Is it our destiny to verify the Existence Theorem or our fate to falsify it.

Who Lies Sleeping?

Joshua, Josiah and the Deuteronomic Historian 3

The believer may well point to a verified event and say, “Behold! The work of God!” But there is nothing in the event itself which confirms that it is the word of God. The perception of an event as an act of God may still be an illusion.
George W Ramsey

Josiah
Deuteronomic Law
A Mouse that Roared?
Divine Intervention in History
Monarchy

Abstract

Since eventually Canaanites and Israelites were differentiated, the question is when. The Merneptah stele reports the people of Israel as in the land of Canaan c 1200 BC. So, the line was drawn between 1200 BC, when Israelites first appeared in history, to the time of the Ptolemies, around 300 BC, when Greeks noticed the Jews and their temple in Jerusalem. The Ptolemies supported the temple for almost 100 formative years, and translated the scriptures into Greek in the third century BC. In that 900 years, the Jewish religion was founded and the bible started. The historian has to find this line that separated off the Jews. Archaeology yields nothing distinctive down to the fifth century when Persians colonized the province of Yehud in the so-called “return”. This deportation of Aramaeans from Syria and Urartu into Yehud is a clear, unbroken and impermeable line.

Consolidation of Political Power

It is idiotic of clergymen to pretend Joshua pertains to some period around 1200 BC when all the evidence denies this, and few scholars will not place it hundreds of years later. Most take it to be part of the “Deuteronomic History” which relates to the hypothesis that the missing manuscript found in the reign of Joshiah was Deuteronomy, and, in Joshua and the Rhetoric of Violence, Lori L Rowlett takes Joshua also to be written in the Assyrian period. Whoever wrote the part of the history referring to Josiah meant the document to be Deuteronomy, but the story is a myth to persuade the people that the new law of Ezra was simply an old law that had not been properly applied. Rowlett observes that nearly all scholars admit that post-exilic editions have been made, displaying a reluctance on their part to recognize that the work itself is purely post-exilic.

Rowlett says that the authors of Joshua used “the rhetoric of warfare and nationalism as an encouragement and a threat” to intimidate the people into submission to the government. The concern in Joshua for national unity implies a lack of it. An aim of the text was to encourage it. Despite her mistakenly dating Joshua two centuries early, Rowlett correctly sees its purpose as the “consolidation of political power”, as seeking to assert a socio-political order amidst chaos. In fact, the chaos was the colonization of the hill country and the imposition of a new god by the Persians, hated and opposed by the native Canaanites. “The threat inherent in the Joshua text functions as an instrument of coercion, or at least, encouragement to submission” to a central government whose authority was not secure. The aim is to suggest a sense of identity, based on a common opposition to surrounding enemies, that would unite the factions. The Canaanites are the outsiders but they are also, of course, among the subjects of the propaganda. The aim was to persuade them to accept the new religion and principles. The Canaanites who were thus persuaded and joined with the colonists in the new belief were set up in opposition to the Canaanites who preferred their original religion. Those who refused to accept the changes being made were deemed the enemy, the outsiders.

At the same time, those who submitted and became loyal were depicted as united and purposeful under the leadership of Joshua (“Yehouah Saves”) acting as the earthly agent of the god. This was the common concept of the time, and still is, to all intents and purposes, today. The US will not invade another country without at least making a pretence of calling upon God’s help. In those days, it was more immediate, but there is no basis for Rowlett to claim that the relationship of Joshua and Yehouah is evidence of the Assyrian period, and no other. It was true also of the Persian period when the Shahanshahs were certain they had been chosen to rule on earth by God.

Josiah

Josiah is another version of Joshua as many prominent scholars, like F M Cross and R D Nelson, have noted. Both are the Persian “Salvation of God” retrojected into the past, one to explain historically the divine right to the land and the other to justify historically the divinely given law. In the first, Joshua succeeds Moses (Mazda) and the vassal treaty formulation in which a subjected people pledge allegiance to the suzerain is invoked, as it was in Deuteronomy, the law. In Joshua 8:30-35, Joshua is depicted as the king, but the real king of the temple state was God, so Joshua is simply a title of God, and the story is an allegory of God’s salvific action. In 2 Kings 23:1-3, the same covenant mediation occurs, but Joshua is Josiah, and in 2 Kings 11:17, a similar event is led by the priest, Jehoiada, on behalf of the underage Joash, another Joshua. Jehoiada means exactly the same as Ahuramazda—Wise Lord!

In Joshua 8:34, a reading is made from a divine book! Runaway slaves with a book in 1200 BC! The book meant Ezra’s law—the law of the Medes and the Persians. The divine book was the legal agreement being imposed by the Persians on Yehud—Deuteronomy! It was a covenant, literally a contract with the Persian king who stood for God. Josiah is depicted as a political Joshua. He is shown mainly as uniting the people politically and religiously, not militarily, under “one god, one cult, one law, one ruling house and one subject people”. There was no basis for this in Assyrian times. Though the Assyrians had their national god, Assur, they made no pretence, as the Zoroastrians did, of monotheism. If the mythology of the bible is accepted, Josiah instituted Persian policies 200 years before the Persians. The biblical Josiah is an invention of the Deuteronomistic Historian.

The Deuteronomic History school of writers aimed to show that God controlled history, so that the disobedience and apostasy of the people would be rightly punished by God pulling the appropriate historical strings. The history was meant to show that He had done it many times before in the past and would do it again, if the people refused to conform to the law written down in the covenant.

God was recognizably at work in this history, continuously meeting moral decline with warnings and punishments, and, finally, when they proved fruitless, with total annihilation.
Martin Noth

Christian evangelists today seem to think this is their own tolerant and loving God. Of course, there had been no total annihilation, but since the colonists “returned” from elsewhere in the Persian empire had no previous history, being an utterly disparate group dependent on the Persians for everything including their previous history, the authors could maintain the myth of total annihilation, of which the “returners”—the colonists—were the uncomprehending “remnant”. They will have realized—or some will have—that they were not a remnant at all, but accepted that they had been put in charge of Yehud as its ruling elite under Persian protection, so it was in their interest to maintain the pretence. They had every reason to promote the myth provided for them, that they were the righteous remnant spared by God, while the incorrigible natives were mainly wicked and perpetually disobeyed God.

Deuteronomic Law

Noth had no understanding of the meaning of the covenant, which he took to have its conventional biblical meaning—the rules handed down by God to govern the relations between Him and His people. Once the covenant is seen as a vassalage treaty, the only question is, “Under which suzerain?” The treaty form was general in the Near East from the second millennium and was used by Hittites, Egyptians, Assyrians and Persians, but the Persians fit best in this instance.

The Deuteronomic History retrojected the fifth century colonisation of Yehud into the remote past to show that, even before the Jews had settled in Yehud, they had had a commitment to their god, Yehouah, and His law. In Deuteronomy 9:9-11, the covenant is identified as equal to the law, but the authors are concerned above all with the loyalty of the people to God, and the dangers of apostasy. Plainly their theory was that a commitment of the people to the new god was essential to their acceptance of the rest of the law, and emphasis on particular parts of the law was pointless to people who were not loyal to the god who was its ultimate author. A second concern, though, is the centralization of worship in Jerusalem (Josh 8:30ff; Dt 27:4-8). Since earlier colonists and the native people had worshipped at several shrines, it suggests the Deuteronomistic Historian was writing originally late in the fifth century, or in the fourth, after Jerusalem had been rebuilt as the capital of the temple state.

So, for the Deuteronomic History, the law is the Deuteronomic law. It shows this was the law when the Deuteronomic History was written, and all the sacerdotal aspects of it were post-Persian additions. So, “the law” in Joshua has few legal implications but mainly the moral requirement to be loyal to one god in one sanctuary. Moses as a “historical” figure who wrote down God’s laws had not yet been invented and existed only as a misunderstanding of the meaning of Ahuramazda.

Joshua 22:10-34 strongly condemns building sanctuaries that might divide the cult. When the Deuteronomistic Historian invents the mythical kings of ancient Israel, it is their responsibility to ensure observance of the law. The only king the Jews had at the time was the Persian kling, so the mythical history established the king’s right to apply God’s law. Effectively he has “the monopoly on religious power” with the priesthood subordinate. And since the king was appointed by God as His regent, the king had God’s own approval to ruthlessly suppress opposition, competitors and insurrection. This was exactly how the Persians saw themselves as kings. They did not claim divinity, like Roman emperors, but had divine rights conferred on them by God. The very fact that they held the office of king proved it. It was God’s will and they had God’s sanction to do anything to uphold God’s will.

Yet the Deuteronomic History makes no bones about the monarchy as a local phenomenon not being God’s prime wish, but only a concession to the desires of His people. The Deuteronomic History shows that the kings were fallible, often going astray and leading the people astray. Only a few were upstanding and even they were characterized with blemishes. Among them is Josiah, though Noth realizes that Deuteronomy was not really written then. He makes it a sixth century work—still a century or more early. Josiah is the Persian Salvation retrogressed by 200 years. Apostasy from its high standards led immediately to the Babylonian conquest. It was a direct warning that if they did not remain loyal to the actual Persian Salvation, they would suffer similarly.

The myth of the good king Josiah was to show how the law could be obeyed when it was approached seriously. It was a mythical historical precedent for Persian rule. Josiah was ideal with respect to religious exclusivity, the aspect of the law that best served the Persian consolidation of power. Otherwise the History showed that local monarchs mainly led to trouble, and essentially the history proposes that the people were better off being obedient to God and His Saviour king, the Persian Shahanshah, who would allow the people to be ruled directly by God providing they served the temple loyally. The purpose of the temple was to collect taxes.

Is a law given by God through a prophet, God’s law or the prophet’s law? The law God gave through Moses is called the law of Moses. The obvious explanation is that Moses was once considered as God. God’s law began by being called the law of Moses when Moses was the name of God. Later, when people thought God had another name, and was no longer Moses, they decided that Moses was the prophet whom God had used to send his law. He was a prophet who was intimate with God, but he was not God. The new name for God was Yehouah. In the story of the Conquest written in Joshua, although Yehouah is prominent, Joshua is following the orders of Moses. Joshua is literally God’s Saviour who follows the instructions of his God, Moses, just as the Shoshyant is the Persian Saviour who follows his God Ahuramazda. Yehouah ordering both Moses and Joshua looks like an additional layer of authority added later.

The Deuteronomistic Historian draws parallels between Joshua and Moses. Moses is how the word Mazda sounded to the uncomprehending audience of Ezra. So Moses is God (Ahuramazda) mortalized as His messenger on earth. Joshua is the same. He is God’s Saviour (or Saoshyant in Persian religion) , and so also a mortal regent of God on earth. Since Moses and Joshua finish up with the same role as Yehouah’s agent, they have marked parallels that do not pass the Deuteronomistic Historian by. Unsurprisingly, F M Cross and R D Nelson see Joshua as Josiah, and R E Friedmann sees Moses as Josiah. A multiplicity of scholars note many parallels between Jesus and both Moses and Joshua. All are the same mythical figure, the Persian Saoshyant, transformed into Judaism.

The scholar to bring the post-exilic authorship of the Deuteronomic History to attention was J H van Seters. Van Seters was criticized for not explaining the pre-exilic themes in the Deuteronomic History. One wonders how anyone can know what a pre-exilic theme is except through the Deuteronomic History. These critics cannot seem to understand that what they know of pre-exilic Israel comes from the bible itself. The pre-exilic themes are what the Deuteronomic History tells us they are, and they are Persian propaganda. Many, perhaps most, of these biblical scholars cannot step out of their preconceptions, and those who can cannot find academic employment. Though the whole of the history in the Jewish bible was written in and after the Persian period as propaganda, they can fool themselves that they can nevertheless discern a history besides this.

Manasseh is blamed for God’s punishment of defeat and exile by Nebuchadrezzar, yet Josiah had appeared between Manasseh and the defeat, apparently righting Manasseh’s wrongs. Scholars are puzzled by this and suggest that blaming Manasseh was added on, but its was probably the insertion of Josiah that upset the original plan. The Deuteronomic authors decided that the new law would be more acceptable if it were seen as an old law, newly discovered shortly before the Babylonian conquest. They therefore slotted in Josiah and his Deuteronomic reforms. Josiah’s reign becomes the culmination of Israelite history, as is becoming for any Saoshyant, but the Saviour was the Persian king not Josiah.

A whole school of critics following F M Cross and R D Nelson, on the basis of style and references to the promise to David, consider the Deuteronomic history to have been edited twice, the original that of Josiah’s time and then during the exile. The perception of two redactions can be understood, but it is hard to understand how they know when they were done, other than wishful thinking. If the Persians devised the first edition, it was most probably the Maccabees who made a major alteration in the second century BC to justify their new independent state of Judaea, and give it a glorious but spurious ancient history.

S McKenzie cannot understand why a book written to magnify Josiah should begin with Deuteronomy, Joshua and Judges. Why, indeed? But that the books were written by and after the time of Ezra under the Persians, who needed to impose a new law on an unwilling people, and persuade them to accept it, accounts for the whole arrangement. The conditions throughout the whole of the Deuteronomic history remain the same—they are the conditions that the Persian colonists met when the temple state was being set up. The people were worshipping the Baals, the righteous were trying to reform them, the native people’s religious rituals and traditions were being forcibly abandoned, local sanctuaries were being closed and their administrators and provincial priests were unemployed.

The opponents of Josiah’s reforms were the traditional enemies of the Persians in the region, the Egyptians. The purpose of the history was to counter this opposition by showing that the law, the centralization of worship in Jerusalem, and loyalty to the god, Yehouah, had a long history behind it, and history expressed God’s will. It is incredible that a well established and ancient law had been forgotten until it was rediscovered as Deuteronomy. Much more credible is that Deuteronomy was the law! What was the incentive and purpose of inventing such a law in the time of Josiah? There is none. The only credible hypothesis to explain the mysterious appearance of such a law was as a vassalage treaty by the Persians.

Sin in the Deuteronomic History is apostasy and disobedience to God. It has nothing to do with crime or disobedience to law in general. The promise to David is an empty promise aimed at getting enthusiastic support for the reforms. The reluctance of God to concede a monarch is the reluctance of the Persians. The promise is conditional on loyalty and the obedience of the people to God, and is plainly meant to impress upon people that the only way they will get political independence is through obedience. The Persians can have had no intention of ever allowing independence to Yehud, and the promise to David is purely propaganda. When the independent state was achieved by the Maccabees, they showed themselves as the realisation of the promise.

The sins of kings like Jeroboam and Manasseh were serious affairs because they were God’s regents, allowed reluctantly by God in response to the popular demand, and their crimes of leading astray the people had to be viewed seriously. The aim was essentially to predispose the paople against local monarchs. The fact that a king like Josiah was shown in a good light was meant to emphasize the overall pessimism about monarchy. No occasional good kings could make up for the generality of sinful ones, and so Josiah could not, in the end, save the people from God’s anger. The way to avoid it was to reject native kings all together and accept God’s will. The Jewish king could only be the king of kings—the Persian king!

The amusing thing about biblicists is that they accept everything in the biblical mythology and try to explain it from the evidence in the myth itself. Why should a minor king of a tiny kingdom about as big as Devon be concerned about centralisation. Why should such drastic measures suddenly be necessary, disrupting the kingdom, tiny as it is? Utterly divorced from history, the biblicists can pretend that Israel is large like the USA, or even like the UK. They can speak of “outlying areas” “far from Jerusalem”, when almost nothing was more than a day or two’s walk from the capital. They will not seek historical explanations but only rationalizations within the mythology itself.

The real point is to figure out when the new religion was imposed, why, by whom, and why and how it was written back into history. The Persian explanation, with subsequent development under Greeks and Maccabees, is a complete explanation, unlike the hodge-podge of explaining-away biblicists indulge in. Naturally much has been lost and not all the details can be known, but the explanation puts the bible properly into history. What biblicists hate is that it shows that most of the wonderful Old Testament sagas were propaganda.

A Mouse that Roared?

People like R D Nelson can talk of “the literary and intellectual life” of Judah in about 620 BC. It is hard to see that such a tiny and poor country had any literary and intellectual life, but if it had any, it must have been too small to matter. He talks about Judah expanding under Josiah to fill the vacuum left by the decay of Assyrian power. This is purely fantasy—an acceptance of the myth of David and Solomon, doubly fantastic in that it could happen again, let alone at all. The minute country of Judah could not have replaced Assyria in a million years. Assyria was replaced by its powerful southern neighbour, Babylonia, then by the Medes and the Persians—mighty nations with populations of millions of people. Judah cannot have had even a significant fraction of 100,000. No one who gives it a minute’s thought can hold such views, but doubtless Nelson, like most of his breed, think such falsehoods are holy indemnities, or perhaps they are happy to milk their earthly sinecures.

So, we are invited to imagine Assyria retreating before the might of Judah, that Josiah presided over a growth of nationalism, reunification, centralisation and dynastic pride, all of it deduced from within the myth itself. It is astonishing! And they call it scholarship. They would be no less useful expounding on God’s promise to Bilbo Baggins. Anyone can conjecture whatever they like within a fictitious situation, when the author is no longer alive to tell you what they meant, if anything, but these clever men must know it is utterly futile. Those who are not utterly cynical believe that it is God’s work—it is God’s work to invent lie upon lie to keep the sacred mythology in touch with history! Lori Rowlett, rather dryly for a biblical scholar, notes that there is no reason to believe that the Deuteronomic History version of the past was “either accurate or objective”. It almost restores your confidence in religious scholarship!

Robert and Mary Coote think Josiah was up against local bandits like the ones in Judges. These irregulars were supposed to have lived 500 years earlier than Josiah according to the biblical scheme of things, and one imagines should have little basis after half a millennium of the Israelite god and His law. “Apostasy!” they declare was what Josiah legislated against, but the story of continual apostasy over 500 years is itself incredible. Deuteronomy was not directed at apostasy but at the people who continued to worship their traditional and familiar Baals. The Cootes, nonetheless, are right but the reforms were 200 years later, and the period of Judges is really the period when the Canaanites resisted the imposition of Medean rule, and the imposition of the Persian God. The Cootes, and Cross and Nelson all take Joshua to be Josiah mythologized. Not bad! But both were mythologized Saviours, and Saviours were imposed by conquerors. Josiah was an internal Saviour in the myth, but was really an invention of the Persians. He stood for the Persians as Saviours, and did just what the Persians wanted to do—but 200 years early.

It is, or ought to be, plain enough that the Deuteronomic History was not initially for public consumption. Few could read, and those who could were priests. The history was to train and indoctrinate the priestly class of Yehud. Deuteronomy, the law, was read out in public as the bible says, and as we know from other vassalage treaties. The priests read it out, and the Deuteronomic History would have given them material to use in their exhortations to the people that accompanied the reading of the law. These were the origins of the sermons of the Christian churches, and soon the sentiments were being set to song for the Levitical cantors to chant, and spur the people themselves to sing in their daily lives.

Divine Intervention in History

The Jewish and Christian idea that the Hebrew god was unique in revealing himself in history is yet another big lie. T C Vriezen declares that “Israel did not derive its knowledge of God first and foremost from nature, as the ancient oriental people did, but from the acts of God in the history of the people”. If clergymen believe this they rarely show any curiosity about why it should be. For them, it is enough that God reveals Himself thus, but the historian would want to find a reason why the Israelites should differ from their neighbours. The plain answer is that they did not. The Israelites had gods exactly equal to their neighbours, fertility gods and seasonal gods like Baal, Mot and Anath.

The religion that the clergymen speak of was not the native Israelite religion but an ethical religion brought in by colonists from Persia. Not only that, but it is not true either that the older gods did not have historical intentions. B Albrekson, in a book with the long but descriptive title, History and the Gods: an Essay on the Idea of Historical Events as Divine Manifestations in the Ancient Near East and Israel, refutes the belief that the Jewish god was unique in showing itself in the events of history as opposed to the cyclical return of the seasons. Albrektson has shown that the Jewish god was in a line of gods, a whole tradition of gods, that revealed themselves in history from the third millennium BC onwards. Sumerians, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians and even the Moabites all had such gods. In view of the “exile” in Babylonia, it cannot be unimportant that Marduk was one of these gods.

Albrektson says that a god who acted in history was “part of the common theology of the Ancient Near East”. He found the nature gods of the fertility religions were just as willing to intervene in history. There is absolutely no point in calling upon a god, if it is unwilling to intervene on your part in answer to your prayers. These gods were believed to intervene, and also to side with their worshippers in battles. It was so obviously commonplace that it is monstrous that Jews and Christians should say the opposite in the interests of their own exclusiveness. It is a transparent lie that no one even stops to consider.

As long ago as 1901, Friedrich Schwally, from a detailed examination of all near eastern ancient literature on warfare, observed that all cultures in the region asked for divine assistance in battles. Ashurbanipal, quoted by M Weippert, writes:

Not by my own strength, nor by the might of my bow,
By the might of my gods, by the might of my Goddess,
I subjected the lands…
To the yoke of Assur.

The Canaanite legends of Ugarit speak of cosmic battles, and it is possible that the tradition remaining in the bible of Yehouah as a warrior leader is a relic of the Canaanite god, Yehouah. Besides the tradition of a warrior leader, Yehouah fights against chaos, a Canaanite tradition that would have facilitated the transition to the Persian ethical god. In the Ugaritic myths Baal also fights chaotic forces, paralleling Psalms 68, 74 and 89.

Texts similar to the Ugaritic ones are found from second century BC Mari, and they too suggest that divine assistance will overcome odds against. The supposed distinction is that the Israelites did not have to fight at all because God would defeat their enemies for them, but king Zimri-lim is told to stay at home while his god took full responsibility for the outcome of the battle. It seems this could only have been true in mythology, but it was true in biblical history because, half the time, God was on the side of the enemy to punish the sinful people. God is on your side when you win but on the enemy’s side when you lose. How does this differ from there being no god at all?

All battles in the ancient near east were dominated by gods but the result had to be rationalized with hindsight knowledge of the outcome. Notwithstanding, ancient myths of gods expected to fight chaos or their followers’ enemies, the biblical traditions all have the impress of divine assistance having been deduced or assumed after a profane battle had yielded its outcome. War in the ancient near east was always a divine responsibility, and the outcome showed the mood of the god. Persian kings attributed their success to Ahuramazda.

Whereas the consensus of older scholarship was that the scriptures were unique, as they had to be to be uniquely revealed, more and more modern scholars are accepting, what should have been obvious to an uncluttered mind, that the scriptures have much in common with ancient near east texts. The more objective modern scholars have laid to rest the clerical lie that the scriptures are unique in their representation of the finger of God in history.

Monarchy

The Persians were intent on setting up a theocracy but there had been a period of monarchy in Israel and the administrator-priests had to explain it within their theocratic historical framework. If God’s people wanted a king then they should have a king to teach them a lesson. Saul’s history was written as a warning that a theocracy should not want kings. The institution of the monarchy in 1 Samuel chapters 7-13 was shown as a blasphemy against God leading to innumerable punishments, the overthrow of the monarchy and “exile” (if there ever was one). Only the saviour of the Jews, Cyrus, allowed righteous Jews to “return” to their homeland!

P Weimar has shown that the holy war in the Jewish scriptures was directed at the royal court in Jerusalem, and its ideology. The holy war tradition reflected the dichotomy between prophecy and kings, and was a criticism of monarchy. It was therefore part of the propaganda against those who resisted Persian rule, in favour of home rule.

Plainly there were two sides to the battle, and both seem to have been partly represented mutatis mutandis by the Deuteronomic Historian. The prophets were originally Persian propagandists, and since there were no actual kings at the time of the struggle in the fifth century, kings stood for Baals, the divine kings of their followers, just as Yehouah was for His. When the Deuteronomic Historian wrote his propagandist history bringing the Baals down to earth, he represented them as mythical kings, whose proper allegiance was to Yehouah. David and Solomon might have been popular gods in Yehud before the Persian reforms. Solomon was surely a Canaanite sun god, and David a southern Canaanite Thoth or Hadad. Both were depicted as near perfect followers of Yehouah rewarded by success, but yet subject to the usual faults.

The first king, Saul, is depicted as a bad king, incompetent and disobedient to God. He reigned only two years according to 1 Samuel 13:1, and then God replaced him with his own choice. God designates David as king and the Merlin of the time, Samuel, anointed him.

Many of the later monarchs were shown as being disloyal not only to God but also to the people, making sinful alliances with foreign powers. Vassalage treaties prevented the subject states from making other alliances, so kings were shown as making illegal alliances to show that they defied God’s wishes—all part of the aim of discouraging native kings. God was their king—the Persian king His agent.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.