For two years, nobody has responded to my critique of DH. There are lots of reasons for people not commenting on my posts.
· People have been busy with their lives. When they have a spare moment, they can’t find information that would help them, that I didn’t already cover.
· Or they already agreed with me, even if on different grounds.
· Or the people who used to support it, have given up on it for whatever reason.
· Or the right people haven’t seen the posts. If you know somebody and you think they could refute me, send them a link to the first post. Remember, I trashed DH from multiple angles, including mathematical probability and logic, as well as false facts and failures of Occam’s Razor.
I still occasionally go out on the web looking for new papers on DH. I found a 2016 paper (see first link) that had three takeaways for me.
First, DH continues to unravel. Ongoing studies are casting doubt on the history “in” D. Combined with the late 20th century retreat from E, and Baden’s complete rejection of historicity (which undermines P), it means there’s not a lot left to DH.
Second, the paper comes to a conclusion, no doubt surprising to DH scholars, that Joshua reflects knowledge of Torah, which is not possible if the DH timeline is correct. Unless, of course, Joshua was invented after all of them including P. Which is not possible because Joshua uses pre-Captivity Biblical Hebrew grammar -- certainty epistemics, va-y’hi timing expressions, duplicate conditionals – as well as having examples of Olrik’s principles, the sign that it is an oral tradition.
Third, the author committed a mistake common to high-school writers. The conclusion has new material not predicted or supported by the body. It tees off on having to study for years to get accepted as an expert. It was a startling mistake for somebody who had been publishing for at least 5 years, all the way back to a paper in a 2011 book called “The Death of Archaeological Theory”. The introduction to this book is in the second link.
Reviews of the book are instructive.
· The title is a nod to a well-known interpretationist author. Bintliff's conclusion is clearly interpretationist.
· Flannery and Marcus commit the redefinition fallacy by equating archaeology and anthropology – and denying that archaeology ever existed in the first place.
· Kristiansen uses 20-year-old data without support and without citations. As a 60-year veteran in academic studies (as of 2011), he should have known better.
· Gramsch shows how monolinguism has prevented European archaeologists from using work not written in their first language – something that also happens in the US – and therefore they lack a well-rounded understanding of events in the field.
It’s just another sad example of people in academe who create uproars at professional conferences (which they did) to get attention in their field, and why they have to create uproars.
This is not the caliber of work needed to rehabilitate DH, assuming that Bintliff and the others wanted to. None of them know that it needs rehabilitation. That’s where Graf/Baden isolationism has put DH: in Plato’s cave, looking at the light show without a clue of what’s going on outside.
No comments:
Post a Comment