Judaism
The Truth about the Jewish Scriptures 2
Abstract
Somehow or other, God, the One God, comes into Jewish history, and all the other gods go out and finally dissolve into sheer nothingness, mere fancies of the ignorant.T R Glover
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, September 24, 2001
Objective History
To judge a story’s historicity by its degree of realism is to mistake verisimilitude for historicity. Verisimilitude is the literary term for the illusion of reality. Just because a story sounds real does not mean that it is. Realistic fiction is just as fictional as nonrealistic fiction.Adele Berlin, J Biblical Literature (2001)
It can be said that objective history is impossible, as it is, but natural and inevitable bias is quite distinct from deliberately composing history to support a religious view. All good historians try to recognize prejudice and try to correct it whether in others or themselves. The historiographer is not interested in what is or was true but in what upholds a chosen view. It might be said that any revisionist is therefore a historiographer, and perhaps in a sense that is true, but the revisionist is nevertheless trying to correct an error to get at the historical truth. Revisionists are not trying to hide truth to uphold a dogma. When a bias can be seen in some historical work, the revisionist will try to point it out and correct it. The reader has access to both views and can judge.
The historiographer will not be challenged. Religious writers all lean in much the same direction, squabbling over arcane details to give an illusion of scholarship when they are all agreed on the bulk of the religious edifice they have. The reader, if unprepared, will get enmeshed in this esoteric quibbling about how God meant His bad communicating to be interpreted, and will finish up praying to empty space for help, by which time it is too late to get any.
Religious works that purport to be history cannot be assumed to be accurate until confirmed by independent means. It is not safe to accept, with the guardians of religion, that we should accept religious history unless it is proven wrong. It is safer to take the skeptical scientific view that it is myth, or at best legend, until it is proven true.
Nor can the logical jump be made that it is all correct because something in it has been shown to be historical—historiography often takes the form of historical fiction. It is put in a historical setting that might be more or less convincing, but a convincing setting cannot vouchsafe the central plot. This should be plain today—plainer than it ever was—because historical fiction, science fiction and fantasy fiction are commonly presented to us on TV, the silver screen, video games and in books. All give us an acceptable period setting for fictional stories. Are we to suppose that people 2000 or even 3000 years ago—only 30 or 40 lifetimes distant—could not write fiction? They could, and many ancient papyri and stelae prove it by exaggerrating the exploits of the king who commissioned the work.
Biblical History
So, we have good reason to question the history of the Jews and the Christians. They will not, so we must. We immediately find our suspicions confirmed, but the walls of the established religions are not so unsteady as those of Jericho. N P Lemche published Early Israel. Anthropological and Historical Studies on the Israelite Society Before the Monarchy in 1985 but attracted little attention. G Garbini in History and Ideology in Ancient Israel, New York (1988) attacked theological interpretations of history that countenanced the theologizing historiography of the biblical texts as historical statements.
Garbini is Professor of Semitic Philology in the University of Rome, essentially a philologist and archaeologist with a specific interest in the history of Israel, and is neither Jew nor Christian, but part of the wider circle of ancient historians.John Bowden
But P R Davies, In Search of “Ancient Israel”, Sheffield (1992) opened up the debate and invited the descriotion “biblical minimalists” and the even less flattering ones. The same year, T L Thompson published a book reaching similar conclusions, Early History of the Israelite People. From the Written and Archaeological Sources, Leiden (1992).
Ziony Zevit does not agree with the biblical minimalists, but thinks they are “much maligned by Biblicists and historians”, though they are engaged in a legitimate historical undertaking. Yet Zevit seems to like to be all things to all men. He has written an 80 page introduction on method to his fat textbook (The Religions of Ancient Israel), but abandons basic principles when it comes to the Jewish scriptures:
Although a skeptical position concerning the facticity of the contents of these narratives is justified in some cases eg Jericho and Ai, blanket denial that any facticity adheres to any aspect of the narratives… is not warranted automatically…
Regrettably, for his scientific credentials, it is! He knows, or ought to know, that documentary evidence cannot be trusted at all when parts of it are known to be false, and when it is known that the author has an agenda other than recording the historic truth. Both of these apply to the scriptures, and Zevit would not disagree. How then can anything in the Jewish scriptures be accepted as factual automatically? The rules say the opposite. A blanket denial that anything in them is true should be automatic. Skepticism about factuality is warranted. If huge swaths of the book are wrong, or even dubious, then none of the rest can be assumed to be correct. That is proper method, and students who accept Zevit on this will be taught wrongly.
In his textbook, he does not want to explain why he disagrees with the minimalists, even though much of his own research upholds their views, simply adding, in a similar vein:
Those who deny any facticity or historicity for the events in which David, Solomon and subsequent rulers took part, events described in Samuel-Kings, err grievously in that they ignore textual, inscriptional and archeological data.
He must hope that this is sufficient for his readers for he does not offer to say what these evidences are that he says the minimalists grievousely err in omitting. Did they do it because they are stupid, or did they do it, like biblicists because they want to protect God from His detracters? The truth is that they do not have a reason to tell lies unlike the biblicists. They are therefore more likely to be trying to seek the truth, but truth is not what biblicists want. The truth, then, is that there is no such evidence for Saul, Solomon and a good many kings of Israel and Judah, except what is in the bible, and the bible is precisely what is in question. No data are ignored. There are often no data to support the bible. It is the biblicists who ignore its absence and carry on regardless. Saying that minimalists are ignoring the “textual data”, meaning the bible, is like saying that Greek historians ignore the textual data about Oedipus, Odysseus or Pegasus, the flying horse, meaning Homer and the Greek myths.
All proper historians are trained to require adequate answers to certain questions about any written documents before they decide how they can be used:
- What is the nature of this document?
- Who wrote it?
- Who benefits from this document?
- When was it written and why?
- Where was it written?
The Jewish scriptures make up a constitution for the Jewish people to whom they were given. The earliest time that rules like reading the Torah publicly and observing its charges faithfully, abstention from work and commerce on the sabbath, avoiding intermarriage, tithing, maintaining temple sacrifice through a self-imposed tax (Neh 10:30-40) could appear is when Ezra and Nehemiah were sent by the Persian king during the fifth century BC to determine civil and religious policy in Yehud.
Textual examination of the books of the scriptures shows that they could not have been written in the times they claim to have been. Moses cannot have written the Pentateuch in 1500 BC or even 1300 BC; Isaiah could not have written his book in 700 BC.
Moreover, the books are not uniform within themselves and so are not written by a single author, but by different hands at different times. The period intervening between the supposed events and when they were set to paper is explained by historiographers as a period of oral transmission. It never occurs to them that the gap is better explained by the author being a fiction writer.
They use the poems of Homer describing the seige of Troy as a parallel because Homer wrote in 800 BC when the seige of Troy was in 1200 BC. Yet the bulk of Homer’s works were romance, even if they were based on recollections of real events. And Troy has been discovered but no trace of an exodus of two million people from Egypt has. Nor has any unequivocal trace of a kingdom of David or an empire of Solomon. We can be certain that the scriptural accounts of these events are fictional and no amount of explaining away by Jewish and Christian believers can alter it.
Garbini had already dated biblical compositions to the Persian and Hellenistic periods, and minimalists conclude that the books of the Jewish bible were written then. The historical books are fictional histories based on earlier legends or less refined fictions, through which the local Persian colonists provided themselves with a mythic past that linked them to the land and to a religion. Zivit points out that this conclusion has two important corollaries:
- Bible narratives about the political, social, and intellectual world of ancient Israel from Abraham to the temple’s destruction lack probative value.
- Any narrative about the actual people living in the central mountain areas of Palestine during the Iron Age must be based on archaeological data alone.
No archaeological data or any data external to the bible itself confirm the patriarchal or exodus stories as narrated in Genesis and Exodus. Only with qualified explanations can archaeological data be drafted to support some elements in the Joshua-Judges narratives. If Egyptian slaves escaped in dribs and drabs over a period of 400 years and were joined from time to time by bands of wandering Arab shepherds, then we do not have a biblical exodus! If these runaway slaves and nomads settled in Palestine over a long time span, then we do not have a conquest and we do not have a Joshua! Is that clear? you at the back!
The patriarchal narratives were first told by colonists from Syria who were settled in the Palestinian hills, but the proto-exodus-conquest narratives were written by the colonists to explain the law which they had to obey because it was imposed by the Persians whose enemy was the Egyptians, and to allegorize the century of struggles by the colonists to establish their hegemony over the native Canaanites.
Historical Israel, the actual flesh and blood people who dwelt in the central mountains during the Iron Ages, didn’t come from Egypt. They were descendents of earlier, Bronze Age inhabitants of the places where they lived. Their culture and religion was a slightly evolved form of the earlier, Bronze Age Canaanite ones.
All the factual evidence we have is that the culture of the Hill Country of Palestine called Israel and Judah remained Canaanite until the Persians came at the end of the sixth century BC. Only in the following century were books about Jewish history written down. The people of Israel, its leaders and heroes are literary fictions or inventions or constructs. Stories about them, their victories, defeats, religious policies are all late concoctions written at the earliest in the Persian period.
Even when the stories were written down in a book, it was not treated, as it is by simple Christians today, as the unalterable word of God. The history of Israel given in Chronicles is not the same as that given in Samuel and Kings, just as the gospel of John is not the same as the gospel of Mark. Readers of the bible should realize that it was not written in one sitting. The Persians began it using various older legends and the available annals, the Greeks of the Ptolemies added Hellenistic romances, and the Maccabees added more of them and justified the free state. Some of these early legends and proto-histories were greatly elaborated as Hellenistic romances perhaps in the third and even the second centuries BC.
Contrary to what their detractors believe, minimalists take the historical writings seriously. Some events of the bible are confirmed by external investigation. Some of the kings of Israel and Judah appear in Assyrian records and therefore can be dated. However, given that the history of Israel was only first written in the Persian period, and the Persians had conquered Assyria and Babylonia, and had access to their archives covering hundreds of years, it is more than likely that the scriptural stories of the monarchical period were simply written from the official king lists, inscriptions and diplomatic correspondence of those formerly mighty powers. In short, it is largely historical fiction but set in a realistic historical framework. For those who are Jews and Christians and want to explore history, they should realize this.
Although minimalist claims are derived through reasoning processes practiced by contemporary historians, and constitute a valid and necessary undertaking, they shocked biblical scholarship by their boldness and in their assignment of biblical historiography to the genre of apologetic mythmaking and “big lie” propaganda methods. Davies challenged his readers to decide if they were truly historians or believers masquerading as historians. Did they intend to introduce theological concerns to their analyses?
Is reconstructing “ancient Israel” a historical undertaking or a theological one? If theology is part of the argument, then it can no longer be scholarship, which has to be free of religious commitments to avoid bias. Davies thought belief was more important to biblicist motivation than truth or knowledge. Davies’s statements were considered an attack on the intellectual integrity of those who thought they could hold religious faiths and still be objective scholars. Common sense says that they cannot.
Both Judaism and Christianity are supposed to reject idolatry—the venerating of material objects above God. Yet, to regard the bible as, in any way, infallible is to treat it as a god. The rabbis, indeed, are particular in their monotheism to point out that nothing outside of heaven is perfect, and so the bible (they specify Torah ) cannot be infallible. The good historian here agrees—the veneration of any earthly writing must be eschewed. Those who cannot had better be honest enough to become theologians instead of pretending to be historians or archaeologists.
The sad thing is that non-religious historians think religiously motivated historians are honest and so leave the religious fieldwork to them. Some religiously motivated historians do deserve praise and much of what we do know, they have uncovered, but they have done so like a patient taking the dressing from their own wound—slowly and with a lot of grimacing!
In summary, minimalists exposed the overt influences of theological assumptions in the interpretation of Biblical literature. Their concentration on the importance of the Persian period should lead to more scholarship being concentrated here to rectify the obfuscation and neglect of earlier times.
A Proper Approach to Religious History
Scholarship has shown that there is a lack of correlation between the Israel of biblical history and that of actual history. It is no longer possible to use traditional methods of historically conditioned scriptural readings to gain access to the historical people of Israel. We therefore either need to look elsewhere or change our response to the text… The text might not reveal actual history but it does point to a religious and social reality concerning those that wrote it…Benjamin J Cliff Bury, University of Birmingham, UK, Journal of Beliefs and Values
What is needed now is for objective historians to take over religious history and place it in its proper context. The bible should be ignored until external evidence shows that something in it is valid. God should be ignored as a cantankerous supernatural personality stirring up the affairs of humanity with His index finger. Anyone with such an absurd and childish belief should be relieved of their academic positions, and the many useless and unproductive departments of theology should be abandoned and their funds transferred to proper history or ancient language departments.
If this were ever done we could hope to make huge strides in the confusion of Near Eastern history, much of which remains quite baffling, despite being recorded for 5000 years, because it is always packed into the biblical jam jar and is never allowed to display its own shape. The Assyrians and particularly their disciples, the Persians will prove to be the founders of the Jewish strand of monotheism, and the history of the Jews will become part of the history of the many small kingdoms set up in the Levant of the Iron Age before the Assyrians and then the Persians absorbed them into empire.
In using old records, chronicles and inscriptions, the historian has to be alert to the fact that that the writer might be writing propaganda. Kings want to glorify themselves not admit their failures, so a battle won might really have been inconclusive and a battle lost might be omitted altogether, and will have to be sought in the records of the victors. Knowing this, biblical historians ought to be aware of the possibility of such tendencies in the scriptures, yet most firmly set themselves against such thoughts, or only accept them grudgingly when they are forced upon them.
What is needed now for progress to be made is a change in paradigm. The scriptural paradigm of Jews and Christians traditionally is that of a gradual revelation of God to His Chosen People through the medium of their history. To state it thus is enough for any proper historian to reject it. The paradigm that should replace it is that of scriptures written by world conquerors intent on pacifying and intimidating their vassals to act as watchers upon a larger and dangerous country subject to the same world power and known to be rebellious. The world power was Persia and the dangerous subject nation was Egypt.
The Christian and Jew will say that the scriptures are the natural place to start to understand Jewish history, but they are the last place to start if bias and pitfalls are to be avoided. Biblical history is largely myth, but the task is to show what is and what is not, within the parameters available, using every technique that is relevant, documentary, archaeological, anthropological, scientific, social and so on. Ideally, the budding historian of the Near East should read what has been discovered about Near Eastern history from other sources first. Since this is probably impossible for anyone brought up in our culture, they should begin by firmly believing that all of the bible is myth and forgetting it while they get a historical picture first. Only then should they turn to the scriptures to try to understand who, writing hundreds of years later would want to invent a bogus history for the Jews.
Doubtless, it seems old hat to postmodernists, but how can pure subjectivity do better? If “deconstruction” is interpreted as “textual criticism”, in which evidences of the author’s prejudices are adduced then that is fine—it is constructive despite its name. But, if the rhetoric of postmodernism is to be believed, it replaces enquiry after truth with fiction writing, and all scholarhip might as well cease.
While Dever has some valid points about the extremes of postmodernism, he walks right into the trap of supporting the postmodern contention that so-called “objective” scholarship is far from objective but is meant to support the status quo and the establishment. Furthermore, he ends up being the one who defends fiction against truth.
Biblical scholarship is largely a sham and should be mercilessly criticized, deconstructed or whatever, but with the objective of replacing it with proper scholarship. The opposite viewpoint ends up with giving prizes to the worthless rubbish that biblicists keep churning out—despite themselves, the epitome of postmodernism. It is all make-belief. Honest checking of the biblical stories against other criteria so far shows that biblical history is, to say the least, improbable. The “deconstruction” of biblical history presented in these pages is to stimulate the reconstruction of a better one, and that is initiated too. There is no doubt that it will be thoroughly disliked by Jews, Christians and Moslems alike because it shows that their religions began in a country they all hate, a country whose history has been ignored—Iran!
Others are not interested either in the trendy faddishness of postmodern subjective meanderings, or the aim of supporting present political set-ups, but are interested in truth, or the closest they can get to it, when much of the data are lost or deliberately destroyed. The Israelis have control of Palestine de facto. If they feel they need a myth to justify it, that is up to them, but their psycho-sociological need for it should have no bearing on any scientist trying to determine the true facts of history. If the leaning of the data we have is that ancient Israelite history is mythical then to defend the Israelis is no reason to deny it.
Dever does not like the criticisms of the traditionalists but they are quite justified. After one hundred years, Dever says we must still wait for some “mass of complex data” that will revolutionize the history of Israel. The critics of the truth of the Jewish scriptures as history are tired of hearing this, and are tired of hearing so-called archaeological experts lie through their eye teeth about what the archaeological record says.
The trouble is that most of these people have a vested interest in their belief, not in truth. When a few renegades suggest that a belief that depends upon lies should be questioned, they get enraged. It is not just Judaism or Christianity that they see as threatened but, as Dever says, the “Western cultural tradition”. It is a poor tradition that has to be upheld by lies, and it is a poor god that requires his believers to lie for him.
Wellhausenians
P R S Mooney says ( A Century of biblical Archaeology ) that, as early as 1890, “it was no longer possible to accept without question that the original religion and society of the peoples of ancient Israel had necessarily been different in kind from their neighbours”. Yet more than a full century later, not only are people who want to be ignorant taught it in churches, children who are supposed to be being educated are taught it in our schools. Is it right that Christians should oblige us to be taught what is not, or even what might not, be true? Julius Wellhausen’s Prologemena, over ten years before that, had dated the Pentateuch and Joshua to the Persian period. Solomon Schechter, the discoverer in a Cairo geniza of the Damascus Document, called Wellhausen anti-Semitic. But the German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, writing before 1851 when he published Parerga and Paralipomena had referred to…
…the Zend-Avesta from which Judaism is known to have been derived…
What Christians cannot fight they ignore, and they have been ignoring the truth about Judaism for 150 years at least. R J Coggins and J L Houlden can edit a book that purports to be a dictionary of biblical interpretation without even having an entry on Julius Wellhausen, rightly described by Joel Sweek as “the most important biblical critic since the Reformation”. Christians are aware that sins of omission are more effective—because less easily noticed—than sins of commission, though they use both to fool their ignorant flocks.
The first sign that the bible was not true history was when historians realized many laws in the Pentateuch could not have been those of a nomadic people. Wellhausen’s documentary hypothesis was that priests of an already sedentary population must have written much of it, so that, even if the general history of Israel given in the bible were true, it could not have been true that the so-called books of Moses were actually written by Moses, the leader of a tribe of displaced wanderers. It was the search for an explanation of inappropriate laws supposedly used by nomads that began the critical study of the Jewish scriptures. It was a search for a more suitable dating of the books.
H G A Ewald thought the Pentateuch was written in the time of Solomon, hundreds of years after Moses had died. W M L de Wette then put Deuteronomy in Josiah’s reign in the seventh century, hundreds of years later still. The priestly book, designated P, that included all the temple mumbo-jumbo then had to be placed after the exile, another hundred or more years later again. These abstract and onerous legal requirements, expanded by an even more extensive oral law, were still being applied at the time of Christ. It is time for another adjustment to Jewish religious history, to bring it into line with reality—the law was newly imposed by the Persians in the fifth century, barely four hundred years before Christ, and Moses was invented as its mythical founder, in deepest antiquity.
Nineteenth century archaeology might have been relatively amateurish and even incidentally destructive, but it was mainly non-sectarian and non-apologetic, and therefore honest. The archaeology that arose in the twentieth century under W F Albright and his school was much more destructive because it was sectarian and apologetic and so would not entertain contrary evidence. It was “biblical archaeology”. W G Dever wrote that W F Albright’s “overarching goal was to undo the critical, liberal re-writing of Israel’s history, ie, to rewrite Wellhausenism”, while J M Sasson said that “Albright never exerted himself to understand” Wellhausen, confirming that this highly cited Christian archaeologist was no professional at anything except being a Christian.
For over half a century, the gadding about Palestine of W F Albright and his school was counter-productive for many outside of America. European scholars saw it as ruled by a theological motivation and an apologetic purpose which was to defend the authenticity of the bible through its fundamental historicity. The contempt for archaeology the Albrightians generated led to its neglect and almost to its rejection by many European scholars. It shows that some students of the bible are interested in integrity and truth, but they are a rare breed among Christians.
Gosta Ahlström was a European scholar who became an American one through spending half his working life in the USA. He had no regard for the Albright school of mendacity. Biblical research could not be divorced from any other sort of historical research. Theological preconceptions and biases should be set aside along with any other bias not based on evidence, and nor were enquirers scholars unless they were willing to be led wherever the evidence led. He disdained those who played to their peers in the gallery to prove their academic purity without any commitment to historical fidelity. He said that they were not just wrong, they were immoral. Of course, most Christians say, “Not me!”
Ahlström did not want to accept an idea just because it was popular, but only when it had been satisfactorily demonstrated. Christian apologists remain fond of influencing young minds with expressions like “most scholars believe” but Ahlström would tell his students that the weight of scholarly opinion counted for little, if they were all wrong! From the bible alone Ahlström by 1963 had decided that the perpetual monotheism of Yehouah was a myth. It was clear to him that the god had begun in a polytheistic setting.
It was also clear to Ahlström, according to Carl D Evans, a professor at the University of South Carolina, that he saw religion was an instrument of royal policy and administration in the ancient near east, a hugely important observation just because it defies orthodoxy, and explains so much. And yet in his posthumous history of ancient Palestine, he shows how hard it is for biblical scholars to purge their minds of the prejudices they were brought up with. The earlier chapters are commendably objective, but he later falls into the trap of accepting and paraphrasing uncritically the Deuteronomic history.
In 1921, Friedrich Delitzsch made out the Wellhausenian case afresh, refuting the empty apologetics that had filled books and journals since Wellhausen. Again it made no difference and churches continued to teach their myths as history. What is less forgiveable is that newspaper writers and academics did the same. A recent case reported that medics had diagnosed Herod’s mortal illness from his reported symptoms. It is a nice exercise for doctors, no doubt, and nothing wrong with that. Herod had to die of something whether the doctors are right in their diagnosis or not (autopsies show that 25% of diagnoses are wrong). But the reporter added to his report the so-called massacre of the innocents as if it were history! This reporter ( Mark Henderson, UK Daily Telegraph ) is a science reporter too! It is time that people of all walks of life stopped pandering to Christian mendacity, especially scientists and historians.
Even though the biblicists came to accept that the oldest date for the earliest parts of the bible to be written was the ninth century—as much as a millennium after Abraham—they claimed these stories had been passed down by a historically reliable oral tradition! Yet the evidence we have in any depth on oral transmission, from the middle ages, does not confirm that it is historically reliable. It might nevertheless be possible to argue that there is some reliable history in these traditions, but how is anyone to know what it is? Without independent confirmationn it is impossible to know. What Christians mean, when they claim there is some historical truth in these ancient tales, is that they are essentially historically true, quite a different argument, but the one that they want Christian tyros to believe. They are essentially mythology, and any history in them cannot be decided upon, so they are useless as historical documents and should be discarded.
Biblicists, under pressure from genuine historical scholars sought to classify portions of the bible as secondary. Having done this, what was left was primary, and what was secondary was not authentic. What was primary was authentic. Naturally what was primary and authentic was declared historical and turned out to be the core history of Israel!
Delitzsch saw it as the propaganda that it was, and he too was often denounced as anti-Semitic for trying to distinguish truth from lies, and Christians even called him anti-Christian. Anyone who brings forward evidence that the Jewish and Christian bibles are mythical stands the risk of getting such treatment. Those who know nothing about truth and try their utmost to hide it will never hear truth as a defence. To attack falsehood is to them to propagate hatred, yet they are often the people who hate, and not their critics. It is another right that religious people want to preserve for themselves while hiding behind a bland veil of love.
T R Glover shrewdly noted (The Ancient World, 1935) that no one could read the earlier parts of Jewish history with any conviction, and that it was a stranger history than any other in the East. He meant, of course, that it was too strange to be true because it was mythical, but even as late as the 1930s he was chary about saying so frankly. The history of Assyria, Babylon, Persia and Egypt had been revealed by archaeology, but excavation unsettled Jewish history, and fresh discoveries made new uncertainties, difficult to explain. Could Abraham, Moses and David, long assumed to have been as historical as Winston Churchill, have been mythical? The evidence that had been found was that the names of some Israelite tribes were being used in Palestine before Joshua got there. Contrary to the Law, a Jewish temple operated at Yeb (Elephantine) in Egypt about the time when Cyrus let the Jews return to Palestine.
That Israel left Egypt as monotheistic as the Jews of modern Poland, and then relapsed again and again into paganism, is not likely.T R Glover
Jewish history seems to have been written over and over again, but always left some clues to allow contradictory glimpses. The Philistine Goliath is killed by two different people. To say the hero had two names, or changed his name smacks of excuses. In other myths, the son of Aeneas had two names, and Romulus two, and Pallas Athene. In myths, they symbolize the merging of people, but in history they suggest the story is myth!
When one comes to ask why the Jews developed as they did, no satisfactory answer is given.T R Glover
Jews have been scattered but have maintained their exclusiveness. They marry among themselves. They maintain ancient customs and ceremonies, taught them when Pericles led Athens.
It remains the historian’s hardest task to explain why or how Israel came to the central belief in One God.T R Glover
The “exiles” from Judah settled down in Babylonia, and, given the opportunity, many of their descendants never went back to Palestine. Some Jews instead moved East, and the Bagdadi Jews, the Bene Israel and certain other Jews of India may be their descendants. If the biblical thesis is right that the Jews wailed by the rivers of Babylon to go home, then why did many, perhaps most, do the opposite?
After the exile all Jewish life is modelled on the basis of a belief which astonished the rest of mankind.T R Glover
It “was so abstract, so contrary to all tradition, so obviously unintelligible and unacceptable to every tribe and nation known”. It has been obvious to many that something was odd and quite different about those who returned from the captivity. Glover says that the whole character of the race seemed changed.
The false gods and village cults, stone pillars “under every green tree” (still familiar in Southern India), no longer attract the Jew. In psalm after psalm he speaks his contempt for them—“mouths have they, but they speak not”.T R Glover
“Israel went into captivity a nation and returned a church.” And, the ancient religion of the Jews survives, when all the religions of every ancient race of the pre-Christian world have disappeared, except for a few Zoroastrians (Parsis) in India and in Persia. How singular it is, and its explanation hidden in religious mysticism, but the existence of only these two religions links them, and suggest an explanation in real history. Glover does not entertain the myth that the Jews had been taught monotheism a thousand years previously, and E T Mullen (Ethnic Myths and Pentateuchal Foundations, 1997) showed that Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic history were composed in the Persian period, and the preceding books were composed to give Deuteronomy a context. Nehemiah brought the new religion, and Ezra, a Persian minister, inaugurated it. Nehemiah was a contemporary of Pericles, a man of the Persian court of Artaxerxes. He came from the Persian court to reconstruct Jerusalem 150 years after it had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar. It stands to reason that it is not a task for a private citizen. Every page of his account shows him battling with problems, external threats and apathy and treachery among the people of the land. He was intent on keeping the Jews from mixing with the local stock, people who were supposed to have been Jews themselves, but ones who were not deported to Babylon. It was an immense task possible only because it was Persian policy.
The Jewish people emerge very much what Nehemiah had wished to make them.T R Glover
According to Z Zevit ( The Religions of the Ancient Israelites ), Sara Japhet posed a series of rhetorical questions in 1998 that refuted the thesis. If they were meant seriously, they are puerile examples of the prejudiced historian unable and unwilling to grasp a concept undermining their existing paradigm. The questions set up the Jewish scriptures as completely written more or less as they are now by the Persians about 500 BC. Needless to say, that is not the hypothesis proposed, so she is setting up her own straw man to knock over, and biased “scholars” support her in her trickery. The actual hypothesis is that the Persians gave their colonists a law, Deuteronomy, to take with them, and the duty to impose it and get it accepted. To do so, they provided an outline history based on Assyrian archives, but bent to the Deuteronomic theme of apostasy instigated by kings. What the questions ignore is that this was not a once-and-for-all event, but initiated a process that carried on into Hellenistic times. Her questions allow for no development of the scriptures during the Persian period, and no evolution of them in the next 300 years. Zevit cites one of the questions as:
If David and, in particular, Solomon were literally constructed models intended to promote Persian imperialism, why is it that they were presented as flawed characters whose idolatry and foreign wives led to the failure of empire?
If it was the Persians who introduced the myths of David and Solomon for the purpose suggested, the post-Persian priesthood expanded the stories. The later Persian kings were idolaters and did have foreign—Babylonian—wives, and the empire then did, indeed, fall. So, the expanded story was an ironical reflexion on the Persians by those who eventually tried to hide altogether their Persian origins. “Scholars” postulating questions to which they ought to be supplying answers shows that they are biased or dishonest. The other questions she posed are just as puerile and dishonest, and have been answered on these pages, if she is really unable to think of answers herself.
Numbers 34:25 has in it Parnach, a non-Semitic, name. It is a rendering of Farnaka, a Persian name! Perhaps Sara Japhet can explain what a Persian was doing leading the tribe of Zebulon when the Israelites under Moses were preparing to enter the Promised Land. It was no glitch in reality, since the Persians sent the colonists into Yehud who became the Jews, but it was a glitch that an editor did not spot the name and change it to something more suitable for the myth.
Critical Dominance
An extreme but obvious lie that believers propagate is that they stand in a minority as the defenders of god and His truth in the world against the critical scholars, who plainly then are in a huge majority! B S Childs ( Introduction to the Old Testament in Scripture ) says critical scholars are a “hegemony”. He means a dominating force. Albright thought he was standing against the massed disciples of Wellhausen, apparently a recently coined name for Satan. The clappies like to feel they are struggling like the victims of Nero against a cruel world, when the only cruelty they suffer is the indulgence of their parents and their overweening selves. These though are not sheep but pretend to be scholars. When scholarship is not concerned with truth it is not scholarship, and to claim God’s Truth, is to admit to being a liar.
The opposite of a “critical dominance” is the truth. The critics cannot get any broadcast time or print space to air their views and can only get published in academic tomes. Every newspaper has its devotional columns, extremely rarely given over to a non-Christian view and very rarely indeed any view critical of the Christian tub of hogwash. This medium, the internet, is overwhelmed with Christian pap while having little that is critical. There has even been recent talk by the UK government, run by a frustrated vicar, as the country’s foremost satirical journal knows, of extending the blasphemy laws. More than a hundred years of critical scholarship has penetrated to the minds of ministers to the extent that they must stop their parishioners from hearing about it, and if by accident they do, dismiss it as the work of cranks or devil worshippers. The whole of critical scholarship has not impinged in the least on the way that clerics address their congregations or the way they teach their Sunday schools. What is this if it is not dishonesty and contempt for discovery?
Views contrary to the believers’ are not argued against but are declaimed as contrary to faith:
Views like those of Noth attack the very heart and core of the biblical proclamation.
Reaction against such extreme criticism is the only possible approach for those committed to the truth of the bible.
Opponents are extreme and are not even allowed to be sincere Christians committed to the truth of the bible. They are in error, and “error must be combatted!” We know how Christians have combatted what they call “error” in the past. What do they propose to do today?
T L Thompson observes upon the circularity of the reasoning of the biblicists who “derive context from text” and interpret “that text in terms of its wholly dependent context”. This utterly unscientific nonsense is the lifeblood of biblical scholarship. G E Mendenhall writes that the apologists have destroyed any pretence that biblical studies is scientific:
If the ability to command general assent among those who are competent be the criterion of the scientific, it must now be admitted that a science of biblical studies does not exist.
The real point about scientists is that they must bow to the weight of realistic evidence. That is what committed Christians cannot do, and why they are unscientific. What is worse is that they pretend to be scientific for the sake of their sheep. Though they ignore the evidence countering the Christian myth, they effect a pseudo-scientific purity for the benefit of their converts. It can be nothing other than hypocrisy when Christianity braggs that the central requirement of salvation is persistence of belief whatever evidence is brought against it.
Defenders of the scriptures are beginning to accept that they are not history and are seeking to present them as something less than historical, without actually admitting they are myths. Two recent editions of popular text books frequently accept the bible as less than historical. Understanding the Old Testament (UOT ) and Old Testament Survey, according to Ron Vince in a review, defend the bible by denying its historicity. Repeatedly they say of a biblical passage that it “is not history as defined by modern historians”, or it “is not history in the modern sense”. History in the “modern sense” is “a purely objective practice”, or “a detached report of events”. The Exodus story, writes Anderson (UOT ), “does not pretend to be objective history”.
The historicity of the bible is a religious premise. Expressions such as “Faith affirms that blah blah was superintended by the same Spirit of God that prompted blah blah”, are quite impossible to contradict without being insulting. To do so is to challenge the religious beliefs of the utterer, not to challenge any evidence. That is why these pages are quite uncompromising. Compromise leaves the pious Jews and Christians unchallenged and so continuing in the delusion that their position is unchallengeable.
Minimalism points to serious questions concerning the nature of the biblical text and its relationship to religious faith, such as what is meant by the truth of the bible. In what sense is it true when it is not historically true? Is the theological truth that God revealed himself in the bible dependent upon it being historical truth, or is a different method of expression truth? Are scholarly evidence and argument to be readily accepted when they support the historicity of the bible, but to be rejected when they point to it being allegorical or mythical? Christians have an obligation to use their mind because Matthew (Mt 22:37) has Jesus adding “mind” to the commandment to love God with heart and soul (Dt 13:3;30:6). One assumes he did not mean “use your mind”, but “ignore whatever it discovers, and combat error in those who do not ignore it”!
