Lemche . . . accounts for the Grand Canyon yawning between biblical “minimalists” (like himself, Thomas L. Thompson, Jason Van Seters [sic — read “John Van Seters”], and Philip R. Davies) and “maximalists,” the latter being . . . fundamentalist literalists, evangelical scholars who think they are real critics but are actually a kind of sophisticated apologists, and others who really practice critical methodologies (tradition criticism, form criticism, etc.) but still try to preserve the substantial historical accuracy of Old Testament narratives, albeit by means of “rationalistic paraphrase.” All these allies vilify minimalists as nihilistic, anti-Semitic, postmodernists, wild rhetoric not seen since the days of the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy. It is Lemche’s mission in this book to demonstrate that the inertial credulity of these apologists (for, essentially, that’s what all of them are) stems from a failure of intellectual nerve. . . . For the so-called “minimalism” is simply the result of the consistent application of tried-and-true critical methods . . . (Price, 153 — highlighting is my own. Van Seters agrees with minimalists like Lemche and Thompson on critical points but his name, as far as I am aware, is not normally associated with “minimalists” per se)
and
Scholars like Lemche, Thompson, and the rest have amply demonstrated, from both archaeological and textual analysis, that the biblical “history” of Israel is anything but. Instead, it must now be recognized as a piece of Hellenistic literature, bearing every mark of that genre. There was no historical Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, or Josiah. Samson = Hercules. Yahweh has the same ontological value as Zeus. Jonah no more than Jason. Such is the astonishing truth that one must dare to know. (Price, 154 — again, my highlighting)
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One thing to note is that “Hellenistic Dating of the Hebrew Scriptures” does not necessarily mean that the authors of the Hebrew Scriptures were Hellenistic. Personally, I think they were, but Russell Gmirkin did not. (I believe that, just as Ptolemy I sponsored a syncretic religion based on the Egypto-Greco god Serapis to make Greek colonists comfortable in Egypt, Ptolemy II sponsored a syncretic religion based on the Semitic-Greco god Yahweh to make Greek colonists comfortable in the Levant.)
Is it not Canaan, though, and places like Shechem, Bethel, Ai, Hebron, Beersheba, Jerusalem, Mizpah that are the focus?
I have no doubt that the connection Israel–Shechem–Gerizim is very old, Israel being most likely the one mentioned in Merenptrhah’s inscription as being no more. Well he will have to find his place in the queue; there is a lot of other who have wanted to extinguish Israel — whatever it was/is. People should pay more attention to Finkelstein’s The Forgotten Kingdom.
Finkelstein speaks of large scale migration from southern Samaria into Judah in the wake of Assyrian invasions. Is that migration a debated hypothesis? — I am wondering if my memory is correct in thinking some have challenged this view of Finkelstein.
The fact that Genesis mentions a bunch of places in Canaan doesn’t necessarily mean that Genesis was written in Canaan. Note that the author of Genesis was also aware of the names of all of these actual cities in Mesopotamia: Babylon, Ur, Uruk, Eridu, Larsa, Elam, Ninevah (plus 3 cities in the surrounding vicinity of Ninevah), etc., and he used Berossus’ version of Enuma Elish (written in Greek) as one of his most important primary sources. Manetho’s Aegyptiaca was another extremley important source for Genesis. Probably only about 1/4 of Genesis takes place in Canaan, 1/4 takes place in Egypt, and 1/2 takes place in Mesopotamia. Canaan doesn’t even enter the story until Genesis 12 and practically completely leaves the story by Genesis 39. And then Canaan is completely off the radar for four more books before finally reappearing.
Note also that it is questionable whether some of the mentioned places in Canaan even existed or are just made up place names. Beersheba meaning “well of 7” seems extremely likely to have just been completely made up. I’m less certain about whether the others are purely fictional or not (Bethel? Ai? Mizpah?) and some definitely aren’t (Jerusalem, Shechem), but I wouldn’t just assume that any location mentioned in the Bible and ESPECIALLY in Genesis or the Pentateuch are real. Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, Oaks of Moreh, Oaks of Mamre, Mount Moriah, Arrarat – all completely made up places.
One thing I haven’t heard mentioned much is that in the 200s BCE when the Pentateuch was first written during the Hellenistic era, the population of Jerusalem was at best several thousand people. The population of the entire region of Judea was perhaps 20,000. The population of Samaria was notably bigger than the population of Judah.
But the Canaanite speaking population of Alexandria, Egypt was larger than the entire population of Judea, and Alexandria had the best library in the world, and the Ptolemies were spending large amounts of money to patronize the world class scholars at the great library.
It seems highly plausible that when Ptolemy II sponsored the creation of the Pentateuch, his primary intention was to regulate the religious practices of Canaanite speakers in his capital, and while he probably wanted it to also be accepted by people living in his more distant provinces, regulating the capital would have been far more important.
I disagree with Gmirkin that the authors of the Pentateuch went back to Jerusalem and continued to produce more literature. I know we’re in the realm of speculation here, but I think it more likely that the authors of the Pentateuch were probably permanent residents of Alexandria and that there’s absolutely no reason to think that Ptolemy II would have had any need to engage in lengthy correspondence with Jerusalem and pay to have people from Jerusalem move to his capital for 1-2 years to write the Pentateuch.
So I wonder, when did they actually start writing anything in the Old Testament in Jerusalem? I suspect that nearly everything in the Old Testament was written in Alexandria. Maybe Daniel or Chronicles weren’t. Although, maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised to learn that there is good evidence to date some Old Testament books to the Hasmonean period at some point.
All the accounts we have of the Ptolemies and the function of the Alexandrian Library and Ptolemaic patronage of literati testify to an interest in gathering the extant literature, sources, from the eastern Mediterranean world. Librarians and others were assigned to correct texts etc, but the value of the program lay in its comprehensiveness as a collection for the world. There was no interest in regulating religions of any factional groups. If anything, the reverse — collect the records of all in all their diversity.
Expense was never an issue. The Ptolemies spent big in money and labour on gathering texts wherever and however they could.
The only interest in promoting religious uniformity was in the introduction of Serapis. But this deity did not replace existing cults as far as I am aware.
Very interesting observations.
And yes, money presumably isn’t an issue, but the logistics and practicality of sending several people to Alexandria who are local intellectual elites in Jerusalem and presumably have families in Jerusalem to Alexandria for 1-2 years to produce a new collection of literature presents logistical challenges, even if they can be overcome with sufficient money.
Still, I’d like to propose a question:
You are the high priest of Jerusalem. Ptolemy II is going to cut your head off or replace you and force you and your entire family out of your current life of wealth and prestige into poverty if you don’t pay him a vast sum of money every 12 months. Ptolemy II tells his chief librarian to write to you a letter that tells you that he has heard of the Laws of Moses. He would like for you to send him a copy for the library along with a few of your most learned representatives to travel to Alexandria and translate it into Greek.
You have never heard of Moses. You know that no such laws exist, and included in the letter is a short summary of what Hecataeus of Abdera wrote about how Moses founded Jerusalem, which you know is complete BS.
How do you write back?
Option 1: Yes, Ptolemy. I am an expert on the laws of Moses. I am sending several of my closest associates from Jerusalem (all of whom happen to be very well learned, capable of writing long novels, and able to read Greek) who can translate our ancestral laws of Moses into Greek.
Option 2: Yes, Potlemy, I’ve never heard of Moses. But if you’d like, I can send advisors who are experts in our ancestral laws and traditions who can produce a new set of laws for the library that will be acceptable to your lordship.
I don’t know that I speak for everyone when I say this, but my gut reaction is that I am not going to try to pull a fast one over my boss who might literally kill me. Also, humans suck at keeping secrets. I’m not betting my livelihood on unnecessary deception.
I also find it extremely farfetched bordering on lunacy to presume that Ptolemy and/or his chief intellectuals running the library could have been fooled into believing that the Pentateuch was being translated when in reality what was happening was that it was being made up for the first time on the spot, even if the high priest wanted to try to pull off the lie. It was indeed being made up for the first time on the spot, and we have to presume that anyone who wasn’t totally stupid, especially anyone who was extremely intelligent, would have figured this out. This is especially true given that the authors of the Pentateuch incorporated many ideas taken straight out of Greek literature into the plot of the finished product and everyone would have known at the first public reading.
Given that they would have known that what was happening was not a translation project but actually making it up for the first time on the spot, the desire to produce it could not possibly have been driven by any concern to accurately preserve a diversity of ancient, local laws, and thus it must have been to generate value to Ptolemy himself.
And it seems crazy to think that Ptolemy wouldn’t have wanted to audit or give his own input on what should be in laws that he was paying for and intending to help promote.
Maybe one could debate what the exact value Ptolemy was looking for. Was it to regulate Canaanite religious practices in Alexandria, Judea, or Samaria? Was it simply a matter of prestige so that Ptolemy could tell his Greek speaking associates, look at the great and glorious past of the lands that I now rule? Was it to create a religion that could help his bottom line by regulating religious practices to encourage money to flow into the temples he sponsored? Was it purely for entertainment?
> There was no interest in regulating religions of any factional groups. If anything, the reverse — collect the records of all in all their diversity.
While it very well may have been the case that Ptolemy would have wanted to collect all the known writings in the world, to say that there would have been no interest in regulating religious practices within the empire seems extremely implausible and contradicted by well know evidence. Ptolemy I had never heard of any of the gods of Egypt when he left Macedonia and surely didn’t believe in a single one of the Egyptian gods, and it’s extremely doubtful that his son or descendants would have believed in them either. Yet they obviously spent lots of time and money in promoting the cult of Serapis and making up stories claiming that the Greek gods were the same as the Egyptian gods.
And, perhaps it was Ptolemy I who wrote the famous quote of Alexander, “you my generals may know that I am mortal, but the regular people don’t need to know that.”
Also, Ptolemy II Philadelphos (sibling lover) forced his sister into a marriage she probably didn’t want to be in and considered a sensitive topic leading to the deaths of a few people who made nasty comments about her. Ptolemy went so far as to give himself a title based on that marriage and put it on his coins so that the local Egyptian population would view him as being like Osiris and Isis.
Alexandria was a completely new city, and the Ptolemies had to build temples in their capital city of Alexandria, both temples for Serapis and temples for the Jewish god. There are inscriptions from Jewish synagogues in Alexandria saying that they had Ptolemaic sponsorship.
And of course money is important. The high priest in Jerusalem was responsible for paying tribute to the Ptolemaic pharaohs every year. Regulating religious practices could have a direct impact on the ability of the high priest to collect tribute.
This isn’t said often enough, but the reality of the ancient world was that religion from the time of the oldest known written records was tightly interconnected with politics. Kings replaced priests they didn’t like. Kings installed their family members to be high priests. Kings held elaborate religious ceremonies promoting themselves as the chosen messengers of the gods. Sure, they probably believed in it to some degree, but they were just as intelligent as modern humans and could recognize what was really going on and take corrective action if priests spoke out against them.
> The only interest in promoting religious uniformity was in the introduction of Serapis. But this deity did not replace existing cults as far as I am aware.
Serapis was the official state sponsored god to be worshipped in the biggest, fanciest temples of the capital city of Alexandria. Serapis was later successfully exported from Alexandria across the Mediterranean.
Even if the Ptolemies didn’t attempt to push the cult of Serapis on the Egyptian people outside the capital, the fact that they made it up to be the official religion that they would sponsor in the capital provides an excellent parallel for the hypothesis that the motivation for creating Judaism was to provide a state sponsored religion for Canaanite speakers alongside Serapis for Egyptian speakers in the capital. And if they were mainly concerned about sponsoring Serapis in the capital without pushing it on the Egyptians outside the capital, then why would they have been concerned about pushing Judaism on the distant provinces in Judea and Samaria?
Also, Manetho’s Aegyptiaca was used as a primary source for many books of the Old Testament beyond just the Pentateuch. That pretty much confirms that it was all written in Alexandria. Gmirkin was working on Berossus and Kings when he died. The same people who used Berossus to write the Pentateuch also used it when they were writing Kings to make up the stories of the kings of Israel and Judah. I’ve dug up a bunch of highly compelling new evidence confirming that the Aegyptiaca was used in a lot of books of the Old Testament. Hopefully I’ll be able to publish it someday.
I haven’t had time to check whether the NT authors were using the Aegyptiaca too yet. They probably were.
The Letter of Aristeas needs to be studied to understand both what kind of writing it is and when it was composed before we can rely on its contents as containing historical information.
Most likely it was written a good century — ca 150 CE — after the translation of the Septuagint. (For details of the discussions see Gmirkin, Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch, 76f)
In other words, it was written when the Septuagint was believed to have been a translation of a much, much older Hebrew text, or when it was possible to introduce such an idea.
At least, then, the Letter of Aristeas, as per Sylvie Honigman in The Septuagint and Homeric scholarship in Alexandria: a study in the narrative of the Letter of Aristeas (2003) (and reinforced by Johann Cook in “Ptolemy Philadelphus and Jewish Writings: Aristobulus and Pseudo-Aristeas as Examples of Alexandrian Jewish Approaches” in Ptolemy II Philadelphus and his World (edited by Paul McKechnie and Philippe Guillaume, 2008), can be seen as an attempt to build the myth of a much older Hebrew Pentateuch that was only in Ptolemaic times translated into Greek. Honigman calls it “a charter myth”.
The Jewish and Samaritan scribes who presumably worked on the composition of the Pentateuch in Alexandria most surely did not invent names and places and themes out of thin air. They had Greek templates, but they also had their own local traditions and practices.
They built narratives, or at least revised and adapted narratives that drew upon their local gods of Bethel, El, Yhwh, et al. Presumably traditional “human” characters were also incorporated. We can identify some Ugaritic underlay in some of the narratives. They were adapted to meet the needs thrust upon them by the new Hellenistic world. The idea of bringing disparate narratives and traditions into a common story acceptable to both Judeans and Samaritans, demonstrating they shared an origin tale that matched the ideals of Greek virtues, was not alien to the Library of Alexandria’s projects. As Gmirkin proposed, such a “unifying/revisionist” effort would have been comparable to an earlier effort in Egypt (under Darius I) to research and compose a definitive edition of Egyptian laws (Berossus and Genesis, 252).
We have no evidence that Ptolemy II or the librarian of the Alexandrian Library had knowledge of “Laws of Moses” or a Pentateuch — We only have late myth-making to make us think otherwise.
Jonathan,
May I recommend my The Canaanites in History and Tradition from 1991 (2nd ed 1999)?
The notion of Canaan is biblical. Yes the term is sometimes used in ANE connections, but is a rather confusing way … until hellenistic times when it was Phoenicia.
In the OT the Canaanites are the bad guys, the Israelites the good guys. I spent a night on the roof of Case Valdesi in Rome back in 1991 together with Philip Davies (and a bottle of Whisky … or maybe two) discussing the consequences: That in case the biblical image if the Canaanites is a fiction … actors in a dramatic play, the the Israelites are most likely also literary actors in the same play: The good guys.
1st edition discussed here: https://vridar.org/2012/02/14/will-the-real-canaanites-please-stand-up/
A discipline which is only able to repeat itself is bound to die. Historical biblical studies which are no more than sophisticated modern paraphrases of what biblical authors wrote more than 2000 years ago has little future in a modern ever changing world. So the present state of biblical studies is not the death of a discipline but a standby for its historical parts. In this way much of what we see today coming out is not very different from what happened in pre-critical periods. There is a lot of interesting studies coming out at the moment about everything relating to life and ideas of these ancient times, human sentiments, the position of women, etc etc. But because the historical dimension is ignored — as if it has definitively been solved — the modern trend seems mostly occupied with “finding ourselves” within the context of biblical writings. The lack of historical considerations means that it is mainly ignored today that literary remains from antiquity was merely a business of a few percentages of those who lived back then and really only represents a segment of society which was neither low class or the top level economically or politically. It is also a very arrogant position which basically ignores what the ancients really intended to communicate. In this way it is a modern example – just another one — of eurocentrism.
I have often wondered if the ancient writers knew so much literary theory as assumed by their modern students … or maybe they knew if they had studied Aristotle’s poetics and similar before they began to write, but here the lack of interest in social history which seems to be the case in biblical studies today prevent modern students to ask relevant questions as: How was it possible, if we want to date anything to the Iron Age, or even the Persian Period, that this lackluster society was able to produce literature as sophisticated as the one found in biblical writings?
Maybe the ironic and tragic development is that we are losing the idea of history and are returning to the naïve conception of the past as was common at least from antiquity to the coming of the modern age as seen, e.g., in art, where biblical episodes were recorded in art as something contemporary. The fight against history as a subject naturally leads to the loss of history.
Modern paraphrases? Maybe not any more even “modern”, but simply retelling of ancient stories.
Forgive me being a little slow, but can you clarify further what you mean by “So the present state of biblical studies is not the death of a discipline but a standby for its historical parts”? Thanks.
So many people are confused because they cannot reconcile modern historical analyses with traditional Bible-speak retelling. So they skip the history and tell the story and analyse the story, almost as it it is history. The stopped doing this more than 200 years ago in Germany.
And then they make these ancient stopries confiurm whatever they want relevant to present day society and its sentiments. But nevermind, biblical authors have been dead for more than 2000 years — if it was not God himself! and even God?
I have found this to be especially so in studies of Christian origins. Unless one begins with the assumption that the gospels are written “memories” (even if only third hand “memories”) and Paul’s letters are authored to some extent by the person we read about in Acts, there are relatively few people to engage with.
Oral tradition is a logical fallacy. When you are reading an obviously made up story that doesn’t claim to be the product of oral tradition and reads like it was written by a third person omniscient narrator, you have to seriously consider the hypothesis that whoever wrote the text in front of you just completely made up the story.
We always know that whoever wrote the text in front of us definitely existed. We don’t know whether oral traditions ever existed at all, let alone a chain of oral tradition spanning multiple people going back to long before the writer ever wrote or was even born.
The weight of probability is always on the side of the author just making it up barring some extremely compelling reason to the contrary.
It’s refreshing to read what Dr. Lemche has to say. It’s unfortunate that there aren’t more people on board with the minimalist perspective or the Jesus Mythicist perspective.
“Oral tradition is a logical fallacy.”
Because tradition has to be written? I have no expertise in this matter, but didn’t the Grimm brothers collect stories that had been passed down orally for generations?
yes but never taken to be “history”! Also think of young Goethe about biblical stories: Die Geschichte sind … but old Goethe about the same: Die Geschichte ist! You see, something happened in Goethe’s time. Our history concept was invented and applied on poor texts who were written without knowledge of this concept.
I have by now said it a number of times:
Alt history writing before 1800 was cultural memory, a memory constructed by a little group of “literati”, as some scholars like to characterize them.
So what you meant was that “oral history is a logical fallacy”.
I agree that may be a fallacy (not sure about “logical” though).
In case anyone is not aware of it, Hector Avalos’ (d.) book (2007) “The End of Biblical Studies” addresses the fate of literalism very well. I don’t meant to digress but cannot resist the implications for today’s genocide and annexation in Palestine – it being justified in the minds of many (including many Israeli citizens, many Jews worldwide and many Zionists whether they be Christians or atheists) by the myth of the so called “chosen people”. Chosen by whom ? By Yahweh, who as RM Price puts it, and I concur, is reduced to a Zeus parallel.
You write: “There was no historical Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, or Josiah.”
Not absolutely happy with the formulation. I see no reason why there should not have been a historical Josiah. If not I cannot understand the animosity against him in Chronicles, where the hero is Hezekiah. This does not mean that the story of the finding of the BOOK is historical: Read Diebner’s essay about the finding in B.J. Diebner: Failed Methodology and Ideology in Canonical Interpretations of Biblical Texts. Changing Perspectives 9. Edited by Ingfrid Hjelm. Translators: Niels Peter Lemche, Ingrid Hjelm and Jim West (Copenhagen International Seminar; London: Routledge, 2023). For friends who can read German, Diebner’s very comprehensive output of very critical commentaries on biblical scholarship — mostly published in his Dielheimer Blätter (published in Heidelberg) — will be a revelation. Just read his “Es lässt sich nicht beweisen, Tatsache aber ist! Sprachfigur statt Methode in der kritischen Erforschung des Alten Testament”, English translation in the volume mentioned here.
The correct formulation would, perhaps, be: “There was no historical Abraham, Moses, David, or Solomon but there certainly was a biblical Abraham, Moses, David and Solom”.
To shift the focus somewhat: There’s an interesting question posed by Diebner in his chapter on 2 Kings 22. He compares other tales of discovery and then writes:
I heard an echo of another question: We have to ask why it was that the Jesus legend developed in this shape and first appeared in the historical record exactly in the time of the aftermath of the Bar Kochba War.