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To: talk.religion.misc,alt.magick.tyagi From: tyagi@arkaotika.abyss.com (tyaginator) Subject: JSmith: Patterning in the Torah Date: 27 Mar 1999 02:37:34 -0800 [from thelema93-l@hollyfeld.org: Jeffrey Smith] Re the computer that said the Torah had one author: The analysis was done on the [Hebrew] Masoretic text. It's not really possible to go beyond that to underlying material. The Document Hypothesis is after all just that, a hypothesis (and one that in my view has far weaker foundations that academic orthodoxy will allow). The computer found no real differences among the sections that were supposed to be from the J document, as opposed to other sections supposed to be from other sources. Consider this hypothetical situation: a person, called the Redactor, finds several different manuscripts, each of which is a history of Thelema written by various people: say Frater Achad, Jack Parsons, Kenneth Grant, and Bill Heidrick. The Redactor takes these different versions and combines them into one longer manuscript; Redactor does this by the cut and paste method, writing short bridging passages, and making as little editorial changes as possible. You thus get a history of Thelema written by several people, giving differing POVs, and occassionally including two or more accounts of the same event, not necessarily in harmony with each other. The Redactor doesn't gloss which sections are from which author, or even that they are from different authors, or note where the manuscript switches between original authors. The unwary reader thus finds a history of Thelema which seems to be from one person, but has major portions that are stylistically unlike each other, and sometimes contradict each other on the facts. That is the modern academic theory of how the Torah came to be. A computer analysis for literary traits would identify which passage comes from which author based on statistics (for instance, longwinded sentences, use of certain favorite words or terms, etc.) and style analysis. The computer should have found some differences among the portions alleged to emanate from J, as opposed to E, and P, and D. It did not. Based on literary considerations, the Torah (according to this computer study) has one and only one author. Presumably this would be either God, or the person who produced the final version that is essentially the Masoretic text we use today. [My own take: the Redactor, guided by God; who then made sure that the text was kept whole and preserved via scribal efforts and the Masoretic program in later times--by which an overt campaign was conducted to determine and put into general use a uniform text as close as possible to the original, rather like academic text scholarship of the current day.] One final consideration I learned from a Conservative rabbi some years ago. "R" for Redactor is the usual abbreviation given to denote the work done by whoever produced the final version. This rabbi suggested that we treat the R as an abbreviation for Rabbenu--our teacher. Jeffrey Smith f901030k@bc.seflin.org We must live in joy. We must live in love. They are moreover, one and the same thing. --R. Moshe Kobriner EOF
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