Dean Anderson

A summary of my position (as promised in my last post):

1) There are multiple criteria we can differentiate between parts of the Torah - by age of writing, style of writing, interests of author, vocabulary used, and so on. The results that we arrive at when we split the Torah using each of these criteria are consilient with each other. I have provided evidence and examples of this in this thread.

2) The DH proposes that - because when the Torah is split by these methods into four parts, the parts each individually show narrative continuity - it is reasonable to infer that these four parts were originally separate written documents which were edited together into a single work.

3) This inference (that there were four sources edited together throughout the Torah) is able to explain the consilience, and the narrative harmony, and is completely compatible with the archaeological record.

4) The DH makes no claims about whether or not the stories within the sources (about Moses, the Flood, and so on) are true.

5) Since Tablet Theory ascribes 80% of the Torah to the same author, it is unable to explain the consilience between the ways of splitting the Torah.

6) Tablet Theory is also unable to explain why Moses apparently wrote in a variety of styles and wrote in Hebrew of a variety of ages of the Hebrew language (all younger than the time at which he supposedly lived) - and why, when we split what he wrote by various criteria as above, each of the resultant parts of he wrote matches the style of some isolated parts of the "earlier Tablets" and has narrative continuity with these same parts.

7) Tablet Theory claims that Moses was the author of 80% of the Torah, which is contradicted by the various evidence I have presented against Mosaic authorship - even if we grant for the purposes of argument that Moses was a real historical person.

8) The various example of colophons that have been presented in this thread simply do not show the similarity to toledoths that the proponents of Tablet Theory claim.

9) Therefore, since the DH is both harmonious with and explains the evidence - and the Tablet Theory is both contradicted by and fails to explain the evidence - it is unreasonable to ascribe to the Tablet Theory.

Dean Anderson

To be honest, I'm quite relieved that Dave hasn't actually cited Wyatt as evidence yet...

Dave Hawkins

I have addressed your textual analysis where you have given me some data. But all you've given me is the Flood Story and I found a small portion of Genesis 1 on my own. You haven't given me much to analyze.
Boy am I confused. Is the existence of Moses relevant to this debate or not in your opinion?No, it's not equally true. I supplied you with references in ancient literature to pre-Flood written records carried on the ark by Noah. You have supplied ZERO references to J E D P documents in any ancient literature.

OK. Fine. Drop that part then. Can you answer the question?

Consilience with contrived ideas is pretty easy. We could perform similar butcher work on other literature and achieve consilience for pretty much anything we want. What would be convincing is if you could provide some actual evidence that there really were 4 documents which were merged according to your labyrinthine scheme, then provide some explanation as to why on earth some Jewish scribes would do such a thing. Is there any precedent for this type of thing in any other literature anywhere?

spin

If you are honest enough to believe this, please go ahead and similarly butcher other literature to prove your point.

As it stands, your statement seems as unreflective of any reality as does much of what you've said in this thread.


spin

Dave Hawkins

1) What are your bases for these criteria? You have only given me the splits for the Flood Story. Nothing else. Most of the Torah (last part of Genesis plus Exodus through Deut. less last portion of Deut.) is consistent with the writing style of Moses. The differences in style, age, interests, vocabulary used in the non-Mosaic portions of Genesis is better explained by the Tablet Theory. I don't think there are any major differences within the parts attributed to Moses byt the Tablet Theory.

2) Again, you haven't shown us how the splits fall except for the Flood Story. So how can we analyze this?

3) Getting a nice narrative flow by butchering text does not prove that the text was butchered along claimed lines in it's original. When the butchering criteria is subjective, we can achieve any result we want. How in the world is this inference compatible with the archaeological record? I think the opposite is actually true.

4) Maybe not per se, but the originators of the DH held this view, which is why they came up with this theory in the first place.

5) Nonsense. It explains it quite coherently.

6) Moses DIDN'T write in a variety of Hebrew styles. That's because Moses didn't write most of Genesis.

7) There ARE authorial claims. See Exod. 20:22-23:33 and 34:10-26, also Deut 31:9, 24-26 and Exodus 17:14. Also, scribes were probably employed thus explaining the 3rd person narrative. As for anachronisms, you have not given me any. As for reporting Moses' death, I explained this. Joshua probably wrote that piece.

8) Oh but they do. They are shorter yes, but they bear a resemblance.

VoxRat

I don't remember any such references - assuming for a moment that you mean remotely credible references.

Is there any particular reason you didn't supply a link to these alleged references? Would that be part of the whole hand-wavy, "I already dealt with that... somewhere else", argumentum ad nebulam creationist M.O. ?

Jack the Bodiless

Dave, I don't see why you added any of the section above, because at best it doesn't appear to be relevant. But when you added the bolded section, why did you fail to mention the towns that did not exist at that time?

VoxRat

Hey Dave, now that you're back...
Are you ever going to clear up that whole 2 = 14 conundrum? The one that had you falling out of your chair in uncontrollable laughter over a week ago? The one you said you were going to explain, as soon as you "recovered"?

Dean Anderson

Well, I can hardly re-type the whole Torah - can I?

And for any individual section I give - whilst (like the Flood story) it will be consistent with the DH, you would simply argue that just because that bit of the Torah is consistent with the DH doesn't mean that other bits will be.

By the way, most of the people on this thread don't seem to think you have successfully addressed the Flood story. You might want to revisit it and address their criticisms...

The existence of Moses is not relevant to whether or not the DH is true. The DH could be equally true regardless of whether he existed or not.

The existence of Moses is crucial to the Tablet Theory in that if he did not exist then Tablet Theory cannot be true. However, since the evidence is so overwhelmingly in my favour, for the moment I am willing to accept for the sake of argument that he did exist.

Does that make it any clearer?

The presence of ancient written records is not controversial. What you have failed to show is any evidence of the tablets written by the Antediluvian Patriarchs.

Of course I can.

Your quote from Albright is way out of date, and archaeology has since shown that it is wrong, and contrary to what he says the passage you talk about is not in fact accurate. However, the DH does ascribe it as being a written source - actually as being a composite of two written sources, J and P.

Even in an English translation, you can see the join between the two styles where the text switches between the "And the sons of X; Y and Z..." format and the "And X begat Y..." format.

No you couldn't.

I bet you couldn't take any piece of literature and split it in the ways that we can split the Torah and still get consilience and continuous narrative in each section.

That's the whole point of consilience. Each individual way of splitting the text could be contrived - but to get all the ways of splitting the text to be consistent with each other, and for each resultant section to form a continuous narrative too? Throughout a text the size of the Torah? No-one could contrive such unless the text were originally formed from those sections.

Do it, if you think it can be contrived. Project Gutenberg is full of texts that you can download and play with.

Pick any text from a single author that is about the size of the Torah, and split it by style, age of language, theme, and so on - and try to come up with consilient results that each form continuous narratives.

Cege

I am very interested in the Babylonian words in the first 11 chapters. What are those words and in what verses are they found?

I realize that Moses is an Egyptian word, and I'd like to also know the Egyptian words contained in chapters 36-50.

Please explain how the Babylonian words and the Egyptian words in Genesis indicate that the source material is very ancient.