2010-05-29

The Fall of Jericho — inspired by an old Canaanite tale?

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by Neil Godfrey

The Fall of Jericho, as in Joshua 6:8-20, illu...
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Marieke den Braber and Jan-Wim Wesselius published an article that argued the story of Joshua’s besieging of Jericho drew on literary precedents centuries old.

Gosh, maybe even the story of the fall of Jericho after 7 days of silence and loud blasts of trumpets on the 7th day was made up too.

These are notes from “The Unity of Joshua 1-8, its Relation to the Story of King Keret, and the Literary Background to the Exodus and Conquest Stories.” — Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament, Vol. 22, No. 2, 253-274, 2008.

The original article covers a much more complex discussion than the following table suggests. I’ve just picked out these bits for general interest here. Braber and Wesselius don’t suggest that the Joshua story necessarily directly copied or transvalued the Keret story we have, but that the evidence suggests that such a story, such tropes as 7 days besieging and 7 days noise bringing about the fall of the city, was known in the literature before the biblical author penned the Jericho story.

My primary interest in stuff like this is to explore the links between biblical stories and other narratives and themes in the wider area. Anything that helps understanding possible literary backgrounds to the Bible is “A Good Thing” in my view.

The Epic of Keret is a Canaanite/Ugaritic epic poem from around 1500 to 1200 B.C.E. I admit I find it a little difficult to connect a king going crazy enough to surrender his city because of the noise of animals with walls falling flat at the noise of trumpets. So make of this what you will.

Continue reading “The Fall of Jericho — inspired by an old Canaanite tale?”


Why early Christians would create the story of Jesus’ baptism – and more evidence the gospels were very late

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

by Neil Godfrey

John the Baptist baptizing Christ
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The historicity of Jesus’ baptism is asserted on grounds that the event would not have been told unless it were true, because it implies views of Jesus that no Christian would invent:

  1. that John was up till that point superior to Jesus,
  2. and/or that Jesus had sins to be buried in the Jordan River.

This is hardly a solid method to determine whether or not an event is historical or not, especially when reasons do exist that could indeed explain why Christians might invent the story.

I have usually given just one of these possible reasons in other posts, and that is that the author of the Gospel of Mark viewed Jesus as an ordinary man until the moment of his baptism when he was possessed by the Spirit of God and declared at that moment, God’s Beloved Son. Such a view is supported by this Gospel’s depiction of Jesus as far more human than the way he is shown in later Gospels, and also by Mark’s description of the Spirit possessing and driving Jesus into the wilderness. It was this lowly view of Jesus that the later evangelists attempted to re-write: Matthew declaring that John protested that he should not baptize Jesus; Luke only indirectly implying that John baptized Jesus; and John not mentioning the baptism at all.

But there is another evident reason that this scenario might have been invented. This was to fulfill prophetic expectations held among the Jews. One criterion that some scholars (e.g. Robert Funk in “Honest to Jesus”) use to cast doubt on the historicity of any passage in the Gospels is that of intended prophetic fulfillment. If a passage appears to have been written in order to fulfill some “prophecy” of Christ, then the historian must at the very least accept the possibility that it was invented for that purpose.

G. A. Wells in The Jesus Myth alerts us to the evidence that the Jews were expecting the Messiah to be anointed by Elijah. And Mark’s Gospel specifically identifies John the Baptist with Elijah, and that at least one early Christian did point to Jesus’ baptism as another proof that Jesus was the Christ. Continue reading “Why early Christians would create the story of Jesus’ baptism – and more evidence the gospels were very late”