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.