Fact-Checking the Torah -- taking a razor to the argument from silence

Countering a false argument from silence can be done a couple of ways.  One is from existing data by means of Occam’s Razor.

The existing data shows an ethnic group named Israel living in the Holy Land by 1207 BCE, and that Merneptah’s Egypt considered it comparable to the other great people of that region, the K’naani.  We don’t know how long they had lived there but we have analogies from two other ethnic groups.  (Modern radiocarbon dating puts this about 20 years earlier but that’s “in the noise”, as we used to say at work, compared to something I’ll talk about later.)

Possibly the best known example is the Celts.  Herodotus, in the 400s BCE, refers to them as Keltoi living in what is now Austria.

Archaeology identifies the Celtic people of that time as the La Tene culture, remains of which were discovered by Hansli Kopp in 1857.  The Celts go farther back, however, to the Hallstatt culture of the 800s BCE, first described by Johann Ramsauer in 1846.  The Hallstatt culture already occupied Austria, and one of the oldest items of that culture turned up there in 1851.

So the initial possibility for the age of the Israelite ethnic group in 1230 or 1210 BCE could be 100 years, or it could be 400 by analogy with the Celts.   Close enough for government work.

The other example is the Greeks.  Their own tradition claims that they developed from the Ionians, Dorians, Aeolians and Achaeans.  Again, this is in Herodotus, from the 400s BCE, and we know he isn’t reliable.  Modern archaeology places the Dorians in Crete as well as in the Peloponnese, and as you know the Mykenaeans referred to the Ionians as being in Crete in the 1400s BCE, a millennium before Herodotus.

So history knows that the Hellenes or their constituents go back at least 400 years before Herodotus, to the time when the Ionians migrated to western Anatolia.  Archaeology takes them back to 1190 BCE when the Sea Peoples or at least the Cretan contingent destroyed Wilusa/Troy VIIb.  The Mykenaean description from the homeland of Agamemnon places the Ionians possibly in 1400 BCE, of course with a history of some decades or centuries before that.  And modern language research pushes their origins to the 2000s in Anatolia, under an unknown name, when they and the Hurrians and Hittites all shared some form of the “war of the gods” story with the Akkadians of Mesopotamia. 

A 400 year past for the Israelites therefore places them chronologically close to the expulsion of the Hyksos from Avaris and the explosion of Thera.  A thousand year past places their origins close to the destruction of Ebla, and the destruction of the cities of the plain.

But a past extending long before 1207 BCE is reasonable even if no recognizable physical remains exist.

The question then becomes what would be recognizable physical remains of Israelites at that point in time.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- where's the evidence?

The chaser lamed heh or ”certainty/evidentiary epistemic” has two functions. One, at the start of some text, briefly shows what the following verses are the evidence for. The other, at the end of some text, validates what the previous text says.

 

This has an important result for the syntax of Biblical Hebrew. You will find single verses that include both epistemic and evidence, certainty epistemic plus narrative past. See Genesis 9:22:

וַיַּרְא חָם אֲבִי כְנַעַן אֵת עֶרְוַת אָבִיו וַיַּגֵּד לִשְׁנֵי־אֶחָיו בַּחוּץ:

 

The way to translate this is “Cham must have seen the nakedness of his father, for he told his two brothers outside.” Vayar is the certainty epistemic; va-yaged is the narrative past for the evidence of the truth of vayar. How do we know he told his brothers? Because of what they did in the next verse. Just one more example of how a single verse is never the complete context.

 

This two-part situation appears all over Torah. Any time you see the certainty epistemic, look for the evidence. The next verb that looks like a narrative past, is “for” plus the evidence.

 

Exodus 36:8 supports my point that Torah can use narrative past instead of the certainty epistemic.

וַיַּֽעֲשׂ֨וּ כָל־חֲכַם־לֵ֜ב בְּעֹשֵׂ֧י הַמְּלָאכָ֛ה אֶת־הַמִּשְׁכָּ֖ן עֶ֣שֶׂר יְרִיעֹ֑ת שֵׁ֣שׁ מָשְׁזָ֗ר וּתְכֵ֤לֶת וְאַרְגָּמָן֙ וְתוֹלַ֣עַת שָׁנִ֔י כְּרֻבִ֛ים מַֽעֲשֵׂ֥ה חֹשֵׁ֖ב עָשָׂ֥ה אֹתָֽם:

 

But verse 14 uses the certainty epistemic.

וַיַּעַשׂ יְרִיעֹת עִזִּים לְאֹהֶל עַל־הַמִּשְׁכָּן עַשְׁתֵּי־עֶשְׂרֵה יְרִיעֹת עָשָׂה אֹתָם:

 

The audience didn’t see the work in verse 8, but the curtains in verse 14 were visible to them, otherwise the narrator should have used the narrative past again.

 

Compare to Genesis 9:22, you will see X and Y reversed in the creation story: “Gd said (narrative past) X.” “Gd said” is in narrative past, but it’s not evidence for X; it’s a completely independent verb.

 

In your Bible, or on the web page where you’re reading the Hebrew, find Exodus 35 and bookmark it. When you get there, watch for all the certainty epistemics and see if they have a follow on narrative past with the evidence. If not, you’re looking at something that the audience could still see at the point when the grammar for this material was frozen.

 

That’s what I’m talking about. I was already sure Olrik was on to something important with his origin and final “localizations” (the geographic evidence for the truth of the story).

 

When I read Cook’s dissertation and found out about the certainty/evidentiary grammatical structure with an identical function, it was electrifying.

 

It seemed to me that Olrik had seen a human mental phenomenon in terms of the structure and content of what people transmitted orally to future generations.

 

It seemed that Dr. Cook had found the same feature in terms of the grammar people used as the medium of oral transmission.

 

As far as I know, Dr. Cook never read Olrik’s book in the 10 years he was studying after it was translated. Olrik died some 80 years before linguists began to study modality as a feature of all grammars.

 

When two researchers describe the same phenomenon from different viewpoints, independently, there’s a there there.

 

YMMV.  Need more convincing?

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Outdoors-- it's summer!!

On summer mornings, the sun shines through the big window on the  north side of my house.
It makes a bright spot on a closet door that creeps left to the wall next  to the stairs.
It turns around and creeps back
and it disappears two months after the solstice.

It showed up yesterday morning and I might have seen it Saturday but it was cloudy and raining.

The catbird should be back in town and Saturday it should start calling.

I'm convinced the blue jays have a nest, I just don't know where.

My violets were blooming Friday morning  on the eve of Passover.
My columbines are blooming.
My wild ginger, planted last fall, is starting to spread.
The chicory is coming  up.
If my hydrangea survived the most recent frost, they'll bloom in a couple of months.
The  pokeweed is showing, promising berries for the birds.
And  I gotta cut the freaking grass.  Again.

Yep, it's summer.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- silence is not golden

Possibly the most important fallacy when it comes to archaeological finds, is the false argument from silence saying that something didn’t happen or didn’t exist because the evidence hasn’t been found.

There are two arguments from silence, one true and one false.

The true argument from silence has a specific requirement.  If the person making the argument has access to complete data, then the argument that something didn’t happen or didn’t exist based on its absence from the dataset is true.

When somebody says that a given sports performance is not an Olympic record because it’s not in the Olympic record book, that’s a true argument from silence.  The Olympic committee has absolute control over what constitutes a record for purposes of the Olympics. 

Archaeology doesn’t have a complete record.  This is another resemblance with paleontology, and for similar reasons.  Normal weathering or decay processes destroy fossils and human artifacts.

Humans also destroy them. We don’t know the extent of the library of Alexandria, because it was deliberately destroyed by people.  In 500 years, if people are still around, there may be arguments about whether there were Buddhist statues at Bamian in Afghanistan.  Humans destroyed those statues.  The records of them may go missing or also be destroyed.  In 500 years it will be a false argument from silence that they didn’t exist.  The same is true for Tell Nimrud, destroyed in 2015 (after the antiquities were looted for sale to support terrorist activity).

What paleontologists do, in that case, is the same thing archaeologists do, or should do.  Actually it’s several things.

One is drawing conclusions from what they did find.  If a paleontologist finds a fish skeleton which is a fossil and not just a recently dead fish, then the paleontologist knows that a long line of ancestors back to the original life form came before that fossil fish.  Identifying the geological age of the rock containing the fossil shows where in the geological age of earth the fish lived, and thus how much of the 4 billion years of life on earth stand behind that fish. 

Archaeologists have to do the same thing.  In particular, this applies to the Merneptah stele.  Given the determination that it was put up about 1207 BCE, archaeologists realize, from the part of the inscription giving Israel as the name of an ethnic group raided at the same time as the K’naani, that such an ethnic group existed in the Holy Land at that time, and had done so for long enough to be generally known to the Egyptians as living there.

What’s more, archaeologists know that the two ethnic groups could somehow be distinguished from each other, or nobody would give them two names.  That’s the lesson of the terms Ekwesh and Peleshet in the Medinat Habu inscription.  The Ekwesh had a distinct cultural feature that did not apply to the Peleshet, and the Peleshet were culturally indistinguishable from people living in Crete, right down to using Linear B writing.  Likewise from the point of view of the Hittites, the Ahiyyawa did not have distinctive subgroups.  For us to decide that Ekwesh means Ahiyyawa ignores some of the facts and therefore doesn’t meet the test of Occam’s Razor.  The process of elimination that identifies the circumcised Ekwesh with the Ahiyyawa breaks down, and it is much more reasonable to identify them with Kush, a people known to be circumcised.

Finally, archaeologists know that no ethnic group leaps into existence at the moment it is first named in writing but has developed distinctive characteristics over a period of time.  How long?

For that, archaeologists can use Occam’s Razor as a diagnostic.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- Cook meets Olrik

This lesson is where the rubber hits the road as far as Dr. Cook’s  dissertation.  I said the chaser lamed heh or ”certainty epistemic” is used by a narrator who is certain that what he is telling is true. I also called it an evidentiary epistemic and now I will show why.

 

On the Fact-Checking page of this blog, I am going to talk about oral narratives from the point of view of Torah structure. I won’t reach that part of the page before I post this. I rely on a book by Axel Olrik called Principles of Oral Narrative Research, written early in the 20^th century in Danish from his lecture notes at a university. In 1992 it was translated into English.

 

Olrik says that narrators in an oral tradition have an issue of credibility with their audience. Oral narratives always include something out of the ordinary, and the narrators have to counteract audience disbelief.

 

One way is to tell about a landmark well-known to the audience because it is visible.

 

When the narrator names it at the start, she then goes on to tell why it is important and it’s always about the start of a cultural feature or about a historical event whose consequences are still in force.

 

When she names it at the end, she has just told a story the audience can hardly believe, and the narrator uses the landmark as evidence of the truth of the story.

 

The “certainty epistemic” can appear either at the start of a series of verses or at the end.

 

When it appears at the start, it has to be followed by evidence.

When it appears at the end, it stamps and seals the truth of the preceding material.

Because it points at evidence of which the audience has a physical or mental picture, it provides certainty that the story is true.

 

Cook gives an example of the first format when he refers to Kings II 8:1-4. It starts out with metadata about Chizqiyah, saying “he did (va-ya’as) what seemed right to Gd.” Since the certainty epistemic has to be followed by the evidence, it then says what Chizqiyah did that was right.

 

You’ll find the second type in Exodus with the making of the tabernacle. Over and over again, it says “He [B’tsalel] made (ya-as) ” plus the thing he made. One example is Exodus 36:14:

וַיַּעַשׂ יְרִיעֹת עִזִּים לְאֹהֶל עַל־הַמִּשְׁכָּן עַשְׁתֵּי־עֶשְׂרֵה יְרִיעֹת עָשָׂה אֹתָם:

 

Why is that so important for understanding Biblical Hebrew? Because the audience has evidence that proves what the narrator was saying is true. In other words, a narrator doesn’t use this grammar unless everybody knows about the things that were made to go in the tabernacle, like the ark of the covenant. They have to have seen it with their own eyes by the time the narrative was first told with this epistemic, otherwise they won’t believe what the narrator just said.

 

There’s a perfect example of the opposite in Numbers 32:31.

וַיַּֽעֲנ֧וּ בְנֵי־גָ֛ד וּבְנֵ֥י רְאוּבֵ֖ן לֵאמֹ֑ר אֵת֩ אֲשֶׁ֨ר דִּבֶּ֧ר יְהוָֹ֛ה אֶל־עֲבָדֶ֖יךָ כֵּ֥ן נַֽעֲשֶֽׂה:

The historical setup is this. The Gadites and Reubenites had no impact on Jewish history once they helped with the Ingress. They didn’t even furnish any characters for the book of Judges. The next time they appeared in Jewish history was in Joshua 22 when they got in trouble for building a mirror image of the cairn at the Yarden River. After that, they fled west when the Assyrians attacked them. That’s why we have a narrative past here instead of an evidentiary or certainty epistemic. This happened in the past, it’s over and done with, and it had no impact on the Israelites or Jews later.  The narrator can’t use a certainty epistemic or his audience will think he is crazy or stupid or something.

 

I have one more piece of linguistic data and then I’ll move on to the last modality.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

 

I'm just saying -- Earth Day

So on Dear Abby somebody posts about the time it takes for things to break down in a landfill.
Dear Abby has not been doing well this year; she didn't answer the question and she didn't refer people to reliable websites.

Let's empty our recycling bins.
Let's stop drinking sodas, which are causing obesity and diabetes instead of preventing them.
Let's stop drinking bottled water, unless our local water is rotten (does the name Flint ring a bell) or we're in an emergency.
Let's stop eating in restaurants; new studies show that the PACKAGING of fast food is dumping bad chemicals into your body.  This packaging winds up in your trash because it ISN'T recyclable.
Also you don't  want to go somewhere "gluten free", only to find out later at home that they weren't  gluten free enough.  Word.  News story.
Let's cook from scratch.    We'll get fewer calories, less fat and sodium and sugar, more fiber and vegetables and fruit, for less money.  More packaging that doesn't go in the trash.
Let's take the raw vegetable and fruit refuse and the egg shells and compost them.
Let's stop dumping grass cuttings into the recycling.  It's great fertilizer for your lawn. 
Let's stop dumping leaves into the recycling.  Mow them into tiny bits and you have instant compost.  The only other thing you need to put on your lawn is cornmeal gluten for weed and feed, spring and autumn.  Cuts bee-killing chemicals.
Let's buy grocery bags that last nearly forever.  Word again.   I have some that are ten or fifteen years old.  Think of how much plastic hasn't gone into my landfill for 10-15 years because I spent $10-15 at the start of that time.

Think globally.  Act locally.

I'm just saying....

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- piling on the evidence

I guess I forgot about this because it’s not just a scientific principle, it’s a principal in all discussion of any topic.

Whoever presents extraordinary claims, has to present extraordinary evidence.

If you’re going to make a claim that is unexpected or goes beyond the expectations of your field, you have to provide evidence that goes beyond what other people in your field have to provide.

The burden of proof is on you. And where have you heard that before?

So a for-instance: you can’t prove that ghosts exist in the ordinary sense of being able to detect their presence, if all you do is pile up anecdotes told by people who believe in ghosts. Not when you’re talking to people who want scientific evidence.

What you have to do is get them to agree on what a ghost is and what evidence proves they exist. Then you have to get that evidence. If you don’t, there could be something wrong with what you did, or you may have picked the wrong evidence, or the definition of ghost you agreed on is wrong. You have to make the changes and do all the tests over again under the new paradigm, and somebody else has to be able to do the same tests and get the same results.

Bietak didn’t use the same techniques as other archaeologists covered by the Archaeometry article and he hasn’t convinced them to accept his definitions or techniques as proving what he thinks he proved. So he hasn’t taught us anything new, not even that the technique of radiometric dating is invalid, because he didn’t prove that all the other archaeologists were wrong or that the techniques they used had flaws.  He simply didn’t do the tests that would have showed he was wrong.

Notice that part of the issue is defining your audience. Who is it that you are trying to prove things to? If all you want to do is prove things to other people who already agree with you, then you don’t have to prove anything at all, they already agree with you.

If you want to prove things to people who don’t already agree with you, you have to know what they know and what they accept as proof.  If you don’t, can’t, or refuse to, provide that proof, you can’t prove anything to them.

This is what separates the little kids from the big kids, too. If you’re not going to take the challenge, you’re stuck in a box with yourself and the people who already agree with you.

But then, the rabbis knew that more than 17 centuries ago. Babylonian Talmud Nedarim 25a says proof goes according to the standard definition, not a private definition (this will come up again in the next part of the blog). Which should show you another problem that archaeologists sometimes have. I’ll discuss it in a couple of weeks.

For now, there is a bigger fallacy to fry that relates to archaeology.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved