Wellhausen read pre-Islamic Arab lore as evidence for early Hebrew life
Evidence
Because of the problems he discovered in his Hebrew material, he believed that the lore of the pre-Islamic Arabs provided the best evidence for the way of life of the early Hebrews. Eventually he moved on from close scrutiny of the Old Testament and became interested in the romantic and colourful world of the Arabs: ‘I have made the transition from the Old Testament to the Arabs with the intention of getting to know the wild vine upon which priests and prophets grafted the Torah of Yahweh. For I have no doubt that some idea of the original characteristics with which the Hebrews entered history may most easily be won by means of a comparison with Arab antiquity.’ — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 330
Categorization
- ADDENDUM: Wellhausen’s ‘wild vine upon which priests and prophets grafted the Torah’ is literally a grafting metaphor for cultural borrowing and stratification — a strong supporting anecdote for ‘Grafting & Growth: On Trees as Infrastructure’.
- CANDY: A career scholar who loved the Umayyads and roared ‘To hell with the Abbasids! They might as well already be there’ because they weren’t fit to hold a candle to the German Kaisers is a wonderfully comic specimen of scholarly partisanship.
Related
- Wellhausen applied biblical source-criticism techniques to Islamic history (similarity 0.82)
- Wellhausen’s Islamic-period preferences were shaped by German patriotism (similarity 0.78)