Fact-Checking the Torah -- completeness

So we know that DH is not necessarily a hypothesis intended to be turned into real science. It might have just been a talking point to start with, which is the number 1 definition of hypothesis. Now we’ll look at its base claim of “completeness” in each of the four putative documents.

What does “complete” mean?

•           All four documents covered Jewish history from beginning to end, and therefore covered all the same historical issues. The final redactor(s) chose among them: eliminated the entire discussion from a given document; kept more than one version (pillar four); combined parts of the versions from multiple documents (pillar five).  

•           The four documents didn’t necessarily address all the same historical situations, but when they did, they did so completely. So if D didn’t have a creation story, the redactor had to choose between the ones in E, J, or P, each of which had complete information on the situations it addressed. Unfortunately the genealogies, which supposedly come from P, are not complete. Genesis 11 supposedly addresses the death and age at death of each of Avraham’s progenitors, BUT the “editor” had to add that information for Avraham’s father Terach because P didn’t have it.

•           Each document addressed its material according to the document’s individual characteristics, and they had some topics in common, and repetitions represent those common topics, but "completeness" only means that the redactor received an unfragmented document.

The word “complete” obviously has ambiguities. If they have been resolved and DH has a technical definition of “complete” that all its researchers accept, give me a link to the online article so that all my readers can examine it. 

But there’s a problem with the “completeness” doctrine besides the ambiguity of the term. Issues 1 and 3 above beg the question: if the redactor received complete copies, why would he pick them apart and enfilade them?

You might think that we have a historical example of enfiladement in what Rev. Brian Walton did when he reproduced Samaritan Pentateuch in his London Polyglot Bible. The evidence is not in his edition; it's in August Freiherr von Gall’s critical edition of the manuscripts.  Von Gall tagged most of the material in SP with designators for more than one of each of dozens of manuscripts of Samaritan Pentateuch that survive from medieval times and the Renaissance. Except for A and B, these manuscripts are all in fragments. However, this does not mean that A and B are the result of enfilading multiple manuscripts.  So Samaritan Pentateuch is a weak analogy for DH.

What I said about option 2 shows that P did not have all the information that should have been in it. That argues against option 1 as well as option 2, and I’ll have another argument against completeness later.

We are left with option 3. Notice that my statement of option 3 is a conjunction, any term in which may be false. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that option 3 might be a strawman argument, a claim that DH says something it doesn’t. We’ll know it IS a strawman argument, when somebody comes up with a standard definition for “completeness” that everybody in DH agrees on, and it’s different from option 3. Go for it.

On the other side of New Year I'll start discussing three authors who get favorable mention from Wellhausen.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- nifal binyan

Genesis 1:9

 

ט וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יִקָּווּ הַמַּיִם מִתַּחַת הַשָּׁמַיִם אֶל־מָקוֹם אֶחָד וְתֵרָאֶה הַיַּבָּשָׁה וַיְהִי־כֵן:

 

Transliteration: Va-yomer elohim yiqavu ha-maim mi-tachat ha-shamaim el-maqom echad v’teraeh ha-yabashah va-y’hi-khen.

Translation:     Gd said be the water gathered under heaven to one place and be the dry land revealed; it must have been so.

Letters in this lesson:

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

 

יִקָּווּ	gather (3rd s.)
אֶל	to
מָקוֹם	place
תֵרָאֶה	appear (3rd f.s.)
יַּבָּשָׁה	dry land

 

Now we are going to have some real fun because in this verse we have two examples of the nifal binyan. If you have studied Hebrew before, you were probably taught that nifal is the “passive” of the qal. That’s not true, “passive” was just a convenient label used by western clergy in the Renaissance who were trying to pretend they knew all about Hebrew when really, they only knew Latin.

 

Semitic languages don’t have passive morphology. They have two situations, a structure I will call “agentless”, and another that is reciprocal. Westerners are used to translating agentless structures as passives and that’s how nifal got its designator.

 

What nifal really does, according to my observations, is refer to a binding legal decree. 

 

Arabic has a comparable Form VII conjugation and, according to one of my sources, in Quranic Arabic this form has the connotation of submitting to a decree. It is not identical to nifal but it sure looks like it’s related.

 

Akkadian and Ugaritic had an N-stem, and Assyrian had a IV-stem, that took an “n” prefix the same as nifal and the Arabic Form VII. I have a reader of Assyrian with some examples of the IV-stem and sometimes it doesn’t even seem to have a passive meaning, but there are also verbs in Hebrew where the nifal is the only way of expressing action. Nishba, “take an oath”, is  one of them.

 

Aramaic dropped the nifal completely at some point in its history, probably well before the Aramaeans conquered Mesopotamia.  It did not re-acquire the binyan after the Aramaeans conquered Babylonia, when Aramaic and Babylonian merged.  Jewish forms of Aramaic did not re-acquire it, although they adopted words like Shabbat and numerous verbs from Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew.

 

One take-away from this comparison is that related languages don’t function identically.  If you studied more than one Germanic or Romance language, you already knew that.  While studying Biblical Hebrew may be a gateway to Aramaic or Arabic, don’t expect everything to work the same or mean the same.

So that's what it does. What does it look like?

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Knitting -- lace top -- purl technique

For this I had to learn a new skill and it helped me with my argyle project.  Here's my swatch in Comfy Sport so I could see the true size of each repeat. 


The start of the top was easy. I was using the bottom motif from the swatch, which comes from the Williamson stole, and I worked that in the round in Comfy Sport Peony. Then I did a round of alternate peony and white stitches  to work the body thread in.





After knitting for several inches above the start of the armholes, I wanted to attach a Peerie Flea motif from the same stole, which is the other motif  on the swatch. So when I got to the right purl row, I knitted the armhole binding in white and then added in the Comfy Sport Flamingo. I purled that one row, then attached a new ball of yarn at the other side and worked the armhole binding  there. Turn, work the binding, Now I have to switch back to Flamingo.

I used the technique from Fair Isle to weave the white and flamingo together on the knit side, so I wouldn't wind up with the binding separating from the lace. But I didn't know how to make that happen on the purl side.

This video is by somebody who has used similar techniques for knitting Fair Isle on the flat instead of in the round and that's what I used to keep the armhole binding and lace together. It points out that you purl color A stitch with color B held toward you out of the way.

Then place the needle as if to purl, lay color B down alongside that needle, and pass color A on your side of color B, then purl color A normally.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWHr3PH0RHg

This video says basically the same thing but points out a step the other doesn't.  If you were knitting this row, you would keep the red yarn in your right hand. Since you are purling, however, you have to put the blue yarn in your right hand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuLY2qd3THk

So what I had to do was work the purl side of the binding, then purl a stitch of flamingo, then insert the needle in the next flamingo stitch as if to purl it. Then I had to stop, lay the white yarn next to the needle, and then put the flamingo over top of the white yarn and then around the needle for the purl stitch. It still came out flamingo on the outside of the top, and then I could purl across since I was working the top in stockinette instead of garter.


And oh yeah, this was a summer top with no sleeves and that's why I bound off the armholes instead
of doing steeking.

I know I could have avoided all this trouble by doing the same thing on the top as the bottom and worked that whole band in flamingo. Nobody ever learned anything by taking the easy way out.

Where this helps with argyle is that this is how you would make a vest. You would bind the armholes with probably the darker or darkest of your colors, and then you would work stockinette in argyle above the armholes. You probably want to use a thin yarn like a two-ply Palette or at most a DK yarn, instead of a worsted. If you do use worsted, make sure it has a good hand and drape and you'll end up with a supple, warm top in a classic pattern.

I'm sure most people think of Shetland lace as using one color. I have my own limitations; I would never do this piece in a multi-color or hand-painted yarn because I have enough trouble just making the lace come out right without trying to ignore all the colors in the yarn. Try it out and send me a link to where you posted the photo. You might open up a whole new world to knitters or attract some new people to knitting or lace who were never interested before because they thought single-color work was boring.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- why "hypothesis"?

I’m not going to bother with the other three pillars at this point because they fit better in later posts. What I will do now is show that people who support DH may not understand what it means by describing itself as a hypothesis or by the completeness of the putative four documents.

I don’t know who developed the name “documentary hypothesis” but I do know what the word hypothesis means. And that begs the question why Graf-Wellhausen is called a hypothesis.

According to the dictionary, “hypothesis” doesn’t always mean “unproven scientific concept.”

The top definition of “hypothesis” in the dictionary means an idea proposed for discussion. The third and last meaning is “the ‘if’ clause in an if-then.”

Most of the academic papers ever written were hypotheses in the first sense of the word, and most of them include a list of sources. As a result, the peers reviewing the work could verify that the author quoted the sources correctly or didn’t take things out of context and use them with a meaning opposite to that indicated by the rest of the material in the source. That’s necessary to turn a hypothesis into a theory; it’s part of the on-paper test. When it passes that, you can go on to examining the mathematical or experimental or observational testing.

Wellhausen’s work doesn’t have a source list. He doesn’t even cite to book chapter and verse when he is supposedly referring to Biblical material. He simply declares by fiat that Amos is trustworthy when Wellhausen uses him for support, and untrustworthy when what Amos says conflicts with the point Wellhausen wants to make. To get Amos to agree with him, Wellhausen has to quote out of context and claim that the text means the opposite of what it means while in context. You know that quoting out of context is a fallacy and a classic tactic for getting something out of, not only nothing, but something that disagrees with you. Movie reviews and book reviews do it all the time.

Bad for a real theory.

But fine if you’re just running it up the flagpole to see who salutes.

It’s entirely possible that Wellhausen expected people to come back and make him show the support for his claims. But his Composition des Hexateuchs, which went through 3 editions, and his Israelitische und Judische Geschichte, which went through 4 editions, do the same thing as Prolegomena.

So Wellhausen’s work might have been a proposal to spur discussion, and it worked. But at some point the discussion has to produce results or we’re right back into that environment that led Descartes to write his Discours.

In which Descartes said you can’t rely on your own or anybody else’s claims unless everybody understands how they were made.

At this point I’ve shown that outdated information underpins some DH claims and at least one other involves a fallacy. When you run that up a flagpole, it’s not worth saluting.

There’s another source of ambiguity in DH that is even more important and that’s next week’s post.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 1:8, textual evidence

Genesis 1:8

 

ח וַיִּקְרָא אֱלֹהִים לָרָקִיעַ שָׁמָיִם וַיְהִי־עֶרֶב וַיְהִי־בֹקֶר יוֹם שֵׁנִי:

 

Transliteration: Va-yiqra elohim la-raqia shamaim va-y’hi erev va-y’hi voqer yom sheni.

Translation:     Gd named the raqia heaven and there was evening and there was morning a second day.

Letters in this lesson:

Vocabulary in this lesson:

שֵׁנִי    second     

 

Now, here’s another question. Verse 1 says “creation of heaven and earth,” but here it says that Gd gave the name “heaven” to the raqia. Does that mean that heaven didn’t actually exist before this? Judaism would say no.

 

There were dialogues for a long time about about whether heaven or earth was created first, and one answer was that it doesn’t matter because they are equal partners in the world.

 

R. Shimon bar Yochai said they were created at the same time, like a pot and its lid. Apparently makers of clay pots used to make sure the lid fitted tightly by building a large ball, then cutting the top off, scooping out the insides, and making a lip for the lid to sit on. R. Shimon was known as one of the greatest explainers of Torah in his time, which was around the Hadrianic persecution, and he is credited as author of the Zohar, the best-known work of Jewish mysticism.

 

In any case, Rashi gives credit to a Rabbi Yitschaq (somebody other than his own father who played a large role in his education) as saying that the creation story is not intended to teach the exact order in which things happened. You can see that for yourself. We still haven’t come across anything describing the creation of heaven or earth, they simply were there. You also know that one stream of Jewish thought says that light already existed at the start, it simply wasn’t perceptible to mortals until Gd took action.

 

What’s missing from this second day of creation? Anybody? Anybody?  Bueller?

 

That’s right, there’s no ki-tov here. Think back and tell me why that would be? I have given you the clue.

 

The raqia is not and cannot be perceptible to mortals, not in and of itself. Gd never made it manifest. It therefore cannot be used as evidence for the truth of what the narrator says about it; he has to add va-y’hi khen for credibility. So in and of itself, the raqia is not good.

 

Which is an interesting perspective on the heavenly journey of the rabbis. What separates the waters is not good in and of itself; the separation of the waters happened simply because Gd ordered it, not because He knew it was good. He had a purpose, but some of the things Gd uses for His purposes are not in and of themselves good. They are only good in relationship to His purposes, and mortals cannot perceive His purposes any more than they can perceive the raqia.

Next week: a confusing binyan.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

I'm just saying -- do your homework

So I heard an ad on the radio this morning for property in the next state at prices below $30K  per lot.

It's the same location where the lots originally (about 10 years ago) were advertised in the hundred thousands and more with their lake access and boat docks.

WHAT HAPPENED?

People found out about the lake. There's a nuclear power plant at one end. That's one highly desirable neighborhood.

I've heard stories of people who bought beach houses but not flood insurance and then got wiped out in hurricanes, from Isabel to Sandy to Katrina... you know the rest.

I heard of somebody who bought a house without having it inspected and got very upset when there turned out to be a sludge problem interfering with installation of Internet access, and drafty windows.

I know of a helicopter mom using Roundup on her son's yard in a town where herbicides are illegal and a guy who bought a property in a bird sanctuary and started cutting down trees.

Your American dream is going to turn into a nightmare pretty quick unless you know the laws, the climate, the specific house, and what facilities are nearby.

That includes finding out whether your sanitation system will work when -- not if, when -- the power goes out. Or how long it will take the county to plow the snow and the power company to restore power.

Or whether police, fire, and ambulances can get to you in time to  prevent the worst tragedies.

I'm just saying...

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- translations

Even though mischsprache is useless as a pillar for DH, it has a hidden assumption that has to be discussed.

Can you analyze Torah that has been translated?

That’s an absurdity. If language layering in Hebrew supposedly helps identify the various documents by placing different verses at different times in Jewish history, then the only valid analysis has to be directed against Torah in Hebrew.

You’re asking, “but if the translation was done by somebody really good, why is it still a problem?” That is, you’re asking if you’re new here. I just spent 50 posts giving you evidence that the translation of a word is not its meaning, which can only be determined in the context of the material where it appears, and the context of that material within the culture (which is a time-limited phenomenon as the Kings List shows), and the context of the transmission format – oral or written, and the context of its grammatical and idiomatic formulation.

But I left one thing out.

I said of dictionaries that lexicographers use prior sources.

The same is true of grammarians of Biblical Hebrew. None of their sources wrote based on the 21^st century understanding of BH. Everybody who has ever written a grammar to use in reading or translating Torah relied on an outdated understanding of the grammar.

So as well as copying historically bad translations like “Ohozath”, translators have been victims of historically bad grammatical explanations.

On top of the fact that verbal expression develops to express the culture. Pretending that this expression records the divisions DH wants to make in Torah is a case of a circular argument. I’ll show evidence later that two of the founding writers in DH did just this: decided where to put the divisions, and then made up reasons why they were right, when the text doesn’t support them.  I’ll also discuss a situation where expression is a diagnostic to authorship and how its procedures differ from DH.

I’ll give more evidence later that grammar makes DH infinitesimally probable. For now, let's look at some of the terminology.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved