robison@eosp1.UUCP (Tobias D. Robison) (12/17/84)
The Tamar story, and the story of Josph's brothers
bloddying his coat, contain a similar verb regarding
the recognition of signs of office. ( Jacob is asked to
recognize the coat; Judah to recognize his staff and ring.)
These are, I think, the ONLY uses of that verb in Torah, and
there is a lot of commentary about this link.
The grand tradition of assigning different authorships to parts
of Torah belongs to some 19th century German scholars.
Their work may have been brought up to date, but it
originally suffered from a lack of may kinds of textual analysis
that are now routine. Of particular importance is the study
of historical anachronisms. In many cases, texts that
are claimed to originate at different times because of
differences instyle show the same attitude toward events
that supposedly occurred after one of the texts was
written. The similar attitude argues strongly for consistent
origin.
For more on this topic, see the Hertz Soncino Chumash, which
discusses in great detail, for example, arguments that the 5th
book is of later origin, and disposes of most of the arguments.
- Toby Robison (not Robinson!)
{allegra, decvax!ittvax, fisher, princeton}!eosp1!robisongtaylor@lasspvax.UUCP (Greg Taylor) (12/18/84)
About 2 years ago, a text came out in France called something like "The Music of the Bible Revealed" (I know, ridiculous title). It caused quite a stir, since the woman who published (an ethnomusicologist) it seemed to present a rather valid claim for having figured out some of the "musical" markings found in very old texts. As I understood the argument, a fair amount of the musicological community disputed her reconstruction of intervals, but found the work interesting. The book was of interest to scholoars because of a similar musical structure to the use of anachronism. There were certain modes and melodic and cadential motifs associated with given authors and passages and constructions. As the author recontructed the system, she began to realize that the sense of attribution found in the texts was more extansive than she had realized. Evidently there were some circumstances when the musical text could have been cited as corollary evidence of authorship. Sadly, I don't recall the name of the book in French. I only got a copy of the recordings. Thought you might be intrigued....... Greg