Re: DH Idiocy 1


Dan Kimmel wrote:
"Lisa" <lisa@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1149802804.202741.180820@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
We had the document for centuries and were well aware of its complexity
and the ways in which it seems, at a very raw surface reading, to have
internal contradictions. There is no historical record of us
addressing these complexities *as* internal contradictions, and we have
a quite consistent methodology of dealing with them. The assumption
that this methodology is a kind of "quick fix" to a problem has no
basis in historical memory.

I have to step in here and point out the basic fallacy of this line of
argument. New critical tools are developed over time. No doubt no one
applied feminist or Freudian analysis to the Torah prior to the 20th
century. That doesn't mean those critical tools are valueless in deriving
meaning from the text.

Indeed - and "deriving meaning from the text" using the tools of DH is
precisely what R'Dr Mordechai Breuer does. On the other hand, there is
a great difference between using a new critical tool for litcrit or
hermeneutics, and using it to make declarations about matters of
empirical fact. I think that few, if any, of the "anti-DH" folks in
this thread would object if the only claim that DH-ers were making was
that "DH methods lend some insight into the meaning of the text". But
the claim is that DH work proves (or demonstrates, or shows) that the
Torah was redacted from some set of previously existing documents
written by people, perhaps divinely inspired, perhaps based on old
legends (or some combination of the above). The fact is that it does
nothing of the kind.

As it happens, today I attended the first day of a 2-day workshop on
text-based authorship attribution, and I spent the day discussing the
state of the art in this field with top linguistics, literary scholars,
statisticians, and computer scientists working in this area. The clear
and entirely undisputed consensus view was that nothing even
approaching an empirically validated theory of text generation and
construction exists, which could be used to derive methods for
comparing the authorship properties of two texts. That is, there is NO
WAY that DH-type methods (or any other methods currently known) could
possible conclude, based on internal textual evidence, that the Torah
was edited together from multiple source documents. This is ENTIRELY
separate from the issue of Divine authorship, note.

-Shlomo-

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: DH Idiocy 1
    ... There is no historical record of us ... addressing these complexities *as* internal contradictions, ... New critical tools are developed over time. ... comparing the authorship properties of two texts. ...
    (soc.culture.jewish.moderated)
  • Re: DH Idiocy 1
    ... There is no historical record of us ... addressing these complexities *as* internal contradictions, ... a quite consistent methodology of dealing with them. ... New critical tools are developed over time. ...
    (soc.culture.jewish.moderated)