Old Testament

2024-09-19

Problems Dating Israel’s Exodus and Conquest of Canaan

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

by Neil Godfrey

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.

The Exodus and Natural Catastrophes

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 1450 B.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 Ramesside Period as the Setting of the Exodus

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.

2024-09-17

Seeking a Plausible Origin for the Seducing Serpent in the Garden of Eden

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

by Neil Godfrey

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, Russell Gmirkin, and related posts etc)

For the significance of the serpent to Greeks in general and Athenians in particular, see the post
The Ambiguity of the Serpent: Greek versus Biblical

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 more φρονιμώτατος [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

2024-06-20

Understanding Contradictions and Incongruities in the Bible – Or Not…

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

by Neil Godfrey

A couple of months ago I posted Why Bible Authors Wrote Anonymously and with Contradictions. I was setting down in writing my thoughts as informed by my latest reading at the time. But doubts remained. In that post I said that ancient Near Eastern authors corrected details in an existing narrative by adding contradictory statements or narratives next to them. That didn’t answer the question, though: If they wanted to make a correction, why not replace the perceived error entirely?

Another perspective on that question is presented by Isaac Rabinowitz in his posthumous 1993 book A Witness Forever: Ancient Israel’s Perception of Literature and the Resultant Hebrew Bible.

Rabinowitz argues that the ancient Israelites, like other peoples in the region, attributed to words a power beyond their merely symbolic representations of their referents. To some extent I found myself sympathetic to the argument given that we see evidence of some cultures today seeming to have the same view. I am thinking of warnings on tv and radio for the benefit of first nations audiences that the ensuing program will contain images and names of the deceased. Words are considered to be more than mere sounds to be decoded for meaning. However, in the end, I found myself wishing that Rabinowitz had produced more explicit evidence to buttress the main thrust of his argument that for the Israelites words of themselves (apparently independent of social context) consist of magic power. Too much — especially given my lack of wider reading in this area — was left to a single interpretation of the data, and perhaps just a tad overly deductive. Still, the book does raise questions.

But what do we make of the following examples of repetition and redundancy in the biblical text? Continue reading “Understanding Contradictions and Incongruities in the Bible – Or Not…”

2024-06-19

Finding a Place for King Josiah in the History of Biblical Israel

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

by Neil Godfrey

Recent posts relating to King Josiah’s reforms:

Why Josiah’s Reforms “Must Have Happened” – part 1 (2024-03-30)
Why Josiah’s Reforms “Must Have Happened” – part 2 (2024-03-31)
Why Josiah’s Reforms “Must Have Happened” – part 3 (conclusion) (2024-04-01)
The Discovery of the Law in Josiah’s Day Compared with Like Discoveries (2024-04-02)
Caught out (2024-04-04)
Did King Josiah Change the Course of History? (2024-06-09)
Archaeological Evidence Behind the Narrative of Josiah’s Reform (2024-06-10)
Can we salvage history from beneath Josiah’s reforms? (2024-06-11)

The past few posts have set out the grounds that different scholars have either accepted the historicity of Josiah’s reforms (with varying degrees of certainty) or rejected it.

What we read of Josiah in 2 Kings 22-23 has engendered many questions, problems and hypotheses — theological, textual and historical. In this post I set out some of the various solutions to those questions.

First, recall a few of those problematic questions:

Josiah is said to be one of the “good kings” of Judah, even the best since David. He is said to have restored the “true worship” of God and rid the land of idols. But then we read that Pharaoh kills Josiah and God punishes Judah by sending them into exile because of the sins of his long-dead predecessor!
When Josiah hears the words of the book that was discovered in the temple he tears his robes and weeps. Because of his contrition the prophetess promises him a peaceful death. But his end was not peaceful at all. As mentioned above, we read that Pharaoh killed him.
The prophetess even tells the king that God is going to punish the people of Judah and there is no indication of any hope for them. Yet we read that Josiah proceeds to lead the people in mass repentance — all in vain. God still punishes them. What was the point of the reforms and covenant renewal?
Why do we read that Josiah felt it necessary to consult the prophetess about the book found in the temple when it is clear that he understands the message of the book very well and he acts on it accordingly?
When we read about Josiah’s list of reforms we sense a disconnect from all that has gone before. There is no reference at all to those reforms having anything to do with the discovery of the book of the law.
Later passages in the book of Kings imply that Josiah was one of the “bad kings”. This negative evaluation of Josiah is also found in the books of Jeremiah and Zephaniah. Why was his major reform of returning Judah to God ignored?

Proposed Solutions

Up to the 1940s scholars had generally looked at the first six books (Genesis to Joshua) as a self-contained unit with the following historical books being tied to those six with only a minimum of editorial commentary. The Pentateuch (Genesis-Exodus-Leviticus-Numbers-Deuteronomy) began with promises of the land of Canaan to the patriarchs and the book of Joshua (the sixth book) told of how those promises were fulfilled. Hence the Hexateuch made cogent sense: it began with the promises being made and concluded with them being fulfilled. The historical books from Judges to 2 Kings were of quite a different set of styles and themes.

Martin Noth broke with that assumption and analysis and influenced many to follow or only slightly modify his arguments. For Noth, the historical books through to 2 Kings began with Deuteronomy. An editor or editors had before them existing writings about the law, Joshua’s conquests, various judges, prophets and kings, and they brought these works together into a narrative unity, joining and interrupting the various segments with commentary that reflected key themes and ideology found in Deuteronomy. The result was “a Deuteronomistic history” that, despite some bright moments along the way, was doomed to end in disaster.

Noth’s Deuteronomistic editor(s)/author(s) was working with sources already in existence but these were augmented. The original book of Deuteronomy, for example, was thought to only include our chapters 5 to 30 but Noth’s Dtr (the standard abbreviation for this person or persons) added introductory and concluding chapters that addressed core themes found interspersed throughout the ensuing historical books.

One of the most conclusive and least disputed findings of scholarly literary criticism is that in the books of Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings we are confronted with the activity of a Deuteronomistic author in passages both large – sometimes very small. Like all the other historical books in the Old Testament, this author’s work is anonymous, but we call him the “Deuteronomistic” author because his language and way of thinking closely resemble those found in the Deuteronomic Law and in the admonitory speeches which precede and follow the Law. Broadly following present academic practice, we shall refer below to this author and his work by the abbreviation Dtr.

It is generally considered that Dtr. is by a single “Deuteronomistic editor”, or rather by different “Deuteronomistic editors” closely resembling one another in their style . . . . (Noth, 4)

This style is distinguished by its simplicity, fluency, and lucidity and may be recognized both by its phraseology and more especially by its rhetorical character. . . .

The deuteronomic phraseology revolves around a few basic theological tenets such as:
1. The struggle against idolatry
2. The centralization of the cult
3. Exodus, covenant, and election
4. The monotheistic creed
5. Observance of the law and loyalty to the covenant
6. Inheritance of the land
7. Retribution and material motivation
8. Fulfilment of prophecy
9. The election of the Davidic dynasty . . .

What makes a phrase deuteronomic is not its mere occurrence in Deuteronomy, but its meaning within the framework of deuteronomic theology. . . .

The most outstanding feature of deuteronomic style is its use of rhetoric. This is true of all forms of deuteronomic writing. . . . (Weinfeld, 1-3)

For over 40 pages of specific instances of Deuteronomistic style and rhetoric see Weinfeld’s Appendix A on archive.org

What is that style and theological flavour identified as Deuteronomistic? For a detailed answer by Moshe Weinfeld to that question see the extracts and link in the side box.

Our interest here is on the core theme of that history. For Noth, the story was a story of failure. The people of Israel time and time again apostatized from the Deuteronomist’s true worship and, from the vantage point of the author/s, ended their days in exile from their land. The northern tribes of Israel were deported by the Assyrians and the southern kingdom of Judah was exiled into Babylonia. Maybe it could be called a morality tale. Beware, we can see what has happened because of transgression of the laws of Yahweh. So beware.

Though highly influential, Noth’s interpretation seemed to be too easily dismissive of other more positive moments in that history. Were not the promises made to David that his dynasty would last forever unconditional? Does not the final chapter of Kings provide a hint of future hope with the raising of the captive king of Judah to royal favour? And how can one explain the glorious time of Josiah’s reformist rule?

Frank Moore Cross proposed another explanation for the combination of hope and despair in the Deuteronomistic history. For Cross, the first historical books were written or at least shaped in the gloriously hopeful days of good king Josiah. The historical work ended on a high note: Judah had repented, Josiah had cleansed the land of idolatry, and a king as great as David was once more on the throne. Sadly, a few kings later (587 BCE) and Judah was overrun by Babylon’s Nebuchadnezzar, Jerusalem and its temple were destroyed, and a large portion of the population were deported. Around the middle of the sixth century another scribe, reflecting on the disaster that had overtaken Judah since the time of Josiah, picked up the historical tale and added the chapters of apostasy and failure following the time of Josiah.

Cross’s proposal had the advantage of somewhat explaining how the anomaly of the record of Josiah’s righteousness sat so awkwardly prior to the final doom of Judah. But if the evidence for the historicity of Josiah’s reforms is scant to non-existent, why is it included at all? And how do we account for other oddities in the Josiah narrative, some of which I listed at the beginning of this post?

Other scholars have proposed other refinements: Helga Weippert has suggested there were three redactions. The first Deuteronomist editor concluded the history with Hezekiah’s reforms; the second with Josiah’s reforms; and the third with the fall of Jerusalem. Rudolf Smend identified three different hands working over the same material: the first Deuteronomist redactor completed the historical book so that it concluded with the demise of the kingdom of Judah and its Babylonian exile; the second worked through the existing text by adding prophetic commentary and speeches and documenting their fulfilment; while the third worked at making the importance of the Deuteronomistic law more prominent at key points. There are other variants. Too many — and that’s the reason there has been such a wide gap between this post and my previous one: I have been tracking down and taking on board many of these various explanations — only to set most of them aside so I could conclude this series.

But there is a common thread through all of these proposed explanations. They view Josiah’s reforms as an unremovable fact of history that must be included despite the problems this raises in relation to their beliefs in God’s justice. They scarcely account for the difficulties raised by the Josiah portrait — a good king who leads his people in repentance is cast aside without his promised reward and the people are punished for the sin of a long-dead king.

An Alternative

But what happens if we consider the likelihood that Josiah never undertook any reformist program: that possibility has been raised in recent posts (see above). What happens if we imagine the historical chronicle without any mention of Josiah’s reforms? What if the first historical rendering did not conclude with Josiah’s reform but, knowing nothing of that reform, proceeded to trace the final demise of Judah and its Babylonian captivity?

In other words, What happens if we treat the Josiah reform story as a late interpolation into the earlier doomsday narrative?

Before answering that question, notice that there are reasonable grounds for suspecting it to be a valid scenario.

Possibly the most striking evidence that the Josiah reforms were not written by the same deuteronomistic author/s responsible for the larger and final portrayal is its violation of a fundamental premise of Deuteronomy: that repentance leads to forgiveness and mercy. Up until the story of Josiah the consistent message we have read is that if kings turn away from the sins of their predecessors they can avoid God’s wrath. Josiah completely undid the sins of his predecessor Manasseh:

Manasseh (2 Kings 21:3-6)

Josiah (2 Kings 23:4, 8, 10, 12)

³He rebuilt the high places his father Hezekiah had destroyed; he also erected altars to Baal and made an Asherah pole, as Ahab king of Israel had done. He bowed down to all the starry hosts and worshiped them.

⁴He built altars in the temple of the Lord, of which the Lord had said, “In Jerusalem I will put my Name.”

⁵In the two courts of the temple of the Lord, he built altars to all the starry hosts.

⁶He sacrificed his own son in the fire, practiced divination, sought omens, and consulted mediums and spiritists. . . .

⁴The king ordered Hilkiah the high priest, the priests next in rank and the doorkeepers to remove from the temple of the Lord all the articles made for Baal and Asherah and all the starry hosts. He burned them outside Jerusalem

⁸Josiah . . . desecrated the high places, from Geba to Beersheba, where the priests had burned incense. . . .

¹⁰He desecrated Topheth, which was in the Valley of Ben Hinnom, so no one could use it to sacrifice their son or daughter in the fire to Molek. . . .

¹²He pulled down the altars the kings of Judah had erected on the roof near the upper room of Ahaz, and the altars Manasseh had built in the two courts of the temple of the Lord. . . .

Scholars have written at length about the problems raised by the cruel fate of Josiah and the nation despite their wholehearted turning to Yahweh. It is often thought that among the exiles there emerged a crisis in understanding the ways of God. Rationalizations abound, but there is little evidence in any of the biblical writings to support these revisionist notions about the justice and will of God. Some scholars have seen in Josiah a foreshadowing of the death of a righteous messiah. The first difficulty with that interpretation is that in the story of the discovery of the book of the law the prophetess Huldah assures him he will die in peace. One more rightly must conclude that we have a text whose parts were written by authors “not talking to each other”.

There are other pointers to an interpolation. Immediately after the death of Josiah we read of the next king, Jehoahaz, that

He did evil in the eyes of the Lord, just as his predecessors had done. (2 Ki 23:32)

Then of the following king, Jehoiakim, we read

And he did evil in the eyes of the Lord, just as his predecessors had done. (2 Ki 23:37)

Did not the author recall that immediately prior to these kings was a predecessor who was the greatest and most righteous king of all since David? How could that author lump Josiah in with those who had done evil just like all the rest?

Further …. we have other writings referring to Josiah yet are oblivious to any righteousness associated with his reign. One of these is the book of the prophet Jeremiah and the other is that of Zephaniah.

The only prophecy that the book of Jeremiah directly dated “in the days of king Josiah” was Jer. 3.6-11, in which the idolatrous whoredoms of faithless Israel (Samaria) were said to have been exceeded by her unrepentant sister Judah. Additionally, the book of Jeremiah stated that Jeremiah’s prophecies and warnings over a period of 23 years from the thirteenth year of Josiah to the fourth year of Jehoiakim went entirely unheeded. The Jewish people were destined for punishment for their disobedience and their having violated the divine covenant. Repentance by the Jewish nation or its kings could have averted disaster, but none took place in the years leading up to the fall of Jerusalem. Indeed, the rise of Nebuchadnezzar was the direct result of the utter lack of repentance of the Jews during the preceding 23 years of Jeremiah’s prophetic activity (Jer. 25.1-14). It was precisely the utter lack of reform during those years that signaled doom for Jerusalem. There is thus not the slightest hint that Jeremiah’s author(s) were acquainted with changes in religious practices prompted by a purported discovery of the book of the law in Josiah’s eighteenth year. Quite the contrary, Jeremiah’s prophecies against Jerusalem and its rulers starting in the reign of Josiah were unremittingly negative and Jeremiah had nothing favorable to say of any of Judah’s kings after the time of Hezekiah. . . .

A speech in Jer. 44.2-30 to the exiles in Egypt contains significant literary parallels to the regnal evaluations of the last kings of Judah: the speech twice referred back to abominable sins committed in Judah and Jerusalem by their “fathers” and by “the kings of Judah” who made offerings to other gods, committed abominations, ignored the laws and statutes and did evil in the sight of Yahweh (Jer. 44.9-10, 21-24). This negative evaluation of the people of Judah, their ancestors and their kings forms a close verbal parallel to the negative evaluation of Jehoahaz, Jehoiakim and their ancestors. Both painted a negative picture of the last kings of Judah and neither was compatible with Josiah or his generation having walked in obedience to the laws of Yahweh, especially in the matter of worship of other gods.

(Gmirkin, 15f, 29f)

and

A similar picture of Josiah may be inferred from the book of Zephaniah, whose prophecies were dated to “the days of King Josiah son of Amon of Judah” (Zeph. 1.1). Zephaniah predicted the coming of the day of the Lord to punish Jerusalem and make the land desolate, brought on as a result of idolatrous practices (Zeph. 1.4-6) and violence against the law (Zeph. 3.1-4). Jerusalem would not accept correction (Zeph. 1.4, 6; 3.1, 7); the kings’ sons and royal officials were singled out as sinners destined for punishment (Zeph. 1.8; 3.3). While these prophecies are connected to the figure of Zephaniah only in the Deuteronomistic superscription, one may reasonably infer that at the time the superscription was created, the Deuteronomistic editor knew nothing about the reign of Josiah that would rule out assigning these prophecies to his time. Specifically, the charges of Baal and Molech worship in Josiah’s days at Zeph. 1.4-5 appear to indicate that the Deuteronomistic editor was unaware of the cultic reforms of 2 Kgs 23.²⁹

²⁹ Attempts to harmonize Zephaniah and 2 Kings 23 typically overcome this difficulty by postulating that Zephaniah was written early in Josiah’s reign, prior to his initiation of cultic reforms. Such an approach assumes that both Zephaniah and 2 Kings 23 were both ancient, authentic witnesses to historical events under Josiah. It is preferable to maintain the literary integrity of both texts by acknowledging their dissonant content.

(Gmirkin, 16)

So it appears from evidence both within the book of 2 Kings and in writing outside 2 Kings that at some point there was no knowledge of the Josiah reforms currently in 2 Kings 23.

The alternative I am setting out here is entirely from Russell Gmirkin’s article published in the Journal of Higher Criticism over two years ago. It is available to all on his academia.edu page. You can read the full argument there.

Another piece of evidence that the 2 Kings 23 recital of Josiah’s reforms were not part of the original work is found in the comparison of Josiah with Moses. The comparison with David and the reminders of God’s promises to David is part of the Deuteronomistic language (see the insert box above and instances of the Davidic notices by the Deuteronomist in Weinfeld’s list at archive.org). Richard Elliot Friedman has detailed the allusions to Moses in Josiah’s portrayal, although note that Friedman is not himself arguing that the Josiah episode is an interpolation. He in fact concurs with Cross’s view (above) that the Josianic reform was the conclusion of the original book of Kings and argues that with Deuteronomy and references to Moses it formed an inclusio to the entire history. But the comparison of Josiah with Moses implicitly nullifies the comparison with David who cannot match the status of Moses. In the table below I have restricted the comparison of Josiah to the person of Moses and not to other passages relating to the law in Deuteronomy.

Moses

Josiah

“There did not arise a prophet again in Israel like Moses . . .” (Deut 34:10)

“There was no king like him before him turning to Yhwh with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might according to all the Torah of Moses, and after him none arose like him” (2 Kings 23:25). – REF acknowledges Jack R. Lundbom for observing this allusion

Moses burns and smashes the golden calf “thin as dust,” . . . and casts the dust on the wadi . . . (Deut 9:21).

At the site of Jeroboam’s golden calf of Bethel, Josiah smashes the [high place] and burns it, “and he made it thin as dust . . .” (2 Kgs 23:15).

Josiah burns the statue of Asherah which Manasseh had set in the Temple, at the wadi Kidron, “and he made it thin as dust . . .” (23:6). The phrase [“made it thin as dust”] occurs nowhere but in the passages noted here. Josiah also smashes the altars which his ancestors had made and casts their dust into the wadi (v 12).

I have illustrated other proposals with diagrams. Here is one that helps us visualize what the biblical record looks like if the Josiah reform narrative were never part of the original deuteronomistic history. The first writing did not include or conclude with Josiah’s reforms. Rather, Josiah was among the “bad kings” that marked Judah’s decline after the good Davidic king Hezekiah. The story outline of the final chapters of 2 Kings is thus:

The Davidic Kings keep David’s “lamp” alight until Hezekiah; after Hezekiah the new king, Manasseh, followed the ways of the wicked king Jeroboam of Israel; Manasseh and Jeroboam are alike (for the extensive parallels between these two figures see Gmirkin, p.34), and both lead their kingdoms to ruin: Jeroboam set Israel on the path to Assyrian captivity and Manasseh set Judah on the path to Babylonian captivity.

The discovery of the book of the law in the temple of God was included in this anecdote as a classic final doomsday warning. This is not only a common enough motif in ancient literature but it is also the explicit reason Moses had the book of the law placed in the ark of the covenant. Recall Deuteronomy 31:24-29 —

²⁴After Moses finished writing in a book the words of this law from beginning to end, ²⁵he gave this command to the Levites who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord: ²⁶“Take this Book of the Law and place it beside the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God. There it will remain as a witness against you. ²⁷For I know how rebellious and stiff-necked you are. If you have been rebellious against the Lord while I am still alive and with you, how much more will you rebel after I die! ²⁸Assemble before me all the elders of your tribes and all your officials, so that I can speak these words in their hearing and call the heavens and the earth to testify against them. ²⁹For I know that after my death you are sure to become utterly corrupt and to turn from the way I have commanded you. In days to come, disaster will fall on you because you will do evil in the sight of the Lord and arouse his anger by what your hands have made.”

The prophetess speaks the words of “a female Jeremiah” (Jeremiah 19:3, 11, 25:7, and 7:20 — the comparison is Christoph Levin’s – p.366) and echoes the above words of Moses. The purpose of the book was not to provoke repentance but was to testify mercilessly against king and nation:

¹⁵ She said to them, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: Tell the man who sent you to me, ¹⁶ This is what the Lord says: I am going to bring disaster on this place and its people, according to everything written in the book the king of Judah has read. ¹⁷ Because they have forsaken me and burned incense to other gods and aroused my anger by all the idols their hands have made, my anger will burn against this place and will not be quenched.’ (2 Kings 22:15-17)

Indeed, Russell Gmirkin’s case for the favourable presentation of Josiah is that it arose only after the completion of the book of Jeremiah:

It was only after the book of Jeremiah was completed that a new literary tradition arose in which Josiah was recast as a Deuteronomist reformer extraordinaire. Once both 2 Kgs 22-23 and the book of Jeremiah are understood as late literary accounts rather than archaic historical accounts, the problem of determining the relationship of the two becomes a simple matter of literary analysis rather than a torturous exercise in historical speculation, as in most past attempts to reconcile Jeremiah and Kings. It is only under the assumption that the reforms of Josiah described in 2 Kings and the prophecies of Jeremiah in Jer. 1-25 were both grounded in historical fact that a compelling need to reconcile the two literary traditions arises.

(Gmirkin, 21f)

Josiah’s reforms are an anomaly at many points:

they violate the theology of the Deuteronomist author who promised salvation to the repentant;
they are contradicted by independent works, Jeremiah and Zephaniah;
they are contradicted by the ensuing text in 2 Kings that refer to the sins of the last kings of Judah;
they present Josiah as a figure who stands beyond comparison with David (viz. with Moses);
the blame placed on Manasseh for the Babylonian captivity only makes sense if Josiah was originally among the “bad kings” — or if the author added an explanation that Judah apostatized after Josiah’s death (Gmirkin, 28);
the archaeological evidence indicates “business as usual” regarding worship of Asherah and idols at Josiah’s time.

I have skimmed the surface of the far more detailed arguments of Russell Gmirkin’s proposal by which the many problems of the Josiah report in 2 Kings 22-23 can be resolved. But one more salient feature must be added.

The book of the law that witnesses against king and nation is not the same one that Josiah acts upon. Or rather, the creator of the righteous Josiah had a different kind of book in mind from the one in the original judgement narrative. Rather than the book of the law that witnessed against the sins of the people, the author states that Josiah is acting on “the book of the covenant”. The covenant restored by Josiah culminated in a mass observance of the Passover and this aligns with the vignette of the Mosaic covenant at Sinai. God came down to show himself to Moses once more after he had broken the first stone tablets:

¹⁰Then the Lord said: “I am making a covenant with you. Before all your people I will do wonders never before done in any nation in all the world. The people you live among will see how awesome is the work that I, the Lord, will do for you. ¹¹Obey what I command you today. I will drive out before you the Amorites, Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. ¹²Be careful not to make a treaty with those who live in the land where you are going, or they will be a snare among you. ¹³Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and cut down their Asherah poles.^[a] ¹⁴Do not worship any other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God. . . .

¹⁷“Do not make any idols.

¹⁸“Celebrate the Festival of Unleavened Bread. For seven days eat bread made without yeast, as I commanded you. Do this at the appointed time in the month of Aviv, for in that month you came out of Egypt. (Exodus 34)

As did Josiah…

Then the king called together all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem. ²He went up to the temple of the Lord with the people of Judah . . . . He read in their hearing all the words of the Book of the Covenant, which had been found in the temple of the Lord. ³The king stood by the pillar and renewed the covenant in the presence of the Lord—to follow the Lord and keep his commands, statutes and decrees with all his heart and all his soul, thus confirming the words of the covenant written in this book. Then all the people pledged themselves to the covenant.

²¹The king gave this order to all the people: “Celebrate the Passover to the Lord your God, as it is written in this Book of the Covenant.” (2 Kings 23)

So we can add here a seventh point on which the Josianic reforms sit anomalously with the broader text: the book of the law with its pronouncement of curses has been redescribed as a book of covenant renewal.

How it happened

The original document consistently set forth the sins of the kings in the wake of Hezekiah’s son Manasseh. The discovery of the book of the law in the temple was a climactic moment pronouncing the ultimate curses that were about to fall upon the nation.
Another scribe, presumably unaware or only partially aware of that original writing, independently composed a biography of Josiah as an ideal king restoring a utopian covenant renewal with Yahweh.
When that scribe (or another closely associated one) learned of of the detail whereby the prophetess delivered the curses from the book of the law, an additional scenario was added in which Josiah repented and a new statement by the prophetess was added acknowledging Josiah’s righteousness.
When an editor decided to add this new idealistic biography of Josiah to 2 Kings, they made a few adjustments to “make it fit” between 2 Kings 22:1 and 2 Kings 23:verses but failed to create a smooth transition leading to his death and the subsequent notes about the wickedness of all kings in the wake of Manasseh.

A literary analysis of the closing chapters of 2 Kings thus provides evidence for multiple Deuteronomistic authors.

(Gmirkin, 87)

Conclusion

Russell Gmirkin is best known for his books setting forth the evidence for a Hellenistic provenance of the Hebrew Bible. If his arguments are sound then the traditional view that the book of Deuteronomy and a deuteronomistic history were authored or revised in the days of Josiah and soon after in the exilic period must be set aside.

An alternate model of Deuteronomistic authorial and editorial activity literary activity is to view it as the product of a relatively small group of Deuteronomist authors working contemporaneously and collaboratively. The interrelationship of [the original Josiah account and the subsequent somewhat clumsy Josiah reforms additions] already points to this conclusion. Given that the entire corpus of Deuteronomistic texts display awareness of Jerusalem’s fall and anticipate a return of exiles to the land of Judah, this would seemingly point to a date for this Deuteronomistic activity after ca. 450 BCE and conceivably as late as the early Hellenistic Era when we have the first external evidence for the book of Deuteronomy (the LXX of ca. 270 BCE), Kings (Demetrius the Chronographer, ca. 221-204 BCE) and Jeremiah (Dead Sea Scroll fragment 4QJer^a palaeographically dated to ca. 225-175 BCE). If we take these texts as roughly contemporary, this points to a date no later than ca. 270 BCE. The Deuteronomists should thus be situated within a relatively brief time span falling sometime within the period ca. 450-ca. 270 BCE.

(Gmirkin, 95)

Cross, Frank Moore. Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Friedman, Richard Elliot. “From Egypt to Egypt: Dtr¹ and Dtr².” In Traditions in Transformation: Turning Points in Biblical Faith, edited by Baruch Halpern and Jon D. Levenson, 167–92. Winona Lake, Ind. : Eisenbrauns, 1981. http://archive.org/details/traditionsintran0000unse.

Gmirkin, Russell. “The Manasseh and Josiah Redactions of 2 Kings 21-25.” Journal of Higher Criticism, January 1, 2022. https://www.academia.edu/82084563/The_Manasseh_and_Josiah_Redactions_of_2_Kings_21_25.

Levin, Christoph. “Joschija Im Deuteronomistischen Geschichtswerk.” Zeitschrift Für Die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 96, no. 3 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1515/zatw.1984.96.3.351.

Noth, Martin. Deuteronomistic History. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1981 [1943].

Provan, Iain W. Hezekiah and the Books of Kings: A Contribution to the Debate about the Composition of the Deuteronomistic History. Berlin New York: De Gruyter, 1988.

Weinfeld, Moshe. Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School. Eisenbrauns, 1992.

Weippert, Helga. “Die ‘Deuteronomistischen’ Beurteilungen Der Könige von Israel Und Juda Und Das Problem Der Redaktion Der Königsbücher.” Biblica 53, no. 3 (1972): 301–39. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42610051

2024-06-11

Can we salvage history from beneath Josiah’s reforms?

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

by Neil Godfrey

My interest in these posts is in reviewing the basis for some historical fact behind the Biblical narrative of Josiah’s reforms. Other questions about the textual problems in 2 Kings 22-23 and difficulties with identifying in that passage the discovery of the book of Deuteronomy will come later.

So after discussing the evidence of seal images and amulet inscriptions, Christoph Uehlinger (UC) clarifies the question he is addressing:

Within the limits of this article, we may cut down the historical problem to the following question: Does 2 Kings 23 list measures that are most plausibly understood against the background of the political and religious situation of Judah during the latter part of the seventh century BCE than at any other period? (CU, 300 — all bolded highlighting is mine)

UC’s answer to his question:

At least two measures appear to be directed against cult practices or institutions whose introduction in Judah must have been originally connected with the Assyrian expansion and the accompanying reception of Assyro-Aramean traditions of astral cults:

the removal of the horses and chariots of the sun-god

and the suppression of the כמרים priests.

(300 – my formatting)

Horses and Chariots of the Sun God

Assyrian horse associated with temple of Sun God Shamash: Wikimedia Commons

2 Kings 23:11 (NIV)

He removed from the entrance to the temple of the Lord the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun. They were in the court near the room of an official named Nathan-Melek. Josiah then burned the chariots dedicated to the sun.

The Hebrew word for “official” in that text (סָּרִ֔יס — saris) is understood to be an Assyrian civic title, not a local religious or priestly one.

The horses are probably living animals, not crafted statues, given that the Hebrew uses the word for “dedicated” or “ordained” as with priests (v.5) and not the word for “made” that is used in connection with roof top altars that were removed (v.12). Further, they appear to require the care of an official.

The connection between horse and sun-god has no tradition in Palestine itself but is typical of Assyria, especially during the late eighth and early seventh century (the time of Sargon and Sennacherib), when the horse was repeatedly represented as the symbolic animal of the sun-god.

(302)

The Assyrians used horses dedicated to the sun god for divination purposes. But as UC acknowledges, the Assyrians were no longer a presence in Judah at the time of Josiah, having been replaced by the Egyptians. At most, UC can suggest that since Assyria was long gone, the “time was ripe to come back to local [Yahwistic] custom”. He adds that removing cult horses would also have a cost-saving benefit.

“Idolatrous Priests”

2 Kings 23:5 (NIV)

He did away with the idolatrous priests appointed by the kings of Judah to burn incense on the high places of the towns of Judah and on those around Jerusalem—those who burned incense to Baal, to the sun and moon, to the constellations and to all the starry hosts.

The word being translated as “idolatrous priests”, kemarim (כְּמָרִ֗ים), is of Syrian origin and associated with the moon god. Given the rarity of the term in the Hebrew Bible it may be inferred that these priests were no longer present after the exile, and if so . . .

It is therefore scarcely conceivable that their dissolution by King Josiah was only an invention of a post-exilic redactor. (305)

Roof Altars

2 Kings 23:12 (NIV)

He pulled down the altars the kings of Judah had erected on the roof near the upper room of Ahaz, and the altars Manasseh had built in the two courts of the temple of the Lord. He removed them from there, smashed them to pieces and threw the rubble into the Kidron Valley.

Zephaniah 1:5 and Jeremiah 19:13 link roof-top worship to astral deities.

The passages quoted from the books of Zephaniah and Jeremiah, which assume that worship on the roofs continued after Josiah’s reform, therefore do not contradict the historicity of Josiah’s measures, since they remained confined to the temple and, again, affected a specific cult practice, namely sacrifice. (305)

Conclusion — and my response

CU thus suggests that the end of the seventh century “offers the most plausible religious-historical background for the three reform measures discussed above.” That may be so, but are we still not a step away from establishing whether or not any reforms took place at all?

UC underscores the following points:

All three purges (horses/chariots, idolatrous priests, roof altars) relate to “practices that have lost their plausibility in view of the changed political climate with . . . lessened contacts with northern Syria and Assyria.”
All three focus on the Jerusalem Temple.
All three are associated with astral worship.

On the other hand, one may be inclined to think that points 1 and 3 had little relevance by the time of Josiah given that they are more closely associated with Syrian and Assyrian practices and those powers had lost their influence over Judah by Josiah’s time.

UC is seeking a midway between “minimalists” who rely on the archaeological witness to the exclusion of textual narratives that cannot be established as existing until generations later, and “maximalists” who rely on the textual narrative unless it can be proven in error. I am not so sure that a mid-way can be justified. Yes, UC can point to historical data that coheres in varying degrees with the biblical narrative, but by interpreting that data through the biblical narrative — even allowing for modifications to that narrative to make it fit the known historical and archaeological details — is still fundamentally a method that relies on a late text to through which to interpret much earlier data.

But how would/does UC respond to my misgivings? Here are five pertinent passages with my responses.

One:

However, ‘methodological minimalists’ should not take their task too easily. Measures possibly taken under king Josiah in order to redesign the Judahite state cult cannot simply be dismissed because they are not explicitly mentioned as such in primary sources: such a conclusion would proceed from an argumentum e silentio which should be inadmissible for maximalists and minimalists alike. (285f)

“Simply be dismissed because …. not explicitly mentioned” can be taken as a pejorative put-down of the methodology of the “minimalists”. Rather, I don’t see any question of “dismissing” information that is “not explicitly” clear in the sources. Instead of “dismissal” of the “non-explicit” there is an attempt to examine each type of evidence in its own right. One might justifiably prefer to examine primary or archaeological sources independently of any other kind of evidence as the first stage of research. The second stage would be to examine the secondary narrative sources independently as far as possible against their verifiable provenance. In other words, the secondary sources for Josiah should, as far as possible, be studied as primary sources for the time and place from which they originate. Where we cannot be certain about their provenance, it is reasonable to see how the narratives might be explained in the context of the earliest period for which we can establish their existence. If nothing makes sense in that independently confirmed context, then we can test the narratives against earlier and more hypothetical periods of origin.

There is no argumentum e silento. The arguments are attuned to the voices of each type of evidence within its own verifiable context. Nor is this taking a “too easy” route. One might even say that the problems to be solved are doubled since we are grappling with two types of evidence, each on its own terms, instead of rationalizing them into a third source that is of our own making and that means we have to fudge the edges of both sources to make them fit with each other.

Two:

No serious historian should dismiss secondary sources on the sole argument that they cannot be confirmed with utter precision. On the other hand, we must of course endeavor to build only upon such secondary sources that plausibly fit the primary framework based on primary sources. (307)

Again, I wonder if I am right to detect another slight pejorative in the expression “with utter precision”. “Utter precision” might seem to imply that there can be room to fudge our data to make it fit a hypothesis. I don’t see anything wrong with accepting date ranges for known data (astral seal images, the influence of Assyrian cult in Judah, the silver amulets) and working with where they lead – whether stopping short of Josiah’s time or extending either side of it. Let the data speak without trying to refine it more precisely than it is.

When UC calls for using secondary sources “that plausibly fit the primary framework”, I think this and earlier posts have shown that his method is problematic. Rather than take the biblical narrative about Josiah’s cult centralization or purification or renewal, he has not UC actually changed the biblical narrative so that we come to imagine Josiah merely discarding practices that were no longer relevant in his time (e.g. Assyrian astral worship) or even undertaking a cost-saving measure? By reimagining the narrative to “plausibly fit” the primary evidence, has not UC actually replaced the biblical narrative with a new and different account that exists nowhere except in the historian’s imagination? Certainly, we can hypothesize that the author changed the facts before him to create a new narrative of more significant theological import, but why not simply hypothesize that the author drew upon known customs and traditions to create a historical fiction in a manner not very different from historical novelists do today?

Three:

The minimalist approach becomes extremely maximalist when it approaches the sources with inappropriate expectations, just to drop them as soon as they do not respond to gross questions. . . . We can know so little about the past, that we should endeavor to interpret adequately what little we have. (307)

There is an implicit circularity here, I think. Yes, we “know so little about the past”. And by all means we certainly “should endeavor to interpret what little we have.” It is not valid to see how we can make disparate sources from variable provenances throw light on each other until we first establish a valid argument that they are related in the way tradition and orthodoxy have led us to believe they are related. If we make invalid assumptions about the genre and provenance of our written sources we will almost certainly not be advancing genuine historical knowledge if we try to relate them to the real history behind their surface narratives. We would be in gross error if we found ourselves using Walter Scott’s novels to reconstruct medieval England, or Geoffrey of Monmouth’s saga to reconstruct a historical King Arthur. But this returns me to my response to point #One above.

Four:

Nothing remains for exegetes interested in historical research but to take note of the new methodological hierarchy which implies the necessary subordination of non-archaeological, secondary documentation, including the biblical texts, to primary data. (308)

Yes and no. Certainly there is a hierarchy of sources about any given time and place in the past. Primary sources, those produced in the time in question, surely take precedence. That does not mean we accept them uncritically because we know kings like to stretch the truth when making public boasts. But sources that derive from a later time need to be assessed according to what their authors could have known and what they wanted their audiences to read and believe. Those things may not cohere with the realities of the past. If those later sources can, however, demonstrate that they themselves are drawing upon “primary sources” since lost to us, then we are indeed fortunate in having more witnesses about the past to help us in our research.

But what is not allowed, in my view, is using a hierarchy such as the following:

Exhaust all we can from primary sources
Finding that we still lack much desired information, turn to secondary sources
Use secondary sources to fill in the gaps.

No, valid historical research is not that simple. Here is a valid approach:

Exhaust all we can from primary sources
Finding that we still lack much desired information, turn to secondary sources to see if they contain evidence of further primary sources otherwise lost to us, (or see if they contain information that is evidently reliant upon lost primary sources otherwise lost to us)
Use the data from primary sources evident in the secondary sources.

Five:

In the interest both of historical and theological research, we should therefore neither overstrain this link with historicist or biblicist naiveté, nor simply leap over the gap with dismissively minimalist assumptions. (308)

I hope my above responses have demonstrated that a valid “minimalist” approach is not “dismissive” of any justifiable source material.

Next post, I’ll consider another argument to explain the existence of the Josiah reform narrative in 2 Kings 22-23.

Uehlinger, Christoph. “Was There a Cult Reform under King Josiah? The Case for a Well-Grounded Minimum” In Good Kings and Bad Kings: The Kingdom of Judah in the Seventh Century BCE, edited by Lester L. Grabbe, 279–316. London: T&T Clark, 2007. https://www.academia.edu/19958547/Was_There_A_Cult_Reform_under_King_Josiah_The_Case_for_a_Well_Grounded_Minimum_2005_

2024-06-10

Archaeological Evidence Behind the Narrative of Josiah’s Reform

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

by Neil Godfrey

Continuing from the previous post, here are the archaeological finds that Christoph Uehlinger suggests should be considered when deciding whether or not we have evidence outside the Bible for the reforms of Josiah, circa 622 BCE, the last quarter of the seventh century. (The finds at Arad, you will recall, were dealt with in the previous post.)

1. Images on seals

Locally produced glyptic of the eighth and early seventh centuries shows . . . a stark tendency to portray astral symbolism, a tendency that is clearly related to growing Assyro-Aramean influence. (Uehlinger, 292)

Samples of astral seals from Keel & Uehlinger, pp 297, 303, 321

But this imagery is no longer found in the sixth century (Uehlinger, 292).

There is some tricky business involved when surveying all the seals because a number of them have come through the open market so provenance comes with a question mark. I am setting out here a very general picture on the basis of Uehlinger’s chapter.

There is one “family archive recording real estate transactions extending over two or three generations until the city’s conflagration in 587 BCE.

In a family archive [cited as the “House of Bullae”] containing records of transactions “over two or three generations until [Jerusalem’s] conflagration in 587 BCE. These seals . . .

. . . display a conspicuous reservation towards iconic designs and merely use decorative features and space fillers. . . . Clearly … neither iconic design in general nor astral symbolism in particular were en vogue among the literate Jerusalemites represented in the ‘House of the Bullae’ archive. (Uehlinger, p. 293f)

Worshiper facing a branch; plant and architectural (tree?) motifs (K&U, pp 356, 358)

Another collection depicts . . .

. . . architectural and vegetal or floral motifs which can be related tentatively to temple and/or fertility symbolism. (Uehlinger, p. 294)

Uehlinger concludes:

. . . from the eighth to the sixth centuries, we may discern a clear evolution of preferences characterized by the rarefaction of iconic and otherwise deity-related seal designs.

(Uehlinger, p. 295)

A rough visual outline of the different types of seal collections and their predominant periods — based on my reading of Uehlinger.

2. Epigraphical sources

From the surviving inscriptions from the time of Hezekiah (circa 700 BCE) through to the Babylonian capture of Jerusalem (587 BCE) Uehlinger identifies “an expansion of Yahweh’s divine authority, which eo ipso implies a transfer of authority from other deities or divine entities and thus their relative deprivation of power.” (295) Further,

Hebrew and particularly Judahite inscriptions make it probable that between c. 700 and 587 Yahweh took over specific functions as provider of blessing and salvation from ‘his Asherah’.

(Uehlinger, p. 296)

Recall that “Asherah” is widely understood as a reference to Yahweh’s wife.

Uehlinger further finds significance in the absence of any reference to Yahweh’s Asherah in the greeting formulas appearing in letters from Arad dated from the time after Josiah, from the period 605-587 BCE.

Another epigraphical source is found in the pair of silver amulets from Ketef Hinnom that I discussed in a post not so long ago. Uehlinger notes that their inscription appears to extend Yahweh’s power to the underworld and as such would be a significant expansion of his power from what we know of him in earlier times. Yahweh’s salvation is described by means of a metaphor of restoration of light:

. . . this recalls the common Near Eastern concept of the sun-god who travels through the underworld during the night and literally ‘brings back light’ in the morning. . . .

From the end of the eighth century onwards, Yahweh himself was to a large extent perceived as a royal solar deity. . . . Once the idea developed that Yahweh could be active in the grave and netherworld and preserve the dead from evil, too, some sort of competition between the main deity of Jerusalem and other gods who were traditionally related to the netherworld (among them, mlk?) became inevitable.

If a cult reform ever took place under King Josiah, it must be plausibly situated within the religio-historical context implied by the afore-mentioned developments.

(Uehlinger, p. 297)

Unfortunately, as we saw in the earlier post about these amulets, the preferable date for them is “the late sixth or early fifth century BCE” — a period of Babylonian and Persian dominance and well after Josiah’s time. (But not necessarily “unfortunately” if we interpret the data as a long-lasting effect of Josiah’s reforms.)

Thus concludes my overview of Uehlinger’s discussion of potentially relevant archaeological evidence. (The temple remains at Arad were addressed in the previous post.) The full article is available via the link below.

In the next post I will focus on the literary sources, but even here the net will be cast over additional “facts on the ground”.

Till then, interested readers might like to compare their own responses to the above evidence with a comment by Juha Pakkala:

Several scholars have tried to find external fixed points for 2 Kings 22-23 by using archaeological finds [citation here to Uehlinger’s chapter being discussed in these posts] but so far one has only been able to show possible broader lines of development that could make sense if there were a reform. Clearly, the nature of the archaeological evidence is such that it would be difficult to find direct evidence for a specific event such as a reform. Archaeological evidence cannot distinguish between the reign of Josiah and 587 BCE, or between the reigns of Manasseh and Josiah. Therefore, much of the discussion about archaeological evidence is tied to attempts to validate or disprove what the Bible says. But the dangers and limitations of this approach have to be acknowledged. For example, if seals from Judah are increasingly aniconic towards the end of the monarchy, should we assume on the basis of 2 Kings 23 that iconographical representations of the divine were banned by Josiah? One cannot exclude this possibility, but 2 Kings 23 does not say anything about Yahweh’s iconic representations and it has often been shown that the ban on making an idol or other pictorial representation of Yahweh belongs to the latest editorial phases of Deuteronomy and 1-2 Kings. A cult reform would, for example, not explain why one would not carve a picture of an ibex or a flower, unless one assumes that Josiah’s reform included a systematic iconoclasm. In other words, the tendency to increasingly prefer aniconic seals cannot be directly connected with 2 Kings 23.

The main problem with these attempts is that we still know very little about the historical and religious context of the late 7th century BCE in Judah. Much of what is usually assumed about the religious context of the late monarchic period in Judah has been built on Josiah’s reform, or on an interpretation of what it is thought to have been.

(Pakkala, 218)

Keep in mind that Uehlinger acknowledges that archaeological evidence alone cannot establish the historicity of Josiah’s reforms. It is his “middle way” between “minimalism” and “maximalism” that I hope to address at the conclusion of this series.

Avigad, Nahman, and Benjamin Sass. Corpus of West Semitic Stamp Seals. 2nd edition. Jerusalem: Institute of Archaeology, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1997.

Keel, Othmar, and Christoph Uehlinger. Gods, Goddesses, and Images of God in Ancient Israel. Illustrated edition. Minneapolis, Minn: Augsburg Books, 1998.

Pakkala, Juha. “Why the Cult Reforms in Judah Probably Did Not Happen.” In One God – One Cult – One Nation: Archaeological and Biblical Perspectives, edited by Reinhard G. Kratz and Hermann Spieckermann, 201–35. Berlin ; New York: De Gruyter, 2016.

2024-06-09

Did King Josiah Change the Course of History?

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

by Neil Godfrey

A ChatGPT image of a young King Josiah ordering the destruction of pagan cult centres

Finally I am catching up with where I left my earlier discussion about the historicity of the reforms of King Josiah.

King Josiah — a sixteenth-generation, descendant of King David — declared all traces of foreign worship to be anathema, and indeed the cause of Judah’s current misfortunes. [He] embarked on a vigorous campaign of religious purification in the countryside, ordering the destruction of rural shrines, declaring them to be sources of evil. Henceforth, Jerusalem’s temple, with its inner sanctuary, altar, and surrounding courtyards at the summit of the city would be recognized as the only legitimate place of worship for the people of Israel. In that innovation, modern monotheism was born. . . .

Such an ambitious plan would require active and powerful propaganda. The book of Deuteronomy established the unity of the people of Israel and the centrality of their national cult place . . . .

(Israel Finkelstein & Neil Asher Silberman pp. 2, 283 — all bolding in quotations is my own)

Josiah’s reform was nothing less than the beginnings of the religion from which Judaism and Christianity emerged, according to Finkelstein and Silberman:

Josiah’s messianic role arose from the theology of a new religious movement that dramatically changed what it meant to be an Israelite and laid the foundations for future Judaism and for Christianity. That movement ultimately produced the core documents of the Bible — chief among them, a book of the Law, discovered during renovations to the Jerusalem Temple in 622 BCE, the eighteenth year of Josiah’s reign. That book, identified by most scholars as an original form of the book of Deuteronomy, sparked a revolution in ritual and a complete reformulation of Israelite identity. It contained the central features of biblical monotheism: the exclusive worship of one God in one place; centralized, national observance of the main festivals of the Jewish Year (Passover, Tabernacles); and a range of legislation dealing with social welfare, justice, and personal morality.

This was the formative moment in the crystallization of the biblical tradition as we now know it.

(F&S, 276)

What makes the reform of Josiah so controversial is the fact that Josiah has no mention in any extra-biblical sources. Although several Judahite kings are recorded, either by name or at least by office, Josiah is completely absent from the Assyrian texts so far, in spite of his alleged importance for Judah. Extant Egyptian records do not record Josiah’s death, even though Pharaoh Necho II is well known from both Egyptian and Mesopotamian sources. We are thrown back on the biblical text and archaeology for information about Josiah’s rule and his supposed religious activities. There is also the central question of the law book allegedly found in the Jerusalem temple and shown to Josiah. Since archaeology does not seem to give us a great deal of help, we rely more on the text than we would like, and a number of scholars are sceptical of the text’s story. (Davies, 383)

What is the evidence for this widely accepted scenario? The same authors concede in the same 2001 book, The Bible Unearthed,

Although archaeology has proved invaluable in uncovering the long-term social developments that underlie the historical evolution of Judah and the birth of the Deuteronomistic movement, it has been far less successful in providing evidence for Josiah’s specific accomplishments.

(F&S, 287)

If we had no Bible to tell us about Josiah’s reforms, would we know that there was definitely some kind of religious change in Josiah’s time from the archaeological evidence alone?

The importance of the question extends beyond the views of the two scholars just mentioned:

The reform accounts have had considerable impact on Biblical Studies and the study of ancient Israel, its history and religion.

Many histories of Israel and introductions to the Hebrew Bible refer to the reforms as important events that took place in the late 8th and late 7th centuries BCE. Many central or even defining concepts of later Judaism, such as cult centralization, exclusive worship of Yahweh, idol criticism and law-based religion, would have been introduced by one of the reforming kings. The reforms have also had considerable impact on the study of Biblical books. For example, because of the evident similarities between the Deuteronomy and 2 Kings 22-23, the dating of Deuteronomy is often connected with Josiah’s reform. Some scholars who have questioned the historicity of most events in 2 Kings 22-23 have still connected the Deuteronomy with King Josiah or the late 7th century BCE. The Deuteronomy would then be a witness to the religious changes that took place during this time.

(Pakkala, 202)

In 2001 an article in Journal of the American Oriental Society by another scholar, Lisbeth S. Fried, concluded:

There is no archaeological evidence consistent with the assumption that Josiah removed cult sites from the Iron Age II cities of Judah, Samaria, Megiddo, or the Negev. Except for sites under the control of Edom and beyond Josiah’s reach, there were none to be removed. All had either been destroyed by Egyptian or Assyrian kings, or purposely buried in anticipation of such destruction. None was rebuilt. Neither the reforms of Josiah nor those of Hezekiah against the bāmôt [=”high places”] should be considered historical.

(Fried, 460)

Map from Wikimedia Commons; Israel Museum Model of Arad temple from Aharoni, p 26.

That reference to “purposely buried in anticipation of such destruction” is a reference to the discovery of a temple site at Tel Arad in southern Judah. (You read that correctly: Jerusalem did not possess the only temple in the kingdom of Judah during this era. Another temple from this time has been discovered at Moza, about seven kilometers northwest of Jerusalem). Of the Arad finds, Uehlinger explains,

. . . it is impossible to relate the archaeological evidence [of the Arad temple finds] to the biblical testimony about Josiah’s reform. The shrine’s cancellation is . . . an emphatically careful treatment of cultic paraphernalia within the building proper: two horned incense altars and a massebah [=sacred pillar] were all laid on their sides at their respective positions, a measure which seems to indicate an intention to preserve and not to destroy them. . . . While we cannot know the precise reasons of [sic] the cancellation, protective measures at a time when the southern border of Judah came under military pressure and Judahite defensive control could not be guaranteed anymore to provide the most reasonable scenario. This may have occurred during the years of Hezekiah’s revolt against Sennacherib, although other explanations are equally valid. . . . ‘In any case, the careful burial of the symbolic objects expresses the desire or hope for a restoration of cultic activities in the future’. This interpretation certainly does not fit the biblical report of a violent defilement of high places throughout the country—whether such a defilement took place under Hezekiah, or Josiah, or both.

(Uehlinger, 290)

Why might anyone seek to carefully hide cult items in this way? Citing Mordechai (Morton) Cogan’s Imperialism and Religion: Assyria, Judah and Israel in the Eighth and Seventh Centuries BCE, Lisbeth Fried points to a possible explanation:

Mordechai Cogan describes the effect of Assyrian attack on cult sites. During these attacks the sacred images were either destroyed, or most often, taken to Assyria or to other cities to pay homage to the Assyrian gods. Cogan reports numerous cases in which shrines were not restored until the image was returned . . .

(Uehlinger, 460)

But why was it not restored after the threat of foreign invasion was over? Fried suggests that by 701 BCE every other cult site in Judah had been destroyed by the Egyptian pharaoh or Assyrian kings leaving only the temple at Jerusalem standing.

The Temple’s miraculous survival in 701 after the demise of every other cult site may have given rise to the belief that the Temple in Jerusalem was the only place in which YHWH had caused his name to dwell. All other sites were anathema.

(Uehlinger, 461)

That sounds plausible but is also speculative and in fact surely begs the question: Why would not those associated with the hidden altars and sacred pillars have declared their own cult site divinely protected, too? No matter the answer, the fact of hiding sacred items for the sake of preservation does not testify to the violent destructions carried out by Josiah according to 2 Kings 23. Seeking to hide the presence of a temple from outside invaders is quite a different matter from any possibility of hiding it from one’s own community and authorities.

I will continue with Christoph Uehlinger’s discussion, however, because despite its setting aside the evidence of the Arad temple’s remains, in other ways it advances the strongest case I have been able to find for religious reforms by Josiah.

Uehlinger seeks a position that he might classify as mid-way between “minimalists” on the one hand who would rely exclusively on what the archaeological remains tell us, and “maximalists” on the other hand who would accept the Biblical account as reliable except where it is positively disproven.

‘Josiah’s reform’, regardless of whether exposed by ‘maximalists’ or ‘minimalists’, is essentially a scholarly construct built upon the biblical tradition; without that tradition no one would look out for a ‘cult reform’ when studying the archaeology of Judah of the Iron Age II C [=700-586 BE].

(Uehlinger, 279)

So the question becomes: To what extent, if at all, does the archaeological evidence provide reasonable grounds for the historicity of Josiah’s reforms. If it is true that . . .

without the biblical text, no archaeological findings or non-Biblical ancient text would have given any reason to assume a cult reform in Judah

(Pakkala, 218f)

. . . is it nonetheless the case that there is enough archaeological evidence to lend some credence to the biblical narrative and for a Josianic reform to remain a viable hypothesis? After examining that question it will be time to consider a literary analysis of the Bible’s story of Josiah’s reforms.

Next post will set out some of the evidence that gives Christoph Uehlinger reason to believe we should not discard the reasonableness of believing a major reform led by Josiah did take place.

Aharoni, Yohanan. “Arad: Its Inscriptions and Temple.” The Biblical Archaeologist 31, no. 1 (February 1968): 2–32. https://doi.org/10.2307/3211023.

Davies, Philip R. “Josiah and the Law Book.” In The Hebrew Bible and History: Critical Readings, edited by Lester L. Grabbe, Annotated edition , 391–403. New York: T&T Clark, 2018.

Fried, Lisbeth S. “The High Places (Bāmôt) and the Reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah: An Archaeological Investigation.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 122, no. 3 (2002): 437–65. https://doi.org/10.2307/3087515.

Silberman, Neil Asher, and Israel Finkelstein. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. New York: Free Press, 2001.

2024-05-29

Two Ages and the Inventions of Four Religions

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

by Neil Godfrey

One of my primary interests has been to understand how the religions of the Bible (Judaism and Christianity) and the Bible itself (both the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament and the Christian New Testament) came about. There are other far more important questions pressing on us at the moment and I will address those as well — but for now, it’s time to sum up what I have learned from reading through mountains of scholarly literature.

This post will only touch on the conclusions. The various roads to those conclusions, I hope, will follow — although much of the background relevant research has been posted over the years on this site.

Russell Gmirkin has published several scholarly books and articles that present a very plausible case for the the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), as well as some of the subsequent literature, being the work of authors and editors of the Hellenistic era (that is, from around 300 BC after the conquests of Alexander the Great) who were bringing together ideas and myths from the Samaritan-Judean worship of Yahweh into a new mix with Greek tropes and ideals. Such a notion is hard to accept at first if we have known nothing but the traditional Documentary Hypothesis (DH) of Biblical origins. The DH leads us to view the Bible as having is origins in the remote Iron Age (ca 1000 BCE, the purported time of David and Solomon) and through centuries of editorializing and additions it became what today we know as the “Jewish/Hebrew Bible” or the “Old Testament”. Niels Peter Lemche, according to my understanding, was the first to propose that we should rather look to the Hellenistic era (the time after the conquests of Alexander the Great from 334 BCE to his death in 323 BCE) for the origins of the Hebrew Bible. Since then, it would appear that Yonatan Adler has set out the archaeological evidence that would support the notion that the biblical religion did not emerge until the Hellenistic era.

Is the very idea that a new religious myth and a new concept of a supreme god could be “artificially” created and embraced by a mainstream of a community at all feasible? If we are to accept the view that the Hebrew Bible was an invention of scribes seeking to create a new myth of origins for disparate Yahweh worshipers (Samaritans and Judeans in particular, but also other Yahweh adherents), do we have any analogous enterprises that could help us accept that the such a development was to be expected — that it was not a bizarre outlier?

Yes we do. And not only does it exist, but it is located in the same time period and broader geographical area where we find the proposed Hellenistic origin of the Bible.

Not too long ago I attempted to illustrate the meaning of the term “Hellenism” or “Hellenistic” by pointing out that the term indicates an amalgam of Asian and Greek concepts. The Egyptian god Serapis was an invention of the Hellenistic era. This invention was an attempt to unite Greeks and Egyptians into a common community. The god had both Egyptian and Greek aspects merged into one. But there is more….

When Ptolemy I [a successor to Alexander] assumed power in Egypt, he faced the daunting task of uniting the various elements of the population—conquerors and conquered—to at least an extent where they tolerated each other. It has often been admired and extensively described how skillfully he proceeded, particularly in the perilous realm of religion, and how he managed to spare the feelings of the Egyptians without forcing the Greek spirit into the forms of Egyptian worship. As he set out to give the new center of the land a city deity—without such, no ancient foundation is conceivable, and here in Alexandria, as in Antioch, one stood entirely outside historical context, and therefore a city deity had to be created here as well—and as he began to establish a sacred center of his land in the new capital, he had to seek a god in whose worship Greeks and Egyptians could meet. No force on earth could have compelled the Egyptians to abandon their four-thousand-year tradition and turn to a Greek cult; but the king also did not want to make the Greeks Egyptians in their beliefs. Thus, it was only possible for something higher to unite both.

(Schmidt, translation from page 78 of Kultübertragungen [=Cult Transfers])

Continuing….

Those who created him must have been able to conceive of a god who had a part of the essence of each god and who therefore stood above them all; they may have had a sense that the countless gods worshiped by the world were ultimately only the emanation of a divine being, and they gave shape to this intuition and created a god whom they could interpret to the Greek as Greek and to the Egyptian as Egyptian: this was only possible if they created a universal god.

The details can wait for another post, but in short, the new god was Serapis. His statue looked Greek, but his name sounded Egyptian (a possible phonetic elision of Osiris and Apis). A myth of origin was created, too. It was declared that the first Greek ruler of Egypt (Ptolemy I) had a dream in which a numinous figure commanded him to send for a divine image from Sinope, a Greek area in northern Asia Minor. The newly created myth assured Greeks that Serapis was in many ways a familiar Greek god. Apart from looking Greek, his myth and name also contained hints of the Greek god Zeus of the underworld, or Pluto. The sound of the name Serapis, at the same time, strongly hinted at those thoroughly Egyptian deities of Osiris and Apis. So this new god was a creation of both Greek and Egyptian motifs. Its function was to bring Greeks and Egyptians together.

Serapis

But his name would hardly have been chosen if another element had not also played a role: that it was possible, through slight phonetic changes, to create the belief that the name Sarapis was simply the Greek form of the Egyptian wsr-hp (Osiris-Apis). Thus, the possibility was given to conceive Sarapis as an Egyptian god and to implant in the Egyptians the belief that they worshipped one of their ancient gods only in a new form.

And on the other hand, it has also been understood to represent the god referred to by the name Sarapis to the Greeks as a Greek one. His image shows it, and it is often emphasized in literature how closely related he is to Pluto, and in the legend that tells of his introduction from Sinope, it is even explicitly emphasized that he is none other than Pluto. And the existence of such a detailed narrative, as found in Tacitus and Plutarch, can only be explained if it was intentionally fabricated for a specific purpose: the purpose was to derive Sarapis from Greek belief.

(Schmidt 79f – translation)

On a lesser scale the Hellenistic era also witnessed the creation of many new religious myths and family cultic associations to promote the prestige of new rulers and city-states — as I referenced in another post not too long ago.

Prior to the Hellenistic era the Yahweh religion was polytheistic. Yahweh had a wife. The Bible presents Yahweh as the sole god. Genesis narrates the erection of shrines and appeals to various gods that the casual reader can easily assume are early names of the god Yahweh in the book of Exodus: El Shaddai, El Olam, El Elyon, Bethel ….

If it can be concluded that early in the Hellenistic era a new religious concept was built upon both the entrenched traditions of Greeks and Egyptians in such a way that neither tradition was offended, then it may not be too wide a step to imagine at the same time diverse Yahweh worshipers (viz. Samaritans and Judeans) constructing a narrative of mythical origins that both could embrace. The common god was, like Serapis, a universal deity, stripped of local particularizing appendages.

What of Christianity? We have here another potential analogue, also from the first two centuries of the Roman empire. In fact, the Schmidt work I quoted above came to my attention through a book by Troels Engberg-Pedersen discussing specific Greco-Roman influences on the shape of Christianity.

In the traditional (pre-Hellenistic and pre-Roman) Persian religion that we think of as Zoroastrianism, the god Mithras was not a major character. Yet in the second century CE the worship of Mithras, through a “mystery cult”, was widespread. This was the same period for which we have clear evidence of Christian growth.

The ancient [pre-Hellenistic and pre-Roman] cults in which Mithras appeared were public; in contrast, the Roman cult was secret, a mystery religion, and such religions appeared precisely during the Roman Empire.

Without the Roman world, in fact, they would not have been possible. Previously, all religions were closely tied to specific states or peoples; one was born into one of them. . . . They primarily addressed the spiritual needs of individuals and were generally “more religious” than other cults of the time. Initiates of Isis and Mithra, like Christians, were missionaries. Regardless of their country of origin, those who accepted the premises of the new cult and wished to join were welcomed, as it constituted a spiritual homeland.

Common to all these religions is the fact that they emerged from a people who had lost their political identity . . . .

(Merkelbach, 82 – translation)

If the founder(s) of the Christian religion, whether that was Paul or another, put an innovative twist on some branch or branches of Judaism to create their new faith, and did so at the time of the early Roman empire, they were not alone. Some unknown “genius” appears to have done something similar in relation to the orthodox Persian religion to create a new cult focusing on the worship of Mithras.

The mysteries of Mithras constituted a new faith that no longer had much in common with that of the ancient Persians, except for the name of the god and some mythical episodes.

Once fixed, the system . . . did not undergo any substantial modification over time. Therefore, it cannot be the result of a long evolution but was necessarily conceived and structured in its entirety once and for all. In Geschichte der griechischen Religion (vol 2 p. 675), M.P. Nilsson states that the mysteries of Mithras were created as a whole by an unknown genius, and we can only confirm his opinion.

The place of origin of this cult is unknown, but its creator was well acquainted with the Persian religion. It will be seen how, probably very soon, the center of the new religion became Rome, the capital of the empire, from where that cult then spread to the provinces.

(Merkelbach 82f – translation)

The reference was to Nilsson, who wrote:

The conclusion is inevitable that the Mithraic mysteries are a unique creation of an unknown religious genius, who, based on certain myths and rituals selected by him and incorporating elements from the astrology prevalent at the time and from Greek beliefs, created a form of religion capable of conquering a place in the Roman world.

(Nilsson 675)

I do not suggest that Christianity mutated from Mithraism. Not at all — despite the embarrassment of some early Church Fathers attempting to grapple with a few overt similarities between the two religions. Rather, what is of particular interest is the emergence of two comparable religions around the same period and place as a result of deliberate invention to meet what were arguably comparable public needs.

If both Mithraism and Christianity were “invented” to meet certain needs of individuals who found themselves looking for a new community and identity, they may have been little different, in essence and function, from two earlier Hellenistic religions that were created to meet specific community needs of their day.

Engberg-Pedersen, Troels. Paul in His Hellenistic Context. T&T Clark, 2004.

Merkelbach, Reinhold. Mithras. Konigstein/Ts : Hain, 1984.

Nilsson, Martin P. (Martin Persson). Geschichte der griechischen Religion. Vol. 2. 2 vols. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1974.

Schmidt, Ernst. Kultübertragungen. Giessen: Alfred Töpelmann, 1909.

2024-05-18

Why the Bible Gives Persia Such Good Press: a Hellenistic Perspective

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

by Neil Godfrey

If the Old Testament books were not written before the Hellenistic era as a number of scholars have argued and as I have posted about for some years now, why would their authors have chosen a very favourable Persian empire as the narrative setting of the restoration of Judea after the Babylonian exile? We know Persia and the Greek states were enemies, after all.

One may object that the narrators had little choice but to choose the Persian period for the release of the Babylonian exiles simply because the Persians did historically replace the Babylonian empire and they were historically tolerant towards other religions. It would have been difficult to place the return from captivity as late as Hellenistic times if the story were to have any credibility at all. But why depict the Persians as being so benevolent towards the Judeans? The account of the exodus from Egypt proved that one could create a high drama in a tale of escape to freedom if one introduced a hostile ruler. Besides, the Persians were not in fact as magnanimous as the Bible has portrayed them. In reality, the Persians continued the mass deportations that Assyrians are infamous for.

* Nabonidus Chronicle III.12–14 (Grayson, Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles, p. 109): . . . “In the month Tašrītu (27 September–26 October 539), when Cyrus did battle at Opis on [the bank of] the Tigris against the army of Akkad, the people of Akkad retreated. He (Cyrus) plundered and killed the people.” — (Van der Spek 255)

Cyrus’ clemency towards the subdued nations must not be exaggerated. The massacre among the Babylonians after the battle of Opis has already been mentioned.* The Nabonidus Chronicle mentions how he looted the Median capital Ecbatana after he had captured it. In 547, Cyrus killed the king of Lydia and Lydians, Phrygians, and Urartians were probably deported to Nippur.¹⁸⁵

¹⁸⁵ The Murashû archive provides evidence that deportees from Lydia, Phrygia, and Urartu were settled in Nippur. . . .

Later Persian kings also deported people.

(Van der Spek 256, 258)

Similarly for Cyrus’s “religious tolerance”:

The idea of Cyrus as the champion of religious tolerance rests on three fundamentally erroneous assumptions. In the first place, it rests on an anachronistic perception of ancient political discourse. In antiquity, no discourse on religious tolerance existed. Religion was deeply embedded in society, in political structures, in daily life. . . .

Secondly, it is too facile to characterize Cyrus’ rule as one that had ‘tolerance’ as its starting point. Although it is indeed possible to describe his policy as positively pragmatic or even mild in some respects, it is also clear that Cyrus was a normal conqueror with the usual policy of brutal warfare and harsh measures. . . .

Thirdly, the comparison with Assyrian policy is mistaken in its portrayal of that policy as principally different from Cyrus’. . . .

(Van der Spek 235)

There is no contemporary evidence outside the Bible testifying to a Persian policy of deliverance for the Judeans. The archaeological evidence is clear: during the Persian era both Judea and Samaria were polytheistic societies (Yahweh being the chief god but not the only god) and sacred sites were multiple (not centralized in Jerusalem). The previous link will take you to several explanatory posts. See also the post on Yonatan Adler’s research demonstrating the “late origins of Judaism“. The Persians were no more tolerant of the Jewish religion than any other ancient power.

Cyrus proclaims end of Babylonian captivity. Image from MediaStorehouse

Yet Persia holds pride of place in the narrative background to the religion of the Bible.

According to the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, the Persian rulers from Cyrus to Artaxerxes allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem, and helped with the building of the second temple. Jean Soler believes that this era saw the ‘invention of monotheism’ as the influence of Persian religion would have led the Jews to consider their regional god, Yahweh, as a unique god who alone created the universe. Soler thinks this invention was made after the writing of the Bible, when it became a national tradition. I disagree with Soler’s position as it still speaks from the perspective of religious evolutionism in that it fails to understand that the Bible is not a primitive literary work; rather, it was written directly under highly philosophical influences—mainly that of Plato. Moreover, this evolution of religion towards monotheism is actually part of the biblical narrative; in a world where polytheism and sin ruled, a pious people and their ancestors came to discover the only god. Once again, interpretation is a new version of the myth. Most scholars still paraphrase the divine revelation, always later in chronology, but the Persian era is kept as the ultimate end-point. (Wajdenbaum 38)

The authors of Chronicles, Isaiah and Ezra certainly give the Persian king Cyrus the highest praise as God’s anointed and as the restorer of the Judeans to their “homeland”. I wrote about the origin of the Cyrus-Messiah myth not so long ago. But if we accept the influence of Hellenistic literature (Apollonius of Rhodes, Berossus, Euripides, Herodotus, Hesiod, Homer, Manetho, Plato, Xenophon . . . . ) on the Pentateuch and other biblical texts, the question inevitably arises: why do the Persians get such good press?

Personally, I found myself wondering if Persia was chosen as the matrix for a resurgence of biblical religion in an effort by some biblical authors to implicitly rebut their intellectual captor, Hellenism. But no, the answer is surely simpler than that. Returning once again to Plato’s Laws (a work that others have seen as highly influential on both biblical narratives and laws), we read:

ATHENIAN: Hear me, then: there are two mother forms of states from which the rest may be truly said to be derived; and one of them may be called monarchy and the other democracy: the Persians have the highest form of the one, and we of the other; almost all the rest, as I was saying, are variations of these. Now, if you are to have liberty and the combination of friendship with wisdom, you must have both these forms of government in a measure; the argument emphatically declares that no city can be well governed which is not made up of both.

CLEINIAS: Impossible.

. . . .

ATHENIAN: Hear, then:−−There was a time when the Persians had more of the state which is a mean between slavery and freedom. In the reign of Cyrus they were freemen and also lords of many others: the rulers gave a share of freedom to the subjects, and being treated as equals, the soldiers were on better terms with their generals, and showed themselves more ready in the hour of danger. And if there was any wise man among them, who was able to give good counsel, he imparted his wisdom to the public; for the king was not jealous, but allowed him full liberty of speech, and gave honour to those who could advise him in any matter. And the nation waxed in all respects, because there was freedom and friendship and communion of mind among them.

CLEINIAS: That certainly appears to have been the case.

(See also the R.G. Bury translation along with book and line citation at perseus.tufts)

The very notion that in the time of Cyrus the Persians possessed the purest form of an ideal monarchy, the type of monarchy that could confidently give freedom to its subjects, was a myth perpetuated in Plato’s Laws. Another genre introduced in the Hellenistic era was the biographical “novel”, such as we find in the Book of Nehemiah. Should one further be reminded of the freedom with which Nehemiah (and later, Esther) conversed with remarkably friendly Persian kings. Those later incumbents to the throne fell far short of Cyrus’s beneficence, of course, and Plato went on to explain why such an ideal could not be maintained.

(If I have read this same point somewhere in work by Philippe Wajdenbaum or Russell Gmirkin I do not recall doing so, although both scholars are responsible for my train of thought and interpreting this passage in Plato as a rationale for Persia’s key role in the narrative of the Judean restoration.)

Continuing in Laws, Plato has his Athenian speaker explain why later Persian kings fell short of the ideal said to be embodied in Cyrus. While Cyrus was busy fighting to build his empire his sons were left to the care and instruction of women and eunuchs. This was sufficient to explain the flawed characters of Cyrus’s successors. Kingship ideals were somewhat restored under Darius but that was because Darius had not been subjected to a “royal education”.

ATHENIAN: [Cyrus] had possessions of cattle and sheep, and many herds of men and other animals, but he did not consider that those to whom he was about to make them over were not trained in his own calling, which was Persian; for the Persians are shepherds−−sons of a rugged land, which is a stern mother, and well fitted to produce a sturdy race able to live in the open air and go without sleep, and also to fight, if fighting is required …. [Cyrus] did not observe that his sons were trained differently; through the so−called blessing of being royal they were educated in the Median fashion by women and eunuchs, which led to their becoming such as people do become when they are brought up unreproved. And so, after the death of Cyrus, his sons, in the fulness of luxury and licence, took the kingdom, and first one slew the other because he could not endure a rival; and, afterwards, the slayer himself, mad with wine and brutality, lost his kingdom through the Medes and the Eunuch, as they called him, who despised the folly of Cambyses.

CLEINIAS: So runs the tale, and such probably were the facts.

ATHENIAN: Yes; and the tradition says, that the empire came back to the Persians, through Darius and the seven chiefs.

CLEINIAS: True.

ATHENIAN: Let us note the rest of the story. Observe, that Darius was not the son of a king, and had not received a luxurious education. . . . he made laws upon the principle of introducing universal equality in the order of the state, and he embodied in his laws the settlement of the tribute which Cyrus promised,−−thus creating a feeling of friendship and community among all the Persians, and attaching the people to him with money and gifts. Hence his armies cheerfully acquired for him countries as large as those which Cyrus had left behind him. Darius was succeeded by his son Xerxes; and he again was brought up in the royal and luxurious fashion. Might we not most justly say: ‘O Darius, how came you to bring up Xerxes in the same way in which Cyrus brought up Cambyses, and not to see his fatal mistake?’ For Xerxes, being the creation of the same education, met with much the same fortune as Cambyses; and from that time until now there has never been a really great king among the Persians, although they are all called Great. And their degeneracy is not to be attributed to chance, as I maintain; the reason is rather the evil life which is generally led by the sons of very rich and royal persons; for never will boy or man, young or old, excel in virtue, who has been thus educated.

If that story of an ideal warrior king (and former shepherd) having the misfortune to see less worthy sons engage in bloody strife sounds familiar, it might be because you are aware of the story of King David — a narrative that another scholar, John Van Seters, believes owes much of its detail to the history of the Persian court. One might further wonder if we can focus that provenance a little more sharply by suggesting it was the Persian court as interpreted through Hellenistic ideals.

If Plato could imagine the Persian monarchy as a kind of antithetical ideal foil to Athens, a monarchical ideal that granted liberty to former captives, and one whose kings had the self-assurance to encourage discourse with their subject people, one might conclude that nothing would have been more natural than for Hellenistic authors to find a respectful place for Cyrus and at least a few subsequent (not quite so perfect) Persian monarchs who represented “the highest form” of the alternative to the government of Athens.

Plato. “Laws.” Translated by Benjamin Jowett. The Internet Classics Archive. Accessed May 18, 2024. http://classics.mit.edu//Plato/laws.3.iii.html.

Spek, R.J. van der. “Cyrus the Great, Exiles and Foreign Gods.” In Extraction & Control: Studies in Honor of Matthew W. Stolper: 68, edited by Charles E. Jones, Christopher Woods, Michael Kozuh, and Wouter F. M. Henkelman, 233–64. Chicago, Illinois: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2014.

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

2024-05-09

The Samaritan Tenth Commandment

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

by Neil Godfrey

The most obvious objection to the previous post’s idea that the Torah was composed (or at least finally edited) in such a “cunningly ambiguous” manner as to allow divergent traditions and practices between and among Samaritans and Jews is the Samaritan tenth commandment. For Jews (or Judeans, the more appropriate term for the period we are addressing) the tenth commandment forbids coveting one’s neighbour’s house, wife, slave, ox or donkey. For the Samaritans, that is the ninth commandment. Their tenth is an order to construct an altar to Yahweh on Mount Gerizim. Since Judeans believed Jerusalem was ordained as the central place of worship we may think that a command to build an altar at Mount Gerizim could hardly have arisen through any collaborative effort of Samaritans and Judeans. But we would be wrong to think so.

But first, let’s be clear about what the Samaritan tenth commandment says. Here it is as it follows the command against coveting:

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house, you shall not covet his field, his male or female slave, his ox or his ass or anything that is your neighbor’s.

And when YHWH your God brings you to the land of the Canaanites which you are about to invade and occupy,

You shall set up large stones and coat them with plaster.

And you shall inscribe upon the stones all the words of this teaching.

And upon crossing the Jordan you shall set up these stones about which I charge you today, on Mount Gerizim.

And you shall build an altar there to YHWH your God, an altar of stones. Do not wield an iron tool over them.

You must build the altar of YHWH your God of unhewn stones. You shall offer on it burnt offerings to YHWH your God.

And you shall sacrifice well-being offerings and eat them there, and rejoice before YHWH your God.

That mountain is across the Jordan, beyond the west road which is in the land of the Canaanites who dwell in the Arabah, before Gilgal, by the terebinth of Moreh, before Shechem.

(Translation from Hepner 149; Hepner also points to an alternative Samaritan translation of the tenth commandment into English.)

There are several ways one can parse the words spoken from Mount Sinai to make them align with ten points. I have tried to capture the variants in this table along with some additional notes in the last row.

Samaritan	Jewish	Protestant	Roman Catholic & Lutheran
	1 I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. (Exodus 20:2) (But see note below)		1 I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. . . . You shall have no other gods beside Me. . . You shall not make for yourself any graven image…
1 You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself any graven image…	2 You shall have no other gods beside Me. (Exodus 20:3) You shall not make for yourself any graven image… (Exodus 20:4)	1 You shall have no other gods before me.
		2 You shall not make for yourself any graven image…
2 You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. (But see note below)	3 You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. (Exodus 20:7)	3 You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.	2 You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
3 Remember the Sabbath day…	4 Remember the Sabbath day… (Exodus 20:8)	4 Remember the Sabbath day…	3 Remember the Sabbath day…
4 Honor your father and your mother.	5 Honor your father and your mother. (Exodus 20:12)	5 Honor your father and your mother.	4 Honor your father and your mother.
5 You shall not murder.	6 You shall not murder. (Exodus 20:13)	6 You shall not murder.	5 You shall not murder.
6 You shall not commit adultery.	7 You shall not commit adultery. (Exodus 20:14)	7 You shall not commit adultery.	6 You shall not commit adultery.
7 You shall not steal.	8 You shall not steal. (Exodus 20:15)	8 You shall not steal.	7 You shall not steal.
8 You shall not bear false witness	9 You shall not bear false witness (Exodus 20:16)	9 You shall not bear false witness	8 You shall not bear false witness
9 You shall not covet your neighbor’s house… You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his man-servant…	10 You shall not covet your neighbor’s house… You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his man-servant… (Exodus 20:17)	10 You shall not covet your neighbor’s house… You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his man-servant…	9 You shall not covet your neighbor’s house…
			10 You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his man-servant…
10 Build an altar on Mount Gerizim
Ex 20:2 – Preamble or first commandment: The official Jewish view takes Ex. xx, 2-3 to be the First Commandment, followed by verses 4-6 as Second. But R. Ishmael (second century A.D.) counts verse 3 as the First Commandment, viewing verse 2, apparently, as a preamble, in complete agreement with Samaritan practice. A similar system is adopted by Josephus and Philo who count verse 3 as Commandment 1, verses 4-6 as Commandment 2 and verse 7 as Commandment 3. (Bowman 220) The Samaritans consider the first commandment of the Jewish tradition as an introduction to the Decalogue, so that in their tradition there is room for an additional commandment. (Tov, 94) Ancient Samaritan stone inscriptions point to variation in enumerating the commandments: [T]he first three Commandments which are extant only on two of the stones (Nablus and Palestine Museum) are quoted with an interesting variation. The Nablus Decalogue has no trace of Ex. xx, 2 as part of the First Commandment, which verse is treated in the Samaritan MSS. as a preamble to the Decalogue. … The Palestine Museum inscription starts off with what is definitely taken from the official Jewish First Commandment (Ex. xx, 2). It has, after that, as its Second Commandment verse Ex. xx, 3 in exactly the same form as the Nablus stone, which latter treats this phrase as First Commandment. But the Jewish Third, ” thou shalt not take the name of Lord thy God in vain”, which is the Samaritan Second Commandment, is omitted in the [Palestinian inscription] while it is found in the [Nablus inscription]. This seems to suggest that [Palestinian inscription] included in its Second Commandment by implication Ex. xx, 7, the Jewish Third Commandment. (Bowman 219f)

As we can see from the table there are several ways one can count “the ten”.

Furthermore, Judeans would interpret the Gerizim command as a one-time action to apply to the moment when Israel entered the land of Canaan and not as an ongoing command.

Bóid’s observation that we cited in the previous post applies:

We see, then, that there is nothing in the Samaritan Torah that is necessarily unacceptable to Jews, and nothing in the MT [=Masoretic Text of the Jewish Bible] that is necessarily unacceptable to Samaritans.

(Bóid 340)

I am bypassing at this point another discussion addressing the Samaritan reading that God “has chosen” his place of worship — as per Gen 12:6 and Gen 33:18-20 — against the Jewish reading that he “will choose” his place so that we do not read of Jerusalem and its temple until the later books of the Bible.

But is not the Samaritan tenth commandment a “blatant interpolation”, an egregious sectarian intrusion into the narrative of the Ten Commandments? It does not have to be read that way. There is nothing in the tenth commandment that is not found elsewhere in the Jewish Torah. The editors have merely turned to Deuteronomy and copied verses from there into the Exodus account of the Ten Commandments. So there is nothing new or objectionable in the wording, even to Judeans who worshiped in Jerusalem. And what for the Samaritans could be read as a command to be kept “forever” for the Judeans could be read as a one-time historical edict.

I have constructed the following table from an article by Stefan Schorch (2019) to illustrate how the Samaritan tenth commandment was composed. It begins with the Samaritan ninth commandment and shows what passages from Deuteronomy were inserted at this point in Exodus 20 and the second narration of the ten commandments in Deuteronomy 5. The column on the right lists the verses of the Samaritan tenth commandment so you can see how they were taken from Deuteronomy 11 and 27 (middle column). You will notice that the passage from Deuteronomy 11:29-30 has been split to form an inclusio — a frame — for the main body of the commandment.

Ex 20:17 Dt 5:21	You shall not covet your neighbour’s house. You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife . . .
Dt 11:29	When the LORD your God has brought you into the land you are entering to possess, you are to proclaim on Mount Gerizim the blessings, and on Mount Ebal the curses.	And when YHWH your God brings you to the land of the Canaanites which you are about to invade and occupy,
Dt 27:2	When you have crossed the Jordan into the land the LORD your God is giving you, set up some large stones and coat them with plaster.	You shall set up large stones and coat them with plaster.
Dt 27:3 . . . . . . Dt 27:8	Write on them all the words of this law when you have crossed over to enter the land the LORD your God is giving you, a land flowing with milk and honey, just as the LORD, the God of your ancestors, promised you. And you shall write very clearly all the words of this law on these stones you have set up.	And you shall inscribe upon the stones all the words of this teaching.
Dt 27:4	And when you have crossed the Jordan, set up these stones on Mount Ebal [original=Mount Gerizim — see note below], as I command you today, and coat them with plaster.	And upon crossing the Jordan you shall set up these stones about which I charge you today, on Mount Gerizim
Dt 27:5	Build there an altar to the LORD your God, an altar of stones. Do not use any iron tool on them.	And you shall build an altar there to YHWH your God, an altar of stones. Do not wield an iron tool over them.
Dt 27:6	Build the altar of the LORD your God with fieldstones and offer burnt offerings on it to the LORD your God.	You must build the altar of YHWH your God of unhewn stones. You shall offer on it burnt offerings to YHWH your God.
Dt 27:7	Sacrifice fellowship offerings there, eating them and rejoicing in the presence of the LORD your God.	And you shall sacrifice well-being offerings and eat them there, and rejoice before YHWH your God.
Dt 11:30	As you know, these mountains are across the Jordan, westward, toward the setting sun, near the great trees of Moreh, in the territory of those Canaanites living in the Arabah in the vicinity of Gilgal.	That mountain is across the Jordan, beyond the west road which is in the land of the Canaanites who dwell in the Arabah, before Gilgal, by the terebinth of Moreh, before Shechem.

It is clear, therefore, that the Samaritan tenth commandment is nothing other than a rearrangement of passages from Deuteronomy. In the narrative flow of the Pentateuch, a Judean reader would have understood that an altar was to be built on Mount Gerizim but the same Judean reader would have understood those passages as a reference to a one-time historical moment – not as an eternal command.

Indeed, the above method of rearranging biblical material into new configurations was typical of the way scribes worked to produce expanded and “clearer” or more “relevant” texts, as can be seen in the “rewritten scriptures” of the Dead Sea Scrolls:

Scholars have long noted that the redactional process resulting in the new Samaritan Tenth Commandment shares many characteristics with the scribal tradition that produced the expanded Qumran scrolls. In fact, the techniques are identical. . . . The creation of the new tenth commandment, which takes material from Dtn 27 that had no connection to Sinai, exhibits the same type of freedom as in the third insertion in SP [=Samaritan Pentateuch] Ex 20, »showing that the ›Samaritan‹ scribe was only following his predecessor’s footsteps«. Moreover, the Samaritan Tenth Commandment did not involve the creation of any new material; the scribe simply duplicated text found elsewhere in the Pentateuch, including the reference to Gerizim, taken from Dtn 27,4 according to what many scholars now regard as the original text of that passage. As Tigay rightly comments: »What is noteworthy about the interpolator’s technique is that actual changes in substance are remarkably few. On the whole he accomplished his tendentious purpose with material already present somewhere in his sources.«

(Gallagher 104)

.
Mount Ebal or Mount Gerizim?

In case you think I am cheating by striking out Mount Ebal in the above table and replacing it with Mount Gerizim, I appeal to the scholars in my defence. (Recall also the same point made by Gallagher in the above quotation.)

We have to realize, however, that the Masoretic [=the Jewish Bible] reading in Deut 27:4 בהר עיבל “on Mount Ebal” is almost certainly a secondary ideological correction, as opposed to the text-historically original בהר גריזים “on Mount Gerizim”, which is preserved in the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Old Latin (Vetus Latina). According to the original text of the Book of Deuteronomy, therefore, this altar is to be built on Mount Gerizim, which is the mountain of the blessings according to the framing passages Deut 11:29 and 27:12‒13.

(Schorch 2011 28)

Magnar Karveit discusses the manuscript evidence through a six page excursus and concludes:

… that the reading “Gerizim” in Deut 27:4 is older than the reading “Ebal” of the [Masoretic Text = Jewish Text].

(Karveit 305 — the title of the excursus is Deuteronomy 27:4 in the Old Greek Papyrus Giessen 19 and in the Old Latin Lyon Manuscript, and the Altar-Pericope in Joshua 8:30–35)

In the following passage the sign ⅏ represents the Samaritan Pentateuch:

The main ideological change in ⅏ concerns the central place of worship. Wherever the Torah mentions or alludes to Jerusalem as the central place of worship, ⅏ inserted, sometimes by way of allusion, Mount Gerizim, . . . This change is particularly evident in the Samaritan tenth commandment referring to the sanctity of Mount Gerizim. This commandment consists of verses occurring elsewhere in the Torah: Deut 11:29a, Deut 27:2b-3a, Deut 27:4a, Deut 27:5-7, Deut 11:30, in that sequence in ⅏-Exodus and Deuteronomy. The addition includes the reading of ⅏-Deut 27:4 “Mount Gerizim” instead of “Mount Ebal,” which appears in most other witnesses, as the name of the place where the Israelites were commanded to erect an altar after the crossing of the Jordan.¹⁴⁰

140 This reading is usually taken as tendentious, but since it is also found in the Vetus Latina+ it should probably be considered non-sectarian and possibly original. . . . A reading [Mount Gerizim] is also found in a Judean Desert fragment (Qumran cave 4?). –> U. Schattner-Rieser, “Garizim versus Ebal: Ein neues Qumranfragment Samaritanischer Tradition?” Early Christianity 2 (2010) 277-81. See also R. Pummer, “APΓAPIZIN: A Criterion for Samaritan Provenance?” JSJ 18 (1987) 18-25. This reading, written as one word, occurs also in a Masada fragment written in the early Hebrew script+ (papMas 1o). –> Talmon, Masada VI, 138-47. However, the Samaritan nature of that fragment is contested by H. Eshel, “The Prayer of Joseph, a Papyrus from Masada and the Samaritan Temple on APΓAPIZIN,” Zion 56 (1991) 12536 (Heb. with Eng. summ.).

(Tov 87f)

Images adapted from NET and Britannica.com

Who proclaimed the commandments? God or Moses?

One may object that in both the Samaritan and Jewish/Judean texts it is Moses who is instructing the Israelites to build the altar on Mount Gerizim so it could hardly be one of the “Ten Commandments” per se. Not so, however. It is only in the first of the ten commandments even in the non-Samaritan versions where God speaks in the first person. Returning to Schorch:

[O]nly the First of the Ten commandments (according to the traditional Samaritan counting), uses indeed the divine first person:

You shall have no other gods besides Me. . . .

Beginning with the Second commandment (Samaritan counting), God is referred to in the third person, where applicable:

You shall not swear falsely by the name of the LORD your God; for the LORD will not clear one who swears falsely by His name. etc. (Exod. 20:7)

The literary difference between these two parts is obvious and was already observed by early Jewish Midrashim preserved in Pesikta de-Rab Kahane and the Babylonian Talmud, which solved the problem by suggesting that only the beginning of the Decalogue reflects God’s own speech, while the reminder is attributed to Moses and refers to God in the third person. 34 From that perspective, the Gerizim composition, inevitably continuing the mode of speaking introduced already with the Second commandment (Exod 20:7), is more plausibly understood as being inserted in the context of Moses’ words rather than God’s

(Schorch 2019 93f)

So the fact that the narrative has Moses speaking the Mount Gerizim command to the Israelites does not disqualify it from being one of the “Ten Commandments” — if one’s tradition wanted it that way.

The Samaritans read this passage as the tenth commandment. The Jews can find nothing objectionable in the extended verse because all of those instructions are found elsewhere in the Pentateuch; the main difference is that the Jews count the earlier commandments differently so that the Jews would not need to read the extended passage of the Samaritans as one of the ten commandments. So it comes down to how one counts and how one interprets the temporal context of the command.

In the next post I hope to present some of the evidence that the Mount Gerizim command preceded both the traditional Samaritan Pentateuch and Jewish Bibles.

Bóid, Iain Ruairidh MacMhanainn. Principles of Samaritan Halachah. Leiden ; New York: Brill Academic Pub, 1989.

Bowman, J., and S. Talmon. “Samaritan Decalogue Inscriptions.” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 33, no. 2 (March 1951): 211–36. https://doi.org/10.7227/BJRL.33.2.3.

Gallagher, Edmond L. “Is the Samaritan Pentateuch a Sectarian Text?” Zeitschrift Für Die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 127, no. 1 (January 20, 2015). https://doi.org/10.1515/zaw-2015-0007.

Hepner, Gershon. “The Samaritan Version of the Tenth Commandment.” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 20, no. 1 (May 2006): 147–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/09018320600757101.

Kartveit, Magnar. The Origin of the Samaritans. Leiden: Brill, 2009.

Schorch, Stefan. “The Samaritan Version of Deuteronomy and the Origin of Deuteronomy.” In Samaria, Samarians, Samaritans: Studies on Bible, History and Linguistics, edited by József Zsengellér, 23–38. Walter de Gruyter, 2011.

Schorch, Stefan. “The So-Called Gerizim Commandment in the Samaritan Pentateuch.” In The Samaritan Pentateuch and the Dead Sea Scrolls: 94, edited by M. Langlois, 77–98. Leuven ; Bristol, CT: Peeters, 2019.

Tov, Emanuel. Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. 3rd edition, revised and expanded. Minneapolis, Mn: Augsburg Books, 2011.

2024-05-08

So the Bible is “Intentionally” Ambiguous!

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

by Neil Godfrey

How is it that there are so many different interpretations of the Bible? Surely the original authors could have written more precisely and consistently to avoid this state of affairs. But what if the earliest authors and editors of the biblical texts were working to bring divergent groups with varying traditions and practices into a kind of unity with a book they could all claim as their own? That is the view of several scholars but I will focus on just one of them, the Samaritan scholar Ruairidh MacMhanainn Bóid, in this post.

We now have to reconcile this variation within the halachic tradition with the uniformity of the text of the written Torah, which all Jews and Samaritans accept. If there are no variations in the written text, how is it that there are variations in the halachic tradition? (328 – bolding is mine in all quotations)

It may seem obvious enough that we should assume that interpretations of the text and traditions of practice were once uniform and that over time, through ignorance or carelessness, divergences set in. But this assumption falls apart when one takes the trouble to examine the evidence that informs us about those variations (Bóid 309). There is no evidence for a common tradition among either Samaritans or Jews having ever existed. I did begin to draw venn diagrams to try to grasp an overview of the range and types of disagreements and agreements among the various opinions within and between Samaritan “sects” and Jewish “sects” but the task became simply too monumental. For an overview of these disagreements begin reading at page 309 and again from 328 in the available Google pages. Here I will only point out Bóid’s conclusions.

First of all, it is now known that the Samaritan Torah was originally neither Samaritan nor Jewish, but the common property of both. (The passages commonly considered to be tendentious are discussed below). But aside from this, what concerns us at the moment are the halachic passages in the texts used by the Samaritans and Jews. Now, an examination of the two texts shows that there is very little difference in wording between the Masoretic Torah and the Samaritan one in the halachic passages, that what variants there are do not usually affect the meaning, and that there arc very few halachic differences between Samaritans and Jews that can be related to differences in the text. (329 — I will address a key “commonly considered tendentious” difference below; the specific halachic regulations Bóid is addressing have to do with the various “bodily emissions” of males and females)

So we come back to trying to understand how to explain the particular state of affairs concerning divergent practices and interpretations that arose from a common text (again, see the pages available through Google books, linked above). Bóid’s conclusion is that the different practices and understandings preceded the Torah:

The Torah, both traditional and written, is the possession of all Israel and was intended as such from the time of its composition. It has been accepted by all Israel, the ancestors of all the known and unknown Samaritan and Jewish groups and sects. When edited in its final form it would have had to be acceptable to the bearers of all the existing halachic traditions. This means that the final editors, whether they touched up an existing book, or put a book together out of existing sections, or however they did their work, were faced with the problem of producing an edition that could be used by people following different traditions of halachah. Perhaps there were already several different versions, in which crucial verses had slightly different wording in agreement with one tradition of halachah or another. How was the problem solved? (331)

Bóid finds part of the answer to that question by looking “at the qualities of the text” of the Torah itself:

The text of the halachic sections of the written Torah is normally very precise in its wording, but is cunningly ambiguous or vague on purpose in the verses that lay down a point of halachah about which there is disagreement between different Jewish groups, or different Samaritan groups, or between Jews and Samaritans. The text has been worded very carefully, it is very precisely vague and unequivocally ambiguous so that it will bear a certain number of interpretations and no more, and will agree with all the halachic traditions in mind. (331)

Precise and cunning — sounds like a lawyer.

This way, each tradition can be supported by the text of Scripture. This explains why the text is so vague or uses wording that does not seem completely appropriate in verses on the interpretation of which there is disagreement: the disagreement is older than the present form of the verse. This explains, as well, how it is that the Pharisees (or Rabbanites) can say that the tradition is to be followed in interpreting Scripture even if a verse has to be understood in a way that seems the verse was phrased so as to make their interpretation possible, even if unnatural. It equally well explains how the Karaites and Samaritans (and apparently the Sadducees) can object to the Rabbanite theory, and maintain that their tradition never contradicts Scripture: the text of Scripture is formulated with their traditions (along with everyone else’s) in mind. We see, then, that although the two sides contradict each other over the relationship between written and oral Torah, they are both equally historically correct, and differ only in the expression of their theory. (331 – italics original)

Why not, rather, assume that the different practices arose from a common text that was interpreted differently by the founders of the various factions? Bóid’s answer is twofold:

The first is, as we have said, that differences in practice are often connected with verses the apparent meaning of which does not strongly favour one reading over another. . . .

The second phenomenon is that the verse to which the different traditions are linked and which is interpreted in one way or another is often so obscure or vague that it is hard to see how it could have got past the editors unless the wording is deliberate. The wording of the written Torah is normally very precise. (332)

But surely there are major differences that cannot be harmonized! Think of the Samaritan tenth commandment that orders an altar to be built on Mount Gerizim . . . I’ll discuss that passage in the next post. It will be demonstrated that there is nothing in the Samaritan Pentateuch that is “necessarily unacceptable to Jews, and nothing in the [Jewish Pentateuch] that is necessarily unacceptable to Samaritans.” (Bóid 340).

We conclude . . . that just as the compilation of the Pentateuch brought together and combined whatever forms of the book had been current in different parts of the country or amongst different groups, and produced a book acceptable to the whole nation, the final editors acted in the same spirit and as part of the same movement, and chose a wording in crucial places that would suit the bearers of all the variant sub-traditions of the halachah. The Pentateuch in its completed form had to be a unity in spite of its disparate sources, to fulfil its function as the version that would serve and be acceptable to the whole nation as spiritually (though not politically) united. The compilers did manage to turn the parts into a unity, integrating the different outlooks of both kingdoms [sic – Bóid appears to be assuming a text more ancient than I have been positing in recent posts] and all groups or movements or traditions, and people capable of such a compilation would have had the ability to choose the precise details of the wording of the halachic passages needed to satisfy the same disparate groups of people, and would have seen the need to do so. The compilers were the ones that integrated the sources, and were the final editors as well. (Bóid 340f).

Bóid suggests that such a work would have taken generations. I’m not so sure. It is easier to imagine diverse interests cooperating harmoniously over a shorter time span than a longer one.

Bóid also works to mollify traditionalists who prefer their sacred texts to be very, very ancient:

This is not to deny that the written Torah goes back to time immemorial, or to Moses, depending on the system of terminology: it is simply to say that various books making up the written Torah in different traditions were deliberately combined into one in a form that every Israelite could accept. Rather than suppress or ignore any tradition, the compilers and editors achieved a near-uniformity of wording in the halachic sections, a wording into which could be read (artificially if necessary) the halachah of each tradition. Where uniformity was not reached, the alternatives of wording were either inconsequential and trivial, or were both equally ambiguous . . . . (Bóid 341).

As mentioned earlier, the specific Pentateuchal topic Bóid is addressing is a narrow range of bodily cleanliness regulations. But what of the larger story narratives?

Because of the impossibility of finding an ambiguous wording of historical or chronological statements, existing differences between the source-books would have had to be allowed to stand, so that the final edited written Torah would have had to have several different recensions, according to the source of the historical sections in each case. This would not have been a serious difficulty, since in later times it has always been halachah and basic theology that have divided Israel into sects or religious factions, not disputes over historical details or the chronology of the Patriarchs, and the outlook would presumably have been the same in earlier times. (Bóid 341)

Bóid, Iain Ruairidh MacMhanainn. Principles of Samaritan Halachah. Leiden ; New York: Brill Academic Pub, 1989.

2024-05-04

Imagine Palestine

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

by Neil Godfrey

The reason my posts relating to Biblical questions so often express a view that is inconsistent with mainstream narratives has nothing to do with wanting to be different (as the moderator on the earlywritings forum has patronizingly insisted) but everything to do with examining the evidence according to the same methods that are accepted as normative best-practice in other fields of history and classical studies. It was for this reason — identifying what I considered a fundamentally sound method of research and interpretation of evidence — that attracted me to the methods of what is sometimes (and dismissively) termed “minimalism” in explorations of the origins of Judaism, Christianity and the Bible.

So I feel a little reassured when I read that the same so-called “minimalist” authors themselves acknowledge that their approach is nothing other than what is considered uncontroversial in other areas of historical studies. It is only controversial, it seems, in the context of biblical studies — for reasons not hard to fathom. It is even more reassuring and encouraging to see that some of the “minimalist” scholars have taken practical steps to change the way Palestine’s history is understood more generally and taught in Palestinian schools and universities. Given the current ongoing slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza by the IDF it is very difficult to conceptualize anything positive for the future in Palestine-Israel, so one does hope that the candle-flame of The Palestine History and Heritage Project (PaHH) will not be fully extinguished.

The methods — doing history the way other historians are expected to do it

The PaHH project follows research principles set forth in the Copenhagen School’s insistence on producing clear methodological and epistemological evidence based historiography, such as is required in classical history writing, and rejecting the biblical-archaeologically designed history of “ancient Israel” most often presented in historiographies of ancient Palestine. (Hjelm 15)

We do use late historical works (e.g. Arrian of the mid-second century CE) to learn about Alexander the Great around 330 BCE, but in that case we know that Arrian was in turn using writings from Alexander’s own time.

In short, the only legitimate method of finding out “what really happened” in the past is to begin with primary evidence, the evidence from the time and place being studied. If we have much later narratives, accounts, myths, we don’t by default reject them as “lies” but we do examine them and try to trace their origins according to the culture that produced them. And that originating culture has to be determined by independent evidence. We cannot simply assume that a story about King David (or King Arthur for that matter) originated in the time of King David or King Arthur. The only legitimate method demands that we do not mix up the two types of sources. We don’t use Homer’s epics to learn about the historical Helen of Troy, nor Walter Scott’s novels to learn about the historical King Richard and Robin Hood, nor should we use the Bible’s stories to inform us about events that are known to have happened centuries before the Bible’s books were written.

The application of what I call normative historical method to the “history of Israel” has led to some considerable heat:

This has even been the case in the non-theological Biblical Criticism & History Forum – earlywritings.com as I mentioned in relation to my own experience there when attempting to discuss the case for the Bible originating later than the Babylonian exile.

The debate cemented the minimalist-maximalist positions with accusations of ‘revisionism’, ‘anti-semitism’, ‘anti-zionism’, ‘anti-biblical’, and ‘nihilism’, on one side, and ‘fundamentalism’, ‘evangelism’[sic] and ‘bad scholarship’ on the other side. Moving from the discussion of methods in history writing which had been the focus of scholarship since the deconstructionist tendencies of the ‘60s-‘80s, the Bible’s role as witness to its own histories, rather than its ancient mental history, became the primary issue. It became almost “illegitimate” not only to deny or criticize the Bible’s historicity, but also to discuss its origin later than the Babylonian Exile, although the Dead Sea Scrolls had made it absolutely evident that no Hebrew Bible existed that early. The approach taken by the so-called “minimalists” is, however, a basic demand in scientific history writing and is called for if biblical scholars are to be included in the guild of historians. Rather than being the ideologically driven program of a small group it has been adopted, to some extent, ‘by a fairly large number of scholars in response to the collapse of “biblical archaeology”, and the absolute necessity of reconsidering the way in which archaeological data and biblical texts are best related in the search for a critical history’. (Hjelm 50)

The content — imagining a non-biblical history of Palestine

Biblical-influenced history of Palestine or Israel is not limited to evangelicals. But I hope by the time interested readers reach the end of this post they will recognize the need to move beyond our common Bible-influenced histories.

Biblically based history does not only feature in histories written by biblical scholars, but is common in writings by archaeologists and historians alike. (Hjelm 15)

Ingrid Hjelm adds examples to demonstrate what that statement covers, some of which no doubt many readers will at least have seen referenced in online discussions:

W. G. Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? What Archaeology Can Tell Us about the Reality of Ancient Israel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001);
Israel Finkelstein and N. A. Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (New York: The Free Press, 2001);
P. Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander. A History of the Persian Empire (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2002);
T.C. Mitchell, ‘The Assyrian and Babylonian Empires and Other States of the Near East from the Eighth to the Sixth Centuries’, in J. Boardman et al. (eds.), The Cambridge Ancient History. Sec. ed., vol. Ill, Part 2 (1991): 322-460;
A. Kuhrt, The Ancient Near East. Vol. II, (London: Routledge, 1995);
K. A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: MI, Cambridge, U.K.: Eerdmans, 2003)

There is Israel and there is Palestine. Unfortunately, among many of us who have been immersed in a certain view of the Bible and history the term Palestine can easily conjure up images of the other, the outsider, the crude pagan destined to be supplanted, or other Orientalist visions of “the Arab” or even “Islamism”. But the term Israel is also problematic. As Philip R. Davies pointed out in 1992 we find ourselves with shifting images of three different Israels:

1. Historical Israel:

Historical Israel is the Kingdom of Israel / Bit Humri / House of Omri (9th century -720 BCE) — the kingdom that archaeologists have uncovered in the northern region of Palestine. It is known from Moabite and Assyrian inscriptions.

2. Biblical Israel:

Biblical Israel is the 12 tribe confederation, the United Monarchy, the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and the “Israelites” throughout history and tradition in the 2nd – 1st millennium BCE (Hjelm 16)

3. Ancient Israel:

Finally, the Ancient Israel perspective offers a harmonization of biblical traditions with archaeology and epigraphy and uses the name “Israel” indiscriminately of its historical use and verification. In regard to historical research, such traditional “ancient Israel” histories are oxymoronically neither biblical nor historical, but reductionist conflation of biblical myth and historical fact. (Hjelm 16)

See the above list of titles for examples of that kind of harmonization.

Where is there room for Palestine here? We know that Palestine is even denied as a legitimate name in itself by various extremist pro-Zionists and Islamophobes.

Imagining Palestine

Speaking of the Palestine History and Heritage Project, Hjelm explains:

We have chosen to use the term “Palestine” generally, because it is the most consistent name of the area stretching from as far north as Sidon to the Brook of Egypt and from the Mediterranean into the Transjordan with ever changing borders since the Iron Age. It is testified in inscriptions from Ramses III (ca. 1182-1151 BCE) with increased regional comprehension in the 12^th-10^th cent. BCE. From the neo-Assyrian period (10^th-7^th century BCE) onwards it is the most common etic collective designation, manifested in the Roman period (1^st cent. BCE – 4^th cent. CE), and it has been in continuous use until 1967, whence the name became a modern political term for areas that are not Israel or are occupied by Israel. Our use relates to the various meanings of the name throughout three millennia, in which many polities have co-existed, including the ancient kingdoms of Sidon, Ashkelon, Gaza, Gezer, Israel, Judah, Edom, etc. in addition to later Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine provinces and the imperial polities established from conquests by Sassanid Persians, Arab (peninsular) tribes, crusading Europeans, Mamelukes, Seljuks, Ottoman Turks and the British Commonwealth. (Hjelm 10f)

That image reduces the notion of the above three Israels to passing visions in a kaleidoscope of richly varying histories. Certainly a study of “historical Israel” (the first of the three listed above) is a necessary undertaking for anyone who wants to understand the Bible — if only to come to appreciate that the Biblical Israel cannot be identified with the historical Israel. In other words, before studying the Bible’s view of history one would do well to study history on its own terms first. Instead of seeing cultures and today’s descendants of past eras through biblical lenses we would do well to study those cultures and descendants in their own right first.

Palestine is much bigger than “biblical Israel”. A study of Palestine embraces a study of other great city states that dominated the region at various times yet which the Bible only alludes to with a passing or a negative glance, if at all.

Nor is its history limited to a few centuries in ancient times followed by a “dark age” of early Christian and Islamic domination only to be “liberated” and “revived” in 1948 or especially in 1967 with the seizure of Jerusalem — again as the highlighted portion of the above quotation demonstrates.

The relevance of the PaHH must go without saying though I think it must be said at this time, however hard that saying is.

The Palestine History and Heritage Project (PaHH)

The Palestine History and Heritage Project (PaHH) was formed in 2014 with the twofold aim at producing a trustworthy history of Palestine and of offering this history as a basis for the production of new school textbooks which may reflect Palestine’s multi-vocal and multi-facetted history in a form that is scholarly evidence based rather than rooted in traditional religious interpretation.

PaHH is an international and interdisciplinary project, at present counting some 40 members (half of whom are academically situated in the Middle East or are of Middle Eastern origin) related to or working at academic institutions in Palestine, Europe, Africa, and North and South America.

The initiative to form the project came from Dr. Thomas L. Thompson and Dr. Niels Peter Lemche of the University of Copenhagen; Dr. Hamdan Taha, Former Director of the Department of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage, Palestinian Authority; Dr. Ilan Pappe, Director of the Institute of Palestine Studies, University of Exeter; Dr. Issa Sarie, Head of the Archaeological Department, Al Quds University, Abu Dis; and Dr. Basem Ra’ad, the University of London.

The project has been housed at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Copenhagen, with me as project leader until 2017, Dr. Mahmoud Issa as project coordinator and Thomas Thompson as project developer. Although we are now all retired, the faculty has accepted to keep the relationship and non-economic support. Over the years, the project has been funded by minor Danish and British funds to cover workshop and conference expenses. In addition, many Palestinian educational institutions have graciously hosted parts of our workshops and invited us for lectures and discussions. (Hjelm 9f)

Thompson, Thomas L., and Ingrid Hjelm. The Ever Elusive Past: Discussions of Palestine’s History and Heritage. Ramallah, Palestine: Dar Al Nasher, 2019.

2024-04-25

Questioning the Hellenistic Date for the Hebrew Bible: Circular Argument

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

by Neil Godfrey

So let’s resume my specific responses to criticisms raised on the earlywritings forum over the question of the Hellenistic era being the earliest setting for the Pentateuch and other books of the Bible. (I am posting my responses here after discovering that on that forum some of my responses were being removed without notice or explanation.)

I have now come to the moment when the moderator (Peter Kirby) of what was designated an Academic Discussion part of the forum entered. His initial post was lengthy and it took me quite a number of readings before I thought I understood the main points clearly enough before responding. But I’ll focus here on what was clear.

Gulliver discovers Laputa, the flying island (illustration by J. J. Grandville)

From that remark I assumed that the commenter must have known the arguments I was referring to and disagreed with the claim that they were circular. But in the course of the discussion I learned that he did not know what those arguments were and simply assumed I must have been falsely claiming they were circular. The fact that I had alluded to the critique of circularity itself came from scholarly criticisms was no doubt inadvertently overlooked.

I found myself in a confusing situation. Here I was being asked to reword arguments (that I later learned were unknown to the commenter) in such a way that they were no longer logically invalid.

In effect, the daunting challenge that I was being confronted with was this:

Take the following argument:

The biblical narrative of King Josiah strongly indicates that Deuteronomy made its first appearance in the time of King Josiah
We conclude this from the fact that the story of Josiah appears to have been written to prove to readers that King Josiah learned of the laws in Deuteronomy and proceeded to act on them. Many passages in the Book of Kings reflect Deuteronomistic language so it looks like Deuteronomy was a key text motivating the author of the story of King Josiah.
Therefore we conclude that the author of the narrative had historical sources about these events and used them to create his narrative
The narrative is therefore based on historical events that came to be known to the author although we concede that the author put his own spin on the events.

Now I was given a monumental challenge. I was being asked to accept that the above line of “logic” was not credible (to this much I agree!) — that I was being asked to grant that biblical scholarship would not be so crudely fallacious (to that I cannot agree, having seen so many, many instances of biblical scholarship arguments based on fallacies and ignorance) — and that I was being asked instead to find a way to re-present the arguments for Deuteronomy being known to Josiah in a way that was not circular.

If only I could inform readers of the arguments in a way that did not make them look fallacious!

Now I fully agree with the principle that one should always construct one’s opponents’ arguments in as strong a manner as possible before attempting to address them, but how does one rearrange a circle into a straight line and still claim one is addressing the original point?

And what should I make of countless scholarly volumes that at some point zero in on critiquing a logical fallacy (most commonly circularity) of arguments being bandied about in the field?

My dilemma was that I had read and analysed the arguments of the Documentary Hypothesis (or let’s keep it simple and limit it to the discussion of Josiah and the Book of Deuteronomy), AND I had read the observations of scholarly critics of those arguments, and now was being asked to create new arguments for Deuteronomy being known in the time of Josiah that were not circular.

I felt like I was being asked to perform a magic trick even though I knew I was not a magician. If the only arguments that have been presented in the literature are indeed circular, how could I re-word them so they would not be circular?

If such a challenge was coming from one of the well-known trolls on the site I would have brushed it aside. But the moderator had some kind of reputation for being reasonably knowledgeable and intelligent — and he even said he wanted me to take his criticism in the presumably well intentioned spirit in which it was offered.

I do have to give him credit, though. He really was kindly condescending enough to try to help me out and to get me to “be reasonable” and join his world in the land of Gulliver’s Laputans.

It took a little more discussion — one that devolved into where I found myself fending off a barrage of presumptuous psycho-analysis in which he attempted to persuade me to acknowledge my “hidden psychological identity needs” that were propelling me to make the arguments in the way I was — before it finally dawned on me that I had misguidedly been knocking on the gates of Laputa.

Thus it has ever been the way, has it not? Guardians will always be there to fiercely defend the defined limits of allowable discussion and criticism. And the weapon they will always pull out is the pop-psychological analysis, otherwise known more politely and generically as “ad hominem”.

2024-04-24

Origin of the Cyrus-Messiah Myth

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

by Neil Godfrey

https://aspectsofhistory.com/the-rise-of-cyrus-the-great/

The Cyrus Cylinder is not evidence that the Persian king Cyrus commissioned a return of Judeans to restore their temple (as explained in the previous post) but it does show us why the biblical authors proclaimed Cyrus to be the “anointed one” as their central character in their mythical narrative of that return.

In the book of Isaiah (a work that claims itself to have been written around about 700 BCE) we read that God foretold that 200 years hence he would use a king named Cyrus to restore the Judeans (who since 700 BCE had been taken captive into Babylonia) back to their homeland. The author of the “book of Isaiah” boasted that God knew 200 years in advance that the name of this ordained king would be “Cyrus”.

This is what the Lord says to his anointed,
to Cyrus, whose right hand I take hold of
to subdue nations before him
and to strip kings of their armor,
to open doors before him
so that gates will not be shut:
²I will go before you
and will level the mountains;
I will break down gates of bronze
and cut through bars of iron.
³I will give you hidden treasures,
riches stored in secret places,
so that you may know that I am the Lord,
the God of Israel, who summons you by name.
⁴For the sake of Jacob my servant,
of Israel my chosen,
I summon you by name
and bestow on you a title of honor,
though you do not acknowledge me. (Isa 45:1-4 NIV)

I suggest that the biblical author was very likely inspired by the propaganda of the priests of the god Marduk. Their god, Marduk, according to what was written in that famous Cylinder, prophesied that a king by the name of Cyrus would arrive as a savior and restorer of his temple cult:

Marduk examined, inspected the totality of all his countries. He looked for a just prince to his heart’s content, who holds his hand (in the new year’s ceremony). Cyrus, king of the city of Anshan, he told his name, he announced his name to rule over the whole universe. He threw the Gute country, the totality of the ummân-manda before his feet. (Harmatta 226)

or in another translation of the cuneiform tablet:

He [Marduk] scanned and looked [through] all the countries, searching for a righteous ruler willing to lead [him] [in the annual procession]. [Then] he pronounced the name of Cyrus, king of Anshan, declared him to be[come] the ruler of all the world … (Wiesehöfer 45)

Was the god Marduk emulating Yahweh in calling Cyrus “by name” for his mission or was it the other way around?

But why was Cyrus the chosen figure in the first place? If the biblical accounts were written in the Hellenistic period — a view that I have been supporting in recent posts — how do we explain their interest in the Persian king Cyrus?

The answer to that question comes from Hellenistic era works themselves. Or at least it comes from Greek works that surely became better known throughout the “Near East” in the wake of Alexander’s conquests.

We have some evidence that there were popular stories told about Mesopotamian kings by word of mouth, folk-tales if you will, throughout the centuries.

That the non-literate public not only told, but also shaped tales about the past is, I think, shown by the curious relationship between the stories of the young Sargon of Akkad and Cyrus the Great. (Drews 388)

The stories, Drews points out, that are told about a much earlier (by centuries) king Sargon of Assyria are almost an exact prefiguring of stories that came to be told about Cyrus —

Both were abandoned by their parents
Both were raised by lowly parents and became gardeners
Both became cupbearers to the king
Both replaced the king they served

Robert Drews reasons that the fact that the same story can be told about two different figures in different times indicates that the story was passed on by oral tradition. If the details such as the identity of the hero had been a matter exclusively of written record it is hard to understand how such a detail could be changed. Drews further points to “the same story” told by an even earlier Mesopotamian hero, Lugalzagisi. The oral tradents changed the name to suit each new situation.

Let’s come forward to the Hellenistic era, or at least to Greek authors who were already “classics” by the time of Alexander’s conquests.

Xenophon was a Greek commander of mercenaries who had traversed through the Persian empire. In one of his works (written around 370 BCE — circa 160 years after the time of Cyrus) he wrote what was essentially a philosophical treatise on the qualities of an ideal ruler. The person who embodied all of his ideal attributes was Cyrus. Though his account of what became known as “The Education of Cyrus” is more philosophical and idealistic than historical-factual, he did note that

Of Cyrus himself, even now in the songs and stories of the East the record lives that nature made him most fair to look upon, and set in his heart the threefold love of man, of knowledge, and of honour. He would endure all labours, he would undergo all dangers, for the sake of glory. Blest by nature with such gifts of soul and body, his memory lives to this day in the mindful heart of ages. . . . (Xenophon, trans. Dakyns 5)

We can conclude that popular story-telling about Cyrus continued into Greek (Hellenistic) times.

What of the reality, though? What did Cyrus do that might have lent some credence to such stories? After all, after Cyrus defeated the Babylonian army (outside the city of Babylon) at Opis, …..

The Persian victor [i.e. Cyrus] followed up his massacre at Opis by receiving the surrender of Sippar and sending his general Gobryas to invest Babylon, where the defeated Babylonian king, Nabonidus, was taken prisoner. In the calm following battle and defeat, the Babylonian populace received Cyrus formally into the great capital as their new king. Cyrus accepted the surrender, cast himself in the role of divinely blessed ruler of Babylon and expressed it through sanctioning civic and sacred building-works, authorising offerings to the gods and proclaiming formally the restoration of destroyed sanctuaries and the return of their peoples. . . . Such public proclamations were part of the traditional rhetoric of Babylonian conquerors after triumph …: they guaranteed continuity to the defeated and provided a way for the local élite to collaborate with the new rulers ….

Cyrus’ achievements can only be described as spectacular: in less than thirty years, he brought a vast territory under the control of a kingdom which, at the beginning of his reign, had been tiny. He was a brilliant tactician and strategist, able to move rapidly across enormous distances, take his opponents by surprise, and make calculated use of brutal and placatory gestures. The Persians celebrated his fame in song and story . . . . His astonishing success led rapidly to the creation of innumerable popular stories, which obscured his true background: he was presented variously as the grandson of the Median king, Astyages, exposed by his jealous grandfather, brought up by humble herding folk, ultimately identified and eventually returned to his parents (Herodotus 1.107—108), and as the son of poverty stricken parents who worked his way up at the Median court and eventually overthrew the Medes . . . . Other stories abounded, according to Herodotus. They are typical of the tales told about culture-heroes and founders of great empires (e.g. Sargon of Agade … , Moses, Romulus and Remus). (Kuhrt 1995: 659-661)

I have referred to the Greek author Xenophon. Herodotus also related heroic tales of Cyrus — how he was divinely ordained to inherit universal power despite human attempts to thwart his rise. Another Greek author who wrote of Cyrus as a divinely blessed child and triumphant ruler was Ctesias, a Greek physician who tended the Persian royal family in Babylon in the 490s BCE.

It was in the Greek literature that Cyrus stood out as an obvious candidate to fulfil the retrospective role of an ideal ruler chosen by God to fulfill his

The Greek doctor, Ctesias, who worked at the Persian court in the late fifth to early fourth century,² has Cyrus start life in the lowest stratum of Persian society, working himself up to the position of royal cup bearer, and eventually overthrowing the Median realm . . . .

² There is now a growing consensus that Ctesias’ account reflects Persian oral traditions….

(Kuhrt 2007: 108)

Returning to the original testimony of Cyrus, moreover, we find another strong act that made him a most likely “saviour” candidate. The Cyrus Cylinder inscription borrows a line from the Babylonian creation epic (Enuma Elish) to present Cyrus as nothing less than a restorer of the intended order of the creation of the universe:

Without battle and fighting he [i.e. Marduk] let him [i.e. Cyrus] enter Babylon. He [i.e. Marduk] saved his city Babylon from its oppression.

. . . [N]obody should doubt that what is being described here is not a national disaster but a process of salvation (et ̧e-ru = ‘to save’). However, there is much more to the passage than meets the eye. As Hanspeter Schaudig has pointed out, we have here a thinly-veiled allusion to a line from tablet vi of Enu-ma eliš, the Babylonian ‘Epic of Creation’, as it is often called. The relevant passage comes near the end of Enu-ma eliš and forms part of the solemn list of Marduk’s names. It sums up the defeat of Tiamat …, the creation of the world … and the building of Babylon …. The Persian takeover, in the allusive words of the Cyrus Cylinder, becomes part of this grand cosmic drama. Far from disrupting the familiar patterns of Babylonian thought and culture, it presents itself as the moment of ultimate restoration, not only of the city’s political and religious institutions, but of the cosmic order more generally.

In the Cyrus Cylinder, then, the Persians cast their conquest of Babylon as the final act in the cosmic drama which, to Babylonian readers, guaranteed the very existence of their universe.²⁴

²⁴ In case it be objected that the Cylinder was a building inscription and cannot therefore have had any real impact on Babylonian audiences, we need to remember that archive copies were kept of important building inscriptions, and that the extant text of the Cyrus Cylinder may have been just such a copy: Schaudig (2001), 46. More generally, Kuhrt and Sherwin-White (1991), 74 emphasize the public nature of major building inscriptions such as the Cyrus Cylinder.

(Haubold 2007: 51f)

In another Babylonian text from the time of ….. Cyrus is said to have followed in the footsteps of Nebuchadnezzar insofar as his piety in restoring Babylon and the cult of its god to the highest prominence. What could a comparison with Nebuchadnezzar mean? Nebuchadnezzar, in Greek culture, was on a par with the god-man hero Heracles. Perhaps not quite as grandiose as a Restorer of the Cosmic Order, but a powerful figure in the minds of Greeks and others nonetheless.

The Babylonian record comparing Cyrus with Nebuchadnezzar: . . . for the inhabitants of Babylon, Cyrus declared the state of peace. . . . Big cattle he slaughtered with the ax, he slaughtered many aslu-sheep, incense he put on the censer, the regular offerings for the Lord of Lords he ordered increased, he constantly prayed to the gods, prostrated on his face. To act righteously is dear to his heart. To repair the city of Babylon he conceived the idea and he himself took up hoe, spade and water basket and began to complete the wall of Babylon. The original plan of Nebuchadnezzar the inhabitants executed with a willing heart. (Livius.org)

[W]hen Cyrus marched into Babylon, the priests of Marduk declared him a new Nebuchadnezzar in the so-called Persian Verse Account, a pamphlet against Nabonidus. It was not necessary to be of Babylonian descent/come from Babylon in order to impersonate Nebuchadnezzar. It was rather the other way round: Cyrus became legitimately Babylonian by acting like a new Nebuchadnezzar. . . . . (Haubold 2022: 80)

And how did Nebuchadnezzar act — at least according to Hellenistic writers?

Nebuchadnezzar’s importance as a model king would have been evident to any Babylonian readers of Berossus: for them, he was a national hero. It would have been less obvious to Greeks, who could read about him neither in Ctesias nor Herodotus. Things changed under the Seleucids, with Megasthenes comparing Nebuchadnezzar favourably to Heracles.³²

³² FGrH 715 F1. Megasthenes’ claim may owe something to traditions about Nebuchadnezzar’s siege of Tyre, imagined as the city of Heracles/Melqart.

(Haubold 2007: 112)

I don’t have the Jacoby fragment cited but there is the following freely available online (Megasthenes was a Hellenistic author around 300 BC):

Abydenus, in his history of the Assyrians, has preserved the following fragment of Megasthenes, who says: That Nabucodrosorus, having become more powerful than Hercules, invaded Libya and Iberia, and when he had rendered them tributary, he extended his conquests over the inhabitants of the shores upon the right of the sea.

Cyrus in the minds of Hellenistic authors and audiences was clearly a prime candidate to be a Messianic figure ordained to restore the Judeans to their “homeland”.

Subsequent Persian kings were only represented decline. Plato’s great myth of Atlantis is widely interpreted as referring to the once-great Persian empire that only declined in its glories and virtues after Cyrus. The Persian monarch Xerxes is even depicted by Herodotus as reviving the ancient Trojan War when he wrote of the king staging a visit to Troy on the eve of his march into Greece:

As has long been recognized, the visit of Xerxes to Troy was a carefully planned piece of propaganda, designed to cast the king as the champion of Troy in the eyes of a Greek audience. . . . But . . . it is not difficult to see that what he heard, or was rumoured to have heard, was an imperial version of the epic past to match the prophecies [that] had ‘shown’ the king how he could conquer Greece. . . . .

. . . the overall message was clear enough: Xerxes had declared himself the avenger of Priam.

the invaders kept alive the idea that their campaign was a continuation of the Trojan War. (Haubold 2007: 55f)

The Trojan War in Greek minds marked the time that separated the present word of mortals from an earlier time when humans and gods directly interacted, even mating and bearing heroic offspring. If Xerxes was threatening to overturn the will of the gods that had long been decreed, Cyrus, the first Persian king, had “saved” a corrupted world and restored the will of the supreme god by fulfilling the edicts of Marduk, the god who had called him “by name” — just as Isaiah declared that Yahweh would do.

One will not be wrong in thinking that the overall tenor of these recent posts is that they suggest a probability that the Bible originated as a work of the Hellenistic era.

Drews, Robert. “Sargon, Cyrus and Mesopotamian Folk History.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 33, no. 4 (1974): 387–93.

Harmatta, J. “The Literary Patterns of the Babylonian Edict of Cyrus.” Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 19 (1971): 217–31.

Haubold, Johannes. “Berossus.” In The Romance between Greece and the East, edited by Tim Whitmarsh and Stuart Thomson, 105–16. Cambridge New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Haubold, Johannes. “Memory and Resistance in the Seleucid World: The Case of Babylon.” In Cultures of Resistance in the Hellenistic East, edited by Paul J. Kosmin and Ian S. Moyer, 77–94. Oxford ; New York, NY: Oxford University Press UK, 2022.

Haubold, Johannes. “Xerxes’ Homer.” In Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars: Antiquity to the Third Millennium, edited by Emma Bridges, Edith Hall, and P. J. Rhodes, 47–63. Oxford University Press, 2007.

Kuhrt, Amélie. “Ancient Near Eastern History: The Case of Cyrus the Great of Persia.” In Understanding the History of Ancient Israel, edited by Williamson, Illustrated edition., 107–27. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press UK, 2007.

Kuhrt, Amélie. The Ancient near East c. 3000-330 BC: Vol II. London: Routledge, 1995.

Wiesehöfer, Josef. Ancient Persia. 4th edition. London: I.B. Tauris, 2001.

Xenophon. The Education of Cyrus. Translated by Henry Graham Dakyns. London: J.M. Dent, 1914.

"I’d like to thank you for this very nice representation of what I was trying to show in the book. It’s always gratifying when a reader zeroes in on exactly those aspects I thought were most interesting and most central to my argument. Thank you for this careful and engaged reading of my work – much appreciated!"

— Eva Mroczek, – June 2017
"Many thanks for this post, and for the quality of your blog."

— Philippe Wajdenbaum, – November 2018
"I find your blog most interesting and appreciate your ongoing effort to keep to the evidence for the issues discussed!"

-- Thomas L. Thompson, - April 2020
"Neil, this is actually rather useful. Good job."

— R. Joseph Hoffmann, – June 2014
"I always enjoy reading Neil’s blog because I think that he is careful, thorough, intellectually fair, and honest."

— April DeConick, – November 2007
"By the way, my thanks to Neil for an ongoing superb job of exposing Jim’s review for what it is: a farcical and none too effective exercise in mythicism assassination, nothing to do with rational, let alone unbiased, scholarship. I’m also happy to see even Jim giving Neil credit where credit is due."

— Earl Doherty, June 2011
"Vridar is consistently thought-provoking, well-informed, and asking the right questions. There are intelligent, thoughtful comments and commenters regularly offering productive discussion. Books and publications are covered with a range of perspectives with attempts at fair and accurate representation of others’ arguments and content (where there are occasional and inevitable missteps on that I notice Neil making corrections and apologies where warranted, which wins points with me). Please carry on."

— Gregory Doudna, – January 2019
"Thanks much for this book review. I think it expands, and contributes to, the effort in honouring Thomas that we with Lukasz originally had in mind with this volume. Best, Emanuel"

-- Emanuel Pfoh - August 2020
"Neil, You’ve done a clean job in your posting on ‘Jesus the Healer’. It reflects well on you. Best, John"

— John Moles, September 2011 (personal email)
This is superb work, Neil, and reminds me of Albert Schweitzer’s work from a century ago. . . . .

I commend you for being the first to even TRY to translate Bruno Bauer’s brilliant Kritik der Evangelien und Geschichte ihres Ursprungs, which is now more than 150 years old.

. . . . .Thank you for your historic effort.

-- Paul Trejo, M.A., - November 2022
Editor, An English Edition of Bruno Bauer’s 1843 Christianity Exposed
"Very good. This post is going straight to the March 2016 Biblical Studies Carnival."

—N.T. Wrong, – March 2016
"For an excellent example of generally high-quality scholarship by someone who isn’t a biblical studies professor, see Neil Godfrey’s work posted on the website vridar.org."

— Tom Dykstra, – JOCABS 2015
"I have found your website really valuable as an interpretive filter for Biblical scholarship, especially the origins of Christianity and historicity of Jesus issue. Your clarity of expression, fair comments and personal insights are much valued. I refer to your site frequently as yet more names and publications pop up requiring an academic critique and helpful recommendations for book purchases. So, please continue to delve deeply and share this intellectual sustenance with your grateful readers."

— Mary Booker, – February 2020 (personal email)
"These reviews of yours are so bloody weird!"

— James Crossley, – April 2010
"I still wonder at all the material you turn out for Vridar. The more I read your stuff (and I still do, of course), the more I realize how much we all owe you. Your voice is unique."

— Earl Doherty, November 2013 (personal email)
"I think you have a high quality blog that provides a positive public service by discussing academic topics within a wider audience."

— Russell Gmirkin, – October 2016
https://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=145080#p145080
Neil made a good synthesis of the work without being an “expert” of the field.

-- Enrico Tuccinardi, - October 2022
"Thanks for your very elaborate review! I realized that I hadn’t added your blog to our blogroll. This oversight has been corrected. Looking forward to more segments."

— Anthony Le Donne, – September 2009
"Neil, for what it is worth it is obvious to me that if you had earlier in life tracked into a graduate program at one of the world’s leading research universities you would be one of the world’s formidable ones. You are doing essentially the same quality now (apart from the philology and languages) except mostly sticking to commenting on others’ work as informed comment/discussion."

— Gregory Doudna, – January 2019
"Note that I do not use the term ‘amateur’ pejoratively. . . . In fact, Godfrey is extremely well read and his librarian skills have brought many important academic works to my attention."

Raphael Lataster - August 2019
"Fantastic. I’m so glad you’re helping to spread these ideas!"

Nancy Fraser - June 2019 (personal email)
"I want to say here that this site is so resourceful and highly on top of the most modern scholarship in the areas discussed here. . . I know of no other site which offers a wide range of topics related to careful critical analysis of historically and scripturally related issues."

-- Martin Lewadny, - March 2009
Congratulations, Vridar, . . . I declare, Vridar, your own hard work translating Bruno Bauer will make a major difference in future studies of Bruno Bauer and the evolution of Hegel’s philosophy of religion.

-- Paul Trejo, - April 2023
"Neil Godfrey and Tim Widowfield, who both write at Vridar . . . happen to be some of the most astute and well-read amateurs you can read on the internet on the subject of biblical historicity. I call them amateurs only for the reason that they don’t have, so far as I know, advanced degrees in the subject. But I have often been impressed with their grasp of logic and analysis of scholarship. I don’t always agree with them, but I respect their work."

— Richard Carrier, – March 2014
"Here I give an admittedly subjective short list, in random order, of useful, high level and regularly updated weblogs on the study of the Old Testament . . . ‘Vridar: Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science’ (http://vridar.org/) by Neil Godfrey"

-- Klaas Spronk, - Bibliotheca Orientalis LXXI, 3/4 (2014)
"I’ve even been cited by atheists with approval (which I really don’t know how to take, so thanks, I think, but I’m not sure, Vrider (even though I feel like I need to take a shower now))."

-- Jim West, – September 2010
"Thanks for this detailed interaction! I’ll try to offer something more substantial than 'Thank you' in response at some point, but I didn’t want to wait . . . to express appreciation for your detailed interaction with what I’ve written!"

— James McGrath, – June 2009
It is worth saying another word of appreciation here for Neil Godfrey's effort to make Bruno Bauer accessible in English.

-- Peter Kirby, - May 2023

Neil Godfrey on Jesus Mythicism and Historical Knowledge, Part 2: Certainty and Uncertainty in History: “What is your view on the question? I am sure you have given it much more thought than I have.…” Nov 22, 06:04
Clarke W Owens on Jesus Mythicism and Historical Knowledge, Part 2: Certainty and Uncertainty in History: “Other writers have said much the same thing, i.e., that the Gnostics considered the story of Jesus true, but taking…” Nov 22, 03:08
Clarke W Owens on Jesus Mythicism and Historical Knowledge, Part 2: Certainty and Uncertainty in History: “This was from “The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul.” Signature Books 2012. Don’t have the page…” Nov 22, 03:02
LC on Jesus Mythicism and Historical Knowledge, Part 1: Historical Facts and Probability: “As far as I am aware historians are 100% certain (probability = 1) about the basic fact that Gaius Julius…” Nov 22, 01:49
Tim Widowfield on How Did We Get Here? Part 1: “That’s pretty much it. The problem for me will be to relate history that is rarely discussed and poorly understood…” Nov 22, 01:34
Neil Godfrey on Jesus Mythicism and Historical Knowledge, Part 2: Certainty and Uncertainty in History: “Just one more thing while I prepare my next post….. In response to your point: You know that we have…” Nov 21, 23:28
Neil Godfrey on Jesus Mythicism and Historical Knowledge, Part 2: Certainty and Uncertainty in History: “In my next post I might address more specifically some of the points you raise in your comment here. Carrier…” Nov 21, 22:46
Neil Godfrey on Jesus Mythicism and Historical Knowledge, Part 2: Certainty and Uncertainty in History: “Can you give me the source for Price’s discussion? I don’t recall having read that one. I don’t see how…” Nov 21, 22:28
db on How Did We Get Here? Part 1: “As I understand, Tim will examine US historical events over a long-period, to understand the underlying structures and patterns that…” Nov 21, 18:36

The Amorite Hypothesis

The Exodus and Natural Catastrophes

The Ramesside Period as the Setting of the Exodus

Transjordanian Occupational Gap

Thirteenth-Century Destructions

The Search for a Distinctively Israelite Material Culture

The Conquest of Canaan: Observations of a Philologist . . .

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Proposed Solutions

An Alternative

How it happened

Conclusion

Share this:

Like this:

Horses and Chariots of the Sun God

“Idolatrous Priests”

Roof Altars

Conclusion — and my response

Share this:

Like this:

1. Images on seals

2. Epigraphical sources

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Who proclaimed the commandments? God or Moses?

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

The methods — doing history the way other historians are expected to do it

The content — imagining a non-biblical history of Palestine

Imagining Palestine

The Palestine History and Heritage Project (PaHH)

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: