So bit by bit I'm going through the Williamson Talmud and I get to this. We started on daf 3b with Mosheh saying the firstborn would die k'chatsot, "about midnight"; we have drilled down through aggadah about David and the lyre that used to wake him up at midnight to study Torah, and now we back out to where Mosheh says his thing. And the discussion is, of course Mosheh knew exactly when midnight was, so why did he say "about".
Mar [bar Rav Ashi] says, "Lest Pharaoh’s astrologers err and say: Moses is a liar. Mar said: teach your tongue to say: I do not know, lest you become entangled in a web of deceit."
At the start of this section, I wrote a note to myself that the exact point of midnight can’t be known to mortals, only to Gd, but my rationale was different from Mar's. I went with the archaeology: Pharaoh's waterclock might have been running fast because the water had leached away some of the clay around the hole, and when he thought midnight had passed, and all the firstborns were alive, he would have said Mosheh lied, if Mosheh had said "at midnight".
For Mosheh to lie is important: it would mean he was a false prophet, punishable by death, see Deuteronomy 13:2-6. In fact, for Mosheh to lie is so important that the Samaritans rewrote their Pentateuch.
Samaritan Pentateuch seems to regard Deuteronomy as the most authoritative book in chumash. In Deuteronomy, Mosheh says things that are clearly related to earlier events that, in particular, should have come up in Exodus. Whenever this happens, SP copies the wording of Deuteronomy into the appropriate place in Exodus. It keeps Mosheh from looking like a liar.
SP retains some of the variants that were put in the Cave 4 genizah at Qumran, which was founded in Hasmonean times. What follows Exodus 18:24 is one example, and it is also copied from Deuteronomy (middle of 1:9-18). Long before any of the surviving Samaritan manuscripts were produced (from 1000 CE to the middle of the Renaissance), SP inherited methods of keeping Mosheh from looking like a liar, that are not consistent with an oral tradition. But nothing in Deuteronomy deals with the meaning of k’chatsot so the Samaritans never had anything to put into Exodus, even if they wondered about the “about”.
Meanwhile, 22 centuries before Olrik documented the features of Danish oral narratives, Jewish mainstream experts rejected material they didn't know was evidence of literate operations, and preserved the Jewish canon in a format that they didn't know reflected all the features of an oral tradition. IOW there was no way for them deliberately to produce something that paralleled Olrik's finding. It's just that they knew what was canon and what was not, and it turns out that canon is a record of an oral tradition.
During the oral transmission of the tradition, any hint that Mosheh lied would have been dealt with in its place, not by a far distant part of the tradition. The Israelites would have been right to try and execute him on the grounds that his prophecies a) contradicted Torah, b) did not happen, or c) did not happen on schedule. That would have been the denouement of the narrative containing the thing Mosheh said that was the lie. This is a classic epic law of using vivid action to illustrate a point .Separating the denouement from the rest of the narrative would doom the narrative to languishing into at best a survival. Torah records no such trial; Mosheh either was not suspected or was not convicted of being a false prophet, or the denouement got separated from the rest of the narrative and disappeared.
There are good reasons why Torah would never have brought up the astrology thing. Some are due to the format of oral narratives, and Jewish narratives in particular. Torah tells about three (magic number) times that Pharaoh's magicians mimicked Mosheh's miracle. The fourth time is the killer; in Jewish oral tradition, the fourth of anything is always a step too far and it is minimized or the fourth thing is a failure. "Israel" would have been a fourth patriarch so it is minimized as Yaaqov's other name. Rachel was the fourth mother of the Israelites and she died. There are three main prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel); Zechariah may be the longest of the others, but he is a fourth and a step too far, and his book is combined among the Trey Asar with Obadiah, the shortest of all. I comment on other examples in Narrating the Torah. The fourth attempt of Pharaoh's magicians fails.
Five is another magic number. Pharaoh's magicians are mentioned a fifth time, in connection with the fiery boils, but they do nothing in that episode, and we get a rational cause: they too are afflicted.
Six is not a magic number in Jewish oral tradition. There were not six and only six days of creation; there was no "hexateuch". There is no sixth reference to Pharaoh's magicians.
There's no opportunity for a seventh appearance to which the sixth would have led. Seven is Gd's number: seven days of creation including Shabbat, seven pairs of animals suitable for sacrifice in the ark, seven branches on the candlestick. To keep "seven" from being associated with Pharaoh's magicians, a sixth and seventh episode would have been suppressed, even if they had occurred.
And of course divination is prohibited to Jews so there's no sense bringing it up in connection with the Exodus.
Mar's tiny narrative here about Pharaoh’s astrologers is manifestly how an oral tradition could deal with the possibility of Mosheh being a liar. Mar (bar Rav Ashi) lived in the 400s CE, right in the middle of when Talmud was being recorded. Everybody was doing political astrology, from the Sumerians in the 3000s BCE down to Johannes Kepler in the 1600s CE; his laws of planetary motion came from crunching (with the help of Napier's brand-new logarithms) the massive database compiled by Tycho Brahe to use in casting horoscopes. Not knowing about archaeology, Mar naturally turned to astrology as an explanation.
Mar’s comment never would have been part of canon because telling that tiny narrative doesn't fit in with the epic laws that the rest of the canon has so many strong examples of. The idea that aggadah is a tradition remembered from as far back as the Exodus, works when we have an aggadah that does not disrupt the normal features of an oral tradition; disruptive aggadot would have been forgotten because they didn't use the format that promotes memorization. The aggadah are an oral tradition all their own, and the ones that survived did so because they did not contradict Torah, even if they offer a different take on its meaning.
Oh, by the way, I put a comment on the Wikipedia article about Mar; seems the Jewish Encyclopedia authors didn't discuss everything attributed to Mar, most notably this quote, when they claimed that he didn't do aggadah. Sampling bias will destroy your credibility every time, it shows you didn't do your homework. This is one of many reasons why studies done before there was an Internet, are not necessarily reliable, especially when it comes to the humanities. Too few scholars could afford the travel and living expenses to make exhaustive studies of all the relevant material. If somebody else had already accessed it, the later writers saved themselves time and money by just incorporating the older results. It was bad work but nobody called them on it because everybody was doing it. When your academic advisor lets you off the hook doing your homework, stop for a moment and think. Your advisor is making things easier on theirself by making things easier on you, not helping you do good work. Is that how you want future scholars to remember you?
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