Judaism
Deuteronomic History and the Prophets
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, October 24, 2001
Deuteronomic History
The Former Prophets equate with the Deuteronomic History. The Deuteronomic History was noted first by Martin Noth. It stands for the work of a school of authors who wrote what Noth saw was a coherent history from Deuteronomy (except chapters 32-34) to 2 Kings—Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings—books that follow the criteria of Deuteronomy and are likely therefore to spring from the same source.
The Deuteronomic History introduces David, Saul and Solomon but depicts the monarchy as corrupt, blasphemous and always bringing misfortune to the people. Needless to say, biblical scholars have had many views and formulated many theories about it, most, if not all of which accept it at its own value. However, most of these scholars will accept that these books have one main theme that they will not dispute—that they express the central view of Deuteronomy, that disobedience of the law will bring punishment by God, and particularly the withdrawal of the gift of the land.
The chronology is coherent, the language, style and sentence structure is characteristic, the text is periodically broken by speeches by the leading participants summarising the story so far, and looking ahead, and the author’s purpose is clear and consistent—to condemn apostasy and warn about its dire consequences for the people.
Under the influence of Noth, the books of Kings were considered coherent enough to have been written complete, by a single author. No one today imagines that the Deuternomic History was written down once and for all by a single author. Almost every authority has thought otherwise—it has several layers of redaction. What happened, the experts agree, is that an author compiled an initial Deuteronomic History using the sources he had, then a series of editors made changes over succeeding centuries. Biblicists think the original composition was pre-exilic. This historian could have taught Herodotus and Thucidydes their jobs, yet it went un-noticed until the third century BC.
Unbiased historians would date the original history to after the Persian period when cultural activities blossomed everywhere in response to Persian influence. The Persians provided Ezra with a law, a purpose, a theme, and an outline history explaining it all. The theme was that the Jews had had countless chances in history but had remained backsliding apostates before their God, the self-same God that had saved them through the founder of the Persian empire, Cyrus. Only a remnant ever remained righteous, the rest being punished. This outline history was expanded in later times by several editors, those of the Ptolemies particularly, and the Maccabees. Biblicists reject this sensible hypothesis.
Ziony Zevit ( The Religions of Ancient Israel ) confirms that the Deuteronomic Historian was a contemporary of the initial author of Deuteronomy. There is agreement on that, but Zevit wants both works to be seventh century in the time of Josiah, not the fifth century in the time of Darius II. It is quite impossible to build any sound conclusions on “history” that is partly, if not largely, fiction. So the perpetual harking back of the biblicists to Josiah is unwarranted. Once, believers were sure that the bible was true because God—who does not lie—inspired it. No one serious can any longer hold that it is true. So, no one is certain that the biblical story of the finding of a book in the reign of Josiah is true. If it is not, then no book in the present bible can be it. Even if the story is true, no one knows for sure which book in the bible it is.
It is assumed that a book really was found and it is assumed that the book was Deuteronomy. Any history based on unfounded assumptions is built on quicksands. The real history of the Jews must emerge from the true history of the region, not from a book that is often wrong or uncorroborated. Having found a proper basis for Jewish history, the Deuteronomic History can be critically checked against it. A supposed history can be tested within itself for consistency, but it cannot be used to illuminate external history until it has been tested against it, and found to be valid. The Jewish scriptures too often do not tally with history known from elsewhere, so building up fantastic theories built on the scriptures being true is absurd.
To attempt to explain Josiah’s reforms, when there is nothing that unequivocally suggests that Josiah, or anyone else, reformed anything to do with the religion of the region, or even that Josiah existed, is to be a fantasist. That is what many biblical historians are. It is a curious thing that the reforms of Josiah, described in the bible a century before the supposed return from exile, had already made all the fundamental changes that the returning Jews undertook under the Persians. There is little possibility that such a tiny impoverished country as Judah could have written a history like the bible, even as fiction, until the time of the Persians. With the ethically based religion the Persians already had, and the objectives they had in setting up a loyal state in Yehud as a buffer against the Egyptians, the Deuteronomic History becomes logical and even necessary.
You have to ask how a scribe of a small nation like Judah with only a short history of its own and therefore no time to develop a literary tradition could have access to the annals of major nations like Assyria and Babylon. Yet the Deuteronomic Historian had access to them, as differences in spelling of some proper names shows, the reason being different spellings in different sources at a time when writing was not regular. These annals told of military campaigns, important state building work, and agricultural initiatives. They also explained that populations and their incomes were estimated for effective taxation and tribute demands. Movements of people were also noted. No small nation could have had the state resources to keep such data, and Judah was a wasteland, to judge by archaeology, and—in this instance—the bible, for over 100 years before the Persians colonized it.
Information was available on inscribed monuments, the sort of find that archaeologists value, but in those days, many will still have been in situ. But are biblcists seriously suggesting that some amateur historian will have travelled the ancient east carefully noting what had been left to be read on monumental inscriptions, to write a peculiar history? It is as absurd as imagining Moses keeping a diary for 40 years. Nor is it necessary. The Deuteronomic Historian admits he had sources. The question is did he have genuine ones, and, if so, how did he have access to them. It could only have been done with the co-operation of the ruling empire, whichever it was, and for Judaism to have the characteristics it has, only the Persian empire will do. Ancient Israel before the fifth century BC had religions, but after then it had a religion.
If the biblicist idea can be flattered with the name “hypothesis”, then it is a hypothesis of picking and choosing random nuggets of information here and there to uphold a generally untenable history, and ignoring much more. No historical hypothesis will ever be complete because data have always been lost, but the hypothesis of the Persian foundation of Judaism is remarkably complete and is coherent. Cherry picking the data is not a theory. Obviously, the Jewish scriptures no more came from Mars than they were revealed by an almighty God. They are products of their time and culture, and must reflect it, and the main difficulty is that they were multiply edited after the Persian era, and the history of the editing needs to be worked out properly. There is more chance of doing it than of finding Moses’s original texts!
The chronicles the Deuteronomic Historian claimed he used “were based on information similar to what was available to Mesopotamian chroniclers and to those composing historical types of inscriptions in NW Semitic dialects”, according to Z Zevit. And, when supposed sources are no longer extant and unattested anywhere else, how can anyone be sure they ever existed? Anyone clever enough to invent a tendentious history to intimidate a subject people must be clever enough to write into it that it depended on certain sources that sound convincing. Since these would have been of the type of sources that only leading people could ever have had access to, no one would have been in a position to challenge them—especially as they were fictional!
The Record of the Matters of the Days of the Kings of Israel, and the parallel one of Judah, might have been genuine sources, but they might have been a trick to give a false history a bogus authenticity. The aim of the Persians was to give Yehud a history that it did not have. How then could it cite genuine sources? For Ziony Zevit, this is “passing from skepticism to ‘know-it-all’ cynicism”. Needless to say, it is believers who “know-it-all” because they have God on their side, and He helps them out when they are not sure about biblical matters, and God is necessarily omniscient for believers, despite not being in Genesis. Nor is it cynical to point out the permanent feeble-minded gullibility of biblicists, not that a man who can write 80 pages on proper method before starting a book should need to be taught it. A detailed account of method which is discarded as “know-it-all cynicism” when it no longer suits the investigator is not worth the ink it is printed with. Indeed, it begins to look like yet another cynical biblicist ploy to fool the credulous.
To doubt the sources of a supposed history that is all too often unsupported anywhere else, is anything but cynical. Zevit might not like it, but it is simply being skeptical, as the scientist must be! To claim that there is some limit of skepticism which is unacceptible is no different from special pleading, and that is what biblicists cannot stop doing.
It is plainly enough false method to assume something that you are supposed to be trying to prove. You cannot prove the bible is true by assuming it is. The proper method is to assume it is not—to be skeptical about it. If that is so, why does it suddenly become “know-it-all cynicism” to question dubious sources in the dubious history? To question the history but believe the unknown sources it cites is ridiculous. Is it “know-it-all” to question the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? No, indeed! It is only ever “know-it-all cynicism” to question the bible, and these cynics have been responsible for all progress that has been made in biblical study. The Deuteronomic Historian has no a priori or a posteriori reasons to fabricate sources, Zevit says. What he means is that he will not contemplate any. These pages explain them in detail.
Zevit has an argument akin to the Christian’s claim that eyewitnesses could corroborate the writings of the evangelists. The reader of the Deuteronomic History could turn to the sources to check them! Presumably, he would just go along to the local library and borrow the books or ask the librarian to get them for him. The idea is ridiculous. The person who read the history could only have been one of the priestly conspirators, and whatever anyone else knew of it all was read out to them as exhortations in the temple. It is risable for a scholar to pretend otherwise. Most people were illiterate, and the ones who were not were the rulers and their servants the scribes.
These biblicist “scholars” supposedly steeped in the age can only be dishonest, knowing the reality. They must know that their argument is pitiable, but that believers will think otherwise in their ignorance. Deuteronomic law was not available to all in law libraries, and nor was history. Ezra read out the law, he did not publish it for ignorant and illiterate people to wonder about. We know this because the bible says so. No one in the audience could have had the chance of checking a source. They took it on the authority of the priests that it existed. The Christian excuse is the same. Who in Rome when the gospels were published over 40 years after the events, would have been able to find any of the named people in the gospels a thousand miles away by sea, even if they had existed? It is absurd to imagine it, yet it is a major plank in the Christian argument for the authenticity of the gospels. The argumemt for the Deueteronomic Historian’s sources is no better.
Zevit cannot bring himself to see these biblical works as Persian even though he agrees that the Deuteronomic History was written after 560 BC, the date of the last events it records. Cyrus of Persia became king of Babylon in 539 BC. It does not leave much time for it to be pre-Persian. In the years that the Babylonians ruled Judah, after its rulers had been deported, it seems to have been neglected and impoverished, so it seems impossible that anyone could have written such a work in Judah, dependent as it was on the state archives of the empires of the ANE. Biblicists therefore have to attribute the authors to exiled Jews in Babylon. That seems equally unlikely because the exiled Jews were quite well off where they were, better off than they had been in an arid little backwater, and they can have had no idea or desire of returning. The Deuteronomic Historian had an agenda. He presumes a “return”, otherwise its lessons and polemics were directed at no one. It was no “return”, but it was presented as one. That was typical of deportations.
The author of Isaiah saw the victory of Cyrus over Babylonia as punishment of the Babylonians by Yehouah for abducting the leading Israelites. But Cyrus himself had a different view. He declared to the Babylonians that their own god, Marduk, had punished them for their own sins. This is interesting in several ways. It shows that the worshipper of any god thinks historical events are interventions of their own deity. A crucial distinction of the Jewish God, Yehouah, used to be that He had an historic plan for the Jews. It is now an abandoned idea because archaeologists and historians have found that most kings of the ANE justified their actions as having been planned by the country’s god or gods. It is attested “among the Hittites, Phoenicians, Moabites and in Mesopotamia”, as Zevit says in his own words. So, Cyrus said to the Babylonians exactly what he said to the Jews—their own god would punish them if they resisted the policies of the king of kings. It shows him using religion for his own purposes, just as he did with Judaism. Cyrus equated Marduk with Yehouah, in that the God of Heaven favoured the Persian king, the agent through which He acted on earth. The objective of the historians the Persian king despatched to various places was to get over this message.
For long, despite Cyrus being in the bible as the messiah of the Jews, biblicists never spoke of the Persians as being important. Babylon was important because of the exile, not Persia, except that it allowed the “exiles” to “return”. Babylon was where many of the biblical books were supposed to have been written, and traces of Babylonian culture in the bible, such as the names of the months confirm it. What the biblicists overlook or exclude, is that by the time the Jewish state was colonized by the Persians, the shahs lived in Babylon! The Babylonian tradition seen in the bible is actually Persian. It comes from the Persian occupation of Babylon. Persia was beginning to adapt to the Babylonian culture, as conquerors often did to more advance civilizations. So, the biblicists have the wrong Babylon!
It is only because the Deuteronomic History was written out of Persian state policy that the Deuteronomic Historian could have had access to state archives. But some of the archives archaeologists compare with the Jewish scriptures might have been “scriptures” themselves. From the example of Marduk in Babylon, the Persians used the same or similar techniques of persuasion on other subjects besides the Jews. The Babylonian Weidner Chronicle blamed the fortunes of the Babylonian kings on how closely they had followed the ordinances of the Babylonian god, Marduk, and the practices of the temple at Esagil. No one considers that it might have been written by the same Persian chancellery division as the Jewish scriptures.
Did Darius do the same in Egypt, when the Persians had control of, and spent a lot of time revising, Egyptian law and the texts of the Houses of Life attached to the temples? Some Egyptian papyri are critical of the Pharaohs. The question is when were they written and by whom. Darius was known in Egypt as a law-giver. Biblicists can see as well as anyone else how modern governments manipulate history, but think the ancients did not have the brains for it. The Persians could have been doing the same in Egypt as they did to the Jews. They were aiming to control them through their history and religion. No one has noticed it in Egypt ot Babylon, but then most Egyptian and Babylonian texts were not known until recently, and no one even noticed it in the far more open case of the Jewish scriptures. Many still refuse to consider it!
The Purpose of the Deuteronomists
The Persian kings did not want to restore local kings but hoped to control people by religious authority—the God of Heaven had his reign on earth in the person of the king of kings—the Persian king. The present recension of the Jewish scriptures is even later—from the time of the Maccabees. Indeed the findings at Qumran show that they were still being written in the first century BC.
So, Noth is correct that there is a clear cohesion about the Deuteronomic History but wrong to conclude that it implies a single author. The cohesion is conditioned by the unity of purpose of the books, which cannot be lost provided that each editor had the same central purposes. Editors might have intended to add, or clarify or repair when the original was damaged or lost, but even if they had different minor themes, so long as the central themes remained those of the Deuteronomist, the books would remain coherent. After a few generations, say 100 years, the Deuteronomic History was accepted by all as God’s word, and future editors would have been unwilling to alter it.
The messages conveyed in the books were those of the Deuteronomic Historian. He objected to calves being set up by the Israelites in Dan and Bethel, Zevit explaining that the Hebrew word “egel” refers not to maturity but to size, so the “calves” were really small bulls. What evidence there is from the archaeology suggest that Yehouah was represented as a bull. Or he stood on one! The Deuteronomic Historian also objected to Israel having high places with its own priesthood who were not Levites. He objected to the Samarians having a different calendar for festivals, and to the king officiating as a priest at Bethel. All is explained by the Persian hypothesis, if the Samarians from the outset refused to co-operate with the plan to set up Jerusalem as the cult center. The bible itself is evidence that they did not. Zevit recognizes that the Samarians were not deviating from any Yehouhistic norm because there was none, and these practices seem to have been standard in Canaanite religions. It was the norm that did not exist. What became the norm after the fifth century the Deuteronomic Historian retrojected into the past so that the people could be blamed as perpetually apostatizing—all except a remnant, and these stood for the Persian colonists or “returners” as biblicists call them.
The sins of each king is the reason why the people sin—over and over again, the people are blamed for the deeds of their rulers:
And he did that which was evil in the eyes of Yehouah, and walked in the way of Jeroboam, and in his sin that he caused Israel to sin.1 Kg 15:34; 16:19, 25-26, 31; 22:53; 2 Kg 13:2
And he did that which was evil in the eyes of Jehovah… he clung to the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin.2 Kg 3:2-3; 10:29-31; 13:2, 11; 14:24; 15:9,18,24,28
The northern kingdom, Israel, disappeared from history because its kings, from Jeroboam I on, were sinners. Sin is, of course, not any particular moral wrongdoing but simply disobedience to Yehouah and apostasy. The name “Israel” signifies those who worhipped El. The southern kingdom of Judah was treated slightly more favourably by the redactors because its kings were considered of the line of David and mostly aspired not to sin. Those who did sin eventually brought “the exile” to the people of Judah as a punishment. The name “Judah” signifies those who worshipped Yehouah.
There is no need to believe it is true. It is propaganda, and Zevit admits the Deuteronomic Historian was a propagandist. Yehouah was the judge of the evil done and it was the same in each case, namely what Jeroboam had done. It was all the fault of the kings, but the outcome was that the people sinned, and they were to be punished. The propaganda appeals to the people on behalf of God and their own self-interest. They are to obey the law, that is, be righteous, and avoid any desire to have their own kings. The beneficiary of this is the Persian shah, not any native ruler.
In these myths, Israel is the embodiment of Canaanite apostasy from Yehouah and His laws, laws that were only introduced in the Persian period as Ezra admits. These new and largely alien laws were justified by re-writing Canaanite history. Eventually, even the people of Yehud had been wicked enough to attract the wrath of Yehouah in the sack of Jerusalem and the exile, but the reward of a righteous “remnant” was to be returned by the Persians as colonists. Apparently, Israel had been too wicked to be returned, because they stood for all the people who worshipped the traditional gods of Canaan and not the instrument of Persian foreign policy, Yehouah. Kings pretends that Yehouah struggled throughout history against a wilful and unworthy people and failed, so He had to destroy them! Nearly the same happened to the Jews, but they were not so unworthy and were saved by a remnant, those sent as colonists from Syria to start up the temple state of Yehud. Nevertheless, these myths signified that their position was precarious indeed, so they had better be exemplary people. Attached to this theme of God’s punishment for disobedience is the eulogising of the “prophets.”
Prophets
The supposed act of reading the future was common in the Fertile Crescent in the first millennium BC and even before. Seers advised kings and lesser ones gave oracles to anyone willing to pay, like fortune tellers today. They were astrologers, Chaldaeans, Magi, oracles and prophets. In texts from Phoenicia, Aram (Syria), Ammon, Anatolia, Emar, Mari, Assyria and Babylon, prophets appear of either sex. Only Egypt seems to lack the equivalent position, but they had their schools of life which might have included such a function.
The ancient astrologers of Mesopotamia were a profession of advisors to the king and the country, looking to the skies for omens, studying not just the rising and setting of stars and the motions of the planets, notably the moon, but also meteorological phenomena like clouds and and thunder.
The Dead Sea Scrolls show that, at the turn of the era, some Jews were immensely interested in such matters, and their absence in the scriptures looks odd. The Maccabees fought the northern Greeks of Babylon, and, it seems rejected their astrological magic when they repaired the damage of the sacred books in the war. The Essenes however, remained loyal to the original Persian forms of Judaism, including astrology. They called themselves prophets!
Prophets claimed skills like these and more mundane ones like interpreting dreams and examining entrails. Biblicists find it difficult to call astrologers and augurers prophets, so they call them just oracles, or even “oracular speakers,” so that the faithful will not get them mixed up, but they all had essentially the same job. The scriptures note ecstatic prophets (1 Sam 10:5), and ordinary people could be prophets, if Amos is to be believed.
The scriptural Huldah is a female prophet (2 Kg 22:14), supposedly called “Weasel,” when her name probably signifies “Beautiful Disc.” Her husband is Shallum, looking like a variant of Solomon (Shalim), the evening sun, and therefore perhaps Huldah meant the moon. She had to be visited to elicit her prophecy, making her sound like Python at Delphi. Otherwise female prophets seem to have been expurgated from the scriptures, if others were originally present, by later biblical editors determined to take patriarchy to its limit. Ezekiel, a late work, condemns female prophets (Ezek 13:17-23), so the direction was clear.
Propagandists
About the time of Cyrus the Persian, some kings had realized that the prophecies of these men could be used as propaganda, demoralizing enemy countries and arousing patriotic fervour, as the case might be. It was a powerful psychological weapon. There is evidence of the Persians using this method in Babylon and in Anatolia. If biblicists suppressed their kneebending inclinations in favour of looking at the Jewish scriptures as historians, they would find the scriptures were excellent historical evidence that the Persians did the same in Yehud. So, prophets became under the Persians, if not before, a propaganda machine. Baruch Halpern sees the prophets as essentially agents of a totalitarian state agenda (J S Cooper and G M Schwartz (eds), The Study of the Ancient Near East in the Twenty-First Century ). If there is any distinction between prophecy and divination, it is only that prophecy assumed this propaganda role, and thus became less mechanical and more attuned to the political needs of the hour.
Prophets were the spokespeople of different “political parties,” one of which would have favoured the foreigners. The Jewish scriptures could not be clearer that the party of those loyal to the practice of worshipping Baal, had their own prophets, and so did worshippers of Asherah, the goddess (1 Kg 18:19). The scriptures are clear that there were schools of prophets which disagreed, but the impression clerics give is that they were like the Greek schools of philosophy or the medieval schools of theology.
The record left to future generations is that of the victors, so we have a record of the Persian salvation prophets, those who presented the conquerors as saviours. In the mythical histories of the Jews, the prophets often predict disaster and it comes about, surely proof that the accounts were not written by genuine contemporaries. The kings of Israel, and sometimes Judah, and even the people are often denigrated by the prophets, yet there they are—recorded! If Jews wrote these accounts they did it under Persian hegemony to suit the wishes of their masters. They had only one treaty, called a covenant, with their Persian suzerains, and other alliances and coalitions were forbidden. Oracles against foreign nations were warnings not to think of making them.
The success of the prophets plainly gave them authority, as the scriptures expressly say. It was authority that came from them being on the right side. But the writers who came to write their exploits, or if not them, later elaborators, wanted to show that they always had authority. Hermann Gunkel showed that the original prophecies of the recorded prophets became literature in a complex process. They introduced “call” narratives, and “disputes” among prophets to show they spoke truly.
No one suggests that the prophets did not have opponents but the truth will have been suppressed and lost, and the “disputes” added as fiction. They could be set convincingly in period because pre-Persian societies had their prophets, and to show the propagandist prophets in a suitable historical situation was no difficult task. It suited the Deuteronomic message that their reception was mixed to allow their “apostate” opponents to be highlighted. The original propagandists voiced their view against the other parties, and at some personal risk. Their messages in support of a foreign power were not necessarily well received, not least by the local authorities, so there was a basis in fact for stories of prophetic conflict, and they were retrojected mutatis mutandis to past times and places. Conflicts like that of Micaiah and the 400 (1 Kg 22) show the righteous prophet standing up against the odds, an illustrative myth set in the past, but meant to justify the Persian officials called prophets.
It is often poetic, but oracles in many societies from the Delphic Oracles through the Sybilline ones to Nostradamus are often poetry, however crude. Many scriptural prophetic works were refined by skilled poets, and Ezekiel might have been completely rewritten or composed anew to replace a lost original. In the literary process, especially when the original purpose was forgotten or had to be hidden, contradictions amerged making prophecy often seem incoherent or abstract, though it is plain enough that the central purpose remains Deuteronomistic.
The role of prophets in the history of appointing and deposing kings can hardly have been that of real prophets who were at the mercy of kings. Amos calls Jeroboam II to order, to Amaziah’s horror. Nathan condemns David. Elijah condemned Ahab. Jeremiah condemned Jehoiakim. It is mythology again aimed at puffing the Persian officials. The astrological prophets of Babylon had a precarious existence, depending upon the patronage of the king, who often neglected to reward them, as we know from plaintive letters found on cuneiform tablets. They were also liable to suffer the ultimate penalty if their prophecy was wrong. The scriptures say the same was true of biblical prophets. Jeremiah was threatened and Uriah killed.
The Persian prophets might sometimes have had the power to act directly for the Shahanshah himself, above the head of the local satrap or governor. They were men to be listened to—Hearken to me! P D Miller comments that “such political matters were always ultimately theological,” and vice versa, and that is because the tenor of Deuteronomy echoes throughout.
The Persians were careful to tell the people who the right prophets were (Dt 18:20,22). The prophets of the Persian party could make promises that they knew the Persian chancellery could bring about. Others were false prophets and their fate was death. They were, of course, those who prophesied against Persian rule. Prophets therefore would be careful to prophesy what the Persians wanted.
Popular prophecy, according to J S Holliday Jr, is not attested anywhere else except in Assyria, but the Persians inherited and applied more effectively what they had learnt from being neighbours of the Assyrians for centuries. Persian archives have been thoroughly destroyed by the Greeks and the Moslems, leaving us with astonishingly little knowledge of the first great world empire, whereas Assyrian records were preserved on clay tablets beneath the desert sands. This is why biblicists have been able to ignore Persia in exploring biblical origins, even though it is plain that Judaism began with the Persians, the only people at that time with an ethical, monotheistic and eschatological religion.
Concerns of the Prophets
Patrick D Miller, Jr in Old Testament Interpretation, summarises the topics addressed by the prophets as:
- tyranny
- injustice and social oppression
- military conquest
- people directionless in starting a new life
- people lamenting their exile
- political alliances
- apostasy.
There could be hardly a better summary of the concerns that faced the Persian colonists deported from their homes into an alien and hostile environment by their conquerors. They show the propaganda concerns of the prophets, and fit the concept that they were propagandists for a foreign power. Cyrus the Persian used such propaganda, as is an unarguable fact, and we can be sure that, even before the conquest, spokespeople for his pro-Persian parties would have railed against the injustice, oppression and tyranny of native rulers, depicting the conquerors as saviours, and would have recommended the political alliances that favoured the invaders and denigrated others.
They would have painted the foreign take-over as a necessary act ordained by a just god who would favour those who supported Him and punish enemies and apostates, so the best way to avoid hardship, injury and death was to support the just god and His cause. When deportees were moved in as rulers of the new colony, their problems of estrangement alienation and dispiritedness also were addressed. They were faced with the task of building a new life and society in the face of hostility from the local population, while lamenting their exile from their homeland, and their confusion in an unfamiliar place. All of this then is evident in the scriptures, even though the circumstances are sometimes altered into a mythical past, or the exile is rendered ambigously. Understanding this is the key to understanding “prophecy” in the bible, even though the prophetic works themselves have been substantially altered in later times when Persian requirements no longer pertained.
Messengers of God
The Hebrew word used for prophet, still used in the Arabic, is “nabi,” a word that it is impossible not to associate with the god, Nebo, the Babylonian equivalent of the Greek god Hermes (Mercury), the messenger of the gods. Prophets are precisely that—messengers of God.
The prophetic oracle is a message… from the divine assembly where the decrees of God are set forth and transmitted as a divine proclamation or message by the prophetic herald: “Thus said the Lord.”P D Miller Jr
The prophet came to speak… as an emissary of the heavenly assembly to the covenant people who were in league with the deity Yehouah.P D Miller Jr
Or, to be less mythological, as an emissary from of the Persian court to the vassal people whose universal god, Yehouah, acknowledged the Persian king as his agent on earth. This heavenly assembly appears in these monotheistic religions unequivocally (1 Kg 22:17-23; Isa 6; Jer 23:16-22), and prophets would describe a sight of it as proof of their authenticity. The executive assembly was in reality the Persian court, but the theory of the universal god of heaven was that the earth reflected what went on in heaven, and so the Persians actually presented their own court as the heavenly one. The Persian king was God’s khalif on earth, so what came from God came from the Shahanshah. The Persian kings never claimed to be gods themselves, but effectively they were God! Heaven spoke through the prophet but the rules that emerged were those of the Persian king.
Yes, there were prophets in the ancient near east before the Persian period but mainly they were court officials engaged as advisors to the king, as the scriptures show. The popular prophets, who were really propagandists might have appeared in the Assyrian period, but most of the biblical narratives about them were mythical anachronistic retrogressions of the Persian prophets, whose task was to urge obedience to the regulations of the universal god—in practice the laws of the Medes and Persians.
Scholars accept, in Miller’s words, “the prophetic insistence on justice and righteousness was rooted in the covenant traditions of Yehouahism.” What they are incapable of understanding is that gods are inventions of the human imagination and are incapable of forming covenant relationships with anybody. Covenants and treaties are made between people! Even though the mythical history of the bible is less credible than Santa Claus, they believe it as true and fail to see the real history in it. The covenant relationhip the scriptures speak of was with Persia in the fifth century not a transcendental being at the time of Noah, Abraham, Moses or anyone else. That is the mythological basis used to justify the covenant with the masters of the Jews, the Persians.
Kings
The whole of Kings has the theme of God punishing sinners to lead up to the destruction of Jerusalem and the “Exile” in preparation for the “Return.” The “Return” was the start of Jewish history.
Kings must have been written after 561 BC when Evil-merodach acceded to the throne of Babylon and Jehoiachin was released from captivity. That is evident and uncontroversial. But commentators fatuously argue the book could not have been published after 539 BC, because the author omitted reference to Babylon falling, and the “return” to Palestine during the reign of Cyrus the Persian. The same commentators say that the history is a sacred history, and not factual in the sense that a social, economic or military history would be.
Thus the founder of Samaria is dismissed in a few verses, Menahem is shown in a bad light though the country seems to have been peaceful and prospered under his sensible policy of submission to the Assyrians. Uzziah was supposedly king of Judah for 50 years but is only briefly mentioned. The purpose of the author is to condemn the people as serial apostates, and rebels from the rule of God. His aim was not to show that they had been forgiven by God allowing them to return, but to realize that punishment still awaited them if they cntinued to apostatize in future. The author therefore omitted the return as counter to his aim, and the book could easily have been written a hundred or more years later. It was.
To suggest the book was written during the “exile” is fantastic. The fantasy has it that the deported Jews lived in freedom and, within fifty years, luxury, with leisure time to seek out and consult the annals of their former kingdom and write an extended history before they, by surprise, with the unexpected victory of the Persians, were able to return to their own barren land. No doubt Jews and Christians will see the finger of God in this, but scholars ought to see something quite different—mythologizing!
In reality, the ruling elite of the Judahites were sent as captives abroad with no prospect of returning. These deportations were permanent, not merely a sentence. Deported people were put in difficult situation, administering a distant province as a foreign elite, but disliked by the natives they were put in charge of. The people deported were clever and skilled, rulers, and they were made rulers of an alien country. It was meant to be a precarious existence that occupied their time fully, preventing them from plotting uprisings themselves for fear and lack of native support, but, while they ruled successfully for the Persian kings, they were rewarded and protected, and so had the chance of being prosperous, even if unpopular. The “returning Jews” were in just that boat themselves, being in reality the deported rulers of other Persian conquests.
The language of Kings belongs unmistakably to later than the Persian conquest. Many words and phrases in the book do not appear elsewhere in scripture. The language of Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Kings closely resemble each other, and there is the rabbinic tradition that Jeremiah wrote Kings. The language of Kings and of Jeremiah seem so similar that the authors were either the same or one deliberately imitated the other. Characteristic similarities show it:
- hardened their neck (2 Kg 17:14; Jer 7:26)
- vanity and became vain (2 Kg 17:15; Jer 2:5)
- cast them out of His sight (2 Kg 17:20; Jer 7:15)
- for a prey and for a spoil (2 Kg 21:14; Jer 30:16)
There are many others, yet Kings does not mention Jeremiah in its account of the last days of Judah, and he is only mentioned twice in Chronicles (2 Chr 35:25; 36:12). As one commentator, James E Smith, remarks:
The role which Jeremiah played during those crucial days was so significant that it is hard to conceive of any impartial, not to mention pious and prophetic, historian ignoring both his name and his work.
Indeed, that seems to be what the redactor of Chronicles thought, and felt obliged to fill the gap, evven if inadequately, but this biblicist commentator can come to no sensible conclusions—the prophetic author of Kings was just modest.
It is unlikely, if not impossible, that Jeremiah lived in the times claimed internally in Jeremiah and yet wrote Kings. Jeremiah would have been too old. His prophetic years supposedly began in the thirteenth year of Josiah, 627 BC. If Kings could not have been completed before 561 BC, sixty-six years later, Jeremiah would have been about eighty-six. It is possible that such an old man would have started writing a book of history, but this, with the linguistic evidence, shows he did not.
Jeremiah can have had nothing to do with this fall of Jerusalem, but a later one, to the Persians during a rebellion, and that therefore is when he lived. Redacters have conflated the two occasions because they had no genuine accounts of the original fall of Jerusalem after perhaps 200 years and so they used a more recent seige. Moreover, scholars think Kings was written in Babylon, and Jeremiah never went there, but the author evidently did:
- He knew what happened in the court of Evil-merodach in Babylon.
- Kings does not mention the remnant of Jews that fled to Egypt after the fall of Jerusalem.
- In 1 Kings 4:24 the region west of the Euphrates River (Syria and the Levant) is called, literally, “beyond the river.” if this is just a relative reference then the author of Kings must have been east of the Euphrates, probably in Babylon. More likely however, the reference is to the name of the satrapy, Abarnahara, which means the same, but shows the book was written in the Persian period.
The translators of the Jewish scriptures have constantly tried to keep the name of the Persian satrapy out of the text because it is a givaway, but “beyond the river” occurs frequently. It mostly literally translates Abarnahara.
Throughout Kings are passages in which the author reflects upon what he is relating and interprets it in the light of his overall theme. This is the Deuteronomistic framework which gives coherence and purpose to the book. The author is committed to the concept of a centralized sanctuary, at Jerusalem. Kings rails against the high places, and the book also attacks the infiltration of Baal worship into the kingdoms. Much of the Deuteronomic History presumes that Jerusalem has the only legitimate temple. It shows it must have been written when that was the state policy, and not when worship was legitimately practised in a variety of places all over the land.
Another concern of the editor of Kings is the monarchy of Judah. A late and substantial redaction portrays David, the mythical first noble king of Judah, as a God-fearing, ideal king (1 Kg 11:33, 38; 14:8), and the standard by which all the kings were judged. Kings of Israel are secondary and incorrigible anyway. The reason is that Israel, Samaria, no longer existed. Only Judah remained. Archaeological material for the study of Judah after 722 BC is abundant, not before, when the abundant material pertains to Samaria. Of the forty kings of Israel and Judah who are named in Kings, only fourteen are named in the inscriptions thus far unearthed by archaeologists, and none of the Jewish kings are early.
The reigns of the kings of the two countries do not match up without fudges, and unlikely presumptions. Josiah was born when Amon was sixteen, and Jehoiakim was born when Josiah was fourteen. Some have alleged that Hezekiah was born to Ahaz when the latter was eleven! Athaliah, queen of Judah, and Jehu, king of Israel, began to reign the same day. The city of Samaria fell in the sixth year of Hezekiah (2 Kg 18:10). Athaliah to Hezekiah Year 6 adds up to 165 yrs. Jehu to the fall of Samaria adds up to 143 yrs. Co-regencies are specifically indicated only on two occasions (1 Kg 1:34, 35; 2 Kg 15:5).
Coregency was the ancient means of guaranteeing succession and was not unusual, but Biblicists use it to settle the problem of dates—they reckon arbitrary years of coregency in the total of years attributed to both kings. If a father and son shared the rule for ten years, that ten years would be counted in the total number of both kings’ reigns. It just becomes a question then of juggling the reigns and regencies to get the desired numbers. Problem solved! But the dates are conjecture.
Most of the Judahite kings are seen by the Deuteronomists favourably, unless they had a Samaritan connexion or refused to destroy the “High Places.” For the kings of Judah, only Hezekiah (2 Kg 18:3-7) and Josiah (2 Kg 22:2) are mentioned uncritically. Asa (1 Kg 15:11-14), Jehoshaphat (1 Kg 22:43), Jehoash (2 Kg 12:2-3), Azariah (2 Kg 15:3-4), and Jotham (2 Kg 15:34-35) are treated with some favour, while the other kings of Judah are condemned as evil (2 Kg 8:18, 27; 21:2, 20).
The “High Places” look likely to mean Canaanite shrines, but could refer mythically to early shrines of the colonists, whether to El (originally) or to Yehouah, when the decision was taken to centralize worship in Jerusalem. Hezekiah is shown as the first king to address this issue but both he and Josiah look like retrogressed salvation kings—they are depicted as introducing Persian reforms anachronistically to give a spurious historical legitimacy to the reforms when they were really introduced new by Ezra in the fifth century BC. The Deuteronomists give Hezekiah unequalled praise for his “reform,” so much so that he is the Messiah in some Jewish traditions. Since the scriptures depict Cyrus as the Messiah, the two are equated. Hezekiah’s reforms are those of the Persian kings. I Provan suggests that Kings once ended here with no reference to the fall of Jerusalem. Instead the Persian colonists were the immediate successors of the mythical reformers in Hezekiah’s reign, and the reforms seemed continuous. Some later editor thought there was an omission and filled it.
The kings of Israel are unanimously condemned in Kings for not doing what was right in the sight of the Lord (1 Kg 15:26, 34; 16:25). The condemnation even falls on Jehu, the greatest defender of Yehouah in the north (2 Kg 10:29-31), though it is mollified. It is no accident of history or God that Judahite kings were often reforming ones while Isrelite kings were apostatizing ones. Yehud was being set up among people who worshipped Canaanite gods. The history depicted worshippers of Canaanite gods as apostatizing from their proper god, Yehouah. Among this phony historical condemnation of the intransigence of the people, some hope was needed.
So the righteous people who remained true to Yehouah were saved. The main prophet of Kings (2 Kg 18-20) is Isaiah, meaning “Salvation is Yehouah.” The Yehudim (Jews) were those who worshipped Yehouah and Yehud (Judah) was their country. Besides those already mentioned, Asa (“Salvation”) is a reforming king (1 Kg 15:11-15) and so is Jehoash (2 Kg 12:2-16) meaning “Yehouah Saves”. The even more favourable account in Chronicles gives more good Jewish kings.
Foreign Alliances
Another theme is that of foreign alliances. Jehoshaphat did not remove the high places, but also made a treaty with the king of Israel (1 Kg 22:44). Indeed, Jehoshaphat seems to be a vassal of the Israelite king (1 Kg 22:1-4). The purpose of this being mentioned in the history, whether it is true or not, is to warn the Jews, whose suzerain was Persia, not to make covenants with other countries. it was a requirement of ancient covenant treaties and this is a reminder of it.
Jehoram (2 Kg 8:16-19) forms a treaty with Israel and so did Ahaziah (2 Kg 8:25-29), and Jehoash, a forty year king (signifying God’s favour) paid all the wealth of the temple to Hazael of Damascus in tribute. Ahaz similarly settled with the Tiglath-pileser of the Assyrians (2 Kg 16:1-20), but he was also an apostate. In contrast, good king Hezekiah apparently rebelled against the Assyrians and was rewarded. Neither Isaiah nor Kings favour foreign alliances, but want the people to have faith in Yehouah providing they are righteous. This suited the Shahanshah but he could hardly have viewed favourably a successful rebellion against the foreigner.
The Deuteronomist always wanted the threat of God’s wrath for wrongdoing, yet here is a promise of God’s eternal protection of Jerusalem. It seems unlikely that this could be the work of the original Persian authors, and the rebellion might be a later addition in Maccabaean times, the narrative at this point becoming conspicuously layered (2 Kg 18:13-19:37). The story of Sennacherib’s invasion appears three times, the first one merely in brief. The Persian one must have been that of Hezekiah following the advice of the salvation prophet, Isaiah, and securing the safety of Jerusalem (2 Kg 18:7-19:9,36). The original author probably meant the Assyrians to represent the Persians as foreign conquerors, and meant foreign treaties to be respected, but a later editor thought it wrong or dangerous to encourage any foreign alliances, and God’s destruction of the Assyrian army was added, perhaps even signifying the destruction of Persia.
Some Prophets
According to R P Carroll, the prophets were “invented.” The post-Persian editors of the prophetic works did not understand the prophecies of the earlier practical period of Jewish formation, and were swayed by the subsequent evolution of the cultus and its mythology in the Greek period, so they introduced errors of transcription and irrelevant and misleading “explanatory” glosses.
Zephaniah seems to have been composed in the time of the seventh century reforms of Josiah, king of Judah, but its awareness of a world wide judgement and restoration of Jerusalem betrays its origin in the Persian period to rational minds.
Isaiah seems to be set towards the end of the eighth century when the Assyrians were subjecting Palestine but the identification of Second and Third Isaiah as identifiably later, and many “interpolations” in the first 39 chapters, show it to be a production of the Persian period when the temple state of Yehud was “saved” from extinction. Words written three centuries before turn out to be prophetic of the fifth century colonists building Yehud. They were contemporary texts written to encourage them and give them a spurious history.
Amos seems to be set even before Isaiah, in the middle of the eighth century. Amos (“The People are Saved”) begins by being a prophet of salvation but ends being a prophet of judgement. Biblicists accept the book’s own date even though the book has plain signs it was written later. It is because of later redaction, they say, and doubtless editors did work on it after the original writer, but it was not written when it claims anyway. Indeed, even if there were a book about a man called Amos written in the eighth century, what we have now was written much later. Once it is accepted that the book was actually written later and is not contemporary with its contents, it could be purely fictional, merely set at a time in the past.
Believers and biblicists will rarely consider this, for the simple reason that they have already convinced themselves that the bible must be “the word of the Lord.” They end up in a conspiracy of lies to uphold their God and His holy word, as they see them. That is just what has happened for centuries, and continues today, though their line is untenable. Liars write for other liars, refusing to think what is for them the unthinkable and refusing to voice any doubt out loud for fear of losing their admission to God’s balmy place. They happily explain to us God’s Truth knowing but not admitting it to be lies. They call themselves biblical scholars, thus reducing scholarship to deceit. They know what they want to be the core of these works, and do not mind arbitrarily rejecting what reveals it as false, called the “interpolations” of later editors. Lo! They find just what they expected—the utterances of an eighth century prophet. Mention of the Assyrians prove the time as the eighth century. So the author of a play called Julius Caesar must have been a first century BC Roman not an Elizabethan English playwright.
Amos is a defender of the poor in a supposedly rich kingdom, and a critic of the king and the national cultus, said to be based at Bethel, a place that archaeology cannot find at that time. Amos prophesies that the kingdom would be swept away. It was indeed! The picture is written as a mirror of what happened to Judah, which the Persian claimed to be reversing, thus saving the people. That is the very meaning of the name, Amos. A miracle, apparently. Amos issues a whole series of oracles not just against Israel and Judah, but against the “nations” who strangely are those that constitute the Persian satrapy of Abarnahara. Each begins with, “Thus said Yehouah” showing that Yehouah was meant to be the god of all of these nations. He was the god of all of the people of Abarnahara—the Hebrews!
Imaginary History
Biblicists like to say the Deuteronomic History is too accurate historically to be a fiction or a forgery, yet it bears little resemblence to anything archaeologists have revealed in the earth. Despite the archaeology, they cannot bring themselves to assess the Deuteronomic History properly. No basis for an empire like David’s has ever been found. Nothing has been found that suggests any splendour like Solomon’s. Nothing testifies to Judah even existing until Israel was absorbed by the Assyrian empire. The Deuteronomic History is full of anachronisms, but biblicists overlook them, or explain them away. It is special pleading.
When almonds or lemons are mentioned before the Persians introduced them, it is a late editor’s interpolation, but it cannot be that the whole bible is a late work. Anachronistic names betray that late editor again, not that the texts are late anyway. So all the anachronisms are cut out as the work of late editors, and Lo! what remains is historically accurate.
The books are not even internally consistent. Moses came first according to the bible, but made such a slight impression that he is hardly mentioned by other writers. Let us suggest that the few mentions of Moses in the scriptures other than in the Pentateuch are the late additions of editors, and believers are aghast. Doubtless it is “know-it-all cynicism”. Jehoshephat set up a judicial system, but in the chronology of the bible, Moses had already done it. David (1 Chr 15:2) gave the Levites the responsibility for looking after the Ark of the Covenant. It was a responsibility they already had (Dt 10:8-9). David (1 Sam 30:23-25) decides how booty shoul be divided up, but it was a rule already agreed (Num 31:27). Most glaring of all is that Ezra came from Persia to give the Jews a law when Moses is supposed to have done it a millennium before. A book could be written about biblical anachronisms, but they never deter believers.
Zevit writes that the traditions of the Pentateuch are “retrojections providing mythical support”. Quite so, but support for what? It is for the Judaism introduced by the Persians. Indeed, David and Moses are two quite separate and contradictory foundation myths for Judaism. Zevit makes Moses the later one. He will be right on this, David being the Persian one—albeit nothing like as refined as it has become in Samuel—and Moses was added by the Greeks in Ptolemaic times.
The Deuteronomists and later editors did not necessarily write pure fiction. They did not have to invent all of these sagas, but had material to work from that they edited in such a way that the aims of the returning priests were fulfilled. They put their own extensive gloss on the fragments of legend they already had, recasting them as allegories of the struggles of the foreigners deported into Israel by the Persians, and later editors fleshed it all out with fiction based on events they knew such as the guerilla war of the Maccabees against the Greeks. That is, new legends were added by the Hasmonaean editors to give the newly founded free state of Judah a history.
But even when biblical facts are “confirmed” in secular history, they are often significantly different. The Deuteronomic Historian tells us that two sons of Sennacherib killed their father when he had returned from the stand off with Hezekiah over Jerusalem (2 Kg 19:35-37). The assassination of Sennacherib has been confirmed in Assyrian records, and it was by a son, but it was years later. Sennacherib survived to seize Babylon in 689 BC, twelve years after the seige of Jerusalem, and the assassination did not hapopen until 681 BC another eight years on. In total, the assassination, which in the bible seems to have been a prompt punishment by Yehouah, was actually twenty years later. If an almighty God meant retribution, why would he leave it so long, so that the retribution seemed utterly divorced from the act that brought it about? Why then would God or His Holy Ghost, make it seem in His Holy Word that the retribution soon followed the deed? That is dishonest. Is it God who is dishonest or the biblical authors? Either way, how can the bible be simply accepted as true? It cannot.
What began as an instrument of Persian foreign policy finished up as an imaginary history to found the national identity of the Jews when the national state was set up as independent by the Maccabees. Inventing history might have exceeded the boundaries of Jewish piety by then, but taking the ragbag of legends and romances they had and reworking them to suit their own aims did not. Thus, the history of the mixed peoples of Palestine was revised to give them a national and ethnic identity to be proud of, to show the hand of the god of the second temple, Yehouah, behind that history and to show the Israelites apostatizing as ever.
