re: #578 Guanxi88

Who says you can’t apply these tools to these texts? But I do argue that one misses the point in doing so.

Look, there’s evidence to suggest the texts were edited on a number of occasions - and yet, errors in the re-telling of tales, goof-ups in geneologies, deviations from accepted spellings and known chronologies - all appear.

The editors left these in, on the very sound principle that these things, as they do not obviously contradict Mosaic monotheism, might in fact be of some importance. They understood that the thing at which they looked was perhaps greater than they could understand, and so they were very careful not to cut out anything that wasn’t obviously blasphemous or insane.

No one misses the point. Textual critics take all those things into consideration, you seem to have a very low opinion of textual critics.

(P.S. I am filling out some on line job applications, so I am now paying real close attention to this conversation… my bad).