Sheshbazzar

Riiiight.... Jehu lived, ruled as a king, and just did nothing.
Because.... scholars of 3000 years latter find it hard to accept that violent religious disputes and intrigues do actually happen.

Maklelan

So either he murdered the priests of Baal or he "just did nothing"? This is how you characterize the possible conclusions regarding this text? Are you in middle school?

Not at all, but the fact that it's possible something happened in antiquity is not evidence that it did. The texts in this case (1) date to centuries after the events they purport to narrate, (2) are part of a corpus of narratives aimed at promoting a very specific ideology that engaged the culture contemporaneous to the editors, not the characters of the narrative, and (3) follow a structured and highly rhetorical thematic pattern. These considerations, combined with the complete and total lack of any material or independent textual evidence to support the events, leave us with no reason whatsoever to take it seriously. Certainly the fact that the events are not physically impossible is not evidence enough to outweigh these concerns.

Sheshbazzar

Then do tell, what is it that you think Jehu may have done?
What about Ahab? or Jezebel? Is it your position that because these texts are latter than the purported conflicts, that these conflicts never occured?
And what source(s) do you derive this information from?

Maklelan

Most likely they just did what warring political factions did back then: tried to legislate their downfall and/or rally political or public support to their faction. Akhenaten did the same thing with the priests of Amun-Re when he acceded to the throne.

I'm not denying that there was conflict. I'm denying that it was resolved through mass murder of a type never attested anywhere in the ancient Near East.

That the text is Deuteronomistic derives primarily from a combination of literary criticism and the situations we know existed as a result of synthesizing textual and material remains from the immediate contexts of those time periods. That it is also not true derives from the what those same sources tell us about how royal conflicts were handled in antiquity, as well as more literary criticism. It's simply too convenient that these murders always followed the same pattern that just happens to take a shape that perfectly fits the Deuteronomistic authors' rhetorical goals.

Whence do you derive the information that supports the historicity of the murder of the priests of Baal as described in 2 Kings?

Sheshbazzar

Allow me to put it this way, being aware of the known and historically documented conduct and brutality of fevernt religious believers, and extrapolating from the known facts and instances of such heinious conduct, and lacking any other contemporary testimony or evidence that contradicts the Biblical accounts, I find little reason to dismiss these fratricides out of hand.

It was The Law that those of Israel who turned and served other Elohim, or even suggested such, were to be immediately executed. 'Your hand shall be first upon him to put him to death'. (Deut 13:9)
Look at religious fundamentalism in any primative Middle Eastern country to this day, those that dissent, or are viewed as serving other gods, or as promoting other faiths are summarily executed either by the Political process, or simply by the religious factions taking their Laws into their own hands and taking up stones and carrying it out to the letter. Or gangs of organised religious factions fall upon entire groups murdring and beheading religious infidels.
Before you say 'only Muslims' do these things, stop and consider where these practices originated.
Religiously motivated murder is much older than the written texts of the Torah. And where religion and government go hand in hand, religion is Power, and Authority, and control of the common Wealth, for which men are willing, and if able, to enter into wars, and to rationalise the carrying out of mass-murder purging of their 'unpatriotic' or 'infidel' countrymen as being the will of their god.

I do not at all buy into a view, that the Jewish nation out of all people on earth, alone, did not conduct their religious affairs with the kind of brutality that is related in these ancient texts, and which has long been endemic to feverent pursuit of religious domination.

This kind of 'Historical Criticisim' smacks of whitewashing the Jewish religion and people, and falsly presenting them as the only innocent religion to exist.

stephan huller

But do you really really believe that the person writing these things actually saw the events he was describing? Do you really believe there was a talking ass? Flying fiery snakes? Why is any of this any more historical?

Lugubert

The mass murders could have been invented in order to legitimize any future genocides.

Maklelan

The fact that such brutalities are possible is not evidence that they did happen in this particular instance.

That was a law written during the exile and put into the mouths of religious leaders from centuries before. The material data unambiguously attests to the widespread worship of multiple deities all the way down to the exile. In other words, there was no such law before the exile.

If you know anything at all about those events you know that the details of the events and the circumstances surrounding them are vastly, vastly different from the situation of Jehu and the priests of Baal. Irrespective, the fact that it happened between Christians and Muslims, Christians and Christians, and Muslims and Muslims is hardly evidence that it happened two millennia before between Israelites and Israelites.

In the Near East in the Common Era. That is hardly evidence that Jehu murdered a bunch of priests in the ninth century BCE.

Human sacrifice is older, but religiously motivated mass murder certainly is not. Before the Common Era the vast majority of killing associated with religion was far more intimately linked with political dynamics than religious.

I've never presented any such naive position, but the fact that religion can contribute to heinous acts is not evidence at all that in this particular instance, it did.

manwithdream

Maklelan,

I am not sure I understand what you are saying about Deut. 32:8-9 and 43, and other quotes that mention other gods. Are you saying that some quotes were changed in the Masoretic text and the Septuagint to sound more monotheistic because the Septuagint and the Masoretic text have other quotes like Psalm 82 that were not changed in Hebrew or Greek. I looked at some of Michael Heiser's articles that list different quotes and the Masoretic text and the Septuagint seem to have kept the words "gods" in most of them, even if they didn't sound monotheistic, so why would you think they intentionally changed some of them, but not all of them, if that is what you think?
Ps.82:1,6, Ps. 95:3,Ps. 86:8, Ps. 136:2 I think are the same. Ps. 138:1, Ps. 97:7, and Ps. 58:1 are different in the Septuagint, but the Hebrew says "gods" ( I am a little blurry right now, but I think I am right about this). I might have messed up this list because I wrote it sleepy.

Kenneth Greifer

Maklelan

It wasn't necessary to change every last text, just the more commonly known ones. All they had to do was create an interpretive framework that would govern the reading of other texts. It the reader understands one texts that refers to gods in a monotheistic way, they'll do the same for others. Texts like Exod 22:8–9 would have already been interpreted in a "monotheistic" way or would be interpreted that way in light of the readings provided by the manipulated passages (it wouldn't make sense otherwise, which is why a lot of people still appeal to those texts as indications that אלהים can refer to human judges, which it simply does not). For example, Deut 32:8–9 didn't really need to be changed after it was incorporated into the Song of Moses and the larger Deuteronomic narrative. Deut 4:19 anticipates Deut 32:8–9, but it explicitly identifies Yhwh as the one doing to allotting, linking Yhwh with Elyon. By the time the reader got to 32:8–9, they would have already been prepared to read the text as a reference to just Yhwh. The change of ויהי to כי at the beginning of v. 9 would support that reading, since it breaks up to flow of the narrative and acts adversatively. In other words, it is read as "Elyon separated the nations according to the number of the sons of God, BUT Yhwh's portion is his people." This lends itself to being read as a reference to only one God, where the alternative does not: "Elyon separated the nations according to the number of the sons of God, and Yhwh's portion is his people." This worked just fine for quite some time. As Judaism became more and more defined by its rejection of other gods, and became more sensitive to these things, other methods were employed, and Deut 32:8–9 got further changed. The change from gods to angels occurred during the process of translating the Hebrew Bible into Greek, so the earliest manuscripts read "gods," while the later manuscripts would read "angels."

The most important theological innovation was the identification of the gods and the "sons of God" (בני*אלהים) with angels. This restricted the gods of the nations to a servile and contingent taxonomy, which made it perfectly fine to acknowledge other gods: "Yeah, they're called gods, but they're just angels." This is why at Qumran you can have dozens and dozens of positive references to "gods."