AW! Epistles
There Was No Moses. From Fred G
Abstract
Sunday, 23 May 2004
Mike, I have the following comments on: AskWhy Christian and Jewish History for Students and Skeptics; Nature or Christianity? I’ve enjoyed looking at your website. I think we share a similar point of view.
I also think that those bible scholars who have been working on the further development of the Documentary Hypothesis (such as Richard Elliott Friedman) and archaeologists (such as Israel Finkelstein) and bible scholars with a skeptical turn of mind (such as Philip R Davies) are soon going to be able to persuade large numbers of others (hopefully, even the evangelicals) that there was no captivity in Egypt, that there was no exodus, that THERE WAS NO MOSES (as S David Sperling has said), and that the Bible is just a book, written by human beings with far less divine inspiration than guides Yundi Li’s fingers when he performs Chopin or Liszt in concert.
I suspect that David wrote the Book of Jashar as a sort of political spin-piece, that Solmoon’s Court Historian wrote the original Book of Samuel (borrowing from the Book of Jashar), that a woman wrote the original version of Genesis and Eodus as a prequel to the Book of Samuel, that priests at the time of King Hezekiah began developing a plan to establish a theocracy limiting the power of the monarchy but had to pull back under Manasseh’s long reign, that Hilkiah and Jeremiah wrote the original Deuteronomistic document (including portions of the Book of Joshua) as a guide for their puppet, Josiah who destroyed Ai and Jericho in what he must have been led to believe was a repeat of his namesake… and that the Song of Songs (a Greek drama complete with Greek chorus) and Ecclesiastes (clearly inspired by the letters of Epicurus) were written in Alexandria circa 250 BCE by members of the Library staff who thus had access to Greek literature and philosophy…
There is history in the Bible (by which I mean the Tanakh) but it’s too intermingled with allegory and etiological tales and deliberate distortion for the reading of it to be anything other than an interesting literary investigation.
I am glad someone likes my website. Your comments are welcome, but far too generous to the Jewish scriptures, which seem to me to have been all written late, that is within a few hundred years BC of Christ. They were, though, based on the original law sent by the Persians about 400 BC, so have some earlier material than Eccelesiastes, and deliberately archaeized to make them seem older than they were. The idea that David or his courtiers were writing history 500 years before Herodotus and Thucydides seems ridiculous to me. As you will know, since you are familiar with my website, David and Solomon, most of the Jewish kings and the early Israelite kings are all mythical, besides Moses and Abraham, so there simply was no David whose courtiers could have written anything. Even some Christians are begimning to accept that David and Solomon, at best were simply bandit chiefs and could have had none of the glory or literacy the bible gives them. The Jewish kingdoms only began with Omri. Christians, of course, have to believe the bible, for their whole system of belief depends on it, and so they ignore the evidence of proper history and archaeology. They are like the legendary ostriches burying their heads in the sand, and have to claim that the bible is sacred history, somehow different from real history. They mean it is mythology, but cannot accept that either.
Thanks for your comments. I think we may be in more agreement than my email made it appear.
I think so, but I have tried to emphasize on the pages that a single source like the bible cannot be considered as an adequate source of history, and yet all believers in Judaism and Christianity are so credulous that they think it is. The “sin” of the so-called minimalists is that they will not accept the bible as history until it is confirmed by some other means, whether by documents or archaeology. It is no more than historians normally do when assessing documents, but because these ones have achieved over the centuries the reputation of being divine, they are considered infallible. It means that believers treat this ancient book like a god, and will not have it gainsaid, despite the evidence that it is sorely erroneous. The earliest fact of the bible confirmed externally is that there was a king of Samaria called Omri (Khumri). It does not mean that everything supposedly preceding Omri is wrong, but quite honestly, it probably is, simply because the empire of the Israelites just cannot fit into the known historical sequence and it seems quite unlikely. It would mean there was no tenth century David or Solomon identifiable with the biblical ones. Attempts to lessen them into local dukes or even bandits simply denies the bible account, and shows the bible to be unreliable as history.
On the matter of the archaeizing, that seems to be common to books of scripture, like the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon. I find the idea of a early 19th century farmer from upstate New York translating an ancient book into 16th century English an obvious clue as to the fraudulent nature of the entire enterprise. That thousands, millions, tens of millions, or even billions of people buy into similar rubbish is a sad commentary on human credulity.
Agreed.
I should, perhaps, have said that I see very little, if any, historicity in the account from Genesis up to somewhere in the first book of Samuel and, even then, with great reservations. I don’t believe in the story of Moses except as an allegory as suggested by S. David Sperling in his book, The Original Torah: The Political Intent of the Bible’s Writers, published by New York University Press in 1998. Sperling’s idea was that the Moses story was based upon Saul. Of course, simply changing the names doesn’t turn the story into history, either.
Omri does not appear until 1 Kings. This insistence on David and Solomon exemplifies what I said above. There is no reliable evidence of either David or Solomon in history or archaeology, yet here you say Sperling accounts for the mythical Moses by reference to the equally mythical Saul. What is the point of it? We certainly have these books of pseudo-history called the Jewish scriptures, but all of the stuff written that explains one bit of them by referring to another bit seems utterly futile and worthless to me. I have tried to explain the Jewish books by reference to real, known history, and, to my mind, the only adequate explanation is that Judaism was founded by the Persians. The Persians, and even the first Jews of Yehud, however, did not write the Jewish scriptures complete. Once the religion was founded, the mythology had to be written, so the Jewish books evolved—were actually written after the foundation of the religion, except the original law, and an outline history based on its premise and drawing on Persian access to Assyrian records, something I cannot believe any previous people in the Palestinian hills had. In fact, the story of Moses seems to have been composed in the third century BC, by the Ptolemies so that the temple of Jerusalem—favoured by them—had a basis in an Egyptianized people.
As for what I suspect David wrote (or, more likely, dictated), he was merely composing a political spin piece designed to distance himself from all the murders which had led to his deposing Saul as leaders of what couldn’t have been much more than a tribal federation. To call David’s home in Jerusalem a palace in the usual sense of the word, as many have, would be a gross exaggeration. I don’t think David ever intended for his book (Jashar) to become scripture. I do think it possible that a very talented scribe at the time of Bathsheba’s son, Solomon (ben Uriah), could have written an account designed to justify or explain Solomon’s rise to power.
Who knows that there was not a book called Jashar, but, if there was, it was not written by any ancient Samarian bandit called David. The word Jashar looks to me to be a possible rendering of "Yah is King" in Persian! There is some reason to think that David is or was Darius—a mythologized Darius—since he was the shah who founded Judaism.
As for history being written before Herodotus and Thucydides, we do have the verifiably ancient account of Uruk’s king, Gilgamesh written around 1300 BCE. I’ve been told, by one well-known Assyriologist, that at the time of Mr Bush’s unfortunate invasion of Iraq, a team of German archaeologists was about to excavate Gilgamesh’s tomb which they had located in the desert. According to the story I was told, when Gilgamesh died his subjects diverted the course of the Euphrates, allowed the river bed to dry, dug a tomb in the river bed, buried Gilgamesh, his retinue and other possessions, sealed the tomb, and directed the Euphrates back to its original course. In time, the course of the Euphrates changed of its own accord but, by then the story had been pretty much forgotten.
The question is whether Gilgamesh was a historical king or a king Arthur. So far as I know, there is no other evidence for any such king as opposed to a myth, and, of course, his exploits are like those of Hercules, fantastic. It would be hard to try to maintain that the Epic of Gilgamesh is history rather than deliberate mythology meant to explain certain rituals and puzzling phenomena, though I do not deny that remarkable jewels can grow from a grain of dirt. I am suspicious of Bush’s motives for invading Iraq. Greed for oil was certainly the main one, no doubt, but he is such a fundamentalist, it would not surprise me that he also wanted to destroy any evidence that might question the biblical accounts. The US were supposed to have been ready to defend the treasures in Iraqi museums and just did not do it. Many are lost, stolen or destroyed. If there is any evidence left of biblical origins, it is in Iraq, for sure.
There is much in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Tanakh and the Qu’ran that is myth rather than history—almost all of it, in fact. I think anyone who looks at the front page of any major newspaper ought to be aware that very much the same process is taking place today…
And we know why! The philosophical basis of the neo-cons in the USA makes no bones that the ordinary people should be fed lies as modern myths just as they had been fed myths as simple explanations and motivations in classical times. Leo Strauss thought hoi polloi could justifiable be kept docile by lies, and the biggest one is religion. Those who ruled knew the purpose of religion. Only the slaves at the base of society did not know, and could not be allowed to know because it comforted them, making life smoother for rulers. It is a sad world we live in when modern technology ought to be able to make it comfortable for us all.
PS I have just read in this morning’s paper, Just before I came online to send this email, that some communications company called Lincoln has got a $100 million contract from Donald Rumsfeld to plant lying stories favourable to the “coalition” in Iraqi newspapers. Just tell me how it is possible for Christians to condone such liars within their supposed religion of love, let alone vote them to high office. Christians have always been hypocrites, and Christianity the cover for crooks. History proves it. I cannot see how any just God could forgive these Christians, and that they should expect any god other than the Devil to save them simply shows how ignorant and deluded they must be. (Not that Rumsfeld is an idiot. He is probably a Straussist by choice and a Christian for the sheep.)
