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Friday, February 23, 2024

Fact-Checking the Torah -- DH and the "old words"

A long time ago I pointed out that one problem with DH was its claim that P used words no older document used.

I came across my own counterargument to this while re-reading my study Narrating the Torah. On Exodus 6:2, I said that DH assigning this verse to P has no basis in the text.

Every single word in this verse appears in another Torah verse that DH has assigned to an older document like J or E. In fact it uses both elohim and the Tetragrammaton, so it can't be assigned to J or E unless it's a conflation of two verses, one from J and one from E. 

What's more, elohim appears in Amos, a Judean work from the 700s BCE which should, according to DH, use the Tetragrammaton everywhere. And the latter appears in Hoshea, a northern work from slightly before Amos' time which should use elohim everywhere.

With both names, this verse says that Mosheh was a bad writer in the estimation of Jean Astruc -- but since Mosheh took down Gd's exact words, that makes Gd a bad writer. Say what?

It also makes a liar out of Astruc for saying he only worked with Genesis. This verse is not at the start of Exodus and therefore plausibly misplaced from Genesis (which obviously closes with Joseph's death). It is six chapters into Exodus and the actual Egress will happen eight chapters later.

It's been six years since I finished posting about DH but obviously I didn't include every last detail that blows it up. For those of you who missed it, here's the start of my destruction of DH. It starts out with math and logic, and then it goes into details like this one from Exodus 6. It's about 50 posts long and each post is about a page worth in Word. Whether you never heard of it, or never liked it, or just didn't know what a pile of crap it was, you have a chance at learning the truth.

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