Fact-Checking the Torah -- withdrawal

If you're here because it's Friday, and you're looking for the Fact-Checking post, today's info is different.

Last week I posted my last item on Torah urban legends.

You can do a number of things at this point.

1.  If you jumped into the middle of this blog, you can start at the beginning.

2. If you want to study the source documents, you can go to the resource page.

3. If you want to read the material that I used to write the blog, you can go to the bibliography.

The only other thing I have for you is Narrating the Torah, which I have mentioned several times on the blog. Use the email at the top right of this page to get in touch if you are interested. If you are on mobile, go to the bottom of the page and click on "website version" and find the email at the top right.

Narrating is a commentary on the Biblical Hebrew source, with a translation that incorporates what I learned about Biblical Hebrew that is documented on the 21st Century Bible Hebrew thread. I am working on what I hope is the last overall edit and expect the page count to pass 1800 for just that portion.

I have tried to make it easier on you by having content guides and indexes, which take the page count very close to 2000.

I can let you have the introduction for free, as well as the summary of Biblical Hebrew grammar and Olrik's principles. But the rest of it, and the Afterword, I'll charge for. I'm working out the pricing structure now.

But you can avoid paying anything by learning Biblical Hebrew and studying the source documents for yourself. Which is really best because all you will learn from Narrating is what I think. You ought to decide what you think.

(I never just let things drop. If you're here working through your withdrawal, I can give you one last hit.)

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Olrik's conjunction

And finally, why isn’t my use of Olrik’s principles a case of the conjunction fallacy?

Well, look back at the DH description of the documents. Graf and Whybray agreed, at opposite ends of over 100 years, that some of them are subjective, not objective. What’s more, I turned up that parts of them are factually false or disproven, or incorporate fallacies.

Olrik’s principles, on the other hand, play upon objective information in his source texts with consistent application of the rules and without fallacies like sampling bias.

In addition, Olrik’s principles are not hanging out there without a net. They correlate with known features of human nature, from the fragility of memory, to the nature and contents of gossip whether face-to-face or on social media.

Olrik’s principles independently express the first rule of Sapir-Whorf Linguistic Theory from later in the 20^th century; they dovetail with Dr. Cook’s 21^st century description of the grammar of Biblical Hebrew as far as that goes.

Olrik coordinates with archaeologist William Dever and some of his colleagues in showing that cultures do not spring fully formed at the time they develop or adopt writing. Writing becomes a factor after they’ve been up and running for a while. Cultura non facit saltus, remember? And until then, they share information among themselves orally, using entertainment to convey behavioral norms.

Olrik’s principles don’t just describe Jewish Torah, they also explain some of the differences between Torah and its nearest relative, Samaritan Pentateuch. Other differences relate to a common pattern of linguistic change in orally transmitted material (Saenz-Badillo’s work).

Cross-fertilization between Olrik’s principles and other fields is exactly what DH doesn't do, which is what helps to make it a Linda problem and not a science.

Torah is the written record of an oral tradition transmitted by the ancestors of the Jews for about 6000 years prior to the 21^st century, and continuing today. It was not just narratives they told for fun, but narratives embodying their laws.

Which is where I started this blog.

Thank you for your time and attention.

Don’t forget to pick up your coats in the lobby.

(Added later: OK I am not leaving you high and dry having withdrawal symptoms.)

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 2:23, qual binyan

Genesis 2:23

 

כג וַיֹּ֘אמֶר֘ הָֽאָדָם֒ זֹ֣את הַפַּ֗עַם עֶ֚צֶם מֵֽעֲצָמַ֔י וּבָשָׂ֖ר מִבְּשָׂרִ֑י לְזֹאת֙ יִקָּרֵ֣א אִשָּׁ֔ה כִּ֥י מֵאִ֖ישׁ לֻֽקֳחָה־זֹּֽאת:

 

Translation:     The man said this, this time, is a bone from my bones, and flesh from my flesh; this shall be called woman for from man this was taken.

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

זֹאת	this
פַּעַם	time
עֶצֶם	Bone

 

Yes, I played a trick on you last time; there was no zaqef in that verse. There was a little curve but no zaqef.

 

In this verse we have an agentless structure: me-ish luqachah zot. We know perfectly well who the agent was, He is named in the previous verses. What’s important is what the action says about the narrative.

 

Luqachah is in what I call qual binyan, perfect aspect, 3^rd singular feminine. So it has important consequences later on, although the action is completely finished. There’s no midrash on this so I’ll stop with – we’ll see what it is later. It involves this verb again.

 

Laqach can mean buy or acquire. In other words a contract with consideration. In Jewish law there is no marriage without consideration on both sides: he has to sign up to the ketubbah which settles money on her. She can earn money by her activities; for example, one woman can process one or two fleeces a week into yarn and then make cloth, or she can turn out about 20 pounds of goat cheese. This money goes to her husband to pay her maintenance. If he refuses to spend it on that, she keeps it to maintain herself.

 

In this one case in all the world, the man acquired the woman in marriage from himself. It’s the only time in history such a thing was possible. In all other cases, the man acquires the woman from her family, or from herself. The marriage between Adam and Chavvah was the exception proving that there’s an opposite law, which is not mentioned because the opposite law is the normal case.

 

So that sort of reverses the play on who is the agent in this verse. Is it really Gd, or is it the man acquiring his wife?

 

Knitting -- Spinnerin

At my Mom's house, I found a 1963 or 1966 Spinnerin book and she let me keep it..

You will never see this book on my eBay account. It will stay with me until I die and then I will give it to a niece who also likes knitting.

Most of the patterns are the usual suspects, except for a miniskirt and matching jacket in a tweed yarn.

Another exception is a large coat worked in two colors of worsted yarn. The cast-on uses two strands and sets up a 12-stitch checkerboard pattern with solid color and mixed color squares. The coat is kneelength; the sleeves stop a few inches short of the wrists.

The final exception is something I think my Mom made for herself once, in the same pink as the photo, so I made one, only in sport weight in a shade of orange called Mai Tai Heather.  It uses a 5-stitch, 4-row motif that fits easily onto your basic pullover:

BE CAREFUL ABOUT THE YOs. It's as disastrous to forget them here as it is when you work lace.

Cast on a number of stitches divisible by 5 and also 4 (such as 220 for sport weight) and work your k2/p2 rib.
Row 1: K1 through back loop, yo, K3tog through back loops, yo, k1
Row 2: slip 1, K3, slip 1
Row 3: Do not work 1^st stitch on needle: knit 2^nd through back loop, leave on left needle, now knit 1^st stitch through front loop and pull both off (twist seen in Aran design); K1; work stitches 4 and 5 the same as 1 and 2.
Row 4: knit

It can be tricky to keep everything lined up. Use the last row-1 when you start a new one, to make sure the bobbles line up in the middle of each horizontal frame.

Work the inches you want under the armholes. A repeat is about 1/2 inch high, so for 13 inches above the ribbing, you want 26 repeats or 104 rounds.

Bind off 5 on each side of the "seams" (you did run a contrasting yarn to mark them didn't you?)

Work steeking at the armholes. The original pattern assumes you're going to work a front and back and sew them together at the sides, so it doesn't tell you how to work the pattern on a purl row.

Work 60 rounds and finish with row 3 of the motif, knit a row, knit off your shoulders and work your neck ribbing.

For the sleeves, you have to work from the cuffs up to get the motif to go in the right direction.
Cable on 60 stitches to size 5 DPs and work your k2/p2 rib.
K1, F/B increase, knit around to next to last stitch, F/B increase, K1.
Work one set of rows and in the knit row, do another increase on each side of the underarm where you are running your marker yarn.
Now increase every 5th row for 10 repeats. Your counting can be tricky since you're not increasing on the same row of the motif every time but if you keep with the row-4 increase, the sleeve will increase too quickly.

At some point, like about the 5th increase, you'll see that you have 7 stitches on each side of the underarm before you start working the motif.
In the photo, the arrow marks the underarm "seam".
The brown line is below the 7 stitches on one side of the "seam".
The next time you get to row 1 of the motif, K2, do row 1, and at the other end, K2.
This maneuver keeps you from having an increasing number of Ks at the start and end of every round.
You can see where I added this motif above the brown line,

When you have done your 10th round-5 increase, you will have done 12 sets of increases.
Now increase every 4th round for 10 rounds, doing that maneuver where you extend the line of the round-1 motif whenever necessary.

When you have increased 20 times, you should have 100 stitches on your DPs, which are getting crowded.
Switch to a size 5 circular needle with a 16 inch tether for the rest of the sleeve.
Do your last two sets of round-4 increases.
You're at row 98.

Now do increases every 3rd round, doing that maneuver when necessary.
Your final stitch count should be 136.
Your final number of rounds should be 159, ending on a knit round.
If you get to 136 stitches before you get to 159 rounds, stop increasing and just finish the sleeve.
Bind off the edge.

Now cut your steeking, turn the body inside out, match the shoulder join to the middle of the sleeve at the top, and match the middles of the underarms.
Sew together, easing the sleeve gently so that there are no folds along this seam.

Do the other sleeve, weave in your yarn ends, and you're done.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- oral tradition or urban legend?

Now the kicker.  What’s the difference between an urban legend and an oral tradition?

You thought I’d never ask!

Olrik’s definition of oral narratives is that they come into being only because they express a cultural feature or relate a founding event of the culture which transmits them, giving its members an enjoyable, easily remembered representation of their own culture.

That’s not what an urban legend does.  An urban legend is made up by one culture about another. Then for credibility, it may acquire false attribution to a police, university, or professional organization.  It is easy to transmit in multiple hops, with attention-getting contents, but it is not produced or shaped by norms of the culture it purports to be about.  It is shaped by norms of the culture that made it up, which are different. 

The best example I can give is probably the urban legend that if you see an oncoming car flashing its lights at you, that’s a gang signal.  This story did not originate among gangs or gangstas. 

It doesn’t build on the audience’s knowledge; it takes advantage of their ignorance.  People flash their headlights at oncoming cars who have their headlights on bright when they shouldn’t or have their headlights off when they shouldn’t.  Flashing headlights are also a warning that the police have set up a speed trap in the direction the flasher is coming from. 

Urban legends do not embody norms by which the audience lives.  They are simply titillating to the people who pass them around.  The same thing is often true about gossip.

Torah as a saga, a form of oral narrative, is not an urban legend.  It’s about the law, history, and language of the people who transmitted it for millennia, using structures and grammar that reinforce each other and reflect its oral nature.

The urban legends on this blog formed in cultures which were ignorant of Torah’s precise text or cultural content. 

So if you have been asking yourself the above question for any length of time while reading this blog, you can stop now.  Oral narratives and urban legends are indeed two different things, with only oral transmission in common.  If that, since so many urban legends have spread only in email for their entire lives. 

And now, just to bring things full circle...

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 2:22, about that evidence

Genesis 2:22

 

כב וַיִּ֩בֶן֩ יְהֹוָ֨ה אֱלֹהִ֧ים ׀ אֶת־הַצֵּלָ֛ע אֲשֶׁר־לָקַ֥ח מִן־הָֽאָדָ֖ם לְאִשָּׁ֑ה וַיְבִאֶ֖הָ אֶל־הָֽאָדָֽם:

 

Translation:     **** Gd must have built the rib that He took from the man into a woman; for He brought her to the man.

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

וַיִּבֶן	He must have built
צֵּלָע	Rib
לָקַח	He took
אִשָּׁה	woman

 

Here you see the perfect aspect of laqach, that verb I had to eat my words on in a previous lesson.

 

Va-y’vieha “He brought her,” is an example of a verb with an object suffix. Notice that it is the hifil of “to come” which I just gave you.

 

This verse starts with an evidentiary epistemic, a shortened lamed heh verb with vav as a prefix. The key to this morphology is that whatever evidence you get, that’s enough. It’s also true that the audience knows that men and women go together now; that cultural feature started back in Gan Eden.

 

Notice the segol version of et. This is the distinctive, not the collective version. In lesson 86 on Genesis 2:7, it uses the distinctive et, too; the man was made of dust from the earth. The woman was made of a rib taken from the man.

Also notice that Gd formed (va-yitser) the man and He built (yiven) the woman. What’s more, we have a certainty epistemic here. When He brought the woman to the man, she was evidence of what happened to the rib. Midrash Rabbah Breshit 80:5 says that the issue is that Gd built the woman, He didn’t create her using bara. Since he didn’t create her from nothing, bara is not appropriate.

There’s also an aggada on Talmud Sanhedrin 39a: If thieves took silver from you, and left gold in its place, are you going to go to the authorities about that?

Where’s the zaqef?

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Taking the Wellhausen out of Graf-Wellhausen

Back to Joel Baden of Yale and his proposals for “Neo-DH”, a label he attributes to another writer.  He agrees with the old, isolated, unfactual, illogical structure.  What’s new and improved about it?

This reminds me of a scene in the old Beverly Hills 90210 TV series where the daughter is imagining herself back in the 1960s. She and her family are eating TV dinners off tray tables in the living room, watching the Vietnam War play on the evening news. The father says, “This tastes different.” The mother, being an obedient consumer, cheerfully repeats the ads, “It’s new and improved.” They probably were tasting a new combination of fat, salt, sugar, and chemicals.

Baden claims that Documentary Hypothesis is undergoing a resurgence in America because it has dropped one of the two parts of Wellhausen’s program – the historical analysis. Baden says “Neo-Doc” is strictly literary, and that JEDP can only address the literary issues.

But he still maintains that the sources can be identified without an example to compare to, which you know is an invalid method; you can’t identify the author of a work if you don’t have an authenticated sample of the author’s work for comparison. Same as you can't identify a person's fingerprints unless they're on file with police, or that they didn't believe they had found the remains of Richard III until they found a live distant relative and got a DNA match.

By giving up on historical issues, “Neo-Doc” avoids the inconvenient truth that history – ok, archaeology – which has hard evidence for its claims, outperforms DH, which does not.

Giving up on history makes DH an abstraction.

OK, let’s look at it abstractly. I didn’t actually give the value for the probability that DH is true, did I? So what is it?

Well, there are five possible sources to assign every verse in Torah to, JEDP and at least one that is unknown. The probability that any assignment is correct is at most 1/5, the way the probability of any side of a die coming up is 1/6. If there is more than one unknown source, the probability is 1/6, 1/7, whatever that final number of sources adds up to. And you know from grade school math that the larger the number in the denominator, the smaller the value of the probability. But since I'm in a generous mood, I’ll stick with 1/5 for now.

Starting with Astruc, I showed that the criteria for assignment are based on false “facts” or subjective methods. One of them, the mischsprache concept crucial to P, is based on history, which is now being ripped out of DH. So the criteria cannot boost the probability of any assignment above 1/5.

Since DH is eliminating history (archaeology), there never will be hard evidence for any assignment. So the probability is less than 1/5, less than 20%, less than 0.2.

Since DH still supports splitting one verse from another, every verse has to be used as a separate term in the calculation.

So the total probability is the product of the probability that every assignment is correct, which is some value less than 0.2 multiplied by itself 5845 times at a minimum. You do the math.

And then we look at the abstract logic, and find all the fallacies, which make the probability zero.

So students at American universities are being graded, and some are having their futures depend, on their performance in a subject with a zero probability of being true.

Two points left to make on this thread. First...
 

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 2:21, more on trop

Genesis 2:21

 

כא ווַיַּפֵּל֩ יְהֹוָ֨ה אֱלֹהִ֧ים ׀ תַּרְדֵּמָ֛ה עַל־הָֽאָדָ֖ם וַיִּישָׁ֑ן וַיִּקַּ֗ח אַחַת֙ מִצַּלְעֹתָ֔יו וַיִּסְגֹּ֥ר בָּשָׂ֖ר תַּחְתֶּֽנָּה:

 

Translation:     **** Gd caused a sleep to fall on the man, he slept; He took one of his ribs, He closed the flesh below it.

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

יַּפֵּל	He caused to fall
תַּרְדֵּמָה	Sleep, trance
יִּישָׁן	He slept
צַּלְעֹתָיו	His ribs
יִּסְגֹּר	He closed
בָּשָׂר	Flesh, meat
תַּחְתֶּנָּה	Below them

 

“He caused to fall” is the hifil of nafal, to fall, a peh nun verb. As you can see, like many verbs with nun at the start of the root, the nun disappears in the imperfect and the middle consonant takes the dagesh of assimilation.

 

Tardemah is not a common word in the Hebrew Bible. The next chance you have of seeing it is in Genesis 15:12 in the episode about what Jews call The Covenant Between the Pieces. 

 

“Below them” uses a personal ending with the preposition tachat which is part of an urban legend I discuss to death on the Fact-Checking page.

 

This verse has caused an urban legend that men have one rib less than women do. It’s not true.  We all have 12 pairs.

 

Find the zaqef. Which one is it?

 

Now find the revia. It marks a verb in narrative past, creating a new clause. Right before it there’s a word marked with etnach. Where did we see that before?

Right, last lesson. The zg was on one word, and the word before that was marked with etnach.

Revia and zg only mark one word. Or rather one lexical unit. When I get the opportunity to point out the difference, I will.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- "contradictions"

I want you to know that there are source critics who complain about the contradictions in Greek myth. In The Republic, Plato specifically targeted Homer and Hesiod for saying inconsistent things about the origin of the universe and the attributes and activities of the gods.

[Scratchy needle] What’s wrong with this picture?

Homer and Hesiod get credit for recording two oral traditions. Plato is firmly seated in literate classical Greece a century or two later.

The two oral traditions I’m talking about both draw on material from Anatolia, one back in the 3000s or something BCE, the other incorporating a historical event from about 1190 BCE. There is absolutely no reason why they have to say the same things. But Plato didn’t have the background to know that. He died more than 24 centuries ago.

I have a copy of a book I read for the first time when I was 4, D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths. There’s a “family tree” of the named characters. If you read the stories carefully, some people don’t seem to have been born at the time when they were supposedly active. Others are dead.

That evaluation assumes that they were part of a saga or were composed in a literate environment. Agamemnon himself was part of the first writing-dependent culture in Greece. Stories that lead up to his lifetime, especially those which Hesiod recorded after Agamemnon’s death, developed in an oral environment. The fact that they are chronologically inconsistent suggests that they were not developed as part of a saga, but independently. And even if that’s not true, you now know that there is absolutely no requirement that oral narratives obey realtime.

Some Greek myths also use different locations with the same story. Deucalion and Pyrrha, the flood survivors, are said to have landed at four different sites. Each site is important in Greek culture, but each has a different reason for being important. Greek culture is woven from multiple ethnic groups – even the earliest Greek writers admitted that. It’s perfectly reasonable for each group to lay claim to this important landing taking place on its own turf.

Contradictions don’t invalidate the worth of oral narratives to the culture that transmits them.

Back to the “contradictions” in Torah. The most-cited one seems to be the two lists of animals in the flood story. Anybody who sees these lists as contradictions has not done a complete analysis of the story (failing the test of Occam’s Razor). At the end of the flood, Noach makes a sacrifice. What does he sacrifice?

Well, it’s a reach nichoach l’****. Every time this phrase appears in Torah –it also shows up in Yehezqel – it means a sacrifice appropriate to Gd. What is appropriate for a sacrifice to Gd? A tahor animal. Follow me now.

If Noach had taken only one pair of every animal and bird into the ark, then when he made his sacrifice, he must sacrifice the male. But if the female is not pregnant, that ends that species forever. The audience knows first-hand that the tahor animals exist “to this day”. So something else had to happen.

Noach had to take enough tahor animals so that his sacrifice would not end the species. It’s no surprise that the actual number of pairs is seven, Olrik’s Magic Number for religion.

This issue of the pregnant female animal is raised in a different way in Jewish midrash.

This is another example that DH is a product of literate people who failed in fact and in logic at every turn. Apparently practical data like survival of the species played no role in their conclusions. If you were hanging on to contradictions as a last support for DH, you are now hanging in the air with no net.

So now back to my sheep.

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 2:20, lamed alef verbs

Genesis 2:20

 

כ וַיִּקְרָ֨א הָֽאָדָ֜ם שֵׁמ֗וֹת לְכָל־הַבְּהֵמָה֙ וּלְע֣וֹף הַשָּׁמַ֔יִם וּלְכֹ֖ל חַיַּ֣ת הַשָּׂדֶ֑ה וּלְאָדָ֕ם לֹֽא־מָצָ֥א עֵ֖זֶר כְּנֶגְדּֽוֹ:

 

Translation:     The man gave names to all the domestic animals and the flyer of the sky, and all the wild animals; but for the man -- no help opposite him did he find.

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

מָצָא

He found

 

See the conjugation of yatsa.  Matsa is identical, except in the imperfect, because yatsa has that yod at the start which disappears in the imperfect, while matsa has a mem which never disappears. This is more like bara except that it doesn’t have that weird central resh.

 

Imperfect

 

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אֶמְצָא	נִמְצָא	First
תִּמְצָא	תִּמְצָאוּ	Second/masculine
תִּמְצְאִי	תִּמְצֶאנָה	Second/feminine
יִמְצָא	יִמְצְאוּ	Third/masculine
תִּמְצָא	תְּמְצֶאנָה	Third/feminine

 

Notice that this is NOT the same word as matsoh, the unleavened bread of Passover.  Matsoh ends with a heh, not an alef.

 

We have the opportunity here, so let me point out something from the Mechon Mamre site on trop. You see the zaqef qatan and the zaqef gadol in this verse. They are both disjunctive. Well, right before the zaqef gadol, there’s an etnach.

 

The “zg” only ever and always marks a single word. But before the “zq”, there’s a phrase and before that there’s a revia.

 

We’ll see this again if we get the chance to compare two other trop, but I might have to do a special lesson on that because one of them is extremely rare. I don’t think there’s been one so far but I have been paying attention to other things.