Though the average Brazilian consumes less meat each year than a domestic cat in the United States, he has to slash and burn forests to satisfy our demand for steaks and hamburgers.

Who Lies Sleeping?

The Bible 3

The Mythical History of the Jews
The Truth about the Prophets
Pious Fiction

Abstract

The most important theme of the Old Testament is the fall of man. That of the New Testament is the career of the Christian saviour, Jesus. In the Old Testament, the first man, Adam, disobeyed God, who cursed him and his offspring, introducing sin—original sin—into the world. To lift the curse, that He Himself placed on mankind, God had to manifest Himself on earth as the Son and be sacrificed, thus propitiating the sin committed at the beginning of human history—though not everyone’s but only those who believe unquestioningly the fancies of the Christians. Christians need these Jewish legends to justify their God’s sacrifice, which otherwise is inexplicable. So they say the bible is the inspired or even infallible word of God.

The Mythical History Of The Jews

The story of Abraham is very simple. His original name was Abram and he lived in “Ur of the Chaldees” but God called him and changed his name to Ab-ra-ham, which is the Hebrew for “Father of many peoples”. In fact, no Hebrew scholar can make Abraham mean anything, except with difficulty. It has no meaning in Hebrew. It therefore does not mean “Father of many peoples”. Abram may have come from Ur but it was not a city of the Chaldees until about 1000 BC which proves that the legend was written at a later date by the priests.

If Abram means anything it is something like “great father”. Late in Jewish history, he began to be regarded as the ancestor of the people, but Christians say this grew out of genuine tradition about him. This is proved, they say, by archaeological discoveries which have confirmed the names of certain kings in the story of Abraham.

This illustrates why critics of the clergy call them dishonest. Of the entire story of Abram, only the fact that three or four kings mentioned are now known to have really existed is confirmed. It would follow only that there was an ancient legend about Abram, but of the whole supernatural story about him there is not a tittle of confirmation. A few names of kings, or alliances, or battles in many centuries are confirmed, a vast amount is disproved. In honesty, only the view of the Old Testament as a fabrication in the fifth century which included some older writings based on tribal traditions is confirmed.

One of the royal names discovered is King Hammurabi of Babylon. Christians tell us Amraphel in the Abram story is obviously the same person! Well, actually, it is not obvious. It is an ancient northern Canaanitish or Syrian narrative which shows us Abram as a valiant chieftain, perhaps originally a god. The Jews, who came later to Canaan, probably brought the legend with them from Beth eden where they had previously lived. This Abram was possibly an ancestor of their race, and the priests incorporated this scanty story into the sacred history of the mixed people of Abarnahara, the Persian satrapy that had Jerusalem as its temple.

Joseph is the next outstanding historical character in the Jewish scriptures. Joseph retires with the Khabiri chieftain into the very dim mists of ancient legend. In Genesis 41:43, Joseph was set high and the Egyptian people called before him, “Bow the knee”. This is a fanciful rendering of a word which the translators did not understand. Sayce tells us the word is a Babylonian title of honour! Strange, isn’t it, to find an Egyptian crowd talking Babylonian?

It takes a long time for discoveries to reach the faithful. The story of Potiphar’s wife has so close a parallel in an Egyptian story that it is, according to Sayce, writing a century ago, “impossible not to see the connexion”. Scholars found the Orbiney Papyrus, now in the British Museum at London, in 1852 AD. In it two brothers lived together. They were working together in the field one day, and the elder, who was married, sent the younger back to the house for some seed. The elder’s wife, had had her eye on the younger for some time, said, “Come let us lie together for an hour. That will be pleasant for you, and I will make fine clothes for you.” The blushing youth indignantly refused, and fled, saying much for the morals of ancient Egyptian youth. So the wife, to protect herself, told people he had tried to seduce her, and when her husband came home, she accused the younger brother of saying to her, “Let down thy hair, and let us lie together for an hour.” And the elder slew the younger brother. Compare Genesis 39 with this. Joseph went to his master’s house to do his business, and, as there was no one else there but the wife, she caught him by his garment, saying, “Lie with me”. He refused, and she turned the tables on him, as in the Egyptian tale.

The Pentateuch is supposed to have been written by Moses, before the Israelites had entered Canaan. Yet it contains phrases like “the Canaanite dwelled then in the land” (Gen 12:6;13:7), and “before there reigned any king over the children of Israel” (Gen 36:31), which must have been written after Moses’s death when the land had been entered, the Canaanites had been evicted, and there were even kings in Israel. Moreover, nearly every occurrence from the creation of the world to the death of Moses is related to us twice, and in some cases three times.

The writer of Joshua, who never pretends to be Joshua, often says that a thing goes on “unto this day” (Josh 9:27;15:63). In Joshua 24:31, the author intimates that he is writing at least after the death of the eldest person who had known Joshua. There are the same doubles and contradictions. The Samaritans did not accept the book, so it is a priestly third century forgery.

Judges, Samuel and Kings have all the same faults. The plain truth is that we cannot by independent authority prove a single statement of any importance in the history of the Jews until their history is no longer miraculous. Even the latest historical works are a series of forgeries including, in a changed form, ancient otherwise lost traditions.

In 1 Chronicles 24:7, money is paid or valued in darics, coins of the Persian Darius. It must have been written after 520 BC, the first year of Darius I. In 1 Chronicles 3:19, six generations had elapsed since Zerubbabel, so the book must have been written about 400 BC. In Nehemiah 12:1-26 is a list of names to the time of Alexander the Great (d 323 BC). Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah must be forgeries of the fourth century, possibly using older Assyrian and Babylonian royal annals but giving a revised version of the events.

Even the most contemporary prophets of the setting up of the temple state, Haggai and Zechariah, Ezra and Nehemiah are full of purposive misstatements. Their editors' contributions are agreed to be often inventions, especially what they say about the “return of the Jews” from Babylon and the rebuilding of the temple. Zechariah says the exiles were still in Babylonia when the temple was rebuilt, yet the author of Ezra gives us a glowing description of 42,360 Jews, with 7,337 servants, two hundred singing men and women, and great troops of horses and treasures of gold returning. Only about 4,000 men had been deported.

We are asked to believe that in two generations they grew, on the fertile plains of Babylon, to 42,360 plus the thousands more who never returned. In those days a population took several centuries to double! In fact, the total population of Yehud, after the colonization, was only about two myriads, and that includes the native Am ha Eretz who never left. This extended list is centuries older, probably from the time of the Maccabees, and was written to give certain families kudos. The value of the history of Ezra, was bringing out the real author of the law of Moses. No serious scholar doubts that it was written in Babylon by Persian ministers.

Experts assure us that much of the Old Testament history has been discredited. The books are a tissue of inventions, expansions, conflations, or recensions dating centuries after the events.

The Truth About The Prophets

A prophet in those olden days was not a man who in particular predicted events, but, in the Greek and Hebrew understanding of the word (respectively, “prophetes”, “nabi”), was a man who was believed to speak for and interpret the words of the gods. In the Jewish scriptures, they were men who spoke out, as Jeremiah did about Hilkiah’s pious fraud. They called a whore a whore. The modern interest in the prophets is the supposition that they made remarkable predictions. These supposed predictions are quite simply false, unless you are a Christian.

In reality, prophets were the messengers of the king, but the king spoke for the gods, or God. They were also propagandists for enemies of the king, or even for foreign kings wanting to interfere in the affairs of foreign countries. By claiming to be speaking for God, and usually having a king's authority to do so, they had a certain amount of security. Even so, it must have been a dangerous job sometimes, though most of them were more like the medieval town criers, simply spreading news that the king wanted to be spread.

The works of the original prophets, if they existed in written form, were edited like all the other scriptural literature, but most of the biblical prophecies were written long after the events they described, so, they were easy to get right. Sometimes the “prophecy” was in any case a reference to past events as when Isaiah wrote descriptions of the “Servant of God”, regarded as predictions about Christ, and are really of Moses, or are a personification of Israel.

Only occasionally are the predictions shrewd forecasts, and they have been emphasized, while failed ones have been ignored. Correct ones are when the fulfilment of some dire warning from the prophet of a foreign king comes true because it was meant to intimidate the local people. The king then followed up with an invasion, and the people were meant to expect it and willingly surrender. Sometimes supposed biblical prophecies of Jesus are wrongly translated, as in the famous “Behold a virgin will conceive”, a prophecy that came true even though it is wrongly expressed. The Hebrew word means not “virgin” but a pre-menstrual girl, and conception by such a girl was not miraculous, even in ancient Judaea.

Biblical prophets regarded themselves as superior people because often they spoke for very superior people. They wanted to be striking in appearance so that people would hear them, and, apparently, dressed in a sort of uniform of a mantle of goat’s hair. They also like to have mystic marks on their foreheads, possibly official tattoos to show their authority. Some had schools of prophets, again suggesting their official role. Such was Elijah. There is, the experts say probably a basis of fact in the story of Elijah and Elisha, but we can’t disentangle it, as “the interests of prophetic orders led to unhistoric fictions and exaggerations” besides valid warnings.

They were not forgeries, though! Amos and Hosea were supposed to be the first and, naturally enough, they are the crudest and most poetic. Memory is assisted by poetry, and so messages will have been committed to memory in poetic form. But Amos and Hosea are morally crude. Amos, whose story makes him active about 750 BC, was a sheep trader. The great sin is what the translators honestly call whoredom. Judaea was full of whores, in spite of polygamy and concubinage. And, figuratively, the great collective sin of the nation was whoredom—a courting of false gods, whose existence is not denied.

Hosea, who purports to have been active in the northern kingdom about the same time, or about 750 to 725, is a shade worse. The call of Yehouah to him was, “Take unto thee a wife of whoredom and children of whoredom, for the land doth commit great whoredom”. He literally obeyed the divine command, and learned to love the girl, a metaphor for Israel and her sins. For centuries Christians have taken it that all ancient people were thoroughly immoral, even God’s own people needing stern lessons from time to time. Yet Egypt was then as moral as the bible belt is today, and, in Babylon, they drowned people for adultery.

However, the Book of Isaiah is, apart from later manipulations, the work of several totally different writers, separated from each other by two centuries. The real Isaiah seems to have been a man of good social position and education, and keenly interested in politics. He was pro-Assyrian—though Assyria in these pseudepigraphs probably stands for Persia—and he was opposed by the pro-Egyptians at court. His opponents won, and Judaea cast off its allegiance to Assyria and turned to Egypt. Isaiah gave a reasonable forecast of the punishment of Judaea by the Assyrians. These “prophecies” made after the event are really warnings that it will happen again unless the people co-operate with the conqueror.

When the Persian colonists came from Babylonia, some other prophet or prophets gave other warnings that also were incorporated into Isaiah. The colonists had been told they were being returned to Yehud from a previous exile, whether this exile had actually happened or not. So, this “prophet” “predicted” “the exile”, and it was attributed to Isaiah. He also predicts a terrible destruction of Babylon, which the Persians actually took peacefully, and he says it was taken by the Medes, though they did not. It shows that the prophecy was false , and that it was actually written sufficiently later that the truth had been forgotten. Babylon was in the time Isaiah pretends to be writing was not the enemy of Judaea, and the city was actually destroyed by Xerxes in a much later punitive action after an act of rebellion. So, the prophecy was added after the time of Xerxes. The later Isaiah's language and religious ideas are quite different from those of the earlier one, but the two have been pieced together in one book together with a third one. The scholars call them Second Isaiah, amd Third Isaiah. Why would God want to do this sort of thing?

The second major prophet is Jeremiah. He is described as one “of the gentlest of men” though he told Hilkiah in very good Hebrew, and us also, that his new book was a lie. Judaea was so wicked and perverse, according to these propagandists, and the pessimism of the prophets reaches its deepest in Jeremiah. The prophecies took the same general shape. The Jews were going to be fearfully punished—rebels generally were in those days—but the Lord would some day rehabilitate them. Jeremiah was the son of a priest, and was called in the year 626 BC in his pseudepigraph, but probably lived in the fifth century in fact.

Micah is supposed to have been a contemporary of Isaiah but his work is hopelessly adulterated. Ezekiel was a priest, of the sterner type, and was shown as deported to Babylonia, but the whole book has been massively edited in Hellenistic times, perhaps by the Hasids. Joel, Malachi and Obadiah are Persian forgeries of the fourth century.

The Psalms are called The Psalms of David and Christians believe or pretend they really were written by king David, as in the close of Psalms 72. There is not a scholar in the world who now believes that any of them were composed by David. Internal evidence and the language itself show that they are a collection of songs or chants composed mainly seven hundred or more years after the mythical David is supposed to have lived. In the second century BC, it was a much disputed question amongst the Jews whether David was really the author. Now every fundamentalist Christian in the USA is sure that he was. He was not.

The psaltery was a Jewish stringed instrument and a song or hymn sung played on it was a psalm. So, Psalms is an anthology of Jewish religious songs and poetry. Some psalms are written word for word in Samuel. Others (such as 20, 21, 61, 63, etc.) are actually addressed to the king, and it was always quite absurd to suggest that the author of these was David or Solomon. Psalms 104, taken bodily from the Egyptian liturgy, is one that could possibly go back in parts to the tenth century BC. Songs composed for wedding feasts were sung to the psaltery and some of the psalms (such as 45) were poems to be sung at a marriage festival, supposed to have been royal, but actually divine. It was the “hierogamos”, the popular festival of marriage in the ancient near east.

Some of the psalms are so crude and bloody in their sentiments that the Church of England has debated in solemn conferences whether it ought not to omit them from its services.

Pious Fiction

Ecclesiastes is a strange book to include in a Jewish sacred collection. The author is an Epicurean philosopher. He believes in God, but is an agnostic about a future life. Over and over again he expresses his skepticism, so that the one verse which does profess belief in a future life is palpably part of the retouching which the book suffered later at orthodox hands. The writer disdains the temple sacrifices (5:1) and constantly urges his readers to eat and drink and be merry while the sun shines. He was probably a Jew living in the new Greco-Egyptian city of Alexandria about 200 BC.

Proverbs is much earlier, probably going back to the fourth century, but the Wisdom of Solomon, and Ecclesiasticus, are written in Greek in the first century before Christ. They had nothing to do with Solomon.

The Song of Solomon, full of thighs, breasts and bellies, is openly erotic. It was used as a symbol of the union of Christ and his Church, or the union of Yehouah and the synagogue. As a whole it is a collection of marriage songs. There might be a mythological element in parts of it, which seem to celebrate the union of the sun god and a goddess (Shelamith) in the hierogamos. In the east, a marriage festival lasts a week, and songs about the charms of the bride and the bridegroom’s particular interest in her are features of the celebration. Some of these songs may be quite old, but others include Persian, and even Greek, words, so that the collection must belong to about the fourth century. By that time the forged historical works had made Solomon and all his glory and his wives very popular amongst the Jews, and an aspiring author could not do better than borrow his name.

Solomon was at best a petty king living in a third-rate oriental mansion who did not build the first temple even. The builder was probably Ahab. Solomon was not wealthy, as in the legend, but Ahab was. Indeed, Solomon most probably never existed.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.