Category: Old Testament

Why, when different religions meet, does syncretism sometimes follow? What need does it fulfil? This was the question in the minds of Claude Orrieux and Édouard Will in Ioudaïsmos — Hellenismos; essai sur le judaïsme judéen a l’époque hellénistique, 1986, when they sought to understand the religious reactions of Judeans living in Judea when faced with acculturation pressure from Greek colonization in the wake of Alexander’s conquests. I am drawing this discussion from Philippe Wajdenbaum’s Argonauts of the Desert: Structural Analysis of the Hebrew Bible, 2011. (These posts are archived here.)

That those peoples conquered by the Greeks and who embraced Greek religion the need met may seem obvious.

For the peoples who submitted to the Greeks, adopting Greek religion was a means of joining the ranks of their masters. (p. 40)

Before continuing, it is important to address another name appearing in this discussion — that of political anthropologist Georges Balandier. Balandier, as I understand from this outline, posits 4 possible reactions of peoples faced with acculturation:

1. Active acceptance or collaboration with the new powers; the peoples embrace the culture and lifestyles of the new masters.
2. Passive acceptance by the masses; people allow themselves to be dominated.
3. Passive opposition, such as fleeing, passive resistance, anxiety, expressed through utopian or messianic hopes and dreams.
4. Active opposition, which is not simply a rejection of the dominant culture, but often consists of using some aspect of the ruling culture as a weapon against the new masters.

Wajdenbaum believes

that the writings of the Bible matches this fourth concept; Greek culture was used in order to make both a national history and a religion, as well as to resist Hellenisation and gain independence. (p. 41) Continue reading “Bible: composed as a reaction against Greek domination?”

In recent posts on Dr Philippe Wajdenbaum’s thesis I shared a few passages from the opening pages of his introductory chapter. One reader responded with a series of points with which I suspect many other readers concur. To sum up the tone and reduce it to its most concentrated essence the criticism appears to be this:

1. Finding mythological parallels with the Bible a fatuous exercise since the parallelomaniacal human imagination is creative enough to find any parallel or pattern it wants anywhere it looks, and even where similarities are palpable, such as the flood stories,  these can be found around the globe and prove nothing about interdependence;
2. any work from Europe that cites a Marxist and “invokes” any name connected with postmodernism, and especially a French! name (quick, reach for the Freedom Fries!) that is associated with structuralism (and by extension Jungian archetypes, let’s add) and is an inspiration for a thesis, is by definition, a failed sham of an intellectual enterprise.

I have posted on the works of many scholars in the past, some positively, some negatively and some a mixture of both. But I have begun with a clear positive bias for Philippe Wajdenbaum’s (PW) thesis so I am obligated to defend my initial forays.

Let me explain why I believe the sorts criticisms above are without warrant — at least until after one has heard and patiently assessed the arguments presented. Continue reading “Argonauts of the Desert: a defence of an anthropologist’s interpretation of the Bible”

In my previous post presenting a few comments by social anthropologist Philippe Wajdenbaum from his thesis Argonauts of the Desert I quoted his summary conclusion of a Claude Lévi-Straussian structural analysis of the Bible:

The Bible is a Hebrew narrative tainted with theological and political philosophy and inspired by the writings of Plato, one that is embellished with Greek myths and adapted to the characters and locations of the Near East. (p. 4)

To expand on that a little (with my own paragraph formatting and emphasis):

According to the results of my analysis, the Bible’s author(s) wanted to transpose — in the form of their own national epic — the Ideal State of Plato’s Laws, a political and theological project initiated in the Republic.

The biblical story, recalling the foundation of a twelve-tribe State that is endowed with divine laws which enable it to live ideally , seems to be inspired by Plato’s Laws, probably the least known to moderns of the philosopher’s dialogues. I will analyse all the similar laws between the two texts as well as their respective theologies, and will try to show that even biblical monotheism owes a debt to Plato.

To enhance this platonic utopia with narrative, the biblical author(s) used Greek sources — Herodotus serves as a source for myths and stories in ‘historical prose’. Then come the great Greek mythological cycles: the Argonauts, the Heraclean cycle, the Theban cycle and the Trojan cycle by such authors as Homer, Pindar and the Tragedians, whom I believe were sources of inspiration for the Bible. Its author(s) borrowed myths, split them up and transformed them according to need, yet traces were left, perhaps intentionally, of these borrowings.

In Genesis–Kings there exists an opposition between the twelve-tribe ideal State — a State governed only by laws, for which the plan is given by God to Moses and which is founded by Joshua — and the monarchy. The monarchy of the nations in Genesis and Exodus, and that of Israel in the books of Samuel and Kings, is one whose excesses will first bring Israel to division, and then to its eventual downfall.

The biblical story from Genesis to Kings is a coherent and unified literary work that can be analysed by itself — as Jacques Cazeaux does — without referring to the alleged sources of the texts, regardless of whether they be ‘Yahwist’ or ‘Elohist’, as the documentary hypothesis posits, or even Greek, as in my view. Whatever its sources and dating may be, the Bible is first and foremost a collection of books — extremely well written, and too rarely read! (p. 4)

I look forward to sharing a few of the details underpinning the above outline in future posts.

Anyone who has read ancient Greek literature and has been struck by the frequency with which they hear echoes of a line or episode in the Bible will, I believe, begin to find their curiosity whetted and satiated as they begin to read Wajdenbaum’s anthropological insights into the structural analysis of myths. (I also believe it is only a matter of writing another chapter to apply the same to the Gospels, but that’s just my view.)

But back to the expected response to such a thesis and Wajdenbaum’s approach and justifications:

Continue reading “Anthropologist’s analysis of the Bible and of Biblical Studies as a variant of the Bible’s myth”