Like many Americans, I’m still stunned about the 2024 election. In fact, it still feels a bit unreal. The morning after, I decided to suspend my Facebook and Threads accounts for mental health reasons. Doom-scrolling for countless hours will hurt your brain. But enough of that.
Over the past few years, I’ve been studying areas of history, historiography, and the philosophy of history not normally taught in U.S. universities. In particular, I’m focusing on the longue durée. You’ll sometimes see this perspective used “safely” with regard to geography and climate. However, political historians in my country tend to ignore it, chiefly because too many of its practitioners rely on the analysis of Marxian class structures and how they play out over time. Continue reading “How Did We Get Here? Part 1”
In the previous post I spoke of the historian’s absolute confidence — of their certainty, of no room for doubt — in the basic events of the past. I don’t know how anyone can seriously think there might be even the slightest room for doubt that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and overran Singapore shortly afterwards, for example. But historians are not interested in simply documenting past events. That’s not chiefly what they do. Not most of the time. Or certainly not all that they do.
There are many ways to write history but I will be speaking about the approach well known to us all — the narrative or story approach to describing past events.
It is not the facticity of the events that is in question
It is at this narrative level where problems and disagreements, doubts and uncertainties, among historians arise.
Consider the difference in the following statements about event of Japan bombing Pearl Harbor:
In a “Day of Infamy” Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, dragging the U.S. into war.
The US suddenly cut off nearly all of Japan’s oil supply, thus compelling Japan to take the oil fields in Borneo; but first it needed to make a preventive strike on the fleet at Pearl Harbor.
In both statements the raw events are the same. There is no dispute about any of the specific events mentioned. The “facts” themselves are certain. No probability analysis is required to determine how “probably true” any of the details are. But we have two very different stories, two very different histories, all because of the way the events have been selected from the masses of other details that could have been added to both stories, and because of the way those selected events are woven together and the innuendo in which they are embedded.
That’s where the debates of historians centre. That’s where historians, for all the pains they endure sifting through the masses of data, selecting particular items they think to be most relevant, and trying to weave them into a story that they hope will be worthwhile for others to read — that’s where the real historical work happens. It is not about assessing the probabilities that this or that event actually happened. The groundwork of getting the clearly established “facts” or events is a given. (I am speaking generally, not about those special occasions where new documents are discovered and in need of verification or where some isolated point is in dispute.)
Witness the History Wars
The book that opened Australia’s History Wars
Last time I referred to History Wars. When one side launches a salvo about, say, the good intentions of most of the pioneers and cites specific incidents to argue that very few indigenous people were mistreated directly or deliberately by white settlers, the historians on the other side might grant some of those points but pull out more newspaper stories and police records and archival material to supply the factual evidence that they expect to win the other side of the debate. The debates are about the meaning and interpretations of those recorded events. They may supply evidence to demonstrate that some of the details are exaggerated or down-played. But very rarely, as far as I am aware, do historians spend time trying to assess the probability that X or Y happened in the first place.
Undeniability of certain events
Richard Carrier does acknowledge that some of our knowledge is undeniable and not subject to any shadow of room for any doubt:
The only exception would be immediate experiences that at their most basic level are undeniable (e.g., that you see words in front of you at this very moment, or that “Caesar was immortal and Brutus killed him” is logically impossible). . . . Therefore, because we only have finite knowledge and are not infallible, apart from obviously undeniable things, some probability always remains that we are mistaken or misinformed or misled.
and
. . . . apart from the undeniables of immediate experience, all facts are theoretical . . .
Of course “historical facts” do include direct uninterpreted experience . . . .
(Carrier 25, 298, 302. My comment: Few historians would say that even direct experience is ever “uninterpreted” or that all knowledge that does not come to us from direct experience is necessarily “theoretical”.)
The war memorials, the war cemeteries, the plaques with honour rolls of the dead in countless school and club halls around the nation, the photographs, the memorabilia passed down through generations, — all of these and more tell us that the twentieth century world wars were not at any level (not even at an infinitesimally low level) “theoretical”. Those wars are not known by “immediate experience” to most people today. But those wars are “facts of history” that are undeniable. (Again, I am speaking generally. Of course we may discuss historical events as theoretical events for other reasons and in other contexts, but I am addressing more fundamental bread and butter issues here.)
When we examine why those wars are undeniable, we find certain kinds of evidence that gives us certainty. The same applies to other events in other times. The difference will be that the further back we travel, generally speaking, the more scarce various types of evidence become. But historians still look for the same kinds of evidence about the remote past as they find for more recent events. Naturally questions of authenticity arise for different types of sources. But that even applies in modern times. One famous historian who specialized in the study of Hitler, Hugh Trevor-Roper, was initially deceived by the discovery of the Hitler Diaries that turned out to be forgeries. Historians are well aware of the possibility of fraud and the difference between fact and fiction when examining different kinds of evidence. But that doesn’t reduce all their knowledge of “what events happened” to a “theoretical” status along with some sense that they think they could be “possibly, even if only very very slightly, mistaken”).
So when Richard Carrier writes . . .
Most of what we can say, especially about ancient history, is “maybe” or “probably”—not “definitely.” There is obviously more than one degree of certainty. Some things we are more sure of than others, and some things we are only barely sure of at all. Hence, especially in history, and even more so in ancient history, confidence must often be measured in relative degrees of certainty, and not in black-and-white terms of only “true” and “false.”
(Carrier 23)
. . . I might be wrong, but I suspect that not even Richard Carrier entertains for a moment even the slightest theoretical possibility that there was no Roman empire in existence two thousand years ago.
Not even postmodernists view historical events as “theoretically probable”
One might expect theoretical doubts about “facts” of specific events in the past among postmodernist historians. But no, not even postmodernist historians go as far as Carrier does in the above quotations. In the words of a Professor of Religious and Cultural History at the University of Dundee, Callum Brown,
Any postmodernist historian is not being a postmodernist all of the time. Like every historian, the postmodernist must conduct empirical research, establishing that events occurred and the order of them, checking sources that verify the facts of the case, and making decisions of judgement (balance of probabilities may be the best term) where absolute certainty is not possible. . . .
Historians are probably the least likely academics to preface their books with theoretical explanation.
(Brown, 10f. My comment: note the role of probability applies to exceptional cases.)
Here is how Brown presents “a good historian”:
To be a good historian, it is thought you have to be good in empiricist method, and be seen to have a full grasp of facts. This involves the application of scholarship skills to a series of questions. These occur on different levels. On the upper level are the big questions of: What happened, when did it happen, and why did it happen? At the second level of scholarship, the historian answers these questions by asking: What is the existing state of historical knowledge? And what hypotheses best fit the known facts? At the third level, the historian tests the existing state of knowledge by locating new documents and other sources, or re -evaluating already known ones, checking their date and place of origin, their authorship, their destiny and circulation, and how these discoveries alter the existing state of understanding. Next and last, the historian writes a report or a narrative of the issue, replete with edited evidence and how to interpret it, properly sourced with footnotes, and publishes this in book or article form to be checked by peer review by other historians. If after being read by other historians the published account alters in some degree the existing state of knowledge, it acquires a degree of acceptance that other scholars then come along to challenge and re-assess, in turn to repeat the process of investigation in an endless cycle of moving knowledge forward.
This method of doing History is broadly what all academic and professional historians aspire to the world over.
(Brown 21f)
A time to be certain, a time to doubt
There is a difference between establishing facts beyond doubt on the one hand and interpreting those facts and weaving them into a bigger narrative on the other. So there is a place for doubt and debate among historians but it is rarely over whether or not a particular event at some level actually happened. Again, keeping with postmodernists (persons many would assume to “doubt everything, even facts”), we see that even they hew to “getting the basic facts right”, leaving no room for doubt in that area:
The postmodernist critic distinguishes three different aspects of empiricism. These are empiricism as an event, empiricism as a method, and empiricism as a philosophy of knowledge. To each of these, the postmodernist has different attitudes.
Empiricism as an event is the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is an event in the History of ideas within which empiricist method and empiricism as a philosophy of knowledge originated. . . .
Empiricism as a method is the second aspect distinguished by the post modernist. This is the method by which empiricism defines knowledge. Empiricism argues that knowledge is acquired through an apparatus of human observation, experience, testing of authenticity, verification, corroboration and presentation for judgement (or peer review) by others in a value-free form. Even if the consequences of empiricism are challenged, postmodernists most certainly do not reject empiricist methods. Like all historians, the postmodernist needs empiricist method for the essential skills, and any student of History must learn and deploy them.
The postmodernist distinguishes a third aspect of empiricism, however – empiricism as a philosophy of knowledge. And this is seen as being full of problems. In the work of many academics across science and non science disciplines, there is an implicit notion that empiricism constitutes all that is necessary to knowledge – that it is a complete system of knowledge with no other connections. This notion is that human knowledge acquisition is nothing more than empiricism, and needs nothing more than this for the advancement of each discipline. In the case of History, the writing of the past has been seen by some empiricists as being satisfactorily embraced by empiricist method.
(Brown 21-25)
Historians who go beyond “getting the facts right beyond doubt” and view all their historical work as “getting even the narratives right” are not in fashion today:
One such empiricist historian was Geoffrey Elton, a leading right-wing historian, who regarded empiricism as the only worthwhile basis of professional training in the History discipline. . . . His purist empiricist position brought him to dispute with other historians over decades – including non-postmodernists.
(Brown 25)
Callum Brown discusses the difference between undoubted (we can say “undoubtable”) events and the way historians put them together to tell a story. What we are calling an “historical event” (I prefer the term “event” to “fact”) in this post (e.g. the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor) is “something that happened . . . the event occurred . . .” Where historians differ is how they put those events together to each tell their own distinctive account.
Once an event of the past is described, it becomes something else — it becomes a narrative. . . . There is never any neutrality in a story.
(Brown 28f)
Brown concludes his discussion by leaving the reader in no doubt about the absolute certainty of the past events investigated by the historian:
Empiricism is the basic method in all scholarship. It bears endless repetition that the empiricist skills of verification, close textual attention, proper and rational sourcing, referencing and so on, remain absolutely central to all that historical scholarship does, whether postmodernist or not. In this regard, the Enlightenment created the method of the modern historian.
But empirical method is one thing. The other is the empiricist philosophy of knowledge, or modernism, and that most certainly is challenged . Empiricism gives the illusion of delivering fact, truth and reality, by slipping from the event to a human narrative that describes the event.
(Brown 30)
But does not certainty breed arrogance?
But doesn’t certainty breed arrogance? Is not there an admirable and necessary humility in doubt? Yes, but no one can be arrogant by claiming to know the world is round. The kind of certainty that engenders arrogance is the certainty of opinion and moral perspective — of conviction of holding “The Truth”. Brown calls upon the words of Friedrich Nietzsche to make the point that doubt belongs in the way we tell stories, in the ways we interpret and understand the events of the past. It is not about the two world wars of the twentieth century or the ancient Roman empire to some theoretical status of which we can only be 99.99% certain.
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration, and which, after they have been in use for a long time, strike a people as firmly established, canonical, and binding: truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour, coins which, having lost their stamp, are now regarded as metal and no longer as coins.(Nietzsche, 1873)
Certainty emerges as a linguistic construction which, Nietzsche went on, ‘prompts a moral impulse’ to doubt the denier of certainty, to see in doubt the very basis of immorality. This is a massive irony. Nietzsche says doubt itself becomes superior to fact and moral certainty. This seems like craziness. It seems to be completely absurd and inverted in logic. It over turns everything we are trained to believe as students at school and in college. It may be difficult to grasp that doubt is superior to certainty. This is why postmodernism is truly revolutionary as a philosophical system of thought.
(Brown 30f)
Was the gingerbread vendor really kicked to death?
There are occasions, however, when historians do actually disagree over the factual status of an asserted event of the past. The historian Edward Carr once argued that a past event known to have happened only becomes a “historical event” when it is used by historians in their narratives.
At Stalybridge Wakes in 1850, a vendor of gingerbread, as the result of some petty dispute, was deliberately kicked to death by an angry mob. Is this a fact of history? A year ago I should unhesitatingly have said ‘no’. It was recorded by an eye-witness in some little known memoirs; but I had never seen it judged worthy of mention by any historian. A year ago Dr Kitson Clark cited it in his Ford lectures in Oxford. Does this make it into a historical fact? Not, I think, yet. Its present status, I suggest, is that it has been proposed for membership of the select club of historical facts. It now awaits a seconder and sponsors. It may be that in the course of the next few years we shall see this fact appearing first in footnotes, then in the text, of articles and books about nineteenth-century England, and that in twenty or thirty years’ time it may be a well-established historical fact. Alternatively, nobody may take it up, in which case it will relapse into the limbo of unhistorical facts about the past from which Dr Kitson Clark has gallantly attempted to rescue it. What will decide which of these two things will happen? It will depend, I think, on whether the thesis or interpretation in support of which Dr Kitson Clark cited this incident is accepted by other historians as valid and significant. Its status as a historical fact will turn on a question of interpretation. This element of interpretation enters into every fact of history.
(Carr 12)
Notice that Carr understood the event to have been factual because it was found in an eye-witness’s memoirs. He was discussing what he understood to be a real event, not a theoretical one. But another historian checked the source and raised doubts:
The likelihood of the gingerbread salesman’s unfortunate death being a historical fact in this sense is moderately but not overwhelmingly high because the reference Kitson Clark used for it was not a contemporary one, but a set of memoirs written long after the event, and memoirs are sometimes unreliable even where they are giving eyewitness accounts of happenings in the past. If I had been Kitson Clark, I should have looked for a contemporary document to verify my claim. It is for this reason, I think, not because it has not been widely quoted elsewhere (except in discussions of Carr’s What Is History?) that the status as a historical fact of the gingerbread sales man’s murder in 1850 must be regarded as still provisional, to say the least.
(Evans 66f)
Richard Evans is far from being a postmodernist historian. Note the kind of source he prefers to use to help establish the historicity of a person or event. It is a contemporary one. Not even a late memoir of recording personal reminiscences is considered as secure as a contemporary reference to the event. Let those who rely upon Josephus as a slam-dunk verification of the existence of Jesus take note of how historical research is undertaken in “non-biblical departments”.
Where probability lurks in history
Notice also that Evans did acknowledge a role probability (and its attendant humility) in historical studies:
No historians really believe in the absolute truth of what they are writing, simply in its probable truth, which they have done their utmost to establish by following the usual rules of evidence.
But that sentence should not be ripped from its context. Evans was specifically addressing the narratives historians write, the way they interpret the established events. Here is the context:
In similar vein to David Harlan, Ellen Somekawa and Elizabeth Smith argue that because “within whatever rules historians can articulate, all interpretations are equally valid,” it is necessary for historians to “shift the grounds for the assessment of integrity from the absolute or objective truth to the moral or political. That is,” they continue, “rather than believe in the absolute truth of what we are writing, we must believe in the moral or political position we are taking with it.” They add that they “reject the assumption that if we abandon our claim to objective truth we must be writing in bad faith (writing propaganda in the most pejorative sense of the word),” but they offer no reason to suppose why this should not be the case. In fact, of course, in classic postmodernist fashion they are caricaturing the position they are attacking by pushing it out to an extreme. No historians really believe in the absolute truth of what they are writing, simply in its probable truth, which they have done their utmost to establish by following the usual rules of evidence. In the end it simply isn’t true that two historical arguments which contradict each other are equally valid, that there is no means of deciding between them as history because they are necessarily based on different political and historical philosophies.
(Evans 188f)
Evans is disagreeing with claims that interpretations or understandings of historical events are all equally valid and the accusation that historians necessarily believe that those interpretations are “absolute truth”. Note further that Evans began his book with the following quotation, even comparing the fact-finding methods of historians to the work of astronomers, a comparison used by Carrier though with a quite different perspective (Proving History, p. 105). In what follows I cannot detect any sense that the “raw events” of the past are to be understood as theoretical knowledge with a minimum of some room for doubt about their historicity. Quite the opposite, in fact.
However much they might have agreed on the need for accuracy and truthfulness, historians down the ages have held widely differing views on the purposes to which these things were to be put and the way in which the facts they presented were to be explained. . . .
Ranke, Leopold von
. . . Ranke introduced into the study of modern history the methods that had recently been developed by philologists in the study of ancient and medieval literature to determine whether a text, say, of a Shakespeare play or of a medieval legend like the Nibelungenlied was true or corrupted by later interpolations, whether it was written by the author it was supposed to have been written by, and which of the available versions was the most reliable. Historians, argued Ranke, had to root out forgeries and falsifications from the record.They had to test documents on the basis of their internal consistency and their consistency with other documents originating at the same period. They had to stick to “primary sources,” eyewitness reports and what Ranke called the “purest, most immediate documents” which could be shown to have originated at the time under investigation, and avoid reliance on “secondary sources,” such as memoirs or later histories generated after the event. . . .
Ranke’s principles still form the basis for much historical research and teaching today. . . .
Whatever the means they use, historians still have to engage in the basic Rankean spadework of investigating the provenance of documents, of inquiring about the motives of those who wrote them, the circumstances in which they were written, and the ways in which they relate to other documents on the same subject. The perils which await them should they fail to do this are only too obvious. All these things have belonged to the basic training of historians since the nineteenth century, and rightly so. . . .
Skeptics who point to the fact that all sources are “biased” and conclude from this that historians are bound to be misled by them are as wide of the mark as politicians who imagine that future historians will take their memoirs on trust. Nor is there anything unusual in the fact that a modern discipline places such heavy reliance on principles developed more than a century and a half before: Chemistry, for example, still uses the periodic table of elements, while medical research continues to employ the mid-nineteenth century device of “Koch’s postulates” to prove that a microorganism is the carrier of a particular disease. These analogies with scientific method point up the fact that when source criticism was introduced into historical study, it, too, was regarded as a “scientific” technique. Its use legitimated history as an independent profession. . . .
The understanding of science which these claims implied was basically inductive. Out there, in the documents, lay the facts, waiting to be discovered by historians, just as the stars shone out there in the heavens, waiting to be discovered by astronomers; all historians had to do was apply the proper scientific method, eliminate their own personality from the investigation, and the facts would come to light. The object of research was thus to “fill in the gaps” in knowledge—a rationale that is still given as the basis for the vast majority of Ph.D. theses in history today.
(Evans 13-17)
Evans goes on to point out that even the pioneer of modern history himself, Leopold von Ranke, failed to produce a genuinely “objective history” despite his claims to be attempting to do so. Ranke failed to understand the subjectivity that enters when we seek to understand and use data in a narrative. For that reason his approach to historical knowledge (not his methods), known as historical positivism, has long since been discarded by most historians today. But as Evans reminds us, the spadework required to establish facts as certain remains with historians today. (Here we are entering another misconception I very often find among biblical historians: they all too frequently tend to equate discarded positivism with the methods of positivism!)
History is not the same as science
Contrast Carrier’s comparison of historical research with the historical method:
Geology and paleontology, for instance, are largely occupied with determining the past history of life on earth and of the earth itself, just as cosmology is mainly concerned with the past history of the universe as a whole. . . .
For example, we can document our testimony to seeing highly compressed rock on a mountaintop with extinct seashells embedded within it. But this information is only useful to us if we can infer from such observations (and others like it) that that rock used to be under the sea and thus has moved from where it once was, and that this rock has been under vast pressures over a great duration after those shells were deposited in it. . . . A particular pattern and sequence of layers in a rock formation can even confirm to us specific historical facts, such as exactly when a volcano erupted, a valley flooded, or a meteorite struck the earth thousands of miles away. . . .
History is the same. The historian looks at all the evidence that exists now and asks what could have brought that evidence into existence.
(Carrier, 46f)
Marx and Toynbee — both believed that they had discovered “laws” governing historical events
I have to disagree with Carrier here. No, history is not the same. The geologist is interpreting the rocks through a knowledge of physical laws and seeing how those laws have acted out in the past to shape our earth today. History is not the same.
Historians study human actions and few historians would agree today that the persons or events they study follow predictable laws. There was once a time when a good number of historians hoped or believed they could find laws at work in historical processes but generally speaking those days are gone. The one example of historical processes following laws that most of us have at least heard about is Marxism: the view that historical events were all manifestations of class struggle. (Another “history follows laws” approach that I was introduced to at high school was Toynbee’s “challenge and response” model of historical events.)
The reason history cannot predict the future is because “it”, or human societies are all different, events are never repeated, they are never the same. They are not governed by the (theoretical) laws of science as is the physical matter of the cosmos. We can predict outcomes only at the most general level and at that level it tells us nothing more than we already know about human behaviour.
In principle the methods of the historian may be the same as the bulk of those of a scientist and for that reason history is sometimes called a science or scientific, but few historians are trying to understand theoretical laws to explain events.
Continuing in the next post…..
Brown, Callum G. Postmodernism for Historians. Routledge, 2005.
Carr, Edward Hallet. What Is History? Vintage, 1967.
Carrier, Richard. Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Prometheus Books, 2012.
Evans, Richard J. In Defence of History. Norton, 1997.
It’s been a long while since I wrote about Jesus mythicism. I hope what I write now will present a slightly different and useful perspective.
Should not Christian apologists be thrilled with Richard Carrier’s widely known conclusion and welcome it:
In my estimation the odds Jesus existed are less than 1 in 12,000. . . .
There is only about a 0% to 33% chance Jesus existed.
(On the Historicity of Jesus, 600, 607)
Doesn’t that indicate that Jesus was a truly exceptional figure according to the best conclusions of the atheist scholar? Don’t believing Christians want Jesus to be unique, to be different from anyone else, to bring about an unlikely event by normal human standards? A 1 in 12,000 figure is surely bringing Jesus down too close to normality, isn’t it? Shouldn’t Jesus be a unique figure in history? So if historical tools as understood and used by Richard Carrier conclude that Jesus is not to be expected in the annals of normal human history and left no record comparable to the records of other mortals for historians to ponder, should not apologists take comfort from such findings?
I want to address what appears to me to be a widespread misconception about historical knowledge across various social media platforms and in some published works where this question is discussed.
Too often I hear that historians can never be absolutely certain about anything in the past and that they always, of necessity, can only speak of “what probably happened”. (When I speak of historians I have in mind the main body of the historical guild in history departments around the world. I am not talking about biblical scholars and theologians because their methods are very often quite different.)
So let’s begin with Part 1 of the question of probability in historical research. Richard Carrier is widely known for reducing the entire question of Jesus’ existence to a matter of probabilities. I agree with much of Carrier’s approach but I also disagree on some major points. A fundamental point on which I disagree with Carrier is the claim that the most a historian can say about any historical event is that it is “probably” true. Carrier writes:
All claims have a nonzero epistemic probability of being true, no matter how absurd they may be (unless they’re logically impossible or unintelligible), because we can always be wrong about anything. And that entails there is always a nonzero probability that we are wrong, no matter how small that probability is. And therefore there is always a converse of that probability, which is the probability that we are right (or would be right) to believe that claim. This holds even for many claims that are supposedly certain, such as the conclusions of logical or mathematical proofs. For there is always a nonzero probability that there is an error in that proof that we missed. Even if a thousand experts check the proof, there is still a nonzero probability that they all missed the same error. The probability of this is vanishingly small, but still never zero. Likewise, there is always a nonzero probability that we ourselves are mistaken about what those thousand experts concluded. And so on. The only exception would be immediate experiences that at their most basic level are undeniable (e.g., that you see words in front of you at this very moment, or that “Caesar was immortal and Brutus killed him” is logically impossible). But no substantial claim about history can ever be that basic. History is in the past and thus never in our immediate experience. And knowing what logically could or couldn’t have happened is not even close to knowing what did. Therefore, all empirical claims about history, no matter how certain, have a nonzero probability of being false, and no matter how absurd, have a nonzero probability of being true.
(Proving History, 24f – my bolding in all quotations)
A little further on Carrier raises again the exception of a “trivial” event like an “uninterpreted [direct personal] experience”:
The only exceptions I noted are claims about our direct uninterpreted experience (which are not historical facts) and the logically necessary and the logically impossible (which are not empirical facts).17 Everything else has some epistemic probability of being true or false.
17. Of course “historical facts” do include direct uninterpreted experience, because all observations of data and of logical and mathematical relations reduce to that, but no fact of history consists solely of that; and “the logically necessary and the logically impossible” are empirical facts in the trivial sense that they can be empirically observed, and empirical propositions depend on them, and logical facts are ultimately facts of the universe (in some fashion or other), but these are not empirical facts in the same sense as historical facts, because we cannot ascertain what happened in the past solely by ruminating on logical necessities or impossibilities. Logical facts are thus traditionally called analytical facts, in contrast to empirical facts. Some propositions might combine elements of both, but insofar as a proposition is at all empirical, it is not solely analytical (and thus has some nonzero epistemic probability of being true or false), and insofar as it is solely analytical, it is not relevantly empirical (and thus cannot affirm what happened in the past, but only what could or couldn’t have).
(Proving History, 62, 302)
And again, in pointing out that historians can never be absolutely certain about any “substantive claim”,
Such certainty for us is logically impossible (at least for all substantive claims about history . . . )
(Proving History, 329)
Not even God can avoid reducing all knowledge of the past to “what probably happened”:
A confidence level of 100% is mathematically and logically impossible, as we never have access to 100% of all information, i.e., we’re not omniscient, and as Gödel proved, no one can be, for it’s logically necessary that there will always be things we won’t know, even if we’re God . . .
I have to disagree. We don’t need “100% of all information” or to be “omniscient” in order to be absolutely certain about certain facts of the past. Historians are indeed certain about basic facts. We know for a fact that the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor a few years before that event, that Europeans migrated to and settled in the Americas, Africa, Australasia in the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, that King John signed the Magna Carter in 1215, that Rome once ruled the Mediterranean, that the Jerusalem temple was destroyed in 70 CE.
Historical events are unique and unrepeatable and our knowledge of many of them can often be absolutely certain. Witness the “History Wars” around the world — the Americas, India, Australia. In Australia, for instance, the arguments over the killing of aborigines and removing children from their families is not about what “probably” happened but what the evidence tells us did actually happen — with no room for any doubt at all. The 1992 Holocaust trial of David Irving was not about what probably happened but what can be known as an indisputable fact to have happened.
To be certain about such events does not require us to possess 100% of all the related information. Further, being certain about such events does not mean we are certain about all the details. There are grey areas where probability does enter the picture but the core events themselves cannot be legitimately doubted.
* The quoted phrases are from Hindess, Barry, and Paul Q. Hirst. Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, page 2, in reference to Willer & Willer’s book, Systematic Empiricism: Critique of a Pseudo-Science.
A “brilliant and devastating critique”* of the probability approach to historical facts (in fact to the entire area of theoretical empiricism that once typically “characterised the academic social sciences and history”) was published in the 1972 book Systematic Empiricism: Critique of a Pseudo-Science by David and Judith Willer. The chapter that specifically addresses probability in this context was written by the sociologist Dr Cesar Hernandez-Cela. Here is what he says about probability in the context being discussed in this post:
A relative frequency is a probability only if the number of events taken into account is infinite. But when the number of instances is finite . . . the ratio is a relative frequency but not a probability. . . . . A relative frequency is a description, but a probability is a calculation. Although we may calculate a theoretical probability value of 1/2 for a universe in which A and B are equally represented when the number of instances approaches infinity, the most that can be said about the number of heads that will turn up when tossing a coin twenty times is that there will be a particular frequency which is unknown until we toss the coin. In other words, the assignment of a value of 1/2 simply because the coin has two sides is an error because we do not know that each side will be equally represented in any empirical case. Equal representation in probability is a mathematical assumption which is violated in finite empirical cases. . . . We may instead find that tossing a die results in a successive run of fives . . . .
The theory of probability . . . can be used in scientific theories, but it cannot be used to associate observables. Sociological statistical procedures are concerned with observables and therefore violate the conditions under which probability calculations may be legitimately used. But they are so often used that they are frequently accepted (in spite of their obvious absurdity) without question. We are told that the probability of rain tomorrow is 60 percent when, in fact, it will either rain or it will not. Such statements are unjustified, wrong, and misleading.
(Systematic Empiricism, 97f – italics in the original)
One is reminded here of Richard Carrier’s discussion of the “Rank-Raglan hero class”, a category of ancient figures — most of whom are mythical — who share certain mythical attributes.
This is a hero-type found repeated across at least fifteen known mythic heroes (including Jesus) — if we count only those who clearly meet more than half of the designated parallels (which means twelve or more matches out of twenty-two elements), which requirement eliminates many historical persons, such as Alexander the Great or Caesar Augustus, who accumulated many elements of this hero-type in the tales told of them, yet not that many.
The twenty-two features distinctive of this hero-type are:
1. The hero’s mother is a virgin. 2. His father is a king or the heir of a king. 3. The circumstances of his conception are unusual. 4. He is reputed to be the son of a god. 5. An attempt is made to kill him when he is a baby. 6. To escape which he is spirited away from those trying to kill him. 7. He is reared in a foreign country by one or more foster parents. 8. We are told nothing of his childhood. 9. On reaching manhood he returns to his future kingdom. 10. He is crowned, hailed or becomes king. 11. He reigns uneventfully (i.e., without wars or national catastrophes). 12. He prescribes laws. 13. He then loses favor with the gods or his subjects. 14. He is driven from the throne or city. 15. He meets with a mysterious death. 16. He dies atop a hill or high place. 17. His children, if any, do not succeed him. 18. His body turns up missing. 19. Yet he still has one or more holy sepulchers (in fact or fiction). 20. Before taking a throne or a wife, he battles and defeats a great adversary (such as a king, giant, dragon or wild beast).
and
21. His parents are related to each other. 22. He marries a queen or princess related to his predecessor.
Many of the heroes who fulfill this type also either (a) performed miracles (in life or as a deity after death) or were (b) preexistent beings who became incarnated as men or (c) subsequently worshiped as savior gods, any one of which honestly should be counted as a twenty-third attribute. . . .
1. Oedipus (21) 2. Moses (20) 3. Jesus (20) 4. Theseus (19) 5. Dionysus (19) 6. Romulus (18) 7. Perseus (17) 8. Hercules (17) 9. Zeus (15) 10. Bellerophon (14) 11. Jason (14) 12. Osiris (14) 13. Pelops (13) 14. Asclepius (12) 15. Joseph [i.e., the son of Jacob] (12)
This is a useful discovery, because with so many matching persons it doesn’t matter what the probability is of scoring more than half on the Rank-Raglan scale by chance coincidence. Because even if it can happen often by chance coincidence, then the percentage of persons who score that high should match the ratio of real persons to mythical persons. In other words, if a real person can have the same elements associated with him, and in particular so many elements (and for this purpose it doesn’t matter whether they actually occurred), then there should be many real persons on the list—as surely there are far more real persons than mythical ones. . . .
So there is no getting around the fact that if the ratio of conveniently named mythical godmen to conveniently named historical godmen is 2 to 1 or greater, then the prior probability that Jesus is historical is 33% or less.
(On the Historicity of Jesus, 229-231, 241 – italics original)
First, we have fewer than a quarter of 100 instances in our group so a per centum figure is misleading. The total number Raglan studied was twenty.
Second, on what basis can we validly decide to count only those figures who score more than half of the listed attributes? Carrier identifies ten of the twenty-two listed features as applicable to Alexander the Great and acknowledges (though disputes) the possibility of assigning him thirteen. Half seems to be an arbitrary cut-off point (or at least tendentious insofar as it excludes the exceptions, historical persons who would spoil the point being made) especially when we know that Raglan himself said that his list of twenty-two was an arbitrary number. Other scholars of mythical “types” produced different lists:
Von Hahn had sixteen incidents, Rank did not divide his pattern into incidents as such, and Raglan had twenty-two incidents. Raglan himself admitted that his choice of twenty-two incidents (as opposed to some other number of incidents) was arbitrary (Raglan 1956:186).
(In Quest of the Hero, 189. — Raglan’s words were: I have taken twenty-two, but it would be easy to take more. Would a more complete list reduce the other figures to matching fewer than half….? So we begin to see the arbitrariness of Carrier’s deciding to focus only on those with more than half of the attributes in the Raglan list of 22.)
Alexander the Great and Mithridates are not the only ancient figures to whom “hero attributes” were attributed in the literature. Sargon and Cyrus were also studied in the same context by other scholars:
Raglan wrote in complete ignorance of earlier scholarship devoted to the hero, and he was therefore unaware of the previous studies of von Hahn and Rank, for example. Raglan was parochial in other ways too. For one thing, the vast majority of his heroes came exclusively from classical (mostly Greek) sources. The first twelve heroes he treats are: Oedipus, Theseus, Romulus, Heracles, Perseus, Jason, Bellerophon, Pelops, Asclepios, Dionysos, Apollo, and Zeus. Raglan could have strengthened his case had he used some of the same heroes used by von Hahn and Rank and other scholars, e.g., such heroes as Sargon and Cyrus.
(In Quest of the Hero, 187 – my bolding)
One might even argue that the further east one went from Greece the more likely it was that historical persons matched the mythical hero reference class! Much fun can be had with statistics.
Let’s continue with Hernandez-Cela’s discussion of probability as it applies to the social sciences and history:
Social empiricists, when presenting numerical values such as the “probability” of churchgoers giving alms to the poor, might state that only in 5 percent of cases would an association as large as 60 percent or larger not obtain when instances are randomly selected. But, observing individuals, we may only say that they either do or do not give alms. In the first observation we may find that 60 percent of the total sample gave alms, but in succeeding observations this value may differ. We cannot, in fact, have any expectations of probability of giving alms to the poor, no matter how many samples we take. If, on the other hand, the sample approaches or is equal to the total population of churchgoers, then the figure represents a simple proportion, a frequency, not a probability. On the other hand, specification that only 5 percent of samples will not result in the .60 or more is meaningless. If we chose several samples all of the same size, and found that in only 5 percent of them the figure was under .60, then we still can draw no conclusions, for we know nothing about the empirical conditions prevailing in future samples. Such a claim has no basis either in theory or in observation. What the claim means is that if there were an infinite number of cases whose composition was on the average like that of the sample, then in only 5 percent of them would the percentage be smaller than .60. But, we cannot assume that any other empirical cases are on the average like the sample studied, and we cannot assume that they are infinite in number. Theoretical cases can be infinite in number, but empirical ones cannot. Such statistical claims, of course, cannot be violated empirically because they are not probability statements at all but disguised frequencies obtained by observation. Future observations cannot verify or falsify frequencies but only slightly modify their numerical value in the light of new cases. Furthermore, the statistical procedures themselves are not open to any kind of empirical verification or falsification . . .
(Systematic Empiricism, 99)
So a sample of a score of mythical heroes cannot be the basis for predicting the likelihood of any particular figure being historical or not.
The statement, “All As are Bs,” . . . . really means no more than “As have been observed with Bs.” But this statement is not a universal statement, but limited to a population. . . . Consequently no empirical generalization can act as a major premise in a deductive explanation, and empirical generalizations can never be used deductively to explain or predict.
(Systematic Empiricism, 130 — no longer from Hernandez-Cela’s chapter; italics original)
An illustration of the fallacy is set out thus:
Premise A: The probability of recovery from a streptococcus infection when treated by penicillin is close to 1.
Premise B: John Jones was treated with large doses of penicillin.
Conclusion: The probability that John Jones will recover from his streptococcus infection is close to 1.
(Systematic Empiricism, 130)
One might rephrase this as:
Premise A: The probability of a figure in the hero-class being non-historical is close to 0.
Premise B: Jesus is a figure in the hero-class.
Conclusion: The probability that Jesus is non-historical is close to 0.
But as D. and J. Willer observe,
Predictions and explanations cannot be made from [such a statement]. John Jones either does or does not recover. If he does recover the probability value of statement A is slightly increased by his case, and if he does not the probability value decreases. . . . [T]he event itself cannot be predicted with any certainty. Furthermore, if John Jones either recovers or does not, he does not recover with a probability of close to 1.
Individual facts either occur or they do not. Certain facts cannot be explained by uncertain statements. Even in ordinary everyday practical empiricism we do not make that error.
(Systematic Empiricism, 131, 135)
No two historical events are ever exactly alike. People and societies are not like that. There are always variables that make each historical event unique. Of course there are common experiences such as war or economic depression but no two wars or depressions are the same. Human events are not governed by laws in the same way geological forces or the weather are governed by scientific laws. Historians do not observe the results of “laws” in the historical data. They cannot make predictions about a unique historical event or person — all historical events and persons are unique in some respect — on the basis of limited samples with variable (“arbitrary”) attributes. Generalizations can be made about the impacts of technologies on various kinds of social groups but particular historical events are each unique in some way. But generalizations cannot predict what a historian will find in the sources.
The most that probability (in the context of Richard Carrier’s discussion) can tell us about the likelihood of Jesus having existed is that Jesus was one of a few historical exceptions (or even the only exception) to general notions about mythical persons.
In the next post I’ll show what historians say about the certainty or otherwise of “their basic facts”.
Carrier, Richard. On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press Ltd, 2014.
Carrier, Richard. Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Amherst, N.Y: Prometheus Books, 2012.
Hindess, Barry, and Paul Q. Hirst. Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Books, 1975.
Raglan, Lord. The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth and Drama. Mineola, N.Y: Dover Publications, 2011.
Rank, Otto, Raglan, and Alan Dundes. In Quest of the Hero. Mythos (Princeton, N.J.). Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Willer, David, and Judith Willer. Systematic Empiricism: Critique of a Pseudoscience. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1973.
Since becoming a nation in 1948, the Israelis have developed a productive, fertile and wealthy nation in a desert wasteland. They have been outstanding custodians of their homeland. . . .
. . . . many Palestinian Muslims believe they also have a religious claim to the land of Palestine. That is why they have fought and will continue to fight so ferociously for it.
When Jews began to immigrate to Palestine in large numbers in 1882, fewer than 250,000 Arabs lived there, and the majority of them had arrived in recent decades. Palestine was never an exclusively Arab country, although Arabic gradually became the language of most of the population after the Muslim invasions of the seventh century. No independent Arab or Palestinian state ever existed in Palestine. When the distinguished Arab-American historian, Princeton University Prof. Philip Hitti, testified against partition before the Anglo-American Committee in 1946, he said: “There is no such thing as ‘Palestine’ in history, absolutely not.” In fact, Palestine is never explicitly mentioned in the Koran . . . .”
Prior to partition, Palestinian Arabs did not view themselves as having a separate identity. When the First Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations met in Jerusalem in February 1919 to choose Palestinian representatives for the Paris Peace Conference, the following resolution was adopted:
We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic and geographical bonds.
In 1937, a local Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, told the Peel Commission, which ultimately suggested the partition of Palestine: “There is no such country [as Palestine]! ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria.”
“A land without a people for a people without a land” is a phrase that gets under the skin of most Palestinians, who think that the authors of the phrase looked at Ottoman Palestine, did not see them, and instead saw an empty land. Yet perhaps this phrase would have made sense if we zoomed in on the meaning of the word “people.”
Whoever coined the phrase that became a Zionist slogan did not use the word people to describe a bunch of humans dwelling on a certain land. People, in this phrase, is used to mean a nation, a state or a nation-state.
Before 1948, the Arabs who lived in Palestine had never organized themselves in a state, but had, for centuries, lived as subjects of empires that ruled them from faraway capitals, such as Damascus, Cairo, Baghdad, and Istanbul. In the history of the Arabs, Jerusalem never served as the seat of any dynasty and never practiced sovereignty. At best, the city served as a provincial capital. In this sense, when the Zionists looked at Ottoman Palestine, they did not see a nation-state. They saw Arab provinces of successive empires, Arab or Turkish. This is why the land looked one without a people, that is without a nation state.
Historically, the word “Palestinian” did not refer to Arabs living in the region, but to the region itself. Some 100 years ago, the land was administered by the British, and its inhabitants were Jewish, Christian and Muslim – all of whom were identified as “Palestinian.” However, for most, their primary identity was not their nationality, but their religion.
Indeed, many Arabs bristled at being called “Palestinian,” voicing strong opposition to the label. Instead, they saw themselves first and foremost as Arabs or Muslims. Only in the mid-1960s was the word co-opted to mean Arabs.
Hence, before 1948, it would not have made sense to talk about Palestinians as opposed to Jews. The population was divided into two primary groups: Jewish and Arab.
This makes sense because a sovereign Palestinian state never existed. Therefore, there were no “Palestinian lands.” Rather, the land was part of the Mandate for Palestine, a geographical area controlled by the British after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War.
The Palestinian peasant was indeed being dispossessed, but by his fellow-Arabs: the local sheikh and village elders, the Government tax-collector, the merchants and money-lenders; and, when he was a tenant-farmer (as was usually the case), by the absentee-owner. By the time the season’s crop had been distributed among all these, little if anything remained for him and his family, and new debts generally had to be incurred to pay off the old. Then the Bedouin came along and took their “cut”, or drove the hapless fellah off the land altogether.
This was the “normal” course of events in 19th-century Palestine. It was disrupted by the advent of the Jewish pioneering enterprise, which sounded the death-knell of this medieval feudal system. In this way the Jews played an objective revolutionary role. Small wonder that it aroused the ire and active opposition of the Arab sheikhs, absentee landowners, money-lenders and Bedouin bandits.
Comment:
. . . . Note that the local Arabs never claimed that they had a sovereign country.
. . . with
2 a humanist perspective, stripped of Eurocentric beliefs in the primacy of nationalist feelings:
[This history] refers to the groups that as a rule live outside the realm of politics and power. . . . The narrative is clear; it begins with a society in Palestine as remote as possible from politics in the late Ottoman period . . . .
They are not one mass of people. They are grouped according to choice in small social units, usually households. But, with time, they prefer to define themselves via ethnicity, gender, occupation, class or culture. They change at will, but at times are forced to, not always to their advantage. Their world is a mix of material necessity and spiritual solace. Many of them are closely connected to the land where they live or chose to settle on. They cling to the land or to their property not from a national imperative to protect the mother/fatherland, the entity, but for much more mundane and at the same time humane reasons.
These local actors are leaders as well as ordinary members of the community. They are Palestine’s women and children, peasants and workers, town dwellers and farmers. They are defined according to their religious or ethnic origins as Armenians, Druzes, Circassians, or Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews, as well as to their views on religion, whether secular, orthodox or fundamentalist. In writing about them, definitions call for a balance between their own claims and the author’s understanding of what groups them together. Feeding a family, staying on the family land or attempting to make a new life on foreign soil can be portrayed as patriotism or nationalism: for most people it is an existentialist and survivalist act. (bolding added)
So begins (pages 8-9) the history of the land by a Jewish historian:
Pappé, Ilan. A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
(I am reminded of the way our nineteenth century ancestors (who had migrated thousands of miles from their homeland) erroneously portrayed the Australian aborigines as “nomadic”, with the implication that they had no notion of attachment to any land. It is a colonialist mind-set that has always “justified” ethnic cleansing and genocide. (I use the word “genocide” according to its meaning as defined by the originator of the word, Raphael Lemkin.)
In discussing how researchers create narratives to portray historical events or write biographies, Benedict Anderson, author of the highly acclaimed Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, drew a contrast with the Gospel of Matthew.
These narratives . . . are set in homogeneous, empty time. Hence their frame is historical and their setting sociological. This is why so many autobiographies begin with the circumstances of parents and grandparents, for which the autobiographer can have only circumstantial, textual evidence; and why the biographer is at pains to record the calendrical, A.D. dates of two biographical events which his or her subject can never remember: birth-day and death-day. Nothing affords a sharper reminder of this narrative’s modernity than the opening of the Gospel according to St. Matthew. For the Evangelist gives us an austere list of thirty males successively begetting one another, from the Patriarch Abraham down to Jesus Christ. . . . No dates are given for any of Jesus’s forebears, let alone sociological, cultural, physiological or political information about them. This narrative style . . . . was entirely reasonable to the sainted genealogist because he did not conceive of Christ as an historical ‘personality,’ but only as the true Son of God. (pp 204f)
Yet how many biblical scholars have attempted to fill in the gap in Matthew’s Gospel by calculating the exact or approximate years of Jesus’ birth and death! Rather, the more enlightening inquiry should be to seek to understand why the first evangelists did not have the historical interests that fascinate modern readers.
(Of course, it would be too easy to fall back on the claim that Pilate’s appearance in the gospel establishes a historical setting and time — until one pauses to recall that the Pilate in the gospels is a character utterly unlike the historical Pilate. As I wrote earlier, the Pilate of historical record (sc. Josephus) was renowned for his cruelty but all the evangelists, Matthew included, present him — most UNhistorically — as benign and soft when he meets Jesus, and as being cowered by the Jewish priests and mob into doing their will against his own. A historical person has been rewritten to meet the needs of the narrative.)
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised Edition. Verso, 2006.
Former Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, speaking on Australia’s national current affairs program, 7.30, about the reason for the government of Israel refusing to declare a truce to free the hostages and for continuing the war (“if someone would have said we would still be stuck in Gaza after a year no-one would have believed it” @ 28:40) and even expanding it into the West Bank and Lebanon. The specific question Barak was responding to was whether “right wing elements within [Netanyahu’s] cabinet” ride their “successes” in the current war to continue to expand Israeli settlements in the West Bank….
Oh sure. For sure they will do it. They do it even without this. They want a settlement… And if we wait for too long they might raise some idea that we had some promise from some corner of the Bible to get some part of Lebanon. They are Messianic Jewish supremacists, racists, of the worst kind. I compare them to the Proud Boys of America, those who were behind the 6 January event. So, think of the American President, who would nominate one of these leaders from the program to be secretary of treasury with certain formal roles and the other one to be in charge of national security, of homeland security. That’s crazy but that’s exactly what Netanyahu did because he needs tight control for the survival of the government. If there is even a ceasefire, in order to exchange the hostages and a ceasefire for four months, immediately it will become a day of reckoning because people will demand to establish a national investigation, a committee led by a Supreme Court judge, to find who is responsible for the worst day in our history. (@ 26 mins 55 secs)
(Of course, Barak is introduced as “having come very close to securing peace with the Palestinians” when he was Prime Minister. We are rarely reminded that the “best deal” the Palestinians were ever offered was a “state” divided into four island-regions, each surrounded by Israeli settlements or territory. The above quotation is not meant to imply agreement with every other view Barak expressed in the 7.30 interview. — No thought, of course, that there might be “a day of reckoning” to investigate responsibility for expulsions and killings of Palestinians since 1948.)
Given that every historical event in some way is unique, how can historians have confidence that their research into the past is yielding reliable explanations for what happened?
The answer will depend on the type of event being studied and how historians frame their questions.
Two questions that particularly interest me are:
What led to the production and adoption of much of the “Old Testament” literature in Samaria (the Pentateuch) and Judea (the Pentateuch plus the historical, poetic and prophetic writings)?
What led to the production and adoption of the New Testament literature among certain Christians?
Notice I avoid, specifically, the question of origins of “Judaism” and “Christianity”. That’s because I don’t know how to define either of those two religions at the time of their beginnings. We can’t assume they looked the same as we find them in the record some centuries after their beginnings. But the texts are sources that we can define and work with as concrete data. They are something we can get our hands on and know what we are trying to understand with respect to origins.
But what would it take to make an explanation for the emergence of this literature to be more than guesswork or somehow guided by the fancy or prejudice of the researcher?
One tool the historian can pick up and apply in order to approach this goal comes from the field of sociology. There is nothing new about this approach:
Historians have begged or borrowed concepts and theories from many other disciplines, leading to an enriched debate around the course of human history, and the implications for both present and future. . . . (Green and Troup)
In a basic sense, sociology has always been a historically grounded and oriented enterprise. . . . The major works of those who would come to be seen as the founders of modern sociology, especially the works of Karl Marx, Alexis de Tocqueville, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber . . . . to varying degrees, all offered concepts and explanations meant to be used in truly historical analyses of social structures and social change. . . .
Each of the founders was so committed to making sense of the key changes and contrasts of his own epoch that he was a historically oriented social analyst . . . . None of the founders ever got entirely carried away by a philosophy of universal evolution, by formal conceptualization, or by theoretical abstraction for its own sake. Each devoted himself again and again to situating and explaining modern European social structures and processes of change. (Skocpol 1985, 1f)
What does all of that mean in practice? How does it apply to the study of a non-repeatable historical event, in particular an event that consists of striking changes in a social group’s ideas, beliefs, and texts?What do sociologists do when there is not enough evidence to confidently construct an explanation for a particular change or development in a social group? Skocpol explains:
According to this method, one looks for concomitant variations, contrasting cases where the phenomena in which one is interested are present with cases where they are absent, controlling in the process for as many sources of variation as one can, by contrasting positive and negative instances which otherwise are as similar as possible. (Skocpol 1976, 177 – my emphasis)
Where else do we find groups producing fresh origin myths comparable to those we find in the Bible? What circumstances are associated with the emergence of those kinds of myths? In what ways can we both compare and contrast the various myths themselves and what we can know of their social, political and other settings?
That kind of inquiry requires us to begin where we have the firmest evidence. In the case of the Hebrew Scriptures that means beginning where the archaeological record and the independent literary witness points us. That means beginning with the early Hellenistic era and working back only insofar as our data dictates. For the New Testament writings it means beginning in the second century and working back, again, only insofar as explanations for our data necessitate.
The inquiry means casting our net to embrace other instances of the emergence of new foundation myths and comparable apocalyptic writings and philosophical-theological treatises. Non-biblical instances of these abound in Hellenistic and Roman eras. Studies of pre-Hellenistic era and the first century of imperial Rome will also prove useful — whether as offering either better or worse explanations in order to yield a better hypothesis of time of origin or a support for a hypothesis of a later origin.
Take, for example, the Old Testament prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve “Minor Prophets”, along with narratives involving prophets like Elijah, Elisha and Jonah. We find historical instances of those kinds of persons in pre-biblical ancient Syria. See my post, Meet the Prophets of Israel’s Predecessors. The written records of those prophets provide us with a useful starting point, but we are quickly led to something quite different in the Hebrew literature. If the Syrian prophets were generally encouraging kings of city-states to continue in their piety, the biblical prophets are often chastising kings of a realm (not just a city-state) to forsake their piety and champion a different deity. Does the evidence in the Ebla and Mari archives (as well as for Assyrian prophecies) enable us to imagine those prophets adopting a similar critical stance against their kings? What conditions might help us understand such a contrast? Do we have secure evidence for the contrasting conditions?
Or to take another example, this one from the New Testament writings of Paul. Our earliest independent witness to Paul comes from the second century records of theological conflicts. Do Paul’s writings address specific contentious issues at the centre of those conflicts? (Many scholars respond reflexively with a resounding “No”. But I think they are far too hasty with that conclusion. My point is that the question is one that involves a real choice: it is not merely rhetorical.) What functions do the epistles serve among the various and competing Christian factions? Troels Engberg-Pedersen has compared some of them to Stoic treatises. What does that insight tell us about a potential audience for them as well as their possible provenance?
I have introduced only two items of inquiry. I could introduce similar questions and viable instances for comparison and contrast with the Old and New Testaments’ narratives of origins — the Pentateuch and the Gospels with Acts. Scholars have often observed similarities between the biblical literature and literature of Greek, Roman and other cultures. Other scholars have published research into the emergence of new myths and ideologies within defined social groups.. (The link is to an introductory post on Tanya S. Scheer’s study of local origin myths being manufactured in the wake of Alexander the Great’s conquest; for the emergence of new ideologies note John Dominic Crossan’s comparison of the “gospel” of Augustus with the NT gospels and Marianne Bonz’s comparison of Acts with the Roman foundation myth.)
I have a question after having read so much about the proposed origins of the Judeo-Christian canon. Despite the many variant views about origins — and there have been many studies introducing sociological concepts here (e.g. Bruce Malina, Bengt Holmberg, Richard Horsley, James Crossley) — I have seen precious little offering comparative studies. Richard Horsley and John Hanson had an excellent opportunity to do so with Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs: Popular Movements in the Time of Jesus, but alas, they, too, hewed to a description of Palestine alone despite the known existence of other resistance movements elsewhere in the Roman empire.
Maybe my memory has failed me for the moment or maybe there are works/authors I sorely need to seek out. So this post is a plea for assistance. If you, dear reader, know of the kinds of comparative studies I am missing and are deplored at my lack of awareness, please kindly inform me!
Green, Anna, and Kathleen Troup. The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in History and Theory, Second Edition. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.
Skocpol, Theda. “France, Russia, China: A Structural Analysis of Social Revolutions.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 18, no. 2 (1976): 175–210.
———, ed. Vision and Method in Historical Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
In a recent post I praised Douglas Campbell for drawing attention to the laziness (if not “dishonesty”) of rebutting an argument with the blanket “I am not persuaded” line. In this post I come to blame him for rejecting a genuinely critical reading of source material. It is with the very essence of critical reading that he objects:
Descartes suggested, in a classic argument widely influential in the modern period, that everything is in effect guilty until proved innocent. The result was, rather famously, the reduction of all certain knowledge to the conviction that his mental processes at least guaranteed his existence. In other words, he used radical doubt as a fundamental method. Everything must be doubted until it can be demonstrated indubitably to be true. (16)
Now Descartes’ method (shorn of the extremism with which Campbell presents it) does serve well enough in everyday life and especially in the legalistic professions and scientific research enterprises. But it is possible to take issue with it on a philosophical level, as demonstrated by Wittgenstein. But is there not a valid comparison here? We know that Newtonian physics “fails” at the subatomic particle level; but we do not reject the fundamentals of Newtonian physics when taking care climbing ladders or driving a car.
Campbell wrote — and note the pejorative language in which he couches Descartes’ scepticism:
But the Cartesian method has struggled to get anywhere significant and has, moreover, been subjected to ferocious critique, not least from Wittgenstein, who pointed out (characteristically indirectly) that the use of language implies participation in a broader linguistic community, which is in turn difficult to detach from a complex broader reality that cannot be doubted in the first instance without lapsing into utter incoherence. So Descartes’s key initial claims are in fact delusional. Unfortunately, however, the critical method, which played such a significant role in the rise of the modern university, has had a long dalliance with Cartesianism, so the latter tends to live on, haunting the corridors of the academy like a restless shade. It allowed figures like Kant to reject tradition out of hand and to argue from simpler and more certain first principles, although Kant too struggled to develop his principles with the certainty and extension that he really sought. It is not a completely crass oversimplification to suggest, then, that many modern Pauline scholars, shaped in part by the traditions at work in the modern university, seem to assume, at least at times, that the “critical” assessment of evidence simply involves the application of doubt in a generic way, ultimately in the manner of Descartes. It is a posture of comprehensive skepticism. One must be unconvinced until one is convinced of something’s probity on certain grounds. But I would suggest that when practiced in this generic and universal manner, this is an invalid and self-defeating methodology and a false understanding of criticism.’ (16)
Campbell had faulted as “posturing” the “I am not persuaded” rejoinder as a substitute for critical engagement. He faults Cartesian scepticism with the same label — “posturing”.
I doubt that I would be excused from jury service if I tried to opt out by explaining that Wittgenstein tells me that my particular semantic world may not be capable of deliberating in a truly objective manner the information conveyed to me as it is coded in semantic variations other than mine. Newtonian physics is still valid, its quantum companion notwithstanding.
Campbell then proceeds to justify another misguided “howler”:
We will rely on slender snippets of evidence in what follows, because that is all that we have — occasional and fragmentary remains of conversations that took place millennia ago. But we do have evidence, and it will not do to dismiss parts of the following reconstruction with a generic claim that “this is insufficient” or “there is still not enough evidence.” If this is the evidence that we have and it explains the data in the best existing fashion, then the correct scientific conclusion must be to endorse it and not to complain that we need more data that unfortunately does not exist. (18)
That may sound like a correct scientific approach but it is not. A scientific hypothesis must rely on multiple datasets. A single experiment is never sufficient. An experiment, a survey, must of necessity be repeated in different places with different samples to be sure of the results. The medical profession will not rely on a single survey of data to recommend a particular program to treat a physical condition.
The scientific method does not build on “slender snippets of evidence” if there is no other choice. If the evidence is inadequate to answer a particular question, or on which to base a certain line of inquiry, then it is the question and the line of inquiry that must be changed.
I frequently encounter the following kinds of statements in by biblical scholars in their works relating to early Christianity or Judaism:
We historians confront a supposed event in the past, as in some text or object, as though to “try it in court,” in order to reach a verdict to establish the truth of the matter. And the principles we can best employ are those used in the practice of law:
(1) The accused is presumed (not judged) innocent unless proven guilty. (2) The preponderance of the evidence (anything over 50%) is decisive. (3) The verdict rendered is considered proven beyond reasonable doubt (not absolute).
(Dever 140f — Old Testament scholar arguing against fundamentalist readings of the Bible)
and arguing the case for accepting the overall integrity of the canonical text of New Testament writings…
As in a court of law, the evidence deserves to be judged innocent of being an interpolation until proven guilty. This proof must be able to stand up before the jury of scholarship, which must decide whether “guilt” has been established beyond a reasonable doubt. If there is reasonable doubt about the extraneousness of the accused data then it should not remain any longer under a cloud of suspicion. In that case the verdict must be acquittal in order to protect the innocent. If scholarship does not follow such a “rule of law,” serious injustice will be done to much innocent data.
Sometimes the biblical scholar will cite a (“nonbiblical”) historian for support:
Unless there is good reason for believing otherwise, one will assume that a given detail in the work of a particular historian is factual. This method places the burden of proof squarely on the person who would doubt the reliability of a given portion of the text. The alternative is to presume the text unreliable unless convincing evidence can be brought forward in support of it. While many critical scholars of the Gospels adopt this latter method, it is wholly unjustified by the normal canons of historiography. Scholars who would consistently implement such a method when studying other ancient historical writings would find the corroborative data so insufficient that the vast majority of accepted history would have to be jettisoned.29 In the words of the historian G. J. Renier:
We may find . . . an event is known to us solely through an authority based entirely upon the statements of witnesses who are no longer available. Most of the works of Livy, the first books of the history of the Franks by Gregory of Tours, belong to this category. Since there is no other way of knowing the story they tell us, we must provisionally accept their version. This brings us back full sail to accepted history as the starting point of all historical investigation.30
30. Renier, History, pp.90–91.
(Blomberg 304)
Although Blomberg cites a 1982 reprint of the classical historian’s (Renier’s) work, the original publication date stands at 1950. That is important for a reason I will explain.
But first, note the muddled metaphor in the above quotations. In a court of law it is not the witness who is “presumed innocent until proven guilty” but the one charged with a crime. Witnesses are cross examined to test their claims. Though the witness swears an oath to tell the truth their testimony is never accepted at face value. Their claims must be tested. Yet the above comparisons of the historical method confuse witnesses (sources) with the person who is on trial and seeking to prove his innocence.
In response to Dever above: In a court of law it is the one accused and on trial who is presumed innocent: it is the claims of the witnesses, the sources — not the accused — that must be tested.
In response to Wisse above: It is not the “evidence” that “deserves to be judged innocent”. It is the evidence that is tested for authenticity, relevance and reliability to determine the guilt or innocence of the one on trial.
Finally, in response to Blomberg: The Renier method of accepting the testimony of Livy for believing in the historicity of events for which there is no other evidence may have been par for the course among classicists in 1950, but by 1983 that naive approach was well and truly debunked by a series of lectures delivered by the classicist historian Moses Finley:
For reasons that are rooted in our intellectual history, ancient historians are often seduced into [accepting as historically factual] statements in the literary or documentary sources … unless they can be disproved (to the satisfaction of the individual historian). This proposition derives from the privileged position of Greek and Latin, and it is especially unacceptable for the early periods of both Greek and Roman history…
(Finley 21)
Renier referred to Livy as an example of a historian whose word he felt he had no choice but to follow. Finley pointed out the cruel truth, however:
Yet a Livy or a Plutarch cheerfully repeated pages upon pages of earlier accounts over which they neither had nor sought any control. . . .
Where did they find their information? No matter how many older statements we can either document or posit – irrespective of possible reliability – we eventually reach a void. But ancient writers, like historians ever since, could not tolerate a void, and they filled it in one way or another, ultimately by pure invention.
The ability of the ancients to invent and their capacity to believe are persistently underestimated. How else could they have filled the blatant gaps in their knowledge once erudite antiquarians had observed that centuries had elapsed between the destruction of Troy and the ‘foundation’ of Rome, other than by inventing an Alban king-list to bridge the gap? Or how could they contest an existing account other than by offering an alternative, for example, to provide ideological support for, or hostility to, a particular ethnic group, such as Etruscans or Sabines, who played a major role in early Roman history? No wonder that, even in the hopelessly fragmentary state of the surviving material on early Rome, there is a bewildering variety of versions, a variety that continued to increase and multiply as late as the early Principate. Presumably no one today believes the Alban king-list to be anything but a fiction, but any suggestion that there is insufficient ground to give credence to the Roman king-list is greeted with outraged cries of ‘hyper-criticism’ …. (8f)
There was a time — it is long past — when classicists would reconstruct ancient history from their Greek and Latin sources as naively as many biblical scholars continue today to reconstruct the origins of Judaism and Christianity from the texts in the Bible. Finley added:
I suspect that Ogilvie’s slip [naive readings of ancient historians] reflects , no doubt unconsciously, the widespread sentiment that any thing written in Greek or Latin is somehow privileged, exempt from the normal canons of evaluation. (10)
Classicists have long since moved on. Perhaps it’s time for more biblical scholars to follow them.
Blomberg, Craig L. The Historical Reliability of the Gospels. 2nd edition. Nottingham: IVP Academic, 2007.
Campbell, Douglas A. Framing Paul: An Epistolary Biography. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing, 2014.
Dever, William G. “Christian Fundamentalism, Faith, and Archaeology.” In Misusing Scripture: What Are Evangelicals Doing with the Bible?, edited by Mark Elliott, Kenneth Atkinson, and Robert Rezetko, 131–52. Routledge, 2023.
Finley, M. I. Ancient History: Evidence and Models. London: Chatto & Windus, 1985. [Chapter 2 was part of a series of J. H. Gray Lectures at the Faculty of Classics of the University of Cambridge]
Wisse, Frederik W. “Textual Limits to Redactional Theory in the Pauline Corpus.” In Gospel Origins & Christian Beginnings : In Honor of James M. Robinson, edited by James E. Goehring, Charles W. Hedrick, and Jack T. Sanders, 167–78. Sonoma, Calif. : Polebridge Press, 1990.
What follows is what I originally planned as the second part of the previous post. My aim is to contribute towards expanding public awareness of material that is otherwise sheltered within cloisters of academic publications and paywalls.
The information here covers the evidence for the Hebrew language being indigenous to Canaan. That means that the Hebrew language was not introduced into Canaan by Israelites or anyone else entering the land as newcomers. Linguistic evidence supports the view that the kingdoms of Israel and Judah emerged from people indigenous to the land of Canaan. The roots of the Hebrew language are found in the Bronze Age, centuries before the emergence of Israel as a distinct political entity.
Think for a moment of other cases where newcomers have occupied land through mass migration. The Anglo-Saxon and Norman invasions of England made their mark in linguistic changes as evidenced in early literary sources. Yet, as philologist Felice Israel remarks, there is no comparable linguistic evidence to be found in the wake of the supposed entry of Israelites into Canaan after their acclaimed exodus from Egypt.
I was led to the evidence for Hebrew origins by a reference in a major 2008 volume on the archaeological finds relating to the religious ideas of Israel’s Syrian neighbours:
Recently, the results of a long study conducted by F. Israel on the general cultural aspects (primarily linguistic), whether innovative or conservative, related to the conquest of Palestine by the tribes of Israel, have been published.352
352 F. Israel, “La conquête de Canaan: observations d’un philologue,” in Antiquités sémitiques IV, Paris 1999, pp. 63-77. I wish to express my gratitude to my colleague F. Israel, who discussed with me the issues presented here.
(Mander, 97)
I immediately requested a copy of Felice Israel’s presentation, (translation = “The Conquest of Canaan: Observations of a Philologist”) from the ever-helpful librarians at the Queensland State Library.
The philologist begins with Israel Finkelstein’s archaeological reconstruction (published 1988) of the emergence of Israel in Canaan and selects the linguistic sources surrounding this period. Finkelstein had identified two phases of settlement expansion of the people who would later be identified in the historical record as consisting of the kingdom of Israel. Where did these settlers come from?
The vast majority of the people who settled in the hill country and in Transjordan during the Iron I period, must have been indigenous . . . . (Finkelstein, 348)
They had “dropped out” of earlier Bronze Age city-state networks that suffered collapse — Shiloh constructions were violently destroyed in the middle Bronze Age and sharp population decline followed. The first phase of the new settlement begins around 1200-1150 BCE (Early Iron Age) with former pastoralists beginning to settle down (left map):
. . . . These people had dropped out of the framework of permanent settlement back in the 16th century BCE and lived in pastoralist groups during the Late Bronze period. While they might have been active all over the country, their presence would have been felt most keenly in the sparsely inhabited ‘frontier zones’ that were suitable for pasturage — the Transjordanian plateau, the Jordan Valley, the desert fringe and the hill country. They had traversed these areas as part of a seasonal pattern of transhumance and established economic relations with the sedentary inhabitants, especially those resident in the few centers existing in these marginal regions, e.g., Shechem and Bethel. (ibid)
— Left map (Finkelstein, 325): first phase of settlement, ca 1200-1150 BCE; — Centre map (ibid, 329): second phase of settlement expansion, ca 1000-950 BCE “when the last Canaanite enclaves in the Jezreel Valley were subdued and when the Philistines were repulsed from certain areas”; — Notice the comparative emptiness of what was later Judah: the reason being that this area at the time was very rocky and covered in dense coppice (ibid, 326, 339) — Right map (added for comparative reference) from Coogan, 6.
So the archaeologist concludes that the population increase in the region destined to become the land of Israel “must have been indigenous”.
The Philologist’s Sources for Assessing Hebrew Origins
Top: Clay liver model (Landsberger 207); vase inscription with owner’s name (Yadin, Pl. CLXXX); Bottom: Lexical list (Tadmor, pl. 13); Letter fragment (Horowitz, 165); Multiplication table prism (Horowitz, 192)
Now for the philologist to present her evidence. This consists of . . .
— two inscribed liver models — a legal document — a new fragment of a known lexical list — a vase inscription from the 15th-16th centuries with the name of the owner — an administrative tablet containing a list of proper names — a letter — a mathematical text
— Tell Taanak: letters and name lists — Shechem: a letter and a contract — Megiddo: a fragment of the seventh tablet of Gilgamesh — Gezer: a letter recognized as being from the Amarna period — Tell el-Hesi: a letter
— Finally, among the various inscriptions from Aphek, the glossary no. 8151 … reveals the evolution of the diphthong ay > ê in the noun yênu, “wine,” as well as the preservation of the monosyllabic nominal form in the noun dušbu, “honey” …
These documents are compared with the Egyptian Amarna archive that contains copies of correspondence with Canaanite city states
(Israel, 65-68 — all quoted text from Felice Israel is my translation)
Felice Israel identifies in these sources specific features that become precursors of the two languages that will, following internal evolution, become Hebrew and Phoenicia. (68) (I have copied the technical information below.*)
The definition in Is. 19:18, according to which the language of Canaan and Hebrew are one and the same language, is thus confirmed. (68 – my highlighting in all quotations)
The above relates to the Bronze Age. We next come to the transition addressed by Finkelstein (above) — the end of the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, the period of transition of settlement especially in the region that later became known as Samaria/Israel. In this period we see both changes and continuities in the languages of Canaan. But before I list the details of those points and for the benefit of readers less interested in delving into the technicalities, here is the conclusion to the philologist’s observation:
At the end of this brief essay, let us take stock of the results. In examining the linguistic documentation from the Bronze Age as a substrate up to that of the first millennium, a few facts have emerged:
. . . . In the Middle [and] Late Bronze Age . . . the first manifestations of the Canaanite linguistic type can be detected. These early manifestations, due to their specificity compared to other Semitic languages, both synchronically and diachronically, compel the specialist to recognize Hebrew as an indigenous language of Palestine, already attested before the events conventionally called the “conquest.” Consequently, for the philologist, the hypothesis of a conquest by a group of external origin is not confirmed. (77)
Changes and continuities in the languages of Canaan from Late Bronze to Early Iron Age (ca 1500-1100 BCE)
(I have omitted the footnotes that far exceed the length of the main text)
Dialectal Fragmentation: The distribution of the different Canaanite dialects89 in the first millennium is as follows: on the northern coast of the Levant, various Phoenician dialects are noted, while on the southern coast appears the dialect we have elsewhere called “coastal Canaanite,” which was spoken in the Philistine region.90 In the interior of Palestine, however, we find the Hebrew of the kingdoms of Samaria and Judah, Moabite, the Ammonite dialect, and that of the Edomites.
Onomastic Innovations: The disappearance of the Hurrian component in Syro-Palestinian onomastics is observed. This component was well present in the documentation of the substrate or, according to traditional terminology, at the time of the “conquest.“91 To the data noted by R. S. Hess92, we can add Hurrian-derived anthroponyms mentioned especially in CAT 4.635 as coming from Ashdod.
Religious Innovations: The emergence of national or ethnic states is accompanied by the rise of the national god figure93. The history of some of these deities, such as Kamosh or Qaus, has been reconstructed, but for YHWH, as revealed by an investigation conducted by R. S. Hess94, all ancient95 or recent96attempts to find an attestation of the name outside the Old Testament have been unsuccessful. The only testimony of continuity is the heavenly nature97 of his theophanies, which brings him closer to the figure of Hadad. R. Zadok98 has highlighted the frequency of texts that mention this deity in relation to Palestine.
Preservation of the Hurrian Substrate: Regarding phonetic conservation, F. W. Bush’s hypothesis99 suggests that the double pronunciation of the bgdkpt consonants in Hebrew and Aramaic is due to the influence of the Hurrian substrate. This influence is not necessarily direct, as it reached Hebrew through contact with Aramaic. For now, it can only be noted that the Hurrian substrate/adstrate, which fully exerts its influence in Ugarit, Nuzi, and Emar, has never been thoroughly studied in the documentation of the first millennium. From an onomastic perspective, few proper names of Hurrian etymology100 have persisted in Old Testament documentation. The most famous of these are Uriah101, the husband of Bathsheba, sent by David to a certain death, and the judge Shamgar ben Anat102. In the lexicon, one of the few preserved Hurrian elements is the term siryôn and the variant siryôn, “cuirass”103.
Conservation of Egyptian Onomastic Elements: In the onomastic documentation of post-exilic Hebrew, Egyptian etymology104 seems characteristic of priestly proper names.105
Conservation of Egyptian Lexical Elements: A series of lemmas, which abundantly testify, through their etymology, to the ancient Egyptian presence in the province of Canaan, have been preserved in the Hebrew lexicon. These words can refer to chemical substances, such as neter, “natron”; plants, such as šittâ, “acacia” or gōme’, “papyrus”; semi-precious stones, such as lešem, “carnelian”, aḥlamâ, “jasper”, or šenhabbîm, “ivory”; certain boats, such as ṣî, “type of ship”; or finally, scribal tools like ṭabba‘at, “seal-stamp” or qeset, “scribe’s case.”
Conservation of Egyptian Administrative Practices: The scribes of the two Israelite kingdoms106 employed and preserved a numerical notation system of a hieratic type107, rather than a Phoenician-Aramaic type. This is confirmed by the presence in the lexicon of measurement unit names such as lōg, hîn, and ʾêpâ, all of Egyptian etymology.
(That last point, #7, relates to the experience of Canaan under Egyptian hegemony in the Late Bronze era.)
—o0o—
* Common precursors of the two languages Hebrew and Phoenicia that indicate they are both indigenous and related.
(I have omitted the footnotes that far exceed the length of the main text)
The phonetic evolution ā > ō 43: it is attested not only on the coast but also inland, in Galilee and Samaria, extending beyond the Jordan to Pella44. The shift from the etymological ā to ō is foreign to Aramaic45. Moreover, already in the Amarna documentation, it does not appear in regions that, in the first millennium, will be linguistically occupied by Aramaic. This phonetic evolution is absent from both Amorite46 and Ugaritic47.
Application of the Barth-Ginsberg law48: This law49—yiqtal(u) imperfective < Proto-Semitic yaqtal(u)—also applies in Ugaritic50 but not in Amorite51; in Aramaic, it will apply much later than in Hebrew52.
The independent personal pronoun of the first person singular anōkî53: The personal pronoun anōkî is a characteristic of Proto-Canaanite54, which is not attested in Ugaritic55 or Amorite56. It anticipates the Hebrew, Phoenician57, and Moabite58 forms.
The suffix of the perfect first person singular -ti59: This element is also considered a Proto-Canaanite characteristic60. It differs from Ugaritic61 but anticipates the usage in Hebrew, Phoenician62, and Moabite.63
The independent pronoun ninu64 and the first person plural66 suffix65 pronoun -nu: The appearance of the independent first person plural pronoun ninu is ambiguous because there may be interference between a Canaanite form, which can be reconstructed with a good probability based solely on Hebrew but not Phoenician67, and the usual Akkadian form68. Regarding this, see the analogous spellings attested in the Giblite dossier: da-na-nu-u16 and ni-nu-u16 in EA 362 = LA 168:16, 27. On the other hand, the use of -nu as the suffix of the first person plural perfect69 or as a suffix pronoun70 is a Canaanite characteristic because it anticipates Hebrew usage and differs from the Amorite71 and Ugaritic72 form -na and, at a different time, from the similar Aramaic form -na.73
The beginning of the pronominalization of the noun ašar74: This transformation of the term75 ašar, “place”76, into a relative pronoun, is not of the Amorite type77 but constitutes an innovation that will be common to Canaanite dialects such as Hebrew78, Moabite79, and Edomite80.
The modal system81: It seems to anticipate the modal system of Biblical Hebrew. The cohortative form yaqtula anticipates, for example, the Hebrew cohortative in an obvious way.82
The use of the internal passive83: It actually anticipates the reduction to only seven verbal conjugations, which will be typical of standard Hebrew and Phoenician.84
Coogan, Michael D., ed. The Oxford History of the Biblical World. Oxford University Press, 2001.
Finkelstein, Israel. The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1988.
Horowitz, Wayne. “A Combined Multiplication Table on a Prism Fragment from Hazor.” Israel Exploration Journal 47, no. 3/4 (1997): 190–97.
Horowitz, Wayne, and Aaron Shaffer. “A Fragment of a Letter from Hazor.” Israel Exploration Journal 42, no. 3/4 (1992): 165–67.
Israel, Felice. “La Conquête de Canaan: Observations d’un Philologue.” In Guerre et conquête dans le Proche-Orient ancien: actes de la table ronde du 14 novembre 1998, edited by Laïla Nehmé and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 63–77. Antiquités sémitiques. Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient, 1999.
Landsberger, B., and H. Tadmor. “Fragments of Clay Liver Models from Hazor.” Israel Exploration Journal 14, no. 4 (1964): 201–18.
Mander, Pietro. “Les Dieux et Le Culte à Ébla.” In Mythologie et Religion des Sémites Occidentaux. Volume 1, Ébla, Mari, edited by Gregorio del Olmo Lete, 1–160. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta. Leuven: Peeters, 2008.
Tadmor, Hayim. “A Lexicographical Text from Hazor.” Israel Exploration Journal 27, no. 2/3 (1977): 98–102.
Yadin, Yigael, Yohanan Aharoni, Ruth Amiran, Trude Dothan, Immanuel Dunayevsky, and Jean Perrot. Hazor II: An Account of the Second Season of Excavations, 1956. Jerusalem : Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1960. http://archive.org/details/hazoriiaccountof0000jame.
I use two sources for this post. The first is a widely used text for advanced studies (seminaries and universities) in the “biblical history of Israel”. The second is a research conference paper by a specialist in the Middle Bronze Age Levant.
Let’s get our bearings with respect to the various ages that will be referenced in what follows:
Ancient Times From the emergence of cities and the beginning of writing to Alexander the Great—i.e., the first three thousand years of recorded history. This was the era of the ancient empires of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia. The kingdoms of Israel and Judah appeared toward the end of Ancient Times, during the Iron Age.
Early Bronze Age
3200 to 2000 B.C.E.
Middle Bronze Age
2000 to 1550 B.C.E.
Late Bronze Age
1550 to 1200 B.C.E.
Iron Age
1200 to 330 B.C.E.
Miller, J. Maxwell, and John H. Hayes. A History of Ancient Israel and Judah. 2nd Ed. Louisville, Ky. London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006. p. 2
Under the heading Questionable Correlations between Archaeology and the Bible Miller and Hayes explain the problem with early attempts to line up the Bible’s accounts of Israel’s origins with archaeology:
During the early years of archaeological research and throughout most of the twentieth century many archaeologists and biblical scholars attempted to correlate the constantly increasing archaeological evidence with an essentially uncritical reading of the biblical account of Israel’s origins. This approach has been largely abandoned in recent years, for two reasons. First, both the biblical story and the archaeological evidence had to be used selectively, and often given strained interpretations as well, in order to achieve even a loose correlation. Second, an increasing number of biblical scholars and archaeologists have come to view the biblical account of Israel’s origins as idealistic and not historically trustworthy. It will be instructive to review some of the proposed correlations between the biblical account and archaeology that linger on in the public media but do not represent the current thinking in most scholarly circles. (p. 51)
The first of the “proposed correlations . . . lingering on in public media” they discuss is:
The Amorite Hypothesis
In the Early Bronze Age we have strong city states flourishing in the Fertile Crescent until towards 2000 B.C.E. when we find “a breakdown of this urban phase . . . followed by a period of largely nomadic and seminomadic society”.
Mesopotamian texts around this time or shortly before the “urban breakdown” phase mention Amurru (the Amorites). During the Middle Bronze Age there is said to be a “resurgence” of urban centres along with Amorite rulers of major Mesopotamian cities.
The hypothesis formulated in the 1930s was that Amorite migrations into the Levant had been responsible for the “urban breakdown” and it was the Amorites who were responsible for the waves of nomadic or seminomadic movements. The patriarchs of Genesis, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who were said to have arrived from Ur of the Chaldees and who moved around the region of Canaan were understood against this background. The biblical patriarchs belonged to this “(semi)nomadic” time.
The hypothesis matched one selection of the Bible’s chronology:
And it came to pass in the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel were come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in the month Zif, which is the second month, that he began to build the house of the Lord. — 1 Kings 6:1
Now the sojourning of the children of Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years. — Exodus 12:40
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob
(Absence of strong city states allows easy movement between Mesopotamia and Egypt; customs of the time were supposed to match those depicted in the Bible’s patriarchal narratives)
ca 1900 to 1800 B.C.E.
Hyksos rule in Egypt
// Israelites enter Egypt
ca 1700 to 1550 B.C.E.
400 + years —–> Exodus // conquest of Canaan
ca 1100 B.C.E.
Solomon’s temple
ca 980 B.C.E.
Miller and Hayes point out that “there are serious problems” with the above hypothesis, noting:
A frontal assault on this view was carried out by T. L. Thompson, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives (BZAW133; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974); and John Van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975). (p. 52)
There is no consensus among archaeologists that the Amorites were responsible for the urban changes between the Early and Middle Bronze Ages.
A timeline of biblical chronology using the genealogical data (Genesis 15:16, 46:8-11 and Exodus 6:18-20) requires four generations (Jacob-Levi-Amram-Moses) with each generation averaging 100 years.
The earliest extra-biblical reference to Israel is the Merneptah stele of ca 1200 B.C.E. announcing that Egypt had defeated “Israel” in Canaan so that they “were no more”.
The parallels between biblical names and customs, on the one hand, and those known from Middle and Late Bronze Mesopotamian texts, on the other, become less impressive when one takes into account that the sorts of names and customs involved were not confined to the second millennium b.c.e. but were apparently characteristic of the first millennium as well. This renders the parallels relatively useless for pinpointing any particular period as “the patriarchal age.” (p. 53)
Biblical “traditions” associate the patriarchs with Iron Age Arameans (Deuteronomy 26:5) and other Iron Age people (Moabites, Edomites, Philistines) — never with the Bronze Age Amorites.
Immanuel Velikovsky argued for catastrophes on earth resulting from earth’s close encounter with a mammoth comet, specifically resulting in the pulling of the waters of the Red Sea apart and returning them in a tidal wave to drown Pharaoh’s army. The Egyptian plagues and subsequent “long day” of Joshua were likewise the ripples from cosmic phenomena in dance.
Others have bucked the trend to date the volcanic eruption of Thera to around 1600 B.C.E. by marking it around 1450B.C.E. Ash was responsible for the plagues and geological shifts produced massive waves destroying the Egyptian army pursuing Israel.
Bryant G. Wood and Piotr Bienkowski argue — behind the paywall of the Biblical Archaeological Review — over just how early in the Bronze Age an earthquake brought down the walls of Joshua’s Jericho. (When Miller and Hayes wryly comment on Wood’s argument, “apparently in perfect timing for the seventh day of the Israelite march around the walls”, I assumed they were being cynical. But no, a reading of Wood’s article does make it clear that the “earthquake” presumably struck after the Israelites had marched around the walls seven days!)
Theories of this sort attempt to give naturalistic and scientifically acceptable explanations for the more fantastic and miraculous biblical claims. In our opinion, however, these theories presuppose such hypothetical scenarios, such a catastrophic view of history, and such marvelous correlations of coincidental factors that they create more credibility problems of their own than the ones they are intended to solve. (p. 53)
The famous Ramses/Ramesses name featured eleven times throughout the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties of Egypt — from the Late Bronze to the Early Iron Age. And since in Exodus 1:11 we read . . .
So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh
. . . and since that bland “statement of fact” has, for some, a “ring of authenticity”, the Exodus is best dated during the reign of one of the Ramesses. The great Ramesses II is the one of choice. He began his long reign around 1300 B.C.E. One detail in favour of this time slot is that it would allow the Israelites to reach Canaan in time for the above mentioned Merneptah stele inscription to record that “Israel is no more” after an Egyptian campaign.
Hayes and Miller again draw readers’ attentions to the drawbacks of this hypothesized date:
For one thing, we would expect Israelite storytellers to be familiar with and to use Mesopotamian and Egyptian names and customs in their narratives. Another problem with this proposed correlation between Egyptian history and the biblical narrative is that it does not square very well with biblical chronology. The Nineteenth and Twentieth dynasties ruled from the end of the fourteenth century until after the beginning of the eleventh century. Yet biblical chronology seems to place the exodus already in the fifteenth century. (p. 54)
Transjordanian Occupational Gap
It was once believed that there had been a significant gap of more than half a millennium in settlement in the region east of the Jordan River prior to the thirteenth century. From the 1200s B.C.E. renewed settlements and the rise of the kingdoms of Edom and Moab were witnessed. Given that the Biblical account of the wandering Israelites encountering the kingdoms of Edom and Moab on their way to Canaan, it followed that the Exodus and conquest of Canaan could not have happened before the 1200s B.C.E.
This line of argumentation was combined with, if not inspired by, the identification of Pharaoh Ramesses II as the pharaoh of the exodus (see above).
But there is a but…
More recent archaeological exploration in the Moabite and Edomite regions of southern Transjordan has discredited the idea of a sharp occupational gap prior to the thirteenth century. (p. 55)
Thirteenth-Century Destructions
West of the Jordan River, in the land of Canaan, there is evidence of “widespread city destructions” toward the end of the Late Bronze Age. Here is the accompanying map from the Miller and Hayes volume (p. 56):
Again, M&H list the problems with this hypothesis:
Late Bronze Age city destructions “were part of a general pattern throughout the ancient world”. We cannot know if the destructions occurred simultaneously or even with the onslaught of a common enemy. We do not know if warfare was responsible in most cases.
With the exceptions of Lachish and Hazor, the cities destroyed in this period are not the ones listed in the biblical account of the conquest.
Most of the sites that are identified with cities that the biblical account does associate with the conquest, on the other hand, have produced little or no archaeological indication even of having been occupied during the Late Bronze Age, much less of having been destroyed at the end of the period. Prominent among such “conquest cities” are Arad (present-day Tell Arad), Heshbon (Tell Hisban), Jericho (Tell es-Sultan), Ai (et-Tell), and Gibeon (el-Jib). (p. 55)
The Search for a Distinctively Israelite Material Culture
If only distinctive cultural remains could identify “Israelites” in distinction from other ethnic groups in the land! Some scholars have focussed on “collared-rim jars and four-room houses”:
The collared-rim jars; the four-room house: room 1 is a narrow courtyard, rooms 2, 3 and 4 are separated by pillars – room 3 likely being unroofed. People likely slept in the upper storey, animals below. – (Images from Dever, Rise of Ancient Israel)
Yet there is nothing intrinsically “Israelite” about either of these features, and in fact they show up in the regions of ancient Ammon and Moab, east of the Jordan River, as well as in the areas generally associated with Israelite settlement. Apparently these items belonged to a commonly shared culture throughout Iron I Palestine and therefore cannot be used to isolate particular sites, geographical areas, or historical periods as “Israelite.” (p. 57)
And as for pig bones? Surely the absence of pigs would indicate Israelite settlement, yes?
From the foregoing discussion, it is clear that no human behavioral evidence exists to indicate that pig avoidance was unique to any particular group in the ancient Near East. The fact that complex variables affect the choice to raise swine have confounded attempts to find an origin to the pig prohibition. Lots of people, for lots of reasons, were not eating pork. The bald fact is that there is no date before the Hellenistic period when we can assert with any confidence, based on archaeological and textual evidence, that the religious injunction which enjoined Jews from eating pork was actually followed by them alone as a measure of social distinction. (Hesse & Wapnish, p. 261 — referenced by Miller and Hayes — See also the post: The “Late” Origins of Judaism – The Archaeological Evidence)
The Conquest of Canaan: Observations of a Philologist . . .
Continued in the next post . . . .
Miller, J. Maxwell, and John H. Hayes. A History of Ancient Israel and Judah. 2nd ed. Louisville, Ky. London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006.
Hesse, Brian, and Paula Wapnish. “Can Pig Remains Be Used for Ethnic Diagnosis in the Ancient Near East?” In The Archaeology of Israel: Constructing the Past, Interpreting the Present, edited by Neil Asher Silberman and David B. Small, 238–70. Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997.
Shanks, Hershel, William G. Dever, P. Kyle McCarter Jr, and Bruce Halpern. The Rise of Ancient Israel. Lectures Presented at a Symposium Sponsored by the Resident Associate Program, Smithsonian Institution. Biblical Archaeology Society, 2013.
I am currently reading Edenglassie, a novel by Melissa Lucashenko, because it was introduced to me at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival a few months ago and because I am always delving into historical records relating to the aboriginal people, especially those around where I live.
I recall that many years back, probably like most other white people here, occasionally noticing a few black people in a city park, assuming they were drunk and sensing them to be almost like an alien threat to decency. Here is an excerpt from Edenglassie — an old aboriginal woman, Eddie, is in hospital telling a naive white person, Dartmouth, what it used to be like back when whites first settled here:
“And there was always blackfellas camped near the Valley [a part of the city ofBrisbane], right up till the war, they was never shifted off. A lot of that crowd ended up in Spring Hill and Paddington later on, stone’s throw from the city. The Beehives, the Johnsons and the Wallabys. You ask Aunty Deb Beehive, her old father and uncles used to all corroboree at Spring Hill in the seventies. We’d hear em often when we was over that side of the river, clapsticks and all. And card games at Victoria Park, oh my! Biggest card games all us Murries had. No, we was a part of Brisbane alright, we was always in the thick of things.’
‘And this, ah, crowd – the fringe dwellers at Spring Hill. Where were they from?’ Dartmouth asked, . . . .
Granny Eddie peered at him. Not just an idiot, but blurry too. ‘From?’
‘Yes, originally. Before they were in the Valley.’
‘They weren’t from anywhere. They was always there.”
“Dartmouth adjusted his glasses, flushing. ‘Ah, yes. Of course. Of course, they were.’
‘They call us mob fringe dwellers,’ Eddie added, ‘but Goories ain’t no fringe, you whitefellas is the fringe! We always lived on our own Countries and then the dagai come and plonked themselves down next to us. Or on top of us, if they felt like it! Beehive and Wallaby mob always been in the Valley, long before John Oxley came up the damn river! Fringe dwellers my dot! That word makes me proper wild!’
Dartmouth changed tack.
‘Okay, roger that, no fringe dwellers. Do you know much about the convict era, Eddie? Or the Petrie family?’ he probed delicately. ‘They say Tom Petrie* grew up with the local tribe?’
‘Oh, he did, he did!’ Eddie sat up, enthused. ‘Well, he had to. He was . . . the only white jarjum here for years and years. He learnt the lingo from a baby, a few different lingos in fact. And he was the only one to ask. Ever.’ Granny’s forefinger was raised in admonition of all other colonists.
‘Ask?’ . . . .
“Yep. He was raised with the Yagara mob, so when he grew up and got married, he knew to ask where to select his land, he got permission off of Old Man Dalapai, see. Tom was a man of culture. They say he went through the Bora ceremonies and all … my grandad knew him. And Tom’s father, old Grandfather Andrew Petrie, he saved the Bunya Pines from the logging, Grandad Charlie reckoned. Cos he knew how much them trees mean to the blackfellas.’
‘So, it’s true the Petries were friendly with the Brisbane tribe?’ Dartmouth prompted, mentally deleting his stockwhips in favour of Granny’s narrative. ‘And Tom was actually initiated?’
‘Oh, yes,’ answered Granny. ‘Initiation means ya part of the tribe, well and truly,’ she said, answering the second part of Dartmouth’s question. Suddenly growing tired, she felt the nagging ache in her neck starting up again. ‘The Petries were decent people, educated people. If everyone had been like them things could have been different alright. If the whitefellas had just asked.”
* Tom Petrie was a historical person. For a fascinating education in aboriginal life “as it really was” an absolute “must read” is Tom Petrie’s reminiscences of early Queensland. Tom Petrie as a boy mixed with the local aboriginals, learning more than one of their languages (as a rule they were multilingual), and was highly respected by them all. And when older he really did ask them for land to settle before completing legal paperwork with the white authorities.
I intend in this post to throw an idea into the ring for consideration. I have very little with which to defend the idea but I find it of interest. I have nothing stronger than that as my motive for posting it here:
that the serpent in the Garden of Eden was an allusion to the seduction of Greek wisdom
Early last year I posted — solely for the purpose of showing that the idea was not unknown among scholars — a summary of one academic proposal that Plato at one point was ultimately drawing upon the biblical Garden of Eden story of “the fall”. I still have strong reservations about the case made in that article and for that reason I have from time to time returned to have another look at the relevant sources to see if more cogent sense can be made of the comparisons or if the notion should be dropped entirely. Now I would like to propose a more plausible and cogent case for the reverse: that the biblical authors were drawing upon Plato. (The idea that the Hebrew Bible drew upon Greek literature is a minority view among scholars but nonetheless a reputable one that has been published in academic sources: see Niels Peter Lemche, Mandell and Freedman, Jan-Wim Wessellius, Philippe Wajdenbaum, RussellGmirkin, andrelatedpostsetc)
It is impressive to note how ophidian or anguine symbolism permeates Greek and Roman legends and myths, shaping Hellenistic culture. (Charlesworth, 127)
Yes, the serpent was a positive image among the Greeks of the classical and hellenistic eras of their chief god Zeus, but I will offer a more specific literary connection.
Evangelia Dafni attempted to argue that Plato’s panegyric of Socrates was indebted to some extent to the serpent who tempted Eve (see first link above). A key weakness in the argument, I believe, was its failure to provide a clear motive for the borrowing. If there was borrowing from the Hebrews it seemed to fail to add anything extra to the understanding of Plato’s text.
But notice how different everything looks in reverse. A potentially new depth of meaning is indeed added to the Genesis narrative by inverting Dafni’s suggestion.
Socrates can justly be considered the paragon of Greek wisdom. One might say that Socrates was the midwife at the birth of Greek philosophy, epitomized by Plato and Aristotle and their offshoots. In his dialogue The Symposium Socrates is directly compared with a viper whose bite is compared with Socrates overpowering his interlocutor by his unassailable questioning and speech. Socrates is depicted as being in a class of his own above all other mortals because of his wisdom as Eden’s serpent is wise above all the beasts of the earth. Socrates offers the wisdom of the gods. If one who had not met Socrates felt no disgrace or shame about his person, after an encounter with Socrates he would indeed be overwhelmed with shame of his former state of ignorance — as Adam and Eve were not ashamed of their nakedness until after they succumbed to the serpent’s temptation. What Socrates offers with his words is described as full of beauty, desirability and wisdom.
At this point, let’s recall the passage in Genesis:
2:25 And the two were naked, both Adam and his wife, and were not ashamed.
3:1 Now the serpent was moreφρονιμώτατος [LXX = discerning, prudent, wise] than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
Let’s back up a little and start at the beginning.
Socrates is telling his companions a story of his encounter with the prophetess Diotima of Mantineia (punning names that could be translated literally as “Fear-God of Prophet-ville” – Rouse, 97) who educated him about the nature of love and immortality. Interestingly (perhaps, for me at any rate) Socrates deems the act of sexual intercourse between a man and woman as generating a form of immortality:
“To the mortal creature, generation is a sort of eternity and immortality,” she replied; “and . . . . we needs must yearn for immortality no less than for good . . . .”
All this she taught me at various times . . . . (Symposium, 206e-207a)
The discussion extends to addressing various ways humans can be thought of as immortal (“continually becoming a new person”), not unlike (this is my own comparison here, not that of Socrates) the common ancient image (as ancient as the epic of Gilgamesh) of the serpent regularly shedding its old skin in a process of “eternal” renewal.
I was astonished at her words, and said: “Is this really true, O thou wise Diotima?”
And she answered with all the authority of an accomplished sophist: “Of that, Socrates, you may be assured; — think only of the ambition of men, and you will wonder at the senselessness of their ways, unless you consider how they are stirred by the love of an immortality of fame. They are ready to . . . undergo any sort of toil, and even to die, for the sake of leaving behind them a name which shall be eternal. (208c)
Socrates proceeds to report Diotima’s elucidation of what is truly beautiful, “passing from view to view of beautiful things” until the one learning wisdom finally grasps true beauty and no longer is content with the inferior beauty of the physical world. Diotima concludes:
“Do consider,” she said, “beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, [one] will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities . . . and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if any man ever is.” (212a)
After Socrates’ speech in which the words of a divinely inspired prophet were presenting the ultimate in beauty that could ever be desired by mortals for the sake of an immortal name, who should rudely interrupt the occasion but a drunken Alcibiades. Alcibiades was a “man of the world”, a famed political figure, conscious of his beauty but also one who was enamoured of Socrates, both intellectually and physically.
Bust of Silenus (The MET) and Marsyas the satyr (ChatGPT image): “He is exactly like the busts of Silenus, which are set up in the statuaries, shops, holding pipes and flutes in their mouths; and they are made to open in the middle, and have images of gods inside them.“
In Plato’s dialogue each guest had been expected to deliver some kind of ode to “love”. Alcibiades, arriving late, instead will tell all what Socrates himself can be likened to — in similes. Socrates is like the ugly Silenus, grotesque on the outside but cut him open and inside you will find images of the gods. Or he is like the entrancing satyr Marsyas who invented the music of the flute and “bewitched men by the power of his mouth”. The only difference, Alcibiades explains, is that Socrates can enchant and stir a longing for the divine merely by the means of his speech:
The only difference … is that you [=Socrates] do the very same without instruments by bare words! . . . When one hears you . . . we are overwhelmed and entranced. (215c-d)
Alcibiades brings in another simile with which to liken Socrates and his words: the serpent, specifically the persuasive power of the serpent!
Besides, I share the plight of the man who was bitten by the snake. . . . I have been bitten by a more painful viper, and in the most painful spot where one could be bitten — the heart, or soul, or whatever it should be called — stung and bitten by his discourses in philosophy, which hang on more cruelly than a viper when they seize on a young and not ungifted soul, and make it do and say whatever they will. (217e-218a)
Eve is not bitten by the serpent, of course, but she and Adam do for the first time feel shame as a consequence of listening to him. Shame was the bite Alcibiades said he felt after his time with Socrates. Alcibiades had attempted to seduce Socrates sexually but found him unmoved. Socrates gently chastised him by pointing out that he was trying to exchange what was beautiful to one’s physical eyes and pleasures (bronze) for the true beauty of wisdom (gold) – with the result that Alcibiades felt deep shame for his attempts to attain sexual favour with Socrates:
And there is one experience I have in presence of this man alone, such as nobody would expect in me; and that is, to be made to feel ashamed [αἰσχύνομαι, a form of the same word in LXX Gen 2:25]; he alone can make me feel it. . . I cannot contradict him . . . and, whenever I see him, I am ashamed . . . . (216b-c)
It is at that point where Alcibiades begins to describe his vain attempt to seduce Socrates and its humiliating aftermath.
Socrates was a man like no other:
There are many more quite wonderful things that one could find to praise in Socrates: but . . . it is his not being like any other man in the world, ancient or modern, that is worthy of all wonder. . . .
When you agree to listen to the talk of Socrates . . . you will find his words first full of sense, as no others are . . . (221c-222a)
But, Alcibiades warns, beware of being seduced by his wisdom to the extent that you are stirred to a desire for sexual gratification (an exchange of false beauty for true) and one feel shame as a consequence:
That is a warning to you . . . not to be deceived by this man . . . . (222b)
There we have it. In one episode in Plato’s dialogues we have a blend of a person “more wise” than any other mortal, one likened to a serpent, one whose speech is overpoweringly persuasive, who promises a form of immortality, who displays all that is truly beautiful and to be desired, yet who leaves the ignorant feeling shame over their former condition — specifically in relation to sexual desire.
Much more could be written but I have introduced them in earlier posts. We have seen Russell Gmirkin’s observation that it was Plato who portrayed an idyllic origin scene where animals and humans could converse with one another. I linked above to a similar discussion by Evangelia Dafni who drew attention to Plato’s comparison of Socrates with the serpent — although I believe this post brings an explanation for a possible borrowing from Plato to the Bible. If we ride with the possibility of a Hellenistic origin for the biblical literature, we may see in the serpent’s temptation of Adam and Eve a rebuke to the Greek philosophy that would have stood opposed to the wisdom that must come from an obedience to the commands of God. The image of the serpent as a religious icon had been familiar enough in the Levant for millennia and was most prominent anew in the Hellenistic world with its associations with Zeus, Athena and a host of other Greek associations (compare, for example, the golden fleece in a tree guarded by a serpent) — and even as a fit simile for the shame-inducing yet enlightening and immortality promising wisdom of Socrates.
By no means do I expect the above thoughts to seduce an innocent to partake of the wisdom of a Hellenistic origin of the Hebrew Bible. I present the above thoughts as an observation of some interest to those already persuaded on other grounds for the stories of Genesis being being formed from the raw material of Greek literature, Plato in particular.
Charlesworth, James H. The Good and Evil Serpent: How a Universal Symbol Became Christianized. New Haven Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010.
Dafni, Evangelia G. “Genesis 2–3 and Alcibiades’s Speech in Plato’s Symposium: A Cultural Critical Reading.” HTS Teologiese Studies 71, no. 1 (2015).
Rouse, W. H. D. Great Dialogues of Plato – The Republic – Apology – Crito – Phaedo – Ion – Meno – Symposium. Mentor Books, 1956.
Translations of Plato are a mix of those by Jowett, Fowler and Rouse (above) — with constant reference to the Greek text at the Perseus Digital Library
I was recently somewhat startled to learn that the Elijahs, the Isaiahs, the Ezekiels and Jeremiahs of the Bible were familiar characters in diverse ancient Near Eastern cultures long before biblical Israel appeared on the scene. I am talking about ancient Syria 900 years before the emergence of the kingdom of Israel in the archaeological record. The following information comes entirely from Jean-Marie Durand’s discussion of the Amorite religion in Syria as documented in the Mari archives. The scholarly world has known about it at least since 1948. So why has it taken me so long to learn about this class of religious persons outside the Bible? Prophets could be “anybody” who felt a call from a deity and, as in the Bible, these prophets would take their message to their rulers — a habit well known among the Bible’s prophets. Sometimes the prophets would perform symbolic acts just as we read about some of the Bible’s prophets. Very often the prophecies would be written down and stored in official archives.
Note how familiar to the Biblical tropes it all sounds.
Indeed, at those times, people diligently sought to divine the intentions of the gods, who were thought to be deeply concerned with what was happening in this world. They wanted to know both how the gods reacted to human plans and what they expected, in turn, from human actions. In this sense, the gods behaved just like the human king, without whose authorization no initiative could be taken . . . .
Humans therefore had to inform themselves to avoid certain actions or, conversely, to be encouraged in them. However, the beliefs of the time admitted that the gods could take the initiative to send messages and warn humans, both to help and to admonish them. The contact between the spheres of the divine and the human took various forms, and an ongoing dialogue was established in several ways.
(Durand, p 431 – translation)
Certain persons felt called by a deity and would convey the messages from that god in the first person voice of god so that there could be “no doubt” that the prophet was not misinterpreting the words given him or her.
There were various kinds of prophets, including groups of full time “professionals” as well as lone figures from the lay community, men and women.
A king would sometimes take the initiative and seek the advice of a prophet (or of the god speaking through the prophet). Other times a prophet would approach the court and convey a message to the king through intermediaries.
The Calling
One text speaks of “prophets” – nabûm – as a profession, using a cognate of the same word for prophet that we find in the Hebrew Bible – nābî. The meaning is related to being named or being called.
When I arrived at Asmad, I gathered the nabûm of the Bedouins (= Bensim’alites) and took the omens for the king’s well-being.
These could only be technicians in whose presence, or thanks to whom, investigations into the future were conducted. These people also gave precise advice on conduct to the king. They thus played exactly the role one would expect from the diviner-bârûm or the prophet-âpilum. It is difficult to avoid concluding that, whatever the differences between the Old Babylonian nabûm and the Hebrew nābî’, the denomination already existed as early as the 18th century BCE and referred to someone who gave a discourse about the future.
(Durand, 434 – trans)
Recall how biblical prophets would speak of themselves being overwhelmed by God’s calling them to a difficult mission. If an ancient city-state king in Syria commissioned a servant to fulfil a duty (such as being sent to administer a neighbouring population) the act could be compared with a deity calling a prophet. Note this letter describing such a commission from the king:
My Lord has assigned me to a (too) great task; I do not have the strength (for it): (it is) like a god “calling” a human. Now, I, worm of the foundations, my Lord has touched my chin [touching by the king was a mark of transferring his power or person to another], which is characteristic of his divinity, and he has sent me among men.
. . . . It was genuinely believed that there was a personal contact between the god and the one he “called,” before sending him back (on a mission) to the humans. The individual had to literally feel summoned by the god (nabûm) at a certain point; the mission granted to him was therefore not “fixed for all eternity,” but represented a “historical event.”
The very expression in this letter “sent me back among the humans” allows us to understand why the terms “message” or “mission” were commonly used to refer to the prophetic message itself. This “prophetic mission” is emphasized in more than one text.
(Durand 435f – trans)
Being sent on a mission with a message from the god was not always said to be given to a prophet, but sometimes simply to a “man of (the) god”:
There are several documents where someone, who has no specific prophetic or religious title otherwise, arrives at the royal official’s place carrying a divine message. The most spectacular example has been known for a long time: it is . . . the Revelation of Dagan of Terqa. The god had said to Malik-Dagan: . . .
“Now, go! You are my messenger!”
The individual is defined only as “man of Šakkâ,” not as a priest, nor a prophet, and he did not seem predestined by his functions to serve as an intermediary between Dagan and the king of Mari. Another purely secular individual, a “free man’s wife,” proclaims: . . .
“Dagan has sent me.”
(Durand 436 trans)
Protocol among kings was that a gift (items of clothing or jewellery) be given to a messenger who arrived from another kingdom. The same protocol applied to a messenger from a god.
Two Types of Prophet
There were two types of prophet: the forthrightly eloquent and the “maddies”, or more technically, the muhhûm. The word derives from a verb indicating an extreme form of madness, or “completely mad”, one might say.
As Saul turned to leave Samuel, God changed Saul’s heart, and all these signs were fulfilled that day. 10 When he and his servant arrived at Gibeah, a procession of prophets met him; the Spirit of God came powerfully upon him, and he joined in their prophesying. 11 When all those who had formerly known him saw him prophesying with the prophets, they asked each other, “What is this that has happened to the son of Kish? Is Saul also among the prophets?” — 1 Samuel 10:9-11
These muhhûm would suddenly be taken over by a fit of “enthusiasm” and stand up in the temple to cry out, or in the middle of the performing of a sacrifice would in the presence of many witnesses enter a trance and vehemently proclaim a message. There is evidence that their hair was like a “tangled mane” so we can picture them as “more or less wild and unkempt beings”. They could engage in primitive behaviour such as tearing apart an animal with hands or teeth and devouring it at the city gate to convey, say, in pantomime that the god would “devour” (send a plague) just as the prophet had devoured the animal. These muhhûm, prone to trances and behaviour of “possessed ones” could form groups. We are reminded of the Bible’s account of Saul being caught up among groups of prophets who were in trance-like state as they prophesied.
The other kind of prophet, the âpilum, could present long lyrical speeches often of high literary quality. An âpilum could be sent for by the king and ordered to find out the will of the god on a matter of policy the king was considering. The âpilum was recognized as a legitimate messenger of the god who could call on the god to find out his or her will.
Perhaps the king wanted a firm commitment from the god regarding the successes to come. The âpilum . . . may only be a simple visitor who transmitted a question from the king. He had access to the deities of the major religious centres of his kingdom and also served as a messenger between them. In the absence of the king from his capital, it is to the highest authority of the state that he reports, and it is this authority that is responsible for transmitting the information. He thus has the rank of an ambassador, and his message indeed deals with decisive matters, such as peace with one of the major powers of the time. . . . Nowhere do we see a muhhûm being entrusted with such missions and having such a regular place near the king.
(Durand, 446 – trans)
During times of war such a prophet was able to cross in and out of opposing armies lines in safety. Presumably his person was considered sacrosanct and he could serve as an intermediary between the warring parties.
The same kinds of prophets would make it clear that it was a particular deity who had raised a king to the throne, and therefore the king had a special responsibility to safeguard the temple and demands of that god. For a king to neglect the will of the god who raised him to power would be to risk divine punishment. In this situation, the prophet (âpilum) would take the initiative to visit the king and report his shortcomings. One such prophecy is recorded:
The respondent of Marduk stood at the gate of Eme-Dagan and did not cease to cry out amid the assembly of the entire country: ‘You went to the emperor of Elam to establish peaceful relations. In making peace, you handed over to the emperor of Elam treasures that belonged to Marduk and the city of Babylon. You depleted silos and warehouses that belonged to me, without returning the favors I bestowed. And now you want to go to Ekallâtum? He who has spent a treasure that belonged to me must not ask me for its interest.’”
In this situation the prophet cries out like a wild “muhhûm” but in fact his speech is “longer and more complex” that that of the one possessed.
Many of the prophecies recorded were exhortations to the king to continue in his policies of ruling well and piously. Others were long lists of tirades predicting the doom of neighbouring kingdoms.
When Samuel had all Israel come forward by tribes, the tribe of Benjamin was taken by lot.Then he brought forward the tribe of Benjamin, clan by clan, and Matri’s clan was taken. Finally Saul son of Kish was taken.” — 1 Samuel 10:20f
There were other types of positions that we might think of as related to prophets, such as “seers”. Seers would be tasked with casting lots to acquire a yes/no answer at appropriate times and places such as whether or not to accept a treaty, to besiege a city, and so forth.
Authenticating the message
In the texts that use the formulation “He stood up and…” or “He had a trance” …, the prophet does not specify that he is sent by the deity: the latter indeed speaks directly, in the first person, through his mouth; the assistants observe the event; the evident manifestations of the ecstatic phenomenon are sufficient. . . . Some ecstasies must have taken place far away or without witnesses, and those to whom the divine words were reported had not witnessed them. This is the example of Malik-Dagan named messenger by Dagan in the solitude of a dream . . . Another text specifies:
Now I have written down the oracle he delivered to me, and I sent him to my Lord. However, the oracle, he did not deliver it to me in secret; it was during the assembly of the Elders that he delivered his oracle.
(Durand, 437f – trans)
In cases where the prophet did not deliver the message in person to the king, the message would be written down and delivered by a court official:
Quite often, however, the prophet . . . does not go directly to the king but passes through an intermediary. Only these situations would have led to the drafting of a tablet, while those where the king was directly addressed did not leave written records. . . .
When the man “mandated by the god” does not plan to deliver the message to the king himself, he goes to the legal authority to entrust him with it, possibly emphasizing the responsibility incurred in case of failure to convey the information. An official specifies:
“This man repeated this dream to me and placed (all) responsibility on me, saying: ‘Write to the king!’ That is why I have written to my Lord.”
(Durand, 438 – trans)
The official relaying the message to the king was only fulfilling his job responsibility of keeping the king informed of all important news, including messages from the gods.
Several times, we notice that the royal official before whom the bearers of prophecies present themselves imposes witnesses on them. This was likely a means of ensuring that the message was transmitted to the king accurately and that the official had no personal interest in what was being demanded of the king. It is a safeguard for the official, not for the prophet, whose speech is in some way fixed ne varietur. This procedure is particularly illustrated during the claims made by Addu of Kalassu against the territory of Alahtum …. But the motivations for the operation become clear when we see that a … scribe, sent to record the respondent’s words, does so in the presence of witnesses so that the expression on the tablet cannot be contested.
(Durand, 439 – trans)
When sending a message to the royal court the prophet would include some personal token such as a lock of hair or a cord attached to an identifying seal. It was up to the king to decide whether to follow up the delivered message. Sometimes practical wisdom outweighed any hints a prophetic message might have against a proposed action.
In any case, the sincerity of the prophet is never questioned, even if the stakes are politically very significant. Such suspicions are the product of modern mentalities. “False prophets” are prophets of false gods, not “simulators.”
(Durand, 480 – trans)
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There was a diverse range of both prophetic messages and literary forms.
We are so accustomed to viewing Christian origins within an exclusively Western orb. In our minds we have the images of a Roman Empire that stops abruptly at the Parthian border:
Image from https://www.worldhistory.org/image/15518/the-provinces-of-the-roman-empire-under-augustus/
But what if we were to shift Italy a little further west with a view to imagining where Palestine and Egypt were positioned in the grand scheme of things?
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Roman_trade_relations
Now try to register this newly emerging possibility:
Some economic historians now estimate that such was the scale of the Red Sea trade at this period [early imperial Rome] that the customs taxes raised by Roman officials on the trade coming through the Red Sea would alone have covered around one-third of the entire revenues that the Roman Empire required to administer its global conquests and maintain its legions, from Scotland to the borders of Persia and from the Sahara to the banks of the Rhine and Danube. . . .
Indeed according to some recent calculations, customs taxes on trade with India may have generated as much as one-third of the entire income of the Roman exchequer. . . . [A more cautious estimate by Andrew Wilson in his 2014 Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy essay is that the quarter tax on the Red Sea ships amounted to a third of the annual cost of the army.]
Dalrymple, William. The Golden Road (pp. 6, 55, 318). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Compare this map of locations of Roman coin hoards:
The map shows Roman coin hoards: none are found east of the Pamirs or the Oxus. But there is a notable concentration of Roman gold all around the coasts of India and Sri Lanka, as well as at Aden and on the coast of the Red Sea. Dalrymple, William. The Golden Road (p. 484). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
It all began with Mark Antony’s defeat at the Battle of Actium and the establishment of Octavian’s/Augustus’s new imperial order. With the regular trade winds to and from India to the Red Sea a one way journey would take forty days:
Indian traders heading west used to arrive with the trade winds in early summer and ride the summer monsoon home in August; with the winds behind you, the journey from the mouth of the Red Sea to Gujarat could take as little as forty days, though if you missed the winds the round trip might take as long as a year, and cause you to take a prolonged holiday on the Nile.
Dalrymple, William. The Golden Road (p. 5). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
And just as in more recent times we know Christian missionaries travelled with traders into South America and Africa, so did Buddhist monks travel to Roman ruled regions.
Hermann Detering broached the hypothesis that Buddhism was a significant player in the development of Christianity. I suspect few others have explored his arguments with much serious attention.
I wonder if a reconfiguration of our mental (and cultural) maps might encourage us to examine his thesis more closely. In my visits to different countries in south-east Asia I would always visit places of religious note and one scene always struck me: Buddha walking on water to his disciples just as Jesus…. as per these earlier posts:
But setting aside the question of Christian origins, the place of India in the history of the world in the past 2500 years is most definitely worth a major re-think: Please DO take a moment to listen to this podcast…..
The guest being interviewed in that podcast talks of several places I have visited — and his interview makes me want to return and re-explore those places.
How I would love to be on a committee today planning the history curriculum for school students. So much has been learned since I was in a classroom — the wide diversities of lifestyles and social organizations in prehistoric periods; how climate changes impacted civilizations; … and even the place of India as a fulcrum in world history — sending mathematical advances to the West and literature to the East. You will not regret taking the time to listen to the 50 or so minutes of that interview (pending your reading of the book in question).
Dalrymple, William. The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024.
