PhilosopherJay

Hi Minimalist

Good information, Thanks.

PhilosopherJay

Hi all,

Here are my thoughts after reading a good amount of material the last few days.

I think the secret of the Temple lies in its literary construction.

"Kings" and "Chronicles" ("Kings" latter rewrite) are meant to explain why the kingdoms of Israel and Judah fell. All 19 kings of Israel were evil in the eyes of the lord. (See this list for example http://www.ldolphin.org/kings.html, but note that the judgements on the Kings of Judah are wrong). Of the 20 kings of Judah, 13 did evil, three were mixed and 4 were basically good. The ones who kicked out the foreigners and worshipped a single God (whoever he was) in the Temple were the good ones.

Wellhausen put their writing in the Babylonian exilic period. However, it seems odd that people living far from Jerusalem would care so much to pass judgement on all the kings of Israel and Judah. The few exiles who went to Babylon were likely more interested in getting on with their lives.

More likely is the theory that these texts were written in the 5th century.

One can surmise that the problems of trying to bring together 40 different nationalities into a single army were enormous. That is perhaps the main reason for the Persian defeat by the Greeks in the 480's BCE. The Persians outnumbered the Greeks, five or ten to one, but the Greeks were united, while the Persians must have included many soldiers who hated each other and wanted to kill each other more than they wanted to kill the Greeks.

The Persian policy was to simplify things by having each people subordinate to a single region wide government and worshiping a single main God. In Samaria-Judea, you had at least two distinct competing people probably worshiping the older El and the newer rival Yaweh. Cyrus built a temple in Jerusalem, probably by 516 BCE, to unite the people, but apparently only the people of Jerusalem worshipped there and probably not even very many of those. In around 450 BCE, Artaxerxes apparently wanted to strengthen the worship in the Jerusalem temple (as indicated in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah). This is when Kings and Chronicles were probably composed. It wanted to prove that Cyrus' Jerusalem temple really had a long history going back to the legendary Solomon and that the new priests and people that Artaxerxes was sending from Babylon into the area were really descendents of good Jewish exiles.

One interesting thing of note is that even the Biblical texts admits that the Passover was not celebrated in the Temple until the time of Josiah (circa 620). Whatever Temple was in Jerusalem, it was almost certainly a pagan, and probably a polytheistic temple. Even Josiah's commitment to monotheism may be a Persian political construct.

Apparently, the people of the region under Persian control were still not too happy about worshipping what they probably considered a more or less foreign Temple in Jerusalem. As soon as Alexander the Great toppled the Persian King Darius III, they built their own temple in 329 BCE on Mount Gerizim. The son of Simon Maccabee, John Hyrcanus, destroyed this temple in 129 BCE, when he conquered Samaria.

I guess the important thing is that the first books of Hebrew Scriptures describing events up the United Kingdom seem to be following an indigenous history pretty closely. However the material after that, describing all the kings and the Temple, seems to be a 5th century Persian political concoction. It was designed principally to get the indigenous people of that region to worship in the Jerusalem temple and take their orders from the Persian rulers there.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

Minimalist

I, too, think that Philip R. Davies makes a compelling case for the writing of the OT during the Persian period. The only thing I suspect is that it was not written from scratch. Had it been written all at once I can't see it being as poorly written as it is. The duplications and contradictions make it seem as if a lot of local folklore was scraped up and quickly whipped into something resembling a raison d'etre for the returning "exiles" ( who were Persians and/or Babylonians ) to "rule" Yehud under Persia's benevolent imperial system.

But the David/Solomon crap cannot date from the Persian period. What interest would it serve the Persians to have their province dreaming of freedom under a ruler descended from such a great king? The legal doctrine of "cui bono" applies here. Someone has to benefit from creating such a story and, once you dismiss David/Solomon, the only powerful independent kings of Judah, Persian Yehud, or Judaea during the first millennium BC were the Hasmoneans near the end of the second century BC.

Ultimately the question comes down to not necessarily when were parts written but when were they last edited to suit the needs of the then current power structure?

Horatio Parker

The picture I recall from Thomas Thompson varies from this.

The two kingdoms were never united. When Israel, the stronger and more prosperous of the two, was conquered by the Assyrians, Judea wasn't worth their trouble. That's when Jerusalem became a power center. Monotheism was originally not so much one god as one temple. Sacrifice "in the high places" was forbidden.

The need to legitimize Jerusalem and the temple were probably the motivation for the stories of the evil kings of Israel.

Minimalist

2 Kings 16 suggests that Ahaz sought an alliance with Assyria against "israel" and Aram-Damascus. It makes sense as realpolitik for a weaker state to seek protection of the major power in the area. Moab and Edom also seem to have chosen the winning side and come out of the war as vassal states of Assyria.

Aram Damascus, Israel, and Philistia did not do so well.