Caustic Ramblings

Here's some fascinating thoughts I came across. It's an Amazon book review of Argonauts of the Desert: Structural Analysis of the Hebrew Bible, written by the anthropologist Philippe Wajdenbaum

'Argonauts of the Desert' presents a revolutionary new commentary on the Bible and its origins, arguing that most biblical stories and laws were inspired by Greek literature. From Genesis to Kings, the books of the Bible may have been written by a single author, a Hellenized Judean scholar who used Plato's ideal state in The Laws as a primary source. As such, biblical Israel is a recreation of that twelve tribes State and the stories surrounding the birth, life and death of that State were inspired by Greek epics. Each chapter presents the biblical material and compares this to the Greek or Roman equivalents, discussing similarities and differences.

Anyway, the review, by Laura Knight-Jadczyk:

Years ago while researching the Hittites and their possible relationship to the patriarch, Abraham, I was reading Trevor Bryce's book "Daily Life of the Hittites" and was slightly electrified with his short discussion about the possible/probable relationship between the Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer's Odyssey.

Time went by and I went through all the works of John Van Seters in his search for the History of Israel and Abraham. In his book, "In Search of History", he discussed the relationship of the Israelite history to the historical texts of the ancient Near East and Greece, noting that, while we have many texts from the Near East with historical content, only the Greek histories parallel the biblical histories in their distance from the past that is being described. He noted at the time that there were numerous agreements between the substance and style of some of the OT books and works of Greek historians, particularly Herodotus. However, he didn't go into this in detail and I recall reading it and nodding vigorously because I had noticed the same things.

In 2002, Jan-Wim Wesselius wrote "The Origin of the History of Israel" wherein he argues convincingly that the structure of the OT from Genesis to 2 Kings is modeled on the Histories of Herodotus. He points out the striking parallels between the key figure of Joseph - who is the one who got the Israelites into Egypt in the first place - and King Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire. Some of these parallels are so precise that there is no wiggle room for evading the obvious borrowing. Further, there is amazing duplication of the genealogy of the patriarchs and the Persian-Median royal house, the most striking of which exist between the figures of Moses and King Xerxes. The main subjects of the stories about the two of them are that a leader is summoned by the divinity to bring an enormous army into another continent across a body of water as if on dry land in order to conquer somebody else's land. In both cases, the conquest ends badly, with a horrific siege, though in the case of Xerxes, it was within his lifetime, and in the case of the Israelites, it was when the Babylonians came much, much later.

Following Wesselius, in 2006, along came Russell Gmirkin's "Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus" where he argued his theory that the Hebrew Pentateuch was composed in its entirety about 273-272 BCE by Jewish scholars at Alexandria that later traditions credited with the Septuagint translation of the Pentateuch into Greek. The primary evidence he produced and argued effectively, in my opinion, was the literary dependence of Gen. 1-11 on Berossus' Babyloniaca (278 BCE) and the dependence of the Exodus story on Manetho's Aegyptiaca (c. 285-280 BCE), and the geo-political data contained in the Table of Nations. Gmirkin theorized that a number of indications within the text pointed to a provenance of Alexandria, Egypt for at least some parts of the Pentateuch. The suggestion was made that the many texts that would have to have been consulted to produce such a history probably were available only there. I don't see Wesselius in Gmirkin's bibliography and that is a bit surprising because it seems to me that their ideas dovetail nicely except that Wesselius proposes an earlier date for the composition. What is clear is that the OT author not only used Herodotus for his structure, he was in dialogue with Berossus and Manetho, ESPECIALLY Manetho and his derogatory ethnography of the Jews. Obviously it was seen that a slam-dunk history needed to be written that out-did every other apologetic history that was being produced during those time and that is probably what inspired the author to use the techniques he did which are so interesting to Wesselius.

That the Pentateuch was composed at almost the same date as the Septuagint translation, provides compelling evidence for some level of communication and collaboration between the authors of the Pentateuch and the Septuagint scholars at Alexandria. The late date of the Pentateuch, as demonstrated by literary dependence on Berossus and Manetho, has two important consequences: the definitive overthrow of the chronological framework of the Documentary Hypothesis, and a late, 3rd century BCE date for major portions of the Hebrew Bible which show literary dependence on the Pentateuch.

My own thoughts about this startling (and compelling) argument are that much of the OT was composed in Greek and only later translated into Hebrew and the Hebrew texts were corrected and fiddled with a bit which is why they no longer exactly match up with the LXX.

Moving on, in 2011, Bruce Louden contributed to the ongoing unveiling of the OT with his contribution: "Homer's Odyssey and the Near East". Louden has neither Wesselius nor Gmirkin in his bibliography and that, again, is surprising. Louden argues that the Odyssey is in a dialogic relationship with Genesis, which features the same three types of myth that comprise the majority of the Odyssey: theoxeny, romance (Joseph in Egypt), and Argonautic myth (Jacob winning Rachel from Laban). The Odyssey also offers intriguing parallels to the Book of Jonah, and Odysseus' treatment by the suitors offers close parallels to the Gospels' depiction of Christ in Jerusalem. (It turns out that the works of Homer are well-employed in the composition of the Gospels, too, as explicated by Dennis R. MacDonald, but that's off-topic here.)

We come now to the present book under consideration which is said to be a "revolutionary new commentary on the Bible and its origins, arguing that most biblical stories and laws were inspired by Greek literature." Well, as I have demonstrated in the brief review of the main books on the topic that I have read above, it's not so revolutionary, but it's the logical follow-up and is well-presented. Also, the author has Gmirkin, Van Seters and Wesselius in his bibliography though he apparently didn't read or build upon Louden's work which is a shame because there is a lot of meat there, too.

Basing his hypothesis on Wesselius' foundation's, Wajdenbaum argues that the Primary History - Genesis through 2 Kings - were written by a single author, a Hellenized Judean scholar who used Plato's ideal state in The Laws as a primary source. As such, biblical Israel is a recreation of that twelve tribes State and the stories surrounding the birth, life and death of that State were inspired by Greek epics. Each chapter presents the biblical material and compares this to the Greek or Roman equivalents, discussing similarities and differences.

What is even more surprising is that there are a couple of stories in the OT that appear to have been inspired by Roman history, specifically, the Rape of the Sabine Women. That would suggest that the author of the OT Primary history had access to the (now lost) works of Diocles of Peparethus who was the source for the history of Fabius Pictor as we are told by Plutarch. Diocles' own sources are unknown.

Obviously, the bottom line of all this research and unsettling conclusions is that the Hebrew Bible is certainly not a history of Israel and, as the archaeological record reveals, there probably was no early kingdom of Israel as described in the Bible yet it has been believed in for millennia as fervently as people believe that the sun will rise. The reactions to the above types of analyses are usually outright rejection even in the face of accumulating mountains of evidence that is considered conclusive in any other field of endeavor OTHER than Biblical Criticism. It is asked: if all this is true, how could generation after generation of scholars not have seen it? Wajdenbaum, trained as an anthropologist, is entirely competent to answer this question and he deals with it in his conclusions and that part of the book is well worth reading on its own.

Wajdenbaum proposes the Hasmonean era as being the most likely period in which the OT was established as the official national history of Israel and Judah. This was a time of a religious war between conservative and Hellenized Jews as described in the books of Maccabees, and part of the conflict may have been over whether or not this text was a real history of the Jews or not. The priests of the new Jewish state had the power to promote the Bible to sacred status and it was during the reign of the Hasmoneans that a man coming from Palestine, Antiochus of Ascalon, became the head of the Platonic Academy in Athens.

In a few generations, the Bible was accepted as the official history and after the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, the rabbinical tradition that evolved forbade the teaching of "Greek Wisdom" so a confrontation between the text and its Greek sources was prevented. Christianity, carrying aspects of Judaism into the Greco-Roman world, faced pagans who pointed out the obvious: that the OT was based on Greek sources. The Church Fathers turned those arguments against them and proposed the "Satanic Imitation" theory to cover a multitude of comparisons. When Constantine gave power to the church, the question was answered by persecution by the Church/State and soon, the Christian emperor Justinian, closed the Platonic Academy.

Most Biblical Criticism today is still conducted by "true believers" in the sanctity and primacy of the text and it is in the form of the perpetuation of this dogma rather than true study and research. The Bart Ehrman "Search for the Historical Jesus of Nazareth" debacle of recent times is a case in point. He falls back on his title that gives him (and only others like him) the legitimacy to speak authoritatively about the Bible. Real scientific critics are not allowed to enter the biblical field. If they do, they are shouted down or ignored away by the Churches that grant the authority. As Wajdenbaum writes:

...[T]he game of confrontation between different paradigms during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has only had the effect of diverting the quest for the sources of the Bible to within the Bible itself, a purely circular reasoning; Greek classical literature, although available in any university library, has remained confined to the fields of Greek studies and philosophy. ...Thus, even if biblical studies took on an appearance of a scientific speech that challenged the religious dogma, it has not, until very recently, crossed the line of suggesting Greek sources as direct inspiration for the Old Testament, a most unthinkable idea. The ignorance of such a possibility, the reactions of surprise, doubt and sarcastic hostility to my even suggesting it, are the result of more than twenty centuries of symbolic violence, exerted partly on the tacit demand of the believers. ...the maintaining of the Bible as a sacred text seems to have little to do with spirituality or belief; rather, it has to do with relations of power between the sacerdotal and aristocratic classes. [...]

"In 'Language and Symbolic Power', Bourdieu raises the question of censorship in an intellectual field, based on his own critique of a text by Martin Heidegger. Censorship does not necessarily come from an external authority, or even from the subject that would censor himself. The mechanism comes from symbolic violence, and the ignorance that it supposes...'

"In the case of the Bible, entire generations of scholars felt that they were allowed to speak only of the J, E, D and P sources. The imposition of a precise form in that field goes by a mandatory recognition of the theories produced by theologians, under penalty of ejection. ...The Biblical question is paradigmantic of Bourdieu's theory of symbolic violence, as Christianity is the dominant ideology of the Western civilisation. The refusal to recognise the Western roots of that religion, presented as necessarily oriental and Semitic, is the source of the most unbearable and oppressive symbolic violence exerted on every subject, from believers to atheists, who all ignore that which they should know. ... Christianity is Platonism for the People - that is the main ideology of our civilisation that has yet to be expressed in its objective truth."

My first statement on this is quite simple: In my view, the OT/Tanakh as a whole is not an accurate historical chronicle, but rather a narrative which a small circles of priestly scribes compiled at some point during the Second Temple period. In actuality, there was probably at least a several centuries of edits, redactions and interpolations performed upon the various OT books before the entire corpus was set into its "finalized" form we know of today. Perhaps the most important question to ask is: who exactly were these priest-scribes and why did they concoct the specific narrative that became the Jewish religion? Of course I don't have the answer to that, nor will I ever in this lifetime; however one can certainly poke and prod around for clues.

But first, my own timeline-outline understanding of what the "real" historical events and trends behind the OT narrative may have been, based on years of extensive research and deep thought:

1800-1550 BCE
This period was probably the supposed time of the first Jewish patriarch Abraham and his early progeny. In all actuality Abe is a purely mythological figure, possibly based on a real personage known through some sort of old Canaanite oral tradition. This also happens to be the time period of the Hyksos invasion of Egypt, which brought on Egypt's Second Intermediate Period. During this period a population of foreigners, probably a mix of Semitic Amorites and Indo-European Hittites (and possibly Minoans from Crete) ruled over the Northern (Nile Delta/Lower Egypt) half of Egypt.

After about 200 years, native rules from the South (Upper Egypt) based in Thebes revolted and launched a series of military campaigns against the foreign occupiers in the North and eventually ousted them. Ahmose, the leader of this great patriotic restoration of native rule and the founder of the 18th dynasty and the New Kingdom, sent the Hyksos packing and on their merry way up into the Levant sometime around 1550 BCE. This was in fact the first great "exodus" of a foreign people out of Egypt. Those foreigners who weren't bounced out may have remained in Lower Egypt as a permanent agricultural peonage class. Some of the stories about Abraham's early progeny may have been based on events that transpired in Egypt during Hyksos rule; some of these patriarchs may have been Hyksos pharaohs (i.e. foreign usurper-rulers) or perhaps influential advisors to them. The evicted Hyksos may have become bands of brigands, warlords and petty chieftains in various locales in and around the Southern Levant and Northwest Arabia; perhaps in areas like Judea, Edom and Moab. Stories about the Hyksos kings would have possibly remained strong within local lore of these areas.

1550-1350 BCE: A New Hope for Egypt
For Egypt, this was a time of great prosperity and imperial expansion. It was the glory days of the 18th dynasty, which saw its peak with the pharaoh Amenhotep III. The splendor and exploits of this great king was possibly the basis for the various grandiose legends that Jewish scribe-priests would much later attribute to their version of King Solomon. Of course the "real" Solomon wouldn't be around until about 400 years or so after the period when Amenhotep III reigned; accurate chronology never really matters to fanciful myth-makers. During the 18th dynasty, Egypt became a great imperial power and and conquered much of the coastal Levant region.

The Pharaohs had learned their grand lesson from the Hyksos debacle; the lesson being that they could no longer hunker down and exist as an isolationist hermit kingdom. They would have to interact with the wider world in one way or another, and this interaction had better be in a proactive, expansionist form. In other words, eat or be eaten. The second millennium BCE marked the beginning of the Age of the Ram. The old Age of the Bull (Taurus: roughly 4000-2000 BCE) policies that worked so well during the Old Kingdom would no longer cut it in this new age of countless wars and imperial aspirations. Several millennia of steady-as-she-goes agricultural existence had given way to a vigorous "heroic age" of hyper-vigorous tribal egos.

The most notable feature of the Ram Age (Aries) was perhaps the massive expansion of Indo-European warrior tribes from out of their original homeland on the Russian steppes and Southeastern Europe, to all across the vast expanses of Eurasia. By the middle of this millennium, Kassites were ruling the old Sumerian-Akkadian cultures of Mesopotamia, the Indo-Aryan Mittani people dominated much of Syria, the Hitties ruled a good portion of Anatolia, and of course the Hyksos reigned in Lower Egypt. And much further east, it was during this era when the Indo-Aryan peoples expanded from Central Asia into the Indian Subcontinent and establish their Vedic culture there; those who remained in Central Asia became the various Iranian peoples who would later play a major role on the world stage.

1350-1292 BCE: The Egyptian Time of Troubles (Amarna Period) and the emergence of proto-Monotheism
After the passing of the great Amenhotep III came his son, Amenhotep IV, who was better known to history as Akhenaten. This new king instituted a series of radical reforms that completely upended Egypt's old tradition order. Akhenaten created a completely new state religion based on the worship of one supreme solar god known as "the Aten." The old polytheistic priesthood based around the head god Amun-Ra, was effectively marginalized and put out of work. Akhenaten moved the capital from Thebes to a new capital city he built from scratch, situated about halfway between Thebes and Memphis. The old priesthood accounted for much of Egypt's incumbent ruling order and their ousting massively disrupted Egypt's domestic and cultural affairs. During Akhenaten's reign, a series of plagues, famines and economic disruptions wreaked havoc upon the Egyptian people and the government was unable to secure their imperial holdings in the Levant; because of this, the Levantine vassal states experienced constant raiding and plundering from brigand tribes known in the Amara Letters as "Hapiru" (the "Hapiru" were likely nomadic Amorites; perhaps descendants of the exiled Hyksos). In these letters we can see these vassal rulers desperately begging in vain for Akhenaten to send Egyptian reinforcements to help ward off these ferocious and bloodthirsty bandits. It seems like Akhenaten didn't have the support, will or resources to protect his dependencies. This series of calamities would have thoroughly convinced the average Egyptian that Akhenaten's radical changes greatly angered the gods and thus all this misfortune was divine punishment for these misdeeds. The old Priesthood would have easily capitalized upon this mass discontent and leveraged that in their efforts to forcibly remove Akhenaten from power and subsequently erase every vestige of his ill-fated regime. This is precisely what happened. The Theban priesthood and their military supporters overthrew Akhenaten and installed his young son Tutankhamun (Thoth-Ankh-Amun), the famous "King Tut" most elementary school students know about today. His reign didn't last very long and he was succeeded by a rapidly-succeeding revolving cast of military rulers which marked the end of the 18th dynasty. Some aspects of the Book of Exodus mythos was probably lifted from the actual events of this period. The "ten plagues" that befell the Egyptians may have been the plagues that happened under Akhenaten's reign. These plagues may have in fact been a result of the massive volcanic eruption of the Aegean island Thera.



1292-1200 BCE: The Empire Rises Again and the Second Exodus
With the 19th dynasty, Egypt sees a rapid restoration of order both at home and abroad. Ramesses II The last great native Egyptian pharaoh, led the reconquest of Canaan and it's very possible the events described in the Book of Joshua were actually a retelling of Ramesses' military campaigns in the region. That, or "Joshua" was a Canaanite vassal-warlord fighting on behalf of Ramesses expeditionary forces. Either way, there may have indeed been yet another Semitic exodus out of Egypt during the reign of Ramses. In this case, the people being exiled may have consisted of a Semitic agricultural serf class which had remained in the Nile Delta region after the Hyksos expulsion more than three centuries prior to the 19th dynasty's rise.

It was among these foreigners that perhaps the remaining members of the disgraced and deposed Aten cult sought refuge. In his book Moses and Monotheism, Sigmund Freud audaciously suggested that Moses was actually an native-born Egyptian, perhaps Thothmosis being his real name. In other words, he was not a Hebrew as the biblical narrative claims. Not only that, but this Moses was a high-ranking member of the Egyptian nobility and may have been a close follower of Akhenatan; perhaps a high priest of Aten, or at least an important official in Akhenatan's court.

This Moses would have been forced to flee after his master's deposal and if he sought refuge in the Delta region, he would have come into contact with many of the aforementioned serfs, ne'er-do-wells and other people of rock bottom social status. It's perhaps in this environment that Semitic people following a bellicose Canaanite storm god would have come into contact with the idea of a universal creator god concept. If there's any truth to this scenario then the god of Moses would have been Aten, a god with nearly nothing in common with the typical local nature gods of practically everywhere else. Anyway, by the time Ramesses came to power, this Moses would have likely been dead. But perhaps his memory and some of his teachings were kept alive among the rebel cult. Did Ramesses then put the Atenistm problem to bed for good by putting them to good use? By that I mean Ramesses' army may have escorted this entire population out of Egypt and into Canaan in exchange for them helping Egypt reconquer the region. Basically, there was no preposterous miracles or just-in-time plagues needed for this population transfer to take place. The new exiles would have surely been put in favorable positions of power and been afforded the best lands in exchange for aiding the pharaoh. Of course the Second Temple account obfuscates this likely-true history by demonizing the Egyptians and presenting them as being godless and arrogant adversaries of the Hebrews. I suppose it's quite easy to rewrite history 800 years or so after the fact.

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In the next installment I'll be examining the Bronze Age collapse and the ensuing Dark Age. I'll be looking at how these events radically reshuffled the political landscape of the Mediterranean and the Near East regions and how the authors/editors of the Hebrew Bible threw their own historical spin on said events.