2024-03-14

The Hebrew Bible – Composed only 300 years before Christ?

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by Neil Godfrey

Below is a revised version of a post I submitted to the earlywritings forum. It is the first in a series setting out the foundational arguments for the Old Testament books being written as late as only 300 years before Christ, no earlier. The case being proposed is that our earliest books of the Bible did not have a heritage traced back to Bronze Age times, not even as far back as the kingdoms of Israel and Judah — nor even the “Babylonian Captivity” of the Judeans who were transported to Mesopotamia by Nebuchadnezzar in the sixth century BCE. Rather, the proposition advanced here is that they were the creations of a time after Alexander the Great swept across “Asia” and just prior to the Hasmonean and Maccabean eras. The argument to be advanced is that the earliest books of the Bible originated in the Greek era, only a couple or so centuries before the Roman conquest and time of Jesus.

. . . 

When we apply the fundamentals of historical methods as practised by historians in fields other than biblical studies we quickly see logical flaws at the heart of the conventional understanding that the sources for various biblical books (in particular the stories in Genesis and Exodus) go back as far as the times of David and Solomon.

Multiple sources and circularity

Several times I have engaged in the EarlyWritings Forum on the question of the how the Hebrew Bible came about over long centuries of accumulated writings and editings [i.e. the Documentary Hypothesis] and every time, it seems to me, the argument submitted to prove that the stories came about over long spans of time is the same: the evidence clearly shows us that different stories were combined into one. The classic illustration of this is the Flood story of Genesis. There can be little doubt that two different flood narratives are combined here. Sometimes the account says Noah brought in the animals two by two but in another place it tells us that there were seven of each kind! There are many more indicators to verify the point.

My response has been each time that I have no doubt that different sources were mixed to create the Genesis Flood account, but it does not necessarily follow that those different stories arose and came together over a long time period.

Think of it for a moment: An editor sees before him a story which says that the animals went into the ark two by two. That editor has in mind another story that he has acquired, one that says there were seven of each kind of animal. Now what is that editor likely to do if he wants to create a new single narrative? Would he be likely to keep the two by two account alongside the new one with the sevens? Or should we rather expect that he would delete the two by two references and replace them with what he prefers as the more valid story about the sevens?

What we have is a case of the editor deciding to combine details, even though contradictory, into one new narrative.

To me, that sounds like the editor had two different stories before him and he saw his role as being required to blend the two together, preserving the details of each, to create a single new authoritative story.

If that was the case, there is no reason at all to suppose that the Flood story as we have it is evidence of composition involving the accumulation of different sources over a long time span. It is no less reasonable to think that two interest groups created their own account and an editor was tasked with the job of making them one so that there was one narrative that all could respect as reflecting their own views. Such a project is conceivable as taking place from start to finish within months or even weeks, not necessarily centuries or even decades!

So how did the conventional notion of a centuries long evolution of the Bible come about? Biblical scholars, it is no secret to anyone, not even to themselves on the whole, do have interests that go beyond pure historical research. Even Julius Wellhausen, to whom we tend to attribute the modern notion of the “Documentary Hypothesis”, has been criticized for allowing his Protestant (anti-legalistic) bias to subconsciously influence his model of the “Documentary Hypothesis”. (The criticism has been directed at the widespread idea that “legalistic” texts were a late addition to the original “spiritual” and “prophetic” narratives found in the biblical canon.)

When hypotheses become facts

So much in biblical studies that passes for facts are actually hypotheses, or “theories” of a certain kind. But they are repeated so often it is hard to notice that they have no basis in the hard evidence. Look at this passage from Wellhausen:

With regard to the Jehovistic document [i.e. one proposed “early source” in the Bible], all are happily agreed that, substantially at all events, in language, horizon, and other features, it dates from the golden age of Hebrew literature, to which the finest parts of Judges, Samuel, and Kings, and the oldest extant prophetical writings also belong, the period of the kings and prophets which preceded the dissolution of the two Israelite kingdoms by the Assyrians. About the origin of Deuteronomy there is still less dispute; in all circles where appreciation of scientific results can be looked for at all, it is recognised that it was composed in the same age as that in which it was discovered, and that it was made the rule of Josiah’s reformation, which took place about a generation before the destruction of Jerusalem by the Chaldaeans.

Wellhausen

That’s from

His assertion of relative dating is grounded entirely in scholarly consensus, not in the evidence itself. No doubt those scholars who make up the “consensus” believed they had serious evidence for dating the book of Deuteronomy to the days of King Josiah — but we will see that really they did not. They relied entirely upon “what the Bible says”.< There does happen to be archaeological evidence indicating that prior to the Hellenistic era Judeans and Samaritans had no knowledge of the biblical laws. I am referring to the finds in a Judean colony in Egypt, the Elephantine papyri. (I have not posted nearly enough about this find and what various scholars have had to say about it, but hope to make up for that lack very soon.) The Documentary Hypothesis, it has been pointed out by at least one scholar in the biblical field, might well never had got off the ground had the Elephantine remains -- indicating that Persian era Jews knew nothing of the Pentateuch -- been discovered earlier and had more time to gain traction and wider and more focused attention than it had before the time of Wellhausen's work. None of this is to say that biblical scholars are unprofessionally "biased" or "unscholarly". Of course they are scholarly and their biases are generally known and admitted and taken into account. But their work tends to be picked up by others and over time taken for granted as fact.

Independent evidence is critical

The fact remains that there is no independent evidence that the OT was composed prior to the Hellenistic era. That datum alone does not prove it was a Hellenistic product. But it does at least allow for the theoretical possibility that it was created in the Hellenistic era, and given that our earliest independent evidence for a knowledge of the Pentateuch is situated in the Hellenistic era, it is entirely reasonable to begin with that era when searching for the Pentateuch’s origins.

It also is a fact that scholarship has only cursorily (by comparison) begun noting echoes of Hellenistic literature and thought within the Pentateuch itself. Those are facts. Another fact is that Documentary Hypothesis is not without its inconsistencies and problems – another point I can post about in more depth.

Those facts do not prove that the Pentateuch was created in the Hellenistic era. But they do at least make it possible to ask the question. It makes it all the more necessary for anyone proposing an earlier date to ground their reasons in supporting independent evidence of some kind.

The meaning of “Hellenistic”

The Hellenistic provenance of the Pentateuch does not deny any use of pre-Hellenistic literature or sayings or concepts. Hellenization even means a uniting of Greek and Asian cultures, not a replacement of one by the other. So one should expect in any Hellenistic era hypothesis for the Pentateuch clear allusions to non-Greek (i.e. local Canaanite and Syrian) sources. Yes, we can identify where passages in the Pentateuch are borrowed from ancient Ugaritic (Canaanite) or Syrian sources, but employing local literature does not contradict the Hellenistic era hypothesis for the Old Testament.

The fateful year of 1992

My own understanding of the history of the scholarship in this area informs me that the floodgates to a more widespread acceptability in questioning the “deep antiquity” (pre-Persian era) origin of any of the OT books were opened by Philip R. Davies in 1992 with his publication of In Search of Ancient Israel. The irony was that Davies was only collating various criticisms and doubts about the conventional wisdom of “biblical Israel” that had been available to scholars for some decades. But by bringing these questions and doubts all together in one short publication (only about 150 pages of discussion) Davies’ work started something of an academic “kerfuffle”. [The above sentences are a paraphrase from memory of a review of Davies’ book but, apologies, I cannot recall their source.] Davies himself argued at length for a Persian era provenance of many of the OT books, but those who followed the evidence he set out could see that the way was also open for an even later period. Some scholars identified stronger links between the Pentateuch and Primary History (Genesis to 2 Kings) and Hellenistic literature than to anything earlier. One French scholar has even argued that the entire Primary History was composed by a priest in the Hasmonean era.

Davies certainly established the circularity of the arguments that much of the OT literature was composed in the times of King Josiah and the Babylonian captivity. He also brought together the archaeological evidence that indicates the very notion of “biblical Israel” (along with a kingdom of David and empire of Solomon) is as fanciful as King Arthur and Camelot.

The basics of historical inquiry

I opened this post with a reference to the methods of historians in nonbiblical fields. In short, those methods are nothing other than any journalistic or forensic or “common sense” method of trying to find out “what happened” — minus the theological provenance from which the quest is embarked upon. Start with what we know to be the most secure “facts” on the basis of collating independent evidence and working from there. Assuming that what we read in the Bible is a pathway to “the historical facts” is not safe: we need the support of independent evidence. Unfortunately, our cultural heritage has taught us too well that certain narratives about the past are “facts” (or at least based on facts) so that we find it very difficult to remove these from our minds when trying to see clearly the material evidence before our eyes.

 


2024-03-12

The Problem with an Early Date for the Hebrew Bible

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by Neil Godfrey

Imagine digging down through centuries of layers at an archaeological site and suddenly finding an old smartphone. You would know it must have been planted there by some trickster. You would know that it could not be more than a few years old despite uncovering it in a layer supposedly centuries old.

I believe it can be shown that a similar problem faces us when we try to place the earliest writings of the Bible back into the times of King David and Solomon. Further, if we try to check how old the Biblical works are and use in principle the same type of reasoning as we intuitively use for dating the approximate era of the smartphone, we default to the Hellenistic period. That is an extreme comparison but in principle it is a valid one. I will try to demonstrate its validity by quoting (in translation) the words of the scholar who was the first to assign the earliest works of the Bible to the time of King Solomon.

Gerhard von Rad

I am referring to Gerhard von Rad. (I introduced von Rad in a post outlining the rise of the Documentary Hypothesis.) The chapter of his that I am using is Collected studies on the Old Testament (= Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament), specifically his 1944 chapter, The Beginning of Historiography in Ancient Israel (= Der Anfang der Geschichtsschreibung im alten Israel pp 148-188)

Von Rad begins:

For the modern peoples of the West, historiography is one of the most natural intellectual activities. It seems to us to be absolutely essential for a more intensive understanding of existence. In this respect, the peoples of the Western culture are students and heirs of both Greek and biblical historiography.

Does that opening not set off alarm bells? I am writing in the context of earlier posts addressing works of Niels Peter Lemche, Philippe Wajdenbaum, Russell Gmirkin and others who argue for dating the origins of the Hebrew Bible in the Hellenistic era. Von Rad begins by pointing out that the only comparable historical writing to the Bible is found among the Greeks.

It is easy to see that most ancient peoples did not achieve this form of a more intensive understanding of existence. . . . [T]hey didn’t produce any historiography.

Not the Egyptians?

The ancient Egyptians were characterized by a striking inability to think historically in the sense described above. Eminently conservative, eminently fond of writing, they always focused their reflections on the past in an antiquarian way on details and were unable to grasp larger contexts.

Nor the Mesopotamians?

But the cultures of Mesopotamia, no matter how eventful the history in this area was, did not create a representation of history that went significantly beyond individual documents of the type mentioned above. At best, one can speak of an attempt to grasp the course of historical events in a uniform manner using list science. But their strength failed when faced with the task of presenting and interpreting national history in a unified manner.

But what of the Hellenistic era Greeks?

It was only Berossus who attempted to write their history, long after the great empires had left the stage of history. But this only happened under Greek influence. . . . There are only two peoples who really made history in ancient times: the Greeks and, long before them, the Israelites.

Some of us will be reminded of a work that argued for the Hebrew Bible using the Hellenistic era work of Berossus as one of its sources:

Interestingly, Gerhard von Rad noted that we do not have earlier primitive precursors to the historical writing we read in the Old Testament. The OT comes to us without known Hebrew forebears. It appears in a mature form, as if (my addition here) its forebears lay outside Palestine.

The “emergence” of ancient Israelite historiography cannot be described. It is there at a certain point in time, and it stands there before us in its most perfect form.

How to explain this sudden emergence of the historical writings — Genesis through to 1-2 Kings — of the Hebrew Bible? Von Rad posits three causes:

1. Israelites applied origin stories (etiologies) not only to local phenomena (e.g. various ethnic groups, an altar of stones, a deserted village) but to more universalistic themes: the place of women, why suffering, and so forth. This attention to “the basic facts of human existence” is thought to have given Israelites an edge in seeing the bigger picture of past events.

2. Israelites had an “overarching give of narrative exposition”. They could write simply yet powerfully.

3. Israelites, uniquely, had a monotheistic belief in a certain kind of God, a God who controlled all major human events. It wasn’t left up to demons or lesser sprites to direct human affairs but Yahweh himself.

You will probably be thinking that the above three explanations are really just other ways of describing what is begging for an explanation: why is it that historical writing as we see it in the Bible originated with Israelites, supposedly before the rise of Greek historical writing? The “explanations” also seem to suggest that the “Israelites” had qualities that set them apart from the rest of common humanity in their time.

My personal copy – a favourite

For von Rad, it was particularly the religious beliefs of the Israelites that was the key factor. Their god was imagined to have a position over humanity that no other god in the minds of other peoples had — with the exception of the later Greeks.

The Israelites came to thinking about history and then to writing history from their belief in the power of God to make history. For them, “history is an event of God. God sets the movement in motion with his promise. He sets the target according to his will and he watches over her… All history comes from God and occurs for God” [quoting Regenbogen, Thukydides als politischer Denker]. We can already see here: it is a very unique historical thinking that we are now approaching, because the focus of events is not at all on the earthly stage; neither nations, nor kings, nor glorious heroes are the actual actors; and therefore, in the ultimate sense, they are not the subject of the representation. And yet all the immanent events are followed with breathless interest and the highest inner involvement, precisely because it is the field of activity of divine action. Herodotus also knows “metaphysical powers that have a moving effect on the world of earthly events through a diverse apparatus of signs, prophecies and dreams” [quoting Regenbogen]. . . . 

For Herodotus it was the god Apollo who was overseeing and guiding the course of events in the struggle between the Greeks and Persians. Apollo’s oracle at Delphi functioned in a similar way to Yahweh’s Jerusalem. I once posted a brief outline of what other scholars have observed are overlaps between Herodotus’s Histories and the Bible’s “Primary History”: Correlations between the “Histories” of Herodotus and the Bible’s History of Israel.

Von Rad is always quick to try to point out where the Greek histories are unlike those in the Bible. I could discuss what he posits as significant differences but I want to focus here on the similarities and may do so in the near future. For example, he observes that the role of the divinity in guiding history is not as explicitly pervasive in Herodotus as it is in the Bible. I think such a difference is one of degree, not of kind.

Von Rad zeroes in on the biblical account of the rise of David to kingship and the rule of King Solomon as if that narrative is a historical record. He cannot conceive of it as fiction. It was written by a man full of godly character who is obviously documenting true events, so von Rad suggests:

We do not know the historian who described these events to us. He must have been a man who had precise knowledge of the circumstances and events at court. His descriptions breathe a closeness to life that makes any doubts about the reliability of his portrayal disappear. This author is characterized by a penetrating knowledge of human nature; His attitude towards David himself is particularly impressive. The figure of the king is everywhere drawn with warm sympathy and great reverence. However, the author has retained his freedom of judgment in the most unbiased manner. He never covered up the king’s guilt and failure. But even when he reports dark and ugly things with his “heroic truthfulness” that is unique in the Orient, he does not give in to the lasciviousness of gossip, but always remains chaste and noble. This leads us to the most important question, namely that of the theological and ideological content of his historiography.

The biblical description of the kingdom of David and Solomon is assumed to be historically valid: recall von Rad informing us of the ability of the biblical historian to write simply yet powerfully!

Von Rad explains that this history of David is told as a “secular” narrative with only three passages alerting us to God’s role behind the scenes. (He seems to be coming close to contradicting his earlier point that it was the theological emphasis that distinguished the Biblical historiography from that of the “more secular” Herodotus.)

[W]e have highlighted [in the account of David] the peculiarly secular way of presenting this historiography, for example in comparison to the naive belief in miracles in the heroic legend. This view of history and God’s actions in history must have been nothing short of revolutionary at the time.

King Solomon’s Court — Edward Poynter, 1890

And so we return to discovering the archaeologist unearthing a smartphone in a layer centuries old.

But to make this view of when the biblical history was written sound more plausible von Rad smooth out some of the edges of the idea of it being totally “revolutionary at the time”:

No matter how much one praises the originality and theological genius of our author, such a show also had to have its intellectual-historical prerequisites for the time, because in every historiography an “overall cultural consciousness” is presupposed.

Creativity does not arise without debt to preconditions of some kind.

So how to explain the appearance of this smartphone? For von Rad, it is not difficult:

It is really not difficult to understand this historiography in the context of the Solomonic era, within which it undoubtedly emerged. It was only in [this] epoch . . . that the new things that had already begun under David had a cultural impact on all sides. . . . Life began on a much broader cultural basis than was possible a generation ago. We hear from Solomon that he established large-scale trade relations with distant lands. Riches came into the land; luxury and well-being moved into the court and major building activity began. This flourishing economic life was naturally followed by an intensive intellectual exchange. At no time in the entire history of this people were the regulations against the importation of spiritual religious goods so liberally applied as in this era. The court was a foster home of international wisdom, like the Egyptian courts of old. The presence of so many foreigners gave rise to obligations which were readily fulfilled; places of worship were built for non-Israelite deities. In a word, the era of Solomon was an era of enlightenment, of the abrupt demolition of the old patriarchal order of life. 

That’s interesting in a way, but it prompts me to ask what foreign influences, what other peoples of the day, contributed to this secular and broad new historiography? Herodotus had not been born yet. What were the specific types of ideas that other peoples of Solomon’s day contributed to Solomon’s court that led to such “intellectual enlightenment”?

The archaic institution of holy war, the simple form of worship at shrines with its cult legends were undermined by a flood of secular thinking. The cult legends broke away from their traditional attachment points and became literature. Don’t we also feel this cool touch of a modern, free and entirely non-cultic spirituality in our historical work at every turn

What was it, one has to ask, about other cultures that enabled the birth of a “modern, free spirituality” in the days of Solomon? I doubt anyone can point to any work of literature, to any religious concept, among Israel’s neighbours that fostered such a modern concept.

I suggest that the simpler and more obvious answer should be found in the influence of Greek culture (both literature and ideas) that swept over the Levant and beyond after the conquests of Alexander the Great.


There is an English language version of Gerhard von Rad’s essay in From Genesis to Chronicles : explorations in Old Testament theology. See pages 125ff



2024-03-10

Four Ways Canaan Fell to Biblical Israel

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by Neil Godfrey

Canaanite (Wikimedia Commons)

In the first five books of the Bible there are four different ways God promises to give the land of Canaan to the Israelites. [I continue to write from the perspective argued by many scholars that the Bible’s narratives had multiple authors and that their respective stories did not always agree. In this post I make mention of conventional sources behind the biblical books (J, E, D…) but I do so mainly for convenience. I am aware that some scholarship has questioned the existence of these sources but my point here is that there are evidently different points of view being expressed in the Bible, however we might conceptualize them.]

Inheriting the land through natural population growth

In Genesis God promises Abraham that his descendants through Isaac will inherit the land and be a blessing to all nations roundabout. Genesis 12:2-3

I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you,and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.

In the previous post we saw that ….

The patriarchs served for the writers and editors of Genesis as models of tolerance and coexistence with at least some segments of the native population. (Frankel, p. 325)

For the Genesis authors and editors,

The promise of the land was thought of in terms of hegemony over peoples who would derive blessing from Israel’s dominance, not in terms of eradicating all that is foreign. Only the “enemies” who cursed the descendants of Abraham would be cursed. (ibid.)

When Jacob was passing on future blessings to his sons he condemned the violence of Simeon and Levi in destroying the Canaanite city of Shechem. Genesis 49:5-7

Simeon and Levi are brothers —their swords are weapons of violence. Let me not enter their council, let me not join their assembly, for they have killed men in their anger and hamstrung oxen as they pleased. Cursed be their anger, so fierce, and their fury, so cruel! I will scatter them in Jacob and disperse them in Israel.

While Judah is honoured for taking tribute from his enemies (Gen 49:8-10) and the descendants generally will “possess the gate of their enemies” (Gen 22:17),

There is no basis . . . for understanding these blessings as indicating that all the inhabitants of the land are destined for expulsion or destruction, as implied both in Deuteronomy’s re-use of the patriarchal promise motif and in the pentateuchal conquest laws. Rather, the military aspect is included as an additional element in the achievement of dominion in the land. The blessing of proliferation goes hand in hand with overall dominion and control in the land, not with destruction of all that is “other.” The blessing to mankind of great proliferation is analogously combined with dominion over creation, not with its destruction (Gen 1:28; 9:1–7 116 ). The very fact that the seed of Abraham will possess the gate of their enemies rather than the inhabitants of the land indicates that not all the inhabitants of the land will be “possessed” as enemies. Some inhabitants, rather, will be taken on as allies, or covenant partners in one sense or another . . . . (Frankel, 312)

I’m not saying that the Canaanites and Israelites will be equal partners in this scenario. It is an “idealistic” scenario for the twelve tribes insofar as the Canaanites in the land will honour and submit to them while receiving the blessings God promised through his people. So theoretically everybody knows their place in relation to one another and all are being blessed accordingly.

Clearly, the text speaks of supremacy in the land and not total displacement of all inhabitants. Here too, those who bless Jacob and accept his dominance will be blessed. (Frankel, 313)

Genesis as an outlier

Genesis is not like the other books in the Pentateuch, however. Unlike those other books (Exodus to Deuteronomy) Genesis is about “the establishment of the permanent order of the cosmos and the relationships among [peoples]”. Unlike in other books, God in Genesis appears as a man, face to face, walking with humans, talking with them mostly in the broad daylight, without need of an intermediary prophet. The customs we encounter in the narratives of Genesis are unique: e.g. Genesis is not at all embarrassed in the way it depicts Rachel stealing Laban’s idols or in Joseph and Jacob being embalmed as per the Egyptian Osiris cult.

Nor does Genesis allude in any way to Israel’s unique religious status. Abraham is a God-fearing, just man; but neither in the promises made to him nor in those made to his descendants is the distinction of possessing YHWH’s Torah, or the fact that Ishmael and Esau will be idolaters mentioned. The religious rift that separates Israel from the nations, so prominent in the rest of the books of the Torah, is never hinted at in Genesis. Here, Israel’s distinction is purely one of lineage; it is “lord over its brethren” (27:29). True, there is a covenant between God and Israel’s ancestors; but its promises are purely ethnic: numerous progeny, territorial possessions, and kingship. (Kaufmann, 207)

The story we read in Exodus has only the slimmest connections with the central narratives about the patriarchs in Genesis.

[T]here is no reference at all to the constantly repeated promise of increase addressed to the fathers, of which the author is obviously not aware. The situation is even more striking with the first mention of the land into which it has been proclaimed, the Israelites are to journey after they have been rescued from slavery in Egypt. The text reads: ‘I will lead you into a good, broad land, into a land that flows with milk and honey, the home of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites’ (3.8). The land is introduced here as an unknown land, and more, as a land that is the home of foreign nations; there is not a word which mentions that the patriarchs have already lived a long time in this land and that God has promised it to them and their descendants as a permanent possession. Following the terminology of the promise of the land in Genesis, those addressed here would be the ‘seed’ for whom the promise holds good. But they are not spoken to as such. (Rendtorff, 84f)

One may surely conclude that the authors behind this work were unaware of what others were writing/would write about Moses and Mount Sinai and Joshua’s conquests. (The passage in Genesis 15:13-16 prophesying of the Exodus reads most oddly out of place: it does not relate to the question Abraham has asked and that God is setting up to respond to. Many scholars see this passage as a late addition. Rendtorff’s observation (85): “This text stands in splendid isolation within the patriarchal story“.)

God will drive them out before/as the Israelites arrive

Exodus 34:11

Then the Lord said: . . . I am about to drive out before you the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.

Presumably the God imagines the Israelites crossing into the land before the native inhabitants have all fled so he goes on to warn his people not to make any covenants with them and to destroy all their cult statues. (This passage is said by many scholars to belong to the “J source” of the Pentateuch.)

Another passage, one scholars attribute to the “E source” within the Pentateuch:

Exodus 23:27-30

I will send my terror ahead of you and throw into confusion every nation you encounter. I will make all your enemies turn their backs and run. I will send the hornet ahead of you to drive the Hivites, Canaanites and Hittites out of your way. But I will not drive them out in a single year, because the land would become desolate and the wild animals too numerous for you. Little by little I will drive them out before you, until you have increased enough to take possession of the land.

So here it is God who removes the Canaanites:

The pre-Deuteronomic tradition speaks almost exclusively of the expectation that the displacement of the Canaanites would be accomplished by God. . . . The expulsion, J believed, was to have been carried out by Yhwh. . . . J imagined the promise to have been one of miraculous expulsion of the Canaanites; Israel’s only task was not to get in the way. . . .

. . . Yet in E, as in J, the actual expulsion of the existing population was to be carried out by God. In contrast to J, however, E speaks of a prediction that it would be done in stages. (Schwartz, 157)

God commands the Israelites to slaughter them all

Now we come to a strikingly different source, one that scholars call “D”. Here we find no compassion, no mercy, towards the Canaanites. The descendants of the patriarchs are expected to bloody their own hands

Deuteronomy 7:16

You must destroy all the peoples the Lord your God gives over to you. Do not look on them with pity and do not serve their gods, for that will be a snare to you.

Deuteronomy 20:16-17

However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them — the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites — as the Lord your God has commanded you.

The Land itself will “vomit” them out

Leviticus 18:25-28

Even the land was defiled; so I punished it for its sin, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. But you must keep my decrees and my laws. The native-born and the foreigners residing among you must not do any of these detestable things, for all these things were done by the people who lived in the land before you, and the land became defiled. And if you defile the land, it will vomit you out as it vomited out the nations that were before you.

Leviticus 20:22-24

Keep all my decrees and laws and follow them, so that the land where I am bringing you to live may not vomit you out. You must not live according to the customs of the nations I am going to drive out before you. Because they did all these things, I abhorred them. But I said to you, You will possess their land; I will give it to you as an inheritance, a land flowing with milk and honey.

Here the land God is handing over to the Israelites is “a land flowing with milk and honey”. But if the people sin that land will “vomit them out”.

The land of Canaan, in H’s view [H is another source discerned by scholars, alongside J, E, D above], is a fertile and bountiful land unless it is contaminated by human transgression. When that occurs, its skies withhold their rainfall, desert winds wither its grain, armies of locusts descend upon it, its trees and fields fail to yield their produce, pestilence breaks out, and wild beasts roam the countryside—and its inhabitants, impoverished and plagued by hunger and thirst, must leave in search of greener pastures. (Schwartz, 166)

As Baruch Schwatz views these two passages in Leviticus, the author is imagining that the Canaanites will already have been driven out of the land because of their sins, and that the land will be punished with drought and crop failure by the time the Israelites arrive. The Israelites will therefore enter a land of milk and honey. But they must beware lest they also commit the same sins as the former inhabitants and the abundant land turns once again to desolation and in turn drives them out.

Conclusion

There are many voices in the Bible. The traditional Documentary Hypothesis has worked with the view that these different voices emerged over many generations and at some stage a group of editors sought to combine them in a single narrative or collection of books with an overall narrative. Once that combined work was finished, later editors with new ideas undertook to revise that narrative even more with further additions. Hence we have a work riddled with inconsistencies, contradictions, unfinished or obscure details, and so forth.

More recently some scholars have questioned aspects of the above model. Would not later editors with new ideas seek to eliminate accounts that they strongly disagreed with and produce a more coherent work? After all, that’s what the authors of 1-2 Chronicles did when they rewrote the history of the kings of Israel and Judah. Some scholars have suggested that a better explanation is that editors were attempting to combine into a single narrative multiple viewpoints of different interest groups. The technical terms are that a “synchronic” model of composition (stitching together multiple narratives from different ideological quarters, Levitical and Aaronide, Jerusalem and Samaria, etc) as opposed to the conventional “diachronic” (or multi-generational) model.

Baruch Schwartz has tackled this question in detail and in one of his areas of inquiry, the story of Joseph (Genesis 37) as a linking narrative designed to join the book of Genesis with that of Exodus, concludes in relation to that particular story (my bolded highlighting):

Our analysis demonstrates, first and foremost, that the process of composition of Gen 37 was essentially a canonical one, aimed at collecting, collating and preserving literary works already in existence. The outcome of the compilation process was determined — to the letter — by the pre-existing sources themselves. These were received by the compiler in the form of fully shaped, continuous and internally consistent written narratives, and the compiler viewed them as possessing a measure of sanctity that rendered it desirable, indeed obligatory, to refrain as much as possible from altering, detracting from or adding to them.

Genesis 37 in its canonical form shows no signs of being the result of creative narrative art, nor does it appear to be the work of ideologically or theologically motivated redactors who, having selected freely those sources and traditions that were best suited to their purposes, molded them into a new whole precisely as they wished. The compiler of Gen 37 had no say in determining either its content or its form; he was responsible neither for its themes and motifs nor for its religious teachings; he was not even at liberty to decide what to include and what to exclude. All of these aspects of literary license and creativity belong to the earlier stages in the formation of the Torah. . . .

The analysis of Gen 37 reveals further that no single source served as the underlying text to which the compiler added what he deemed appropriate from the other documents. The compiler did not use E as his Vorlage, adding to it whatever portions of J and P he felt that he needed, nor did he use J as his primary text, adding to it whatever he chose from E and P. He did not stratify, superimposing portions of a later document upon an earlier one or portions of an earlier one upon a later one. The unmistakable impression one receives is that the compiler attached equal weight to the two narratives — as well as to the opening segment from P, which he placed precisely where he was obligated to place it — and so he combined them by alternating between them, adhering meticulously to the principles of composition we have identified: maximal preservation of each source, strict chronological progression, avoidance of addition and deletion and continuing the thread of each narrative as long as possible, moving to the other thread at exactly the point when it becomes necessary to do so, not a single word earlier or later.

Finally and most crucially, our analysis reveals that the result arrived at by the compiler, the composite chapter in its canonical form, is, given the method that he evidently employed, the only possible result that could have been obtained. The final form of the chapter is not a function of the compiler’s ideological agenda, theological tendencies, aesthetic tastes, or artistic abilities. His role was confined entirely to the painstaking arrangement of the existing texts in combined form. The case of Gen 37 is in no way atypical; the composite narratives throughout the remainder of the Pentateuch all yield similar results.

Russell Gmirkin’s studies have placed both the disparate sources and the final compiler of those sources into the result we see today in the Hellenistic time-setting (see Plato and the Hebrew Bible and Plato and the Biblical Creation Accounts). Baruch Schwartz, from my understanding of his works, would place those sources much earlier. I may favour the Gmirkin’s Hellenistic provenance, but the account of how we arrive at such a final text (bound by a single narrative yet riddled with inconsistencies) as outlined above by Schwartz makes a lot of sense to me.


Frankel, David. The Land of Canaan and the Destiny of Israel: Theologies of Territory in the Hebrew Bible. Winona Lake, Ind: Eisenbrauns, 2011.

Kaufmann, Yeḥezkel. The Religion of Israel: From Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile. Translated and abridged by Moshe Greenberg. New York: Schocken Books, 1972.

Rendtorff, Rolf. The Problem of the Process of Transmission in the Pentateuch.  London; Gordonsville: Sheffield Academic Press, 2009.

Schwartz, Baruch J. “Reexamining the Fate of the ‘Canaanites’ in the Torah Traditions.” In Sefer Moshe: The Moshe Weinfeld Jubilee Volume : Studies in the Bible and the Ancient Near East, Qumran, and Post-Biblical Judaism, edited by Chaim Cohen, Avi Hurvitz, and Shalom M. Paul, 151–70. Winona Lake, Ind: Eisenbrauns, 2004. https://www.academia.edu/39296080/Reexamining_the_Fate_of_the_Canaanites_in_the_Torah_Traditionshttps://www.academia.edu/39296080/Reexamining_the_Fate_of_the_Canaanites_in_the_Torah_Traditions


 


2024-03-09

How Patriarchs of the Jews Lived in Peace with Canaanites

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by Neil Godfrey

We know all about the commands in Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy ordering Israel to wipe out, annihilate, the Canaanites. The command was to tear down their altars, destroy their cities and avoid forming any alliances with them, certainly not to intermarry with them. The Book of Genesis is evidence that some of the authors of the biblical books had a very different view of how their neighbours should be treated. [I am writing from the perspective argued by many scholars that the Bible’s narratives had multiple authors and that their respective stories did not always agree.] In my previous post we saw that founding heroes were understood as models for how their reputed descendants ought to behave towards others. With that in mind, recall the following details from your Sunday School days….

Abraham

— made an alliance with Canaanites and joined with them to defeat foreign invaders: Gen 14:13, 24

— restored both the material losses and the political independence of the Canaanite cities: Gen. 14:16-24

— pleaded with God to save the Canaanite city of Sodom from destruction: Gen 18:23-33

— paid tithes to the priest of the god El Elyon in the Canaanite city of Salem: Gen 14:18-20

Abraham purchases field of Ephron the Hittite, Attrib Pierter Coeck van Aelst – Royal Collection Trust

— made a covenant with Philistines, promising peaceful coexistence between the Philistines and Abraham’s descendants: Gen 21:27, 31-34

— married a presumably local (Canaanite) woman and took local concubines: Gen 25:1, 6

— built new altars but never came into conflict with the religious practices of the Canaanites: Gen 12:6-8; 13:18

— publicly purchased land from the Hittites (who respected him as a “mighty prince”) for his and his wife’s burial: Gen 23:5-20; 25:7-10

The fact that the author depicts Abraham as purchasing the burial plot in public view of the Hittites in order to guarantee his claim to it against future Hittite claims (or Israelite claims that the site is foreign?) probably shows that, in contrast to the conquest laws, he considers the continuous presence of the Hittites in the land to be both obvious and normative. (Frankel, p. 286)

Isaac

— made a covenant with the Philistine Abimelech in the Canaanite city of Gerar: Gen 26:28-31

— repeatedly retreated when local Canaanite shepherds stole his well until there was enough room for everyone: Gen 26:19-22

Jacob

— reacted with horror and shame at the cruelty and injustice of his sons’ destruction of Shechem whose people had made generous offers to his family: Gen 34

Many scholars have demonstrated that the story of Dinah has several inner tensions. On the one hand, one finds several strong expressions of sympathy for Jacob’s sons and justification for the sack of Shechem. . . . On the other hand, the narrative seems to go out of its way to depict the people of Shechem as being wronged innocents. . . . All of these tensions have led several scholars to hypothesize that an original story depicting the sack of Shechem in negative terms was supplemented at a later date with the intention of justifying the harsh massacre. (Frankel, pp 294f)

One wonders if this narrative was composed as a rebuke to those who wished for the destruction of Canaanite cities.

Judah

— took a Canaanite woman and chose Canaanites to be his sons’ wives: Gen 38


Frankel, David. The Land of Canaan and the Destiny of Israel: Theologies of Territory in the Hebrew Bible. Winona Lake, Ind: Eisenbrauns, 2011.



2024-03-07

The Age of Inventions of Mythical Histories — Greek and Biblical

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by Neil Godfrey

Some readers will be aware that I am sympathetic to the view that the books of the Old Testament were products of the Hellenistic era. I believe that sound historical methods involving critical analysis of assertions against evidence make such a late dating highly plausible. But it is also vital to be as fully informed as possible about alternative views that would date the origins of the Hebrew Bible to the Persian era or earlier. This requires looking at linguistic and textual arguments as well as archaeological studies. In coming posts I would like to address some of the readings in these areas that I have been undertaking as I have tried to catch up with old and recent publications. My aim will be to present various arguments in ways that are easily digestible for those of us with little time to study academic tomes and specialist papers.

Meanwhile, it will be of interest to some to know a little more about what the Hellenistic world was like for assessing the plausibility of works like Genesis and Exodus emerging from there.

Can we really imagine whole new histories and family genealogies being invented for particular groups of people?

Prof. Dr. Tanja Susanne Scheer, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Let’s look at how the Greek world documented and even created new histories of origins during the Hellenistic era, that is after the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 330s-320s. This is nothing more than an introduction. I quote passages from Tanja S. Scheer’s contribution to A Companion to the Hellenistic World, “The Past in a Hellenistic Present: Myth and Local Tradition”. The first three subheadings are identical to those Scheer used. All bolded highlighting is my own.

Myth as History According to the Greeks

The relationship of Hellenistic Greeks to their past is shaped by much older traditions. In particular two important points characterize the relationship to the past: its genealogical structuring and its re-shaping by epic poetry. . . . Self definition as well as assessment by others are marked by genealogical connections. The past of his own family, of his home city, of his tribe defines the identity and status of the individual in the present . . . . [W]hole cities also prided themselves on their ancestors and founders. (216)

You are probably already reminded of the many genealogies and narratives to justify who’s who and where in the Bible, beginning with Genesis. Genealogies could be used to assert territorial claims but also to explain how related peoples were expected to support one another or know their respective status.

Were these genealogies historically true?

This pronounced Greek interest in ancestry and kinship was, however, not properly historical. The past was only of importance when it was marked by famous personalities or by deeds of mythical heroes. A family tree that ended with an anonymous smallholder was of little use. Even as proof of the great age of a family it could not offer much help: for great age only really began when the genealogy could be traced back to heroic times and thereby into the society of heroes or even gods . . .

Fact checking was not part of the agenda:

People were at a loss when confronted with written or archaeological discoveries from their own past, which chance had brought to light. The Greeks reconstructed the past not so much through concrete evidence from early times but rather with the help of their traditional stories, of myth. . . . Questions about the past led to heroic, not historically correct, answers . . . Already long before Hellenistic times, however, Greek logographers and historians had made the fictional events of epic the focal point of their history and accepted them as containing at least a core of truth. (217)

Ancestries of any worth always went back to the gods:

The habit of evaluating the qualities of individuals and even of cities on the basis of their ancestry understandably encouraged the desire to number the gods themselves — or at least the heroes of epic — among one’s own ancestors. (218)

Past and Present in the Hellenistic Period

There was, in addition, a moral or ethical aspect. The myths surrounding great ancestors were treated as exemplars of how their descendants were expected to behave. If Heracles had conquered Troy or Asian peoples then his descendants were expected to do the same; if Heracles had shown kindness to a city, his descendants were obligated to do likewise.

[T]he history of the family imposed an obligation. Thus the political writer Isokrates could present Herakles as a model for his descendant Philip . . . . The deeds of Herakles in the first conquest of Troy were used to legitimate, and also to oblige, Philip to carry out successful military action in the present — that is the campaign against the Persians . . . . (218)

. . . in the run up to the Persian Wars Persian envoys are supposed to have come to Argos in an attempt to win the Argives over to their side — by appealing to their mutual mythical ancestor Perseus . . . . (219)

(Some scholars have suspected the biblical stories of David’s conquests were created to justify Hasmonean conquests of their neighbours.)

The Greeks Abroad

As the Macedonians and Greeks advanced into new lands of old cultures they did not boast of “being the first” to discover these places; on the contrary,

. . . the stress was placed over and over again on familiar elements in these foreign lands: the geographical opening up of the world took place in the footsteps of great forerunners, of gods and heroes from the mythical past.

Throughout his campaign Alexander recognized Greek gods and heroes in foreign lands; he called on them pointedly and paid honour to them. . . .

In the case of Alexander’s campaigns this emphasis on the mythical past of the Macedonians and Greeks tended to integrate rather than exclude. The aim was by no means a one-sided ennobling of the Macedonians at the expense of the indigenous peoples whom they encountered. Family relationships based on myth did not have the function of an exclusive patent of nobility. Alexander and his generals endeavoured on the contrary to establish a connection between Greeks and Persians. (219)

Some will recall Russell Gmirkin’s discussion of the biblical patriarchs being at ease with local gods in Canaan, some of whom came to be identified with the Israelite deity.

Scheer notes that there was a practical power-play at work by this kind of integration of Greek and local gods:

This integrating use of the mythical past was not simply an unselfish mark of respect or recognition for non-Greek civilizations on the part of the Greeks. At stake surely was the need to prevent the Greek claim to power from appearing to the conquered as foreign rule. (219)

Note, further, that there are two different ways of treating non-Israelite locals (or Canaanites) in the Bible. Many of us know about the commands in Exodus and elsewhere to slaughter them all, or if that cannot be done then to have nothing whatever to do with them. But other narratives demonstrate the virtue of “Israel” being a blessing to foreigners, of peacefully coexisting with their neighbours. (I hope to elaborate on this point in a future post, along with the reasons for thinking that these two viewpoints were even contemporaneous.)

You will recall the stories in Genesis linking patriarchal figures to particular geographical areas where they would erect an altar or bury a family member. We might compare:

At least as important, however, was the opportunity for the Greeks to take mental possession of these new lands. In this aim the structure of the traditional stories of the Greeks was of considerable assistance. A common method of intellectual subjugation of unfamiliar lands consisted in making them accessible through eponymous heroes: every river, every tree, every region, according to the Greek view, was inhabited by local supernatural powers. Once the areas which they reached were mythically personalized, then the local family trees could easily be connected to well-known Greek heroes. . . . The foreign land was not really unknown: their own ancestors had after all once passed through it victoriously. . . . The cultivation of a mythical past was valuable for the Hellenistic present; even in the most far-flung foreign land traces of old familiar patterns could be discovered. Thus, the new world could be integrated into the old as something already familiar. (219f)

Creating Mythical Histories Continue reading “The Age of Inventions of Mythical Histories — Greek and Biblical”


2023-11-01

Archaeological Support for Gmirkin’s Thesis on Plato and the Hebrew Bible

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by Neil Godfrey

Neils Peter Lemche (link is to my posts referencing NPL) has reviewed archaeologist Yonatan Adler’s The Origins of Judaism (link is to my post on Adler’s book) and related its evidence and argument to the work of Russell Gmirkin’s Plato and the Hebrew Bible. — on which I have posted in depth here.

Lemche’s review is available on the website of the Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament but Yonatan Adler has made it available to all through his academia.edu page.

The key takeaways in the review, I think, are:

This book is not written by a traditional biblical scholar but by an archaeologist having his background not in biblical studies but in Judaistic studies. . . .  His task is accordingly not to trace the development of the Torah as if it is something given from Israel’s very beginnings but to find out when its commandments were understood to be normative.

And the “trick” is to follow the normative methods of historical research as it is practised (as far as I am aware) in most fields outside biblical studies:

. . . Adler’s trick: Not to assume in advance what the Bible tells us about the institutions of ancient Israel but to trace the time when the commandments behind these institutions are operative.

And further — what I have found to be so outrageously controversial among so many with an interest in “biblical studies”:

Adler’s methodology is impeccable and indeed factual. His basis assumption is like Occam’s razor: If there is no trace of something, there is no reason to assume that this something existed.

And the point that I have posted about so often here:

The conclusion is that when we move backwards beyond the Hasmonean Period we have no evidence of the [biblical] commandment being followed.

Conclusion:

There is simply no evidence in the written or in the archaeological material that the rules of the Torah were ever followed before in the 2nd century BCE at the earliest.

I’m glad he introduced the Mesopotamian law codes that too many have casually assumed lie behind the biblical laws:He notes correctly that the very concept of a written law was unknown in the ancient Near East — the famous Babylonian law codices were scholarly or academic literature as generally accepted today. Never do we find a reference to the Codex Hammurabi in the thousands and thousands of documents of court decisions which have survived.

And then we move close to where Russell Gmirkin’s research has taken us:

However, the idea of the Torah as a written law to be followed by any person accepting its jurisdiction, is something different, and Adler looks to Greece for seeing this function of the law as a written document.

and it follows that Adler’s research . . . .

only supports the assumption that the Hebrew Bible originated within a context which was definitely impressed by Greek ideas.

Sadly Niels Peter Lemche finds it advisable to warn Yonatan Adler of a hostile reaction that many of us who have attempted to discuss these issues dispassionately with so many biblical scholars have come to expect:

But he should be prepared for what may be sent in his way in so far as his study is of the utmost importance for the present reorientation of the study of the origins of the Bible.

 


2023-10-14

How a Biblical Tale Could have Emerged from a Greek Myth

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by Neil Godfrey

Derek Lambert of the MythVision program dedicated a program to something he found on “yours truly” blog outlining aspects of Philippe Wajdenbaum’s case for linking Abraham’s (near) sacrifice of Isaac with the Greek myth of Phrixus:

Standard definitions

Myths are prose narratives which, in the society in which they are told, are considered to be truthful accounts of what happened in the remote past. They are accepted on faith; they are taught to be believed; and they can be cited as authority in answer to ignorance, doubt, or disbelief. Myths are the embodiment of dogma; they are usually sacred; and they are often associated with theology and ritual. Their main characters are not usually human beings, but they often have human attributes; they are animals, deities, or culture heroes, whose actions are set in an earlier world, when the earth was different from what it is today, or in another world such as the sky or underworld. . . .

Legends are prose narratives which, like myths, are regarded as true by the narrator and his audience, but they are set in a period considered less remote, when the world was much as it is today. Legends are more often secular than sacred, and their principal characters are human. They tell of migrations, wars and victories, deeds of past heroes, chiefs, and kings, and succession in ruling dynasties. In this they are often the counterpart in verbal tradition of written history . . .

Folktales are prose narratives which are regarded as fiction. They are not considered as dogma or history, they may or may not have happened, and they are not to be taken seriously. . . .

Bascom, William. “The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives.” The Journal of American Folklore 78, no. 307 (January 1965): 3. https://doi.org/10.2307/538099. p.4

At the time I wrote those blog posts I was struggling to understand how to apply a Lévi-Straussian structural analysis to the myths related to Phrixus as well as to the Genesis narrative of Abraham and Isaac, and I still am. I feel somewhat vindicated in my failure, though, by an Alan Dundes article —

  • Dundes, Alan. “Binary Opposition in Myth: The Propp/Lévi-Strauss Debate in Retrospect.” Western Folklore 56, no. 1 (1997): 39–50. https://doi.org/10.2307/1500385.

— which notes that Lévi-Strauss fails to acknowledge the “standard genre definitions of myth, folktale and legend”. This failure may be more than a technical one since Lévi-Strauss insists that all variants or adaptations of a myth are essentially the “same myth” — not “legend” or “folklore”, given that myths (in his understanding) are told in a different linguistic/psychological registers from other kinds of narratives. So, if we follow Claude Lévi-Strauss’s reasoning, how could a biblical drama with more in common with a folktale or a legend be an adaptation of a myth?

Further, Levi-Strauss explained variants of myths among different tribes in South America as the product of different social customs and structures. One example:

Finally, we can note one striking inversion: in [Myth 7], the eggs were changed into stones; in [Myth 12], a stone is changed into an egg. The structure of the Sherente myth (M12), therefore, contrasts with that of the other versions — a fact that is perhaps to be explained in part by the social structure of the Sherente which, as we have seen, differs sharply from that of the other Ge tribes. (The Raw and the Cooked, p. 77)

In 2011 I failed to identify that kind of explanation for the differences between the Greek myth of Phrixus and the Genesis “Akedah” (the binding of Isaac). Since then, I have read Russell Gmirkin’s studies of the possible influence of Plato’s thought in his Laws on the Pentateuch. Wajdenbaum had addressed this notion earlier but Gmirkin’s work seemed (to me, at least) to strengthen that likelihood. I have now given up attempting a Lévi-Straussian explanation for the biblical account and have fallen back on a “Platonic” adaptation of the Phrixus myth.

If Lévi-Straussian approaches cannot explain how this biblical episode emerged out of a Greek myth, can an interest in applying Plato’s ideals succeed?

In the following I use the word “myth” in Plato’s simpler sense of a mere fabrication.

–o0o–

If the idea that Plato’s thoughts underlie much of the Pentateuch seems preposterous to you, I invite you to have a look through the earlier discussions relating to this question:

In nuce, the starting point for this post is the hypothesis that early in the Hellenistic era (third century B.C.E.), the priestly and scribal litterati of Samaria and Judea, possibly in close working relationship with the resources in Egypt’s Great Library of Alexandria, created the “historical” narratives that were to become the foundational literature of a new ethnic and cultural identity. The raw materials that these elites reshaped were the stories they had inherited from their home regions (Canaan, Syria, the Levant) along with new Greek epic, poetry, drama, historiography and philosophical writings. Guided by the ideals they imbibed from Plato, they aimed to construct new “foundation myths” that surpassed the ethics of their Greek overlords and thus asserted the superiority of their regional Yahwism over Hellenism. If Hellenistic culture can be defined as a blending of Greek and Asian ideas and expressions, the Pentateuch became a Hellenistic document par excellence — ironically, given that it was the ideological document that underlay subsequent Judean resistance against the Hellenistic rule of the Seleucids. Think of the regular experience of the colonized embracing the culture of their conquerors and using it against them.

My aim here is to try to explain how the Greek myth of Phrixus could have been transformed into the biblical narrative about the binding of Isaac.

–o0o–

As is well-known, Plato had no time for the follies of deities and humans in the Greek myths.  Gods should always be presented as epitomes of the highest morality and heroes as ideal exemplars of god-fearing thought and behaviour. Plato further argued the ideal target audiences of such myths should be a heterogenous population settled from various regions into a new collective. (Should we note in this context the diverse “records” of the twelve tribes of Israel hailing from diverse places — Mesopotomia, Egypt, Canaan?) The myth should assure a people that their ancestral origins were both divinely guided and true. Although the first generation would naturally resist such notions the succeeding generation would be less prone to resist the new teaching.

Plato wrote that ideal laws and the mythical tales in which they were embedded should inculcate the most honourable fear of all, the fear of God, or utmost reverence.

Now let’s refresh our memories of the highlights of the myth of Phrixus and reflect on the possibility of their “Platonic foils”.

1. The king of Boeotia, Athamas, married a cloud goddess with whom he fathered twins: Phrixus and Helle. That cloud goddess, whose name was Nephele, was in fact a special creation by Zeus to look exactly like his wife Hera so she could deceive “a drunken, degenerate king” (Ixion) to goad him into punishment for behaving inappropriately towards Hera. That was before she married Athamas.

2. Athamas, frustrated with his superior wife’s haughtiness, rejected her and married instead the mortal Ino.

Immediately we can sense Plato’s displeasure. How much more noble to have a hero in a stable marriage, if not to a goddess at least to a woman who even in her old age was the desire of kings! Even better if her name can sound like “Princess”. Certainly not a “hero” married to a cloud that was created for the purpose of deception!

3. The second wife of Athamas (Ino) rejected her stepchildren so plotted to have them removed so that her own child could inherit the kingdom. The first step in her plan was to secretly parch the seed that was necessary to feed his people. Athamas was at his wits end not knowing how to overcome the “natural” calamity.

We can see core motifs here that may have been adapted into the Genesis narrative: Sarah rejecting the first born of Abram whose mother had been the slave (not a goddess), and forcing its departure from her household. Of course there is also the theme of barrenness transplanted from the ground to the persons of Sarah and Abram. In this context it is of interest to note that the earlier Hittite myth from which the Greek tale appears to have been borrowed spoke of barren land as well as animals failing to reproduce and even humans unable to have children.

Therefore barley and wheat no longer ripen. Cattle, sheep, and humans no longer become pregnant. And those already pregnant cannot give birth. (Hittite Myths, p. 15)

But in the biblical account the barrenness is not part of a wicked human plot (or in the Hittite myth the consequence of a god deserting his responsibilities in a childish pique) but appears as a condition that God is using to prove that the child to be born is not a natural offspring but a genuine divine gift. That’s another detail that a pure “Platonic” mind would find most fitting.

4. Athamas sought the advice of the god Apollo but Ino bribed his messengers to lie and report to the king that the god wanted him to sacrifice his first born son, Phrixus.

A human sacrifice prompted by a devious lie? Most emphatically utterly inconceivable in Plato’s world!

By now one might wonder why a “biblical” author might select such an unpromising myth as raw material to begin with. The answer to that question was set out in my earlier post, Greek Myths Related to Tales of Abraham, Isaac, Moses and the Promised Land. As in the larger biblical narrative, the episode of a would-be human sacrifice called off by last-minute divine intervention and the sudden introduction of a sheep (“out of nowhere”) was a prelude to a grander narrative of national inheritance and deliverance.

But let’s continue.

As noted above, Plato believed that an ideal community needed to value above all the fear of God. Abram, renamed Abraham, is a perfect demonstration of such a fear and reverence by his willingness to sacrifice his son in response to the divine command. Different versions of the Phrixus myth paint Athamas in a contrary light. In one early version of the myth he is driven mad and it is in that mental state that he carries out the sacrifice.

Fear of God is only commendable, of course, if God himself is perfect. Hence in the story world of the Bible God was in his perfection only testing the perfection of Abraham while simultaneously in his perfection keeping his promise that Isaac would be Abraham’s heir and progenitor of vast multitudes and kings. A modern psychotherapist might have a different evaluation of both God’s and Abraham’s characters but we have to adhere to the “story as told”.

5. Either Zeus or Nephele sent a golden winged ram to rescue Phrixus at the last moment by carrying him away.

In Genesis we read instead of a rational dialogue between Abraham and the divine agent and the “natural” appearance of a ram caught in a thicket nearby to be sacrificed as a substitute. We are removed here from the “far distant other world” of flying and talking golden sheep. On the contrary, we are in the “present world” and in “narrative historical time” that will be linked by named generations to the founding of the nation of Israel. Plato insisted that the myth had to be historically believable.

6. Phrixus sacrificed the ram as a thanksgiving offering for his rescue and hung its golden fleece on a tree. From there it was known as a token to bestow abundantly prosperous kingship to its possessor.

In the earlier Hittite versions what was hung in the tree branch was sheepskin containing tokens of natural abundance and prosperity.

Before Telipinu [son of the Storm God whose disappearance and return were marked by barrenness and plenty respectively] there stands an eyan-tree (or pole). From the cyan is suspended a hunting bag (made from the skin) of a sheep. In (the bag) lies Sheep Fat. In it lie (symbols of) Animal Fecundity and Wine. In it lie (symbols of) Cattle and Sheep. In it lie Longevity and Progeny. (Hittite Myths, p. 18)

The sheep caught in the thicket in the Abraham and Isaac tale appears when the God announces his great promise to Abraham and his son:

Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place The Lord Will Provide. . . . The angel of the Lord called to Abraham from heaven a second time and said, “I swear by myself, declares the Lord, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed . . . (Genesis 22:13-18)

One other detail I bypassed here is the death of Phrixus’s sibling, Helle, who was said to have also been carried away by the flying sheep only to fall off its back and drown in the sea below (the Hellespont). If there is any relevance here it may be tied to the rejection of the other son of Abraham, Ishmael. But that is only an incidental and a most tentative observation. The theme of deities choosing a younger progeny to be an heir over an older one was known in Canaanite mythology long before biblical times.

It may be that the original form of the myth related to the literal sacrifice of a king — or of a child sacrifice by the king — who was deemed to be losing his power to sustain the abundance of the natural order. If so, that does not appear to be related to the Genesis episode — unless the Judean and Samaritan authors did have genuine historical memories of such a human sacrifice.

Leaving that possibility aside, I suggest that the above comparative interpretation of the Biblical mini-saga yields for us an explanation for how it might have been crafted from a Greek myth by a scribe guided by Plato’s ideals.

 


Bascom, William. “The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives.” The Journal of American Folklore 78, no. 307 (January 1965): 3. https://doi.org/10.2307/538099

Dundes, Alan. “Binary Opposition in Myth: The Propp/Lévi-Strauss Debate in Retrospect.” Western Folklore 56, no. 1 (1997): 39–50. https://doi.org/10.2307/1500385.

Hoffner, Harry A., and Gary M. Beckman, eds. Hittite Myths. 2nd ed. Writings from the Ancient World, no 2. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1998.

Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked. Translated by John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.



2023-06-27

BMCR Review of Russell Gmirkin’s Plato’s Timaeus and the Biblical Creation Accounts

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by Neil Godfrey

Bryn Mawr Classical Review has published a review by Nicholas Banner of Russell Gmirkin’s Plato’s Timaeus and the Biblical Creation Accounts in addition to giving space for Gmirkin to post a reply. Last year and early this year I posted a series on the same work: Plato and the Biblical Creation Accounts (Gmirkin).

Banner’s judgment is summed up in his fourth paragraph:

It is worth emphasising both the welcome audacity of Gmirkin’s proposals and the inevitable limitations of any such work. Biblical textual criticism is an endlessly nuanced project, perforce based on numerous arguments from likelihood or probability, sometimes piled one on top of the other. We want to know how these texts came to be as they are, but our evidence refuses to let us know with anything like absolute certainty; that maximalist reconstructions are often put forward as established fact is indeed problematic. Gmirkin’s arguments are welcome in that they remind the reader of this, and remind us of the shakiness of the edifice upon which the accepted scholarly certainties of the eld are sometimes established. However, to this reviewer’s mind, Gmirkin’s take on his own Hellenistic composition hypothesis is itself rather too ‘maximalist’: much that is found in this book would be welcome as intriguing parallels suggesting the need for more research, but fails to convince as an open-and-shut case for widespread Platonic and other Greek borrowing in Genesis. While this is to some degree a question of unquantifiable scholarly judgement, this reviewer does not find the parallels cited by Gmirkin between Genesis and the Timaeus et al. compelling enough to warrant positing a dependency, even assuming a Hellenistic dating for the composition of Genesis. A few more detailed critiques follow as space allows.

Russell Gmirkin expresses his appreciation for an “eminently fair” and “high quality” review and addresses specific points made by Banner – in particular, the absence of Plato’s geocentric cosmology from Genesis, God “commanding things into existence” in the biblical creation narrative, and the following:

(4) Finally, let me address Banner’s criticism of my conclusion that the account of the pre-flood world and flood story drew on both the Atrahasis Story (by way of Berossus, as I argued in Gmirkin 2006) and “in part [on] a Jewish rewriting of the Atlantis myth in Timaeus and Critias (Chapter 7)!” Evidently Banner considered an exclamation point adequate, within the context of the review, to refute this argument. Obviously, it is impossible within the scape of a short review to drill down into the data, but such is actually required here. I note that the account of the pre-flood world in Genesis 6 and Plato’s Critias have these striking elements in common:

• Both have the [sons of the] gods dwelling among humans on earth and taking beautiful women to wife. Others (such as John Van Seters and Guy Darshan) have noted these common motifs in Genesis 6 and the earlier Hesiodic “Catalog of Women,” but none have noted the equally strong parallels in the later account by Plato due to prevailing assumptions about the antiquity of the Genesis account.

• Both portray the offspring of the gods as a mighty noble semi-divine race of heroes (“men of name” in Gen. 6:4). Both describe a subsequent degeneration or corruption of this goodly noble line (in Critias due to the dilution of the divine element through further intermarriages with humans) into a deplorable state of wickedness and violence.

• Both described the necessity of the gods (Zeus, Yahweh) to intervene by earthquake, rain and flood to destroy the wicked generation and give humanity a fresh start.

• Up until the time of Ovid, the only known stories of a flood sent to purge the world of immorality were found precisely in Plato’s Critias and in Genesis 6.

Banner apparently does not find such a cluster of parallels compelling, but I invite every reader to examine and evaluate the arguments for themselves, a sentiment I suspect Banner would agree with.

 


2023-04-02

Israel’s Origins – before Palestine

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by Neil Godfrey

For earlier posts where I indicated the importance of some of Garbini’s approaches, see Testing (or not) Historical Sources for Reliability and Interview with Thomas L. Thompson #1.

The current post follows on from the previous one where we outlined the identification as “forerunners” of Israel the Banu Yamina (Benjamin) with their “davids” in the northern Syrian steppes during the second millennium BCE. One detail I did not note in that post but am adding here is that those same people had a particular group of diviners known as “nabi’um” — from which the Hebrew “navi”, meaning “prophet”, derives. So Garbini drew attention to the “Benjamin” confederacy having connections with Yahud, “davids” and “prophets”.

Giovanni Garbini traced the origins, migrations and settlements of Israel through his research as a professor of Semitic philology. In Garbini’s view, both “maximalists” (those who interpreted all archaeological evidence through the Bible) and “minimalists” (those who relied upon archaeological evidence ‘speaking for itself’) overlooked the evidence of epigraphy — the study of place and ethnic names in both the archaeological finds and the Bible. Garbini wrote that he…

found himself alone in supporting the thesis that adequate linguistic and philological preparation, with the support of extrabiblical sources, makes it possible to reconstruct the ancient history of Israel differently from the biblical account, using the Bible itself as the main source . . . (Scrivere, p. 11 – translation)

Throughout much of that second millennium in the northern Syrian steppes tribal groups were changing their seminomadic and pastoralist lifestyles when they built and settled into cities, allowing for new groups to move in to surrounding areas, with those semi-nomadic groups ever-changing their confederations, with new tribes emerging and older ones disappearing, always over the centuries in ethnic and tribal flux.

Egypt dominated the coastal and hinterland region as far as today’s Lebanon up until the 1300s BCE when we have Egyptian records informing us that new tribal groups and mercenary armies were threatening the security of cities over which Egypt had been the hegemon.

When Garbini integrates these Egyptian records with those of the Assyrian kingdom covering the ensuing century he pinpoints a critical new group of people who will become major players in the Levant: the name by which they were eventually most commonly known was the Aramaeans. They are sometimes named in association with one of the tribes of the Banu Yamini (or “Benjamin”, whom we met in the previous post.)

The Assyrians first encountered the Aramaeans in the northern region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

The region between the Tigris and Euphrates where the Assyrians first encountered these Aramaeans was known as Musri. Over the following centuries Musri was also identified on both sides of the Euphrates and in the ninth century, at the Battle of Qaqar on the Orontes River, some of the combatants were identified as Musri. Evidently they took their name from the region where they had originated. It appears that this branch of Aramaeans was gradually moving west.

1300’s BCE — Israel came out of ‘Egypt’, or Musri?

What are we to make of this name “Musri”?

Musri in the Bible

Musri is also mentioned in the Bible, or rather it was mentioned, because in the current text, both in Hebrew and Greek, this name has been systematically concealed through a series of textual interventions. (Scrivere, p. 22 – translation)

Garbini sets out the evidence that the Hebrew Bible we know today has several times replaced Musri with the name Egypt. When it was not replaced, it was spelled incorrectly to make it look like another name for Egypt (msrym instead of mwsr). At some stage scribes associated closely with Jerusalem and who were responsible for the Hebrew Bible attempted to downplay early links between Israel and the northern Aramaean people and region. They repeatedly stressed that though Abraham had come from Mesopotamia, Israel grew into a nation in Egypt and Yahweh who drew them out of Egypt. That was their identity.

But the evidence of philology, the names in the sources, indicate that Israel rather came from the north, from Musri and the Aramaic area, Garbini explains.

In Garbini’s view, some of the biblical books preserve very ancient traditions to this effect:

When you have entered the land the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance and have taken possession of it and settled in it, . . . Then go to the place the Lord your God will choose as a dwelling for his Name 3 and say to the priest in office at the time, “I declare today to the Lord your God that I have come to the land the Lord swore to our ancestors to give us.” . . . . 5 Then you shall declare before the Lord your God: “My father was a wandering Aramaean . . .  — Deut. 26:1-5

Hosea fondly looks back on the time Israel was in Egypt and called out to be with God, but any perusal of that time in the Pentateuch quickly reminds us it was not a time of fond romance but one of tension, rebellion, so much so that God cursed the entire generation and even required Moses to die before entering the promised land. Hosea and Amos warn that Israel will be punished by being made to return to Assyria — and Egypt, in a context that suggests Egypt is near or under the dominion of Assyria. That makes more sense if the original text spoke of Musri, Garbini argues. There are other detailed arguments but I am avoiding the technicalities in this post.

The testimony of Hosea and the stories about the patriarchs, which were written at a later date, reveal the existence of a remarkably ancient tradition that traced the origins of Israel and Ephraim to the environment of the Aramaic-speaking seminomads who, starting from the 15th century BC, moved in the land of Musri, i.e. the vast steppe area of northern Syria that extended on both sides of the Upper Euphrates. Here, through processes that we do not know, a homogeneous group of tribes was formed, which took the name of Israel and at a certain moment began to move southwards. If several centuries later a prophet, who felt himself to be the custodian of the religious tradition of the group to which he belonged, launched reproaches and threats to his contemporaries who, in his opinion, did not honor the god who had brought them to the land of Canaan enough, it is very likely that the cult of that god played an important role in the formation of Israel. (Scrivere, p. 25 – translation)

Abraham, King of Damascus – and the Damascus Document

If, with Garbini, we leave aside the Bible and look at other traditions about Israel’s origins, we find that there was a tradition that Abraham was a king in Damascus: Continue reading “Israel’s Origins – before Palestine”


2023-03-31

Where Did Israel – and David – Come From? Some Archaeological Evidence

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by Neil Godfrey

* One of those tribes was named Rāfē’, which may be compared with the fifth son of Benjamin, Rapha, in 1 Chronicles 8:2. (see Albright, Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan, p. 80)

Benjamin may have been the youngest of the twelve sons of Jacob according to the Bible but in the archaeological record his name – and tribe – is the first to appear. Or rather, the name, Banu Yamin, represents a coalition of about four or five tribes.* But Banu Yamin, sons of the right (hand), is their name in documents at Mari first appearing around the early second millennium, let’s say around 1600 BCE. That coincides with the time biblical chronology is thought by some to indicate the time of Abraham’s entry into Canaan. (One of those tribes was named Rāfē’, which may be compared with the fifth son of Benjamin, Rapha, in 1 Chronicles 8:2.)

Those who have dealt with the history of Israel so far may not have been pleased to learn that, in the 17th century BC, the youngest of Abraham’s great-grandchildren was circulating instead of Abraham himself.  (p. 17 – translation)

The sons of right refers to the people of the south, or southerners, because another Semitic tribe, one to the north, were the Banu Sam’al, the name meaning “left”. (Perspective is based on facing the rising sun.)

Now it is possible that “southerners” was a common term that could apply to any group of people at any time, and if so, then the Banu Yamin may have nothing more than the coincidence of the name in common with the biblical tribe of Benjamin. But there is more. To translate the comment by Giovanni Garbini:

The possibility of a homonymy between Banu Yamina and Benjamin cannot be completely excluded, but it appears unlikely for the reasons that will now be explained.

First of all, it should be said that the onomastic coincidence between the Mari semi-nomads and Semitic peoples documented at the beginning of the first millennium BC could also concern the “sons of the left”. In the 9th and 8th centuries BC, a city named Sam’al flourished in Cilicia, ruled by an Aramaic dynasty whose members sometimes bore Anatolian names (Kilamuwa Panamuwa, etc.). The singularity of the toponym suggests that the foundation of this Semitic city in a non-Semitic area is somehow linked to the banu sim’al. When we consider that the name of the Semitic people of Sam’al was Ya’ud . . . , a linguistic form identical to Yahud, it will be difficult to attribute to chance that a Ya’ud/Yahud ethnic group was closely related to both the “sons of the left” to the north and the “sons of the right” to the south. (Scrivere, 17)

Yahud, you will suspect, bears some relation to Judah and Jehud (the Jewish province in the Persian era), the name being formed from Yah/Yahweh.

Before continuing, let’s be clear where we are:

The vast steppe areas that close off the northern part of the Syrian desert, bordered to the east by the Euphrates and to the west by the Afrin, Orontes, and Jordan rivers, constituted the environment in which numerous tribes of semi-nomads lived, mainly devoted to animal husbandry and raids while continuously moving. The presence and the very existence of these peoples, who have never left any trace of themselves, are revealed by information transmitted by written texts within sedentary cultures possessing writing, namely Mesopotamia and Egypt. . . . 

 

In the 3rd millennium and the first half of the 2nd millennium BC, all the semi-nomadic tribes were of Semitic language and appeared to be characterized by intense military activity.

The most significant information on Semitic semi-nomads comes from hundreds of letters written in Babylonian found in the royal archive of Mari, a Syrian city on the right bank of the middle Euphrates. Most of the letters date back to the first half of the 18th century BC. In this period, the term amurru, which designated the first semi-nomads who came into contact with Mesopotamia in the 24th century BC, had become a generic name to indicate the “West,” that is, Syria. We recall that the Hammurabi dynasty (1792-1750 BC), which ruled Babylon, was of Amorite origin. By the 18th century BC, the Amorites had already passed the semi-nomadic phase and had become largely sedentary. In their place, two large groups of tribes, the Suteans (Sutum) and the Banu Yamina, had entered the steppe of Syria. (Scrivere, 15ff)

The Banu Sam’al were spread across the north but the map below identifies the location of the city of Sam’al that we read about above:

 

The Davids

The texts at Mari even speak of “Davids” long before the biblical David:

[C]oncerning the banu yamina, the texts often speak of a dawidüm, who was also present in other tribal groups and sometimes in cities, where he was in close contact with the king or members of the royal house. The dawidüm appears in texts as a military leader during a battle, but he is a leader with such particular prerogatives that in texts the expression “to kill the dawidüm” is almost idiomatic to mean “to win a battle”; in some cases, the word dawidùm is synonymous with “victory”. The problem of the dawidüm is certainly complex, and the information we have is not sufficient to fully clarify it; . . .

And, as we would expect, religiously interested scholars have sometimes muddied the research efforts:

. . . what can be said is that it has been made even more complicated by the attitude of those scholars who have dealt with the dawidüm with the sole purpose of demonstrating the lack of any relationship between this character and his functions and the great King David of the Bible; however, we can immediately say that before him, in the whole Near East, there was never any person named David.

Every “david” of the Benjamin tribes who led his army to battle would either be victorious or be sacrificed:

The word dawid . . . is the passive participle (as in Aramaic) of the verb dwd “to love”; literally, it meansthe loved one“. Actually, it is a technical term that indicates a particular relationship between a member of the royal family, usually the king, and a noble. The Amorite dawid finds an exact semantic parallel in the mawd (passive participle of wdd “to love”), which is found in the oldest Sabaean inscriptions (7th century BC) and is usually translated as “friend”; many prominent figures declare themselves mwd of their sovereigns. The Mari texts, which highlight the military function of the dawid that invariably ends with his death, only illustrate one aspect of this figure, which must have carried a complex ideology. If every battle lost by the Banu Yamina inevitably resulted in the death of the dawid, this means that this person did not fall in battle but was put to death, probably in a ritual manner, after the victory achieved by the opponents on the field; reading the Mari texts, one gets the impression that a victory would not have been complete without the killing of the dawid. In confirmation of this, we can cite the inscription of Mesha, the Moabite king of the 9th century BC, in which a dwd is mentioned, which we will return to in due course.

What does all of the above mean, then, in relation to the Bible’s narrative?

In conclusion, the texts from Mari reveal much more than a mere coincidence of names with the world described in the Bible. That being said, it is not being claimed that the banu yamina of Mari were the direct ancestors of the Benjaminites, nor that the history of the Jewish people was already underway in the 18th century BC; this research has merely revealed that one of the components of future Israel had its remote origins in the varied and fluctuating environment of Semitic Amorite semi-nomadism, which was a protagonist in the historical events of the centuries around 2000 BC. (Scrivere, 17ff)

With thanks to a commenter’s recommendation to read Giovanni Garbini’s Scrivere La Storia D’israele.


Garbini, Giovanni. Scrivere La Storia D’israele. Vicende E Memorie Ebraiche. Brescia: Paideia, 2008.


 


2023-02-20

Where Did the God of the Bible Come From? – [Biblical Creation Accounts/Plato’s Timaeus-Critias – 8]

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by Neil Godfrey

Most of us have been conditioned by the conventional wisdom that the Old Testament books were written between the eighth and fifth centuries. But there is no independent evidence for the existence of any of the Bible’s books or any knowledge of biblical traditions (Davies, 1992 and Vridar.info notes), nor any evidence for the practice of Judaism itself (sabbath observance, dietary practices, etc) until the Hellenistic era — the third century (Lemche, 1993 and the post Old Testament – A Hellenistic Book?Adler, 2022 and the post The Late Origins of Judaism). It is against this background of the hard archaeological evidence that we must approach Gmirkin’s thesis of Hellenistic influence on the Bible.

With thanks to Taylor & Francis (Routledge) for the review copy

We come to the final, and longest, chapter of Plato’s Timaeus and the Biblical Creation Accounts: Cosmic Monotheism and Terrestrial Polytheism in the Primordial History by Russell Gmirkin. If the author of Genesis did use Plato’s Timaeus-Critias, what does that tell us about Jewish monotheism in the third century BCE?

In the discussion of Genesis 1 we saw Gmirkin’s case for the Genesis authors drawing upon Plato’s notion of “cosmic monotheism” — the idea of a sole creator god beyond space and time who brings about the universe, including time itself, and then retires from the scene. This god was of a higher order of divinity from other gods and it is in that sense that we speak of “monotheism” here.

In covering Genesis 2 we observed the narrative moving into a storybook world featuring a god who walked amidst his garden and spoke with his created humans and their offspring.

We read of God appearing to address a council of fellow divinities when he (or one of him/them) says, “Let us make humankind in our image….”, “Let us make him a helper….” and then at Babel, “Let us go down and confuse their language….”  The supreme deity creates the perfect world but it appears that lesser deities create potentially sinful mortals and interact with them. Sons of god are even said to bear children with human women. And then we encounter the patriarchs sacrificing at altars to gods recognized by their Canaanite neighbours.

Gmirkin compares this outline with Plato’s narrative in Timaeus and Critias. As in Genesis, Plato begins with a supreme craftsman (demiurge) god who is without human form or body and beyond space and time yet who is responsible for creating the perfect universe. After that, lesser gods take over and create corruptible humans and interact with them.

When we read Genesis against the background of Plato’s myths we begin to understand solutions to hitherto perplexing puzzles about Genesis, Gmirkin notes:

Various otherwise perplexing narrative details, small and large, attain a new clarity when interpreted in light of Platonic parallels. Most significant are those relating to a directly polytheistic mythical narrative context that complements (and in small details contradicts) the cosmic monotheism of Genesis 1: the appearance of a multiplicity of gods in both the First Creation Account (Gen 1:26) and the tale of the Garden of Eden (Gen 2:18 [LXX], 3:22); the contrast between the portraits of Elohim as supreme Creator in Genesis 1 and Yahweh as a storybook terrestrial god introduced in Genesis 2-3, and the marriages between gods and mortal women (Gen 6:1-4). The book of Genesis, like Plato’s Timaeus, promoted two complementary visions of the divine realm of the gods: a transcendent philosophical monotheism manifested in the creation of the perfect kosmos at the dawn of time, and a conventional terrestrial polytheism that accommodated the popular beliefs and cults of tradition. Both of these carefully balanced Platonic theological elements were highly innovative: that a single supremely good eternally existent god created the heavens and earth, and that the pantheon of well-known terrestrial gods, his sons and daughters, were also universally good and worthy of honor. (Gmirkin, 247)

There are also compound forms of these names for god, such as Yahweh-Elohim and El-Shaddai. There are various explanations for these in the literature — a) that the one god took on various “guises” (or hypostases), b) that they were different gods, c) that later editors were attempting to change the text (for which there is manuscript evidence) for theological reasons. Gmirkin understands that some of these later changes to the text were introduced by editors seeking to bring Genesis more closely in line with the theological perspective of Exodus-Deuteronomy.

The Genesis god of creation was called Elohim. The storybook god who appears after creation was given the name Yahweh. Yahweh, as you no doubt recognize, is also a transliteration of that famous tetragram YHWH, the god uniquely associated with the Old Testament. In Genesis 1 YHWH is not the creator.

So much for Genesis, but what about the world outside the literature?

Archaeological evidence informs us that before we have any signs of knowledge of biblical accounts Yahweh was a local deity of Jews, Samaritans and others along with other divinities, such as the mother-god Asherah. All the evidence we have for religious practices in the times of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah points to polytheism. Yahweh is simply one among a pantheon of deities.

When the Judahites were defeated by Nebuchadnezzar and many of them transported to Babylonia, we know that there they continued to worship Yahweh along with other gods — in this case the Babylonian gods. Even into the Persian era, wherever archaeologists have uncovered Jewish settlements, they find the worship of other gods alongside Yahweh. Some readers may find this surprising or think the interpretation of the evidence is perverse, but until I post more about the evidence of what has been dug up from the ground here is a smattering of many publications that interested readers can turn to for further detail:

It is not only a question of whether or not the people of Judah worshipped Yahweh alone, but as indicated in the side-box above, in particular with the Adler reference (see also his academia.edu outline of the book), archaeological evidence points to practices contrary to biblical laws and religious customs until the second century BCE.

Archaeological evidence suggests that the Pentateuch was a Hellenistic era work so it follows that Hellenistic ideas should be seriously considered among its sources.

Since Gmirkin’s analysis places the origin of the first five books of the Bible in Hellenistic times (the third century BCE) it would follow from the state of the evidence as alluded to above that Genesis 1

arguably represents the earliest expression of monotheism among the Jews and Samaritans, alongside the equally novel benevolent terrestrial polytheism of the rest of Genesis. (249)

So in Genesis we have an expression of the Plato-like supreme and sole deity, existing outside space and time, creating the cosmos and then retiring, followed by references to what looks like another deity (Yahweh) living and interacting with mortals (e.g. in Garden of Eden, with Cain and Abel, visiting and eating a meal with Abraham, wrestling with Jacob), along with patriarchs honouring the gods of the Canaanites (e.g. with Melchizedek at Salem, Bethel, El Shaddai, El Olam . . .). At the same time we find the patriarchs enjoying positive relations with their “pagan” neighbours. Abraham bonds with Amorites, engages in peaceful negotiations with Hittites and Philistines, is honoured by Egyptians, while breakdowns only happen as a result of personal wrongs and not because of any “evil” inherent in the different races themselves.

After Genesis, Yahweh changed

In both the stories and legal content of Exodus-Joshua one sees the rejection of benevolent terrestrial polytheism in favor of a Yahwistic monolatry that equated the local patron god of the Jews and the Samaritans with the creator of the universe and which opposed the gods of the nations and their cultic practices. Given that Exodus-Joshua was arguably written contemporaneously with Genesis . . . , yet from a radically different perspective, this suggests a fundamental clash in philosophy and agenda between authorial groups involved in the creation of the Hexateuch ca. 270 BCE. (Gmirkin, 249)

There are other authors who argue that a single author was responsible for the Pentateuch: Bernard Barc, Thomas Brodie, Jan-Wim Wesselius and Philippe Wajdenbaum. (See the post, Did A Single Author Write Genesis – II Kings?) Barc, who also argues for a Hellenistic origin of the Pentateuch, views the respective appearances of the god El and the god Yahweh as two different “forms” (hypostases) of the Most High and each performs an allotted function in a single plan of history. Gmirkin argues for a deeper influence of Plato and other Greek ideas on the text. A difficulty for the average reader when pondering this question is the fact that most Bibles are translations of a Hebrew text that was finalized in the Christian era. To discover earlier versions requires a comparison with ancient Greek translations and the Dead Sea Scrolls (first addressed here). We also have the question of how the final editor made changes to Genesis when he incorporated the work into a set with the following books.

Are the views of Barc, Brodie, Wesselius and Wajdenbaum able to respond adequately to the challenges Gmirkin raises? My next task is to step back and refresh my memory of the details of all of Gmirkin’s works and try to see how all of the evidence coheres.

Gmirkin does, however, offer a plausible response to those who find themselves troubled over what seems to be a fuzzy line between the gods and cults in Genesis but it casts an eye beyond Plato. Elohim is the creator but Yahweh-Elohim engages with humans; El Elyon and El Shaddai are both “Els”. In the views of the Stoic philosophers the many Greek gods were different aspects of “one god”:

Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers 7.147.

The deity, say they, is a living being, immortal, rational, perfect or intelligent in happiness, admitting nothing evil, taking providential care of the world and all that therein is, but he is not of human shape. He is, however … called many names according to his various powers. They give the name Dia (Δία) because all things arc due to (διά) him; Zeus (Ζήνα) in so far as he is the cause of life (ζην) or pervades all life; the name Athena is given, because the ruling part of the divinity extends to the aether; the name Hera marks its extension to the air; he is called Hephaestus since it spreads to the creative fire; Poseidon, since it stretches to the sea; Demeter, since it reaches to the earth. Similarly, men have given the deity his other titles, fastening, as best they can, on some one or other of his peculiar attributes.

It is possible that the well-known Stoic assimilation of the Greek gods to their monotheistic god, the creative fire, influenced the biblical conflation of deities associated with various titles of the ancient god El with the local patron god Yahweh. (Gmirkin, 300, my formatting)

Let’s continue Gmirkin’s discussion.

Something Completely Different: Here is a light-hearted digression on God’s treatment of the Egyptians at the Red Sea that comes from a study on the history of swimming through the ages:

The Hebrews left Egypt ‘with boldness’, but when they reach the Red Sea they accuse Moses, ‘Have you taken us away to die in the wilderness? Why have you so dealt with us, to bring us up out of Egypt?’ Moses (brought up by Egyptians, and perhaps therefore knowing how to swim himself ) soothes the Hebrews, and tells them not to be afraid. He stretches out his hand over the sea. God parts the Red Sea for the Hebrews, and then drowns the Egyptians. . . . .

This was the reverse of what readers might have expected, knowing that the Egyptians had always been strong swimmers and the Hebrews had never known how to swim. The parting of the Red Sea takes on new meaning when we realize that the Hebrews are non-swimmers, afraid of the water, being pursued by confident, experienced Egyptian swimmers.

from pages 55-56 (heard on Late Night Live)

It is only after Genesis, in the book of Exodus, that Yahweh claims to have been the God of the Patriarchs in Genesis and that he will tolerate no rivals. The covenant he makes with his people is to wipe out the Canaanites after having reigned death and destruction on the Egyptians.

God — Yahweh — has changed.

What of the god of the Flood, though? Did not Gmirkin say the biblical author had a more vicious view of god than Plato. At least Plato’s deity sought to discipline humans through calamity for their own good while the biblical god simply wanted to destroy humanity outright. Perhaps some of the Genesis authors also slightly wavered in their view of Yahweh’s character.

Plato’s Program and the Birth of Montheism

Gmirkin concludes from his comparative analysis that the Pentateuch was the work of authors united in seeking to introduce Plato’s program for an ideal society.

Plato taught that there was a supreme deity, formless and beyond space and time, yet who was perfectly good. Such an idea arose from the attempts of Greek philosophers to understand the origins of the universe. This concept of god (Gmirkin traces in some depth the history of the idea and the different functions of the gods of the Greek civic cults, the gods of the literary mythical world and god(s) of the natural philosophers) was the beginning of monotheism as we understand the term.

For Plato (and much of the western world has followed his idea) belief in the concept of a supreme, perfectly good deity is the first requirement of a virtuous society.

Civic authorities periodically accused and punished philosophers who openly taught “atheism” — which was how they understood the new monotheism with its implication of the rejection of other gods. Plato, however, found a role for these lesser gods in the wider society despite his philosophical preference for monotheism. But those lesser deities needed to be refashioned through literature and other arts and regular festivals as perfectly good. Old myths of gods misbehaving had to be banned. People could continue to cement their social bonds by gathering for the worship of these earthly, yet now “purified”, deities.

These ideas of Plato are what Gmirkin finds in Genesis.

Plato further envisioned a Nocturnal Council of the piously qualified as a vital institution to rule his ideal society. Members would be responsible for maintaining the morality of the public and public administration.

In Plato’s Laws, the divine philosophical ruling class elite exercised its power through an institution called the Nocturnal Council to accord with its meetings in the pre-dawn hours (Laws 12.95Id, 961b). Although Laws never explicitly mentions philosophers, “the members of the Nocturnal Council are philosophers in all but name” (Hull 2019: 217). The major function of the Nocturnal Council was to control the internal affairs of the nation. The ruling class elites of this “divine council” (Laws 12.969b; cf. the “divine polity” of 12.965c) would administer the nation’s new laws (Laws 7.809b; 12.951d, 952a-b) and education (Laws 7.811c-812a; 12.951d, 952a-b, 964b-c) from the earliest age on (Laws 12.952b), approve and strictly control its literature (Laws 7.802b-c, 811c-e) and enforce its religious beliefs (Laws 10.908e-909d), controlling the beliefs, and even the collective national memory of the populace, who would come to regard their constitution and way of life as established since time immemorial by their patron gods (Laws 7.798a-b). Through this new theocratic form of government in which the people believed they were under divine rule, the whole of national life would come under the perpetual control and guidance of philosophers, with the willing cooperation of the people who believed their leaders to be the divine agents of the supreme god. (Gmirkin, 268)

and

While the exoteric function of the Nocturnal Council was the administration of the state and its beliefs through control of its legislation, literature, education and religion, its even more important esoteric function was the continued pursuit of philosophical and scientific studies, thought to be essential to the proper administration of the polis. The Nocturnal Council thus functioned both as the ruling body of government and as a university for the continued study of theology, astronomy, ethics and international law, like Plato’s Academy (Morrow 1993: 509; Hull 2019: 228). Investing the nation’s highest educational institution with the full power of government not only ensured wise philosophical rule in the present but allowed the perpetuation of training in the arts of enlightened government from one generation to the next (Laws 12.960d-961b, 965a-b). (Gmirkin, 269)

Here we begin to overlap with what we have covered in other posts about Gmirkin’s earlier work. See the archived posts on Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible.

Authors Divided

Continue reading “Where Did the God of the Bible Come From? – [Biblical Creation Accounts/Plato’s Timaeus-Critias – 8]”


2023-02-12

Two Covenants: Israel and Atlantis — [Biblical Creation Accounts/Plato’s Timaeus-Critias – 7f]

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by Neil Godfrey

Russell Gmirkin concludes his second last chapter with a look beyond Genesis to highlight the plausibility of Plato’s Timaeus and Critias influencing some of Exodus, Deuteronomy and Joshua.

In Critias Plato was composing an account of Athenian origins and its political organization, a politogony. Gmirkin cites Naddaf’s The Greek Concept of Nature which I turned to and read how various Greek poets and philosophers were interested in writing accounts that began with a cosmogony, then moved on to an anthropogony or zoogony, and finally came to a politogony — all of which seems to me to encapsulate the structure of Genesis and the Pentateuch: creation of the cosmos is the opening chapter, then the creation of humans and how humans came to be organized as they are across the inhabited world, and finally how thbe nation of Israel came about with its laws, priesthood, tribal organization as well as how its relations with other peoples originated. After writing the above I quickly checked the early chapters of Gmirkin’s book and found he had made just that point from the outset.

Plato’s account of Atlantis is set in mythical time: the god Poseidon married the mortal, Cleito, and fathered five pairs of twins who became princes ruling the ten tribes of the land. These ten leaders ruled independently as kings but swore allegiance to be one with each other in loyalty and policies and keep forever the laws of Poseidon. Those laws were inscribed on a pillar and kept in the temple. Gmirkin is, of course, prompting us to compare this scenario with the organization of Israel and its covenant with Yahweh.

One can point to the many obvious differences between Plato’s Critias and the biblical book of Exodus. My own approach to such comparative studies is to examine how unique the comparisons are and whether we can find in those similarities explanations for the differences that go beyond the ad hoc. The most significant place where a comparison must begin is the fact that in the following scene we look in vain, as far as I am aware, for parallels in the literature of the Levant or Mesopotamia.

National Covenant with Yahweh || National Covenant with Poseidon

Some similarities between Plato’s Critias and the scene of Israel swearing obedience to their god at Mount Sinai in the Book of Exodus:

Exodus 24:3-8 Critias 119e-120b
Moses came and told the people all the words of the Lord and all the ordinances; and all the people answered with one voice, and said, “All the words that the Lord has spoken we will do.” (4) And Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord. And whatsoever bull they captured they led up to the pillar and cut its throat over the top of the pillar, raining down blood on the inscription.
He rose early in the morning, and built an altar at the foot of the mountain, and set up twelve pillars, corresponding to the twelve tribes of Israel. And inscribed upon the pillar, besides the laws, was an oath which invoked mighty curses upon them that disobeyed.
(5) He sent young men of the people of Israel, who offered burnt offerings and sacrificed oxen as offerings of well-being to the Lord. When, then, they had done sacrifice according to their laws and were consecrating (120a) all the limbs of the bull,
(6) Moses took half of the blood and put it in basins, and half of the blood he dashed against the altar. they mixed a bowl of wine and poured in on behalf of each one a gout of blood, and the rest they carried to the fire, when they had first purged the pillars round about.
(7) Then he took the book of the covenant, and read it in the hearing of the people; and they said, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient.”

 

And after this they drew out from the bowl with golden ladles, and making libation over the fire swore to give judgment according to the laws upon the pillar and to punish whosoever had committed any previous transgression; and, moreover, that henceforth they would not transgress any of the writings willingly, nor govern nor submit to any governor’s edict (120b) save in accordance with their father’s laws.
(8) Moses took the blood and dashed it on the people, and said, “See the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words.” And when each of them had made this invocation both for himself and for his seed after him, he drank of the cup and offered it up as a gift in the temple of the God

The similarities between the passages were pointed out by Philippe Wajdenbaum in Argonauts of the Desert and Gmirkin has gone another step in spelling out specific points for comparison:

  • the moment of the creation of a new nation is identified in a single episodic event;
  • all the tribes of the nation are assembled and participate;
  • a sacrifice seals the event, with bulls representing the tribes;
  • there is an altar with an associated pillar or pillars;
  • blood is (a) splashed about to consecrate the place of sacrifice and (b) poured into ceremonial vessels;
  • laws are inscribed on the pillar or altar [in Exodus the laws were written in a book, but later in Deuteronomy and Joshua they were inscribed in stone: see below];
  • a solemn oath or covenant to obey all the words of the law;
  • strong curses invoked for disobedience to the laws [see below – Deut 27, 28, 29];
  • the oath is binding on those present as well as their descendants [Deut 28].

Such strong and systematic literary parallels exist between Exodus 24 and no other passage in Greek literature.29 Conversely, no literary parallels exist between Exodus 24 and Ancient Near Eastern literature or inscriptions, where there is no example of citizens entering into a covenant to obey a law collection, and where indeed the laws carried no prescriptive force.

29 A minor difference is that in Exodus 24 and Deuteronomy, it was the entire assembled children of Israel who were enjoined to obedience to the laws and who were entered [into] the covenant, whereas in Critias it was the ten princes who ruled in the kingdom of Atlantis.

(Gmirkin, 237, 241 — bolding is my own in all quotations)

Here is a little more detail on the inscribing of laws on pillars in the Greek world. It comes from another work cited by Gmirkin. (I have replaced Greek quotes with translations taken from the same work by Hagedorn or added my own translations alongside Greek text.) Continue reading “Two Covenants: Israel and Atlantis — [Biblical Creation Accounts/Plato’s Timaeus-Critias – 7f]”


2023-02-11

When Yahweh was at Peace with Other Gods — [Biblical Creation Accounts/Plato’s Timaeus-Critias – 7e]

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

With thanks to Taylor & Francis (Routledge) for the review copy

When we read the Bible we assume that its references to God or Lord all mean the same idea: the deity of Judeo-Christian belief. So when we (non-scholars) read that the Bible’s references to the God of the Patriarchs were originally names of various local deities it can be a difficult pill to swallow. But a principal reason I began this blog was to share with the general reader what scholarly research has to inform us about the Bible, so let’s look more closely at the Genesis references to El Shaddai, El Elhon, and the various altars Genesis says the Patriarchs established in Canaan.

Here is Russell Gmirkin’s paragraph in Plato’s Timaeus and the Biblical Creation Accounts that pulls up the reader who is not familiar with the scholarly background references:

Genesis 11-50 mention a number of local gods, such as El Shaddai, with an altar at Bethel or Luz (Gen 17:1; 28:3, 19; 43:14; 48:3; 49:25); El Olam, with a grove at Beersheba (Gen 21:33); El Elyon, with a temple at Salem (Gen 14:18-20, 22); and Yahweh, with altars at Bethel (Gen 12:8; 35:1, 3, 7) and Hebron (Gen 13:18); the god Bethel (Gen 28:17; cf. Cross 1973: 47 n. 14); cf. Baal Berit (Judg 8:33; 9:4) or El Berit (Judg 9:46), the god of Shechem (cf. Smith 1990: 6; Cross 1973: 39, discussing the Hurrian El Berit). Most of these are thought to be local titles or manifestations of the Canaanite deity El (Cross 1962, 1973: 6-69; Day 2000: 13-43). Yahweh was another local god, worshipped in Iron II Hamath (Dalley 1990), Samaria and Judah, alongside Baal, El, Bethel and other Canaanite gods. Far from being inimical towards their polytheistic religious heritage, the pantheon of Canaanite gods was carried over into the present text of Genesis as local divinities associated with numerous ancient altars and holy sites. In Ex 6:3, El Shaddai was explicitly assimilated with Yahweh, but the identity of the two deities is not evident in the text of Genesis itself. (Gmirkin, 233f — bolding is mine in all quotations)

Let’s take a closer look at each of the above. I have for the most part (not entirely) followed up on Gmirkin’s bibliographical references.

El Shaddai

When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said to him, “I am El Shaddai. Walk before me, and be blameless. (Gen 17:1)

May El Shaddai bless you, and make you fruitful, and multiply you . . . .  He called the name of that place Bethel, though previously the city was named Luz. (Gen 28:3, 19)

And may El Shaddai grant you mercy (Gen 43:14)

And Jacob said to Joseph, “El Shaddai appeared to me at Luz in the land of Canaan and blessed me (Gen 48:3)

by the God of your father, who will help you, and El Shaddai, who will bless you with blessings of the sky above, blessings of the deep that lies below, and blessings of the breasts and of the womb. (Gen 49:25)

Here is what John Day in Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan has to say about El Shaddai. Italics are original.

El-Shaddai. The most likely interpretation of the divine name El-Shaddai is ‘El, the mountain one‘, with reference to El’s dwelling place on a mountain. . . . (Day, 32)

And Frank Moore Cross in Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic:

A group of names from Ugarit gave additional confirmation of the etymology . . . 

The epithet šadday thus proves to mean “the mountain one.” (Cross, 54f)

Many Bibles translate the term as God Almighty, but that translation should be discarded:

Traditionally, El Shaddai has been rendered ‘God Almighty’, following the LXX’s παντοκράτωρ and the Vulgate’s omnipotens, but it is widely accepted that this is a later misunderstanding, possibly arising through association with Hebrew šdd ‘to destroy’ (cf. Isa. 13.6; Joel 1.15,  kešōd miššadday ‘as destruction from Shaddai’).

The two most widely accepted views today render the name El-Shaddai either as ‘El, the mountain one’, relating it to Akkadian šadû ‘mountain’ (and šaddā’u, šaddû’a, ‘mountain inhabitant’), or as ‘El of the field’, connecting it with Hebrew śādeh ‘field’. It is a disadvantage to the latter understanding that the Hebrew word for ‘field’ has ś, whereas Shaddai has š. (Day, 32f)

This same god appears among the Hurrians and Amorites:

Amorite states = Yamhad, Qatna, Mari, Andarig, Babylon and Eshnunna c. 1764 BC (Wikipedia)

Cross observes that in a Hurrian hymn El is described as ‘El, the one of the mountain‘ . . . . He also notes that an epithet resembling ‘ēl-šadday, namely, bêl šadêlord of the mountain‘ is employed of the Amorite deity called Amurru; judging from such facts as that this deity is also called Ilu-Amurru and has a liaison with Ašratum, the counterpart of Athirat (Asherah), El’s consort, Cross suggests that Amurru is to be regarded as the Amorite El. (Day, 33)

There is a “Balaam text”, the Deir Alla inscription, from Jordan:

This is a detail of the so-called “Bal’am Text” (also Balaam Inscription) which was discovered in 1967 CE at Tell Deir Alla, in modern-day Balqa Governorate, Jordan. It was written in around 800 BCE. It was written in black and red ink on wall plaster. (World History Encyclopedia)

Interestingly, in the Deir ‘Allā inscription, 1.5-6 we read,

I will tell you what the Shadda[yyin have done]. Now come, see the works of the gods! The gods gathered together;
the Shaddayyin took their places as the assembly.

In both sentences it is most natural to take the Shaddayyin (šdyn) and the gods (‘lhn) as parallel terms referring to the same deities, who constituted the divine assembly. Logically, El, the supreme deity, who also features in the text (1.2; II.6) would therefore be Shaddai par excellence. Since, moreover, this epithet is here applied to the gods in their role as members of the divine assembly, which characteristically met on a mountain, the meaning ‘mountain ones’ seems very appropriate, much more so than ‘those of the field’. (Day, 33 – my formatting)

El Olam

Abraham planted a tamarisk tree in Beersheba, and there he called on the name of the LORD, El Olam (Gen 21:33)

It seems inherently plausible that we have an Old Testament allusion related to El’s being an aged deity in Gen. 21.33, where the patriarchal deity at Beer-sheba is called El-Olam, ‘El, the Eternal One’, which may possibly have meant originally ‘El, the Ancient One’ . . . . Probably El-Olam was the local Canaanite god of Beer-sheba . . . . (Day, 19)

A Canaanite tablet proclaims ‘El is “eternal”, translating “olam”:

Indeed our creator is eternal [= ‘ôlam]
Indeed ageless he who formed us.

El (mythology.net)

Another series of epithets describe ‘El as the “ancient one” or the “eternal one” with grey beard and concomitant wisdom. One is cited above. In another Asherah speaks of a decree of ‘El as follows:

Thy decree O ‘El is wise,
Wise unto eternity [= ‘ôlami],
A life of fortune thy decree.

In the same context Lady Asherah addresses ‘El:

….
Thou art great O ‘El, verily Thou art wise
Thy hoary beard indeed instructs Thee.

(Cross, 16)

We are reminded of the Ancient of Days in Daniel 7 who sits on his throne in judgement when another god “like a man” comes riding on clouds  (Baal was the rider of storm clouds who defeated the beasts of the sea) to be given the rule over the earth.

Olam can be used alone to refer to El. Cross cites and comments on a Phoenician incantation:

The Eternal One has made a covenant oath with us,
Asherah has made (a pact) with us.

The formulaic juxtaposition of ‘Ēl’s consort Asherah with ‘Ôlām . . . argues strongly for the identification of ‘Ôlām as an appellation or cult name of ‘Ēl. The two supreme gods are named and then follows:

And all the sons of El,
And the great of the council of all the Holy Ones.
With oaths of Heaven and Ancient Earth,
With oaths of Ba’l, lord of earth,
With oaths of Ḥawrān whose word is true,
And his seven concubines,
And Ba’l Qudš’ eight wives. (Cross, 17f)

Olam appears in a later (early fifth century BCE) Phoenician account of the origins of the gods as the first god perceptible to human intellect — as we learn from the Christian-era Damascius:

Phoenician mythology according to Mochos. Aither was the first, and Aer; these are the two same principles from which was begotten Oulomos [= Olam] the (first) deity that intellect can perceive, and he, I think, is unmixed mind. . . . This Oulomos himself is the mind that may be intelligible. (from Azize, 219)

Azize also turns back to Cross where he writes:

The name ‘Ôlām also appears in the Phoenician theogony of Moschos reported by Damascius, in the late Phoenician form transliterated into Greek: oulōm(os). Its context strongly suggests, however, that it applies not to a god of the cult such as ‘Ēl, but to one of the old gods belonging to the abstract theogonic pairs. This would equate Moschos’ oulōmos with Philo Byblius’ Aiōn of the pair Aiōn and Protogonos, and, of course, the Aiōn(s) of later Gnosticism.

We also find the epithet ‘ôlām applied to the “old god” Earth in the theogonic pair: “Heaven and Eternal Earth.” (Cross, 18)

Going back to the fifteenth century BCE we have Proto-Canaanite inscriptions in Sinai that point to an El cult in south-west Palestine and identify El Olam with the Egyptian god Ptah, the Egyptian “lord of eternity” (Cross, 18f).

The consort of ‘Ēl, Canaanite and Egyptian Qudšu, whose other names included ‘Aṭirāt yammi, “she who treads on Sea,” and ‘Ēlat, also is well documented in the south. (Cross, 20)

Finally,

In the case of ‘Ēl ‘ôlām, “the god of eternity” or “the ancient god,” the evidence, in our view, is overwhelming to identify the epithet as an epithet of ‘Ēl. This is the source of Yahweh’s epithets “the ancient one” or “the ancient of days,” as well as the biblical and Ugaritic epithet malk ‘ôlām [eternal king] . . . At Ugarit and in the Punic world, ‘Ēl is the “old one” or “ancient one” par excellence: ‘ôlām, gerōn, senex, saeculum, he of the grey beard, he of eternal wisdom.

. . . . ‘Ēl ‘ôlām is an “executive deity,” a deity of the cult, namely the cultus of the (‘Ēl) shrine at Beersheba. (Cross, 50)

El Elyon

Elyon means “Most High”, hence El-Elyon is God Most High according to Day (1985, 129) though in the view of Cross,

The title theoretically could mean “the god ‘Ēlyōn, creator of (heaven and) earth,” or “‘Ēl, Most High, creator …,” or ‘Ēl ‘Ēlyōn, creator …” (that is, a double divine name). (Cross, 50)

Then Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine. He was priest of God Most High, 19and he blessed Abram, saying,

“Blessed be Abram by El Elyon,
Creator of heaven and earth.
20And praise be to El Elyon,
who delivered your enemies into your hand.”

. . . 22 But Abram said to the king of Sodom, “With raised hand I have sworn an oath to the Lord, El Elyon, Creator of heaven and earth (Gen 14:18-20,22 — “to the Lord” translates “to Yahweh” but Cross notes that these words were not part of the original text according to comparisons of various manuscripts.)

[In] Gen. 14.19, 22, ‘El-Elyon, creator of heaven and earth’, . . . is depicted as the pre-Israelite, Jebusite god of Jerusalem. Elyon also occurs elsewhere as a divine name or epithet a number of other times in the Old Testament (e.g. Num. 24.16; Deut. 32.8; Ps. 18.14 [ET 13], 46.5 [ET4], 78.17, 35, 56, 82.6, 87.5; Isa. 14.14; Dan. 7.22, 25, 27). There is dispute as to whether Elyon was originally the same deity as El or not. Philo of Byblos (c. 100 CE) depicts Elioun, as he calls him, as a separate god from El. Interestingly, he refers to Elioun (Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 1.10.15) as the father of Heaven (Ouranos) and Earth (Ge), which is reminiscent of the creator god El, and also strongly supports the idea that the reference to El-Elyon as ‘Creator of heaven and earth’ in Gen. 14.19. 22 is an authentic reminiscence of the Canaanite deity, and not simply invention. Prima facie the eighth-century BCE Aramaic Sefire treaty also represents Elyon as a distinct deity from El, since ‘El and Elyon’ occur together . . . (Day, 20f)

Day concludes that El Elyon is a separate god from El, but El-like. Cross, however, leans towards Elyon being an epithet of El, the creator god of the Canaanites, and thus identical with El.

Sefire inscription – images from http://archive.org/details/aramaicinscripti0000fitz

Yahweh

Continue reading “When Yahweh was at Peace with Other Gods — [Biblical Creation Accounts/Plato’s Timaeus-Critias – 7e]”


2023-02-09

Table of Nations and other Post Flood events — [Biblical Creation Accounts/Plato’s Timaeus-Critias – 7d]

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

With thanks to Taylor & Francis (Routledge) for the review copy

The survival of humans and animals in an ark owes more to Mesopotamian than Greek antecedents, but the division of the known world into 70 nations in Genesis 10 follows Greek patterns of the genealogical organization of nations descending from eponymous founders . . . (Gmirkin, 230)

The Table of Nations

Once again Gmirkin detects a Greek-like interest in scientific thought of the day. (Compare earlier posts focused on the scientific interests underlying the creation chapter.)

The writings of the philosopher Anaximander of Miletus included the book Genealogies, which cataloged nations and migrations of peoples, supplementary to his creation of the first map of the world. (Gmirkin, 232)

Anaximander’s map of the inhabited world (Naddaf, 111)
Genesis 10, the “Table of Nations”, describes the post-flood division of the earth among (as traditionally acknowledged) 70 nations.

Compare Deuteronomy 32:8-9 that in its original wording (as established in part by reference to the Dead Sea Scrolls) says Yahweh (YHWH) was one of a host of lesser gods who was assigned a particular nation to possess:

When the Most High apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God; The Lord’s (Yahweh’s) own portion was his people, Jacob his allotted share.

The number of 70 nations may have derived from a Canaanite tradition that said the consort of the “most high god” (El) had 70 children.

At Ugarit we read in the Baal myth of ‘the seventy sons of Asherah (Athirat)’ (šb’m. bn. ‘atrt, KTU2 1.4.VI.46). Since Asherah was El’s consort, this therefore implies that El’s sons were seventy in number. (Day, 23)

Each nation acknowledged its own god(s):

Babylon (Bel-Marduk, Nebo, Tammuz), Mizraim or Egypt (the Queen of Heaven), the Canaanites (Baal and Asherah), the Arameans (Hadad) and Sidon (Ashtoreth). Later in Genesis we encounter other nations whose gods appear in later biblical books: the Philistines (Dagon), Moab (Chemosh) and Ammon (Molech or Milcom). (Gmirkin, 231)

Recall that Plato portrayed the primeval world as various localities divided up among the gods, the gods ruling the people assigned to them (or those they created) in their respective regions.

Also — though Gmirkin does not refer to the event in this chapter (he had raised it in another context earlier)  — compare the division of the cosmos among three divine brothers.

There are three of us Brothers, all Sons of Cronos and Rhea: Zeus, myself [Poseidon], and Hades the King of the Dead. Each of us was given his own domain when the world was divided into three parts. We cast lots, . . . (Homer, Iliad, 15. …) see below for a discussion of the relevance to Genesis.

I add these other possible links to Greek myth here to reinforce the case for the Hellenistic sources for the Bible. Gmirkin’s work, as the title itself makes clear, is primarily addressing the case for Plato’s Timaeus and its companion composition Critias lying behind Genesis 2-11.

 

Given the monotheism of the Bible, we expect to read that all founders are human.

Gmirkin does not discuss in this volume other studies that suggest the mythical origins behind the biblical account of Noah cursing Canaan, son of his youngest son, for “seeing” him naked when he was drunk:

Noah’s interactions with his sons, and how their offspring are thought to become progenitors for all humankind, may be based upon myths in which the main characters were originally gods, an instance of Euhemerism. Like Euhemerus, Israelite authors could interpret the gods acting in the primeval myths of other cultures as really having been “illustrious humans, later idealized and worshiped as gods.” (Louden, 87f)

The Bible itself takes the same road [as the Greek philosopher Euhemerus], as humans replaced the gods of Greek mythology. (Wajdenbaum, 108)

And

While these two mythic types [see adjacent column] are extant in several different traditions, the versions in Genesis 9, though highly truncated, not only seem closest to the forms the same two mythic types assume in Greek myth but also correspond in four particulars absent from the other known versions:

      • the corresponding names, Iapetos/Japheth;
      • the altered sequence given of the punished sons;
      • the connection with the eponymic Ion/Javan;
      • and the closely corresponding wordplays (yapt/Yepet, Τιτήνας/τιταίvoντας). (Louden, 87f – my formatting)

Great Ouranos [=Heaven] came, bringing on night, and upon Gaia =Earth] he lay, wanting love and fully extended; his son, [=Cronos] from ambush, reached out with his left hand and with his right hand took the huge sickle, long with jagged teeth, and quickly severed his own father’s genitals (Hesiod, Theogony, 176ff]

Plato thought that such a scandalous story should be censored. . . (Plato, Rep. 377 b). It seems likely that the biblical writer recycled that story but modified the detail of Cronos castrating his father into Ham seeing his father naked; it is most noteworthy that some Jewish midrashim interpret Ham’s deed as an actual castration. . . . (Wajdenbaum, 108)

Now behind Genesis there seems to lie a story in which Noah’s sons did more than see him naked: Gen 9:24 “When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his young son had done to him …” What can this have been but castrating him? The association of Iapetus with Kronos, and hence with the castration of Ouranos, suggests that he is the same figure as Japheth youngest son of Noah. (Brown, cited by Louden, 87)

And

I suggest, then, that to connect the Flood myth with stories set in subsequent eras, Israelite tradition utilized a combination of two common types of myth set in primeval times: one in which intergenerational conflict among gods resulted in a son taking power by castrating his father, the former king of the gods; and another in which three brother gods draw lots to determine their own portions of rule and to establish hierarchical relations between themselves.  (Louden, 87)

See also What Did Ham Do to Noah?

See the previous post for the flood event being the beginning of historical time. Once, he [= Solon] said, he wanted to draw them into a discussion of ancient history, so he launched into an account of the earliest events known here: he began to talk about Phoroneus, who is said to have been the first man, and Niobe; he told the story of the survival of Deucalion and Pyrrha after the flood, and the tales of their descendants; and he tried, by mentioning the years generation by generation, to arrive at a figure for how long ago the events he was talking about had taken place. (Timaeus 22a-b)

Genesis 10:1-32

Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood.

The sons of Japheth; Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras. And the sons of Gomer; Ashkenaz, and Riphath, and Togarmah. And the sons of Javan; Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim. By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations.

And the sons of Ham; Cush, and Mizraim, and Phut, and Canaan. And the sons of Cush; Seba, and Havilah, and Sabtah, and Raamah, and Sabtechah: and the sons of Raamah; Sheba, and Dedan. . . . And Mizraim begat Ludim, and Anamim, and Lehabim, and Naphtuhim, And Pathrusim, and Casluhim, (out of whom came Philistim,) and Caphtorim. And Canaan begat Sidon his first born, and Heth, And the Jebusite, and the Amorite, and the Girgasite, And the Hivite, and the Arkite, and the Sinite, And the Arvadite, and the Zemarite, and the Hamathite: and afterward were the families of the Canaanites spread abroad.

19 And the border of the Canaanites was from Sidon, as thou comest to Gerar, unto Gaza; as thou goest, unto Sodom, and Gomorrah, and Admah, and Zeboim, even unto Lasha.

20 These are the sons of Ham, after their families, after their tongues, in their countries, and in their nations.

21 Unto Shem also, the father of all the children of Eber, the brother of Japheth the elder, even to him were children born. The children of Shem; Elam, and Asshur, and Arphaxad, and Lud, and Aram. And the children of Aram; Uz, and Hul, and Gether, and Mash. And Arphaxad begat Salah; and Salah begat Eber. And unto Eber were born two sons: the name of one was Peleg; for in his days was the earth divided; and his brother’s name was Joktan. And Joktan begat Almodad, and Sheleph, and Hazarmaveth, and Jerah, And Hadoram, and Uzal, and Diklah, And Obal, and Abimael, and Sheba, And Ophir, and Havilah, and Jobab: all these were the sons of Joktan.

30 And their dwelling was from Mesha, as thou goest unto Sephar a mount of the east.

31 These are the sons of Shem, after their families, after their tongues, in their lands, after their nations.

32 These are the families of the sons of Noah, after their generations, in their nations: and by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood.

While it is now widely acknowledged that the genealogical structure of Genesis, and especially the division of nations in Genesis 10, is broadly indebted to Greek antecedents . . . a specific indebtedness to Critias and Timaeus has generally escaped consideration. (Gmirkin, p. 232)

Critias 113e-114c

By copying this section of Critias below I do not intend it to be read as a direct hypotext for Genesis 10. Rather, what one finds in common with Genesis 10 is the cogently brief account covering the description of how an entire land was divided up, with geographic markers for verisimilitude, with geographic names taken from founding figures, and other details you may discern for yourself:

[Poseidon] fathered and reared five pairs of twin sons. Then he divided the island of Atlantis into ten parts.

He gave the firstborn of the eldest twins his mother’s home and the plot of land around it, which was larger and more fertile than anywhere else, and made him king of all his brothers, while giving each of the others many subjects and plenty of land to rule over.

He named all his sons. To the eldest, the king, he gave the name from which the names of the whole island and of the ocean are derived — that is, the ocean was called the Atlantic because the name of the first king was Atlas.

To his twin, the one who was born next, who was assigned the edge of the island which is closest to the Pillars of Heracles and faces the land which is now called the territory of Gadeira after him, he gave a name which in Greek would be Eumelus, though in the local language it was Gadeirus, and so this must be the origin of the name of Gadeira.

He called the next pair of twins Ampheres and Evaemon;

he named the elder of the third pair Mneseus and the younger one Autochthon;

of the fourth pair, the eldest was called Elasippus and the younger one Mestor;

in the case of the fifth pair, he called the firstborn Azaes and the second-born Diaprepes.

So all his sons and their descendants lived there for many generations, and in addition to ruling over numerous other islands in the ocean, they also, as I said before, governed all the land this side of the Pillars of Heracles up to Egypt and Etruria.

 

I omitted a section in the above chapter. The reason, again, is to cast an eye beyond what Gmirkin discusses and to note other Greek influence. Here we have a vignette breaking into a genealogy that reminds us of a famous Greek poetic genealogy of heroes who were born from gods.

The genealogies of the Old Testament, especially the Book of Genesis, are much more closely comparable to the Hesiodic ones [than to Mesopotamian lists], both in their multilinearity and in their national and international scope. (West, 13)

And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord: wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord. And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar. Out of that land went forth Asshur, and builded Nineveh, and the city Rehoboth, and Calah, And Resen between Nineveh and Calah: the same is a great city.

The [Greek] genealogies are not homogeneous. They contain folktale, fiction, and saga in very varying proportions. These variations reflect the different sorts of material that were available in different regions for the construction of genealogies. (West, 137)

Fragments from Hesiod’s genealogy of founding Greek heroes:

Of mortals who would have dared to fight him with the spear and charge against him, save only Heracles, the great-hearted offspring of Alcaeus? Such an one was strong Meleager loved of Ares [= the god of war], the golden-haired, dear son of Oeneus and Althaea. From his fierce eyes there shone forth portentous fire: and once in high Calydon he slew the destroying beast, the fierce wild boar with gleaming tusks. In war and in dread strife no man of the heroes dared to face him and to approach and fight with him when he appeared in the forefront. But he was slain by the hands and arrows of Apollo, while he was fighting with the Curetes for pleasant Calydon. (fr 98 )

Aloiadae. Hesiod said that they were sons of Aloeus, — called so after him, — and of Iphimedea, but in reality sons of Poseidon and Iphimedea, and that Alus a city of Aetolia was founded by their father. (fr6 )

Abraham at War

The story of Abram’s military defeat of the coalition of Mesopotamian kings in Genesis 14 has motif and themes that are highly reminiscent of the conflict between Athens and Atlantis in Critias. The kings of Atlantis were portrayed as ruling righteously within their borders many years, until they engaged in a war of territorial aggression to enslave the peoples within the Mediterranean (Timaeus 24e, 25b; Critias 120d, 121b; cf. Gen 14:1-3). All would have been lost (Timaeus 25b-c; cf. Gen 14:4—12) had not the Athenians valiantly engaged the Atlantians in war and defeated them (Timaeus 25c; Critias 112e; cf. Gen 14:13-15). Abram similarly rose to the occasion, leading a small band that included Amorite allies (Gen 14:13-14) to rescue his nephew Lot from slavery, defeat the unjust invaders and liberate the local kings, much as the Athenians took the leadership of the Hellenes and defeated the invading forces of the Atlantians against overwhelming odds, liberating Egypt and the Greek world (Timaeus 25b-c). (Gmirkin, 232)

Abraham is presented as a national exemplar of righteousness and courage in war just as the Athenians were models worthy of their patron goddess of wisdom and courage in war, Athena.

A few pages later Gmirkin proposes that Joshua’s conquests of the Promised Land had a similar literary purpose.

Sodom and Gomorrah

There are many echoes of Plato’s Critias:

    • Yahweh’s portrayal as a terrestrial deity who dined and counseled with Abraham and Sarah (Genesis 18);
    • the ethical decline of the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen 18:20; 19:4-13), precipitating judgment from God (cf. Critias 121 b-c);
    • a cataclysm of fire from heaven (Gen 19:24-29; cf. Timaeus 22c-d);
    • the saving of a righteous few (Gen 18:17-33; 19:14-23);
    • and the re-founding of civilization (Gen 19:30-38, locally, in Moab and Ammon).

One also sees echoes of the catastrophe that ended the pre-flood world:

    • the evocative comparison of the Jordan plain with the Garden of Eden (Gen 13:10);
    • the wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen 18:20; 19:4-13; cf. Gen 6:6-7);
    • the survival of a righteous few (Gen 19:14-23; cf. 6:14-18; 7:1; 9:1);
    • new tribes descending from the survivors of the cataclysm, (Gen 19:31-38; cf. Genesis 10).

These echoes point to the re-use of story motifs from Timaeus-Critias in both the biblical flood story and the story of Lot’s rescue from Sodom. (Gmirkin, 233, my formatting)


Day, John. Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan. London ; New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2002.

Gmirkin, Russell E. Plato’s Timaeus and the Biblical Creation Accounts: Cosmic Monotheism and Terrestrial Polytheism in the Primordial History. Abingdon, Oxon New York, NY: Routledge, 2022.

Naddaf, Gerard. The Greek Concept of Nature. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006.

Wajdenbaum, Philippe. Argonauts of the Desert: Structural Analysis of the Hebrew Bible. London ; Oakville: Equinox, 2011.

Louden, Bruce. Greek Myth and the Bible. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge, 2018.

West, M. L. The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women: Its Nature, Structure, and Origins. Oxford Oxfordshire : New York: OUP Oxford, 1985.

Hesiod. Theogony. Translated by Richard S. Caldwell. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 2015.

Hesiod. “Hesiod, Catalogues of Women Fragments.” Theoi Classical Texts Library. Accessed January 19, 2023. https://www.theoi.com/Text/HesiodCatalogues.html.

Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Émile Victor Rieu. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1950.