Caustic Ramblings

This question flows from the premise that the Russel Grimkin Hypothesis sufficiently explains how the Torah first came to be and that it wasn't written down until the Macedonian Ptolemaic Dynasty established itself in Egypt.

So if prior to the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus there was no official Jewish scriptural canon and that stories found in Genesis, Exodus, ect. were not even written yet, what exactly was the Jewish religion and could we even call it that?

I believe that to get at this question we need to engage in a Sociological analysis of the region where the Jews emerged from; an analysis focusing on the time period right before the aforementioned period. Before the Ptolemies, Alexander the Great and his armies conquered the entire Middle East and Egypt from the massive Achaemenid Persian Empire. So before Alexander it was the Persians who ruled the lands of Judea and Samaria (part of a larger regional province the Persians called 'Eber-Nahara') and there would have been a class structure in place there to administer the land and collect taxes for the Persian overlords. I'm going to go with my hypothesis that the literate and wealthy class of this area may have been of Babylonian and/or Assyrian origin, whereas the vast majority of the people, the farmers and herders, were local Canaanites whose ancestors had been rooted in the area for many, many centuries. The evidence of this administrative class of Mesopotamian origin is hinted it throughout the books of the Tanakh, though of course the literary narrative makes it out like this ruling element was in the region long before it actually was.

And then there's the likely probability that the Persians also deported/exiled noble houses from the Mesopotamian heartland of the prior regimes. During the series of events that brought Darius I to power, there's documented evidence of rebellions occurring all over the empire, with several having taken place in/around Babylonia. If not killed outright, some of the parties Darius would have deemed to be responsible for aiding the rebellion could have very well been sent off to a faraway location like Canaan.

These Mesopotamian colonists/exiles would have been too small in number to radically change the local Canaanite culture and religion and thus they would have had to at least somewhat blend in and assimilate to local customs. Which raises the question of: what were these local customs? The most sensible answer might be the local Canaanite religion and culture that had been in place for many centuries.

Now, any diligent student of ancient Middle Eastern history might be quite familiar with the forced-deportation policies of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires of the Iron Age. Basically, these regimes got in the habit of forcibly relocating the most powerful/influential noble houses of the regions they conquered, so as to prevent local rebellions from occurring. Presumably the main intended outcomes of this policy were (a) dislocating these houses from their long-established local support bases, and (b) use these noble houses "in exile" to establish administrative colonies for the empire in more remote or outlying areas. When the Persians conquered the Neo-Babylonian empire (and other states) they adopted this same deportation policy, albeit in a much less brutal manner than that of their predecessors.

So then the obvious question arises: exactly how and when these Babylonian exiles were displaced into Canaan? We already have the 'why?' part addressed above, and thus the 'when?' part becomes a question of whether it was the Neo-Babylonian or the Persian regime that was responsible for the exile. My own take is that this was not a singular event, but rather a drawn-out series of deportations from Mesopotamia to the Levant. And likewise, there was likely forced migrations going in the other direction as well.

The OT narrative does provide some hints and once we cease taking the surface narrative at face value, we can begin to suss out the clues as to what might have actually took place those many centuries ago. Early in Genesis we find an explicit Mesopotamian pedigree in the original story of Abraham and his family. We see the cities 'Ur of the Chaldeans' and 'Harran' referenced. Why these two cities? If the Ur being refereed to here is the ancient Sumerian Ur that was once a bustling port city (before the Persian gulf receded to its present shoreline), it's a place that's quite a long distance from Haraan, which is situated in the fart northern reaches of Syria. If we're to discard the claimed Bronze Age historiography and look to more contemporary (relative to the writing of the OT) events, we could take note that the main thing in common the cities of Ur and Harran had is that they were the primary cult center of the lunar god 'Sin' of Sumerian origin, also known as Zuen, Enzu, and Nanna. Sin was a particular favorite among the Iron Age Assyrians, and the de-facto favored deity of both the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian regimes. And despite what nomenclature may suggest, the Neo-Babylonian ruling house was in fact an offshoot of the preceding Assyrian dynasty. So when the Neo-Babylonian took over much of the Assyrian empire, we could say that rather than a totally new regime supplanting the old one, this was more like a civil war within the network of Assyrian elite families. So when Nabopolassar (founder of the Neo-Babylonian dynasty) and his family comes to power (with the help of the Iranic Medes), he still has quite a bit holdout elements from the old regime to deal with, particularly in the remaining Assyrian stronghold of the region in and around Harran. Nabopolassar's regime eventually conquered this area. And presumably they use the age-old deportation policy to deal with the remnants of the noble houses in this area. Could some of these families have been sent south into Canaan? We'll never really know the answer to this, but it's a distinct possibility that at least one of the exile events was the result of a scenario like this. The Mesopotamian colonists though would have not seen their pre-existing beliefs and practice just disappear though.

In the next installment, I'll explore what the religious synthesis that took place in Persian-ruled Canaan might have looked like.