Three and the Triad

A famous 1938 theory claimed a shared three-part Indo-European social structure behind many of these triads. A scholar later showed the same pattern could be read into the Hebrew Bible, which has no Indo-European connection at all — the triad is real, but the single explanation for it is not.

Georges Dumézil's trifunctional hypothesis (from 1938); John Brough's 1959 critique, finding the same pattern in non-Indo-European texts