Fact-Checking the Torah -- Conflations and DH

Parallel doublets arise from orally transmitted narratives over the history of their transmission. At some point, having identical goals obscures the fact that they are two independent narratives, and narrators begin telling them as separate parts of a single narrative, ignoring that they have different horizons, different sets of characters, and different motives. Multiple locations, a large cast of characters, and incompatible motivations for the numerous incidents, is a clue that it might be a conflation of two narratives as a parallel doublet, but the researcher has to avoid claiming the conflation without an external source giving only one of the narratives without a trace of the other.

A conflation tells one of its component narratives up to a point where the original source narrative had its denouement, then starts over again with the other story and then gets to the goal that both stories independently tended toward in the first place.

This “halfway” feature is missing from DH’s claims about Torah. The opposite is true. Torah has several examples of narratives being bound off by deaths that actually happened later. You can do the math and figure out that a dead character was still alive for decades into the next episode of the saga. Torah records Terach’s death, but do the math and you can tell that Avraham left Charan during Terach’s life. Torah records Yitschaq’s death, but do the math and you can tell that he was alive until the year before Yosef was sold into Egypt.

DH proposes an independent goal for each of the component documents. J has the goal of supporting the southern monotheocracy. D has the goal of legitimizing reforms undertaken upon the discovery and interpretation of the Temple scroll. P has the goal of establishing priestly temple service and perquisites. And E has the goal of… Hey, what is E’s goal anyway?

At the time E was supposedly composed from the ground up, independently of J and in an enemy nation, how did it serve the powers that were? The description of E as agreeing in detail with southern monotheism is out of joint given the immediate descent of the north to idolatry and then adoption, at least by the ruling class, of K’naani pagan worship. The idea that E’s goal was to preserve a tradition invented in the north, that jibed with the tradition invented in the south, requires that there be a shared cultural past before anything was written down – and DH originally denied a prior existence independent of the writing that they appeared in.

If there is no parallel doublet anywhere in Torah, that does not vindicate DH, because the principles DH operates on assumes written sources, not oral ones. Lack of a parallel doublet also does not invalidate Olrik’s principles as a description of Torah, because Olrik does not require that all oral traditions must have at least one parallel doublet. It is something he observed in Danish oral material. He did not pretend to study Torah to the same depth and so, as I said the other week, he missed one kind of repetition that Torah has.

Next: one narrative in Torah that could be dubbed a parallel doublet and in two weeks I’ll solve the mystery of what Olrik missed.

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 2:4, aspectless verbs

Genesis 2:4

ד אֵ֣לֶּה תֽוֹלְד֧וֹת הַשָּׁמַ֛יִם וְהָאָ֖רֶץ בְּהִבָּֽרְאָ֑ם בְּי֗וֹם עֲשׂ֛וֹת יְהוָֹ֥ה אֱלֹהִ֖ים אֶ֥רֶץ וְשָׁמָֽיִם:

Translation:     These are toldot of heaven and earth at the time of their being created; on the day of the Lord Gd creating earth and heaven.

Vocabulary in this lesson:

אֵלֶּה	These
תוֹלְדוֹת	Generations, births
הִבָּרְאָם	Their being created
עֲשׂוֹת	creation

Eleh toldot is another version of Axel Olrik’s Law of Opening. Instead of being grammatical, like perfect aspect (which is something he didn’t know about and didn’t discuss), it’s the narrative content. It’s kind of like “once upon a time.”

But here we have two special verbs, b’hibaram and asot. These verbs have no aspect. I’ll discuss aspectless verbs as I go along, but one of the things they do is substitute for the other aspects, usually perfect aspect to which they are related. This relationship might be a characteristic of Semitic verbs. In his grammar of Assyrian, written for Hermann Strack’s series on Semitic languages, Friedrich Delitzsch realized that perfect and aspectless verbs looked alike.

As replacements for perfect aspect, b’hibaram and asot imply that the actions they represent are over, but are not the focus of the current narrative. This is not a second creation story. It has a different goal.

Why do I show one of these verbs as a gerundive and the other as a noun? Because gerundives are verbal nouns. But the first one is being used as an adverb of time, so I emphasized its verbal nature.

Finally, b’hibaram is a nifal phrase. Remember, nifal is about decrees from heaven. That makes b’hibaram a parallel to b’yom asot. When Gd issues a decree, both the decree and its being carried out are instantaneous. But bara and asot have to go together, as they did in the previous narrative, because Gd brought into existence from nothing, that which was made into the world.

So you’re saying then why did it take seven days? I already partly answered that question in the last post, but here’s the other part. This verse only refers to heaven and earth, like Genesis 1:1. The seven days happened after Genesis 1:1. Trying to trip me up with a contradiction? Only because you’re not looking at the actual words, you’re thinking of what you were told that I already did to death on the Fact-Checking blog.

You saw the etnach, right? Let’s move on to the “commas” of which there are several. In this verse, there’s a diamond above b’yom. That’s a revia. To me, it seems kind of emphatic to me. This would emphasize that the bara and asot started on the same day. Gd doesn’t lollygag around!

DIY -- "but I'm TIRED of sourdough"

It's been over a year since I started brewing my own sourdough starter from flour and water and I've been looking into the other side of sourdough breads.

It's part of my family history. Our foremothers would go to the rebbetsin every week and buy "yeast" to use in making their challah.

Almost surely what they bought was a cup of "sourdough" starter. They spent Thursday building it into sour, and Friday they would mix in the eggs, sugar, and salt, and some additional flour, to make the four braided golden fragrant loaves used on Sabbath.

Screech. Challah is sweet to the point of being more like cake than bread. How could ambrosia come from sourdough?

So I started googling and this is what I found.

http://www.thejoykitchen.com/ingredients-techniques/sourdough-or-levain-debunking-myths-and-mysteries-harnessing-wild-yeast

Notice that she slaps down the idea of putting fruit in her levain. This was one of my frustrations with some of the sourdough websites I found at first; they wanted you to use pineapple juice. Not very sustainable for the East Coast near Washington D.C. Nevertheless, Jewish classics (Mishnah Orlah 2:4) discuss putting cut-up apple into your dough to make it rise. But our fore-mothers didn't do that, and there's nothing like it in challah recipes.

Now, you might not think sugar is very sustainable but in Eastern Europe, they were stuck-in to sugar beets. Sholem Aleichem made Lazar Brodsky famous as the "sugar king", and all his sugar came from beets. The same is true for Yona Zaitsev who built the brick factory where Mendel Beilis worked.

The rebbetsin's starter most likely was made with white flour, and the rebbetsin ploughed the money into buying more of the expensive white flour needed to make it. For daily bread, my foremothers probably used rye flour which was cheaper and brewed faster, since rye has more natural sugar than wheat even if it has less gluten. I mean, try some of Catoctin Creek's Star-K kosher rye whiskey and notice the sweet little kick at the end of the swallow.

I think there are two things you have to remember about making sweet breads with levain.
The first one is, make a sponge. When you use commercial yeast, you generally only make a sponge for lower-gluten flours like whole wheat. With levain, you make a sponge for "Frisco style" white bread. It cures overnight. This is instead of doing a three-stage build as with the sour you use  in pumpernickel and rye.

Second, you have to be patient with the dough that you make from the sponge. Keep it warm and out of drafts for at least four hours. Challah gets put down to rise three times, an hour each, even though it has all that sugar in it.

And then you use the sugar or honey called for in the sweet bread recipe, like here.
https://thebakersguide.com/kaiser-roll-recipe

I liked this page.
https://thebakersguide.com/windowpane-test

It's for French  bread and French bread needs lots of kneading, stretching, even slamming. YMMV for other types like Italian -- which always has sugar in it anyway.

This is a  recipe recommended on one of the other sites.  While it's labeled Amish, it's really a lot like Italian bread made with your "mother of all breads".  Notice that it uses an overnight sponge and then it rises a whole 'nother day or night.
https://www.friendshipbreadkitchen.com/rustic-sourdough-afb/

Most websites will tell you that if your bread really does taste sour, you've done something wrong like not letting the starter mature or not feeding it at regular times when you're brewing it. I agree. But if you call it levain you sound snooty to most people, so just keep it to yourself and smile when people say "this is the greatest bread I ever ate."

Fact-Checking the Torah -- parallel doublet

I showed that Olrik recognized several strictly defined types of repetitions with different effects, and I ended with the parallel doublet.

The key about parallel doublets is that they originate as two stories, transmitted orally independent of each other, in a single culture. Both achieve the same result, such as placing somebody on the throne.

One may have the motive of punishing a bad king; the other may have the motive of comforting the king and queen who thought their son was dead.

In both cases extraordinary assistance may be involved, but in one narrative several unusual assistants might play separate roles, and in the other a single magical person might work several miracles.

At some point in the lives of the two narratives, they begin to be told as two separate parts of one narrative, and at that point they become a parallel doublet.

The combined narrative has clues of its origin as two separate narratives. One is a large number of characters. One of the Epic Laws is Two to a Scene. Oral narratives rarely deal with more than two characters at a time. They may convert a multitude of characters into a body and have the main character address that group, such as Yosef speaking and the group of his brothers listening. But a parallel doublet will have a number of characters playing independent roles or serving different motives, instead of melting into a group. This is because the parallel doublet will retain both casts of characters from its precursor narratives.

Another clue is a shift in location without an interim journey. The idea that the Israelites were at Sinai and also at Horeb suggests a parallel doublet in the story of bringing the tablets down the mountain, but I’ll discuss this in more detail later. The fact that the jumping off point for the Exodus was named Sukkot, and the name of Deir ‘Alla was also Sukkot at one time, does not define a parallel doublet for two reasons. The most important is that there’s no sign of a single goal to both stories. The other is the series of migrations discussed between Yaaqov’s name-giving and the Exodus from Egypt.

A third clue to a real parallel doublet, is a confusion in motives. When the first part of the story describes the main character’s determination to replace a bad king, and the latter part describes him comforting the sorrowing king and queen whose baby prince supposedly died (plus a recognition scene with a talisman), you can see a possible clue for a parallel doublet combining the two stories with different motives.

The combined narrative will tell one of the precursors up to the point where the goal ought to be achieved. Then it will stop, tell the other precursor, and then finish with the goal achieved. This is another point which argues against the two Sukkots as part of a parallel doublet. Yaaqov achieves his goal, arriving safely at his father’s home despite the threat from Esav.

Olrik specifically states one requirement for claiming identification of a parallel doublet. The claimant must be able to point to an independent source which contains one of the narratives in its full form, told or recorded independently of the other. Without this, the conflation of the parallel narratives is only conjectural.

DH claims a conflation for which it has no external evidence. But that could be a false argument from silence. It’s a good thing there are so many other problems with DH; I would never hang my hat on this one alone.

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- What's it all about?

Genesis 2:2-3

 

ב וַיְכַל אֱלֹהִים בַּיּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי מְלַאכְתּוֹ אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה וַיִּשְׁבֹּת בַּיּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי מִכָּל־מְלַאכְתּוֹ אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה:

ג וַיְבָרֶךְ אֱלֹהִים אֶת־יוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי וַיְקַדֵּשׁ אֹתוֹ כִּי בוֹ שָׁבַת מִכָּל־מְלַאכְתּוֹ אֲשֶׁר־בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים לַעֲשׂוֹת:

 

Translation:     Gd completed on the seventh day His melakhah that He did; He ceased on the seventh day from all His melakhah that He did.

            Gd blessed the seventh day and “sanctified” it, because on it He ceased from all His melakhah that Gd created for the purpose of doing.

 

And now a cognitive dissonance. Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 58b says non-Jews are prohibited from full Shabbat observance. But at the time Shabbat was established, there were no Jews at all.  So how could anybody share with Gd in observing Shabbat before Jews existed?

 

I don’t have a midrash for that. It would mean that as the universe was incomplete until Shabbat existed, so it was incomplete until there were humans who were allowed to observe Shabbat – the Jews. But first Gd went through lots of generations to get to the patriarchs. Why?

 

Because that’s the history experienced by the Jewish people. Axel Olrik says that oral narratives always are based on historical or cultural reality. When history got to the point that there were Jews, they did not retroactively change their history to pretend that it only began when they existed. They even glory in the fact that although their ancestors – like Terach – worshipped many gods and even images of those gods, the patriarchs changed all that.

 

So the first narrative in Torah not only made Shabbat inevitable, it made the Jews inevitable.

 

Final issue. Why seven days?

 

That’s another Olrik principle.  Oral narratives do not contain timing unless it is crucial to the goal of the narrative. If the narrative originated with a historical event, the narrative proceeds according to our sense of real time, that is, things take however long they normally take. After the denouement, the narrative wraps up and if it deals with the later history of the protagonist, it may kill him or her off almost immediately, even if the real historical character lived for decades after the crucial events of the narrative.

 

In this case, Shabbat occurs every seven days in the Jewish calendar, and the very first one, the prototype, also occurred on the seventh day – from the start of creation. It is perfectly conceivable that if Shabbat happened every three months, the narrative with the goal of specifying the first Shabbat in history would have taken three months to finish creation.

 

And now at last we’re done. Next week we’ll move on to the second narrative in Torah, and it will focus on a completely different issue.

Hat trick

So I knew this guy had three vehicles tricked out and I posted photos of two of them on Facebook:

The station wagon















The VW







Here's the third member of the family.  The sign at the top says Main.










The sign on the back is Seventh Avenue.

As we say in my town, you don't have to be crazy to live here but it sure helps.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Repetitions

And now for something completely different. I’m going to knock the “repetitions” pillar on the head.

Olrik confirmed from his studies that narratives which transmit orally and have more than one incident, may have duplicate incidents.  Olrik explored the roles that repetitions play in oral narratives, and they have several functions. Torah has a type specific to itself that Olrik did not discuss but then, he wasn’t studying Torah specifically.

Some repetitions help a narrator maintain credibility with the audience.  After telling the fantastic part of the narrative that is crucial to its denouement, he might add a less fantastic incident which has a similar result.  An example in Torah is the two incidents that lead to Yaaqov naming a given place Machanaim , “two camps.”  One is a camp of angels seen in the same place as the camp of humans that included Yaaqov’s family.  Another is the two camps into which Yaaqov split his family with the very rational explanation that he feared an attack from his brother and hoped that one camp would escape destruction.

A second form of repetition calls the audience’s attention to the importance of an incident.  Something that happens only once in an oral narrative is a throwaway.  Something that happens twice is part of the point of the narrative.  An oral narrative will never say “this is important”; that is descriptive.  What it does is repeat the action, which preserves vividness and avoids memory stress.  Yosef’s two sets of two dreams each is a tipoff that dreams will be important to his fate.

Another type of repetition has a direct connection to the fantastic incidents of an oral narrative.  If the narrative reaches its denouement in more than one episode, the later episodes may be more extreme. This is the Law of Ascents from the Epic Laws.  When Yosef, an ordinary boy in the Holy Land, has two dreams, that is nothing; when two court officials have dreams in Egypt, and Yosef interprets them, that is important; when Pharaoh has two dreams and Yosef interprets them, that is the signal for the denouement. 

A fourth type of repetition is the “derived doublet,” as the translators put it.  Olrik’s description is that incidents are repeated, in less “verbose” wording, to give a character more stage time.   The narrator will get to a certain point in the story and then remember an incident in another story that would give his character more stage time, so he tells about that incident next.  But since it isn’t an organic part of the current story, he tells it with less detail or vividness than its normal setting.  This “languishing” feature is the identifier for a derived doublet.  It also occurs within the cycle of stories for an individual character; an incident early in the cycle can be followed by one or more events, and then the derived doublet later in the cycle.  The “languishing” nature of the repeat episode distinguishes a derived doublet from the Law of Ascents and from an “importance” repetition.

The last repetitive element in Olrik’s principles (although the discussion comes somewhere in the middle of the book) is the parallel doublet.  Parallel doublets represent conflation, during oral transmission, of two narratives that originally had lives as oral narratives separately from the conflation and also separately from each other.  Two such narratives have the same goals, but they may reach them with different casts of characters, at different locations, and for different motives.  Both narratives might have the goal of making a person a king; the motive in one might be to replace a bad king, and in the other to restore a lost prince.

I’ll finish this discussion next week because I’m running long and parallel doublets have been misunderstood by people used to calling all repetitions “doublets”.  You have seen that Olrik does NOT regard all repetitions as doublets, and that he has strict definitions of what doublets are.  Next I’ll show that Olrik has strict definitions of how parallel doublets function differently from other repetitions, and I will also show that he has strict standards for determining whether a parallel doublet exists at all.