Fact-Checking the Torah -- anthropomorphisms

Here's my little homily on anthropomorphisms in Torah.  Most people take them as a sign of primitivism.

But remember, an oral narrative has to be vivid. 

I can imagine Torah narratives with anthropomorphisms originally saying something like “it was as if the hand of Gd did X.” But “it was as if” is extra words to remember, and as the story survived, it could have increased in vividness by dropping those words.  Olrik specifically states that narratives floresce as well as languish.  Think about it. 

What’s more, “the hand of Gd did X” is more fantastic than the original wording.  Gd is unseen but results are still attributed to Him because it takes a Supreme Being to make things happen at points in history crucial to Israelite survival and development.  Saying that His actual hand did it is more fantastic; rationalists down through time have recognized that.  It’s one basis for their objection to the anthropomorphisms.  But it’s what makes an oral narrative tick.

Anthropomorphisms are nothing more than a natural feature of a narrative that transmitted orally for some period before being recorded.  They were retained for reasons internal to the life and survival of oral narratives. 

This answers the idea of splitting P off because it is strictly legalistic material and doesn’t contain anthropomorphisms (if such a claim exists in DH, which I don’t know, and so this might be a strawman argument).  “P’s” legalistic material is fundamental to operating the Israelite culture, everyday happenings like which animals can be slaughtered for food, as well as requirements of avodah. People perform these actions; no anthropomorphisms needed.  But we can’t analyze it by Olrik’s principles specifically because it’s not strictly a set of narratives. (This feeds into my alternate explanation later.)

Now let’s look at a contrary example.  The “Aramaic” (Neo-Babylonian) version of Torah was written by Unqlus, a convert to Judaism who was sister’s son to Titus, destroyer of the Second Temple and Emperor of Rome.  The Targum, as it is known, comes from the time of R. Akiva and avoids anthropomorphisms.  It derives from a written version of Torah, but it’s not a translation because it doesn’t reproduce the meaning of the original.  

So in Exodus, when the elders eat in Gd’s presence at Sinai, that’s a sign of the fantastic in an oral narrative.  And later when Mosheh can only see Gd’s “back,” that’s an anthropomorphism typical of the verbosity of an oral narrative, as is the repeated phrase in Exodus, “with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.”

Unqlus was one of the first who insisted on writing for literate people who did not require the fantastic to promote transmission. How the in-synagogue targumim (translators) handled the material, we don’t know, because it is not on record.  Can somebody build us that time machine, please?

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