Splitting Doublets

Like many Jewish day school students, my formal instruction in the Pentateuch began in third grade with Genesis 12. I still remember our class in which we started with G-d's command to Abraham (then called Abram), "Lech Lecha," to leave his homeland and go to the land of Canaan, making him the first patriarch of the chosen people. Even at a young age, I think most students understood on some level the import of this call, taking Abraham from the cradle of humanity that was Mesopotamia ("Ur of the Chaldeans") and starting him and his descendant on the path towards their spiritual destiny:

"1: Now G-d said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto the land that I will show thee 2: and I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make they name great; and be thou a blessing"

Imagine my surprise later in life when I actually read the two verses immediately preceding these in Gen. 11!

31: And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran, his son's son, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram's wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there. 32: And the days of Terah were two hundred and five years: and Terah died in Haran.

So Abraham was not even in his homeland then! This is an example of what Biblical scholars call a "doublet," the same basic story retold with the details slightly different. Abraham goes from Mespotamia to Canaan, but the circumstance are very different. Instead of a Divine call, in the first version Abraham is just following his father. Genesis is full of examples of doublets [see earlier post]. What surprised me, however, is how many doublets written together end up get split into different Parshas (Weekly Torah Portions). Since the topic is the same, rightfully they should not be broken up this way. But it usually happens that the first one is relegated to the end of a Parsha to be mostly overlooked, while the second, which starts the next week's reading, becomes famous and talked about in Sermons constantly. Another example is the foretelling of the birth of Issac:

^{Gen 17:6} And I will bless her [Sarah], and moreover I will give thee a son of her: yea, I will bless her, and she shall be [a mother of] nations; kings of peoples shall be of her. ¹⁷ Then Abraham fell upon his face, and laughed, and said in his heart, Shall a child be born unto him that is a hundred years old? and shall Sarah, that is ninety years old, bear?...¹⁹ And God said, Nay, but Sarah thy wife shall bear thee a son; and thou shalt call his name Isaac: and I will establish my covenant with him for an everlasting covenant for his seed after him...²¹ But my covenant will I establish with Isaac, whom Sarah shall bear unto thee at this set time in the next year...

^{Gen 18:1} And G-d appeared unto him by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day;² and he lifted up his eyes and looked, and, lo, three men stood over against him: and when he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent door, and bowed himself to the earth,... ⁹ And they said unto him, Where is Sarah thy wife? And he said, Behold, in the tent.¹⁰ And he said, I will certainly return unto thee when the season cometh round; and, lo, Sarah thy wife shall have a son. And Sarah heard in the tent door, which was behind him. ¹¹ Now Abraham and Sarah were old, [and] well stricken in age; it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women.¹² And Sarah laughed within herself, saying, After I am waxed old shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also? ¹³ And G-d said unto Abraham, Wherefore did Sarah laugh, saying, Shall I of a surety bear a child, who am old? ¹⁴ Is anything too hard for G-d? At the set time I will return unto thee, when the season cometh round, and Sarah shall have a son.

Here the elements are very similar. A prediction is made that Sarah will have a son. Someone laughs (which is how Isaac gets his name, since it is related to the Hebrew word for laughter) since Abraham and Sarah are both advanced in age, then G-d affirms the promise. But the second story, which leads off the Parasha "Va'yera," is MUCH more famous than the narrative with Abraham alone. While it is possible to read the stories consecutively, it makes more sense to say that they both came from the same source - analogous to the duplication and subsequent mutation of a gene.

Religion as evolutionary adaptation

The existence of religion, at first, seems to be a quandary. How can feeling the urge to preform costly rituals and maintain conterfactual beliefs possibly be adaptive from an evolutionary perspective? Besides the ablity for religion to be a repository for the transmitted knowledge of a group, its remarkable power to organize people should not be overlooked. Think of any church group as an example. Organized religion creates an automatic circle of trusted allies and strongly deters defection to other groups. That many if not all of the beliefs that together constitute a religion are couterfactual, and the rituals considered bizarre by unbelievers, is actually essential to prove one's loyalty to the group and prevent changing allegiances. I would call this"incompatible counterfactual belief systems" or "Their god is not our god." The following article from Science also highlights the importance of the belief in "morally concerned deities" to enforce social cooperation when this could not be easily accomplished any other way.

From the journal Science:
"The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality"

By Ara Norenzayan and Azim F. Shariff

ABSTRACT: We examine empirical evidence for religious prosociality, the hypothesis that religions facilitate costly behaviors that benefit other people. Although sociological surveys reveal an association between self-reports of religiosity and prosociality, experiments measuring religiosity and actual prosocial behavior suggest that this association emerges primarily in contexts where reputational concerns are heightened. Experimentally induced religious thoughts reduce rates of cheating and increase altruistic behavior among anonymous strangers. Experiments demonstrate an association between apparent profession of religious devotion and greater trust. Cross-cultural evidence suggests an association between the cultural presence of morally concerned deities and large group size in humans. We synthesize converging evidence from various fields for religious prosociality, address its specific boundary conditions, and point to unresolved questions and novel predictions.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/322/5898/58

Documentary Hypothesis

Textual analysis is an inexact science. This is why I highly doubt that the Documentary Hypothesis (DH) will ever be definitively proven, barring surprising new archaeological discoveries of the earlier texts. In fact, there are many competing versions of DH explaining the details of the compilation of the text, each with some advantages and deficiencies. However, there are a multitude of questions that DH in general explains even if we will never know the exact chain of development. As an illustration, consider the multitude of "doublets" in the Bible. These are stories that are appear two (or more) times in the Pentateuch but differ in some important details, or consist of two different narrative strands woven together. A partial list includes:

Creation
Abraham/Isaac Journey to Egypt/Gerar
Hagar Vision
Esau's Wives
The Ten Commandments
Inaugurating the Tabernacle
Moses Striking the Rock
The Death of Aaron

See Also: http://www.2think.org/hundredsheep/bible/dh.shtml

Believers almost always reject the documentary hypothesis because of it replaces infallible Divine authorship of the Bible and a cadre of human writers sometimes working at cross purposes. Religious Judaism is especially incompatible, since the Talmud often makes important scriptural exegetical derivations based on a single extra word or letter. They say that claiming multiple authors for the Bible is based on gross speculation, and there a degree of truth to that. Proponents of DH often have to invoke the actions of a later "redactor" to fix inconsistencies in particular theory. However, traditional authorities themselves often have to rely on strained ad hoc explanations to resolve contradictions and doublets in the Bible. It seems to me that the only way to believe that the Bible is the product of a single author is to start with that assumption and find a way to justify it with a creative reading of the text. In other words, an unbiased observer starting without a preference for either the Documentary Hypothesis or the Traditional explanation would likely conclude that although there is conclusive evidence for any one documentary theory, the premise is much more sound than belief sole author.

What about Viruses?

I recently attended a lecture on viruses and it never ceases to amaze me how successful these little snippets of genetic material have become at self-replication. In fact, making copies is basically all they do. Viruses exist solely to reproduce. They are little more than a protein coat holding rouge bits of DNA or RNA with just enough instructions to hijack a cell and cause to be make more protein coats and copies of the code. As things that aren't generally considered to be alive, these pesky little guys are amazing case studies for evolution and natural selection.
I bring this up because proponents of Intelligent Design originally tried to make the case that ID should be considered a "Science" on equal footing with evolution. It was not a "religion," they claimed, because the "Designer" could be any intelligent being/deity/cosmic force. Of course, the Cristian God was identified as the "Designer" much more often than Zeus or an anomalous probability wave. The Dover decision made clear that this was nothing more than a sham, and the recent movie Expelled doesn't even try to mask the connection. But even before the pro-ID bunch abandoned all semblance of "non-denominational" Intelligent Design, there was, and is, a huge logical problem. If a "Designer" is necessary for life to have come into being, how could viruses exist unless he/she/they/it also made them? And for that matter, what about genetic diseases or birth defects? A "Designer" intelligent and powerful enough to make all life could certainly have done a better job or at least left our the worst disease causing germs. There is a need for something of a "theology" about why things sometimes don't work, be it Pandora's box or Eve's Fruit or some other creation myth. The only alternatives are to say that either the "Designer" harbors come malicious intent or has some secert plan beyond the ken of mere mortals. Only the latter is acceptable to most adherents, but even this is a "theology" in its own fashio. The truth is there can be no coherent theory of Intelligent Design without making claims regarding the "Designer(s)," which is why it was correct identified as religion, not science.