Judaism
Judaism Abstracts Piped from Yahoo! Pipes
Abstract
These abstracts are taken from the actual pages and piped here via Yahoo! Pipes. They allow you to get a flavour of each page to see whether it might be of interest without having to load every one. An aid to browsing the website! The Heading in each case is a link to the page.
© Dr M D Magee
Wednesday, 14 October 2009
AW! Judaism Abstracts
Abstracts from each page on the Judaism directory of the AskWhy! main website.
The Origins of Culture and Religion
The eviction from paradise began when human beings learnt how ro kill large animals routinely and in large numbers. Eventually, the depletion of the animals combined with rising human population meant the use of the available resources had to be intensified. It was continued intensification that led to the emergence of states particularly the falling availability of animal protein. In primitive societies, some perticularly hard working and public spirited men can gather a following by holding feasts. With the promise of the feast, these men, termed big men, cajole, inveigle and bribe others to work to help them bring about the promised feast. There was honour among the people for the big-man and his helpers, the admiration of the tribe, the status, and it was this that led them to become chiefs and then kings, and states formed. In the Old World, the first states were in Sumeria and Egypt before 3000 BC, then in the Indus valley and the Chinese plains about 2000 BC.
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Julian Jaynes wrote his thought provoking book in the 1970s, and it has been panned by anthropologists, scientists and historians. It remains intriguing, though, and the gamut of curiosities that his hypothesis relates together suggests that something might lie behind it, even if his particular theory is wrong. In fact, consciousness did evolve, and human society must have been viable in lesser stages of consciousness. The breakdown of the bicameral mind that Jaynes saw in the mid first millennium BC was a bonfire of scribal vanities, writing conventions from the times when only specialized scribes were literate, and all recording was official. The Persian empire torched the conventions of the ANE, and Greeks continued the bonfire after Alexander. But there was a stage when the personality did not count in consciousness. Everyone saw themselves as simply an element of the group, the clan or tribe. The growth of civilization forced people into larger groups, where their previous clan identities were unimportant, and their individual personality, their “self”, took over.
The Origin of Writing as the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Recording numbers of a known item, counting, need only consist of a scratch for each one. It is writing in the Homeric sense of graphein. A bone marked with notches from Zaire dated around 9000 BC shows that notch counting was being used in Africa when the Iranians in Asia were using tokens. Each notch was an animal, a day in the calendar, an amphora, and so the object being counted had to be noted too. Some symbol was needed for it, the symbol of the token in Mesopotamia or an emblem like the emblems used for the tribe. The breaking of taboos might have been needed, previously emblems having a sacred significance. For advancement, numbers cannot remain sacred, they have to lose their magic and mystery and become practical and utilitarian. The abstract symbols used initially rarely seem to be representations of anything, and might have been chosen so as not to be seen as having any sacred associations as emblems.
Religious Origins: Primeval Human Society
Historically, religion has had the purpose of explanation. It has been the main source of meaning in human life. It no longer is. Now science is what gives us explanations, and the meaning science offers is tried and tested, not just assumed on faith because it is comforting to believe it. But it might be a mistake to assume any strong definition of what religion is a priori. If religion evolved as natural things do, then it evolved the characteristics we deem to be those of religion from something earlier that did not have these features. It was tribal society. Principally, religion began by conveying the significance of social life to the individuals in a primeval group of humans. Tribal society was a part of the natural world to primeval human beings.
Religious Origins: Sociality and Xenophobia in Human Evolution
The further back archaeologists look, the further apart are human settlements. The reaction to becoming aware of another group, “they”, in primeval times, was to keep as great a distance from them as possible. As early men spread across the world, they advanced into virgin territory as the tribes behind them pressed nearer. Early humans would cut through forests, travel down rivers, cross deserts, seek routes through icecaps, float logs across oceans of unknown width, and generally take terrible risks and lose many lives to move onward, and for what reason? It was mutual repulsion, and perhaps fear. The expansion of the tribes just to the rear kept the pioneering tribes advancing. The original relationship between neighbouring human groups was revulsion.
Religious Origins: Playing and Mimicking Nature
The civilized state—law, order, craft, trade, art, poetry, knowledge and, ultimately science—grows out of myth. All begin in primitive ritual, imitative magic to mimic the great processional movements of existence—a sort of childish playing at being Nature which metamorphoses by superstition into necessary acts without which the world would stop. Primeval man “plays the vital order of Nature in a sacred play, in and through which he actualises anew or ‘recreates’ the events” thus maintaining cosmic order. Among the natural phenomena to be explained are also the social ones the primeval people are forming—their rituals, rites, sacrifices and ceremonies. They are explained as necessary to keep the world working. From this ritual play comes the earliest culture, law and government, and religion.
Religious Origins: Culture, Totem and Ancestors
The power of the tribe was the tribal spirit and each person had a spark of it, their own spirit or soul, identifiable with their own personality, which reflected the tribal spirit. As a part of the tribal spirit, the soul itself was sacred, but the person’s body was profane—no more than selfish desires, not the communal ones of the tribe. The religious distinction between body or flesh and soul emerges from the tribal god being the tribe itself, from a society’s god being society. People were selfish but they had tribal welfare inscribed somewhere within, perhaps in their heart, and this was their sacred soul. Individuals die but the tribe lives on. The body dies but the spark within, the soul, lives on because that represents the tribe. The person is mortal, but in comparison the tribe—and so the soul—is immortal.
Religious Origins: From Magic to Imperial Religion
A post mortem life required something of the person not dying when the body does, and this was the soul, effectively the human personality or psyche in Greek. Once that is accepted, it can be considered that the soul can re-infest another body, and, if heaven is the ultimate aim, perhaps it is sent back repeatedly until it became perfect enough to enter heaven. That is reincarnation, or metempsychosis, as Greeks called it. Platonists and the mystery cults of the east mainly took that view and it evolved into Gnosis and the Christian heresies of the Middle Ages. The mystae, candidates for salvation, had to be free of moral violations, be coached in the divine mysteries by the hierophants—professional holy men—had to be initiated into the cult, eventually after all this were declared to be “born again”.
The Social Origin of Religion: God as Society
The ultimate practical good of Christianity is the same as that of other religions, uniting all people for their mutual benefit. Christians forget that their God is every human being in the world. If you hate someone, then you hate God! You can only love God by loving all other human beings. Love is kindness to them. It is the reciprocity of Confucius because it is taught to everyone, and everyone must practice it. If someone does not and you are harmed by it, then you do not compound the evil with a vendetta, you trust to the law. As Chu Tzu said, society can act to punish individual wrongs as long as the punisment is just. There could be no wars if no one fought them, and no Christian should because retaliation was not what Christ taught his followers. There is no escaping this, unless the Christian is going to tell the man who was God incarnate he was wrong. In which case, they forfeit their right to be called a Christian.
Primitive Revelation? Is Humanity Descending to or Ascending from Perfection
The primitive revelation, according to Schmidt, degenerated from monotheism into polytheism, totemism and fetishism. He counts out totemism as the source of religion because it is never found in the “ethnologically oldest” peoples. If “ethnologically oldest” people are the ones closes to the primordial human tribes then it would have to be taken seriously. But how does Schmidt determine who are these ethnologically ancient people? Obviously people can degenerate culturally, but they need not have started with a primitive revelation, and a degenerate tribe might seem more primitive than one that never advanced beyond its original totemistic standards, but advanced in other ways. Schmidt is certain he knows how to tell them apart but Zwemer does not think it is important enough to explain. Maybe the scholarly father is in direct contact with God and so just knows what others do not, the normal Christian case. He knows what no one else does.
Zwemer, Schmidt and Primitive Revelation
Man will leave his parents to cleave to his wife, not really a controversial or remarkable statement to make, although Christians seem to think it is. Christians like to make out that early humans were savages, promiscuous, and took women by force, but it does not fit this Christian hypothesis of the primtive revelation to the first human pair, so suddenly Christians are scientific, and Zwemer pretends these are other people’s notions. The closest to this caveman joke that reality ever came is that the alpha males had the first pick of the women—the first fruits of womanhood, one might say—a privilege that obtains still, rich men selecting “trophy wives”. The thesis is that God restrains human beings from being promiscuous, but God is the tribe itself, human society. It is tribal sanctions that apply to those who break tribal morality, and one of the first, probably instinctive, was the taboo on incest.
Understanding Myths, Ritual and Religion
Myths are connected with religion because they were how the earliest human beings thought, with dreams and reality intertwined and explanations picked from anywhere that seemed suitable at the time, with no particular attempt to find something better. Religion was the magical way these people tried to control their world, and ritual was their method, a type of sympathetic magic. Myths offered pseudo scientific explanations of natural phenomena—fertility, life and death, the creation of the world, its polarities, its social and technical functions. The activities of gods helped humans, but also hit them with evil and disease, and their anger caused floods, famines and wars. Myths were used to explain the rituals, and rituals enacted mythical explanations. The pre-logical way of thinking of mythopoetic thought became associated with religion. Though people began to think logically, they remained associated, and still are.
The Myths of Greece and Rome
Myths are connected with religion because they were how the earliest human beings thought, with dreams and reality intertwined and explanations picked from anywhere that seemed suitable at the time. Religion was the magical way these people tried to control their world, and ritual was their method, a type of sympathetic magic. Myths offered pseudo scientific explanations of natural phenomena—fertility, life and death, the creation of the world, its polarities, its social and technical functions. The activities of gods helped humans, but also hit them with evil and disease, and their anger caused floods, famines and wars. Myths were used to explain the rituals, and rituals enacted mythical explanations. A precis of Dr Jane Harrison's booklet.
The Sun Gods—Mesopotamia, Sumer and Babylon
Each Sumerian city had its own god who owned it. Other gods were admitted, but they were always subordinate to the city god. The Semites to the north had their counterparts of the Sumerian gods. Sin was the Semitic moon god, Ishtar was Venus and Shamash was the sun god, the one true god. The sun was the god of justice, and Hammurabi, famous for his code of law, hailed Shamash as “the great judge of heaven and earth”. Long before Moses even in his myth, the law was engraved on a stone showing the enthroned sun god handing the king the ring and staff of a law giver. After the time of Hammurabi, when Babylon rose to supremacy, its god Marduk did too. The city’s most impressive edifice was Marduk’s temple, rising some three hundred feet above the level of the city. Its seven stages began coated with pitch at the base, then successively faced with red, blue, orange and yellow enamelled tiles, then with silver and gold.
The Sun Gods—Egypt
Many Egyptian deities were deified animals but Osiris never had an animal form and, in legend, was once king of Egypt. Some were nature gods, Horus and Ra and other sun gods, Seb the earth god, Neith the sky goddess. 1300 years before Christianity, Egypt was monotheistic, God being Aten. Conscious beings find it hard to accept their consciousness going forever in death. Gods never died, and humans wanted to be the same. Religions achieved the link mainly by a communion, but, for Egyptians, it was via the Pharaoh, a god on earth. Pharaoh was Horus, the Lord of Heaven, shown as a falcon. Horus was also the son of Osiris, the dark sun, Lord of the Underworld, and when he died became him, while his son became the new Horus. Here again is the endless seasonal cycle of the sun and vegetation god, dying and being resurrected to induce the plants to grow.
Book of the Dead—Saving Souls from Evil
The Book of the Dead is the soul’s vade mecum in its journey from this world. Its Egyptian name is The Coming Out of the Day—“day” denoting a man’s life. Lepsius, the great German Egyptologist, gave it the name “Book of the Dead”, though it does not adequately describe its contents and purpose. “0 Amentet, the lower world, the eternal king is here to put words into my mouth. I am Thoth, the great god in the sacred book, who fought for thee. I am one of the great gods that fought on behalf of Osiris. Ra, the sun god, commanded me, Thoth, to do battle on the earth for the wronged Osiris, and I obeyed. I am among them moreover who wait over Osiris, now king of the underworld.” Abridged version by T Witton Davies lightly edited for HTML.
Old Testament Research and Criticism
The growth of Protestantism against Catholic dogma loosened the tethers that stopped free enquiry into the bible for a thousand years. Enlightenment and science led to the Higher Criticism of the bible. Julius Wellhausen showed that the law of Moses was misplaced in sacred history. It had to come at the end of the evolution of Judaism. The bible shows the tribe, society, at first was the prime entity, not the individual. Marx called it primitive communism. Anthropology found tribal totem power was the power of society, and it was eventually personified as a god. Such gods were the “religion” of the ANE. Then Persia entered a new phase. It was a huge empire in which local gods had fused under Zoroastrianism into an imperial God who transcended the material world. God was above Nature and controlled it, and the bible says He gave that control to humanity. Humanity was Nature’s master. Humans just had to obey God’s commands, and they were issued by the Persian king.
The Truth about the Jewish Scriptures 1
Modern archaeologists have dug down to the roots of the bible stories and found them rotten. If David once lived, but not as in the bible, the biblical stories about him are fiction. Critical scholars consider that Genesis-Judges contains no reliable history. Even biblicists accept miraculously early stories were edited “rather late”. The Jewish bible is a pious fraud, containing a little history hard to discern among the fiction, propagated for theological reasons. Only scripture corroborated by archaeological scholarship should be accepted as history. The Persian period is the earliest admissible context for the biblical romance. Biblicists accuse any critic of the bible as extreme until they accept it as the true account of God’s finger waggling in Jewish history. Most university departments of biblical studies employ committed evangelists not skeptics, so religious history is not history. History is scientific. Religious history is tendentious.
The Truth about the Jewish Scriptures 2
Traditional biblical scholars are guilty of giving a religious text a factual historicity it neither seeks nor deserves. Christians and Jews say scripture is the place to start to understand Jewish history. It is not. Biblical history is largely myth, so the task is to show what is and what is not history using every relevant method, documentary, archaeological, anthropological, scientific, social. Such evidence shows Israel and Judah remained Canaanite until the Persians came at the end of the sixth century BC. Biblical Israel, its leaders and heroes are mainly fictional. Their victories, defeats, religious policies are inventions written no earlier than the Persian period. Some kings of Israel and Judah appear in official Assyrian king lists, inscriptions and correspondence, but the Persians ruled Assyria and Babylonia, and had access to archives which provided the historical framework for stories about biblical monarchs. The bible was historical fiction even when it was written. Pious Jews and Christians ought to realize this.
The Truth about the Jewish Scriptures 3
No trace of the sagas of the Old Testament has ever been found in any archaeological dig from Jericho to Megiddo. A fortified city that fell in a definite moment of history is an archaeological prize. At Jericho, Christian and Jewish archaeologists dug and dug. They found ancient walls thousands of years too old, and none the right age. A thick layer of burnt material above the Middle Bronze Age buildings is the highest surviving layer. No city existed when Joshua invaded. Another myth is that Jerusalem always hosted only one temple. Israel and Jerusalem had many shrines, called high places, employing hosts of priests and priestesses. Even the bible admits Jews had temples for Moabites, Ammonites and PhÂœnicians at Jerusalem, including a shrine to Moloch in the Vale of Hinnom where humans passed through the fire. Biblical editors suppressed the details. The most common archaeological object found in Palestine is the crudely shaped figurine of a naked goddess!
The Truth about the Jewish Scriptures 4
The temple at Elephantine in Egypt, according to a letter of 407 BC, existed before the Persian period, before the “return” from exile and so before the so-called second temple of Jerusalem. The truth is that Yehudim meant a religious group from the outset—people who worship the god, Yehouah. Ezra says the natives of Judah, who had not been deported, and wanted to help the Persian colonists build the temple—“we seek your God, as you”—had been put there by Esarhaddon, king of Assyria. Deported in, they had been made to worship Yehouah! There were also “the rest of the nations whom the great and noble Asnappar (Ashurbanipal) exiled and set in the cities of Samaria, and the rest of the province ‘Beyond the River’”. Ezra was arguing that the Samarians and the Am Ha Eretz were not proper worshippers of Yehouah—not proper Jews!
The Truth about the Jewish Scriptures 5
History tries to show how we got to the present. Modern historians have documentary, scientific and archaeological skills, but ancient historians had little of it. Ancient historians say as much about the aspirations of their time as the history they are discussing. The authors of the Jewish scriptures were not likely to have been members of the society described in these books. They were foreign rulers writing fictional accounts of the history of a subject people to shame them before God to behave in ways acceptable to the God’s choice of king—the Shahanshah. Besides the theme of shame is one of wandering and finding a land—eretz, cognate with “earth”! It is mythology for colonists, linked to the idea of exile—the people have been exiled but God had repented and restored them to home. It gave the mixture of deportees an identity, an history, a cause, and a warning that it could be easily lost without obedience.
Jerusalem and Judaism before the Return: Canaanite in Culture
Before the supposed kingdom of David, in the bible, Jerusalem was a small but well fortified town, the city of the Jebusites that David decided would be his capital. There is no historical or archaeological evidence for this belief. Kenyon found no city walls, no signs of occupation and no buildings that might have been public buildings. The Iron Age date of the excavation is certain from a complete jar found on the site. Other cities, Gezer, Hazor, Lachish and Megiddo, of the same period have grand public buildings. It suggests they were administrative centres for a rural area. The bible says Jerusalem, barely more than a village, was the capital of an empire, yet palatial buildings were in Megiddo not in Jerusalem.
Jerusalem and Judaism before the Return: Canaanite in Religion
For a people devoted to Yehouah in a land from 1200 BC for 1300 years, only one of 502 local place names in Israel and Judah had Yehouah in it. Yet Canaanite gods and goddesses, such as Baal, Shamash, Anath and Mot, anathema to the Jews of the bible, are common. About one in nine is in El, the chief Canaanite god, whose name had come to mean God. The Exodus Israelites could have called places anything they liked. Why chose Canaanite names of gods that Yehouah rails against constantly. Why not change all the names thay hated? Some say it would have been taking the name of Yehouah in vain. So, it should never have been done in personal names either. In fact, everywhere had been named before the exclusive devotion to Yehouah was introduced when the Persians did it. All the places in the hill country had already been named by the local people, Canaanites, long before.
The Bible and History
The Lord God worshipped by the Canaanite peasants was the giver of their corn, wine, and oil, the Baal whom the Greeks identified with Dionysus. Baal, the god of the land of Canaan, and Yehouah, the biblical god of Israel, were from the same root, if they were not the same god. The earliest instance in the Jewish scriptures of the feast of the ingathering, afterwards the chief feast of the Israelites, is celebrated by the Canaanites of Shechem in honour of Baal (Judges 9:27). Is the history of ancient Israel as told by biblical writers exact in any comprehensive way? This history can be split into several succeeding periods, the period of the patriarchs, the time of the exodus, the Israelites travelling in the desert for forty years, the conquest of Canaan, the heroic exploits of the hero-judges of Israel, the period of national greatness under David and Solomon, impending disaster under the kings of Israel and Judah, the exile, and the Persian period. This history ends with Ezra's promulgation of the Torah, the Law of Moses, in front of the assembled inhabitants of Jerusalem and Judah. Has this anything to do with real history?
When Was the Bible Written? In the Persian Era!
The “return” was pacification by deportation, used on unruly subjects. Their leaders were deported away, and new leaders were deported in charged with restoring the corrupted local cult, but that really meant changing the cult to suit the Persians. It is what Darius II did in Judah. The bible was not written by native Judahites, nor in Jerusalem, nor without using ancient sources. The history was written to back up the law, Deuteronomy, by Persian scholars directed by the Persian chancellery, with access to Assyrian records. The message was to obey the God of the covenant whose law it was. It showed God had punished previous generations for apostasy, and would do again, if the people were not righteous, ie obedient to the law. Obedience suits rulers. If the bible was written around 700 BC, Jewish historians preceded the first historian, Herodotus by 200 years. It is manifest nonsense.
Jerusalem and Judah after “the Return”
Philistia under the Persians was ruled by Phœnicians. After Babylonian destruction, Ashkelon was not rebuilt until Persian times. Persian deposits lay over Assyrian ones. Phœnician silver coins gave accurate dating, and Greek coins show the cities were destroyed in the Hellenistic age. Shechem was a colony of Sidon. Samarians rebelled against Alexander so he expelled them, replacing them with Macedonians. Pits of rubbish, below the Hellenistic layers, datable by Greek pottery indicate the Persian period. In southern Judah, ostraca from Persian times have names in which Qos (Edomite) appears 17 times, Baal 16, El 15, Yahu 3. North of Jericho names in Qos, Sahar, Kemosh, Baal, Nabu and Yahu appear. Beyond Jerusalem Judah was not Jewish in Persian times.
Biblical Languages
Hebrew does not have many Egyptian words, a surprising fact for a nation that the myth claims spent several hundred years as slaves for the pharaohs, and known history tells us was an Egyptian colony for centuries until about 900 BC. There are more foreign words in Hebrew from Babylon, a place where only some of the Jews lived for only about half a century. More important, B S J Isserlin says is that Phœnician style and diction influenced Hebrew writers. The languages were the same. The pretence is that Hebrew was somehow different from Canaanite. The trouble with the linguistic evidence presented by biblicists is that it is circular, if not utterly tortuous.
Megiddo and the United Monarchy
The tenth century empire of David and Solomon did not exist because there was no Israel at all before the ninth century. Omri was the real founder of the state of Israel and the Omride dynasty, as Assyrian records and the Mesha stele say. According to Finkelstein’s Low Chronology, strata previously dated to the eleventh century BC should be dated to the tenth century BC. The stone gate at Megiddo, identified earlier as Solomonic, even under conventional chronology was built a century later. The correction would make it another 100 years later still—a 200 year adjustment! It closes the gap of a century or more between the beginning of monumental architecture at Megiddo, and the appearance of developed administration in Israel.
Bent Scholar on the United Monarchy
The bible authors must have seen the temples built by the Phœnicians and could use the Phœnician temples as a model for their description of Solomon’s, and they left no doubt the temple was Phœnician—Solomon had Hiram’s PhÂœnicians build it for him! Phœnician temples all over the Mediterranean were of the same layout with the same two pillars, the biblical Boaz to the north and Jachin to the south, the temple facing east. The six chambered gates found at Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer are supposed to have been built by King Solomon. The stables found about the same time have been discredited. The gates too are unlikely to be of the right date. The lack of archaeological evidence does not support the biblical narrative of David and Solomon.
King David: History or Myth?
Some biblicists claim that archaeological discoveries verify David was an historical king of Israel. The word “house” is used in the bible with two meanings—the temple which should be built, and the descendant who would build the temple. House of David could mean, not a dynasty, but those (people) who owe allegiance to the God David and worship him at his temple (house). The Persian administrators had a purpose in using a historical romance to give a basis to unity. The later Hellenistic editors had even more reason. The style alone is sufficient to show that it has been edited by a refined editor at a much later date. The obvious times were during the priesthood of the second temple and more especially during Hasmonaean times.
Solomon and his Temple
The idea of a major state, let alone an empire, centred on Jerusalem in the tenth century BC has been increasingly disputed in recent years. There was quite obviously a tenth century BC, but what no one has yet been able to prove is that any emperors called David and Solomon lived in it. Crypto-national states did not emerge in the Levant until the ninth century BC, and no evidence of one has been found in the ground of Jerusalem. So-called Solomonic strata dated to the tenth century BC should be down dated to the first half of the ninth century BC and associated with the Omride Dynasty of the Northern Kingdom. Almost nothing in the way of tablets or inscriptions have been found from the glorious time of David and Solomon. No evidence exists of a literary tradition in tenth century BC Palestine.
A Century of Bad Archaeology
No biblicists were interested in the Persian period, with excellent reason. It was when Judaism actually began! Evidence was interpreted to fit the bible by sliding the archaeological dates two or three hundred years into the past, creating a “Persian Gulf”, the absence of strata assigned to the Persian period. It gave an excuse for clearing tells of their most recent layers to get straight to the ones that mattered, dated as Babylonian and Assyrian when they were really Persian. The Persians of the time when Yehud was set up as a temple state were Babylonian Persians. The Persian kings had moved their capital to Babylon and had adopted Babylonian culture. It was why the confusion had arisen, but no reason why it should have been perpetuated. That was pure biblical dogma. How faith contradicts truth in biblical archaeology
Modernism in Biblical Archaeology
Biblicists who take the bible to be the word of God were forcing history into a biblical straitjacket. Biblical archaeology could only reinforce the bible. God expected them to make the bible into true history or they would lose their souls. Never expecting any challenge, they were more likely to hide a finding contradicting the bible than to reveal it, and were sloppy in their work, methods, argumentation and conclusions. Modern critics reject synthetic archaeological interpretation to examine evidence independently of texts like Manetho, the bible and Josephus. Revisionists are not saying the bible contains no history, but that no one knows what it is until it is confirmed externally. Biblicists cannot approach the external evidence without biblical prejudice. That is why they should be excluded from any valuable biblical site and restricted to pulpits.
How Persia Created Judaism: The Rise of Persia
The shah had divine authority. He was God’s chosen one, and held his hand. Shahs were God’s regent on earth. To justify it, they propagagted monotheism in the lands they conquered. For Persians, Ahuramazda was the only true god, and each subject nation had to have one God to confirm the shah as the King of Kings—the Shahanshah. Law was important to the Persians, and even Greeks said Persians were just. The Iranian word for law “data” entered Hebrew from the Persians. Two systems operated, local law based on local custom, and imperial law, the decrees of the shahanshah. Darius hoped for rule by consent and so to pass off his laws to local communities consensually as religious restoration. The great Persian scholar, A T Olmstead affirms that Darius meant to set a code of law for the whole empire. Thiery Petit noted the actions of Darius in Egypt were part of a wide program of legislation.
How Persia Created Judaism: Religion as Politics
The scriptures say that Yehouah put Cyrus in charge of the world. Egyptian inscriptians say that Ra made Darius king of Egypt. Darius built a large new temple to Amun-Ra, the Egyptian god closest in nature to Ahuramazda, at the oasis of el-Khargeh. A letter to his Egyptian satrap tells him to intervene in the appointment of high priests, proving that emperors could not avoid interfering in influential positions like the priesthood. It is imperative that the posts most influential on the people had to be kingÂ’s men. The Demotic Chronicle of Egypt takes the same attitude of the judgement of God on Egypt as the Deuteronomic History does on the Jews. Persian propaganda was used in Egypt as elsewhere. The Persians did in Egypt what they did in Yehud, a finding important for Egyptology.
How Persia Created Judaism: Persian and Jewish Religion
Zoroaster had subjected the Iranian tribal gods to the one Most High God, Ahuramazda. Ezra, at the behest of the Persian king, did the same in Yehud. Around 400 BC, with Jerusalem Persian, Ezra and Nehemiah invented Judaism. They made the Jewish gods into a single monotheistic god akin to Ahuramazda, and the Judahites into a civilized people. About 450 BC, Herodotus had no knowledge of Yehouah, the Jews or their ancient temple in Jerusalem, though the temple was supposedly 500 years old! His history ended before Ezra, the priest, or Nehemiah, the Persian Eunuch, had arrived in Judah. Only with Ezra was Judaism with its famous law founded. Jews or Yehudim were worshippers of Yehouah. Ezra objected that some Judahites were not worshipping Yehouah. Ezra was concerned about religious purity and the purity of the ruling caste of priests, the Jewish Magi. Marriages outside of Zoroastrianism violated Zoroastrian law, so he purged the priesthood.
How Persia Created Judaism: Zoroastrian Legacy
The Babylonian year began at the vernal equinox and the Iranian new year at the autumnal equinox. Then the Achaemenian kings fully adopted the Babylonian calendar and Babylonian month names, with a religious and a civil year, reflected in the Jewish calendar. The spring festival was the important New Year festival for Zoroastrians, beginning on “No Roz” (Norouz), New Day in Persian. The Babylonian calendar began in Nisanu at the corn harvest with an akitu or ritual placing of the images of the gods from the temples to the outside of the city boundaries, a festival full of pageantry lasting a week. The Persians copied the whole festival, and they made it their New Year festival.
Herodotus on the Persians
The “Father of History”, as Herodotus has been styled, was born at Halicarnassus, a Greek colony in Asia Minor, between the years 490 and 480 BC, and lived to about sixty, dying around 425 BC. Most of his life was occupied travelling and investigating the lands with which his history is mainly concerned. His work is the earliest essay in history in a European language a record primarily of the causes and the course of the war between the Greeks and the Persians. It is a storehouse of curious and delightful traveller’s gossip as well as a faithful record of events. The rules of evidence then were defective because simple primitive people took divine intervention in human affairs for granted, and science had not yet explained marvels in terms of natural phenomena. Even so, Herodotus was a shrewd and careful critic, honest, and not remarkably credulous, as some say he is. 2500 years on, history is more scientific, but is rearely so attractively written. A simplicity of style gives it a slight but pleasantly archaic taste. Herodotus on the Persians. An epitome of Histories.
Persia Judaism Discussion
In the Maccabean wars the Jewish scriptures such as they were, were deliberately destroyed by the Greek kings and had to be restored. That would have been the likely time that the Hellenistic redaction was done. I imagine it was a prestige project, sponsored by the state and required good scholars and writers to put together a new bible. Discussion of the foundation of Judaism by the Persians
Marduk and Monotheism
Before the beginning of time, a watery chaos existed, Mummu Tiamat. Neither plains nor marshes were to be seen. Nor did the gods exist. Tiamat and Apsu were differentiated, being the deities of salt water, the sea, and fresh water, the ocean beneath the earth supporting the land. Anu, god of the heavens, was the great grandson of Tiamat and Apsu, and the father of the gods. Gods were heavenly beings. The oldest Mesopotamian prefix for a deity is an eight-rayed star, signifying “ana”, which is heaven. After Anu came Enlil or Bel “the lord”. Ea followed, whose son was Bel-Marduk (Belos), fabricator of the world. Genesis 10 tells of Nimrod, who must be Marduk. Marduk arranged the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars in their proper places. As the force behind the heavens, He originated in the discovery of the precession of the equinoxes in Babylon.
Babylonian Gods
Marduk was one of the offspring of Ea. Marduk was also Bel or Lord. He is the equivalent of Mithras in Persian religion, and Christ in Christianity. His name is shortened from Amar-uduk, “the young steer of day”, suggesting he was the morning or rising sun, the sun god in his beneficient aspect. Many hymns were written to him. Just as Bel meant “lord”, and was used, like the PhÂœnician Baal, of the chief god of any city, so Beltu meant “lady”, the chief goddess. Aruru was one of the names of the “lady of the gods”, and aided Marduk to make the seed of mankind. Ama, Mama and Mami are her other names probably so called as the mother of all things. The Hebrew “Am ha Eretz” can be read as “Mother Earth”. The various gods of pre-Persian Babylon and Assyria.
Yehouah the Sun God 1
Samson is the name of the Semitic sun god, Shemesh. A Mithraic plaque has a lion with a bee in its mouth—Leo being the sun sign when honey is found. Beth Shemesh, a place popular in the Jewish scriptures, is the House or Temple of Shemesh, the sun god. It appears in the Egyptian execration texts. It is about 15 miles from Jerusalem. Many place names with solar implications in the region suggest it was a centre of a solar cult. The Samson stories are in the same region. Solomon looks towards the sky to see his god whom no other god is like. Yehouah was originally equated with Shemesh. Theophoric names in Yah show it. Uriah and Uriyahu mean Yehouah is my light, my fire or my sun. Ner and Neriyahu mean respectively lamp or light and Yehouah is my light or my lamp, Yehozarah means Yehouah shines forth, dawns or has risen. Sheraiah means Yehouah is dawn.
Yehouah the Sun God 2
In the bringing of the Ark of the Covenant to the temple for its dedication, the priests had to leave their duties while the glory of God filled the temple, and Solomon said a prayer that parallels the sun in heaven with Yehouah in the temple. The occasion was the transition from al fresco worship beneath the skies to enclosed worship within the temple. The dawn radiance of the sun illuminated the scene, shining directly from its appearance over Olivet—the very place where Jesus ascended into heaven!—through the east gate and into the Holy of Holies, brightly illuminating the normally dark room. The Glory of God—Shekinah—had entered. The solar temple, designed fairly uniformly over the ancient Near East, is now acepted as a womb—the womb of the earth.
Hebrew Goddesses and the Origin of Judaism
Anath was the sister of Baal Hadad and the daughter of Asherah in Canaanite mythology, and was identified with Astarte (Hebrew, Ashtoreth). Why should goddesses be distinguished then conflated again? The patriarchal religious leaders divided the original Great Mother Goddess into her aspects to weaken her, but worshippers refused to see anything other than the Great Mother. Anath, Astarte and Asherah were seen as the same. Archaeology shows Israelites worshipped a goddess whose spouse was Baal and sometimes called Yehouah. Anath’s main lover was her brother, Baal Hadad, with whom she had intercourse by taking the form of a heifer. Baal is therefore a bull, just as Yehouah was at Dan and Bethel, and in the wilderness. The old goddess was personified as Zion, the city of Jerusalem. The land and people appeared in place of Asherah as the betrothed of God.
Canaanite Religion
Kronos was Saturn because the king was the regent on earth of the sun god, and the king was Saturn in horology. As on earth, so in heaven, the gods too had to have a king subject to the high god, El, and he was the king of the season, Yam, Baal Hadad, and Mot. El favoured Baal but now favours Yaw (Yahu, Yehouah). El renames Yaw as “Prince Yam and Judge Nahar”, meaning the Sea Prince and the River Judge. Sea has negative connotations as the abode of chaos. It manifests as a short but wild season of gales and storms. El also gives Yaw the title “the Beloved”, showing he is the favourite, and the other son has been rejected, but Haddad means the same! The season has moved on from the windy period to the rainy one, and Yaw, the rain god, is now the favourite. Yaw is Haddad. The “beloved” or “only begotten” of God is a kingship formula. Thus, Saul is rejected by Yehouah in favour of David. A summary of the Canaanite (Phoenician) religion.
Angels
To accept angels is to become polytheistic—an angel is a lesser god! A god is a notional being with divine, superhuman or supernatural powers. If angels are not gods, why can they do supernatural things? If Satan is not a god, why is he such a trouble to God Himself? If God is all powerful, why does he need angels to take His messages to earth? God cannot be all powerful, the Devil is just as powerful, and both have hosts of lesser gods. To make Yehouah perfectly good, Jews said fallen angels had rebelled against Him, and the wickedness of humans also was because they had rebelled. It is no answer because God is omniscient. He knew when he created the angels and humanity that they would fall. Because He knew they would finish up evil, He was wilfully creating evil. Both fell because of wicked women! This is patriarchy at work.
Zoroastrian Influences on Judaism and Christianity I.1
High gods in the Vedas were Varuna, Mitra and Indra. Iranian gods had to uphold Arta, the principle of truth, justice, righteousness and order, but Indra was an amoral adventurer who granted arbitrary favours, not rewards for Arta. Arta is in the names of Medes on Assyrian inscriptions in the ninth century BC. Later, the original high gods were replaced by the single god Ahuramazda. A god, Assara Mazas, in eighth century Assyrian tablets must be Ahuramazda. Varuna disappeared unless he was an entity called the Baga, a name of Varuna in the Vedas. Indra became chief of the daevas, immoral gods hated by Zoroaster. Either Mithras made a comeback or Ahuramazda in Iran always stood for the dual deity Mitra-Varuna of the Vedas. So, Mitra was always in Ahuramazda. As a part of the high god, he was not named separately in Persian inscriptions until Artaxerxes II.
Zoroastrian Influences on Judaism and Christianity
Evil in the world is presupposed. Zoroaster created a supreme god of good, Ahura Mazda (Ahuramazda, Ormudz), in his exalted majesty, the figure of an ideal Oriental king, and a new god of evil, Angra Mainyu (Ahriman). Ahura Mazda existed before the world began, made it, and guides it with his forethought, the Good Spirit. The Evil Spirit created death when Ahuramazda created life and went on to create the evil opposites of good things, like darkness, filth, sin, sodomy, menstruation, pests and vermin, serpents—whatever plagued people and stopped earth from being Paradise. The Vedic daevas became devils, creations of the evil god. From the first, the two gods strived to destroy each other. Their armies locked in a struggle for mastery of the universe, a war between Good and Evil. Either would rule if it conquered. At the end of history, the world will return to its original perfection, endless time begins and everything is perfect for eternity.
Zoroastrian Influences on Judaism and Christianity
Parsi, thy name is Charity. Parsis are renowned for their honesty and their philanthropy. They have always enjoyed a high moral standing in India. Parsi charity, like Jewish charity, begins at home, and the Zoroastrian religion has always encouraged mutual assistance. Critics say Zoroastrians were not interested in proselytising and modern Parsis are still not, but Jews have not been interested in proselytisiong for centuries though they once were. One of them was so good at it that he created Christianity. If, as Parsis say, the revelation of Ahuramazda to Zoroaster is the original and purest revelation, a duty to spread it must be implied. Persians were keen to spread the principles of a universal religion of truth, even though they were not concerned about the details used in different places.
Ezra and Nehemiah: Bringing Judaism from Persia
Persian emperors are mentioned in Ezra-Nehemiah in close to the right order, though the three Dariuses and two Artaxerxes are not distinguished. Taking the order and chronology to be true, the return of Ezra and Nehemiah is in the reign of Artaxerxes II. The problem is that Nehemiah could hardly have been as late as the twentieth year of Artaxerxes II and fit in with Elephantine papyri about thirty years earlier that already look to an established temple in Jerusalem. The king was Darius II. Persians gave the Jews the concept that this tiny country could become a great nation if its people were obedient and righteous. The Jewish David is a mythologized Darius II. The Maccabees, once they had set up the Jewish free state, embellished the myth of Darius II as the founder of the Jewish state, into the myth of David, the founder of a Jewish empire!
Ezra and Nehemiah: Piecing together the History of Yehud (Judah)
Ezra, called both priest and scribe, obviously working in a senior capacity, leads Levites in teaching the law. He reads to the colonists and the Am ha Eretz a covenant, an enforceable treaty. The law read out was a law that had to be kept. Ezra imposed it firmly under threat, and the people wept! Some say they wept in joy, but the response was grief—they were commanded not to mourn! It was the law of Mazas, Ahuramazda, called Mazas by the Assyrians and Moses by the Jews. Or perhaps Misa (Mica), the name of Mithras in the Persian dialect. Jewish sages think of Ezra as the second Moses. He was the first Moses, unless Ahuramazda or Mithras is considered the first. It looks more than a coincidence that his brother is Aaron, in Hebrew letter equivalents, Ahrwn. Besides the final “nun” the word looks to be a mishearing of Ahura (Aura, Oura), and the “nun” is from its assimilation into Hebrew as meaning “his brother”.
Ezra and Nehemiah: Ezra Founds Judaism for Shah Darius II
Ezra the scribe attended the ceremony of dedicating the walls, together with Nehemiah. If this happened in a second period of office of Nehemiah beginning about 430 BC, it could have been in the reign of Darius II. The compiler, unable to distinguish between the Persian kings thought “year seven of Darius” meant Darius I. It was impossible, so he rejected it in favour of Artaxerxes, who had already been mentioned in the context of Nehemiah, because the two men were together at the dedication. Ezra really came in year seven of Darius II specially to dedicate the walls and to introduce the new law. Ezra was never a “returner” and could not appear in lists of them, and was never a High Priest of the Jerusalem temple. He was the senior priest in the Persian empire.
Sulpicius Severus on the Restoration of the Temple by Darius
The Church Father Sulpicius Severus, in his history of the world (Chronica), knew the order of the Persian kings, and unhesitatingly said the restored temple was opened in the sixth year of Darius II Ochus!
Returners or Colonists?
The “return” could have been simple. Judah was not virgin land but belonged to the Persian king, and was doled out only on his orders. Those who “returned” were made to go. The need for it was likely to have been the Egyptian rebellion of the fifth century, and that of Megabyxos following it. The Jews were probably involved in them. The Persians decided to set up a new ruling class over them and deported them in. Yehud would be a buffer state against Egypt, and the colonists, called Jews, rewarded by being treasurers of Abarnahara. The temple and city, ravaged in the rebellions, had to be rebuilt. The chief minister of the Persian chancellery, Ezra, was sent to open the temple and city in about 417 BC in the reign of Darius II. Two centuries later, the biblical author thought there was only one Darius, the great one. Though obviously wrong, no one questions sacred texts!
Haggai and Zechariah
On the first day of the sixth month of the second year of Darius, Haggai brought a command to build the temple. The people left in the land, the Am ha Eretz, claimed a right to the land they had lived in since the Babylonian deportation. So, they resisted the plans of the Jews, the Persian colonials. The “returners” were opposed by the locals “all the days of Cyrus, even until the reign of Darius”. The host of people in Ezra and Nehemiah cannot have arrived all at once because so many could have outfaced the locals. The Aramaic text of Ezra, Haggai and Zechariah agree the temple was started in the second year of Darius, taken as Darius I, because the later scribes had no idea different Persian kings had the same name. The temple was not actually completed until the reign of Darius II, a hundred years later. A century was compressed into the reign of Cyrus, Cambyses also being unknown.
Deuteronomy 1
The Deuteronomic historian says Hezekiah centralized religion in Jerusalem, so how did Solomon? Writing about the time of Nehemiah and before Ezra, in about 450 BC, Herodotus knew no great temple of the Jews in Palestine! He knew no Jews in Palestine! The Jerusalem temple was not set up until the late fifth century. The author of Deuteronomy did not know where the new religion would be centralized. The Persians, after initial failures with several shrines, centralized worship of Yehouah in Jerusalem. The decision was given the authority of Moses who had been speaking as God in Deuteronomy before he was reclassified as a prophet. He was God—Ahuramazda! Deuteronomy says nothing about a priesthood of Aaron or Zadok. Its priests are “all the tribe of Levi”. Herodotus calls the Magi a Persian “tribe”. A “tribe” in this usage is a caste.
Deuteronomic History and the Prophets
The Deuteronomic History has one main theme—disobedience of the law will bring punishment by God, particularly the withdrawal of the gift of the land. The Persian kings did not want to restore local kings but hoped to control people by religious authority—the God of Heaven had his reign on earth in the person of the king of kings—the Persian king. So, the Deuteronomic Historian had an agenda. He presumes a “return”, otherwise his lessons and polemics were directed at no one. The deportation was presented as a “return”. It was typical. The Persians used a similar technique of persuasion on other subjects besides the Jews. The Babylonian Weidner Chronicle blamed the fortunes of the Babylonian kings on how closely they had followed the ordinances of the Babylonian god, Marduk, and the practices of the temple at Esagil. No one considers that it might have been written by the same Persian chancellery division as the Jewish scriptures. The same happened in Egypt.
The Prophets 1
The significance of the prophets is immense in explaining the origins of Judaism. People were deported for a political purpose and with a duty—to impose an alien culture on the place they were sent to. Told to restore the worship of a god, they had to do it. The Persians deported colonists into Judah as Jews to restore the worship of Yehouah, who had entered into a covenant—a treaty with the Jews, with moral conditions—to obey God and be obedient citizens. Under the Deuteronomic law, all native and foreign cults were suppressed in favour of that of Yehouah, and every shrine other than the temple closed. It was a Persian law and could not have been a law of Josiah. No such law could have been Canaanitish. That was propaganda to persuade the natives to accept an unpopular law as their own. Prophets were professional propagandists used by the Persians to predispose people towards their way of thinking, and it is known that Cyrus used such propagandists in preparing to attack a country. Propaganda was doubtless always their function.
Joshua, Josiah and the Deuteronomic Historian 1
Since eventually Canaanites and Israelites were differentiated, the question is when. The Merneptah stele reports the people of Israel as in the land of Canaan c 1200 BC. So, the line was drawn between 1200 BC, when Israelites first appeared in history, to the time of the Ptolemies, around 300 BC, when Greeks noticed the Jews and their temple in Jerusalem. The Ptolemies supported the temple for almost 100 formative years, and translated the scriptures into Greek in the third century BC. In that 900 years, the Jewish religion was founded and the bible started. The historian has to find this line that separated off the Jews. Archaeology yields nothing distinctive down to the fifth century when Persians colonized the province of Yehud in the so-called “return”. This deportation of Aramaeans from Syria and Urartu into Yehud is a clear, unbroken and impermeable line.
The Lost Temple of Israel by Zvi Koenigsberg 1
The altar at Ebal was used only 70-100 years. The unhewn stones of the altar had to be plastered and have words of the Torah written upon them. No words of Torah have been found inscribed on the slabs, nor is there any other inscription on the site except on Egyptian scarabs. The pottery types found were thirteenth and twelfth century. The doubt is whether biblical dates and the pottery sequences deduced from them are valid at all. Dating is by the supposed incursions of the Pharaoh Shishak of the time of Jeroboam I. Destructions in suitable layers are attributed to Shishak and are dated from the bible! But the tenth century Jeroboam I looks like the eighth century one written back 200 years into a mythical epoch. Then, this Shishak is not the tenth century Shoshenq but Akheperre Shoshenq V who reigned at the same time as Jeroboam II of Israel, and the pottery sequences have to be adjusted by 200 years.
Judges: a Book of the Persian Period 1
Though written later, Judges consists of folktales culled from the period when Judah was still mainly Am ha Eretz, only haphazardly settled by colonists, and ruled by Persian magistrates, until the organized colonization by Ezra. For example, Gideon is a son of Joash and an Abiezrite (“My father is Ezra”), he is of the brotherhood of Ezraites, the followers of Ezra. Joash is Joshua. Here are folk references to the occasion when Ezra returned and read out the law, and Joshua was mythically the first High Priest of the second temple. The oppressors in this story however are the Midianites (Medes), the Amalekites (King’s men) and the men of the east, references at this time, to the Persian conquerors, who come up with their cattle, like locusts. They are encamped in the Valley of Jezreel, a mythical name for Israel.
Assyria II
The biblical importance of Tiglath-pileser is that he ended the independence of Samaria, the biblical Israel, and was the first Assyrian king to mention the kingdom of Judah. Inscriptions of Tiglath-pileser confirm it. They include the name of Menahem “of Samaria”. The bible depicts the arrival of the Assyrian king in Israel and the offerings of Menahem, but the Assyrian sources do not relate any arrival of Tiglath-pileser III in Israel in the time of Menahem. Menahem goes to Assyria. Judah surrendered to the Assyrians, who returned to their homeland when the campaign ended in 734 BC. Aram and Israel then attacked Judah, because it had favoured Assyria by seceding from Samaria, and so from the alliance. Ahaz, loyal to Tiglath-pileser, asked for him to intervene. Tiglath-pileser, who was in Urartu, lifted the siege on Tushpa, and directed his forces again to the west to punish the coalition.
Puzzles in the History of Israel and Judah 1
Iaua (Jehu), the son of Khumri (Omri), brought tribute of silver, gold, lead and other vessels of gold. A Son of Khumri is an Israelite. The destruction of the Aramaean kingdom of Damascus obliged Jehu to pay tribute. It was the first known contact between the Assyrians and the Israelites. Omri is also mentioned in the Moabite stone of Mesha of Moab. Mesha makes no mention of Omri’s successor, Ahab, who is known to the Assyrians. Mesha speaks about Israelite oppression that lasted for half the reign of Omri’s son who is not named. In the bible, the two other sons of Omri, Jehoram and Ahaziah, are vague figures, and have, curiously, the same names as two contemporary kings of Judah, albeit in reverse order. Mesha mentions no king except Omri. Omitting the two pale sons, the bible fits better what Mesha wrote.
Puzzles in the History of Israel and Judah 3
Iaua (Jehu), the son of Khumri (Omri), brought tribute of silver, gold, lead and other vessels of gold. A Son of Khumri is an Israelite. The destruction of the Aramaean kingdom of Damascus obliged Jehu to pay tribute. It was the first known contact between the Assyrians and the Israelites. Omri is also mentioned in the Moabite stone of Mesha of Moab. Mesha makes no mention of Omri’s successor, Ahab, who is known to the Assyrians. Mesha speaks about Israelite oppression that lasted for half the reign of Omri’s son who is not named. In the bible, the two other sons of Omri, Jehoram and Ahaziah, are vague figures, and have, curiously, the same names as two contemporary kings of Judah, albeit in reverse order. Mesha mentions no king except Omri. Omitting the two pale sons, the bible fits better what Mesha wrote.
Judah in Babylonian Times
Archaeological evidence of a Babylonian presence in Judah, Samaria and Galilee between 600 and 540 BC is so slight that what evidence there is might be wrongly attributed. No sanctuaries or cult objects found in Palestine are Babylonian. No document from the occupation has been found. Supposedly Babylonian artefacts are overwhelmingly Persian. Not one find attributed to the Babylonian period is certain. Some tombs were used from the Judahite age into the Persian age with little to show any Babylonian period between. Excavations show prosperity under the Egyptians and Assyrians, dereliction under the Babylonians and restoration under Persian occupation. L Stager, who excavated Ashkelon, found it was derelict in the Babylonian period but revived under the Persians. Assyrian strata are commonly followed by Persian strata, signs of Babylonian occupation being lacking. There is no Babylonian layer distinct from the Persian layer because the Persians adopted Babylonia culture. Babylon was practically the capital of later Persia.
The Pentateuch 1
Moses, an Egyptian prince with no known knowledge of Babylonia, begins his books of the Torah with stories known to be from Mesopotamia. Their outlook was that of Mesopotamian people emigrating to Canaan. Allusions to the “Exile” in Deuteronomy proves that the Pentateuch is Persian, from the fifth century BC, 700 years after Moses was putatively writing it. So, it was not written by Moses. The older material consisted of Mesopotamian myths, elements of Syrian myths and folklore. The priests added detailed laws to do with temple worship like Leviticus, genealogies to give credence to their authority, and bogus history to justify the temple cultus from a putative antiquity. It showed the Israelites as serial apostates from the worship of Yehouah, and a lucrative meal ticket for the priests.
Genesis Myths 1
Baal was the Canaanite saviour because he fought Yam and Mot the gods of chaos and death, so the world remained fertile and orderly to feed the people. The sea was considered chaotic. Yam, which means the sea, is a sea monster with seven heads, also called Lotan. Yehouah boasts to Job of the dragon Leviathan that he had tamed, and Psalms describes the victory over the monster. In Isaiah, Yehouah defeats a dragon, and Psalms describes another victory over a sea monster, Rahab. Similarly, the biblical creation myth does not show the world as made ex nihilo but as an ordering of the chaos already present. The first creation of Genesis is all about separating and parting things. God splits heaven from earth, darkness and light, night and day, evening and morning, water and sky, sets of pairs of opposites. It reflects a cosmic dualism in which good and bad things have to be separated, as in Persian Zoroastrianism.
Genesis Myths 2
The tree of life in the Jewish scriptures was not original. A stylized tree was often the center of cultic scenes, with animals such as Ibex feeding on it, or people flanking it. A cylinder seal in the British Museum has a man and a woman flanking a tree, hands stretched toward it. Behind the woman is an upright snake. These elements appear in the Genesis myth of the fall. Religions involving a communion meal imply immortality is conferred by the repast. The fruit of the Tree of Life is the ambrosia of the gods that keeps them perpetually young. If death accompanied the knowledge the gods have, the Tree of Knowledge is a tree of death, and the Tree of Life is its antidote. Eating both fruit confers immortality and divine knowledge. The pair ate of the Tree of Knowledge and became mortal, but sadly not wise enough to reject religion.
Patriarchs 1.1
Hebrew is synonymous with Israelite and Jew, so these people have three names. Odd? “Hebrew” means the Israelites who escape from Egypt, but was the name of the people of Abram in use hundreds of years before the Exodus, even in biblical chronology. Mesopotamia is Greek for “between the rivers”, the northern part of modern Iraq, from the point of narrowing between the rivers to their source. It is the Syrian plain where the cities of Urfa and Harran are situated. Mesopotamia is the biblical Aram-naharaim, Aram of the rivers, the region between the Euphrates and the river Khabur. It is the country of origin of the family of Abraham. When Abram is called “the Hebrew” in Genesis, the Septuagint has “Perates”, meaning “Euphrates”. The translators of the Septuagint knew “Hebrew” was to do with crossing the river Euphrates.
Patriarchs 2.1
Yehouah raining fire from heaven on the cities of the plain uses imagery popular with the Assyrian kings in their vassalage treaties. The gods of both sides are called upon to “let it rain burning coals in your land instead of dew”, if the vassal revoked the treaty unilaterally. Like the Romans at Carthage, Assyrian rulers razed rebellious cities, spread the site with salt and sulphur, and sowed their fields with thistles, leaving desolation. The conquering Assyrians blamed the people’s own god for such punishments, as did the Persians. When, in Genesis, Yehouah rained fire and sulphur on the wicked cities and left them desolate, He had used the foreigner to serve up the punishment agreed by the parties to the vassalage treaties. The cities are all destroyed by God and no traces of them have ever been found. The real reason is that they were not there in the first place!
Exodus and Numbers: An Hellenistic Romance
The foundation myth of the Jews is the myth of the exodus from Egypt where they had been enslaved. The story is told in the second and fourth books of the bible, a single work usually designated as Exodus-Numbers. It relates the story and the leadership of Moses. Curiously no biblical Jews are ever called Moses except Moses, even though he was the first great leader they had, according to the tale. The reason is that it is a tale, a late addition to the corpus of the Jewish scriptures and not the earliest as the scriptures pretend. John Van Seters, building on the work of others, shows conclusively that the author of Exodus-Numbers, called J or the Yahwist, used Deuteronomy, the Deuteronomic history and parts of the prophets. Exodus-Numbers must therefore be later than Deuteronomy. Van Seters takes Deuteronomy to be late seventh century BC. If it was really brought by Ezra from Persia in the late fifth century BC as these pages contend, then Exodus-Numbers is fourth or third century. The likeliest time is when the Septuagint was written in the middle of the third century BC. Exodus as written is an allegory of the real exodus, falsely called “the return”, from Mesopotamia to Palestine in the time of Darius II
Moses and the Exodus 1
The bible is at odds with ancient textual sources and with archaeology. Egyptian papyri detail the least things about Egyptian events of the time. One explains that two(!) escaping slaves were pursued across the border, yet there is no record of two million Israelite slaves all leaving one night. Uneducated slaves, desperately escaping from the armies of their powerful oppressor in the desert do not sit down each night and write out a diary of the day’s events. Nomads keep up their spirits by telling tall stories around their campfires. The story was written by Persian administrators sent to secure the loyalty of the Jews for Persia, not Egypt. They used the myth, presented then as it was ever after as true history, to depict those loyal to the traditional gods and goddesses as apostates and backsliders from the true God of Israel, Yehouah, who had made a covenant with Moses.
Moses and the Exodus 2.1
Scriptural books are warnings to the natives in Palestine to back the god the Persians were introducing as the God of the Israelites. They pretended that the people were always backsliding from worship of the true god, so they invented a history to prove it. Moses was not important in it. The Prophets could not have avoided talking about Moses and the Sinai covenant had it really been a long known and central element of Jewish history. Prophets preceding Jeremiah are mainly silent about Moses and rarely use the word covenant, but criticize the people for disobedience. The saga of Moses must have been one of the last additions to the history. Invented pseudepigraphic prophecies showed God would punish the people for their backsliding. Since they were written after the events they could seem accurate. The Persians depicted Jewish prophets during the monarchy as incessantly warning the people not to apostatize. They always did!
When Was Exodus Written?
Books were written in Greek professing to give accounts of Egyptian and Babylonian culture, but in the light of modern discovery they were inaccurate. The Jewish one, the bible, was divinely accurate. In it Jews had been in the Nile Delta of Egypt since before 1600 BC, but Greek writers know nothing of these Egyptian Jews. Herodotus, a Greek born about 484 BC, is the “Father of History”, even though Moses was supposed to have been writing a thousand years earlier. Exodus in biblical chronology was written before 1200 BC, making it the first history written. No one thinks it was. It was really written after 300 BC. Jews and their Temple did not exist until the time of Darius II in 417 BC. The Egyptian priest, Manetho wrote a history of Egypt in Greek, in which he related the fables of the Jews. What he wrote could have been the earliest form of the Jewish scriptures. The great Jewish leader Moses was recorded nowhere else before.
The Theophany at Sinai and the Persian Founding of Judaism by Ezra
In Deuteronomy, Moses had no special role, doubtless because he is fictional. He had not been invented as a great leader of the ancestors of the Jews then. Indeed, it was the J author of Exodus who set down the myth. After the people had reacted to the theophany fearfully, they asked Moses to mediate with God (Ex 20:9). It was the point where Moses entered as Mazda brought down to earth, and Ahuramazda was replaced by Yehouah. The law had been read under the authority of Ahuramazda, the Persian god, but the Jewish tradition required God to be Yehouah.
Yehud Benjamin and Yaudi Bar Samal
Judah North and Judah South
We are not to confuse Azriyau of Yaudi with his more famous contemporay, Azariah of Judah, Yehud to the Persians. Several of the kingdoms of the south are parallelled by similarly named northern kingdoms. Musri is in Sinai but is also in Asia Minor. The Judah of the north also seems to be called Samal, or to be twinned with a closely related neighbouring kingdom called Samal. The Judah of the south was similarly identified with a closely related kingdom called Samaria. The distinguished Assyriologist, Wolfram von Soden, tells us that in an extensive area stretching from Asia Minor through Syria to Egypt, the substratum language does not distinguish between “l” and “r”. So, Samal is in Northern Syria but Samaria is in Palestine, and Yahuda is in Palestine but Yaudi is in Northern Syria! The names Samal and Yaudi seem interchangeable, and the names Judah and Samaria (Israel) also are interchangeable.
The Hebrews: People of Abarnahara
Because the Canaanites of the Jewish scriptures were depicted as barbarous, scholars have artificially distinguished these Canaanite merchants by using the Greek name for them, Phœnicians. Phœnicians called themselves Canaanites, and still called themselves Canaanites when they lived in their colonies such as Carthage in north Africa. Canaanites were the ancestors of the Carthaginians, and called themselves Canaanites right into the Christian age. Alphabets all derive from a single initial one, the earliest sure form of which is the Phœnician one. The archaic Greek alphabet was derived from a proto-Canaanite script about 1050 BC when the proto-Canaanite became Phœnician. Who were the Hebrews? Canaanites, the inhabitants of the Persian satrapy Abarnahara!
Who Wrote the Hebrew Scriptures? Literacy in ancient Judah
What evidence is there of literacy, of administrative complexity, and of scribal education in monarchic Israel and Judah? Speculative reconstructions of ancient Israel always favour the bible, despite the fact that no other evidence supports them, but these speculations get spouted in pulpits. The later in time, the better evidence we have for scribal activity. Even if holy scribbling began before the Second Temple period, it continued and increased during this period. Since scribblers were rare before then, but common afterwards, what is the objection to postulating that the scriptures were actually written when scribbling was popular? The onus of proof of the antiquity of the scriptures lies on those who want to argue that they were written earlier. If less likely, it remains possible, but must be shown, not assumed.
Psalms and Worship
When Yehud emerged, it was identified with exclusive adoration of Yehouah, the creator of heaven and earth and supreme king over all nations, with emphasis on temple, Torah, sabbath, a holy land and its people elected by Yehouah. The Psalter is a treasury of Jewish theologies of this time—the Persian colonization of Yehud, conventionally called the Return. Yehouah appears in Psalms as the supreme God, creator and maintainer of world order, but also the exclusive Lord of His religious community and the teacher, comforter and provider of every Jew. Singers had a prophetic role. Many psalms contain prophecy, direct revelation from Yehouah, meant for the audience of subject people being indoctrinated. These psalms were recited by a temple priest or singer. Temple rituals showed God like Mithras who was conceived as the face of God—the sun on high amid the hosts of heaven.
The Enoch Literature
Over a hundred phrases in the New Testament can be traced to the 1 Enoch. The Enochian literature helps us to see some of the directions from which the biblical traditions have arrived. Enoch has little role in our bible, but was a far more important man than we now imagine. He is the perfect man—the man at the boundary of heaven. Only Noah and apparently Abraham besides Enoch walked with the gods. 1 Enoch is strongly eschatological and depicts Enoch as a wise man, a scribe and a priest who interceded with God on behalf of the fallen angels, and presided over the Book of Life at the Last Judgement, a trial before the throne of God and the struggle of two spirits, one Good and one Wicked, described as angels or princes. A relic of this appears in Jude where the archangel Michael contends with the Devil over the body of Moses.
Esther and Crucifixion
Haman, the Evil Spirit, tried to stand between Mordecai, the Good Spirit, and the king (Ormuzd). Here we have a trinity consisting of the king, Mordecai and Esther, comparable with the Father, the Son and the Mother, opposed by the Evil Spirit. The change in role of the goddess from the Mother (Mother Earth, Aramaiti) to an intermediary between Mordecai and the Most High illustrates a stage of the neutering of the goddess into the Holy Spirit, considered by Christians as God or the son, but not a goddess, in another form. Zoroaster had no place in his religious scheme, to judge by the Gathas, for a son and a goddess, roles probably played in the old Aryan religion by Mithras and Aramaiti. The goddess in the role of Esther, tells the king at one of her special banquets that the Evil Spirit plotted to destroy the Good Creation (the Jews). The king is aghast but realizes that the wickedness has been done in his own name.
The Jews in the Intertestament Years 1
Even religious people know little about Judah between the Old and the New Testaments. Yet this is when Judaism was invented by the as a model religion for conquered people (Juddin) who were not Zoroastrians. Juddin were communities that had cooperated with the Persians, rather than opposed them, and were spread around the Persian empire. The people who lived in Yehud, the Persian name of Judah, were not mainly Jews when Nehemiah arrived, even according to the Jewish scriptures. Herodotus, describing the Persian empire, had never heard of them. Nehemiah had to show them what to do to be Jews, and Ezra had to read them the law, though the scriptures we now have say Jews had had a God given law for a thousand years. The people who already lived in Yehud were happy to join in the building of the temple to their local God, Yehouah, but Nehemiah and Ezra wanted nothing to do with them. Only the people they brought counted as Jews.
The Jews in the Intertestament Years 2
Pompey took the temple in 63 BC. He abolished kings, made Hyrcanus High Priest with the title of Ethnarch, and a smaller Judaea was made tributary to the Romans in Syria. People do not like being ruled by foreigners, and the Roman occupation moved Jewish peasants once more into dissent and rebellion, its focus being the traditional Jewish loyalty to Persia. Jews were likely serving as a Parthian fifth column in the east, or Romans suspected them of it. Hyrcanus was restricted to being High Priest, and Marcus Crassus seized the temple treasure in 54 BC as reparations for three successive uprisings by Aristobulus and his son wanting a restoration of the Maccabees. Jewish sedition against the Romans did not end. In 51 BC, Crassus, later involved in the plot against Caesar, sold 30,000 Jewish bandits as slaves. Under the Romans, the struggle between the Pharisees and the Sadducees continued.
Dating Ancient Near Eastern History I.1
Dating events and finds is the hardest part of writing history and is far from perfect. Archaeologists used Egyptian dynastic records to establish the succession of stylistic changes in Egyptian statuary and pottery. They then established a chronology for Mycenaean Greece and Crete by dating Egyptian goods, found in Greek and Cretan excavations. Then, they linked Greece and Crete to cultures in other parts of Europe. It all assumes the Egyptian dates are right, and everything is dated from them. The chronology of ancient Egypt rests on unproven assumptions. The literary sources of the anchor dates of Egyptian chronology being late and fragmentary does not help. Before Taharqa it is unreliable, whatever the experts say. Radiocarbon dating and other such scientific methods ought to be useful objective checks, but the Egyptologists remain attached to their chronology and refuse to let go for a silly carbon-14 test!
Dating Ancient Near Eastern History II.1
Palestinian archaeology is confused, though you would never believe it listening to Sunday School teachers. The pottery of Samaria is a standard for dating other Palestinian sites. Samaria, founded by Omri, should have been ninth century and built on ground with tenth century remains. Pottery found in the ground was also found in the casement walls, but the pottery in the ground was mixed with identifiably older material. The walls contained pottery that must have been contemporaneous with the building. It was ninth century, offering no trouble to the date of the building, but the same pottery was dated at Hazor and Megiddo by Egyptian chronology to the twelfth century. Kenyon was quite certain that the ground in the pre-Omride period contained only Early Bronze pottery. Biblicists tried to discredit Kenyon, as they do to preserve Solomon! It casts a poor light on the honesty of people who excavate with their bibles instead of scrapers.
Dating Ancient Near Eastern History III.1
Synchronisms on which current chronology rests are few and some are difficult to interpret. The dated Sothic sighting once held to fix New Kingdom chronology is now discounted as not a Sothic sighting at all. The lunar observations which date the reigns of Ramses II and Thutmosis III admit multiple solutions, repeated in a 25-year cycle. Assur-uballit of Assyria seems different in the Amarna letters from the one assumed the same in the kinglists. The Palestinian campaign of Shoshenq I does not match well with the Judean campaign of Shishak in Kings. In the Third Intermediate Period, figures like Shoshenq I, Osorkon, and High Priests of Amun are still dated conventionally. The chronology of Israel from its own internal relativities and Babylonian and Assyrian anchor points suggests a shortening of dates by two centuries. It has to be re-thought.
Dating—Physical Methods
As an example, electron spin resonance (ESR) dating is based, like thermoluminescence dating, on the fact that background radiation causes electrons to separate from their atoms and become trapped in the crystalline lattice of the material. When odd numbers of electrons are separated, there is a measurable change in the magnetic field of the material. Since this magnetic field progressively changes with time in a predictable way, it provides another atomic clock, or calendar, that can be used for dating purposes. Unlike thermoluminescence dating, however, the sample is not destroyed with the ESR method. Electron spin resonance is used to date minerals. ESR has been used to provide dates going back roughly 500 million years. A summary mainly of physical methods for dating artifacts.
Inventing a Religion
How the Japanese rulers manufactured a religion to serve their own purposes, Mikado-worship. Bushido was unknown until the end of the nineteenth century! The word appears in no dictionary before the year 1900. Japan had its chivalrous people but Bushido, as an institution or a code of rules, had never existed. The Japanese ruling class built a new religion for the Japanese. The new Japanese religion of loyalty and patriotism emerged into the light of day, and the feats accomplished during the last war show that the simple ideal which it offered was capable of inspiring heroic deeds, and foul ones too. How could a foreigner imagine that people who made such positive statements about their own country were merely exploiting credulity? Onlookers had no reason to suspect, and even if they did, original sources were out of their reach. What Christians and Jews do not or will not accept is that their own religions were no less phony.
References to Rosh Ha Shanah, The Jewish New Year, in askwhy.co.uk
This Rosh Ha Shanah and Yom Kippur feature is simply the result of a search of these Judaism pages for “New Year”, and show the Jewish New Year in a context of Jewish history, the real Jewish history, not the bogus history in the Jewish scriptures. Jewish New year traditions came out of the traditions of Babylon when it was under Persian hegemony in the fifth century BC. So, these links put the later Jewish tradition in its proper lineage. Each box contains extracts relevant to the page which links from it as a heading at the top.
Future Religion: Judith Maiden of the Land 1
Once upon a time Salem had been the capital city of a great and powerful kingdom ruled by a mighty king. But time is not usually kind. It had been cruel. Powerful enemies had arisen on all sides and the kingdom had been reduced to a province of a vast empire. Once rich and independent, Salem now was in decay. Its once picturesque alleys and yards were overgrown with the suckers of a giant fig tree which sprang up in every street and garden. A myth for a future religion.
