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causticusCopypasting here my response to a very fascinating Magic Monday thread topic jprussell started. His original question:
Here is my response (with some minor edits), which is actually to JMG's reply, but it very much expands on many of the things mentioned in the original question:
For starters, the Elephantine letters is slam dunk proof that polytheism was still quite normal among the Hebrews as late as the 400s BC. The letters even show friendly correspondence between the Elephantine community and the Jerusalem priesthood. So it seems Yahweh-only monolatry as a state-mandated policy in/around Judea would have been a rather late development, relative to the Hebrew Bible' internal chronology (which in the first place should be seen as legendary, rather than factual-historical).
The theory Jeff is referring to is a product of some rather recent developments in critical biblical scholarships, particularly the works of an academic by the name of Russell Gmirkin (as Jeff mentioned); he's published three extensive books so far which lay out his theory. In the first he makes a case, via comparative literary critique, that the Pentateuch has source dependency on the works of Berossus (Seleucid Babylonia), Manetho (Ptolemaic Egypt), and a number of Greek works. Now this is not to say that the stories within the Hebrew bible aren't ancient; many of them most certainly are. But the literary format and narrative those stories were encoded in are a product of the Hellenistic era, according to Gmirkin's thesis.
In his works he dated the penning of the Pentateuch to around 270-275 BC, and the whole affair was funded by the Macedonian-Egyptian king Ptolemy II Philadelphus; that he assembled all or most of the Jewish tribal elders in Alexandria and gave them access to the great library to help them compose their encyclopedic corpus. It was a known policy of the post-Alexandrian kings to employ local priests/scribes of newly conquered subject peoples to write extensive accounts of their own culture's history, lore, laws, and religious practices (see Berossus and Manetho I referred to above). So by this, the documentation Ptolemy wanted on his Jewish subjects is reflective of the same domestic policy other Macedonian Greek rulers implemented for their various other subject peoples. His other books (I only read his first so far) seem to go into extensive comparison between the Platonic corpus and the Hebrew bible.
Flavius Josephus in his histories of the Jews actually goes into vivid detail on how precisely the Septuagint was composed: in Alexandria and with the financial patronage of the Ptolemies, which coincides with Gmirkin's thesis (perhaps he got this idea from reading Josephus). I'll stop here because it would probably take me at least ten more paragraphs to fully flesh out the finer details of this theory.
From an esoteric standpoint, that 270s BC date seems quite interesting because this time period seems to coincide directly with the onset of the Age of Pisces. I believe this was also the approximate time of the Edicts of Ashoka in India (i.e. the first mass-deployment of religious missionaries). In the Middle East, this was also the time the first birth pangs of Magian religiosity, if we're to bring Oswald Spengler's theories into this equation.
Finally, I have to point out that the term "Judaism" needs careful consideration when used in the context of Greco-Roman antiquity. What we understand today as "Judaism" is merely one version of Hebrew religion dating to the Roman era. Particularly, it's a Roman-approved (after three failed revolts against the empire) form of Pharisee Judaism that later underwent considerable changes in the middle ages. There was actually a lot more ideological diversity in and around Hellenistic and Roman Judea/Palestine than most people today understand; the Gnostics, Essenes, and proto-Christians being prime examples (heck, we don't even know what the Sauducees actually believed). The Mandean religion that survives to this day may in fact be a preservation of older Judaic beliefs that have long been snuffed out everywhere else (perhaps an offshoot of the Essenes).
1700+ years of church propaganda asserting the Bible as a historical document (an infallible one at that!) has long made it politically incorrect to suggest that anything other than a literal reading of Biblical chronology is a historically-accurate version of the events that led up to the emergence and development of the Abrahamic religions. What the difference is today is that it's now finally permissible for researchers to propose and present alternative hypotheses.
jprussell started. His original question: I recently heard about a hypothesis that the Old Testament is consciously modeled on Plato and is essentially an attempt to do what he recommended in the /Republic/ and take the known myths of a people and rework them to create a body of belief that would help forge a unified and virtuous people. Advocates of this theory point to similarities in the content and ordering of the Old Testament and Plato's presentation of "the Law," to the fact that we have no textual record of the Old Testament earlier than the time of the Septuagint, and some of the archaeological and textual evidence we do have (like the Elephantine letters) that show the Hebrews being fairly normal eastern Mediterranean polytheists with multiple Gods, temples, harvest festivals and the like, with no mention of things that we now know to be central to the religion (Moses, the Law, the Exodus, and so forth). Have you, JMG, or anyone else here, heard of this theory, and what kind of credibility do you give it? I've heard it second hand from intelligent and knowledgeable people, but it strikes me as one of those theories that might appeal precisely because it is contrarian. Some sources the folks I'm talking to are drawing from: Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible by Russel Gmirkin and Biblical Interpretation Beyond Historicity edited by Ingrid Hjelm and Thomas Thompson
Here is my response (with some minor edits), which is actually to JMG's reply, but it very much expands on many of the things mentioned in the original question:
For starters, the Elephantine letters is slam dunk proof that polytheism was still quite normal among the Hebrews as late as the 400s BC. The letters even show friendly correspondence between the Elephantine community and the Jerusalem priesthood. So it seems Yahweh-only monolatry as a state-mandated policy in/around Judea would have been a rather late development, relative to the Hebrew Bible' internal chronology (which in the first place should be seen as legendary, rather than factual-historical).
The theory Jeff is referring to is a product of some rather recent developments in critical biblical scholarships, particularly the works of an academic by the name of Russell Gmirkin (as Jeff mentioned); he's published three extensive books so far which lay out his theory. In the first he makes a case, via comparative literary critique, that the Pentateuch has source dependency on the works of Berossus (Seleucid Babylonia), Manetho (Ptolemaic Egypt), and a number of Greek works. Now this is not to say that the stories within the Hebrew bible aren't ancient; many of them most certainly are. But the literary format and narrative those stories were encoded in are a product of the Hellenistic era, according to Gmirkin's thesis.
In his works he dated the penning of the Pentateuch to around 270-275 BC, and the whole affair was funded by the Macedonian-Egyptian king Ptolemy II Philadelphus; that he assembled all or most of the Jewish tribal elders in Alexandria and gave them access to the great library to help them compose their encyclopedic corpus. It was a known policy of the post-Alexandrian kings to employ local priests/scribes of newly conquered subject peoples to write extensive accounts of their own culture's history, lore, laws, and religious practices (see Berossus and Manetho I referred to above). So by this, the documentation Ptolemy wanted on his Jewish subjects is reflective of the same domestic policy other Macedonian Greek rulers implemented for their various other subject peoples. His other books (I only read his first so far) seem to go into extensive comparison between the Platonic corpus and the Hebrew bible.
Flavius Josephus in his histories of the Jews actually goes into vivid detail on how precisely the Septuagint was composed: in Alexandria and with the financial patronage of the Ptolemies, which coincides with Gmirkin's thesis (perhaps he got this idea from reading Josephus). I'll stop here because it would probably take me at least ten more paragraphs to fully flesh out the finer details of this theory.
From an esoteric standpoint, that 270s BC date seems quite interesting because this time period seems to coincide directly with the onset of the Age of Pisces. I believe this was also the approximate time of the Edicts of Ashoka in India (i.e. the first mass-deployment of religious missionaries). In the Middle East, this was also the time the first birth pangs of Magian religiosity, if we're to bring Oswald Spengler's theories into this equation.
Finally, I have to point out that the term "Judaism" needs careful consideration when used in the context of Greco-Roman antiquity. What we understand today as "Judaism" is merely one version of Hebrew religion dating to the Roman era. Particularly, it's a Roman-approved (after three failed revolts against the empire) form of Pharisee Judaism that later underwent considerable changes in the middle ages. There was actually a lot more ideological diversity in and around Hellenistic and Roman Judea/Palestine than most people today understand; the Gnostics, Essenes, and proto-Christians being prime examples (heck, we don't even know what the Sauducees actually believed). The Mandean religion that survives to this day may in fact be a preservation of older Judaic beliefs that have long been snuffed out everywhere else (perhaps an offshoot of the Essenes).
1700+ years of church propaganda asserting the Bible as a historical document (an infallible one at that!) has long made it politically incorrect to suggest that anything other than a literal reading of Biblical chronology is a historically-accurate version of the events that led up to the emergence and development of the Abrahamic religions. What the difference is today is that it's now finally permissible for researchers to propose and present alternative hypotheses.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-10-13 04:43 am (UTC)As for this particular theory, one thing I've noticed is that I haven't yet seen a discussion of what I was taught was the default theory, that most of the Old Testament as we know it was put together and written down during the Babylonian exile. But then, I haven't read Gmirkin myself, so maybe he goes into that.
On your topic about the "political correctness" of questioning the sourcing of the Bible, I'd be inclined to see it less as a universal thing, and more a discipline-by-discipline thing. For a long time, even as academia moved atheistic, materialistic, and leftward, Classics and Biblical scholarship lagged behind. These days, that lag may be gone, and as you say, that may mean the introduction of some plausible theories that deserved more attention than they got for questioning orthodoxy, but might also mean theories get more attention for going in the direction everyone else wants to go these days.
Cheers,
Jeff
(no subject)
Date: 2023-10-13 04:49 pm (UTC)Yes, in this case, Classics and Biblical scholarship seem to each have their own internal Overton Window. I agree these have lagged behind the rest of the humanities, to some degree. I think within Biblical scholarship it became permissible to question the previous assumptions about dating the Bible. Though, rather than there being a "default theory" is seems there's been a series of different paradigms that have come and gone in modern Biblical scholarship.
The previous mainstream paradigm is the one you mention, the Babylonian Exile authorship model. And prior to that, the Documentary Hypothesis, which has now been mostly abandoned, though I've seen a few scholars still refer to it. Now with the entire traditional dating being tossed to the wolves, it seems like there's a wide open field for different speculations that could not have gained any sort of mainstream traction in prior eras.
I think here a multidisciplinary approach has been a huge nudge in that direction, particularly given that the incorporation of archaeology into the field has allowed scholars to call into questions old age-old assumptions like "Ancient Israel" (as depicted in the Bible) being a historical fact, when in fact our current archaeological knowledge tells us, "umm, probably not". The work of archaeologists like the Israeli professor Israel Finkelstein has been somewhat of a game-changer, IMHO.
"As for this particular theory, one thing I've noticed is that I haven't yet seen a discussion of what I was taught was the default theory, that most of the Old Testament as we know it was put together and written down during the Babylonian exile. But then, I haven't read Gmirkin myself, so maybe he goes into that."
I agree that this should perhaps be one of the first things scholars proposing new theories need to address. And by address, I mean something akin to how a Viking longship out on the maritime prowl might have addressed a poorly-defended Christian monastery they just spotted along a nearby coastline or riverbank (I you don't mind me using a rather crude analogy). The Pentateuch being composed during the Babylonian exile seems rather implausible from the perspective of scribal logistics, plus the many anachronisms within the text that do not reflect the geopolitical reality or cultural facts of that time period and the time periods prior to that.
So much more I can blab on about here, haha.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-10-13 07:36 pm (UTC)Secondly, what leads you to find the Babylonian Exile theory so implausible? I'm not totally following what you mean by "scribal logistics" (not enough Jewish scribes in Babylon?) and when you say anachronisms, do you mean things from after the exile, or things that are too old, or what? I've always found it plausible that the Old Testament came about (whenever and wherever) in a process similar to how the Iliad and Odyssey came into the form we know in Athens - long, long oral tradition written down at one or more particular point(s), with some amount of "massaging" by the writers during that process.
I'll admit, though, this has never been my primary area of interest or expertise, and digging into it is likely rather far down on my list of nerdy ancient stuff to get into, so I'm largely speaking from impressions that were formed a ways back, by I don't remember what, and a large amount of "eh, seems reasonable" to get things to fit together. All of which is to say, any objections I raise are mostly along the lines of "isn't this interesting," and not much more.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-10-13 09:27 pm (UTC)For sure. It can be an endless expanse of interpretation when we're talking about something so broad as the prehistory of a massive language family that spread all across a megacontinent over the course of thousands of years. Archaeology seems more useful though when zoomed in on a small geographic area, dealing with a specific time period, and featuring cultures we already have quite a bit of historical knowledge on.
"I tend to think that the argument that archaeology is a slam dunk that "Ancient Israel" was a pure fiction is a bit overstated - but I think it very likely that the scope, grandeur, and unity of "Ancient Israel" was back-projected pretty strongly."
Who is arguing that Ancient Israel is pure fiction? I think the point of contention I'm referring to is the notion that Ancient Israel existed more or less as the Bible depicted it. Otherwise, yeah I pretty much agree with what you are saying here.
"Secondly, what leads you to find the Babylonian Exile theory so implausible?
No problem. I should have better explained what I was getting at there.
Short answer:
(1) Because we know of no equivalent of an Athens, or Alexandria, or Rome for the Judeans during the Babylonian Exile. As far as we know (and we're still relying on the bible as a historical document, lol), the exiles (who may have only numbered several thousand people) were scattered across a series of towns and cities throughout Mesopotamia.
(2) The theology of the Hebrew Bible (one god uber alles; all other gods are false or demons) is entirely anachronistic relative to the culture of the Ancient Near East prior to the Persian conquests. The Babylonian Exile period is the period that directly predates the Persian conquests.
I have a much longer answer should you have any interest in getting into the weeds. (I've nerded out on ancient history for decades now, so it can get quite weedy!)
"I've always found it plausible that the Old Testament came about (whenever and wherever) in a process similar to how the Iliad and Odyssey came into the form we know in Athens"
Prose writing and poetic metre are two very different animals. The latter can easily be memorized and passed down orally over the course of many generations without too many mutilations of the content. Prose OTOH needs to be written down and in concrete form, otherwise that sort of transmission is very much subject to the age-old game of telephone. Hence scribal logistics and infrastructure (standardized literary language and workable transmission + preservation methods), to circle back to the first item I listed above.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-10-13 10:15 pm (UTC)That's true, but I guess I was more pointing to the broader idea that with both history and archaeology we have so very little of everything. Even in the best-known, most-important-to-later-history times and places. So, that contributes to my heuristic to be wary of "this received wisdom is completely wrong!" kind of arguments.
Who is arguing that Ancient Israel is pure fiction? I think the point of contention I'm referring to is the notion that Ancient Israel existed more or less as the Bible depicted it. Otherwise, yeah I pretty much agree with what you are saying here.
Touche! Point retracted then.
Short answer:
(1) Because we know of no equivalent of an Athens, or Alexandria, or Rome for the Judeans during the Babylonian Exile. As far as we know (and we're still relying on the bible as a historical document, lol), the exiles (who may have only numbered several thousand people) were scattered across a series of towns and cities throughout Mesopotamia.
Really? I hadn't known that. I had always heard it as there was some kind of concentrated priestly community in Babylon itself. I do know that in later times (like, 1st centuries BCE/CE), "Babylonia" was a center of a number of pre-Rabbinic schools on the Torah, some of which remained prominent until the Islamic conquests. I wonder if there was any earlier antecedents besides there just being Jewish/Hebrew communities there.
(2) The theology of the Hebrew Bible (one god uber alles; all other gods are false or demons) is entirely anachronistic relative to the culture of the Ancient Near East prior to the Persian conquests. The Babylonian Exile period is the period that directly predates the Persian conquests.
To clarify, are you saying that the Persians introduced such a theology (presumably Zoroastrianism), and besides what the Bible claims, it was the first documented to be like that?
Prose writing and poetic metre are two very different animals. The latter can easily be memorized and passed down orally over the course of many generations without too many mutilations of the content. Prose OTOH needs to be written down and in concrete form, otherwise that sort of transmission is very much subject to the age-old game of telephone. Hence scribal logistics and infrastructure (standardized literary language and workable transmission + preservation methods), to circle back to the first item I listed above.
Fair point. I would be shocked, though, if the Hebrews did not have an oral poetry tradition before they became more widely literate, since just about everybody does. I've never given much thought to whether parts of the Bible (besides the Psalms and the Song of Solomon) might be poetry/have poetic elements. Assuming the "poetic tradition that later got written down" hypothesis is at least part of the story, it would be interesting to know why the Hebrews prosified everything (assuming they did), but the Greeks didn't. No idea if we could figure that out, though.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-10-13 11:42 pm (UTC)On your last point,
I would be shocked, though, if the Hebrews did not have an oral poetry tradition before they became more widely literate, since just about everybody does. I've never given much thought to whether parts of the Bible (besides the Psalms and the Song of Solomon) might be poetry/have poetic elements.
They most certainly did. And this is why I believe the Psalms and other poetic parts to be the oldest sections of the entire biblical corpus (granted these ancient sources were redacted and reshuffled in order to fit the Torah's theology). Much study has been done comparing some of the biblical psalms to ancient Canaanite hymns, namely the Baal Cycle, that we have record of from the Bronze Age city state of Ugarit. The later Phoenician and Israelite cultures would have likely preserved their own versions of these ancient hymns orally. Song of Songs has close affinity to ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian love poetry.
Years back I performed some redaction experiments trying to revert parts of the bible back into a polytheistic context, and it's really not very hard to do once you know where to look and what to edit. In my opinion, if it can go one way, it can certainly go back the other way.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-10-13 05:42 pm (UTC)I just want to say I've just had a root around your site, and there is a whole heap of interesting stuff there.
I don't have much to say, for now, except that I think your basic overarching theme - that abrahamic religion has been waging a campaign against all other gods, and native ways, and spiritual impulses, of other peoples for quite a while. And still are (I am the daugher of evangelical missionaries).
It may be that, as Jeff says, we should assume that what ancient sources say happened probably happened, unless compelling evidence pushes away from that assumption. (Velikovsky, for one, has made fascinating use of this assumption).
Still, it is also likely true that anything written down, was written down in the context of political, economic, ethnic, social or ideological necessities and purposes contemporary to the writers, and that such "filters" have to be, to an extent, reverse engineered, in order to appreciate the work properly.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-10-13 07:52 pm (UTC)I'm in broad agreement with the caveat you add to Jeff's statement.