Judaism
Persia Judaism Discussion
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, January 20, 2002
Apikorus
Apikorus wrote about Psalms 110 in connexion with Melchizedek, but out of it came this interesting exchange.
At the time I did not dispute the historicity of David, but now I am sure the biblical stories are a fiction largely composed in Maccabean times, though he might have been an existing mythical character magnified. It is always nice to have constructive suggestions.
Well, if you now believe that 2 Samuel is of Hellenistic provenance, then I’m afraid you’ve made negative progress in your understanding of the Hebrew Bible. But good luck with your web site. I found it quite stimulating and I enjoyed reading several of your essays.
You are coy or cryptic. Have you got some proof that the Deuteronomic History could not have been heavily redacted by the Maccabees. If not, I do not get your point. Perhaps the Holy Spirit is guiding you!
Unless the Holy Spirit is fond of guiding atheists, I doubt I am under its influence. Perhaps, though, you could point to elements of the DH which reflect Hellenistic cultural institutions, the poleis, Hellenistic philosophy, Graecisms in the text itself, multiethnicity of Hellenistic Palestine, etc.
Watch out! That Holy Spirit creeps around filling everyone.
The Sheffield and Copenhagen schools think there are plenty of pointers to a late edition. One book compares the DH in detail with Homer, I gather. Sure, the theological outlook is Deuteronomic and that, I conclude, was Persian, but the later editors have not sought to change the central theme fundamentally, but to add heroics and enhanced nationalism. My impression therefore is that there is no shortage of the clues you ask for, although the editors were not fools and were not trying to write a contemporary book, so there were not as many as one would expect in a contemporary book. If I get time in 2002, I’ll try to get at the critical sources.
The Sheffield folks are not quite as abjectly nutty as Thompson (though I would stipulate that Thompson’s early work on the patriarchal tales was outstanding, important, and influential; more’s the pity that he’s gone off the deep end).
What I have read of Thompson does not sound like the ravings of a madman. Even when evidence is conclusive, some will deny it and call those who cite it ’nutty’. Judging such things as you cite here:
But the difference in literary style and even orthography is enough to scuttle any outlandish theory that the entire DH underwent an extensive Hellenistic redaction. There are glaringly obvious differences in orthography between the DH and Chronicles (eg in the use of the matres).
…literary style and orthography… are likely to be subjective matters unless the comparative literature is extensive enough. I gather that it is not, and when I read such clever men as Freedman, I am reminded of a dog chasing its tale! The arguments are based on such little comparative material that anything can be proved or disproved according to fancy or conviction. The DH has been edited more than once, as most people seem to agree. The question is, “what has been added in Hellenistic times?” That the problem is not as simple as you suggest is indicated by the fact that there are still scholars who think Chronicles precedes the DH. Is this nutty too?
Yes. Anyone who thinks the Chronicler wrote before the Deuteronomistic Historian is certifiably nuts in my book.
Well, I will not disagree, but the point is that these people feel they have reasons for their views, meaning that the whole field is muddy, whereas you seem to think it is transparent.
Look, virtually every single time the name “David” appears throughout the Deuteronomistic History—I think with perhaps a single exception out of scores of instances—it is spelled defectively (dwd). And again, with virtually no exceptions, every single time the Chronicler refers to David, the spelling is plene (dwyd). That ain’t subjective. And this is but one of many examples.
Now hang on. Why is dwd defective and dwyd all right? This old boy who likes chasing his tale in Hebrew and Phoenician thinks that dwd is the older spelling and dwyd a modernization. He can even tell when changes like this happened. Then again, he admits that the Essenes uniformly used dwyd. Why is dwyd not then a mark of a modern copying school, namely the Essenes, and Chronicles was written by them as an update of the DH? Dwd might then be simply the traditional spelling adopted by the Masoretes. It illustrates the point I made last time—that much of this orthographic analysis is not well founded.
Regarding the use of the matres lectiones, I certainly do think that Chronicles was adopted into the canon very late. (Though canonization was probably a gradual affair and largely determined by acclaim.) To assume that the Qumranians represented a major scribal school is perhaps to be unduly influenced by the extremely unusual survival of their library. We know from the ancient sources that the Essenes (I concur with the majority of scholars that the Qumranians were Essenes) were a minority community, and from the sectarian DSS themselves we know that they were bitterly opposed to the Jerusalem establishment. It was the establishment texts which were preserved, so it seems unlikely that dwyd was a unique scribal quirk of the Essenes. 4QSam^b likely predated the Qumran community. That 4QSam^a used plene forms (dwyd) suggests that the Qumran scribal traditions were *not* the ones which survived, at least with respect to the canonical texts. If the Qumranians were so influential, we should have expected Jubilees and Enoch (and perhaps the Temple Scroll from cave XI) to be in the Jewish canon. They’re not.
Well, we are always forced to use the evidence available to us, though naturally we ought to take into account that much has been lost. There might have been equally prestigious scribal schools of whom we know nothing, but the Essenes were obviously important—as important in numbers as the Pharisees. At times in history they had been more important, but after the Jewish war they were not important. The canon was decided when the Essenes were no longer important. In their own canon, Jubilees and Enoch were unquestionably central.
At Qumran we have several examples of biblical texts in the ancestral paleo-Hebrew script (i.e. the script used before the switch to the square Assyrian “Jewish script”; the switch probably occurred with the reconstitution of Judah as Persian Yehud; in a rabbinic legend, there is a Gemara which attributes the change to Ezra).
Since the Persians changed to using Aramaic in their Chancellory at about this time, there seems to be no good reason to dispute the Gemara.
These scrolls, however, reflects merely an archaizing, rather than truly archaic, orthography. I.e. the script is paleo-Hebrew but the spelling is late Biblical Hebrew. The use of the ancestral script probably was motivated by the intense nationalism associated with the Hasmonean period, just as the Nazis resuscitated the medieval German blackletter script. So even patently archaizing texts written during the Hellenistic period still betray their late origin.
Sure, I can see the point, but I puzzle about how standardized Hebrew spellings were, and whether differences were differences of region (dialect) or scribal schools rather than time? I am thrown back upon the experts like Cross, Freedman and their modern counterparts who decide that this is north western Semitic, south western semitic, ancient, modern, this school or that school based on negligible or even fancied differences in minute sherds probably used by people who were only semi-literate like schoolchildren or businessmen. In the end they have decided based on their understanding of the bible and nothing else. That seems not to be scientific to me, and that is what I object to.
Whoa! While Cross et al. may engage in speculation from time to time, generally the characterization of scripts is applied to display inscriptions, and display inscriptions were not written by semiliterati.
Take care. You are sounding like a biblicist again. ’Generally’ can be responsible for many sins. And my understanding of Levantine archaology is that there is an astonishing scarcity of monumental inscriptions in Hebrew and Canaanite to permit any conclusions to be reached. That is why Freedman and co have to use ostraca, and graffiti scratched on stones and such rubbish to base their analyses. Beyond this, their arguments are entirely circular because they assume the mythical biblical history to date styles and usage then call certain usages early or late accordingly, north or south meaning Samaritan or Jewish accordingly and so on. They find they can date the Song of Deborah to 1200 BC. So their analysis comes to confirm biblical mythology. Sleight of hand? Dishonesty? Incompetence? I do not deny that these men are clever, so what should anyone conclude?
A few comments. First of all, Cross’s palaeographic dating of various DSS accords rather well with the radiocarbon dating. Unless you think that, too, is fraudulent, you’ve got to acknowledge Cross is a legitimate expert.
I am happy to accept broadly the dates Cross gives to documents such as those you mention above, but none go back to before the third century BC. These same experts claim to do what I said. Deborah was dated to 1200, fortunately, because that is the time that the Judges were supposedly ruling. They find what they expect! Dwyd seems to have been a late fashion probably from the Greek period while Dwd is original, but was accepted by the Masoretes despite the intervening fashion for Dwyd, presumably precisely because they knew it was the older usage, or perhaps as part of their conscious rejection of Essenism.
Second, there is nothing mythological about the Babylonian invasion of Judah at the turn of the 6th century BCE. The Lachish ostraca make perfect sense in this context, and I see no reason why they, for example, should be dismissed.
Making sense is not the same as giving them a proper date. They could have been later! They could, for example have been from the Persian period. One of Albright’s sins was that he put everything Persian into the Assyrian period. There are now no Persian strata in Israel—or few that are accepted. Israel has a Persian Dark Age! Strange that the very age when on the realistic hypothesis the Jewish scriptures were being invented, there should be nothing to talk of recognized in the ground. All of Albright’s assignments want revising and in many cases will be found to be downdated by two or three hundred years. It is possible that some of the destruction attributed to the Assyrians was really done during the Egyptian rebellions against the Persians and/or the rebellion of Megabyxos (Bagabukhsha). No one wants to consider such matters because they are happy with what they have, right or wrong.
Third, the dating of the Song of Deborah has nothing to do with palaeography since there are no extant Iron Age witnesses. That Judges 5 is quite old is pretty clear from the text itself—Manasseh is replaced by Machir, there’s no Judah, Yahweh came from Edom, etc.
You are assuming what needs to be proved. If Judaism was only invented in the fifth century, there was no Manasseh then! No Judah—destroyed by the Babylonians. Yehouah was Canaanite. The Persians set up the temple state of Yehud, and founded Judaism in about 420 BC.
I wouldn’t say with any great confidence that it can be dated to 1200 BCE, but it certainly seems to predate even 2 Samuel, much of which is probably of Solomonic provenance (see e.g. Baruch Halpern, “David’s Secret Demons”).
Who is this Solomon? He is a sort of Jewish Croesus, isn’t he, except that Croesus actually lived? I am back to my original plea—the stories in Samuel and Kings are late romances anchored here and there into history (from Assyrian records) just as any modern historical novelist would. I do not believe that anyone in 1000 BC had the skill or the temperament to write anything like these works, either as history or as romantic fiction. Their sheer detail, the direct speech and their astonishing modernity betrays what would have been obvious if people had never believed they were written by God—they are modern! Late pseudepigraphs. Even their written core only goes back to the late fifth century, though they draw upon some fifth century tradition related to the Persian attempts to colonize the land, and some Mesopotamian and Syrian mythology that was used to write the prequel to the DH.
I’ve read what Davies has to say, and I think his conclusions are absurd.
All of them? You do have clearly defined views. You sound too certain to be an atheist!
His conclusion that early Biblical Hebrew is an affectation of later writers seems loopy to me. I don’t totally ignore him, though.
I have not read this, but does he mean an affectation because it is a deliberate archaizing? Luke did it. Modern Christians do it in their stories making their characters speak in early seventeenth century English to match the AV. Even ancient bibles were not meant to sound contemporary. If this is what he meant, I can well believe it. Why can’t you?
Your separate point. How do people who hate each other come to have essentially the same Pentateuch? When was the Samaritan Pentateuch considered to have been written? Is the Jewish Pentateuch dependent on it, or vice versa, assuming that one of them must be dependent on the other. What ancient manuscript evidence is there? What evidence is there of editions of the Samaritan Pentateuch? Can any editorial changes or glosses be identified in both? Are there any Greek words in the Samaritan Pentateuch, and, if so, why are they there? You seem knowledgeable about these things, but if you do not have time to reply in enough detail, copy me a page, or give me a link. Needless to say, I am not convinced the whole question has been properly addressed.
There seems to be general agreement that the SP is based on a distinct text type than the LXX or MT (though some scholars like Emmanuel Tov don’t buy Cross’s theory of local text types), but that SP itself also includes a veneer of Samaritan sectarianism (e.g. the extended decalogue in which sacrifices are only allowed on Mt. Gerezim). That the SP itself is conflate is quite clear. There’s a nice description of this in a now out-of-print (check your library) volume edited by Jeffrey Tigay entitled “Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism” (an outstanding book).
Thanks for the reference, but the Sheffield and Copenhagen people are proposing a paradigm shift here. Naturally, such things are not readily accepted even in natural sciences. When sacred mythology is at stake, it is almost impossible. Doubtless Tigay begins his biblical analysis with the usual assumptions. The point is to determine whether other assumptions can answer the evidence equally well or better.
Look, this is not quantum mechanics we are dealing with here (my day job is as a physics professor), but it seems extremely unlikely to me that the Deuteronomistic History underwent a significant revision during the Hellenistic period. Again, there is little that is Greek in the DH. The presence of Greek loan words, which are exceedingly rare in the Pentateuch and the DH, doth not a slam-dunk case make, since indirect contact between Palestine and Ionia had occured for centuries prior to Alexander. In fact, in the case of Daniel, it is the lateness of the Greek words themselves (sumphonia, psalterion, kithara), which is crucial.
You make out the case I am arguing for me with your reference to QM, an orderly complete system of mathematical logic. You can prove something in QM. I simply fail to see how you are so sure here when the evidence is so partial and interpreted as it has been hitherto by dedicated believers. The Albright school are being shown by degrees to have been responsible for disgraceful crimes against history that they felt were justified by their belief that God approved. Daniel is interesting because it seems such an amateurish forgery in so many ways. But we read that 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. I am inclined to believe the project was still going on at Qumran, to judge by the Psalm collections found there, as well as the variant texts recovered. Anyway, it would mean that our present compilation called the Hebrew scriptures probably dates from no earlier than about 130 BC. Is there any singular fact that would dispose of this hypothesis.
Concerning Thompson—He’s not clinically insane, of course, and he certainly is a bona fide scholar who has made a significant contribution, but I found “The Mythic Past” to be largely diatribe. I mean, the book has no real bibliography, for God’s sake (pardon the linguistic fossil; I remain a strong atheist—a mighty atheist, even)—just a 2.5 page “recommended reading” list, which contains virtually no references to scholarly articles, and which would have been significantly out of date by 1979. The entire book contains perhaps a dozen footnotes. Shit, man, the the book doesn’t even have a fucking INDEX, but rather just a list of texts cited—almost all biblical. This, ironically, is a feature usually associated with bible commentaries.
Alas my books are the same, but that is because they are self published and I could not afford to add such essentials. My justification is that they are not meant to be read by scholars, though they are not debarred from it!
I’ve seen many self-published books which are properly annotated. But Thompson himself has a publisher: TMP is put out by Basic Books. There’s no excuse for the inadequate annotation in TMP.
Well, I do agree, of course, but out of interest looked at several books to check and it is surprising how little importance is placed on such as an index by biblicists and biblical historians. Even recent ones like the Dead Sea Scrolls by Wise et al are deficient.
the discussion on pages 203-204. He criticizes the interpretation of the famous sequence “..k bytdwd”, which many scholars read as [ml]k byt dwd = melekh bayit David = King of the House of David = ruler of Judahite dynasty. (The inscription is dated to the early 9th century BCE, so while David’s name is invoked, it is not a direct reference to the legendary figure himself, but, at best, to the eponymous dynasty he founded. The Judahite king at the time was probably Yehoram.) Now I certainly agree that this reading is not a slam-dunk. But Thompson quotes only this line (line 9 on fragment A). Some context would be helpful (and more honest): line 8 clearly contains the words mlk ysr’l = melekh yisrael = king of Israel. Line 5 includes the words “and Hadad went before me”; line 6 “… of my reign. And I killed …”; line 7 “… and two thousand cavalry …”. So the context here is clearly a military battle, and one in which the northern kingdom of Israel also is involved. In the end, though, Thompson allows that bytdwd might just refer to a contemporary (early 9th c. BCE) “House of David”.
What though of the accusation of Garbini et all that the whole thing stinks of forgery, being modelled on the Mesha inscription?
I’ve read Garbini on the TDS and while I generally defer to his expertise in Old Aramaic (my Aramaic is rabbinic), I find his arguments completely unconvincing. In the first place, just whom is he accusing of forging the TDS? Avraham Biran?
I understood that he was not, but was implying that Biran was himself duped by a third party, presumably who had planted the fake. He made the significant point that no one knew where in the excavation the stone had come from. Some said the paving and some said the wall. To say the least this is suspicious and if it is not suspicious, it is incredibly sloppy field work—but that is typical of excavations in the ’Holy Land’.
Secondly, the alleged problems he has with the Aramaic itself seem to be overblown. We have very few display inscriptions from minor kingdoms of the ancient near east. Garbini finds something peculiar concerning the use of waw consecutive with imperfect verbs—a common practice in biblical Hebrew, but also found in (Moabite) Mesha and at (Ammonite) Deir ’Alla (the Deir ’Alla inscription, as you perhaps know, refers to none other than Balaam bar Beor, the legendary figure who is known from Numbers 22-24). As Garbini himself admits, the Zakkur inscription, from northern Syria, also reflects this alleged “anomaly”—an inconvenience which Garbini attempts to explain away. Garbini wants the TDS to derive typologically from Mesha and epigraphically from Zakkur, which is, well, quite a story. His attempts to support his Mesha “typology” are based largely on an extremely weak parallel where (1) Kemosh (Mesha) is to parallel Hadad (TDS), even though the former is a god and the latter a ruler, (2) the triple mention of Israel in both Mesha and TDS in the sections in question are asserted to be parallel, even though the TDS is so fragmentary that there could have been a fourth or fifth mention of Israel therein, (3) Gad is identified with the House of David (so Garbini conceded on the reading of bytdwd here? or does he do so only when he is claiming it is a forgery?), though Gad does not refer to a dynasty. The fact that the TDS breaks off here and there is no triple of toponyms to parallel those in Mesha provokes an outrageous line from Garbini in which he proffers that the forger couldn’t identify three Aramaic towns near Dan. This is all so outlandish as to be almost laughable. For someone such as yourself who apparently is rather dubious of philological overanalysis, you seem to swallow Garbini with no trouble at all, while you choke on Cross and Freedman.
I prefer to return to the word ’skeptical’. Albright, Cross, Freedman and other believers are not at all skeptical about anything that they can force into the scriptural template, and naturally not of anything that seems to need no forcing. We should be skeptical about any artefact discovered until it meets the tests and convinces us. I am skeptical of those who are not skeptical and I am skeptical about the Tel Dan Stone until it convinces. Garbini is skeptical too. That is why I favour Garbini but do not ’swallow’ him. I had a load of irate evangelical rubbish from some Greek Australian who apparently has something to do with the Tel Dan excavation. He should not be let near any historic site, his mania for God’s word is so severe he is just the sort to plant a fake. It is not unknown that these holy Joes should resort to dishonesty to serve their god.
Look, Garbini is unquestionably credentialed in epigraphy and Old Aramaic. But he’s in an extreme minority of scholars when it comes to his assessment of the TDS. If it were a forgery, it wasn’t a very ambitious one.
That is perhaps why it is successful!
Example #2: Thompson’s wild attempts to Hellenize the Hebrew Bible. He says flat out in the introduction that “It is only a Hellenistic Bible that we know…”. What does he mean by this? If the earliest manuscripts of Josephus are from the 15th century, does this mean that Josephus was Renaissance author? And how can he say that the Hebrew Bible’s Israel is “a literary fiction” when the Assyrian annals corroborate many royal names and battles mentioned in the Books of Kings?
What is more to the point is whether Josephus was a Roman author or a Christian author in the passages relevant to Christianity. I think you are perhaps right to disparage Thompson if he thinks the DH is primarily Hellenistic. In other words that it was composed or effectively written in Greek times. What I take to be a ’realistic’ conjecture is that the original work was based on the themes and theology of Deuteronomy, which I take to be at core the law given by Ezra, and that this was worked up in at least two stages. The later stages however copied the style of the original author, and the redactors were not such dolts that they did not know how to archaize.
Again, the sitz im leben of much of the Deuteronomistic History is clearly the Iron Age, or so it seems to me.
The sitz im leben of Horatio Hornblower is the end of the eighteenth century but it is still fiction. When would you have said the Iron Age ended? The real clues we have are the mentions of a few Assyrian kings and the local kings associated with them. Any fiction writer from the New Babylonian age onwards could have had the knowledge of the Assyrian king lists and inscriptions.
Another problem with Thompson is that his instincts are similar to your own, namely to identify all his critics as bible-thumping fundamentalist morons. This is ludicrous.
Well here in Albion, when I see a little yellow creature buzzing around a flower, I do not imagine it to be a humming bird, but a bee. To the best of my recollection you are the first person to engage me on such matters who admits to being atheistic. Even the few who agree with my drift are Christians or Jews. Most others are morons, and even the scholarly morons think they are genuine seekers after truth and not apologists.
I’m a Jewish atheist but I am no moron. Nor are Baruch Halpern and William Dever morons.
The morons I referred to were most of the correspondents I get here. I agree you are not but those who suspend their judgement over scholarly matters for reasons not to do with scholarship are morons in the sense of not properly using their brains. Halpern I have not read, but Dever sounds quite crazy to me. His saving grace is that he disdains deconstructionism, a current fad among literary critics and others, but one that is entirely in the line of biblical exegesis over the centuries. They read into a text whatever they want to get out of it. Presto! Scholarship! Yet Dever is hypocritical. He pretends not to be a biblicist but, in the end, he is!
It is a pleasure hearing reason, even if I do not agree with it all, when most of the posts I receive are bigotted twaddle. Your scientific background must have something to do with it, and perhaps that you are an atheist too, but I suspect that your scientific skepticism deserts even you because you are Jewish and attached to what you have always believed is Jewish history. I guess I am beginning at the end of your replies:
Finally, you accuse scholars of letting their religious convictions infect their work. Certainly this is a danger in the field, and undoubtedly it was true of Albright. In fact, the accusation cuts both ways. By assigning the Priestly strand of the Pentateuch a postexilic provenance, Wellhausen may also have consciously or unconsciously been working to denigrate Jewish religion—rabbinic Judaism is often criticized for being hypernomian. In fact, some have accused Thompson himself of a thinly veiled Pauline supersessionist agenda. And is it any accident that many Jewish scholars, such as Friedman, Milgrom, Knohl, Hurwitz, and others follow Kaufmann in assigning P a preexilic provenance? (Baruch Levine, on the other hand, agrees largely with Wellhausen’s dating of P.) Keith Whitelam is often accused of using his biblical scholarship to advance an anti-Zionist agenda. The accusations fly in all directions, Mike. I prefer to keep the discussion dispassionately focussed on the material record and the plain sense of the Hebrew Bible, to the greatest extent possible.
This last sentence is where your skepticism deserts you, and where we differ greatly, and you differ from the Minimalists. Now if the Jewish scriptures are the word of God, we have no choice but to accept them as wonderful, but neither I nor you believe this to be true. Yet, once God is discounted, you have then to accept that the bible is still a miracle. Stories of Abraham, Moses, Joshua, David and Solomon were all recorded in the detail of a Victorian novel but 3000 or more years before. Nothing like it even appeared in imitation of it until the Hellenistic romance became popular. No one, let alone a scientist, should not be skeptical about this. Even history was not told in this sort of way until Herodotus and Thucydides. You try to persuade me that there are not enough Greek words in the Jewish scriptures for them to be as late as Hellenistic times but to imagine that they preceded the Greeks is even less credible than that the Hellenistic authors were careful not to be anachronistic. Yet these were clever men aiming deliberately to write or continue a tradition that they knew was meant to be ancient. You make a grudging concession:
Could parts of the DH have been redacted during the Hellenistic period? I suppose so. But inasmuch as there is very little that is Greek to the DH, the burden would be on you to argue for such a redaction and to explain clearly what sections were redacted and how they might have been altered and toward what purpose. If the Hasmoneans had redacted the DH, I’d have expected to see priest-king themes played up quite a bit more, and restrictions on the king’s conduct, such as those present in Deuteronomy, to be played down.
’I suppose so,’ means ’yes!’ And I am unsure that trying to cut up the text into early bits and late bits is individually fruitful. Many great biblical reputations have been built on individuals doing it, and few of them carry any conviction to me, yet these people can get their DDs and professorships for writing nothing less than empty speculation. These scholars ought to be trying to propose a realistic hypothesis and evaluate its consequences. That Moses wrote the Pentateuch in 1400 BC is not held by anyone except churchgoers, as far as I know. The Court Historian is no longer believed by many. You yourself reject these ideas but want to hold on to the eighth century if that is what you mean by Iron Age. The Persian period was still Iron Age in fact although it is not classified as such. I doubt that people living in the eighth and fifth centuries BC lived much different lives. But despite the need for scientific skepticism you think there can be too much of it in scriptural matters:
This seems to be a common problem among the minimalists. They are marvelously skeptical, and often they ask some good questions, but overall they offer no coherent picture of Israelite history and the composition and transmission history of the Hebrew Bible which is the least bit compelling.
What is compelling about it now? If a hypothesis is impossible then why must it be accepted at all. It is impossible that primitive people living in hill stations should have written an extensive literature given that much greater empires were unable to do it for millennia before and for centuries afterwards. To hold no theory is better than to have an impossible one. But the credible theory is that the ethical god, the law and the literature were all initiated by a great empire, the cultural successor of several other great empires—Persia.
Given the corroboration of elements of the DH in the Assyrian annals, Mesha, the TDS, given mention of Yahweh in various Iron Age ostraca—often reflecting just the syncretism which is decried and obviously downplayed in the Hebrew Bible itself (e.g. Kuntillet ’Ajrud), given the explicit mention of Israel in the Merneptah stele ca. 1207 BCE, given the fact that the “Priestly Blessing” from Numbers 6 can be found on the tiny silver scrolls recovered from a tomb at Ketef Hinnom (dated to the late Iron II period)—it seems a ludicrous enterprise to attempt to downdate the bulk of the Hebrew Bible to Persian and Hellenistic times.
Not so! It is just in these times that the whole could have been written. The Persians had access to the Assyrian archives, and indeed might have had their own because they were close neighbours and probable allies of the Assyrians in the eighth century. Their priestly caste were the best placed to use these archives to write a sacred history with a political purpose in mind. The Jewish scriptures are political from beginning to end. They say: obey God and his law and you will be all right; disobey and you will be punished. The covenant is a treaty as everyone agrees. That is because it was indeed a treaty between a suzerain and a vassal. That is a sensible hypothesis to my admittedly enfeebled scientific brain. Bits of earlier Yehouistic tradition were doubtless incorporated—Yehouah was apparently a Canaanite Baal, but the Persians made him into a universal God. The Maccabees turned him back into a national god when the Persian empire collapsed followed by its Seleucid successors.
That is a realistic framework, I believe. The novel god, Yehouah of Ezra, was accepted by the end of the Persian empire, though it was a struggle which left its mark in the dislike of Jews and Samaritans, and thereafter, the sacred texts became the property of the Jewish priests and Hasmonean kings. My own guess is that much of the Pentateuch, particularly Exodus, Numbers and Leviticus was written especially in response to the request by the Ptolemies for Jewish sacred books for the Alexandrine library. The temple priesthood took the chance to regularize their cult for the world to see. The Ptolemies favoured the temple cult in Jerusalem.
Now, I do not have your skills in Hebrew and so am dependent on what I read from others, but this hypothesis still looks more convincing to me than anything else I have read. It is, though, a hypothesis, and perhaps you can refute it, but appeals to circular reasoning and guesses about how many Greek words there ought to be in an Hellenistic production do not.
Scholars for many years have acknowledged that the DH underwent a postexilic redaction—Joshua in particular (hence Finkelstein’s pointing to the 7th century towns in the lists of conquests in Joshua is not so compelling).
Did these towns have the same names in the fifth century?
If it turned out that it instead were an archaized text of Hellenistic provenance, I would be shocked, but it wouldn’t cause my worldview to crumble. It just seems exceedingly unlikely to me that that would turn out to be the case.
You are in a comfortable position so start to consider it! It seems to me more intuitive than the Uncertainty Principle and you believe that! I think I said before, this is a new paradigm, and no devout Jew or Christian will consider it, though I cannot understand why not, if it might be the truth. If Greek influenced priests in 250 BC invented the saga of Moses basing it on a true Persian story that ancestors escaped from the the Egyptians and received a law of Mazas which saved them, then why not accept that God’s Truth has been distorted by the devil for 2300 years? Practising Jews and Christians are not interested in truth at all. They are interested only in upholding what they believe, and particularly what suits them. I am naive or stupid enough to believe that truth is important, and neglect of it is more likely to cause trouble in the world than accepting it. First, though, it has to be found.
Walter Mattfeld
I just finished reading your thesis. My own research confirms that the Pentateuch is no earlier than the 6th or 5th century BCE. I would invite you to send for my paper arguing the Pentateuch is a 5th century BCE creation based on clues I have researched in Genesis in regards to Madai’s (the Medes) genealogical descent from Japheth, as well as who Japheth is in Noah’s blessing. All in all, I find myself sharing your premise that Holy Writ is a late invention to control people by.
My main concern is your portrayal of the Persians as actively behind the writing of the Pentateuch. The authors I have studied, suggest differently. The Persians were famous for their tolerance of all religions in their empire and they were indifferent to them as long as open rebellion did not manifest itself. So, I personaly, doubt that the Persians were directly or even indirectly, involved in the composing of the Pentateuch.
Perhaps I have read some of the same authors, but one does not have to accept their suggestions if there is a better or even an equally good hypothesis. These authors are Jews and Christians accepting the Jewish scriptures which they interpret in the way you say. Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes and Artaxerxes were all good proto “Christian” gents spreading compassion and religious tolerance. Read like that it simply looks unlikely! They were rulers of a large and disparate empire and indeed Cyrus and Darius were putting it together. They were not pussyfooters and they were not naïve. So, I think you are accepting the received idea too easily. Read a few more of my pages. I cannot see how you will be able to maintain that the Persians were not even “indirectly” involved. I cannot see how “indirect” involvement can be denied, and my view is that it was deliberate.
In regards to your position on the Persians and their posible influence on the composition of the Primary History (Genesis to 2 Kings), I would point out that the Jews had mixed feelings and were ambivalent about the Persians.
Although they were grateful to them for setting them free from the Babylonian captivity, and allowing them to return to Judaea, the Persians blocked Jewish efforts to have a king and delayed the restoration of Jerusalem and the Temple. The optimism about Cyrus the Persian being God’s instrument of restoration by Deutero-Isaiah, and that Jerusalem would soon be rebuilt along with its temple, and God’s favor would be evident to all the world with the restoration of his people, is undermined by the events that unfolded after 538 BCE according to the history preserved in Ezra and Nehemiah.
The Persian kings heeded the sage warnings of the Samaritans that if Jerusalem were restored with its kings, the Jews would rebel against the Persians. In light of Deutero-Isaiah’s crowing about the blessings that were soon to unfold upon God’s people and how "all the world would bend the knee before God at Jerusalem," the Samaritan advice was on target and the Persians acted prudently in stepping in and halting the building of the temple as well as not allowing the returned Jewish princes to become kings.
Zecariah expected Zerubbabel would become an annoited king (Zech.4::910;6:12-13), but it didn’t happen. Zecariah is dated 520-518 BCE, during this period of time Darius I came to the throne and faced rebellions to his rule. The Jews evidently thought this was a sign that the Persian Empire was about to come to an end and God would restore his people to power and Zerubbabel would be God’s annointed. They were dissappointed to discover Darius was successful in putting down all the rebellions. He may have allowed them to rebuild the Temple in his reign because the Jews were one of the few peoples who did not openly rebel against him, but he was smart enough not to allow them to have a king.
When Nehemiah eventually gets permission to rebuild Jerusalem’s walls he fears most the Smartian threat that he seeks to make himself king and restore Jerusalem’s walls in order to rebel against the Persian king, he denies all this with vehemence. The picture I get from all this is one of Jewish disillusionment with the Persians, they didn’t live up to Deutero-Isaiah’s rosy expectations. Being so bitterly dissapointed with the Persians, I fail to see them permitting the Persians dictate or directly influence the contents of the Primary History (Genesis - 2 Kings).
The whole subject under discussion is admittedly difficult, but you seem to be missing some of the subtleties. We agree that the Jewish scriptures were later than Jews and Christians will allow for them. They were not all written at once of course, but 5th century was the main phase. One trouble is that they have been re-written by the Maccabees for sure and perhaps in part before that by Hellenizers and possibly by different groups of colonists themselves. So, no hypothesis will faultlessly explain what we now have.
To explain myself at a gallop, several waves of colonists under different Persian kings were sent to sort out Palestine as a strategic place to hold. The first ones seemed to fail and others had improving fortunes until Ezra (a Persian name) laid down the law and the proper observance of it through regular readings. The colonists were plainly not liked by the majority of Canaanites that had not been deported because they were set up as a ruling caste and because they did not approve of the new religion they were importing. When you say “the Jews had mixed feelings about the Persians,” this is the explanation, except that properly Jews meant the colonists while the others were Canaanites (Israelites, if you like). When they accepted the new religion they became Jews.
The Jews were set up as rulers in the land with the approval of the Persians but the Am ha-Eretz, later identified with the Samaritans, disapproved of the whole shebang and opposed it relentlessly. Persian policy was, as you say, obviously not to let them have a king but to explain it because it was a kingdom of God—a theocracy run by the priesthood who were effectively Persian agents. You will appreciate that the Jewish scriptures were not written by the Am ha-Eretz but by the ruling Persian administrators who were effectively telling the native Canaanites that they had been sinners and punished by God, but God had sent his redeemer in the form of Cyrus, so they had better accept it or accept more punishment from God, via his earthly agents.
I haven’t time to go on but you get the drift and there is more on the pages. It sounds much more likely and rational than that Cyrus was a goody-goody and the people of Palestine at the time were so advanced that they wrote histories critical of their own kings! Pull the other one! as they say.
I have the following comments on: 1. How Persia Created Judaism.
You are evidently not aware that “Elohim” is a so-called “Plural of Majesty,” meaning that although the “-im” ending is a plural, and thus rendered as “gods,” the term is used in a singular sense for one god. There is no translational “dishonesty”here on scholars’ part as you seem to indicate. Dalley on Plural of Majesty:
“The gods” is used to refer to Nergal. This is a Phoenician and Punic usage, also found in the Old Testament when Yahweh is called Elohim, ‘gods’, and in Amarna letters from Phoenician cities where pharaoh is addressed as ‘My Gods’. Reallexikon der Assyriologie, sv Elohim). (p.177, note #11, Nergal and Ereshkigal. Stephanie Dalley. Myths From Mesopotamia—Creation, The Flood, Gilgamesh and Others. Oxford University Press. Oxford & New York 1989, ISBN 0-19-281789-2 pbk)
Oh, they are honest then? I do not know who Stephanie Dalley is or what authority she has to pronounce, but the idea of a plural of majesty has always seemed to me to be a rationalization of the Judaeo-Christian translators’ need to preserve monotheism. You give no examples presumably because none were given in the note you cite. One wonders why Phoenicians should be giving a title of majesty to a Babylonian god rather than their own favoured god, Melkart or Esmun or Adonis. Christians deliberately mistranslated tablets from Ebla, Ugarit and elswhere to suit their biblical beliefs. Can we be sure that the reference to Nergal is not referring to Babylonians gods in general—the Babylonian pantheon? Pharaohs were gods and sons of god, so the Amarna letter might be simply a respectful recognition of this.
Anyway, I am not convinced that a plural of majesty ever existed. I write in
http://www.askwhy.co.uk/judaism/0350Judges.php
The traditional sources seen in the Pentateuch are labelled J, E, D, and P. Often the J source (Yehouah) is seen as southern and Yehouistic while the E source is northern and prefers Elohim as the name of God. While there is some truth in this, the main point is that there were two initial factions when these legends were being considered for publication. One faction preferred El as the name of God and one preferred Yehouah. This could hardly have mattered to Canaanites for whom both were perfectly respectable gods, El the High God, and Yehouah one of his sons. It came to matter when the Persian colonists came to impose a single high god as a god of heaven and the universe and whose agent was the Persian Shahanshah. El, the Canaanite High God seemed the obvious choice, but there was a faction who preferred Yehouah, perhaps the Persian administrators themselves, and eventually the Yehouah faction succeeded. Before God was named as Yehouah however, there was a period when both factions wrote their own accounts, and there was probably a period when it was expedient to use a combined name Yehouah Elohim—Yehouah of the Gods, the gods being sons of El. For that reason we have a J source and an E source.
The switch from polytheism to a supposed monotheism required the abandonment of “the gods” in popular usage, but by the time it was effected, it seems people had accepted “Elohim” as a name for the singular God. This probably happened when no one any longer spoke Hebrew in their daily lives, and only heard it in the temple and synagogues. Judges 16:28 is quite remarkable: “And Samson called unto the Lord (Yehouah), and said, O Lord (Adonai) God (Yehouah), remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God (Elohim), that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes.”
This story has the hallmarks of being a late addition to the bible, so Elohim might by then have been accepted as a name of God, even though a plural. However Christians justify it, though, it plainly proves that the Israelites (Palestinian Canaanites) have not been monotheists throughout their history as the biblicists love to claim.
Dalley is trained Professor of Assyriology and cognate languages, including ancient Hebrew, Ugaritic, and Arabic. The source for Elohim being a Plural of Majesty was given, The Real-lexicon of Assyriology, The Authority on the various meanings of words for Assyrian, Babylonian, and related spinoffs like Hebrew. This multivolume dictionary sits on the desk top of every modern library of Assyriology. She is not making up the concept of Plural of Majesty of the top of her head to justify a Jewish or Christian Dogma ! I have seen and used this dictionary myself on occasion while doing personal research at the University of Heidelberg’s Department of Near Eastern Studies. I can assure you it is not driven by religious dogma—it is a Humanist effort, compiled by a team of prominent Assyriologists.
The two examples you gave did not convince me. But I am ready to be convinced. I just happen to think that most of the people that compile these things are Christians and Jews who are happy to be crooks for God, or are inadvertent fellow travellers who would never dream that people could be dishonest in God’s name. I am against crooks for God but I do not want to be a crook, like them, but against God, so will accept convincing evidence.
I would suggest that the vast majority of scholars working in Assyriology have no interest in the bible or the Old Testament, their passion is Assyriology. They have a nodding acquaintance with the bible but they are not out to prove it to be true. Many biblical scholars on the other hand have little exposure to Assyriology and its issues and concerns. These two disciplines tend to dwell to themselves in different worlds. There are a few scholars though who are professional Assyriologists and also keenly interested in any light the discipline can shed on the bible. Many bible scholars are not well versed in archaeology, its methods, concerns and findings. Only a few understand the significance of archaeological findings in shedding a light on the historicity of the bible. Again, a gulf exists like Assyriology. Those rare individuals who make it their business to be up to date on archaeological findings and Assyriology tend to be humanists, who are not out to prove the bible to be true, they are aware it is contradicted on many accounts. Dever and Finkelstein are examples of Humanist scholars. The reality, as I am sure you are by now aware, is that Society at large is not willing to face the issue that the bible is not the word of God and that the Exodus never happened and that there never was a garden of Eden. Realizing the hostility in society towards those who would subvert religion, the humanist scholars tend not to evangelize, they publish their findings in journals for each other to muse over. The public generally remains unaware of the new challenges to holy writ that exists in these scholarly journals. I guess society is happy with things the way they are, don’t bother us with the truth, we all ready know what the truth is. Inspired by your efforts in your website, I, like you, hope some of the research against the bible’s historicity will be helpful to the few stragglers who chance to cross it (a needle in a haystack). Those sure of their faith will consider my site blasphemous and mark it off their favorites list. The more open-minded may return to read further articles and become informed. It is my hope that the Humanist scholars in the audience may find some of my observations of help in dealing with various issues and problems which arise in bible studies.
