Abstract

Tuesday, 25 May 2004

Sisyphus was a kind of local culture hero specific to the Corinthians… [A long extract followed on this legend in relation to the Jewish scripture.]

You wrote to me with a long extract about Sisyphus as Joseph and more then about Salmoneus. You sent it as a comment on one of my pages on the patriarchs, but I have an explicit mention of Sisyphus as a saviour of mankind on this page:

http://www.askwhy.co.uk/christianity/0310SunGod.html

I would be glad to know what source you are citing. I must note, though, that since I think the Hebrew bible recognisable in the form it is in now, only stems from the Ptolemies in the third century BC, it is not Israelite myth being transferred to Greece via Corinth, but Greek myth being recast for the sacred books being prepared by the Jerusalem and Egyptian priests for the Greek kings of Egypt. Nothing is known about the Hebrew stories until then, but the Greek stories were already mainly well known long before.

The extract is a couple of sub-chapters of a book that I am writing. I am propagating my own unique opinion only, however, of course you should feel free to investigate these matters for yourself to see how accurate my information is, my source books, namely the bible and Greek mythology, are, obviously, widely available. I like to think of my writing as thorough. I value your considered opinion.

Well, it looks to me as though you will have an interesting book to sell when it is done. You seem to have a much greater depth on knowledge of Greek mythology than I do, but then I have to admit I do not have much and depend upon the works of others. Your work does seem thorough, and that is why it deserves admiration.

I know that you do not think that the myths were culled from the Hebrew history, but rather that the Bible was assembled from the myths, however, I find it much easier to believe that the myths are poetic history than, that a nation should invent it’s history out of another nation’s mythology, and then proceed to believe that it is true. As you say, the Hebrews were aware of Greek mythology at the time of the Ptolemies, If a book were then written that purported to pass off these myths as their history, such a book would have been laughed out of existence. No?

If everyone was literate, as we are now, what you say is possibly true. Only princes and priests were literate, and hoi polloi had to accept what the priests and princes told them. Books were rare and valuable things, and could easily be changed by high ranking conspirators. Even the bible admits it in the case of Hilkiah and what is universally assumed today to have been Deuteronomy. What is more important, in my view, is that the basis and structure of Judaism was not composed by Jews but by Persians. The later Hellenistic heirs of the Persian Jewish religion were only too glad to change it to something more acceptable to the Greeks when the Ptolemies offered to do it, but we agree that the structure could not be changed. The detail could. In the reality of the Persian Jewsh colony, Moses had freed the Israelites from Egyptian hegemony and so “brought the Israelites out of Egypt” but it was not an exodus. The Ptolemies made Moses a major character and invented the exodus.

Could it be that the very popular Hebrew name “Joseph” was invented only at the time of the Ptolemies as a corruption of the Greek name “Sisyphus”? Could then the Biblical Joseph have been given a son named after a city in Greece that was anciently founded by Sisyphus? Surely the Hebrew cities and tribe were not renamed for Ephraim retroactively at the time of the Ptolemies just to bolster the then newly invented scriptural account!

The Joseph story in Genesis has every indication of being a late addition to the Jewish scriptures, whatever hypothesis of its evolution you adopt. I cannot see the Joseph romance being earlier than the Ptolemies. As far as Jewish history is concerned, who knew it other than the conspirators? The people were easily persuaded of new revelations and still are. Do we have any information on the history of the name Joseph? It looks Egyptian.

I feel certain that after you have read all the coincidences that I have outlined in my work, you will either decide that they are just that, mere coincidences, or it will become obvious that so much of the Hebrew histories could not have been derived from one obscure Corinthian myth about Sisyphus, but rather (and, much easier to believe I must say,) that the myth was told by people who were familiar with the Hebrew histories.

I look forward to your book emerging, and I sincerely encourage you to do it, then, you are right, I can read what you say and judge. I guess all I am saying at present, in more or less total ignorance of your work, is that you must be sure of chronology. Everyone accepts that the Jewish biblical history is true presumably because everyone hitherto has accepted that it is God given. I question that. We are doing the same thing in a way, questioning assumptions about history, but I questions God’s supposed version whereas you question secular Greek history and accept God’s version. We need to know what is the chicken and what is the egg. My contention is that Judaism, unquestioningly set in a remote history with Abraham and more importantly Moses, the latter 1400 years BC, was actually all written after about 420 BC, and therefore could draw upon Greek mythology. If Judaism truly had such an ancient history, your own idea would be correct, and the Greeks drew on the Jews, but even Herodotus knew nothing about the Jews, their temple or their history, and no one had heard of about Moses, who supposedly wrote such amazing memoirs around 1400 BC, until the Ptolemaic Egyptian kings.

Over and over again men are deified, but other than Jesus Christ, not many gods get demoted into historic characters.

My guess is that several Jewish patriarchs were probably ancient gods taken down to earth in the interest of a monotheistic bible. Moses himself in my view was Mazda, the Persian god, or rather, Ahura Mazda was separated out by the mythologists into Aaron and Moses. Less controversial perhaps is Abraham as an early god. Arthur was likely to have been a Celtic god, or an amalgamation of god and man. It happened before Jesus, often as an alternative to demonizing an old well-respected god when conquerers imposed a new religion. Christians, in similar fashion, made well-repected Pagan gods into saints, also originally men before the elevation to god-like status.

If, after you have more carefully read my work, you will correspond to me, I should look forward to, and appreciate it greatly. I will be glad to send you another couple of sub-chapters which will make it even more obvious who borrowed from whom.

Maybe, but does the evidence itself establish which preceded the other, or do you ASSUME that the biblical “history” is older? That is the crux. I think Cyrus Gordon wrote a work showing the Greek dependence of the Jewish scriptures, a point which shows to me that the Jewish scriptures depend on the Greek stories. I believe it has been established even more closely by a later writer. It is therefore vital that we are sure which came first without assuming anything. The evidence therefore must be within the stories themselves. Thus, if the bible mentions a citron, it must have been written later than the time when citrons were brought into Europe from India. Current knowledge puts this in the time of the Persians when they formed a bridge between India and Europe—in or after the fifth century.

You wrote with more examples of your examination of Greek myths. I really do think it is excellent work, but am not convinced that you have it the right way round.

Even if we disagree upon the direction of the dispersion you must admit that the two stories are full of intimate corresponding themes and almost certainly have a connection of some kind.

You persuade me of this, but the direction surely is the crucial factor. You seem not to question the biblical chronology even though, as I have said before, there is no evidence of the biblical myths until the third century BC, half a millennium after Homer and Hesiod. Plainly the internal account in the Jewish myths pretends to be vastly older, but the ancients wanted to seem to be older than their rivals and invented vastly extended histories, even by such ploys as making human life stretch into centuries! Surely when interpreting myths as poetic history, the place to start is with history that we actually can confirm. That is not the Jewish scriptures. In actual age, the Greeks myths take precedence, despite the claims of Moses and Abraham.

Perhaps the story of Sisyphus itself is not very convincing. The similarities of the names may be purely coincidental and perhaps some later Hebrew scribe admired the Greek story and so inserted it into their history wholesale, changing only a few names here and there into more Hebrew sounding ones. However, while the story of Sisyphus may be inadequate to show who borrowed from whom, there are other Greek myths that more clearly do show the direction of the cultural flow. (Practically all of Greek mythology can be shown to have Hebrew equivalent.)

If this is true, then, on the principle I mentioned just now, the Jewish myths must be assumed to derive from the Greek ones, and the time it happened logically would be from the time of Alexander the Great. I have wondered on my pages whether there were Greeks among the colonists the Persians planted in Yehud in the fifth century, either then or soon after. Perhaps Greek captives from Xenophon’s long trek home were settled in Yehud. It would explain a lot of mysteries of Hebrew etymology, and perhaps some of the mythological mysteries that you highlight. The deliberate mythologizing of the Ptolemies also then happened, and, of course, Macedonians were settled in Samaria too. There are plenty of Greek connexions that might explain the identity of some Greeks and the Jews, but the main flow was from Greek to Canaan/Yehud. I would not contest, though, that some Canaanite myths passed from Phoenicia to Greece with the alphabet. The Greeks pay tribute to their neighbours through their myths rather as Genesis does, but it cannot be right to believe that Genesis is older just because it pretends to be.

The rest of the story is quite a bit more difficult to explain by means of Persian editing. Surely the Persians did not edit the Greek myths as well, do the Persians have a story of the Exodus that is anywhere as accurate as the story of Io? Is Mazda more like Moses than Hermes is?

It is a mistake to think that the Persians wrote the Jewish scriptures as we now have them. Their colonists set up the temple state and began with the law now called Deuteronomy. They then wrote an outline history based on the Assyrian king lists and correspondence to justify the law and colonial rule. Its basis was that the Canaanites had always been unfaithful to their God, and He had ended up sending them to exile as punishment. A remnant had remained true, and they had been allowed by God to return and set up the temple state. These were in fact the colonists, not particularly exiled Jews returning. The western enemy of the Persians in the middle of the fifth century when this happened was the Egyptians, and the myths accompanying the colonial state included the idea that the Jews had been freed from Egyptian bondage. The Persians aimed to have the Jews as allies against the Egyptians. All of this was officially brought by Ezra, who is the real historical Moses, but when he spoke of God—and he spoke in a strange and unknown language as the bible says—he spoke of Ahura Mazda. The Canaanite Israelites misheard or misunderstood this foreigner and thought he spoke of Aaron Mosha or Torah Mosha. Aaron is meaningless as a Hebrew name. Moses is the same. Torah was also an unknown word, but was interpreted as meaning law or decree, and later Aaron and Moses were declared to be brothers who brought this law.

None of this has anything to do with your ideas, but what it has to do with is what happened soon after. Alexander defeated the Persians and the Hellenistic era began. Then it was that the outline history provided by the Persians with its constant theme that the Canaanites were apostates to their true God was expanded into something closer to the modern Jewish scriptures by the Egyuptian Ptolemies, and their priests. These Ptolemies were, of course, Greeks and took their inspiration from the myths they had been educated by. This is when the Greeks wrote the biblical myths, suitably disguised, and altered more favourably towards Egypt to suit the new geopolitics of the Ptolemies. This is why I say that the structure of the Persian religion provided the base of Judaism, but the detail came from the Greek kings. Greek philosophy and thinking was separately influenced by the Persian religion when Persia became the superpower and rival of the Greeks in Asia Minor, and the western Mediterranean. That was as early as the fifth century when Cyrus annexed the Ionian greek cities, the clever and enterprising Greeks of the time.

The story of Io cannot be fully examined without first considering the myth of Prometheus. Modern mythographers have often suggested that we look at Prometheus, as a Greek “messianic” figure, and indeed, in a very literal sense, this may be true. (We have seen how the Greeks could have had a messianic figure.)

You have not given me this last bit of information, but the idea of a messiah came to the Jews from the Persians who had it as their Saoshyant as part of their theory of cosmic justice and history. The Persians introduced it to Yehud, and, if the Greeks had the same idea, they might have had it also from the Persians. Otherwise, we must look at the idea as being general among the Aryan tribes of northern Europe even before the Persians arrived, and therefore part of the original Greek theological scheme. I would bet it came from Persia.

In order to give a more accurate understanding, of how the ancients viewed the character, whom we know as Prometheus, (whose name possibly derives from a phrase, “Abram’s god”, “Brama-theos”, and has come to mean, like the concept of the name, “Jehovah-Jireh”, at Gen. 22:14, “providence”, or, “that which was provided”)

This derivation would support the Aryan idea I just mentioned. If Prometheus and Abraham and Brahma are all the same, it suggests that the name came with the Aryan invaders of Europe, the Ancient Near East and India. The same Aryans might have had a general idea of a saviour who was the high god or at least favoured by mankind. It seems to be solar and seasonal mythology. My guess would be that this saviour offered eternal life, and the cults associated with the idea were suppressed when the idea became restricted to gods and excluded from humanity. These heretical older gods were then banished to Tartarus.

Prometheus was the son of Iapetus, (like Atlas, who was his brother,) this genealogy makes him belong to the same generation as Zeus, who was the well known king of the gods, to the ancient Greeks. The importance of the Promethean role in classical mythology is often overlooked, but it is central to his theme, that it was he, after all, who with his sage and counsel, was responsible for Zeus’ gaining the kingdom of heaven from Kronos. During the Gigantomachy, (This is the Greek name for the “war of the giants”, in which Abraham participated, on the side of the giants, also known rabbinically as, “The War of the Four Kings Against the Five”.)

Perhaps you have explained this elsewhere in your book, but as it is, it is an assumption that appears suddenly and with no justification other than that it appeals to you. This chapter of Genesis seems to be part of an older work, but most of the allusions seem to be to Mesopotamian. The giants appear in the Book of Enoch as well as in the shape of the Nephilim. They could certainly be a memory of the Titans, but why should we think the Titans are a memory of the Nephilim? All of these books of Jewish Scripture are from the Hellenistic age.

Prometheus at first offered to help the Giants, but his help was little appreciated, and he turned to help his even less appreciative cousin, Zeus and his cohorts the Olympian gods. Prometheus insisted that Zeus enlist the aide of the previously banished masons of antiquity, the cannibalistic, Cyclopes, a move which sealed the victory for the gods. Prometheus surpassed all the gods in cunning and guile, he was very capable of ridiculing them, which he sometimes did. One of his most noteworthy accomplishments, was the creation of mankind out of clay, these men found themselves in a dispute with the gods over which part of an animal sacrifice should be kept by men, and which should be offered to the gods. It was decided that Prometheus, would be the mediator between gods and man, and settle this question of sacrifice once and for all. He did so by a fraud intended to favor mankind; he divided a sacrificial bull into two halves, (This may be in reference to a warped recollection of the episode at Gen. 15:10-17) and wrapped the choice, edible parts, in skin and guts, but the bones he covered with a convincing amount of fat. He then had Zeus choose one of the piles. The king chose the fat, as that looked best on the surface, and so was duped.

It seems to be the mythical reason for offering the fat to the flames, but the practical reason is pretty obvious. The fat burns, but the rest does not. The priests have the choice bits that the Gods do not take and the people have the rest. I understand that because fire was sacred to the Persians they did not roast their sacrifices but boiled them. Only the omentum, the fatty part of the intestines was offered to the flame. But doubtless this is an ancient practice and the myth might be similarly ancient.

Outraged at that insult, Zeus took fire, and all uses away from mankind and determined to wipe out the race. Prometheus would not allow this to happen, so he sneaked into heaven and stole a portion of fire from the lightning bolt of Zeus, and he carried it, hidden in a fennel stalk, back down to mankind. He then cautioned mankind to beware of Zeus, his rule, and all his ways. Because of this indignation, Zeus was now fully enraged at the champion of mankind. He ordered Hephaestos, (some say Hermes) to chain Prometheus to mount Caucasus, (the Promethean Golgatha) to hang, exposed to the elements, where a vulture was commissioned to gnaw at his liver daily, (the liver grew back each eve,) through a wound in his side. In this way, it is said that Prometheus suffers indefinitely for the benefit of all mankind.

Now then, Zeus would have left Prometheus in this predicament forever, except for the fact that he had acquired a curse (the messianic promise,) against himself, at the time that he usurped the Kingdom of Heaven from Kronos, so saying that one of his sons would surpass him. Zeus, more like an earthly king, (such as Nimrod, Pharaoh, or Herod,) than a god, did not know who this son, or his mother, was going to be, but Prometheus was a great prophet, he knew, and Zeus wanted to find out. Zeus promised to stop the punishment if Prometheus would only reveal the name, but Prometheus was silent in the face of his persecutor, choosing to suffer, (for the sake of man) and would not tell the secret, thus insuring the successful downfall of Zeus.

To the ancient Greeks, the savior of man was an enemy to god, but, their “god” was born, had usurped the Kingdom of Heaven, and was destined to be overthrown by a son who was yet to come. We are fortunate indeed that the story of Io, is linked to the story of Prometheus, (thank God for Aeschylus, “Prometheus bound”, c.470 BC.) because, while the story of Io was, certainly a Phoenician tale which was brought to Greece from the land of Canaan, (also called Phoenicia, and Israel) by the likes of Cadmus, who was a descendant of Io, and brought the Hebrew ( “Gephyraei”, so called, by Herodotus, Book 5, page 60) alphabet to Greece. But the story of Prometheus, with Iapetus, (the eponym of Cappadocia, from a Persian version, of the Latin form, Gepetto) and the Caucasus, would direct us toward the Southeastern end of the Black Sea. Although these two myths seem to come from diverse and distant locations, Aeschylus must have known something, because he has them as parts of the same story.

It was soon after Prometheus was sentenced and fixed to his lofty place of suffering, that Io, in the course of her wanderings, approached his mountain and talked with him. The story of how she got to this place, reveals much about Prometheus. The earthly wife of god was in bondage, so god sent his serpent stick carrying messenger, on eagle’s wings, to lead her out of her captivity. The messenger of god smote the head of her captor and delivered the Earthly wife of god. Did he lead her directly home? No, this is when she went on her famous wanderings, “the wandering Io”. There was a mystifying cloud cover, a gadfly plague, and a miraculous water crossing. She gave birth to the “Egyptian” calf god, “Epaphus”. (Apis) But, most telling of all, she approached the special mountain where the creator of mankind was bound to voluntarily suffer for us all, and talked to him. Prometheus told Io that she could expect the savior to be born to her, as one of her descendants, thirteen generations hence. After all this she finally returned to her homeland, Phoronea. Sound weirdly familiar? It should, because Phoronea was Hebron, and the “myth” of Io’s deliverance, is the story of the Exodus. How the story of the Exodus could remain hidden in this Greek myth all this time without being noticed really defies an explanation.

It defies me! How is the wandering of the cow goddess the exodus? Presumably you are personifying Israel as Io, but it is not convincing. The other way round is more convincing—that Israel wandered awhile locally in Sinai, copying in microcosm what Io did on a bigger map.

And why these Greek myths have been preserved for nearly 3000 years for us to read today, is mystery enough. Even more intriguing to learn, is the fact that the entire genealogy of the Greek savior, all thirteen generations are known to this day! (as if it were the thirteen generations from Abraham to David!) Can any other “myths” claim to pay such attention to the details of lineage? Check it out, Heracles was the son of, Amphitryon the son of, Alcaeus the son of, Perseus the son of, Danae the daughter of, Acrisius the son of, Abas the son of, Hypermnestra the daughter of, Danaus the son of, Belus the son of, Libya the daughter of, Epaphus the son of, Io the daughter of Inachus. Why such meticulous genealogical record keeping, for these fairy tales?

Again we have the chicken and egg situation. The Greeks were fond of their genealogies long before the Jews, in my reading of things, since Judaism began with Ezra, who was a few decades later than Herodotus. So, the habit came to Judah from the Greeks.

I included Inachus just to give us a good, biblical, starting point, because the giant Inachus, and the sons of Inachus, (called the Inachids, in the Greek myths) were the founding family of Phoronea, just as the giant Anak, and the sons of Anak, (called the Anakim, in the Bible) were the founding family of Hebron. Thus the giant Inachus is to be identified with the giant Anak. (in light of the foregoing, the parents of Inachus, Tethys and Okeanus, represent plausibly, Heth and Canaan.) Inachus had at least two children, a boy, Phoroneus, whom Phoronea was named after, and a girl, Io. The name Phoroneus must be a shibboleth of the name Ephron, whom I assume Hebron to be named after. A further clue for this identification lays in the fact that Phoroneus was famous, in Greek myth for trying to get nomadic peoples to settle down and live in towns, he was a well known “civilizer”. The biblical Ephron tried the same thing with the nomadic Abraham. When the Hebrew patriarch came to Ephron, (the Hittite) at Hebron, looking for a family grave site, all he wanted was a cave, but Ephron made Abraham buy an entire section of the city. This sharing of ownership in a city, gave Abraham’s family a kind of royal status there, but no doubt, made them responsible for taxation as well. The Anakim are not called Hittites in the Bible, but it is logical to assume. The Bible does say that the Israelites were largely of Hittite extraction, which leads us back to the sister of Phoroneus, Io.

Genesis is, if anything, later than the rest of the five books now called the Pentateuch, though it purports to describe the earliest times. It is later than the third century, either at the very end of it, or in Maccabean times. The original Pentateuch, I would say logically included Joshua, but when Genesis was added as late as it was, Joshua had to drop out because the Pentateuch was already a name for the five books of Torah. It could not be made into a Hexateuch. The Bablyonian myths were probably already mixed among other books and were abstracted and put together with with romances newly composed such as that of Joseph. This redactor will have used the Greek myths as background to his creativity.

The story of Io concerns the founding families of Phoronea. The Greek myths say, that “Phoronea” was the name of the place before it was changed, (at some unspecified date,) to Argos. But Argolis in Greece, was founded by the Anakim from Hebron, who were expelled by Caleb, in the days of Joshua, for worshipping the “queen of Heaven”, Hera. (Lat. “Juno”, Phoenician “Ino”) The People of Argolis brought the stories of Hebron with them as they went to colony in Greece, they called this colony “Argos”, after the son of Hera, Argus Panoptes. (he was a personification of the “law” of Hera.)

I do not get this. When did it happen, and what have you to show it?

According to the myth, there was a contest between Hera and Poseidon, (Apsu-Adon, “lord of the abyss” he was a very jealous god, who often contested against the local, deity, a goddess usually, demanding the exclusive devotion of the inhabitants. The Athenians also, had to vote for either Athena or Poseidon, who wouldn’t share his adoration. He was the “Earth shaker”, the flood, and the drought, were his instruments. But, for all his Yahweh like attributes, he was very Dagon like too. This mixture was the result of a mixture between his main worshippers, Danite and Philistine.) over who should be worshipped by the People of the new colony, Phoroneus chose the queen of Heaven, and thus the place was named for her son. All the stories about the city, while it was still called Phoronea, actually took place back in Hebron, before the Hera worshipers were expelled, but, these Argolians retained those memories as their founding myths. And these were just the first wave of emigrants from Phoenicia to reach Argos, with these stories, for only a few generations after the Anakim were expelled, the Danites followed.

I thought the sea people of whom the Philistines were a part, and perhaps the Danites too, came from the Aegean into the Levant. So, any myths to have been taken would have been taken from Greece to Judah.

In Greece the Danites were known as, “Danaans”, the Greeks say that the Danaans came to the city of Argos and demanded their portion of royalty there. They claimed to be descendants of Io and therefore members of the royal family. (it does seem reasonable that, as descendants of Abraham, they could have pressed their partial ownership of Hebron, the parent city, as a “legal” claim to royalty over the colony, but think of the antiquity of the story, which must have been necessary for it to include this detail.) They had been chased from the land of Aegyptus, (the Jacobite) by their brothers, the sons of Aegyptus. To accomplish this emigration, they are said to have invented the keeled ship, which enabled them to sail over the deep seas, and make their escape to Argos.

What colour were the Greeks? We see them as white marble statues only, and assume they were Teutonic looking. Were they black or brown or red? I have always assumed they were part of the Aryan mass movements from the steppes of Euroasia, but you think they were Phoenicians, so they would have been red, Athene is supposed to be the Libyan goddess, so they would have been brown or black. Does anybody know?

The Danites are a band of rovers, they were not satisfied with the size of their allotment around Zorah and Estahol, so they defied the priesthood of Phinehas, appointed a Levitical priesthood of their own, (directly descended from Moses, not Aaron) and set out to found new lands. First they went up north, and, with the apparent approval, or at least acquiescence of the Sidonians and the Upper Manassites, they took the city of Laish, (this city was very close to the Sidonian capitol at the time, a place called Hazor,) killed all the Laishites, moved in, and called the place Dan. They also held the seaport of Joppa, and it must have been their friendly relations with the seafaring Sidonians that allowed them to build a fleet of ships there. Then, in the days of Deborah, war broke out between the sons of Jacob, and the Sidonians. Treaty obligations, agreed to by the Danites, called for a mutual non aggression pact, with the Sidonians. (the Sidonians had already upheld their end of the bargain when they withheld retaliation against the Danites at the taking of Laish.) When the sons of Jacob threatened the Danites for their neutrality in the war, in accordance with the “Song of Deborah”, the Danites, “lived in ships”. These then, were the Danaans, who “fled” in their keeled ships, from their brothers, the sons of “Aegyptus”, (the Jacobite) to live with the Inachids at Argos, in the land of what would come to be called, “like Canaan”. (Mica+Cana, Mycenae)

Where do you get all this from? Dan was apparently a city when Abraham came wandering, unless, as believers have to claim, the Holy Ghost was being slack as ever, and he had allowed the name Laish to be substituted by Dan at a later date. What historical evidence is there for Dan? Again, if Dan and the Greek Danaans are connected, it seems the Greeks came to the Levant rather than the reverse. Dan is inland and can hardly be a city noted for ships of any kind, and if the Danites were supposed to have migrated there from the coast, then they begin to look more like the Sea People who seem to have been Greeks, or from the Aegian. As you know the Greeks were the Danaoi in 800 BC. Is the Irish myth of the People of the Goddess Danaan related to this mythic interpretation?

Neither does the Saga end here, because then the sons of Aegyptus went to Argolis, following after the delinquent Danaans, to bring them back and punish them for their treachery. But it took them a bit longer to get to there, leap frogging from port to port along the coasts, in their less seaworthy barges. By the time the sons of Aegyptus arrived at Argos, the Danaans were already established, with a degree of royal power, and the Argolian army was ready to defend them. Now the sons of Aegyptus, a mere posse in the face of an army, could not enforce a return upon the Danaans, and because they were told not to return empty handedly, they quit their homeland back in Israel, and resolved to remain in Argos. The sons of Aegyptus sued for their portion of the royalty at Argolis on the same basis that the Danaans did, and they were recognized as well.

It is all fanciful to me, and is just offered as a sort of biblical interpretation of the Greek myth with no other support. Perhaps you have it elsewhere in your book, but it is not convincing as it stands.

Thus it was, that the original waves of immigration to Argolis in Greece, the forefathers of the Mycenaean civilization, were the sons of Anak, and the Jacobites, but, of these, predominantly the Danites, so much so, that the Peloponnesian Greeks, are often called by the general term, Danaans. So far we’ve only covered the few short generations between Joshua and Deborah, many other similar waves of Greek immigration by the descendants of Io, were to follow.

Now here again you speak with certainty about Joshua and Deborah, yet the very existence of Joshua the son of Nun is most doubtful, and Deborah was probably a goddess of some sort and was never a real human being. I note that you challenge current dating by questioning the absurd dark age that currently has to be supposed but was utterly unknown by the ancients. My view is that this dark age is an artefact of inserting biblical mythology, including these that you mention here, into real history.

However, before we go to the next wave, we need to answer a question; How did Egypt come to be named after Jacob?!? The simple answer is that the Greeks had bad geography, but that answer is not complete, there were reasons for their confusion. From the middle of the eighth century before Christ, there began a series of geological cataclysms, related to the Earth shock of which Amos spoke, in the days of Uzziah.

What evidence is there that there ever was an Uzziah, other than the bible?

These were of a devastating magnitude, and included the entire globe, (the stars shook!) the delicate coastal areas of Greece were especially hard hit. This was followed up with an invasion of Greece by the ruder Dorians. The higher culture, and central authority, of the previous Mycenaean civilization was practically wiped out. (So great was the black out of information from this period, that even today modern historians assign a non-existent 500 year “dark age”, to this era.)

I do not think there was any particular black out of information, though you are right that the dark age is phony. At present we are forced into accepting a gap of several centuries when nothing happened at all, then the civilization recovered in the very state it had when the dark age began. Peter James has written a good book on this called Centuries of Darkness. He is being ignored, and even he cannot see that the cause of the dark age is biblical chronology, but his factual arguments seem sufficient to cause a long look from the experts. They do not of course, and just patronise the questionners when they bother about them at all. We put up with all this obfuscation because too many people insist the biblical account is infallible because they think God himself wrote it. It is not an argument that sensible people should accept. The 400 years from the seige of Troy to Homer are mainly spurious. The 350 year gap between the Merneptah stele and the kingdom of Omri is also mainly an artefact created to fit in Moses, Joshua, the Judges, Saul, David and Solomon. All of them are mythical. This latter gap shoves Egyptian chronology back into the past and opens up dark ages in other places.

The origins of the exotic People or places heard of in the myths, were lost and became open to speculation. Thus, while we know that the Jew wandered to the land of the Jacobite, the myths have Io wandering to the land of Aegyptus. And, while we know that the Danites had their falling out with the Jacobites, the myths have the Danaans fleeing from their brothers, the sons of Aegyptus.

How do we KNOW these things? It is because the bible says so, right? Wrong!

We notice the consistent error, the earlier myths had it right, but the later speculation misplaced the name of Jacob on the land of the Nile. If it seems incredible to think that Egypt was named after Jacob, (now the controversies over weather the Copts, and Gypsies, are named after Jacob or Egypt is over, both! Also, do we call the calf god, “of Egypt”, because of the Greeks? Perhaps we should change that to, “Jacob’s calf god”.) then imagine this, a later wave of immigration caused Europe to be named after Jeroboam I, the first king of the northern ten tribes of Israel. This is how.

I fear that Jeroboam I is the same as Jeroboam II simply set back in time. The Assyrians had no doubt that the founding king of Samaria was Omri and they called the country after him for several generations.

Europe is named after a descendant of Io’s who was called, “Europa”. The myth of Europa can be found in any book of Greek Mythology, and has been well known for almost 3000 years. Can anything new be learned from it? No, but oddly enough, we can still learn something old, from it. Let us begin by examining the name itself. The name Europa, is a feminized form of the same Hebrew name that comes to us through Biblical sources, in the masculine Latin form, “Jeroboam”. I learned this, when I compared two maps of the same city in Syria, one had the city labeled, “Jerobulos”, while the other had it as, “Europolis”. It occurred to me that this was a perfectly reasonable transliteration, and that both names were one and the same.

This is interesting but the structure of the names is reversed—polis is “city” in the Greek rendering but Jeru is, in the Hebraic form. The Greek “wide city” seems to be a Hebrew “The Lord’s City” if Bulos is Belos, already partly Graecized it seems. In what form was the city generally known, so that we can guess whether Jerobulos is a Semitic form of Europolis or the opposite. Perhaps it does not matter to you but all of this depends on what depends on what, determined objectively and not by assuming biblical precedence.

King Jeroboam, the first king of the northern ten tribes of Israel, is mentioned often in the Bible, unfortunately his name usually follows after the phrase, “the sins of.”.. This is because Jeroboam was infamous for reintroducing the worship of god in the form of a bull, and calves were set up as images of god’s savior, these constituted “the sins of Jeroboam”. This tendency toward tauropomorphism, began at the Exodus, when Israel’s agent of deliverance, (legends say it was Michael the Archangel) was overwhelmingly agreed, by the very witnesses of the event, to have been a calf, of whom they built a golden image. This was an Idol, not of God, but of the son of god, and they sang these words as they danced around it, “This is your god oh Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt”.

Such archaeological evidence as there is supports the idea that Yehouah was worshipped by the Canaanites in the form of a bull. No one had the idea that gods should not be pictured at all, let alone as animals, until the Persians introduced it to the Jews. The Persian High God was never pictured, the symbol of him being usually a picture of the king—his earthly representative—rising above a loop or disc with wings. This Persian God acted on earth in other forms. He was a Holy Spirit, apparently the same as Mithras, and Mithras is transferred into Judaism as the archangel Michael, a solar angel. Any pre-Persian myths would have shown the Canaanites worshipping the bull, whereas later, God could not be represented thus, and to have done so was an example of the apostasy of the people. The aniconic nature of the Jewish God is further evidence of His origins.

Israel was regularly personified as a maiden, (the Virgin of Israel) who was beloved by God and betroth to Him. But the Israel of Jeroboam, went, whoring after foreign gods. It becomes obvious that, to some, she was known by a feminized version of King Jeroboam’s name. The evidence for this identification is overwhelming. Europa got carried away adoring god in the form of a bull as well, and both the Virgin Israel and the maiden Europa, were from Phoenicia. The resulting, “loss among the nations”, occurred in both cases, from the same place, and for the same reason. Does it surprise us to think that this story, (which included a promise by God to his People who were dispersed amongst the nations,) may have, in ancient times, received a wider distribution, than to be stored away on some Temple scroll and only be known, eventually, through the Bible? In fact the story was far famed, as we might have known.

Once again, it is all a question of when Israel became personified as a maiden and the spouse of God. The Canaanite God had a spouse, as few people except fundamentalists will now deny. She was “His Asherah”, and was perfectly nomal in the ancient polytheistic systems. Only when God was defined as acting alone, when the Persians introduced it, was Yehouah left without a spouse, and at some point therefter His devotion to the people was depicted instead as a marital relationship of God with His Land and People, Israel, personified as a woman. It could not have preceded the fifth century, and you and others are only persuaded by the bible, a history book that apparently preceded Herodotus by a millennium but no one noticed, so that Herodotus became the father of history when it should have been Moses, or if not him then Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah or the court historian of David. Herodotus is more evidence that the Jewish scriptures never existed when Herodotus started reporting history—he started it!

The Greek myths tell us that Europa had a son who ruled over the Island of Crete, his name was Minos. If Europa be from Jeroboam, and the Cretans spoke Western Semitic, (the same language as the land of Canaan) which they did, then I’ll bet “Minos”, is the same name as “Manasseh”. In fact one wonders indeed, if there wasn’t a bit of confusion between the stories of the Cretan, King Minos, and the later Judean, King Manasseh. How many other kings, from this same area, with the same name, were famous for sacrificing youths to a bull headed god? (Minotaur, Manasseh’s Torah? is Manasseh an alternate version of the name Moses? as in Judges, chapter 18, Verse 30, if so, perhaps the Minotaur was blasphemously named for the Law of Moses.) Thus it seems likely that the “Minoan” civilization was named for the son of Joseph, Manasseh.

I cannot buy this. I could accept that the two names had some common Semitic root, but I cannot see why it has to mean that Minos was named after Manasseh. The reverse would be more likely, the chancellor of Egypt naming a son after an impressive foreign dynasty he knew. But since the Joseph romance was written over a thousand years later, it does not apply. You will not stop believing the Jewish myths take precedent merely on the grounds that they say so.

This series of coincidences about Europa is impressive enough without mentioning this other weird point, which was the fact that Israel was prophesied to be regathered by an heir to the throne, and returned to her homeland in the last days. (Isa. 11;10-12) But, this famous promise, must be cited here as evidence that Europa is Israel, because this hopeful prophecy is also coincidental to the “myth”. The Greek myth asserts that the true heir to the throne was sent to find the lost Europa, and he was told not to return until he could bring her back. He didn’t return, and he hasn’t found her yet, down to this very day. (unless he’s reading this, in which case he is perhaps finding her just now.)

Perhaps he is President Bush or Tony Blair.

Although the story of Io must have been in existence in one form or another, since the Exodus, (parts of her story belong to the days of Abraham,

There you go again. It has to be proper method surely to establish that your belief—that the bible is true and accurately dated—is itself a true fact before you accept it as so. Once you start to do it, and begin to realise that very much of the bible is very weakly founded historically, then biblical precedence and accuracy cannot be maintained.

but most of it, is the story of Hermes Argiophontes, her deliverer, who plays the role of Moses at the Exodus) there is no doubt that the version of her story which has come down to us, did not receive its final form, until after her descendant Cadmus came to Greece. We know this, because the story incorporates the use of the Alphabet within its body, for Io was able to spell her name in the sand with her cow hoof. (This part of the story relies upon the fact that the Greek “I” was just a “Jot”, and their letter “o”, resembles a hoof print.) She was thereby identified when she returned home after her extensive “wanderings”. This detail limits the Greek antiquity of Io’s story, until about 850 BC. when the Greeks first began to use the Alphabet. But, this was a Phoenician story that was brought to Greece at a later date, generations after these events actually occurred, and the Phoenicians knew about the founding of Argos already for years back home, because, they were Israelites and the city of Argos was a colony of Hebron, also it was they who had an alphabet with which Io could write her name using her hoof, the Hebrew alphabet. No one doubts that the Hebrew alphabet was used in Greece, but it seems to me, calling it “Phoenician”, is a bit misleading. If Moses, famous for his writings, wrote anything, then it is logical to assume him to be the oldest known user of this alphabet.

You realize that you are not actually saying anything here, but simply trying to mislead a reader who is not on his or her guard. It is a conditional, and the condition is most unlikely to be valid, and it simply is not logical that an Egyptian prince would write his memoirs in a foreign language and script. Slaves would not have had a native culture—certainly not after centuries of slavery—and they would not have been able to write at all unless the Egyptian master had taught them for their own purposes. They would not have taught them Phoenician. Moses doubtless would have been literate but had been brought up in Egyptian.

The Greeks, in keeping with the identification of Moses with Hermes, (the serpent stick carrying messenger of god who delivers god’s earthly wife from her bondage,) credit Hermes as the inventor of the alphabet.

I repeat that, if your identification of Io with Israel is correct, then it was made by the ingenuity of the priests and scholars of the Egyptian Greek kings when they helped the Jerusalem priesthood to westernize their scriptures. They might have made these associations that you claim, though I think they are pretty subtle.

Cadmus is accredited with bringing the alphabet of Hermes, from Phoenicia to Greece, but, not until about 850 BC. its easy to dismiss all myths in a group as fairy tales, but Cadmus was not a god, he was a man who is famous for doing something which really happened, others who lived within a few hundred years of him speak of Cadmus as an actual historic personage. He came to Greece with a colony and was considered to be the founder of Thebes, a quite well known city in Boeotian Greece, which was even called “Cadmea”, after him. While there seems to have been a real Cadmus, it is, as if a very familiar religious doctrine, has gotten attached to him. Because the role of Cadmus in the story about the return of Europa, foreshadows a type of Christ, he is made to perform a series of tasks, which are obviously designed to fulfill many key Messianic prophecies. These tasks were, perhaps, more “expected”, of him than were actually “performed” by him. He destroys the serpent by transfixing it to a tree, thus, “lifting it up”, and “nailing it to the tree”. The transfixed serpent, with its triple tongue, and its triple row of teeth, would appear, to a Christian, as the law (with its triple format, commandments, judgments, and ordinances) fulfilled. In this act, the myths have Cadmus winning a nation, a kingdom, and a bride. In reading about his wedding banquet to his new bride Harmonia, which all the gods attended, one cannot help but be reminded, of the long awaited, “marriage feast of the Lamb”. The nation he won was of “sown men”, the “Sparti”, which grew from the destroyed serpent’s teeth, which were scattered upon the earth. Leaving the Sparti in Greece, Cadmus goes to the Northwest, into Europe proper, where they make him King, in the land of the Enchelians, (Angels? Angles, or English?) where, in the end, he and Harmonia, never really die but are instead Miraculously translated. The Sparti remained in Greece, where they left many descendants, and worshipped Cadmus as a hero, with shrines. One famous, such hero shrine of Cadmus, was located in the Greek nation of Sparta, on the Laconian coast, and was maintained by the Spartans, (sown ones) even down to the days of the Jewish high priests Onias, and Jonathan. As reported by Josephus, and recorded in Rabbinical writings, Onias and the Spartans, wrote to each other, and both recognized the Spartans as lost Israelites. If only the modern Jewish leaders had the faith, to see with an open heart, as Onias apparently did! Only then will they begin to find the vast multitudes of Israelites, who are sifted amongst the Gentiles of today.

Though it seems that Syrians or Phoenicians are behind the story of Cadmus, it was an early colony and it is hard for me to imagine that it was still remembered centuries later. It seems more likely that there is in this the clue that Greeks were among the colonists of Yehud, or among settlers put there later. The military colony settled in Samaria was said to have been Macedonians, but that might have simply reflected that they were Greeks in Alexander’s Macedonian army. Perhaps they really were Spartans. There are certainly mysteries here, but most if not all of them come from late times. It requires the bible to be seen as late itself having been redacted after Alexander’s time, but even the earliest form was only fifth century, bar a few Mesopotamian myths and possibly a few Canaanite ones.

I can only imagine you are a bible believer, writing to impress your fellow believers, but it has never been good historical or textual method to assume one set of texts are preferable to others on religious grounds and no other. It has been a huge obstacle to scholarship in the whole of this area that believers require no evidence let alone proof of their preferred texts. Whatever the final solution to these mysteries is, the least examination of the Jewish myths show that they cannot be what they claim. They are believed on faith, and all reason has to be suspended or, worse, bent to fit belief. Your explorations into these mythologies could be valuable in demonstrating the lateness of the bible, but you insist on having the bible as primary, so I cannot see that ultimately you will be proved correct. You would have to show that biblical history is believable without faith to succeed. It simply is not, and in many instances is demonstrably false or vanishingly unlikely. An occasional infelicity can be understood in old works but not pages and pages of them. Wise believers admit quite openly that the scriptures were not written as history but to buttress faith, and once they perhaps did. In the modern world, those who believe on faith alone had better take care. They are obviously easily duped.

I just broke off to watch a BBC religious documentary on the Flood Myth. Every detail of the biblical account is shown to be impossible before the myth is then reconstructed, presumably so as not to offend believers, supposedly to show its more realistic origins in Sumeria. Whether believers consider this better than nothing is doubtful, but it certainly is not the biblical myth, and we must suppose the Holy ghosts was yet again asleep on the job.

Anyway, I have not changed my mind that your parallels and analogies are fascinating, and you ought to have an interested audience. Doubtless you hope to have the whole of the faith audience too, but if you do that, you will be simply using your skill for exploitation. True scholars are satisfied with the truth but not biblical scholars. They have to uncover God’s truth, namely what they already know from the bible.

Thank you for spending so much of your time and efforts corresponding with me. It must seem like a colossal waste to you who, gets nothing from me, while I on the other hand, am able to hone my argument against your stone. At least you should know that I greatly appreciate it. I have always learned by the motto, “Once a mind has been stretched to fit a new idea, it never again resumes its original form”.

A discussion is two sided and I hope the benefits go both ways. I am glad that you are able to take criticism graciously. Some might have been offended because frankness seems unwelcome these days, but honest criticism must be frank. It does not, of course, mean the criticism is necessarily right, but at least you can judge for yourself and respond to it appropriately. You cannot do that when the criticism is muted.

Your criticisms are true that I rely too heavily upon the biblical sources, when in fact I would be happy to simply place the stories of the Hebrews in a side by side comparison with the stories of the Greeks and let the reader decide why they are alike. I think that I just get carried away sometimes with the conclusion that there must be some original truth that is at least as old as the Greek myths which the biblical stories were based upon. I thought that I could convince you with the identification of the wandering Io as the wandering Jew, but I was wrong. You have made me realize that my thesis still needs a lot of work.

If you want to keep it as it is, then yes, but my suggestion to you was that your thesis is valid but the wrong way round. The Canaanites in the Palestinian hills never wandered anywhere like Io. They were there from the Bronze Age at least, so the myth of the exodus must have been invented on some other basis. Perhaps Io was it.

While you admit that Yahweh was worshipped as a bull and that His people were (however later) personified as his earthly wife, you have a blind eye when it comes to recognizing the same symbolism in the Greek story of Io, even with the serpent stick carrying messenger of god sent to deliver her from her captivity on eagles wings You were not moved even with the knowledge that she had a miraculous water crossing, and approached the mountain of man’s creator and talked to him. You find many general similarities between the Bible and the myths, but will admit that nothing this specific could be true. Of course, if you were to admit that there was some original truth behind these intricately corresponding Greek and Hebrew motifs, then it would ruin your theory that there can be no truth at all in the Bible.

I do not say there is no truth in the bible. I say repeatedly that there is truth in the bible but no one knows what it is until confirmation is found. Very little has been confirmed, especially pertaining to the myths that precede Omri, the first proven king of Samaria. The truth I speak of is historical truth. I am quite happy to accept that there is allegorical or mythical truth in the bible too, but again, no one now knows what it was meant to be, and so interpretations of it are just arbitrary. I have agreed with you that there are similarities between some of the Jewish scripture and the Greek myths, as you are trying to show, but you want it to be from scripture to myth. Nothing validates that direction, and plenty points the other way. That is my criticism of you.

I’m sorry but I must take issue with one of your arguments, or rather rhetorical tactics that you used against me. You painted me as a believer, as if I could be dismissed with the rest of the kooks. (You even kidded me about the holy ghost writing the Bible, of course I don’t think any such thing, but if I did, it occurs to me that I may have considered this to be a mean spirited blasphemy). I don’t belong to any church or group of so called “believers”, neither do I know of anyone who believes the same things that I do, so I can’t be painted with that brush. As far as I can tell the so called believers are in the majority, and my beliefs are more like yours (eccentric) than like theirs. I am not a “believer”, at least as you would define one, I don’t think that the Bible is inspired, nor incorruptible, nor unaltered, I find rather, that it is full of inconsistencies.

I am glad to hear it. I only made the suggestion because you seemed so attached to the primacy of the Old Testament, a fault which puzzled me in view of your otherwise thorough approach. The obvious explanation is that you are a believer. I never apologise to my own critics for using my head to make deductions. I think that is what it is for, but faced with additional evidence, I am ready to admit a deduction was wrong. That is the proper scientific approach.

I don’t trust the conventional biblical chronology, in fact I find it to be inconsistent with its own genealogy. I believe that the Egyptian sojourn only lasted three generations, I don’t trust that the Period of wandering lasted a full forty years, and I wonder how the period of the Judges could have been longer than three generations as well.

Well, without some evidence to draw these conclusions, I do not understand why you hold them. In fact, if the time spent in Egypt were genuine and lasted only three generations, I cannot see how the Israelites could have become so massive an ethnos to trouble the Egyptians at all. But there is little point in going on about it. There is negligible historical evidence for it, and I only say negligible rather than no because the myth has some plausible aspects, such as that Semites did serve the Egyptians, as did many others such as Nubians, Libyans, Greeks and so on. It does not amount to a verification of the bible stories. It only shows that they were invented in context.

However I do not simply judge the entire Bible as completely fanciful as you appear to do. You seem to reject anything biblical, based solely upon the fact that its source was the Bible, while you argue that anyone who believes that a biblical story may have some truth to it, does so only because its source was the Bible.

This is true to the degree that I explained above. The bible is not reliable. It is not that there is no true history in it, but when a source is proven to be unreliable, no respectable historian uses it without carefully checking what it says. Indeed, when there are political reasons why a text might have been written, these reasons have to be used to qualify the text. That is, in my view, what has happened to the bible.

I take great pains to search the myths of the neighboring nations to come up with stories that seem to corroborate those that we find in the Bible. I consider these to be corroborating evidence in favor of believing some of the things at least that are in the Bible.

You are saying the same as me, except that you refer to myths and I speak of history. When it comes to myths, I concur but I then cannot understand why the direction of flow is not plain to you. Egypt, and the Euphrates and Tigris civilzations are both much older than the Jews are. The Babylonian myths in the bible are dated long before the Israelites ever existed historically, and even longer before there was any obvious occasions for the myths to be transferred wholesale.

I don’t believe in the Exodus simply because the Bible says so, other peoples tell very similar stories and I am forced to conclude that there must be something to it.

If you have these stories of the Israelite exodus from these other nations, I should be glad to know of them. If you mean Io, I cannot accept your identification of Io as the Jews historically. I would need more proof of that. On the other hand that the myth of wandering has been applied to the Jews to invent their supposed exodus, then the story is not historical at all but is an adaptation of an earlier myth. That is what the historical evidence suggests, the biblical writings only emerging late in this historical timescale.

Perhaps I am being too harsh on you, surely you believe that there was a Nebuchadnezer, a Sennacherib, a Merodachbaladan, a Hezekiah, an Ahikar Grand Vizier of Assyria, a Shalmanezer, a Jehu, an Ahab a Ben Hadad, a Mesha of Moab, a Hazael, and even one as ancient as a Balaam the son of Beor, for although being biblical characters, these are also attested to by extra-biblical or archaeological sources.

Balaam is dated about the same time as the others and all of them are late on the biblical timescale. The Assyrians were an orderly people who kept sound records, and those will have been the sources of these people in the bible when it was written—in my view initially by the Persians. Despite the biblical interest in prophecy, no one has ever been able to show it is a genuine ability, so prophecy can be discarded as an historical explanation of anything. The bible cannot have been written before the events it records, and it records things into the second century BC.

Even if you distrust the writing of the Bible you must admit that those writers tried hard to fit their “fanciful” tales into what was thought to be true history by those who they wrote for.

They did indeed. Had they not done so the bible would be obviously fraudulent. But Horatio Hornblower is a convincing character set in a convincing time and place, but is utterly fictional. There is some sort of arrogance that exists particularly among believers that people less than 3000 years ago could not do what we now do with a pen and some black ink. It is merely fifty or so lifetimes ago! The bible was invented as the founding legends of the Persian colony in Yehud. It had to be historically convincing, but did not have to be true. Indeed, it was meant to be false from the outset, because the returners or colonists were people without a history once they were settled in Yehud.

Can we glean nothing of value from the Bible without being judged with incredulity?

Absolutely not. In a compilation of many longish books, only a few events and characters have been established, and all of those after the ninth century, mainly after the eighth century. The exile happens in the sixth century! All that went before has simply never been found, even when it ought to have provided plentiful evidence. The Christians are fond of the mantra absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It saves them from embarrassments like all this where there is no evidence, but it is false. To argue that a massive and massively wealthy empire existed for about seventy years in Palestine but just has left no evidence at all is madness. There is no unequivocal evidence at all that Solomon, or his father existed.

Another of your arguments boils down to is this; I show you my evidences for believing that the biblical stories predate the Ptolemies, but you dismiss my evidence with this reason; there is no evidence that the biblical stories predate the Ptolemies. I wouldn’t count on that kind of logic for long if I were you.

Why not? It is exactly how historical dates are set. As I have said before, Moses wrote his memoirs in considerable detail before 1200 BC, but no one noticed for at least 900 years, and Herodotus was given the accolade of the first historian.

Another of your arguments, I answer this way; You rely too much upon the Persians for the source of the Hebrew religion. Surely you know the Hebrews are older than the Persians.

How do you know this? You are believing the bible again. If you are speaking of the apiru who appear in the Egyptian writings, there is still no sound evidence that apiru = Hebrew. The sensible time when the word Hebrew was used of the local people of the Levant was precisely when the Persians took over, though it could have been used on the same basis by the Assyrians.

Any similarity of religious ideas between the two groups is much easier to explain as the newer group borrowing from the older one, and not the other way around.

If we knew that the Hebrews had an ethical monotheism before the Persians I would agree with you, but the only such evidence comes from a very late and unreliable work. It is the bible.

The Persians are not mentioned in the book of Genesis, not even in the table of nations. The table of nations was obviously copied from the Assyrian chronicles of about 700 BC. I say this because, this was the only time when the Cimmerians and the Musku (Gomer and Meshech), who were just then mentioned as coming onto the historical scene for the first time, could have been included, but, it was long before there was such a thing as the Persians, whom the Assyrians don’t even seem to have known. Of course the waning Assyrians of those days did chase the rebellious people of Bit Yakin into Elam, and wiped out the Elamites as well, before they themselves were defeated and “disappeared” from history about 600 BC, without mentioning the Persians, by that name, at all. The table of nations do mention the Medes (Madai) who were later associated with the Persians, and the Assyrians were well familiar with them.

You are wrong about this. As you say, the Madai are mentioned there, and the Persians and Medes were always linked together and either name or both used of them. Daniel called Darius, Darius the Mede. Moreover the Assyrian name for Persia seems to have been Arpachshad which also appears.

The Assyrians had completely defeated the Medes just before they deported Israel about 720 BC. the Bible contends that the house of Israel was deported into those same “cities of the Medes”. Herodotus tells us that the Medes of that time were scattered and left without a government at their defeat by the Assyrians. Herodotus, as he describes the renaissance of these defeated peoples, further places the founding of Ecbatana, the then new capital of the Medes, at about 710 BC. You may say that it was the influence of the Persians, that made the Jews include in their Bible, the note about the house of Israel being deported into the cities of the Medes, in that case the Persians must have admired those Israelites quite a bit because their first king, Cyrus the Great, was descended from those Medes.

Well 2 Kings says it in a single but repeated passage, where it actually mantions places in Syria more explicitly. It is the sort of thing that went on then, and my opinion is that the “return” of the Jews from “exile” is another example of it. It is merely speculation that Cyrus was descended from Israelites, and seems quite unlikely to me.

The book of Tobit, which purports to be a record from the pre-Persian, Assyrian years, and from which we also learn the story of Ahikar , makes the Purveyor of the Medes to be an Israelite at this very same time, and also makes the cities of the Medes to be full of Israelites in his days, we find two of these cities mentioned therein by name Ecbatana and Rages.

You rightly say “purports”, the book being again of much later composition—third or second century. It was not written in Iran but probably Egypt.

I looked up “Zoroaster” in the Encyclopedia Americana and found out that he was born in Rages in the year 660 BC. and that he lived 88 years, during this time he reorganized the Magian priests who then became associated with him as his priesthood. So here is a guy who was born, within 65 years of the Israelite deportation, into a city that was possibly full of Israelites, and the religion of the, still later yet, Persians eventually became named after him. Now Herodotus who didn’t mention Zoroaster, says that these Magi were originally a tribe from the land of the Medes, and that it was they who manipulated the birth of Cyrus the Great, the first king of the Persians, by reinterpreting natural events, (such as the king’s dream), into a prediction of his advent, and building up expectations. Thus, Zoroaster was alive and in control of the Magi at the time of the birth of Cyrus, or should we call him “Project Cyrus”, for Cyrus was born within a year or two of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezer.

Now, I personally do not think that Isaiah’s book could have been completed before the Babylonian captivity, but it does say in the book of Isaiah that Cyrus was raised up to be a Messiah for the captive Jews of Babylon, I detect a bit of the mechanisms of Zoroaster in the “hand of Yahweh” in this case. Up until the days of Smerdis and the Magiphonia the Magi had a large influence over the kings of Persia, they could have been responsible for naming the baby Cyrus, for his upbringing, and they could have controlled the events that lead up to his decree to rebuild the temple.

The timing of all these events could have been purely coincidental, but it is not impossible that Zoroaster for some reason, maybe even his own ancestry, especially favored the Jews, and felt moved by the destruction of their Temple to raise up a Messiah for them. Furthermore, who better than Zoroaster himself to post-predict the whole story as “Deutero-Isaiah? The Greeks, who were also older than the Persians, also knew about how recently the arrival of the Persians to Persia had been. Herodotus and Xenophon both say, that the Persian kings themselves, claim to be the descendants of Perseus and Andromeda’s son Perses. Now, this Perses was a king of Joppa, the same Joppa that was the port city for Jerusalem, the capitol of tribal Dan and the city were Jonah embarked for Tarsus. Could it be true that the kings of Persia, before they were kings in Persia, lived in Israel? Well, that’s what they seemed to think anyway, at least that is what they were telling the Greeks as early as 450 BC.

It is all very interesting, I agree, but admits uncertain data in the form suited to the interpretation. The Encyclopedia Americana might give such a date but it is about the latest date for Zoroaster I have seen. Rhages became a center of Zoroastrianism, but it is not considered the actual birthplace of Zoroaster by many scholars. Anyway, let us get away from speculation and into what is known. What Zoroaster wrote owes everything to the preceding mythology of the Aryans and nothing detectable to the mythology of the bible. Moreover the Gathas are written in a language and style that I understand has so much in common with the Indian Rig Veda that their relationahip cannot be disputed. I have to accept this but have never seen it challenged. The religion of the Iranians therefore came in with the Aryans themselves. It was a modification of their own older myths and cannot be related to Yehouah or anything that the bible tries to suggest the miniscule tribe of Israelites did at an earlier date.

Miniscule when 2,000,000 were supposed to have left Egypt? That figure simply is not tenable, and I gather that you do not accept it either, unless a few wandering Aramaeans with their wives and concubines could breed so extensively in only three generations. The evidence in the ground and common sense shows that such a large population could not have been supported with primitive technology in those arid hills. On the other hand the Iranians had an even larger population than that. The numbers of Israelites deported anyway were much less than the whole population. They were the clever and skilled ones, the poor and uneducated being left behind. The bible is clear about this at least in the case of the deportation of Jews from Judah. Now, numbers might not matter when a holy man has a compelling new religion, and conceivably a few exiled Jews could have converted two million Iranians, but, as I have noted, the actual Zoroastrian mythology itself does not support the notion. If there were any influences to be had it would have been from the Iranians to the Israelite exiles.

Perseus is your link between Moses and Mithras, or Mazda, there is no more compelling corroboration to the story of Moses than the myth of Perseus, who was supposed to be a son of god whom the Persians were descended from. I urge you, if you can find the time, to reread the Greek myth of Perseus, but keep in mind a comparison with the life of Moses.

The similarity is mainly in the ark or chest the child was launched in, in each case. Thereafter, I see nothing similar except for the name Phineus. The myth of the child in an ark is ancient indeed, as you will know, appearing in the birth myth of Sargon of Akkad about 2300 BC, but also being familiar, albeit not for a child, in the myth of Osiris. I do not see why the origins of both birth myths—Moses and Persuas—should not derive from the popular originals.

Well, forgive me for droning on and on, I still know a lot more than what I have here said about the origins of the Magi and the Persians, however please let the foregoing be sufficient to excuse me from believing that just because the Jewish religion is like the Persian one, the Jews must have borrowed theirs from the Persians, for there are lots of diverse sources that claim that the Persians got their priesthood and/or kingship from the land of Israel, which would of course, account for the similarities.

I have given compelling reasons why this cannot have been, but I would like to know what your sources are.

Please indulge me to read the following, one more, sub-chapter of my book, if this cannot convince you that the stories of the Greeks and those of the Hebrews have an ancient mutual origin then, I promise, I will admit my failure and I won’t bother you anymore.

There is no need to be offended. But quite apart from the notion I have defended, that the bible is late and derivative, there is also the point I just mentioned that some of the stories might be derived from a common source. The Greek myths owe a great deal to the Egyptians, Sumerians and Babylonians just as the Jewish ones do.

The contention here being that Greece was colonized largely from Israel, let us look among the Israelites for the origin of the Olympian concept. We won’t have to search Israelite theology for long to find such a thing as the Greek “Olympus”, the idea of a heavenly council of the gods, who spoke with one voice from a certain sacred mountain, these concepts surely did not originate in Greece. Not only did the Israelites have such a mountain based heavenly council of the gods, but they even called it by the same name! The term that was used among the Israelites for “the gods”, was “Ha Elohim”. The Greeks borrowed the Hebrew word, and it wasn’t just the word that they borrowed. In the Hebrew scriptures, the gods are not called the Olympians, they are the Elohim, but to the Greeks Olympus was more than just the gods, it was the kingdom of the gods, the Heavenly Kingdom itself.

The actual circle of the heavens is naturally divided into its twelve sections by the number of months in a year, because animal shaped gods have been assigned to each section of the sky, it has been called the Zodiac (zoo-dial). Accordingly, the Greeks have twelve members of their heavenly kingdom, Olympus (like the Hebrew tribes, the list of Olympians sometimes changes, but the number always stays at twelve). The nation of Israel is also known as the Kingdom of Heaven, thus there is also the requisite twelve part division, the tribes. Many have made this connection between the tribes and the Zodiacal signs already, (with varying degrees of failure and success,) by conveying a sign of the Zodiac to each of Jacob’s inheritors using the poetic language of each individual tribal blessing, (Gen. 49) where indeed it can be said that some animal comparisons are drawn (Judah is a lion, Issachar is an ass, Dan is a serpent, Naphtali is a hind, Benjamin is a wolf.).

The point is, that the Olympian gods were like the tribes of Israel, not only in that there happen to be twelve of each, but also because they share the same reason for being so divided, they each stood for the dozenized Kingdom of Heaven. Both groups of twelve were the children and grandchildren of a single patriarch, Israel for the tribes, and Kronos for the Olympians. Kronos and Israel have been identified elsewhere. Both kingdoms were divided amongst the siblings by lot. Also, it is not insignificant to note, that in each case, the twelve are set up so that one of them is king over the other eleven. The gods of Olympus, like the Elohim of Israel, spoke with one voice, it can therefore be said, that for the Greeks, “Olympianism”, was an obvious step toward monotheism. The same thing could be said about the effects of “Elohimism” on Israel, for the term obviously retains its original plural form. It is not unreasonable therefore, to conclude that the Greek term, “Olympus” derives directly from the Hebrew word Elohim, (appending the usual Greek “-us” of course,) meaning, “the gods”.

The notion of twelve is typical solar mythology, a mythology that has spread almost universally from the people who instituted the Zodiac, considered to be the Mesopotamian civilizations. The analogy here is uneven for one is a real mountain but a kingdom of gods whereas the other suddenly becomes a kingdom of men on earth. If anything, it shows that the origin of the twelve tribes myth is analogous to that of the Greeks. Originally there may have been twelve gods, each supervising a tribe. It does not support the idea of a historical Israel. The Canaanites, indeed, had a heavenly council of gods, but there were more than twelve and were supposed to have been the gods of the nations of earth, according to the bible. Your supposition might therefore be right, if the original Canaanite council were El the sun and sky god supervising his constellations, the twelve sons of God. In the Persian period or later, this was altered to become the council of the gods of nations.

If Kronos equates at an earlier period with Xronos, then Yehouah was a god of time, as sun gods can expected to be, so the twelve are the twelve months too, as they should be in a solar interpretation. Because Christianity was apparently considered among the solar religions of Rome when Constantine admitted it as the state religion, modern Christians have tried to downplay the significance of solar religions in antiquity, even though the vast amount of solar imagery and myth renders it impossible to deny. So, there is no need to suppose that the Greeks took their ideas from the Jews. They would doubtless have been solar worshippers themselves even in pre-Dorian times, and then took up the much more refined mythology of their neighbours in the ancient near east. The Canaanites were among them, but the Canaanites were not the Israelites. The Israelites were a branch of the Canaanites.

So, Israelites and Greeks, inasmuch as we are talking about their native legends both had their myths from the refined cultures of the region, Babylon and Egypt. On this basis, your derivation of the word Olympus is plausible, although additional information is needed to confirm it. What I would complain about is the appearance of the P. Elohim, a plural word, as you point out, is the biblical name of God, even though it is plural. The excuse is it is a so-called plural of majesty, but it looks as though the Canaanites, like the Greeks, spoke of the gods not of God. You see the gods evolving into God because they all spoke with one voice, but why then did the Greeks not take this monotheistic step? It is more evidence, even on your own parallels, that monotheism did not evolve of its own course in Israel, but was imposed from outside. Such impositions are made by conquerors usually, and mainland Greece was not conquered by the Persians.

Another correlation that becomes apparent when we compare the Hebrew Elohim, with the Greek Olympus, is the fact that they both shared the same serpentine antagonist. The Idea that there was a great dragon/serpent opponent to the Most High is not foreign to the Hebrew Scriptures, the Biblical dragon, was named “Rahab”, and this was apparently the same monster that was also called, “Leviathan”. The Hebrew name Rahab, means “storm”, and it is perhaps worth mentioning that storm is also what the name of the Greek dragon “Typhon” means. The name Typhon probably derives directly from the Hebrew name of a mountain called “Baal-Tsephon”, that was located at the Red Sea crossing, where the Pharaoh met his death (Ex 14:9). There is also extrabiblical evidence for equating Tsephon with Typhon for the name can be recognized amongst the Ras-Shamra texts that were found at the site of ancient Ugarit. There we find that Mount Tsephon is the place from where Baal rushes out to defeat his serpentine foe, whose name we also recognize even in its Canaanite form “Lotan”. The name Leviathan, was probably known as well to the Greeks, although altered slightly in form. The name “Python”, of the contender with Apollo, if it did not derive from the usual Hebrew word for a cobra, “pe’then”, is probably just a clipped version of the Hebrew name, Le-“viathan”.

There is also “Phaethon”, who was likewise shot down by Jove amidst a similar traumatic geological upheaval, he was not a dragon, but he was, like the Pharaoh of Egypt, the son of the Sun god Helios, after whom the Egyptian city of Heliopolis gets its name. The Greeks also had the serpent Ladon. The Greek Ladon was a many headed serpent that guarded the way to the tree of the valued fruit in the ancient garden of Hesperidies, the Greek Typhon too, was many headed. According to Psalms 74, verses 13 and 14, the Biblical serpent, there called Leviathan, also has several heads. We learn something more from Psalms 74, for the Arabic Targums here use the phrase, “the strong ones of Pharaoh”, in the place where, “the heads of Leviathan”, usually appears.

The dragons or serpents of the ANE were again part of the solar myth, and this, althouh hidden from direct view is present in the bible, as you observe with the various citations you make. The serpent is chaos which had to be defeated by the solar champion so that creation could begin. The Babylonians and Persians celebrated this creation annually at their new year ceremonies, and there is little doubt that the same celebration was introduced into Yehud. The Jewish months are the Babylonian ones. Leviathan, I suspect might be a slightly different notion, because it seems to me to be the Hydra of the Greeks, and this stands for the Nile with its several mouths at the delta. Leviathan is therefore Egypt, traditionally an enemy and obstacle to the Canaanites who spent a long time under their colonial rule. The Persians aimed to take advantage of this to persuade the Jews that the Persians were their saviours from the Egyptians and their natural friends and protectors, so Egypt was personified as the serpent of chaos.

Obviously the Hebrews did not believe in real dragons, the story of God’s battle against the great dragon was typical Hebrew poetic symbolism, and in this case it was used in association with the exodus of the twelve tribes from Egypt.

This is a cop out. What does not suit you becomes poetic symbolism. You say you are not a believer, but you have a great deal of difficulty throwing off the feeble excuses believers use to defend the monotheism of the Israelites. Unless you have irrefutable proof that these writers were being purely poetic, it seems right to accept what they say at face value, especially when it suits the ideas of the time everywhere in the world except Israel!

The Targums also substitute the phrase, “the Egyptians”, for the name “Rahab”, at Psalms 87 verse 4. Isaiah even symbolizes the Pharaoh and his Egyptian army as the great serpent Rahab, at chapter 51 verses 9 and 10, also at Isa 30:7.

It supports the idea I just outlined.

Well, most of us know what the Bible says, but did you realize that the Greeks and Romans probably did not believe in real dragons either, and that they knew that their great dragon contender with god was, in reality, named after an actual ancient Pharaoh of Egypt? So says the Roman Pliny in book 2, section 91, of his great work, written in 77 AD, and entitled “Natural History”. Now, how many ancient Egyptian Pharaohs, who were symbolized as a great dragon, and had a battle with the highest G/god, were there?

I am not familar with the bit of Pliny you mention, and I suggest you cite it in evidence, but the first Pharaoh in Egyptian mythology was Osiris, and once deified he fought a regular dragon called by the Greeks Apophis. It is again the dragon of chaos represented by night, and it tries to consume the solar barque in its trip across the heavens.

Surely these two stories were referring to the same event. The heavenly twelve were in the land of Egypt at the time that Zeus battled Typhon, they had, according to the myth, fled there to hide from the dragon, and while the twelve tribes had gone to Egypt merely to avoid a famine, in each case it was a forced exile with the hope of finding haven among the Egyptians. The twelve had to remain in their Egyptian exile, until the final defeat of the serpentine antagonist by G/god, at which time, both groups of twelve, the Olympians and the tribes, were able to come up out of the land of Egypt. The Greek variant that mentions the Egyptian exile of the heavenly twelve, has considerable antiquity and has been attributed by others to a lost work by Pindar, a Greek who wrote as early as about 500 BC. Herodotus wrote a book that wasn’t lost, in his “Histories”, near the beginning of book three, written almost as long ago, about 450 BC., he locates the burial place of Typhon, under the water of a great lake (called Lake Serbonis) at the Syrian border with Egypt. Herodotus also notes that these “Syrians”, the Syrians of Palestine as he calls them, wore the sign of the circumcision. Take note, that this is not simply in the same geographical area, but just as the Scriptural Pharaoh of the Egyptian Exodus lies buried under water, so lies this Typhon in the Greek myth about the Olympian exodus from Egypt. That area of the world was well known in ancient times as the location of Typhon’s defeat, the Greek geographer Strabo, in book VII of his, “The Geography”, even refers to the Egyptian shore of the Red Sea as “Typhonia."

There is nothing in all this that is not attributable to the proper source, the battle in the heavens with the Chaos Serpent. As we know only too well from the bible, religious myths all too often become history in the heads of those who believe them. I also say, at the risk of being boring, that these ancient myths fell to earth generally when the Persians began to impose on their vanquished subjects, a different type of religion. Once again, Christians have ring-fenced their own beliefs for far too long in setting up the holy writ that the Persians did not do anything so dastardly. It is too absurd to be simply naïvety. It is dishonesty. The Persians were interested in controlling the largest empire ever seen in the west. Religion was the way it had been done before, and the Persians mastered it, changing the history of the world, even though they are almost totally ignored by historians.

Apollodorus and Ovid both tell this story of the Olympian’s Egyptian sojourn, the story was fairly well known and wide spread, but the most recent versions of the myth, always seem to mention one weird detail of the story, namely, that the gods took on the shapes of animals while they were in Egypt. Much of the Greek myth conforms nicely to the Hebrew story of the Exodus, but the Idea that the, usually human shaped, gods had a metamorphoses into animal shapes, seems too crass for a rational explanation. Modern scholars have called this part of the story an etiology, a clumsy attempt, they say, by later mythographers, to explain the origin of the animal shapes in the zodiac. These emphasize that Pan became Capricorn the fish-goat, and that Venus and Cupid became the two fish of Pisces. Others claim that the myth is an attempt to explain the animal companions that attended many of the Greek gods, these cite the raven of Apollo for example, or the goat of Dionysus. Still others say, that the story shows how the animal headed gods of Egypt originated, these point out that Zeus became a ram and then equate Zeus with Ra-Ammon, and also, that Hera became a cow and then equate Hera with Hathor or Isis. I consider the last of these three theories to be the most accurate, however, I don’t think that the “animal gods” part of the myth was a later addition, but rather, that it was as ancient as, and was part of, the original story, for the Hebrew scriptures, which I believe has a source in common with the Greek myth, includes a very similar tale.

Just above, you hit on another important aspect of your study that you do not seem to give adequate weight. When were these various myths first presented to the world. You seem unimpressed by the absence of any Jewish bible until the time of the Ptolemies, and so perhaps you do not care when the Greek myths were written either. Plainly Homer and Hesiod offer dates for some, but many others, and many refinements only emerge much later. Moreover they are in plays and poems, which drew upon the Homeric myths as a sort of sacred script but without the taboos that long existed on the Christian ones. Latterly, novelists have been giving new interpretations of bible stories including that of Jesus, but Greek dramatists and poets were ready to do it from about the time the Persians stood on their doorsteps in 500 BC. Hoi polloi might have believed the myths as sacred, but intellectual Greeks did not and used them for their own psychological studies. It is another factor that makes your study hard, because the earlier versions ought really to be the definitive ones in the absence of any other evidence, and you seem not to take this into account. So, for example, Apollodorus, say, might have actually drawn upon the biblical legends to render his version of the stay of the gods in Egypt. I am not saying he did, but simply using one of your examples to show that the publication date is relevant here.

Human sacrifice was widely practiced in the pre-Exodus times, and also after that, Abraham, the grand patriarch of Israel, had preached against sacrificing the son of man, the image of God, and in favor of animal substitutes, such as, the Abrahamicly authorized ram. It is certainly no mere coincidence that the main god of the Egyptians, Ra-Ammon, was zoopomorphized by them, as the same animal that was suitable for an Abrahamic sacrifice, the ram. It won’t surprise us to find that the Egyptians, having lived with the Israelites for several generations, and having witnessed the lessons of the Exodus first hand, should have learned something about the practice of the true religion. Accordingly, Herodotus tells us that the Egyptians didn’t engage in human sacrifices, he says that even for the animal sacrifices, which they did perform, the sheep and bulls, first had to be rigorously inspected by the priestly class, having to pass certain tests for cleanness. The eminent mythologist, Sir James George Frazer shows, in his most renown work entitled, “The Golden Bough”, that the sacrificial victim of those ancient rites, was originally meant to represent “the god himself” (Ch.XLIX,4,Pg.551). Perhaps the idea that the highest God would accept animal substitutions for human sacrifices was at first ridiculed by some, as changing the “image” of god. Thus the introduction of the Abrahamic religion into Egypt may have given rise to the Greek myth, a lampoon as it were, where, in Egypt, the gods took on the shapes of animals. Still, it was no lampoon to the Egyptians themselves, who, most reverently it seems, assigned an animal head to practically every god they had.

You cannot seriously believe that the “Abrahamic religion” was taken into Egypt and had any influence there, surely. Totem religions seem to have the idea that killing the totem animal is a crime except for the occasion in the year that the god is celebrated when it is required that believers will partake of the flesh of the god in the form of the consecrated animal. This is very widespread and needs no hypothesis of an Abrahamic religion to explain it. It is also, as you will know, the basis of the idea of holy communion, when the believer unites his flesh with that of the god. That is why Christians eat the wafer and drink the wine, supposed to be the flesh and blood of Christ. It is proof enough of the utter primitiveness of the Christian religion.

Now regarding these practices in Egypt, we are back to curiosities like cleanness and pollution. What defines these ideas? The one religion which has a clear theology of it is Mazdaism. So when you talk of what Herodotus wrote about the Egyptians, you have to remember that Egypt had been run by the Persians for almost a century, and they had appointed priests to the temples and schools of life who were happy to redirect their religious practices along the lines of Zoroastrianism. Moreover, the constellation of the Ram was, I believe, understood by the Persians as being a lamb. Since the solar year by then began in the constellation of the Ram/lamb, they seem to have introduced the sacrifice of the Pascal lamb most probably to make the Jews offensive to the Egyptians.

An even closer parallel to the Greek myth can be drawn from the story of the Hebrews themselves. Consider this, the twelve members of the Kingdom of Heaven (the tribes not the Olympian gods,) had an anthropomorphic God when they went into Egypt, while there, they took up representing Him as an animal, thus the calf god. They stayed in Egypt until God “crushed the heads of Leviathan”, where upon they came up out from the land of Egypt and abandoned their bovine image of God. Now, read the Greek “myth” about the divine metamorphoses again and wonder no longer as to its origin. Numerous Biblical scholars, examining the use of the name “Elohim” in the Pentateuch, have concluded that the source of this, “Elohimism”, was an author, or authors, who lived during the Omri dynasty about 850 BC., in the area of Samaria the capitol of the northern ten tribes. Elohimism, so say these scholars, was the theological point of view of the house of Israel, as opposed to the house of Judah. With this, I must concur, but only partially. I do find it very likely that the Elohimistic view was, at least codified at that time and place, perhaps even by King Omri himself, who as we know from the Scriptures, (Mic 6:16) wrote at least one work, therein referred to as, “The Statutes of Omri”. However, the religious system of Israelite Elohimism had its origin long before the days of Omri.

A study of the Greek myths will make it evident, that Elohimism was most likely set up back in the days when Moses and Joshua destroyed the Amorites, at which time it directly superseded the older Amorite religious system, for the error of the Amorites had come to completion (Gen 15:13-16). To the Greeks, the battle between god and the dragon, their Zeus verses Typhon, was the religious turning point of the Greek religion, it was the establishment of Olympianism. The Olympians had to defeat the giants, whom they called “the Titans” before they could establish their own suzerainty, and Typhon fought on behalf of the giants. The battle between Zeus and Typhon, was considered by some to be the final defeat of the giants.

The fact that the Greeks have many names for the giants, (besides the Titans there were the Earthborn, and the Aloeids) and several versions of their final defeat, should not deter the biblical scholars from an identification between the Greek giants and the Hebrew giants, on the contrary, this apparent confusion is just another thing that both sources have in common. The Scriptures have, the Nephilim, the Rephaim, the Zamzammim, the Emim, and the Anakim; the first were destroyed in Noah’s flood but apparently not entirely. The Rephaim, the Zamzammim, and the Emim were wiped out by the Elamite King Chedorlaomer in the days of Abraham at the battles of Ashtoroth-Karnaim, Shaveh-Kiriathaim, and Ham (Gen 14:5), except for Og (and apparently his brother Sihon) who was called the last of the Rephaim when he was killed by Moses seven generations later. The Anakim were destroyed by Caleb after the death of Moses, and yet there were still a few giants left in the day’s of David for him to him to earn the Messianic attribute of giant killer.

Enumerating the Greek confusion in this regard is equally as complicated; the Titans, like the Nephilim, were confined to Tartarus but were released and then re-confined. The Earthborn Giants revolted against Olympus on behalf of the Titans, their brothers, but were summarily defeated. Then Typhon was born in order to avenge the giants on the Olympians but he was killed as well. The Aloeids were a pair of gigantic brothers, like Og and Sihon, but the Olympians thwarted their rebellion also. Suffice it to say that, in both cases, the war against the giants lasted many years and involved several battles before Olympianism, or in the case of Israel, Elohimism, could be firmly established.

Furthermore, the Greek kingdom of heaven was represented by a mountain, in much the same way that Israel is represented by Mount Zion. To say that Olympus is like Zion is to emphasize the obvious, and may seem to be an insignificant point, after all they were both mountains and many diverse nations had holy mountains. Perhaps an ancient memory of Mount Ararat is responsible for such a wide dispersal of the “holy mountain” motif. Mountains are awe inspiring, they are closer to the heavens and therefore seem “sacred” automatically, especially to worshippers of the god of heaven. But beyond this, the Scriptures tell us much more about the intricate theological symbolism connected to Mount Zion. It is not just a mountain, it is God’s abode, its His people, its their city, it is the bride of God, and she even has a daughter.

Its location is no less ethereal than its symbolism is esoteric. There is a Heavenly Zion as well as an Earthly one, the prophets have it rising above all other mountains in the latter days, while the evangelists have it coming down from the Heavens to establish itself at the end times. Mount Zion had a cosmogonical existence as well as an apocalyptic one. God had a “Holy Mountain” even before David established it at Mount Zion. The Garden of Eden was in God’s Holy Mountain, there was Mount Sinai, and Mount Moriah, even the Amorites had their own holy mountain, which the Hebrews called, “Mount Herman”, but others, perhaps even the Amorites themselves, called it Mount “Sion”.

We know a bit less about Mount Olympus, but what we do know is no less enigmatic. It was the abode of the gods, the bronze floored mansion of Zeus, the mansions of the Muses and all the “shining mansions of the gods” were imagined to be upon the snowy peak of Olympus. Of course, the Greeks knew that there were no real mansions on the actual mountain that they called Olympus, the concept of “Olympia” was not confined to a mere mountain. In Homer, Zeus threatens to pull Olympus up with a golden chain and hang Heaven and Earth from it. Homer usually had the gods living upon the mountain but sometimes he locates them in the sky, which he often distinguishes from Olympus. The concept of Olympus was an abstraction, like the concept of Zion, the literal mountain was only a symbol. Many nations, in order to justify their suzerainty, claimed their own Mount Olympus. There were rivals to Zion as well, and it is apparent that the direct prototype for the Greeks was not Mount Zion at Jerusalem itself, (Athens was already named after Zion,) but a more direct predecessor to Olympianism was the Elohimism from one of the famous rivals to Mount Zion, Mount Gerizim at Shechem.

Nothing in all of Israelite history resembles the Greek story, about the establishment of Olympian order over the Titanic chaos, quite like the account of the convocation at Joshua 8:30-34. Moses directed Joshua to assemble the twelve tribes at Shechem for the convocation, a kind of ceremony of confederation, where blessings for obedience were read to six of the tribes who were gathered together upon Mount Gerizim, and curses for disobedience were read to the other six who were gathered upon Mount Ebal. The spectacle of the twelve tribes taking their places at the Shechem mountains, from which they could look North and see the mountain of the defeated giants, the Amorite’s Mount Herman, has everything that the Greek myth needs. Shechem became the capitol of Israel at least four generations before King David captured the Jebusite stronghold of Salem. However, the Shechemites incurred the malediction that was outlined in the very same “convocation of the tribes”, that argues for their precedence (Deut 11:29; 29:26-28). The Shechemites worshipped foreign gods, and not only Baal-Berith either.

A study of the Greek myths about the establishment of Olympianism makes it evident that the Israelites of Shechem had set up a system whereby each of the twelve tribes of Israel was represented by a god, or a goddess, and all agreed to abide by the word of one voice. Like the Hebrew city/mountain of Zion, there was a Greek city also that was named after their mountain and called “Olympia”, while this city wasn’t in the vicinity of any mountain, it was none the less, founded to portray the abode of the gods. Here was the Temple of Zeus, with its famous statue by Phidias, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Here too the Olympian games were celebrated, this was due largely, we are told in the Greek myths, to the efforts of Pelops himself, after whom the whole “Peloponnesus” was named. The Achaeans of Pelops, these were the champions of Olympianism in ancient Greece... (from here I go on to identify Pelops and Hippodameia with Ahab and Jezebel but it is no more convincing that the rest of my stuff.)

Not in the order that you insist upon, that is true! All of this last section is nonetheless brilliant evidence to me that the whole of the Moses and Joshua mythology drew upon the Greek myths. They were therefore written, all bar the names and some key events they had from the Persian period, by Greeks. The most likely time for this was when the Greeks ruled Judah in the time of the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. And Lo! the myth of Moses and the rest of the bible emerges into history just at the very time when the Ptolemies were favouring the Jerusalem temple and its priests as a bastion against the Seleucid Greeks.

You really ought to consider the chronology of all this more carefully. You will have a much more credible story the right way round, although you will not endear yourself to believers.

Good thoughts, good words, and good deeds, -John

Quite so! Good Zoroastrian sentiments, that we all should live by rather than worthless and ghoulish sacraments. I enjoyed reading your extracts, and our exchanges of ideas. Please let me know how you get on with your project. I am eagerly looking forward to being able to read your complete book.

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