neilgodfrey wrote: ↑Thu May 25, 2023 11:35 amI advise my philosophy students to develop hypersensitivity for rhetorical questions in philosophy. They paper over whatever cracks there are in the arguments.
Firstly, I didn't mention the three law codes with repeated laws as an argument in favour of diachronicity as such - I have other arguments for that. And it wasn't a rhetorical question at all. I was asking
you a question I hoped
you would answer: namely how
Gmirkin's scenario can explain the three laws in three separate law corpora. But you have actually answered a question with another question and avoided giving an answer to mine.
Be that as it may:
neilgodfrey wrote: ↑Thu May 25, 2023 11:35 am
I try to imagine a scribe reading the law about seething the kid in its mother's milk written by a scribe of a previous generation. Why does that scribe or priest decide to add those words a second time to the text "in another law code"? Why repeat what's already there?
But the problem increases. In a later generation we have another priestly scribe now reading the same law twice. Why does that third scribe decide it is a good idea to add some more code where the same law is repeated so it now appears a third time?
In other words, does such repetition really advance the diachronic argument?
Or does the diachronic hypothesis raise bigger problems than it answers?
Actually I think there are a couple of pretty compelling diachronic explanations for the repetition of particular laws in their different law corpora.
(1) The two later Law Codes were conceived as separate revisions or update of the earlier law collection that were not desgned to appear in the same collection as the earlier version. Deuteronomy was its own book, with its own introduction (and its noticeable that the historical survey in the introduction to Deuteronom, itself probably later than the laws themselves, does not suggest that Moses recited the CC to the people at Horeb, so there's no reason for an early reader of Deuteronomy to think that that there was any other law corpus other than this one. In such a scenario, the compiler of Deuteronomy (D) would have been happy to include earlier laws that unobjectionable, hence the repetition of the suckling kid law. Only later, when the CC was added to the Exodus narrative, and redactors linked Deuteronomy to Exodus via Leviticus and Numbers, did the two sets of laws appear in the same five-book "anthology". Something similar was presumably behind the way the Holiness Code was conceived by its authors/tradents, though there is evidence that they were aware of
both the CC and D. They were happy to include the suckling kid law in their code, which was part of a collection of purely priestly documents that had not yet been amalgamated with non-priestly narratives in Exodus or with Deuteromony. However, not long afterwards, perhaps, all three law codes became part of the amalgamated Pentateuch or Hexateuch, or whatever the combined anthology first looked like before further supplements were added.
(2) There are other possibilities for other diachronic explanations of similarities in laws. There are some indications that the various law collections didn't start their lives quite as alike as they subsequently became. Either (a) at an earlier stage, when there were "rival" law corpora each in their own literary contexts or (b) at a later stage (possibly a bit more likely), when the laws had all been collected by incorporation in the proto-pentateuchal narrative setting, scholars or scribes remedied the apparent differences in the corpora by adding laws from other corpora and so harmonising them. Sara Milstein in "Making a Case" (an intriguing discussion of the Pentateuch's casuistic laws and their pedagogic scribal origins which I only know of because Neil has mentioned it on this board) has argued very plausibly that, because Ex 21:13-14 interrupt the squence of "he shall surely be put to death" pronouncements of the verses surrounding it, it is likely that "Exod 21:13-14 constitutes an addition that was inspired by Deut 19:4-13, given the shared illogical sequence and the vague reference to Yahweh appointing 'a place to which [the killer] can flee'." We have a number of harmonistic DSS texts such as 4QDeut
n, where where a scribe has written the basic Deuteronomy text of the 4th commandment (Sabbath) but added the Exodus explanation that isnt in Deuteronomy. So there is clear evidence that this sort of thing happened.
The first of the above diachronic explanations is more theoretical, the latter more literary-critical. They are not mutually exclusive.
So, back to my non-rhetorical question...