dogsgod

Perhaps a church in a looser sense. Paul made reference to a church of God and there seemed to be some semblance of organization within the Jerusalem group that was recognized as important to leaders of congregations that Paul wrote to in Galatians.

bacht

Okay, but we still have to explain where the character of David came from, if not from early tribal history. Are you endorsing an agnostic position about whether such a man ever existed?

We know that the Philistines were real don't we? Is it implausible to imagine that the inland Canaanites were challenged by them? Is it implausible that some folk memory of a Hebrew champion (whether victorious or not) appeared in interior Canaan? Isn't this the sort of thing we would expect from semi-literate semi-civilized tribespeople?

Sheshbazzar

A 'charcter' employed by men in the fabrication of the political religious propaganda of a bogus and highly imaginary version of a 'national history' that promoted themselves.

'David' if there ever was any living David behind the story, most certainly did not do or accomplish those things that these manipulative political propaganda documents attribute to him.

'David' is the equivelent of Paul Bunyon. Employing this rationale, because forest actually existed, and were cut, therefore there must have been a real Paul Bunyon to do that cutting.
There were real Philistines (forests), and the 'nation' of Israel came into existence, therefore there must have been a real 'king David' to cut them down. This does not follow.

The TaNaKa was, and is, composed as a contrived political propaganda document, one with a manufactured, highly distorted, and biased version of Israel's national 'history', as slapped together by the exiled Judean Jews as a means to assert their controlling authority over all the tribes and inhabitants of the land of Israel.
'Yahweh' never spoke or wrote one word of it. Men did this thing in trespass against the Holy Name.

Sheshbazzar the Hebrew

spamandham

The name 'David' means 'beloved', which happens to be the role he plays as YHWH's most beloved. We can chalk this up to coincidence, or we can agree that the name fits the character and is thus itself evidence of a constructed story.

bacht

Yes I understand that the Old Testament is not historically consistent. But wouldn't it have been easier for the mythmakers/propagandists to use an established figure rather than invent someone unknown to the Hebrews/Judahites? Was every character before Nebuchadnezzar completely invented?

I have no problem rejecting Solomon and most of the other names in the king list before the Omrides. I just wonder if there had been some sort of folk hero (like Deborah?) to whom legendary material was attached centuries later. If David was an artificial character constructed to legitimize the authority of the Jerusalem elite I can live with that too.

Sheshbazzar

Of course there remains the possibility that the biblical David figure was a literary riff on some convenient legendary folk hero, or even on some legitimate faint memories of a real former Hebrew chieftain.
That 'David' portrayed within the biblical texts, and that artificial 'history' attached to the name David however, is not in any manner trustworthy.
As for any real life David that might be the germ behind the given text, absolutely nothing at all is known, or has been recovered.
Apart from that fable presented to us within these texts there is no knowledge of David.
Take away the obviously fictitious 'history' and the fabricated narrative dialog, and there is less left than the smile of the invisible Cheshire cat.

Same as with that 1st century figment.

Steve Weiss

You seem to want to elevate speculation to a probability that it does not deserve. I can surmiss anything that my imagination allows me to. I can imagine elephants flying, but history and science is based upon hard evidence that can stand intense scrutiny, and a critical mind requires much more evidence than is available for the existence of a King David.

It is also a myth that the Hebrews were slaves in Egypyt, that there was a massive exodus, that the Jews were a roving mob in the desert for 40 years until they decided to start taking over cities occupied by those who did not honor Yahweh. Worker villages have been excavated around the Great Pyramids showing that contract labor by Egyptians who couldn't get out of the job by paying tax had to do the dirty work of building. There was no opening of the Red Sea for the departing Hebrews, and neither was the Jordan parted for Joshua.

If we go down to the bedrock of evidence for biblical events outside the OT and NT, we find little, if anything, that would support the mythology in those pages sold the gullible as holy writ. The Greatest Story ever told remains a fiction until someone can produce far more evidence than now exists, and don't hold your breath for that to happen.

Steve Weiss

Great analogy! Spot on. Flush the garbage nonsense out of the OT and NT and you have nothing worth spending time on except for tracing the history of how the fraud was put together. Those mind-manipulators who sold us the bill of goods have covered their tracks, so that will be a difficult but worthwhile job. In the end, the tooth-fairy doesn't exist.

mountainman

It's interesting that Constantine appears to be really mad at Arius for calling Jesus by that same term "figment" in his c.333 CE letter to Arius

bacht

Moses seems unrecoverable, probably invented. David I agree is almost the same. I'm just playing devil's advocate here, not trying to bolster the maximalists.

Let's assume that the Torah was largely if not wholly post-Exilic. Who was living in Samaria and Judah before the 6th C bce? Are they lost to history? Were there any cultural elements from Iron Age Canaan that were incorporated into the Tanakh, or did the Babylonian Jews import everything as an overlay during the Persian adminstration? I would guess that they had some material to start from, maybe Mesopotamian models which at the least they modified with names and places from Palestine.

Maybe Abraham is the key character: leaving southern Babylonia and travelling into the Jordan valley and beyond. Maybe he is the personification of the origin of the Jewish population in Palestine in the 6th-5th C? If the Jerusalem group did come from Babylon would this explain their mutual hostility with the Samaritans?