E.A. Speiser on the historicity of Avraham--add it to the next edition of Beyond A Reasonable Doubt

Yesterday I posted about Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. The problem I found with a particular section on archaeology was that the method the author uses is very faulty and it is designed to draw faulty conclusions. The method involves selecting quotes taken out of context, adding them up and attributing a signifigance to them that is simply not there.

The author did not use this following example, but one could easily see how he might have. In the Anchor Bible Genesis translation and commentary by Ephraim Avigdor Speiser the following is found, commenting on Gen. 14:

...Abraham was not a nebulous literary figure, but a real person who was attested in contemporary sources.

Beautiful! Add it to the next edition of the book.

The problem is, that quote is totally devoid of context. To flesh it out a little more:

...it necessarily follows that Abraham was not a nebulous literary figure, but a real person who was attested in contemporary sources. Short of a non-Israelite text mentioning an Abram son of Terah, or an Isaac son of Abram, this is as close as we can as yet come to a direct epigraphic witness of the patriarch.

Hmm. Not bad, but what's this of non-Israelite texts?

Here is a more full quote of the paragraph:

If Abraham was cited in a historical or quasi-historical narrative that was written not by Israelites but by outsiders, it necessarily follows that Abraham was not a nebulous literary figure, but a real person who was attested in contemporary sources. Short of a non-Israelite text mentioning an Abram son of Terah, or an Isaac son of Abram, this is as close as we can as yet come to a direct epigraphic witness of the patriarch.

And what is the context in which this paragraph is found?

Speiser begins the chapter of commentary on the story of Avraham and the war between the four kings and the five kings as follows:

Genesis xiv stands alone among all the accounts in the Pentateuch, if not indeed in the Bible as a whole. The setting is international, the approach impersonal, and the narration notable for its unusual style and vocabulary....One one point....the crtics are virtually unanimous: the familiar touches of the established sources of Genesis are entirely absent in this instance. For all these reasons the chapter has to be ascribed to an isolated source, here marked X.

By the way, those last two sentences could have also been used with profit, taken out of context, by the author of a similar work trying to disprove the documentary hypothesis. But I digress. Speiser's purpose, as he outlines it, is to show that the contents of Gen. xiv seem to be an outside tradition, an outside source about Avraham. Suddenly Avraham is a warrior, with armed forces, fighting and beating kings and their armies. No indication of this personality before or after. That, coupled with its "unusual style and vocabulary" led critical scholars to consider it a piece of a tale from a different origin than the rest of Genesis. Speiser also notes that in this chapter Avraham is called "אברם העברי" (verse 13), which suggest the well known principle that עברי, Hebrew was a title applied by outsiders but not one that was self referential outside of the context of non-Hebrews. Maybe it was, as he suggests, "a historical or quasi-historical narrative that was written not by Israelites but by outsiders."

That's it. There is nothing in this piece that can rise to the defense of a unified Torah min-hashamayim, mi-sinai, al pi Hashem be-yad Moshe (although it must be noted that the two positions don't necessarily contradict it, if we regard the general contents of Bereishit as having been known to Benei Yisrael, or even non-Israelites, even before Mattan Torah). In any case, the sort of quotations found in that book are of this nature. One can prove nearly anything using this method, if collecting such types of quotes and adding them up is considered to be proof.