2025-09-26

An Attempt to Date a pro-Samarian Deuteronomy to the Persian Period

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by Neil Godfrey

An argument has appeared on the earlywritings forum proposing that an early form of the Book of Deuteronomy was produced in the Persian period — more specifically, in Persian period Samaria.

It is mid-semester break for me and the scholarship relating to Persian period writings in Yehud and Samaria is still fresh in my mind (see the previous two posts) so here’s my chance to offer a critical review of a few details.

Archaeologist Yitzhak Magen’s dogmatic declaration that archaeological excavations “prove unequivocally that the temple on [Mt Gerizim] was built in the middle of the fifth century BCE” (before Nehemiah’s presumed arrival in Jerusalem) is quoted uncritically. Ironically later in the discussion Peter Kirby quotes Gary Knoppers who clearly responds to Magen’s published evidence with a measure of equivocation — Knoppers is not the only scholar to observe that the actual evidence presented is by no means definitive and could point to a shrine or altar rather than a temple. Magen’s quote is presented without any apparent awareness of the entirely circumstantial nature of Magen’s evidence and the doubts raised about his interpretations in the scholarship. (As for me, I simply don’t know if there was a temple on Mt Gerizim in the Persian period but as I will explain below, if there was, in the context of other evidence it would actually pose a problem for the argument that Deuteronomy was a product of the priests of such a temple. )

Magen’s dogmatic quote is followed by Diana Edelman’s conclusion that “it is more logical to assume” a Temple was constructed at Jerusalem in the Persian period in the time of Nehemiah — after Magen’s claim that the Samarian temple was erected before then.

The significance of this chronology for Peter K is that since the Mt Gerizim temple was constructed before the Jerusalem temple, then there was hope — as we find expressed in Deuteronomy — that this would be the sole and only temple for “Israel”. (PK does appear to assume the name “Israel” designated the region of Samaria at this time.)

[Unfortunately Peter concludes this section of his argument by misapplying a quote from C. Behan McCullagh’s Justifying Historical Descriptions. PK’s argument thus far is, he notes, one that “seems like the best explanation” and “in accordance with the way historians use such arguments, no more is implied than that ‘it is likely to be true'” — but adds that there remains “some reasonable doubt about this explanation” and a better explanation might come to his awareness some time. — McCullagh wrote that arguments to the best explanation are far from conclusive (p. 26) and his point about the kind of argument that is “most likely to be true” he applied only to those arguments that meet all 7 conditions that are required for us to justify belief — such as “the battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday 18th June 1815, and there can be no doubt who won the battle.” But it was encouraging to at least see an effort to apply a historian’s discussions of historical method here.]

Another encouraging point was to see a reference being made to archaeologist Israel Finkelstein’s “Black Hole” paper in which he emphasizes the lack of evidence in Yehud (Persian period Judah/Judea) for the kind of scribal culture necessary to produce any of the biblical writings. This detail coheres with Peter Kirby’s case for Deuteronomy being in an early form as a pro-Samarian text, one that justified the Samarian temple on Mount Gerizim — not a pro-Jerusalem document. The Finkelstein point is followed by a copy and paste of a full 12+ pages of Gary Knopper’s chapter in Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period that notes:

the demographic strength of Samaria (compared to the low demographic situation of Yehud) in the Persan period — and the “flourishing” of the Samarian economy up until the early Hellenistic period.
Hebrew script was used alongside Aramaic — though the supporting citations Knoppers applies here greatly qualify that statement.
Most names of the period were Yahwistic.
Cultural exchanges existed among Jews of Elephantine, Yehud and leaders of Samaria.
Recent excavations “suggest” that “some sort of sanctuary or temple existed on Mt. Gerizim”.

This is followed by other indicators of the pro-Samarian interest of Deuteronomy, including a reference to a 2011 article by Stefan Schorch (compare my own discussion of a Schorch paper) — and arguments based on archaic Hebrew. No reference is made to controversies related to the linguistic arguments — see reference #12 in an earlier post.)

Finally, reference is made to the Yahwist temple at the Persian period Judean colony in Egypt at Elephantine. For PK, this colony followed “pro-Judean tradition” rather than Samarian according to correspondence discovered at the site. He appears to be unaware of Gard Granerød’s Dimensions of Yahwism in the Persian Period where we read:

Finally, the [Elephantine] community’s orientation towards Jerusalem and Judah suggests that the community considered itself affiliated with Jerusalem and Judah, perhaps as a diaspora community. At least two official letters written to Judah and Jerusalem are known. . . . The letters to Jerusalem and Judah were written against the background of the conflict with the Egyptian priests of Khnum and the local Persian administration in Upper Egypt. Assumedly, the conflict about the temple of YHW sharpened the community’s identity as Judaeans by providing an impetus to reconfirm its ties with the homeland, Judah. However, regardless of whether this was the case or not, the Elephantine Judaeans did not only orientate themselves towards Judah and Jerusalem; they also maintained contact with the Sanballat dynasty in Samaria (A4.7:29 par.). The Elephantine Judaeans received assistance from Samaria by means of a statement. The statement was given by a representative of the Sanballat dynasty in Samaria together with the governor of Judah (A4.9). Regardless of what implications this cooperation between Samaria and Judah may have for the political history of the provinces of Judah and Samaria, the point here is that the Elephantine Judaeans, by also orienting themselves towards Samaria thus displayed a special relationship with Samaria, a relationship that in turn seems to have been confirmed by the ruling dynasty in Samaria. (p. 32)

Here PK overlooks what might be the most damning detail against the plausibility of Deuteronomy being a product of Persian period Samaria. That fact that most personal names found were Yahwistic, the evidence for at least a shrine of Yahweh in Mt Gerizim and assuming a Temple to Yahweh somewhere in Samaria at the very least, — all of that data needs to be studied in the context of contemporary Yahwistic practices, not interpreted through the text of Deuteronomy itself. It is the date of Deuteronomy that is in question here — not the date of Yahweh worship.

The cult of Yahweh or of some form of that name is found throughout the Levant. It is not unique to Samaria or Judea.

The map indicates the places where references to the name Yahweh, or related forms, have been discovered regarding particular extra-biblical finds. . . . Names in italics denote the extra-biblical references. From Mondriaan, Marlene Elizabeth. The Rise of Yahwism: Role of Marginalised Groups. University of Pretoria, 2010. p 306

The Elephantine finds demonstrate that the cult of Yahweh followed practices that were alien to the precepts we find in Deuteronomy. The simple fact of the existence of a temple to Yahweh in Elephantine undercuts the notion that priests of Yahweh (see the above quote for cordial relations between Samaria and Elephantine) demanded a single place of worship for Yahweh. Further, Yahweh was worshipped alongside other deities, including his wife. See the linked references in the previous post. It is not until the Hellenistic period that archaeology locates specifically “biblical” precepts being embraced by communities in Palestine.

As for Russell Gmirkin’s thesis of a Hellenistic date and Alexandrian provenance for the Pentateuch, including Deuteronomy, it remains untouched by the above criticisms and coheres more neatly (according to McCullagh’s principles of sound historical argument) with both the archaeological and textual witnesses.

2025-09-23

Fundamental Problems with the Persian Period Origin of the Hebrew Bible

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by Neil Godfrey

If we did not have the biblical narratives describing returns of Judeans to Judea during the Persian period along with allusions to the rebuilding of a temple in that time, but instead relied solely on archaeological evidence, I suggest we would have no reason to ever propose that the Hebrew Bible witnessed any significant development in the period of Persian rule.

There was a Persian period Jewish/Judean temple built at Elephantine and from the finds there we learn that “Yahweh” was accompanied with other deities — including Yahweh’s wife — in the same temple. See:

Add Adler Yonatan’s observations that there is no evidence in Judea or Samaria of any knowledge of distinctively Pentateuchal laws prior to the Hellenistic era:

Compare also the “religious” culture of Samaria in the Persian period:

Samaria in the Persian Period

And not forgetting that Yahweh worship was widespread throughout the Levant and should not be quickly equated with anything resembling “biblical Judaism”:

And keeping in mind a relatively long period of demise in both Samaria and Yehud in the early part of the Hellenistic period (Samaria had suffered the consequences of rebellion) . . . .

And bearing in mind the material existence for the biblical literature well into the Hellenistic era — and the evidence that this time also witnessed the earliest material evidence for living by Pentateuchal laws (Adler) — . . . .

And recalling Israel Finkelstein’s suggestion that we look outside Palestine for the origins of the biblical literature, including Egypt (though Finkelstein himself relies on biblical narratives to propose Babylonia and earlier Iron Age Judah as likely settings for the event) . . . .

And given the various studies pointing to distinctive structural and intertextual echoes of Greek literature in the Hebrew Bible . . . .

Nor forgetting the indications that a book like Nehemiah actually describes building activity that is known to have happened in Hellenistic (not Persian) times . . . .

It may be quite reasonable to propose Egypt, specifically Alexandria, in the early Hellenistic period as the setting for the creation of much of the biblical literature — as per Russell Gmirkin’s thesis.

2025-09-22

Plan for a Study of the Origins of the Hebrew Bible: Persian or Hellenistic period?

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

by Neil Godfrey

Following is a recent assigmnment of mine — a research plan for an essay — that I think contains some information that will be of interest to some readers. . . . Russell Gmirkin gets a mention, by the way.

Rethinking Scribal Culture in Persian Period Yehud: Evidence and the Formation of the Hebrew Bible

Background, context, rationale

According to conventional scholarship, the Hebrew Bible took shape in Yehud, the Persian period province of Judah, with Samaria sometimes added as a contributing centre. This view rests largely on readings of Ezra–Nehemiah as historical sources and on frameworks inherited from the Documentary Hypothesis. Yet excavations show Yehud lacked the urbanization or resources necessary to sustain a scribal culture capable of producing such complex literature. A question rarely addressed is why there is very scant evidence of Hebrew writing in Yehud.¹ By contrast, Iron Age II and the Late Hellenistic period yield abundant finds that “demonstrate widespread scribal activity and literacy across diverse media and inscriptional forms.”² If Yehud was not the cradle of biblical literature, the implications are considerable, extending to the origins of Judaism’s foundational texts, the interpretation of writings that situate those origins in the Persian period, and conventional accounts of Judaism’s formation.

In 2016, Israel Finkelstein argued that archaeology does not corroborate the settings of Pentateuchal narratives but rather can only illuminate the contexts of their composition.³ At the 2022 Yahwism under the Achaemenid Empire conference he updated⁴ that publication with reference to new excavations and the Tel Aviv University digital epigraphy project.⁵ He advised looking for the origins of the Biblical literature in the Iron Age and then in Babylonia (as more recently suggested by Albertz⁶ and Römer⁷) or Egypt – with additions as late as the Hasmonean era. Taken together, the material record points away from fifth and fourth century Palestine for the production of the biblical literature.

Finkelstein’s challenge has yet to gain traction in mainstream scholarship. At the same conference, only Reinhard G. Kratz explicitly addressed the tension between the archaeological record and the assumption that biblical literature was taking shape in Yehud, highlighting the disparity between the forms of “Judaism” attested in the epigraphic sources of Yehud and those presupposed in the biblical tradition.⁸

An even more radical challenge comes from Yonatan Adler’s 2022 study of archaeological evidence, which establishes that Judeans continued a polytheistic Yahwism and show no awareness of Torah observance before the third century.⁹

The 2019 volume On Dating Biblical Texts to the Persian Period sought firmer criteria for fifth-century dating.¹⁰ Its essays reflect the general trends in the study of the Hebrew Bible’s origins – relying almost entirely on textual analysis, with archaeology relegated to a secondary role, if acknowledged at all. When an attempt is made to apply a theoretical historical method, as when Konrad Schmid invokes Ernst Troeltsch’s principles, the task fails because, as is so common, historicity of the texts is presupposed, thus falling into circular reasoning.¹¹ Again reflecting common procedures in the wider field, other contributions date texts linguistically to the Achaemenid period, a contested procedure.¹²

Kratz has elsewhere sought to maintain the fifth and fourth centuries as the formative period for the biblical texts by suggesting that the traditions circulated orally at this time and crystallized into written texts only in the Hellenistic age.¹³ The papyri from the fifth century colony at Elephantine testify to a form of Yahwism with little resemblance to Pentateuchal prescriptions, despite scholarly efforts to detect in them some background awareness of biblical writings, as Kratz observes. Further, these and other Aramaic papyri from Samaria show no signs of the scribal activity that would have been necessary for the production of biblical literature.

Archaeology further indicates a markedly low population in Persian period Yehud compared with the Iron Age and Hellenistic eras—too low, some argue, to sustain centers of scribal culture.

Niels Peter Lemche has challenged the mainstream by emphasizing the circularity of arguments for a Persian period origin of biblical literature, stressing that archaeological surveys of the period render such a dating highly improbable.¹⁴ He argues that the Hellenistic period provides the most plausible setting for the creation of these texts. In recent years, a small but growing number of scholars¹⁵ have argued for strong textual relationships between the Hebrew texts and Greek literature—relationships that suggest not merely indirect influence through Achaemenid era trade contacts but to a deeper engagement with Hellenistic intellectual culture that contributed to the formation of the Hebrew Bible.

Aims and objectives

1: Clarify the scholarly consensus on the nature of the biblical literature.

Survey how scholarship generally characterizes the Hebrew Bible as a composite work shaped by multiple sources, successive redactions, and editorial layers. Establish what kind of scribal activity this consensus presupposes, and use it as the baseline for testing whether Achaemenid Palestine could plausibly support such production.

2: Assess expected forms of writing and scribal activity.

Distinguish functional writing (administrative, economic, and legal records) from evidence for sustained literary scribal culture (e.g. physical space for archives and schools, inscriptions). Specify what types of finds would be expected if a scribal society capable of producing complex literature were present.

3: Contextualize Persian period material finds within broader patterns of settlement and urbanization.

Identify the archaeological record of Persian period Palestine, comparing it with that of Iron Age II and the Late Hellenistic period. Highlight demographic and urbanization changes in key regions (Jerusalem, Bethel, Samaria, Mount Gerizim), and assess whether these shifts plausibly indicate conditions supportive of a scribal-literary culture.

4: Identify and analyze Persian period finds.

Present the relevant finds from Yehud (Jerusalem and Bethel), Samaria (Shechem and Wadi Daliyeh) and related sites. These will be described with respect to:

medium (stone, clay, papyrus, coins, seals, bullae, ostraca),
archaeological context (urban, rural, temple, cave, or administrative building),
language and script (Aramaic or Hebrew),
function and audience (who produced the text, for whom, and for what purpose).

5: Assess external and imperial evidence and arguments advanced in support of a Persian period creation of biblical literature.

Examine evidence outside Palestine that bears on the question of Pentateuchal origins, including the Elephantine papyri, the evidence for the supposed decree of Darius I to codify laws, and other fifth and fourth century literary sources (e.g. Herodotus, Theophrastus). Assess the debates over whether the external archaeological evidence corroborates or challenges the idea of a necessary scribal milieu.

6: Review other common arguments for Persian period authorship.

Survey the evidence and assumptions underlying widespread arguments that biblical literature essentially came together in Persian-ruled Palestine, and evaluate critical responses in the scholarship. Particular attention to be given to:

linguistic variations in the Pentateuch and their chronological implications,
narratives of Ezra and Nehemiah as historical witnesses to fifth century events.

7: Explore alternative explanations for the provenance of the Hebrew Bible.

Identify alternative models for the origins of the Hebrew Bible and assess their viability (e.g., Hellenistic-period composition or layered traditions). Consider why biblical narratives themselves point to the time of Persian domination as formative for Judaism, and whether this reflects memory, ideology, or literary construction rather than historical fact. This will lay the groundwork for exploring models of provenance beyond the Persian period hypothesis.

Research methods, techniques, and tools

Scholarly foundations and theoretical approach

The research will begin with the most recent collective examination of Persian-period Palestine: the Yahwism under the Achaemenid Empire conference (December 2022; published 2024). Of particular significance is Israel Finkelstein’s paper, which argues from archaeological evidence against the prevailing view that the Persian period was decisive for the emergence of biblical literature.¹⁶

Primary evidence—data from the time and place under investigation—will be assessed independently, rather than interpreted through biblical texts, unless those texts can be shown to convey information that has been transmitted reliably from direct interaction with the event. Archaeological finds will be treated on their own terms, not used to confirm religious or ideological¹⁷ narratives. This approach, sometimes criticized as “hyper-critical,” is instead an effort to respect the integrity of different sources: material data as direct evidence of their period, and literary texts as works requiring literary analysis before being considered evidence for historical events.¹⁸ As several scholars have long observed¹⁹ the Persian period construct of the biblical literature is based on circular argumentation—assuming underlying historicity of biblical narratives and interpreting archaeological finds through those narratives to confirm the basic narrative construct

Archaeological and epigraphic data

The study will consult the major published corpora and excavation reports relevant to Persian period Palestine. These include standard print publications²⁰ as well as specialized online databases to check for more recent finds. Of particular importance are:

IIP: Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine – https://www.inscriptionsisraelpalestine.org/
ETANA: Electronic Tools and Ancient Near Eastern Archives – https://etana.org/node/6795

Bibliographic research

Online and hard copy scholarly sources from diverse perspectives will be assessed for both the nature of the archaeological finds and the various interpretations of these finds. See the Annotated Bibliography.

Translation tools

Because much of the relevant scholarship is published in German, French, and Hebrew, among other languages, digitization and translation tools (including ABBYY Finereader and AI-translation programs) will be employed to ensure access to non-English work.

Scope

The focus will be on Persian administered Yehud and Samaria. Other areas and periods will be referenced only for summary comparison and analytical purposes. Conventional scholarly views of the biblical literature will be used for comparison; no separate literary analysis will be undertaken. Alternative hypotheses will be briefly noted.

Notes

¹ Finkelstein, Jerusalem the Center of the Universe, 351.

²Finkelstein, “Jerusalem and Judah 600–200 BCE Implications for Understanding Pentateuchal Texts,” 14.

³Finkelstein, 3.

⁴Finkelstein, “Archaeology’s Black Hole: Jerusalem and Yehud/Judea in the Persian and Early Hellenistic Periods.”

⁵Faigenbaum-Golovin et al., “Literacy in Judah and Israel.”

⁶ Albertz, Israel in Exile.

⁷ Römer, “Comment Dater Les Textes Du Pentateuque ? Quelques cas d’étude”; Römer, The So-Called Deuteronomistic History.

⁸ Kratz, “Where to Put ‘Biblical’ Yahwism in Achaemenid Times?”

⁹ Adler, The Origins of Judaism.

¹⁰ Bautch and Lackowski, On Dating Biblical Texts to the Persian Period.

¹¹ Schmid, “How to Identify a Persian Period Text in the Pentateuch.”

¹² Ehrensvärd, “Why Biblical Texts Cannot Be Dated Linguistically”; Hurvitz, “The Recent Debate on Late Biblical Hebrew”; Young, “Starting at the Beginning with Archaic Biblical Hebrew.”

¹³ Kratz, “Temple and Torah: Reflections on the Legal Status of the Pentateuch between Elephantine and Qumran”; Kratz, Historical and Biblical Israel.

¹⁴ Lemche, “The Old Testament—A Hellenistic Book?”

¹⁵ Thompson and Wajdenbaum, The Bible and Hellenism; Gmirkin, Plato’s Timaeus and the Biblical Creation Accounts; Gmirkin, Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible; Gmirkin,Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus; Wajdenbaum, Argonauts of the Desert: Structural Analysis of the Hebrew Bible; Wesselius, Origin of the History of Israel.

¹⁶ Finkelstein, “Archaeology’s Black Hole: Jerusalem and Yehud/Judea in the Persian and Early Hellenistic Periods.” Even Finkelstein, who warns against such circularity in his paper, himself falls into the same trap when interpreting Iron Age Judah as the time of a literary renaissance and the composition of the Book of Deuteronomy (Silberman and Finkelstein, The Bible Unearthed).

¹⁷ El-Haj, Facts on the Ground, 8.

¹⁸ Eckhardt, “Memories of Persian Rule: Constructing History and Ideology in Hasmonean Judea,” 262; Finley, Ancient History, 12f, 21; Kosso, “Observation of the Past,” 30ff; Liverani,Myth and Politics in Ancient Near Eastern Historiography, 28; Moles, “Truth and Untruth in Herodotus and Thucydides,” 90, 115, 120; Woodman, “From Hannibal to Hitler: The Literature of War,” 120.

¹⁹ Lemche, The Old Testament Between Theology and History: A Critical Survey; Lemche, Early Israel: Anthropological and Historical Studies on the Israelite Society Before the Monarchy; Thompson, Early History of the Israelite People; Davies, In Search of “Ancient Israel.” Despite such criticisms the scholarly field has for most part resisted a method that fully gives primacy to archaeology. A large segment of scholars adopts a “centralist” position, one that is in between accepting the Bible to be true until proven otherwise and those who avoid a priori presumption of historical reliability in the Hebrew Bible (Lemche, Ancient Israel, pp 5-9).

²⁰ Magen, Misgav, and Tsfania, Mount Gerizim Excavations. Volume I; Dušek, Les manuscrits araméens du Wadi Daliyeh et la Samarie vers 450–332 av. J.-C.; Stern, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, Volume II; Porten, The Elephantine Papyri in English.

Bibliography

Adler, Yonatan. The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal. In The Origins of Judaism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022.

Albertz, Rainer. Israel in Exile: The History and Literature of the Sixth Century B.C.E. Studies in Biblical Literature, no. 3. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003.

Bautch, Richard J., and Mark Lackowski, eds. On Dating Biblical Texts to the Persian Period: Discerning Criteria and Establishing Epochs. Forschungen Zum Alten Testament. 2. Reihe, 101. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019.

Dušek, Jan. Les manuscrits araméens du Wadi Daliyeh et la Samarie vers 450–332 av. J.-C. Leiden ; Boston: Brill, 2007.

Eckhardt, Benedikt. “Memories of Persian Rule: Constructing History and Ideology in Hasmonean Judea.” In Persianism in Antiquity, edited by Rolf Strootman and Miguel John Versluys, 249–65. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2017.

Ehrensvärd, Martin. “Why Biblical Texts Cannot Be Dated Linguistically.” Hebrew Studies 47 (2006): 177–89.

El-Haj, Nadia Abu. Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Faigenbaum-Golovin, Shira, Arie Shaus, Barak Sober, Yana Gerber, Eli Turkel, Eli Piasetzky, and Israel Finkelstein. “Literacy in Judah and Israel: Algorithmic and Forensic Examination of the Arad and Samaria Ostraca.” Near Eastern Archaeology 84, no. 2 (June 2021): 148–58.

Finkelstein, Israel. “Archaeology’s Black Hole: Jerusalem and Yehud/Judea in the Persian and Early Hellenistic Periods.” Paper presented at Yahwism under the Achaemenid empire (Prof. Shaul Shaked in memoriam), University of Haifa. December 21, 2022. Video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T21U7tBCB8.

———. “Jerusalem and Judah 600–200 BCE Implications for Understanding Pentateuchal Texts.” In The Fall of Jerusalem and the Rise of the Torah, edited by Dominik Markl, Jean-Pierre Sonnet, and Peter Dubovsk, 3–18. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016.

———. Jerusalem the Center of the Universe: Its Archaeology and History (1800–100 BCE). Atlanta: SBL Press, 2024.

Finley, M. I. Ancient History: Evidence and Models. New York: Viking, 1986.

Gmirkin, Russell E. Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch. New York: T&T Clark, 2006.

———. Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible. New York: Routledge, 2016.

———. Plato’s Timaeus and the Biblical Creation Accounts: Cosmic Monotheism and Terrestrial Polytheism in the Primordial History. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge, 2022.

Hurvitz, Avi. “The Recent Debate on Late Biblical Hebrew: Solid Data, Experts’ Opinions, and Inconclusive Arguments.” Hebrew Studies 47 (2006): 191–210.

Kosso, Peter. “Observation of the Past.” History and Theory 31, no. 1 (February 1992): 21.

Kratz, Reinhard G. Historical and Biblical Israel: The History, Tradition, and Archives of Israel and Judah. Translated by Paul Michael Kurtz. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

———. “Temple and Torah: Reflections on the Legal Status of the Pentateuch between Elephantine and Qumran.” In The Pentateuch as Torah: New Models for Understanding Its Promulgation and Acceptance, edited by Gary N. Knoppers and Bernard M. Levinson, 77–103. Winona Lake, Ind: Eisenbrauns, 2007.

———. “Where to Put ‘Biblical’ Yahwism in Achaemenid Times?” In Yahwism Under the Achaemenid Empire: Professor Shaul Shaked in Memoriam, edited by Gad Barnea and Reinhard G. Kratz, 267–68. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2024.

Lemche, Niels Peter. Ancient Israel: A New History of Israel. 2nd edition. London: T&T Clark, 2015.

———. “The Old Testament—A Hellenistic Book?” In Did Moses Speak Attic? Jewish Historiography and Scripture in the Hellenistic Period, edited by Lester L. Grabbe, 287–318. Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001.

Liverani, Mario. Myth and Politics in Ancient Near Eastern Historiography. Translated by Zainab Bahrani and Marc Van De Mieroop. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007.

Magen, Yitzhak, Haggai Misgav, and Levana Tsfania. Mount Gerizim Excavations. Volume I: The Aramaic, Hebrew and Samaritan Inscriptions. Translated by Edward Levin and Michael Guggenheimer. Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority, 2004.

Moles, J. L. “Truth and Untruth in Herodotus and Thucydides.” In Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World, edited by Christopher Gill and Timothy Peter Wiseman, 88–121. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1993.

Porten, Bezalel. The Elephantine Papyri in English: Three Millennia of Cross-Cultural Continuity and Change. Leiden: Brill, 1996.

Römer, Thomas. “Comment dater les textes du Pentateuque? Quelques cas d’étude.” In Finkelstein and Römer, Aux origines de la Torah: Nouvelles rencontres, nouvelles perspectives, chap. 2. Montrouge Cedex (France): Bayard, 2019.

———. The So-Called Deuteronomistic History: A Sociological, Historical and Literary Introduction. London ; New York: T&T Clark, 2007.

Schmid, Konrad. “How to Identify a Persian Period Text in the Pentateuch.” In On Dating Biblical Texts to the Persian Period: Discerning Criteria and Establishing Epochs, edited by Richard J. Bautch and Mark Lackowski, 101–18. Forschungen Zum Alten Testament. 2. Reihe, 101. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019.

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: Touchstone, 2002.

Stern, Ephraim. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, Volume II: The Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian Periods. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001.

Thompson, Thomas L., and Philippe Wajdenbaum, eds. The Bible and Hellenism: Greek Influence on Jewish and Early Christian Literature. Durham: Routledge, 2014.

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

Wesselius, Jan-Wim. Origin of the History of Israel: Herodotus’ Histories as Blueprint for the First Books of the Bible. London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002.

Woodman, A. J. “From Hannibal to Hitler: The Literature of War.” The University of Leeds Review 26 (1983): 107–24.

Young, Ian. “Starting at the Beginning with Archaic Biblical Hebrew.” Hebrew Studies 58 (2017): 99–118.

2025-08-06

Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 8

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

by Neil Godfrey

Russell Gmirkin did not argue that ALL of the books of the Jewish Bible originated in the Hellenistic era. When I began to post on the earlywritings forum that “Why the Hellenistic era for ALL “Old Testament” books should be taken seriously” I was attempting to set out why it is both possible and plausible to conclude that “all” were Hellenistic compositions. Russell and I had some differences in both hypotheses and historical methods, but I found the details of his case for the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) being of Hellenistic origin to be very strong: see the links in my post that initiated this series.

Finally a new critic emerged on the “Academic Discussion” section of the earlywritings forum. I post his criticism here:

This is a comment on Neil’s original post in this thread and the issues it raises about general historical methodology. It may not be a response to Neil’s position as developed in later posts.

In later posts Neil has referred to arguments that the author of the Pentateuch knew Plato et al. I’m going to leave this aside.
a/ I am not at all convinced for reasons discussed in earlier threads and don’t really want to rehash those arguments.
b/ Right or wrong this is a rather different argument that the earlier ones about general methodology. If we have solid evidence of links between Plato’s works and the Pentateuch then, accepting that Plato did not know the Pentateuch, there are straightforward implications for dating the Pentateuch whatever ones general methodology.

There is an argument that the Hebrew of the Pentateuch requires a preHellenistic date. I’m going to leave this aside.
It is agreed that prima-facie the Hebrew of the Pentaeuch is much earlier than say the Hebrew of Daniel Chronicles Ben Sira but Hebrew scholars dispute how conclusive this sort of evidence is and my personal opinion is pretty much worthless.

The post is about ALL Old Testament books but I’m afraid I can’t take it seriously in this form. It may be my narrow mindedness but I’m sure Nahum for example is a pre-Hellenistic work. The same goes for Deutero-Isaiah which has real implications for tradition found in the Pentateuch. I’m going to concentrate on the idea of the Pentateuch in anything remotely like its present form being a Hellenistic work.

On the one hand we have no unambiguous pre-Hellenistic evidence for the Pentateuch. (I regard Hecataeus on the Jews according to Diodorus Siculus as authentic but this is technically extremely early Hellenistic rather than pre-Hellenistic.) On the other hand things like the Elephantine papyri suggest that the Pentateuch was not central to Jewish religion in the early Persian period. This means that prima-facie we should take seriously the idea that the Pentateuch was not only redacted in the Persian or later period but effectively created then. I have serious difficulties with a Persian origin of the Penateuch but it prima-facie should be taken seriously.

The difficulty is that neither Neil or I regard the Persian period as plausibly creative in this way, hence ‘Persian or later period’ becomes Hellenistic period. I am unable to regard this as prima-facie plausible. Apart from anything else the creation of a work that has all the signs of a long process of development and combination of different sources almost immediately before our earliest external evidence for its existence is IMO just not how things happen. I have similar problems with the idea of the NT being created around the time of Marcion. This may be a prejudice on my part, but if so then so be it.

by andrewcriddle » Fri Feb 23, 2024 9:54 pm

For the full context see the link/file at the end of this post.

What do you think of that criticism?

At first I was somewhat excited to think that a lengthy argument was being given for me to engage with, but there was precious little argument, alas. Rather, there were lots of “I’ll leave that asides” and an “I can’t take that seriously”. There was no engagement with the case I had set out for the logical fallacy at the heart of the hypothesis that the Hebrew Bible was composed over many centuries from as early as the Iron Age. There was a lot of incredulity expressed. I was disappointed. (It did not seem worthy as a submission to a forum headed “Academic Discussion”. Was the moderator himself unaware of the meaning of “Academic Discussion”? But it appears since I left the forum Andrew has been made the moderator of “Academic Discussion” so I have no desire to return there.)

I have found this among a number of people who have long been so steeped in the Documentary Hypothesis that they have come to assume it is an unarguable fact. Different types of Hebrew are assumed to be evidence of a long evolving series of biblical compositions over centuries. That different forms of Hebrew, even those known to be old, were kept alive and used by different scribes in the same era seems to be too much for them to accept as a possibility despite the scholarly arguments for it.

I posted a copy of my response to Andrew Criddle’s objections at the same time here:

Responding to a Critic of the Hellenistic Era Hypothesis for the Hebrew Bible

For the original comment in its context and responses/criticisms see

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2025-08-04

Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 7

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

by Neil Godfrey

To follow on from my Part 2a comment …..

The biblical works have traditionally been understood as the product of an evolution over centuries, usually said to be from the ninth or eighth to the third centuries, under the influence of Mesopotamian, Hittite, Syrian, Ugaritic, Egyptian cultures.

There is a serious problem with that view, however. The absence of evidence prior to the third century for either the biblical works themselves or for the major events that the Bible narrates.

The advantage of the Hellenistic era hypothesis for the “OT” is that explains

all of the cultural influences we find in the Bible

AND ALSO explains

why we would not expect to find any evidence for either the books themselves or the major events they write about before the third century.

Notice this observation from a conference paper by Jonathan Ben-Dov (I am not suggesting Ben-Dov himself has anything to do with the Hellenistic era hypothesis):

As argued above, the metaphor of influence dictates that the source culture remains unaffected by the act of the contact. Like a candle, which can light other candles without diminishing its own flame, so the great source culture is not changed by the nation which received its cultural capital. . . .

This image, however, is not necessarily true. I would like to suggest an example from the field of Hellenism, which is close in its geographical scope and not too far away in time. People often talk of ʻHellenistic Influenceʼ on Judea, Syria or Egypt. However, the very essence of Hellenism is its being an amalgam of Greek culture with the rich and ancient cultures of the East. The Hellenistic kingdoms in Syria and Egypt were by no means Greek; they combined Greek cultural elements with the ancient traditions of the hosting countries. Hellenism was a cultural entity in constant progression.

Ben-Dov, Jonathan. “The Inadequacy of the Term ʻInfluenceʼ in Biblical Studies.” Tel -Aviv University,. Accessed February 21, 2024. https://www.academia.edu/7499569/The_Inadequacy_of_the_term_Influence_in_biblical_Studies.

That’s also the essence of what the Hellenistic era hypothesis for the Primary History in particular (Genesis to 2 Kings) is all about.

In another sub-forum in earlywritings someone used to object that the Hellenistic era hypothesis “degraded” Judeans and Samaritans by suggesting they were mindless pawns who could not have their own culture. But that criticism misunderstands Hellenism — as I have attempted to make clear from the start and as we see spelled out above by Ben-Dov.

The Pentateuch and Primary History are as unique as Hellenistic era Egypt and Hellenistic era Syria. None is “Greek”. Nor are any of them traditional “Egyptian” or traditional “Syrian”. They are each distinctive cultures that have been created by the Egyptians and Syrians themselves. Ditto for the Judeans and Samaritans, I suggest. The Pentateuch is not Greek, but nor is it a product of the pre-Hellenistic Syrian Yahwist cult. What we find in the Pentateuch, however, are many echoes of Greek literature and ideologies and many references to the Yahwist ideas found throughout Syria-Negev, etc.

For the original comment in its context and responses/criticisms see

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2025-08-03

Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 6

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

by Neil Godfrey

Why the Hellenistic era …. Part 2a

In this post I will explain “my personal reason” for strongly suspecting a Hellenistic origin of the biblical literature — though I am sure I have come across the same ideas throughout different books and articles over the years. It follows on from #5 in the preceding post. When I wrote that I was expecting to follow up with detailed discussions from interpretations of the archaeological finds but have decided now to put that off for later.

I have more recently (subsequent to writing this post on the earlywritings forum) come across a comparable view that was expressed in a 2016 conference (my bolding):

As Jean Louis Ska suggests, The disappearance of a culture triggers off a certain type of literature. This is the case in Mesopotamia with Berossus and in Egypt with Manetho. They wrote their work in Hellenistic times when their civilizations’ glory already belonged to the past. The Torah could be – to some extent – an answer of the same type to the end of Jerusalem and the kingdom of Judah.

– Markl, Dominik, Jean-Pierre Sonnet, and Peter Dubovsk, eds. The Fall of Jerusalem and the Rise of the Torah. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016. p. 6

Russell Gmirkin, it should be noted, published evidence that pointed to both Berossus and Manetho being sources for parts of the Penteuch.

My “personal vibe” that is in sync with the Hellenistic era is reflection on “the nature of the biblical literature itself”. The Primary History [i.e. Genesis to 2 Kings] is not the kind of literature that arises sui generis from a vacuum. One expects to see antecedents over time that lead to that kind of work. And the closest antecedents we find are in the Greek literature, not in that of the SyriaMesopotamian regions. Assyrian vassal treaties, the epics of Gilgamesh, of Baal, and so forth, simply fall short by comparison.

But what kind of society produces that kind of literature? It takes more than a scribal elite responsible for administrative and trade records, or even engaged in cultic verses and prayers and spells for cures, etc. The kind of literature in our Bibles required reasonably prosperous and complex societies with a literate class that engaged with the kinds of stories and ideas that had relevance to their class, ethnic and regional identities. They had to have a reasonably widespread audience to engage with those ideas and stories and whose interest or vulnerabilities or needs encouraged their literary development. The social groups must have been somewhat extensive and complex because of the various competing and related ideas found in that literature.

In other words we are talking about fairly advanced societies in economic growth and social complexity, and who also have comparable antecedent literature.

The archaeological record does point to some kind of growth of Jerusalem and surrounds in the eighth and seventh centuries, but I am not sure it really reaches the kind of level that Finkelstein and Silberman seemed to think was adequate for a “renaissance literary activity”. Besides, what kinds of antecedents were available at or up to that time to mushroom into what we find in the Bible?

The Persian era is by all accounts that I have seen in relative decline. Persian “liberal” rule that allowed Judeans and Samarians to do their own thing is more easily understood as administrative neglect, not caring at all about their development — only collecting levees for the army and taxes for the king. (Witness the Xenophon’s ability to march his Greek army untouched through the empire!)

The economic revival, with its related social growth in complexity and size, came with the arrival of the Greeks. So did the antecedent literature.

Herodotus’s Histories has a remarkably similar structure to the Primary History: opening with world history, having a close look at Egypt as a follow up, and finally getting down to the narrow view of the conflict between two powers — AND all told within the framework of a theological interest: the lesson of the deciding hand of the god through his earthly sanctuary. And all told in a series of books in prose, both frequently with competing accounts of the same event.

Old Testament based on Herodotus? & Correlations between the “Histories” of Herodotus and the Bible’s History of Israel

I am not denying the obvious differences when saying that. What I’m trying to do is to draw attention to the “equally obvious” similarities. Did those similarities really emerge independently? Did the Hebrew literature really inspire that of the Greeks? Were the Judeans and Samarians in the poverty-stricken, underdeveloped Persian era really hosting a literate class devouring Greek literature? (I am on record as deploring argument by rhetorical questions so I will hasten to add that those questions are more than rhetorical: they represent a series of expectations that we must propose with hypotheses other than the Hellenistic era one.)

And then we have the ideological content of the literature. How do we explain the sudden introduction of stories of Exodus, Joshua’s Conquest, Judges, David and Solomon’s united kingdom and empire, if those — as the archaeological record tells us — never happened?

At this point it is worth looking at the propaganda use the biblical works were put to in the Hasmonean period. Were not the Hasmoneans seeking to justify their conquests by appeals to a historical heritage? In a time of Greek conquest do we not expect indigenous populations to at least sometimes seek redress by counter-narratives that put themselves in the positions of the god-blessed and ultimately greater powers? Again, these are more than rhetorical questions.

As for the divisions found even within the literature — the Samarian/Mount Gerizim point of view versus that of Jerusalem — have not scholars long since identified these differences underlying the multiple points of view (and sometimes outright conflict) within the biblical literature?

Mention has been made of Gmirkin in this thread. Before I read Gmirkin’s book I was prompted to read Plato’s Laws (as well as, again, Timaeus and Crito) by another scholar and was completely thrown back in my chair when I saw (and wondered how I had not seen it before) the striking similarities between Plato and the Pentateuch’s laws. Oh of course all those sacrifices and cultic rituals are of Levantine/Syrian/Canaanite origin, but the Pentateuch is a lot more than those.

The creation, the merging of humans and gods, the flood and annihilation, the wandering of the new generation, the coming together ….. and so forth. And then the laws about holiness, godliness, sacred feasts, marriage and sexuality, the judges and tribes, etc etc etc etc : Did Plato really twig to all of that from his reading of the Pentateuch? (At least one scholar has addressed the relationship of a scene in Plato’s Symposium with the temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.)

And further yet — how many scholars have noticed the similarities between the biblical Yahweh and the Greek Dionysus? I have read the comparisons a number of times. Surely pre-Hellenistic Yahwism was distinctively Levantine, with no appreciable differences between the Yahwism of Samaria, Judea, Negev, Canaan, Syria…. So what gave him the Greek overlay in the Bible?

Okay — these are my generally subjective responses to how I read the literature of the OT with my knowledge of Greek literature in mind. I have not presented a systematic argument, I know. But for what it’s worth, I thought it might be of some point to note how I have come to read the literatures of the Hebrews and Greeks and the conclusions that seem to present themselves to me as a result.

by neilgodfrey » Tue Feb 20, 2024 4:29 pm

To read the original post in context and to see Stephen Goranson’s critical responses ….

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2025-08-02

Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 5

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

by Neil Godfrey

By the way, I have informed Stephen Goranson that he is welcome to respond here to my resposting of his criticisms of Russell Gmirkin — despite my earlier prohibition on his posts to this blog. For this series alone I have lifted my relegation of SG’s comments to spam.

In Part 4 I pointed to discussions that answered a list of criticisms against the case that the Hebrew Bible was composed prior to Hellenistic times. Those discussions were mostly from other blog posts of mine but they covered what had been repeated at various times in the earlywritings forum. For anyone interested in the details and context of Stephen Goranson’s ongoing discussion of my responses to his list of data points (that he presented as “evidence” of pre-Hellenistic biblical writings) see the copy of the page at the end of this post.

What follows here is the second part to my attempt to justify the plausibility (even greater explanatory power) of the Hellenistic provenance of all (though Russell Gmirkin would, I think, have said only “most”) the books of the Old Testaments. In my opening post (Part 1) I addressed the circularity underpinning the dominant current view of the Documentary Hypothesis. This time I branched out into the data that is better explained by the Hellenistic era thesis.

I included this in my discussion on the earlywritings forum — again, see the link below for the context.

Why the Hellenistic era …. Part 2

There is more to the Hellenistic provenance thesis than the simple fact of the circularity of the methods of dating the OT books by the past conventional scholarship — something that so far not even SG has denied. Given that SG’s reference to Langlois (when read in full) also allows at least for the possibility of a Hellenistic provenance, we have room to continue.

Archaeology reveals

1. The archaeological evidence of pre-Hellenistic Judea-Samaria has demonstrated that major moments of biblical history are fictions. The “invasion” of Canaan by an “Israelite” ethnic group never happened. The most that can be said about the “Kingdom” of David and Solomon is that it was little more than a village incapable of extending dominance over any area of note. (Jamieson-Drake saw evidence of development from a “lower-order society” to a “chiefdom” in Jerusalem, which falls far from the level of “a state”.)

Why write fiction?

2. The question must arise, then, why such stories were told? Were the stories derived from historical memories? Archaeology has suggested that is unlikely. A fundamental and inescapable fact of any literature is that it must reflect the ideas and beliefs and understandings that are part of its cultural matrix. One specific ideological feature of the narrative of David is that it shares manners, customs, assumptions that we find in the Persian kingdom. One might therefore wonder if the stories were told as part of ideological hopes for an imminent greatness, or at least as an attempt to identify with other great powers, whether of the past and/or present.

But what kind of fiction?

3. The literary structure and style of the Primary History (Genesis-2 Kings), as other scholars (not those arguing for a Hellenistic origin, by the way) have shown, is comparable to the Histories of Herodotus. The closest genre to the Primary History is found in the Greek world. Another comparable genre is the autobiographical narrative. Some scholars have attempted to explain this observation by speculating that Greek works were well known to the subjects of the Persian empire or that even the biblical books were known to the Greeks and influenced the Greeks. One needs to look for the explanation that raises fewest difficulties or questions.

Nothing uniform — why?

4. There are vastly different styles among the biblical books. One can explain this fact by positing a long period of evolution and various cultural influences over centuries. One can also explain the same fact by positing contemporary regional differences. As one scholar noted, imagine if all we had about Socrates were the writings of Plato and Xenophon. Would we have to assume that there was a vast time gap between the two accounts since they are so at odds in so many ways?

What kind of society?

5. One ought also to look at the kind of socio-cultural-economic society that would be required to produce the biblical literature. Here again the archaeological evidence can be interpreted in favour of the Hellenistic period. But this is a vast topic of its own.

The argument emerges from other hypotheses

The scholars I have had in mind while setting out the above points have, with one exception, not been advocates of the Hellenistic origin of the biblical literature. The archaeological evidence that discounts the historicity of “biblical history”, the comparisons with Greek literature and Persian royal ideologies, — all of these are found in works of scholars who never entertained a Hellenistic time setting, as far as I am aware. Philip Davies himself (with whom I began in the OP) always argued for the Persian era for the Primary History and Prophets.

But there are also problems with a Persian era setting that disappear if we move the compositions of the books to the third century.

by neilgodfrey » Tue Feb 20, 2024 11:24 am

In the next post I will set out my personal reason for strongly suspecting a Hellenistic origin of the biblical literature.

The original forum exchange:

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2025-08-01

Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 4

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

by Neil Godfrey

Stephen Goranson has been a regular critic of Russell Gmirkin. Stephen posted the following points (in the earlywritings forum) that he claimed gave reasonable grounds for dating the entire Hebrew Bible (he referred to the “TaNaK“) before Hellenistic era:

There are reasons to consider some TaNaK texts to be older than third century, some of which have been discussed here.

Qumran texts, safely considered to be copies rather than autographs, show developments over time. And some may themselves may be older; at least, so Michael Langlois (name searchable here) has argued concerning some paleo-Hebrew mss. Few have been radiocarbon dated (more to be published). Statistically it is unlikely that the oldest one has yet been tested and published.
Deir ‘Alla inscription.
Silver amulets.
It is not plausible that temple priests, before third century, were illiterate and had nothing to read.
Semitic language history. A recent–Feb. 14, 2024–observation, for example: “A marginal linguistic difference between the Pentateuch and the rest of the Hebrew Bible” by Benjamin Suchard https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/02/14/a-marginal-linguistic-difference-between-the-pentateuch-and-the-rest-of-the-hebrew-bible/

by StephenGoranson » Tue Feb 20, 2024 5:11 am

As Stephen Goranson noted, several of those points had been discussed previously on that forum so one might have expected him to have addressed what had already been presented as responses to his claims that they pointed to a pre-Hellenistic date for the Jewish Bible. I posted my response to Stephen’s reference to the Dead Sea Scrolls and Michael Langlois’ argument in an earlier Vridar post:

Do the Dead Sea Scrolls Invalidate a Hellenistic Origin of the Hebrew Books of the Bible?

As for the Deir ‘Alla inscription, I posted my own observation about how it could well be interpreted as confirmation of Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic era thesis. See

When Yahweh was at Peace with Other Gods — [Biblical Creation Accounts/Plato’s Timaeus-Critias – 7e]

On the silver amulets, see my discussion at

Before “Biblical Israel” there was Yahweh

Stephen’s next point — implying the Hellenistic era hypothesis was declaring that priests “were illiterate and had nothing to read” — is just silly.

As for the difference between the Hebrew of the Pentateuch and other parts of the Bible, we cannot assume that the only explanation for the difference must be a long period of development, and I am sure Stephen knows this. Recently I translated a French work by a couple of renowned biblical and archaeological scholars that included this section:

Linguistic Evidence?

Can the question of the date of the texts of the Pentateuch, or of other biblical texts, be resolved by distinguishing between Classical Biblical Hebrew and Late Biblical Hebrew—a distinction that would offer certain seemingly objective criteria for dating biblical texts? It is not surprising that this method has gained a significant number of adherents, particularly in North America and Israel; we will not go into detail here.19 Let us simply highlight a few precautions to observe in using this method. First of all, we must ask, with E. Ullendorf and E. A. Knauf, whether Biblical Hebrew was truly a spoken language.20 The evidence for the existence of so-called Classical Hebrew21 outside the Bible is limited to a few inscriptions and personal names, which do not allow us to affirm that there existed a unified “Classical Hebrew” during the monarchical period. We must allow for dialectal variation in extrabiblical written and oral texts and, more importantly, for differences between literary language and vernacular language. Furthermore, there is no doubt that certain late texts like Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth) differ from what is called Classical Biblical Hebrew. But texts that may well be as late as Ecclesiastes can also be written in perfectly “Classical” Hebrew, as is the case with Zechariah 1–8 and the extracanonical Psalm 151.22

Finally, it is also very difficult—if not impossible—to draw a clear dividing line between “Classical” and “Late” Biblical Hebrew. As C. Edenburg recently observed, biblical texts that all scholars agree are late (from the Persian period) share with Iron Age Hebrew/Moabite inscriptions a preference for direct object suffixes attached to verbs.23 This means that we cannot assert a linear development.24 “Biblical Hebrew” is, above all, a literary language, whose lifespan would have extended beyond the spoken stage (if such a stage ever existed), and which endured in the scribal milieu. The distinction between Classical and Late Biblical Hebrew—especially when applied to an entire book—fails to take into account the widely recognized fact that every biblical text is the product of a long process of composition and revision. It thus appears that the scribes were capable of preserving or even partly inventing a language that had not been spoken for many centuries. We must therefore be cautious when claiming that the entire Pentateuch was composed before the Exile simply because it is mostly written in Classical Biblical Hebrew.25

[19] C. EDENBURG, Dismembering the Whole: Composition and Purpose of Judges 19–21, Atlanta, SBL, 2016, 115–123.

[20] E. ULLENDORF, Is Biblical Hebrew a Language?, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 1977, 3–17 ; E. A. KNAUF, « War Biblisch-Hebräisch eine Sprache? », in K. SCHMID et al. (éd.), Data and Debates, Münster, Ugarit-Verlag, 2013, 411–423 (421): « l’hébreu biblique n’a jamais été une langue parlée. »

[21] KNAUF, « War Biblisch-Hebräisch eine Sprache ? » remet même en question la plausibilité d’un tel concept.

[22] I. YOUNG, « What Is “Late Biblical Hebrew” ? », in E. BEN ZVI et al. (éd.), A Palimpsest: Rhetoric, Ideology, Stylistics, and Language Relating to Persian Israel, Piscataway, Gorgias Press, 2009, 253–268 (258–259).

[23] EDENBURG, Dismembering, 120–121.

[24] Voir I. YOUNG, « What Do We Actually Know about Ancient Hebrew », Australian Journal of Jewish Studies 27 (2013), 11–31, qui remet en question ladite théorie des trois étapes (hébreu classique, hébreu tardif et hébreu mishnaïque), voir également des appréciations différentes du livre de Job par A. HURVITZ, « The Date of the Prose Tale of Job Linguistically Reconsidered », Harvard Theological Review 67 (1974), 17–34, et par I. YOUNG, « Is the Prose Tale of Job in Late Biblical Hebrew ? », Vetus Testamentum 59 (2009), 606–629.

[25] M. EHRENSVÄRD, « Once Again: The Problem of Dating Biblical Hebrew », Scandinavian Journal of Old Testament 11 (1997), 29–40.

(Translation of a section written by Thomas Römer)

— Finkelstein, Israel, and Thomas Romer. 2019. Aux Origines de La Torah: Nouvelles Rencontres, Nouvelles Perspectives, Paris. 2019. (My electronic copy that does not include page numbers.)

The original discussion in context:

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2025-07-30

Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 3

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

by Neil Godfrey

I’ve addressed the Documentary Hypothesis several times before (see a list of post beginning here). The DH is the basis through which the Hebrew Bible is understood to have begun its development as early as the days of David and Solomon, and in the time of the Babylonian Captivity and through to the period of the Persian Empire. Russell Gmirkin took up the proposal of Thompson and Lemche that the Pentateuch and other biblical texts had their origin as late as subsequent to the conquests of Alexander the Great, less than 300 years before the common era.

Here are a few of my posts in the Academic Discussion section of the Earlywritings Forum that attempted to draw attention to the circularity at the heart of the DH.

Demonstrating the Circularity at the Heart of the Documentary Hypothesis

It had been suggested on the forum that by claiming circularity was at the heart of the DH there was some “caricature” of the DH involved, that the DH was not being presented in a fair way. So I went back to the source and in response to being asked “who” exactly dated the texts in such a way, wrote (I was writing to an audience whom I assumed would know that Julius Wellhausen was the principal pioneer of the DH (=Documentary Hypothesis):

By whom? Here is what Julius Wellhausen wrote in Prolegomena:I.II.2

The Jehovistic Book of the Covenant lies indeed at the foundation of Deuteronomy, but in one point they differ materially, and that precisely the one which concerns us here. As there, so here also, the legislation properly so called begins (Deut. xii.) with an ordinance relating to the service of the altar; but now we have Moses addressing the Israelites in the following terms: “When ye come into the land of Canaan, ye shall utterly destroy all the places of worship which ye find there, and ye shall not worship Jehovah your God after the manner in which the heathen serve theirs. Nay, but only unto the place which the Lord your God shall choose out of all your tribes for His habitation shall ye seek, and thither shall ye bring your offerings and gifts, and there shall ye eat before Him and rejoice. Here at this day we do every man whatsoever is right in his own eyes, but when ye have found fixed abodes, and rest from your enemies round about, then shall the place which Jehovah shall choose for His habitation in one of your tribes be the one place to which ye shall bring your offerings and gifts. Take heed that ye offer not in every place that ye see; ye may not eat your holy gifts in every town, but only in the place which Jehovah shall choose.”

The Law is never weary of again and again repeating its injunction of local unity of worship. In doing so, it is in conscious opposition to “the things that we do here this day,” and throughout has a polemical and reforming attitude towards existing usage. It is rightly therefore assigned by historical criticism to the period of the attacks made on the Bamoth by the reforming party at Jerusalem. As the Book of the Covenant, and the whole Jehovistic writing in general, reflects the first pre−prophetic period in the history of the cultus, so Deuteronomy is the legal expression of the second period of struggle and transition. The historical order is all the more certain because the literary dependence of Deuteronomy on the Jehovistic laws and narratives can be demonstrated independently, and is an admitted fact. From this the step is easy to the belief that the work whose discovery gave occasion to King Josiah to destroy the local sanctuaries was this very Book of Deuteronomy . . .

The whole reasoning process begins with the assumption of the historical veracity (at least in its core) of the biblical Josiah account. From that assumption it follows that the book of Deuteronomy was the source of those reforms (after all, Deuteronomy attacks false worship, just like Josiah did) and therefore Deuteronomy had to have been in existence before the time of Josiah.

That is an invalid argument. How do we know Deuteronomy existed before Josiah? Because the Josiah narrative tells us so? How do we know the Josiah narrative is based on true history? Because the book of Deuteronomy explains his motivation for the reforms. How do we know the book of Deuteronomy explains his reforms? . . . . gets dizzying….

by neilgodfrey » Mon Feb 19, 2024 10:58 am

—oo0oo—

The above failed to impress, so I added another:

Here is another demonstration of the circularity in the dating of Deuteronomy to the time of (or before) Josiah. It is from William Dever in Beyond the Texts: An Archaeological Portrait of Ancient Israel and Judah (2017), pp 611-613.

First, Dever reminds us of the importance of archaeology in assessing the historicity of the biblical accounts:

[A]rchaeological data are primary because an external witness is required to lend support to the historicity of the biblical narratives, if possible, and archaeology is, by definition, the only candidate (including, of course, the texts that it may recover). Archaeology is primary because it provides an independent witness in the court of adjudication, and when properly interrogated it is often an unimpeachable witness. (p. 18)

Agreed 100%.

But then compare that noble statement with how he actually uses archaeological data to “confirm” a biblical narrative:

It is the reign of Josiah (648–609) that is best correlated with the archaeological evidence that we now have. His reputation as a reformer, a restorer of tradition, comports especially well with the more favorable situation that we know obtained with the decline of Assyria

Correlation is not a proof. Dever lists in a table what is explicitly proven by archaeology at the time of Josiah:

“Poly-yahwism”; Asherah cult; Yahu names; Philistia attacked (p. 609)

In the same table he lists as “Probable; Evidence Ambiguous”

Josiahʼs attempted reforms; consulted temple scroll; maintained Judah even if vassal; Josiah slain in battle, 609

So archaeology, according to his own analysis, does not confirm the historicity of the Joshua narrative. Nonetheless, he proceeds to set forth a list of correlations with the biblical account — as if correlations can ever be anything more than correlations. (Compare the correlations with historical data of any historical novel.)

He begins on page 11:

It is the reign of Josiah (648–609) that is best correlated with the archaeological evidence that we now have. . . .

Numerous studies of these intriguing reform measures attributed to Josiah have been published, but few have paid any attention to possible archaeological correlates—that is, to a possible real-life context in the late seventh century. Most scholars have focused on whether the reform was successful, many assuming that the reforms claimed are simply too fantastic to be credible. The fact is, however, that we have good archaeological explanations for most of the targets of Josiahʼs reforms. For instance, we know what high places (bāmôt) are, and we have a number of examples of them, perhaps the most obvious example being the monumental one at Dan.

No-one denies the biblical authors were familiar with the various popular cults of the day. Simply finding evidence of these brings us no closer to finding any support for the historicity behind the narrative of Josiah and the discovery of Deuteronomy.

We have many altars in cult places and private homes, large and small. We even have an example of the altar on the roof in the debris of a building destroyed at Ashkelon in 604.

The sacred poles and pillars are easily explained, even in the Hebrew Bible, as wooden images or live trees used to represent the goddess Asherah symbolically. The tree iconography has now been connected conclusively with the old Canaanite female deity Asherah, whose cult was still widespread in Iron Age Israel, in both nonorthodox and conformist circles (above).

The weavings, or perhaps “garments” or even “curtains,” for Asherah (Hebrew bāttîm) remain a crux. Renderings by the Septuagint, the Targumim, and later Jewish commentaries suggest a corrupt Masoretic Text, but woven garments for deities and tent-like hangings for sacred pavilions are well known in both the ancient and modern Middle East.

The phrase “heavenly hosts” needs no archaeological explanation, since it clearly refers to the divine council well documented at Ugarit and in the Hebrew Bible. The reference to the “horses and chariots of the Sun” recalls examples that we have of terra-cotta horse-andchariot models from the Late Bronze and Iron Ages. In the Ugaritic texts, Baal is the “Cloud Rider” who flies across the heavens daily as the great storm god, imagery that is even applied to Yahweh in Psalms.

The Topheth in the Kidron Valley (a rubbish dump and place of abomination in any case) is readily explained by the famous sanctuary of Tanit at Carthage, where infant sacrifice was the usual rite, and there the Phoenician god was indeed Molech.

Of the various “pagan” deities condemned—Baal, Asherah, Ashtoreth of Sidon, Kemosh of Moab, and Milkom of Ammon—all are well known, as is their iconography and to some degree their cult practices.

It is not only the description of the specifics of the religious situation in Josiahʼs time that is realistic in the light of the current archaeological data. The general context of cultural and religious pluralism in the seventh century is an amalgam well illustrated by the archaeological data that we have summarized above, beginning already in the eighth century. That context helps to answer the question raised above about whether the Deuteronomistic Historiansʼ original version fits in the actual historical-cultural setting of the seventh century in Judah. It can be shown in many ways that it does but in other ways that it does not, even though the written version could have been almost contemporary (the question of an older oral tradition cannot be resolved).

It is instructive to set the central themes and ideals of the Deuteronomistic program as summarized above alongside a general description of the realities of life in seventh-century Judah as illuminated by the archaeological evidence here.

And that’s it. All Dever’s archaeological evidence has managed to do is to tell us that there is no evidence for Josiah’s reforms as per the biblical narrative. No-one has questioned the polytheistic/poly-Yahwist cult prevalent throughout Judah/Samaria/Negev/Syria. The biblical narrative assumes that most of the population did not practice “biblical Yahwism”. The whole point of the narrative is to give some historical context to the book of Deuteronomy.

One may reply that the biblical narrative exaggerated and the reforms were not so successful after all, but it won’t really do to imagine all sorts of reasons why we still do not have the evidence for the historicity of the narrative. We will always need independent evidence to confirm the narrative. Until we have it we cannot validly work on the assumption that we will one day find the evidence we know “must be there somewhere” to justify our dating of the sources.

Dever’s words above are a classic instance of the very problem Davies was addressing. The archaeological evidence is interpreted through the assumption that there is a historical core in the biblical narrative. Without the biblical narrative there is simply no grounds in any of the evidence cited by Dever that would lead anyone to suspect the event of Josiah’s reforms.

by neilgodfrey » Mon Feb 19, 2024 2:54 pm

—oo0oo—

Is the above not enough to demonstrate that the DH is built on circularity?

Continuing ….

The original discussion in context and in full:

Download (PDF, 652KB)

2025-07-29

Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 2

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

by Neil Godfrey

In response to the post that I copied here, one consistent critic of Russell Gmirkin’s thesis in particular (and of the Hellenistic era hypothesis for the creation of the Hebrew Bible more generally) posted the following response:

Elephantine is the site of a Persian era garrison settlement of Jews in Egypt. For an discussion of the relevance of this site for the dating of the Old Testament texts see the post re Elephantine Jews.

I had referred to the Elephantine remains here, pointing out that some scholars have suggested the Documentary Hypothesis (that assumes a long pre-Hellenistic history for much of the Hebrew Bible) would never have gained any traction if the the Elephantine papyrii had been discovered earlier.

My response:

That is logically correct. But the Elephantine remains, in the absence of remains pointing in the opposite direction, do “indicate” (as per the Opening Post) the absence of any knowledge or regard for the Pentateuch. They certainly do not support the conventional dating.

Nor are the Elephantine remains entirely irrelevant to the question:

. . . the Elephantine community stood in contact with Jerusalem. Although Elephantine was located on the traditional southern border of Egypt, it was not an isolated outpost on the fringe of the world. The Nile was navigable all the way from the Nile delta to Elephantine. A journey from Elephantine to Jerusalem might take approximately one month. In comparison, according to the Bible it took Ezra around four months to travel from Babylon to Jerusalem. In terms of travel time, the Judaeans in Elephantine were much closer to Jerusalem than was the priest-scribe who is often accorded great importance in the (re-)formation of Judaean religion in the Persian period. Whereas this may indicate potential contact and demonstrate that the historical-geographical conditions for travelling between Elephantine and Jerusalem were more favourable than those between Babylon and Jerusalem, it is also evidenced by documents from Elephantine that there was actually a two-way contact between Jerusalem and Judah (and Samaria). Not only did the Judaeans in Elephantine know the names of the tenuring governors of Judah and Samaria (in this case, even the names of the sons of the governor) and the high priest in Jerusalem (cf. A4.7 par.), they also wrote letters to them and even got a reply (although the Judaeans in Elephantine regret that the Jerusalem high priest and his colleagues did not respond to their initial letter).

Fourth, the Elephantine documents are contemporary sources and probably even more representative of the lived and practiced Yahwism of the Persian period than are the biblical texts. . . .

Granerød, Gard. Dimensions of Yahwism in the Persian Period: Studies in the Religion and Society of the Judaean Community at Elephantine. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2016. pp. 4ff

What Wellhausen wrote in 1921 about Elephantine continues to be the view of those who hold to conventional pre-Persian dates for the various literary sources that were melded to compose the Pentateuch.

Just a few years after the discoveries of the documents of the Jedaniah communal archive, Julius Wellhausen characterised the community as a “merkwürdiger Überrest des vorgesetzlichen Hebraismus.” In his view, the community located at the border between Egypt and Nubia adhered to its “altes Wesen.” Wellhausen regarded the Judaeans in Elephantine to be standing “noch auf der vorgesetzlichen Stufe,” in contrast to the elite of postexilic Judah. In his view, the Judaean community at Elephantine represented a “fossiler Überrest des unreformierten Judentums.”

Granerød, Gard. Dimensions of Yahwism in the Persian Period: Studies in the Religion and Society of the Judaean Community at Elephantine. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2016. p. 18

Do you have a comment on the circularity of the conventional dating of works like E, J, the Deuteronomist?

by neilgodfrey » Mon Feb 19, 2024 7:00 am

—oo0oo—

The above should suffice. But on the off-chance that my interlocutor is reading these posts I had better be sure to be absolutely fair and include his every word that he wrote in response to my arguments. The remainder of this post is included for that reason alone, though the extract from P.R. Davies might be of more general interest.

—oo0oo—

To which I replied:

The Hellenistic provenance can be argued without reference to the Elephantine finds. It is the absence of evidence not only at Elephantine but elsewhere, especially in the region of Canaan, that does make the Hellenistic argument (on other grounds) possible, however.

The argument for a Hellenistic provenance stands quite independently of Elephantine. The Elephantine finds were introduced as supporting evidence.

I would be interested to know if you have a comment about the critical grounds for criticism of the conventional dating of the earliest sources for the OT — the circularity of the argument and lack of independent supporting evidence. Example, the logic of the argument for Deuteronomy being composed in the time of Josiah? or the logic of the argument for other material being composed in the Babylonian captivity or even in the time of the Persian empire?

and in hope of getting into some nitty gritty of exactly how Elephantine finds could be relevant, I asked:

Would you be interested in discussing the Elephantine finds and their specific relevance to the knowledge of “some Torah books” in the Persian era in another thread if I open it up?

by neilgodfrey » Mon Feb 19, 2024 7:00 am and 7:07 am

—oo0oo—

Alas, there was to be no further attempt to explain how the Elephantine evidence had any relevance to the Hellenistic date of what became the biblical writings. Instead, SG appeared not to have followed the demonstration of how circular reasoning lay at the root of conventional dating of the Hebrew Bible and insisted that the claim of circularity was nothing more than a presumption, an assertion.

—oo0oo—

I hoped a little more detail might dispel the notion that Davies merely asserted circularity instead of demonstrating how it happens in actuality. This was, after all, a newly constructed “Academic Discussion forum” with clear rules for exchanges so I still held hope that SG would respond in a scholarly manner.

I know what the proposed sources for the Torah books are. The problem I am trying to note is that the conventional dating of sources such as J, E, D, P is circular and therefore invalid.

The point about circularity is not a mere assertion or presumption. It is demonstrated in the links I posted in the OP.

Here is what Davies wrote in 1992, and I think it deserves a response:

So far, historical research by biblical scholars has taken a different and circular route, whose stages can be represented more or less as follows:

1. The biblical writers, when writing about the past, were obviously informed about it and often concerned to report it accurately to their readers. A concern with the truth of the past can be assumed. Therefore, where the literary history is plausible, or where it encounters no insuperable objections, it should be accorded the status of historical fact. The argument is occasionally expressed that the readers of these stories would be sufficiently knowledgeable (by tradition?) of their past to discourage wholesale invention.

2. Much of the literature is itself assigned to quite specific settings within that story (e.g. the prophetic books, dated to the reigns of kings of Israel and Judah).13If the biblical literature is gene rally correct in its historical portrait, then these datings may also be relied upon.

3. Even where the various parts of the biblical literature do not date themselves within the history of its ʻIsraelʼ we are given a precise enough account in general to enable plausible connections can be made, such as Deuteronomy with the time of Josiah, or (as formerly) the Yahwist with the time of David or Solomon, Psalms with a Jerusalem cult. Thus, where a plausible context in the literary history can be found for a biblical writing, that setting may be posited, and as a result there will be mutual confirmation, by the literature of the setting, and by the setting of the literature. For example, the Yahwistʼs setting in the court of Solomon tells us about the character of that monarchy and the character of that monarchy explains the writing of this story.

4. Where the writer (ʻredactorʼ) of the biblical literature is recognized as having been removed in time from the events he14 describes or persons whose words he reports (e.g. when an account of the history of ʻIsraelʼ stretches over a long period of time), he must be presumed to rely on sources or traditions close to the events. Hence even when the literary source is late, its contents will nearly always have their point of origin in the time of which they speak. The likelihood of a writer inventing something should generally be discounted in favour of a tradition, since traditions allow us a vague connection with ʻhistoryʼ (which does not have to be exact) and can themselves be accorded some value as historical statements of the ʻfaithʼ of ʻIsraelʼ (and this will serve the theologian almost as well as history).

Each of these assertions can be encountered, in one form or another in the secondary literature. But it is the underlying logic which requires attention rather than these (dubious) assertions themselves. That logic is circular. The assumption that the literary construct is an historical one is made to confirm itself. Historical criticism (socalled) of the inferred sources and traditions seeks to locate these in that literary-cum-historical construct. The placement of sources and traditions in this way is then used to embellish the literary account itself. This circular process places the composition of the literature within the period of which the literature itself speaks. This is precisely how the period to which the biblical literature refers becomes also the time of composition, the ʻbiblical periodʼ, and the biblical literature, taken as a whole, becomes a contemporary witness to its own construct, reinforcing the initial assumption of a real historical matrix and giving impetus to an entire pseudo-scholarly exercise in fitting the literature into a sequence of contexts which it has itself furnished! If either the historicity of the biblical construct or the actual date of composition of its literature were verified independently of each other, the circle could be broken. But since the methodological need for this procedure is overlooked, the circularity has continued to characterize an entire discipline—and render it invalid.

The panoply of historical-critical tools and methods used by biblical scholars relies for the most part on this basic circularity.

Davies, Philip R. In Search of “Ancient Israel.” Sheffield Academic Press, 1992. pp 35-37

So you can see it is not a mere assertion of presumption. It is demonstrated.

by neilgodfrey » Mon Feb 19, 2024 8:36 am

—oo0oo—

Alas, SG appeared to be impervious to registering any possibility that conventional wisdom might have an insecure foundation and curiosly claimed that the extract from Davies (above) was a “caricature”!

—oo0oo—

I had mixed feelings about that response. At least he recognized that the reasoning being described was invalid. But how did he fail to understand that it is in reality how the conventional dating argument has been made?

But still, with new rules in a new forum, surely participants would soon find their feet…..

2025-07-27

Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 1

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

by Neil Godfrey

Since I don’t expect to have much time to write new posts again before the end of the year, I will from time to time copy what I once posted on another forum in defence of Russell Gmirkin’s thesis dating the Old Testament books to the Hellenistic era.

The orthodox view is that biblical books about the Exodus, wilderness wanderings, Joshua, David, the various kings and prophets originated in the time of the historical kingdoms of Israel and Judah, even as early as the era of David and Solomon, circa 900 BCE. What became part of the Old Testament started to take on a recognizable shape after the Kingdom of Judah went into Babylonian captivity around 600 BCE. “By the waters of Babylon” Jews pining for their homeland devoutly penned much of what became their sacred literature, and on their return under Persian rule and intermittent efforts to rebuild their Jerusalem temple, circa 500-400 BCE, the “Jewish Bible” began look more like what it is today. That, more or less, has long been the conventional view of scholars.

The Hellenistic era refers to the period following Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Persian Empire, from circa 300 BCE. It marks the spread of Greek cultural and political influence across Asia Minor, the Near East, and Egypt, extending as far as the borders of India, and lasting until the Roman annexation of these regions.

If these biblical writings were composed so late, a host of other questions inevitably arise, especially in relation to the historical information they seem to contain, their source materials, and even why they were written and the kind of relationship they have to the origins of Judaism.

In 2001 there was published a chapter, written by Niels Peter Lemche:

Lemche, Niels Peter. 2001. “The Old Testament—A Hellenistic Book?” In Did Moses Speak Attic?: Jewish Historiography and Scripture in the Hellenistic Period, edited by Lester L. Grabbe, 287–318. Sheffield, England: Bloomsbury T&T Clark.

I discussed that chapter in a 2010 post: The Old Testament – A Hellenistic Book? (and other digressions)

Russell Gmirkin took up the idea and closely analyzed the early books of the Old Testament in the light of Greek literature. (Attic was the Greek dialect of much of Classical and Hellenistic Greek literature.) Detailed discussions of Russell’s work are linked in my earlier post, Russell Gmirkin. So the Hellenistic thesis per se is not exclusively Russell Gmirkin’s, but it seems fitting to acknowledge the particular contribution of Russell at this time.

In place of regular original posts for coming months, I would like to post some of my defences of the Hellenistic thesis for dating the Old Testament books. These defences were posted on the earlywritings forum (in its “Academic Discussion” section) but I chose to delete them from there after I lost all confidence in how that forum was run by the moderator. (Russell demonstrated far more patience there than I could muster.)

Since Russell’s sudden passing some of his critics have returned there to rebut his work without having the honesty to acknowledge and address earlier answers to their criticisms. Therefore, I have decided to repost my own defences of the Hellenistic hypothesis here in a series of posts.

I must add that I could not help but find myself at times in disagreement with some of Russell’s lesser points. These differences arose from our different ways of approaching historical sources. I seem to recall, for example, that Russell did not date “all” of the biblical books in the Hellenistic era. He placed one or two of them in the Persian period. I disagree, as I did on some other issues with Russell. But I believe the core of my argument in defence of the Hellenistic thesis remains solid. At least until others can demonstrate its flaws in method, logic and evidence.

Why the Hellenistic era for ALL “Old Testament” books should be taken seriously

When we apply the fundamentals of historical methods as practised by historians in fields other than biblical studies we quickly see logical flaws at the heart of the conventional understanding that the sources for various biblical books (in particular the stories in Genesis and Exodus) go back as far as the times of David and Solomon.

Multiple sources and circularity

Several times I have engaged in EarlyWritings on the question of the Documentary Hypothesis and every time, it seems to me, the argument submitted to “prove” the validity of the DH has been a point by point demonstration of how multiple sources were combined to create a new single story: e.g. how two different narratives were combined to compose the story of the great flood in Genesis. Each time I have attempted to make it clear that I have no doubt that different sources were mixed to create the Genesis Flood account, but a pre-Hellenistic antiquity of the biblical flood story does not logically follow from the fact of such a mix.

Biblical scholars, it is no secret to anyone, not even to themselves on the whole, do have interests that go beyond pure historical research. Even Julius Wellhausen, to whom we tend to attribute the modern notion of the “Documentary Hypothesis”, has been criticized for allowing his Protestant (anti-legalistic) bias to subconsciously influence his model of the “Documentary Hypothesis”. (The criticism has been directed at the notion of “legalistic” texts being a latecomer addition to the original narratives found in the biblical canon.)

When hypotheses become facts

So much in biblical studies that pass for facts are actually hypotheses. But they are repeated so often it is hard to notice that they have no basis in the hard evidence. Look at this passage from Wellhausen:

With regard to the Jehovistic document, all are happily agreed that, substantially at all events, in language, horizon, and other features, it dates from the golden age of Hebrew literature, to which the finest parts of Judges, Samuel, and Kings, and the oldest extant prophetical writings also belong,the period of the kings and prophets which preceded the dissolution of the two Israelite kingdoms by the Assyrians. About the origin of Deuteronomy there is still less dispute; in all circles where appreciation of scientific results can be looked for at all, it is recognised that it was composed in the same age as that in which it was discovered, and that it was made the rule of Josiah’s reformation, which took place about a generation before the destruction of Jerusalem by the Chaldaeans.

That’s from Wellhausen, Julius. Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel. His assertion of relative dating is grounded entirely in scholarly consensus, not in the evidence itself.

The Documentary Hypothesis, it has been pointed out by at least one scholar in the biblical field, might well never had got off the ground had the Elephantine remains — indicating that Persian era Jews knew nothing of the Pentateuch — been discovered earlier and had more time to gain traction and wider and more focused attention than it had before the time of Wellhausen’s work.

None of this is to say that biblical scholars are unprofessionally “biased” or “unscholarly”. Of course they are scholarly and their biases are generally known and admitted and taken into account. But their work tends to be picked up by others and over time taken for granted as fact.

Independent evidence is critical

The fact remains that there is no independent evidence that the OT was composed prior to the Hellenistic era. That datum alone does not prove it was a Hellenistic product. But it does at least allow for the theoretical possibility that it was created in the Hellenistic era, and given that our earliest independent evidence for a knowledge of the Pentateuch is situated in the Hellenistic era, it is entirely reasonable to begin with that era when searching for the Pentateuch’s origins.

It also is a fact that scholarship has only cursorily (by comparison) considered assessing the evidence within the Pentateuch itself with Hellenistic literature and thought. Those are facts. Another fact is that Documentary Hypothesis is not without its inconsistencies and problems.

Those facts do not prove that the Pentateuch was created in the Hellenistic era. But they do at least make it possible to ask the question. It makes it all the more necessary for anyone proposing an earlier date to ground their reasons in supporting independent evidence of some kind.

The meaning of “Hellenistic”

The Hellenistic provenance of the Pentateuch does not deny any use of pre-Hellenistic literature or sayings or concepts. Hellenization even means a uniting of Greek and Asian cultures, not a replacement of one by the other. So one should expect in any Hellenistic era hypothesis for the creation of the Pentateuch clear allusions to non-Greek (i.e. local Canaanite and Syrian) sources. Merely pointing to evident instances of Ugaritic or Syrian influence in the OT does not, per se, contradict a Hellenistic origin for the OT.

The fateful year of 1992

My own understanding of the history of the scholarship in this area tells me that the floodgates to a more widespread acceptability towards questioning the “deep antiquity” (pre Persian era) origin of any of the OT books were opened by Philip R. Davies in 1992 with his publication of In Search of Ancient Israel. The irony was that Davies was only collating various criticisms and doubts about the conventional wisdom of “biblical Israel” and its “bible” that had been available to scholars for some decades. But by bringing these questions and doubts all together in one short publication (only about 150 pages of discussion) Davies’ work started something of an academic “kerfuffle”. Davies himself argued at length for a Persian era provenance of many of the OT books, but those who followed the evidence he set out could see that the way was also open for an even later period. Some scholars identified stronger links between the Pentateuch and Primary History (Genesis to 2 Kings) and Hellenistic literature than to anything earlier. One French scholar has even argued that the entire Primary History was composed by a priest in the Hasmonean era.

Davies certainly established the circularity of the arguments that much of the OT literature was composed in the times of King Josiah and the Babylonian captivity. He also brought together the archaeological evidence not just for the absence of a united kingdom of Israel but the archaeological evidence that indicates the very notion of “biblical Israel” is as fanciful as King Arthur and Camelot.

The basics of historical inquiry

I opened this post with a reference to the methods of historians in non-biblical fields. In short, those methods are nothing other than any journalistic or forensic or “common sense” method of trying to find out “what happened” — minus the theological provenance from which the quest is embarked upon. Start with what we know to be the most secure “facts” on the basis of collating independent evidence and working from there. Unfortunately, our cultural heritage has taught us too well that certain narratives about the past are “facts” (or at least based on facts) so that we find it very difficult to remove these from our minds when trying to see clearly the material evidence before our eyes.

Change is very often a generational thing. It happens as the new ideas are embraced by the new students who are less emotionally and intellectually committed to the old ideas.

by neilgodfrey » Sun Feb 18, 2024 6:58 pm
(images were not part of the original)

The above post met with some criticism and I will post that along with my response next time.

2025-07-22

Russell Gmirkin

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

by Neil Godfrey

By now many of you will have learned of Russell Gmirkin’s sudden passing. I am still trying to process the shock. I was privileged to have had frequent communications with him in the past few years and he was on my short list of people I had hoped to meet in person. His website: https://russellgmirkin.com/

His work dug more deeply into the thesis that the Hebrew Bible was a product of Hellenistic times. He was highly respected by other pioneering academics like Thomas L. Thompson and Niels Peter Lemche. I covered his some of his main published ideas here:

He had just completed a manuscript for a new work that many of us are looking forward to engaging with.

There is a tribute to Russell on youtube. I have not watched it yet. I am still trying to process my own grief before I do.

There is also a gofundme page to assist Russell’s wife, Carolyn Tracy.

This post is unfortunately a belated response, I know. I was away in far north Queensland when a notice sent to inform me never arrived. It took me some days for bizarre communications breakdowns to be rectified.

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

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https://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=145080#p145080
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Neil Godfrey on An Attempt to Date a pro-Samarian Deuteronomy to the Persian Period: “And let’s not forget that Russell Gmirkin in particular has demonstrated so many specific overlaps with Hellenistic literature in the…” Oct 2, 04:04
Neil Godfrey on An Attempt to Date a pro-Samarian Deuteronomy to the Persian Period: “Yes, I believe it is on the basis of Nehemiah and Ezra, supported by various promises of return and those…” Oct 2, 03:57
Gordon Rouse on An Attempt to Date a pro-Samarian Deuteronomy to the Persian Period: “So can we clarify what the different theories and what “Persian” era means here? Should I read ‘Persian’ era theory…” Oct 2, 02:26
Neil Godfrey on An Attempt to Date a pro-Samarian Deuteronomy to the Persian Period: “On my point about method — I was of course only echoing NPL’s earlier comment here — not that NPL…” Sep 26, 21:31
Neil Godfrey on An Attempt to Date a pro-Samarian Deuteronomy to the Persian Period: “Just one more point on my being excluded from other fora — Believe it or not I was actually kicked…” Sep 26, 09:36
Neil Godfrey on An Attempt to Date a pro-Samarian Deuteronomy to the Persian Period: “Thank you. I’ve had many opportunities to do things with other programs or appear in places where my profile would…” Sep 26, 07:52
Gavin on An Attempt to Date a pro-Samarian Deuteronomy to the Persian Period: “I’ve always found your articles informative and thought-provoking; but for the last few years, I haven’t been able to express…” Sep 26, 06:52
Peter Kirby on An Attempt to Date a pro-Samarian Deuteronomy to the Persian Period: “I appreciate your comments on the thread. I offer one clarification here. At the time, I did not present an…” Sep 26, 03:22
Neil Godfrey on An Attempt to Date a pro-Samarian Deuteronomy to the Persian Period: “Peter Kirby has already responded to this post on the earlywritings forum. The main critical response, I gather, is this…” Sep 26, 03:20

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Rethinking Scribal Culture in Persian Period Yehud: Evidence and the Formation of the Hebrew Bible

Background, context, rationale

Aims and objectives

1: Clarify the scholarly consensus on the nature of the biblical literature.

2: Assess expected forms of writing and scribal activity.

3: Contextualize Persian period material finds within broader patterns of settlement and urbanization.

4: Identify and analyze Persian period finds.

5: Assess external and imperial evidence and arguments advanced in support of a Persian period creation of biblical literature.

6: Review other common arguments for Persian period authorship.

7: Explore alternative explanations for the provenance of the Hebrew Bible.

Research methods, techniques, and tools

Scholarly foundations and theoretical approach

Archaeological and epigraphic data

Bibliographic research

Translation tools

Scope

Notes

Bibliography

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Why the Hellenistic era …. Part 2a

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Why the Hellenistic era …. Part 2

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Demonstrating the Circularity at the Heart of the Documentary Hypothesis

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My response:

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Why the Hellenistic era for ALL “Old Testament” books should be taken seriously

Multiple sources and circularity

When hypotheses become facts

Independent evidence is critical

The meaning of “Hellenistic”

The fateful year of 1992

The basics of historical inquiry

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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 . . .

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