Fact-Checking the Torah -- chronological signpost

Now I’ll tie together all of those archaeological textual finds, and the records in Amos and Hoshea of Exodus, the cities of the plain, Shabbat and New Moon.

Olrik specifically states that when a reference, a record in brief of an oral narrative, first shows up, it is incomprehensible to the audience unless a prior oral narrative on the subject was familiar to them.

When Amos and Hoshea refer to the cities of the plain as a paradigm of destruction, that wouldn’t mean anything to their audience, if the audience didn’t already know a vivid oral narrative about the destruction. The references to Shabbat and New Moon have nothing to do with oral narratives; they represent a reference to cultural features, which therefore existed before the references. To get their messages across, Amos and Hoshea would have to tell the stories, and they don't.

This coordinates with the archaeologists’ rejection of invention in writing at the point when a culture “needs to have a history”. 

The idea of “needing to have a history” is a literate viewpoint which corresponds to Vergil inventing the Aeneid to say that the Romans were descendants of the Trojans, and Gerald of Wales inventing the “Brutus” origin of the Britains, to satisfy a readership steeped in Roman history.  It is not how oralate (if you’ll let me coin the word) cultures operate.

Cultures with an oral tradition don’t create the tradition from a “need to have a history.”  They “need” to communicate cultural values whether of ritual/theology or of heroic ancestors. The narratives contain internal clues to their dates, but since oral narratives don’t run by the realtime clock, and since the fantastic elements necessary for audience interest and transmission overwhelm the realities, details that establish chronology are blurred or drop out as one of those things not crucial to the culture. Torah never names any of the Pharaohs, but Kings and Chronicles do record (versions of) the names of Pharaohs involved with Jewish politics.

According to Olrik, the rise of narratives related to historical events, closely follows the events depicted, the events are not projected backward in time by later generations.  That coordinates with archaeologists saying that no culture invents its entire past at some point in time.

But a simple reference to the key event in a narrative requires that the narrative be familiar to the audience – grandparents and grandchildren included – prior to the reference, even if the reference is only a survival.

What does all this mean for the origin of Torah?