Fact-Checking the Torah -- equal treatment

You should have a big question after my last post. I pointed to drift in material in Samaritan Pentateuch as a sign of a languishing tradition. Why isn’t the position of the slander stories the same thing?

As usual, I have several answers for that.

First, focusing on the slander stories would be cherry-picking, a form of sampling bias, which is a fallacy. I gave two other issues that identify Samaritan Pentateuch as a languishing tradition. It’s also important for you to know that Samaritan Pentateuch has the slander narratives in the same place and sequence as Jewish Torah. The Samaritan Pentateuch continued languishing after the narratives came to rest in their current position.

Second, when was the last time you read Numbers 21? Go ahead. Read it. I’ll be here when you come back.

Numbers 21:14-20 is a classic survival in Olrik’s terms. If I had that time machine I keep asking you for, I could go back to 1628 BCE and move back and forth between then and 597 BCE. I could catch the narrative in its fullest form, and then watch it languish to these few verses. I never said there was no languishing material in Jewish Torah and in Narrating I point out other examples as they come up.

Finally, we have the same issue I discussed more than a year ago about the similarities between Talmud and Jewish Torah that identify both as oral traditions.  Originally, Talmud was transmitted only by word of mouth, except for notes as prompts for memory. It was eventually all written down to keep it from being forgotten.

When the Jews in Babylonia stopped speaking Biblical Hebrew as their vernacular, it is natural to think that their children began to have trouble remembering Torah – and all the rest of the oral tradition. The Jewish authorities no doubt started writing the material down from their own memories, helped out by elders who still spoke the mame loshn of their youth. There’s no doubt that some of the narratives languished over the millennium before the captivity. It’s how the human mind works. What did make it into writing, became the “scroll of Mosheh” that Ezra had when he brought the Babylonian Jews back to the Holy Land.

So once again, similar situations involve similar processes and have similar outcomes. And we have the external evidence in Samaritan Pentateuch of a waystation in the tradition, a point of departure, which is identical in both daughter traditions, one of which languished in more extreme ways afterwards.

So what is going on with DH in the 21st century?