.

The issue seems to be that Deuteronomy is the most authoritative book of Torah for Samaritans. That’s understandable because Deuteronomy is the one book in Torah that talks about “the place which the Lord shall choose”. Samaritans interpret this to be the Twin Peaks, based on what is probably a case of horizon decay in oral transmission, which I talked about some time ago. But the copying into Exodus doesn’t have the hallmarks of repetitions in oral transmission. I suggest that this copying occurred after the Samaritans put their Pentateuch into writing – whenever that was. They’re in the oldest manuscripts documented by von Gall, from 1000-1100 CE. We know that the great Bar Rabbah of the 200s CE tried to revitalize Samaritan culture. That leaves a lot of time for the copying to happen.

By the way, there might be some sense to the copying from Deuteronomy into Numbers if it followed the pattern of the copyings to Exodus. It doesn’t. Numbers is recapitulating part of the journey. Deuteronomy 2:17-19 is a header for a description of peoples in the Holy Land. There’s no issue here of keeping Mosheh from looking like a liar. I'm not going to speculate on the reason for the insertion; you're welcome to do so although I suggest finishing this blog before you do.

One more bit about repetitions and then I'll move on.