mls@sfsup.att.com (Mike Siemon) (03/14/91)
I haven't responded to O'Keefe's "Contest" as I feel it is futile at best,
and seriously flawed in "experimental design" as given. I'll go into the
latter charge in more detail, offering some suggestions that might improve
the test. But the futility is the main point -- the most such an effort
*could* show, it seems to me, would be that O'Keefe is entitled to his
"reasonable doubts" about the proposed "solution" to the "problems" of the
Noah story. I suppose that if he were deluged with "correct" solutions to
his puzzle, he might be willing to reconsider his objections, or reweight
them -- but given the incompetent reading of modern English demonstrated
every day on the net, it is easy to predict that he will get no such flood.
O'Keefe is welcome to his doubts -- I know of no reputable scholar who would
claim that the Doc. Hypot. has anything like the apodeictic certainty of a
physical hypothesis (say, quantization of electron charge on the basis of the
Milliken oil-drop experiment). And neither O'Keefe nor I (nor most ANYone
on the net, with the exception of one or two names I never see in this group)
has the expertise in ancient Hebrew to be able *seriously* to judge the
arguments adduced for and against the hypothesis. What we see are basically
journalistic popularizations of the argument (as in Friedman's little book.)
Scholars generally *assume* the hypothesis -- and I can see that infuriating
those who *don't* find it compelling -- but that is not a conspiracy, it's
just a matter of needing SOME context for one's work and accepting the best
candidate. They're just saying that alternative hypotheses so far proposed
are open to more serious doubts, so on-going work uses the "best guess."
My problems with the design of the "Contest" are two-fold. One has to do
with the "sample" from whom responses are elicited. O'Keefe presents a
pastiche of two English sources -- but I do not know of any evidence that
the readership of soc.religion.christian has ANY sensitive critics and
readers of English. I myself am but indifferent sensitive. I would (and
I guess O'Keefe too would) prefer that his test be given to a RANGE of
test subjects (who undertook it seriously :-)) that included some that we
could presume to be competent English critics -- there are four people I
know (two of them in this household :-)) whose judgment I would take over
my own in all such cases. That's not counting the people in my schools
from whom I learned what haphazard critical skills I do possess. Thus
(I) the test requires a graded range of English competence, and preferably
a prior understanding of what a "significant" percentage of correct
attributions of the two sources would be, that could be tested by some
simple statistic (chi-squared? :-)) against the graded test subjects as
determined by some critical sensitivity measures on an agreed scale. If
"better" critics score "better" in general, then even if none score very
well absolutely, one *might* conclude that truly *good* critics would
do well enough to validate a possibility that has been debated by some
150 years of high-level Biblical scholarship.
There is an equal or more serious problem of potential bias in the selection
of the test case. O'Keefe is -- or so I read the tone of his remarks -- very
much inclined to dismiss the Doc. Hypot. as nonsense. One must presume that,
however careful he attempts to be in constructing his test case, that he has
chosen it with an at least unconscious preference to "prove" to himself that
respondents *won't* make correct attributions. I am not encourgaged (by what
have seemed to ME in the past to be his mis-statements of the D.H. position)
in thinking that HIS choice of passages would fairly parallel the kind of text
handling the D.H. proposes.
This is not meant as a malicious dismissal of the test -- if *I* were to
try to make up what *I* thought was the fairest representation in English
of what the D.H. claims to be going on in Noah's story, I would take some
Elizabethan or Jacobean English telling of a Greek myth (say, that of
Deukalion :-)) and attempt to find a Jungian exposition of this "same"
myth, or failing to find that, the relevant portion of Hawthorne's child's
retelling of the myths, _Tanglewood Tales_, out of the fond remembrances
of my childhood. These, I venture to suggest, *would* be mostly easy for
the better half of readers here to disentangle -- but my effort would also
be chargeable with bias.
(II) the test cases should give a range of juxtapositions, from something
that the tester *presumes* will be *mostly* correctly attributed (say,
intercut descriptions of Odysseus from the Chaucer and the Shakespeare
traversals of the Troilus and Cressida story) to a case the tester is
virtually certain will *not* be correctly parsed (say two minor Victor-
ian novelists describing a "dark and stormy night" :-)) Actually, to
parallel the D.H. with respect to the Flood, all samples SHOULD be
distinct sources telling something that is arguably the same story,
and that story should be succint and dramatic in *both* accounts.
The point of my suggestions is that CONTROLS on this test are necessary
before the responses can TELL us anything, and that evaluation of the test
has some inherently statistical requirements. That plus finding a group
to test who might be presumed to have the qualifications to TAKE the test.
There is one last problem with this whole thing. Criticism, especially
that based on historical and linguistic criteria, is a PUBLIC activity
in which a *community* discussion goes on, with participants eliciting the
arguments of all other participants, and forming their judgment after the
evaluation of arguments that both support and undermine their own initial
opinions. This is NOT quite the same arena as scientific objectivity such
as we know it in physics and such like endeavors; they have a commitment to
a KIND of argument that is limited to measurements that ANYONE can validate
in principle -- literary criticism has an ineradicable element of subjective
judgment (which is why I suggest a largish sample of judgments). Nothing
but (unlikely, though we may hope :-)) archaeological discovery could give
us the objective evidence that cuts through the fog of critical judgment --
but please note that the scholarship in ancient Hebrew that I refered to
above *is* continually extended by some kinds of epigraphical evidence
(seal stones, notably; plus occasional spectacular discoveries, as of the
letters at Mari). The D.H. -- like all else in historical explanation --
is subject to whatever these field excavations may unearth. I think that
one may trust the standard *secular* departments of archaeology and ancient
languages not to flinch from the tendency of such discoveries, however much
ANY side of the theological disputation in the churches might want to do so.
Having said all this, I feel it incumbent on me to take a look at the test
O'Keefe in fact offers. I regard myself as a middling-good reader of
English, and -- depending on the actual "stylistic difference" of the two
sources O'Keefe has conflated, and depending on how closely that matches the
D.H. Noah proposal (conflation of two tellings of the same story, from view-
points or dates having significant divergences), I predict that I *should*
be able to do noticeably [I don't know how to measure "significantly"] better
than chance (i.e. misattributing half the sentences.) If I find the task
harder -- maybe because O'Keefe's example DOESN'T match my statement of the
Noah case -- I will also attempt to elicit the response of the two people
I live with whose judgment I know to be better than my own.
--
Michael L. Siemon "O stand, stand at the window,
m.siemon@ATT.COM As the tears scald and start;
...!att!attunix!mls You shall love your crooked neighbor
standard disclaimer With your crooked heart."conan@lipton.berkeley.edu (David Cruz-Uribe) (03/19/91)
For those of us with only a very weak knowledge of the documentary hypothesis(DH), could someone please answer the following questions: 1) In summary, what is the DH? 2) What are the tests it uses? 3) What are its principle conclusions? 4) What objections (scholarly or otherwise) have been raised to it? Thank you, Yours in Christ, David Cruz-Uribe, SFO