Marfisa

As I was reading Schadewaldt's splitting of the Odyssey into two hands A and B for the first time, it was so obvious I wondered why I had not noticed myself. Some passages of the Odyssey are clearly later additions to a previous text.

Dave Hawkins

Actually the dead very much alive cat involves 5 presuppositions, not 1. And yours and Deans pronouncements that it is dead does not mean it is any more than someone's pronouncement that racism in America is dead and irrelevant. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. But all Dean has done is ASSERT that these things are irrelevant but he doesn't even want to discuss it, so how can we even evaluate whether these things are relevant or not? His approach is purely textual and as such is a non starter. Had I known that this was going to be his sole approach, I might not have wasted my time. Although I did glean some interesting things from this.

Also, I'm not moving goalposts. The thread title is quite clear. And it's a very important question. And it's becoming quite interesting to speculate about why you and Dean don't want to touch the question with a ten foot pole.

Marfisa

And since I delurked anyway, it would be a shame not to take the opportunity to thank Dean for his stellar work. Thanks.

shirley knott

dave, this argument is idiotic.
NOWHERE does the DH require that there be no writing in Moses' time.
NOWHERE does the DH require that there be a strict bifurcation between written and oral records.
It beggars belief that you could sincerely make this kinds of claims.

no hugs for thugs,
Shirley Knott

Steviepinhead

Dave, on the one hand, I should be surprised that you don't know this, but on the other hand--knowing you as I do from going on two years' "acquaintance"--it doesn't surprise me at all.

But scholars of myth and shamanism (the Ur-religion, if there is one, not monotheism) have organized, arranged, and catalogued the oral and written myths of the world. Google "Seth Thompson" or "motif index" or "Eliade shamanism" or "Joseph Campbell myths" (in fact, I strongly recommend you go to the library and borrow the tapes or CDs of Bill Moyer's public broadcasting shows about Campbell and myth: if nothing else, this will "help" you in your mission by teaching you not to make easily-refuted claims about worldwide flood myths all being the same...).

While certain myth motifs--such as that of a primordial flood--have a very wide distribution, the pattern of their distribution is highly indicative of a LONG HISTORY of oral transmission from parent culture to daughter culture (along with borrowings between neighboring/competing cultures), probably parallel with the dispersal of human beings out of Africa, across Eurasia and Australasia, and then into the Americas and Oceania.

(See here also the structuralists, such as Mauss and Levi-Strauss and, to some extent, Radin...)

Among the other motifs that are found widely dispersed across the world--and in which the Genesis variants are hardly the earliest or most fundamental form--are those of human beings being created in the image of the Creator/Trickster, or wisdom being gained from a serpent, of the division and shaping of the landscape and terrain (usually along very basic cosmological lines such as earth/underworld(s), human/surface world, and over-world/sky), the distribution and differentiation of animals, of humans into different tribes and languages.

That you think any of this was original or unique with one tribe of migrant herders in one little corner of the world is only evidence of your deep ignorance of anthropology, archaeology, history, literature, literary criticism, folkloristics, paleontology, philology, linguistics, and too many other social sciences for me to even name, along with and in addition to your ongoing refusal to educate yourself in any of the basic physical sciences which bear on the issues of concern to you, such as biology, ethology, geology, genetics, biochemistry, physics, cosmology, or origins research.

Indeed, to mention but one factoid of which you appear to be entirely unaware, scholars of Homeric myth such as Parry and Lord have identified many of the imbedded bardic structures which enable us to determine that eventually-written epics such as the Iliad and Odyssey grew out of long traditions of oral performance. These insights have been applied worldwide by anthropologists, linguists, and others (for example, the work of Tedlock and Hymes analyzing the structure of native american storytelling).

As with, say, the attempts to reconstruct the origins of life, there are of course difficulties and controversies. The long history of life and the many layers of genetic palimpsests which are superimposed upon any original signatures of the first chemical replicators may or may not make an exact reconstruction possible. Likewise, the long written tradition that undoubtedly lies behind the texts of the Pentateuch, and the likelihood that those texts in turn were assembled from priestly writings, rituals, and liturgy and from other sources both oral and written, may make it impractical or impossible to reconstruct in precise detail the underlying oral elements that make up the early Bible.

That a task may be rendered difficult or that the results derived may always be, to some degree, controversial is hardly the same as saying that scholars and scientists cannot broadly agree on certain fundamentals: oral mythic, song, ritual and story-telling traditions precede written ones, just as oral language precedes written language. Thus, while the specific sources of the "edited" version of the Pentateuch being discussed here may--or may not--have been written, their ultimate sources, with virtual certainty, trace back to oral myths, stories, traditions, songs, rituals, family sagas, fables, and liturgies.

There are no brand-new motifs, dave, whether in biology or in literature, there are just alterations, mutations, variations, and duplications, and redactions. Some may be superb and sublime. Some may be pop songs, jingles, advertisements, or check-out counter tabloids. Some will survive and flourish. Some will wither and die. That you find meaning, power, beauty, and wisdom in the stories that have survived to us in the early books of the Bible is hardly astonishing. Your astonishment, however, is hardly evidence of supernatural dictation, any more than is your (at this point wilfull) ignorance on all the relevant topics.

-Jay-

I'm specifically referring to #3 of the Documentary Presuppositions you cited from Josh McDowell in the very first post of this thread.

This is the alleged presupposition on which the issue of oral traditions turns. As it turns out, this isn't really a presupposition of the DH. It's irrelevant anyway, as the DH doesn't care whether there was writing in Moses' time or not. What you don't seem to be grasping is that the DH depends on the text as we have it in the earliest exemplars. Throwing around speculations about this oral source or that earlier written source doesn't really buy you much, unless you actually have those sources.

Do you not understand the difference between an assumption and a presupposition? Dean spelled it out pretty clearly here. It isn't like Dean pulled definitions of the terms he liked out of his ear and some of us latched onto them because they fit our agenda. You can look them up. If you assert that something is a presupposition of anything (in this case the DH), and it can be shown not to be (and McDowell's "presuppositions" have been shown to not be presuppositions of the DH), then you can't keep claiming that it is. The cat is dead, Dave. It's not only dead, but it's stinking and turning green at the edges.

Go back and read that post I highlighted. The one about assumptions and presuppositions. Understand the difference. Understand the application of the terms to those supposed presuppositions of McDowell's.

I'm honored that you see fit to group me with Dean, by the way.

Dave, the DH is a textual framework. How did you expect that Dean would approach it? If you want to dispute a textual framework, you need to provide another textual framework that explains things better. You've failed to do that, your quixotic attempt to defend the Tablet Theory notwithstanding.

Of course you're moving the goalposts. You moved them when you stopped talking about Wiseman's Tablet Theory. You moved them again when you switched from quote-mining against Wellhausen's formulation of the DH to raising questions about the origins of the DH sources, which are beyond the bailiwick of the DH. The goalposts are moving so fast they're just blurs now.

regards,

NinJay

Steviepinhead

An entirely predictable consequence of dave's Galloping Continents theory, about which more elsewhere...

VoxRat

I can understand the image of the creator thing, the catastrophic flood thing, distribution of animals, peoples, languages... etc. all being common to completely unrelated cultures.

But what's up with wisdom and serpents? I guess I haven't spent a whole lot of time with serpents, and maybe if I had I would get it, but I haven't, and I don't.

If I were to come up with an iconically "wise" animal, it would probably be some kind of bird (a corvid? maybe an owl?), a canid (a fox?) or perhaps a rodent (a rat? perhaps a Vox rat? )

-Jay-

My son's hamster seems pretty wise, given how many times she's slipped her cage. And this without opposable thumbs...

Count that as a vote for a rodent!

regards,

NinJay

Lucretius

From the review that Coleslaw posted a couple of pages ago

Still want to use Nicholson to support your argument Dave ?