Amedeo

The Bible consists mostly of Chronicles in a theistic context. The references to individual men, peoples and their human exploits, and places, are likely to be true, even though the names may have been used either vaguely (for us) or inaccurately [for instance, as to which of two peoples were the bad and presumptious ones].

The chronology may be inaccurate, but a chronology it is, so that for example the time covered by the Biblical events may be 4,000 years. We may presuppose that the Chronicles were TOLD, and became parts of an oral tradition, soon after certain events occirred. In effect, the Bible narrative was composed a bit at a time during the course of those 4000 years or whatever its accurate period may be.

This is the point, that, theistic interpretations of events aside, the events were narrated either by eye-witnesses or story-gatherers, or by prophets (mouthpieces of God, or story-tellers inspired by God). For instance, the stories of creation are not eye-witness reports; they are stories told or inspired by God. But who was the first man who received the message about creation? When and where did he live [in OUR chronology and geography]?

Whoever edited the oral stories and wrote them down may have made interpolations, such as added remarks to clarify some point for the reader, but in most cases, we have no way of identifying interpolations. So, we have to presume that the texys we have are unadulterated orginal accounts.

We learn that soon after creation, while Adam and Eve were still alive, God planted a garden in the east [of somewhere], in Eden [Gen.2:8]. This place-name means nothing to us, but we recognize at least two of the rivers into which the Eden-river branched out: The Tigris, which runs along the east side of Assuhr, and the Euphrates.

So, we learn that the first prophet or prophets existed at the time when the Tigris and the Euphrates has been so named, and the Asshur country had been founded.

From the Table of nations, which were founded after the Flood, we infer that Asshur could not have existed at the time of Adam and Eve, but the point is that the story of Adam and Even was first told when Asshur already existed.

Furthermore, since the garden was planted for Adam to tend, and since the occupations of his sons were differentiated into shepherding and farming, the story of the creation of man was produced and told in late neolithic times, when real humans had already invented agriculture. So, even if the names of the Eden rivers are due to late interpolations, the orginal story of Adam's creation originated after the invention of agriculture, which, lo and behold, occurred in Sumer, a large part of Mesopotamia. Sumer is nowhere mentioned, for the first Bible prophets spoke when it had been replaced by Akkad or Chaldea (which dates from around 2000 B.C.) So, the Bible stories do not really cover a period longer the 2000 years.

The plain Biblical stories of divine creation (the Elohim's creation, and the Yahweh fashioning of the world), before the story of the lives of Adam and Eve, may be much older. They were undoubtedly inherited by the Hebrews from their Caucasoid cultural background and Yah, and their Araboid cultural background and El. [Elsewhere I analyzed the two stories of creation, the two deaities, and the two languages which constituted Canaanite, Hebrew, and some other Levantine language.]

The supernaturals, such as the Elohim and Yahweh predate the Bible; they are attested outside and/or before the Hebrew culture {Cf., Ugarit, Ebla, The Greeks and Romans}, and there has never been any valid argument to the contrary.

The Bible contains other supernaturals, who are either subordinates of, or enemies of, the Biblical God(s), but they are not present within the two creation stories, either as co-existing with the Deity or created by the Deity.

Two of these foreign supernaturals (obviously inherited from older cultures) play key roles in cosmic events. The crafty talking serpent tempts Eve, who, by disobeying God, causes a revolution in God's creation: Paradise is lost and replaced by toil, disease, and death.

The nephilim, sons of gods [not of the Biblical Elohim] consort with human women -- as is well known from tha ancient Greek culture. Because of this and general human wickedness, God drowns mankind, except for Noah and family, who thus becomes the second head-man in human genealogy.

From the loins of Noah eventually rose Abraham who, together with his relative Lot, came from Ur of the Chaldeans into Egyptian territory. Eventually Lot ended in Sodom. But God had marked the destruction of 5 cities, including Sodom. So, he sent two angels to rescue Lot {Gen.19: 1} Sodomites wanted to rape or meet those beautiful angels; so Lot offered them his daughters, but they were not interested. Divine vengeance was swift.

The Biblical Gods never created angels, but here are two of them -- ministers of the Canaanite Elohim. Well know ministers will appear much later in the Bible as well as in the Gospels: Gabri-El, Micha-El, and others. (Jesus' God was El rather than Yahweh. El's messengers keep on flying unimpeded in the Gospel stories.) The Nephilim and crafty serpents come from the side of the caucasoid God, Yahweh or Youeh.

The Hebrew pantheon is of pre-Hebrew origins.

Amedeo

The story of the genesis of the world in Gen.1 is based on Canaanite theology, whose date is as uncertain at the beginning of Canaan [the people] itself. (Of course, if one goes by the Bible, there was no Cannan until after Noah. It's for us -- ethnologists, linguistics, archeologists of the modern age -- that the Middle East, the Biblically created world, has a pre-history, namely a social/ethnic history that antedates the Hebrews and the Biblical account of the Nations and has not been formulated in any degree by social historians.)

Canaan is certainly much older than Akkad, whose first historical clues belong to about 3000 B.C. Its supreme gods, the Elohim were a male and a female (as in all ancient mythologies of the creating or generating gods), but the Hebrews typically eliminated all female goddesses and eventually Moses established a henotheism [one-god doctrine] for the Hebrews/Israelites, so that El and Yahweh are henceforth treated by the Bible narrators as is they one the same god. [Part of Jesus's messianic mission was to bring the strayed sheep, the Judaeans, into the fold of Israe-EL, as he was their legitimate king (son of David through Joseph), but, as we know, he failed and died as the alleged king of the Judaeans.]

So, the core of Genesis-1 may go back to 4000 B.C. The Canaanite polytheism was the, or one variant of, the proto-Arab polytheism, from which eventuallY Allah arose (the equivalent of the henotheistic El). Chronology aside, the Elohimite theism, such as is evident in Genesis-1 grew outside the Agricultural Age of Neolithic times. Thus El is not an architect and sculptor and farmer like Yahveh, even though all creating, generating, or producing gods operate by "magic power" (not by physical forces, as we would say).

The Elohim are, culturally speaking, much older than Yahweh, but they belong to the Neolitic Age of man, when "nature gods" were personified and conceived as willful causes. All the genesis stories of the ancient world presuppose the human level of intelligence which grasps causality. All the genesis-story tellers (prophets in the ancient religions) were not after demonstrating the existence of gods; demonstration is an operation of the inquisitive mind that belongs to the Philosophical Age. In the Age of Religions, gods were taught and believed in, and if somebody thought that there are no gods, the response would not be, "Let me show you,...," but " Your are a fool," stultus, a person with a crooked mind, an erring man. He who thinks correctly thinks, of course, that the announced gods exist. [The personal gods of Neolithic man manifest themselves -- by signs or words -- only to some special people. For most of the people, they are announced, spoken forth, gods. And it is an absurdity, a foolishness, for a man who has received the word to say that there is no god, unless he is a wicked man and rejects the divine punisher... only a morally corrupt man can be an atheist. Does this sound familiar?]

A theistic-genesis account is simply the reduction (bringing back) of the known world to a divine cause. Before any invention of a genesis-story, the world and historical events were understood in terms of divine causation. The whole world, as I explained elsewhere, was a "moral [morality interpreted] world." For example, a sea-storm is not just a spontaneous and pointless occurrence; it occurred because the divine Poseidon was mad at Ulysses and wanted to punish him. So, he stirs the waters and shipwrecks Ulysses. In more general words, today they say that the world is teleogical and so designed by a divine Designer; special divine interventions may occur, but the point is that everything that happens is by divine design and for a reason, just as in neolithic times. "By premeditation, not by chance" is the key-concept.

So, as we read Genesis-1, we are learning how the prophet, the narrator, conceived the world. The cosmography he presents (with all its vague delineations) is not something he received from some god; it is his cosmography, made up of some contemporary facts [things and adult living things], lack of important facts, and conjectures, which, he imagined, was caused (whether magically or by constructive work) by God. In so doing, he treated the whole world as one event. So, by analogical argumentation (such as people still make), the prophet said in effect: Just as God causes storms and fires or victories and defeats, so god causes [in a few days] the whole world to occur.

The first thing El did was to create the heavens and the earth, and to push away darkness and replace it with light. (That's when the alternation between night and day began.) Of course, the prophet started out with the human knowledge of darkness and light [brightness], and it was he that understood them as things, or he -- a man of his times -- that conceived of the sky as a thing which sometimes is dark and sometimes is bright. The idea that the sky is a solid vault has lasted until recent centuries; so, the old theologians did not have to explain away what we see as an erroneous conception.

We are quickly faced by an ingenious conception, which we can reconstruct: Since rain is water that comes from the sky, the water must be there to begin with. But obviously it is not there the way the stars are. So, it must be on the other side of the sky-vault. Rain comes down when some flood-gates are opened. (When it rains, God opens the flood-gates rather than creating rain.)

El did not create water directly, analogously to: Let there be light or beasts of burden or men of two genders like Us. Water was commingled with land; so actually he separated water and dly land. Before that, he created an expanse so as to separate the water which is now on the other side of the sky, and that water which was commingled with the land --the "earth." Presumably, before the creation of the Expanse, there was no sky. So, the initial idea that El created the heavens and the earth is like a general preface. What He first created was the earth, which was formless and in the dark and covered with water. The Spirit hovered over it, even though there was not an expanse yet. But after creating light and separating it from darknkess, he created the expanse, presumably with the heavens of celestial vault, thereby splitting the water. Some of it lay above the sky; the other, on the earth was then separated from the dry land.

Thus, the prophet's world was his given and conjectured world, which he imagined to be the result of creative constructions, staring with the formless earth. That world, or our world, could not evolve from, or grow from, a single mass, since additional masses or things are needed for the final result. So, the temporal growth of the world which the prophet envisioned necessitated a creator. Even if the earth were given purely and simply, building blocks are needed for the construction of the sky, the stars, the plants, and the animals.

As long as the ancients thought of their world as existing all at once, as a mere given, the personal gods were its governors or lords; for them to become creators of the world logically required a vision of the world as something emerging the way a building emerges -- cumulatively. The building blocks that constitute it must be supplied by the mason or achitect himself.

How did the Greek philosophers envision a temporal cosmography -- the cosmic building emerging in time -- without the need of a creator or creators?

The started with the idea that the building blocks are simply and eternally existing [after the cogent Parmenidean discourse] , but the building blocks are NOT the KINDS of things which make up the present universe, namely rocks, stars, land, water, wind, plants and animals. For mythical an, these kinds of things emerge in a temporal succession in the world, and they emerge by being placed there by a divine power. The philosophers, on the other hand, spoke of the building blocks which constitute any of the existing things, the various and many substances which make up the world. The inherent building blocks are eternal, but the forma stion of diverse substance is in time. There is never any increase or diminution of the given radical or basic existents. So, humans turn their attention to and study the processes whereby those ultimate ingredients form the various substance in the world, rather than positing a god to create substances from scratch. They do physics. (Empedocles and the elements or roots of substances; Anaxagoras and the innumerable seeds or germs [particles of as many kinds as we observe: water, bone, gold, flesh,air, wheat, wine, etc., -- homeomers]; and Leucippus/Democritus with atoms, indivisible particles with diverse hooks, all understood these ultimate ingredients as being naturally active and in motions, so that, in various circumstances, they give rise to compounds and more and more complex compounds, such as animal organisms. Composition and decomposition keep on going on today; composition or formation is not something that happened in the past and then stopped. The ingredients occur also today in the free, non-compounded, state, and new things may emerge today or tomorrow which never happened in the past. We are not talking about a mythological progression of substances, or a big-bang progression of celestial bodies from an origial mass. Today we talk also about the progressive formation of such things as atoms, of electrons, and the like. (So, today's genesis theory of cosmography is something quite different from the genesis theory or evolution theory of substances [organisms/compounds at all levels] and of their radical ingredients.

In conclusion:

The mythological history of the world (based on some largely imaginative cosmography), which many Neolithic people devised, are all such that an external creator is needed (a supplier of new kinds of things and of operations in the physical world), wherefore there is a temporal succession in the making of the envisioned world. (The cosmography is man-made, fashioned on the basis of an architectural model, not revealed by some god. And the idea that certain gods are creators is not revealed by some god; it is a conjecture made in order to rationally explain the envisioned cosmography.)

In the minds of people prior to or outside agricultural or seed/genesis culture, there was no conception of formation going on now or ever ab infimis (from the lowest things). Hence, their world was an accumulations of formed or adult things, but if some kinds of things things are posterior to others [presupposed for their utility], then a god made them and added them to others. (It is but an awareness of physical or utility preconditions that the entities of the world can be lined up in a temporal order; it's not by any empirical evidence that the soil existed before any vegetation, or that vegetation existed before animals. When presuppositions are not evident, light can exist before luminaries, and a body can be caused to move without pushing it.)

The Biblical genesis accounts are not divine revelations; they are the words of sages in pre-Biblical ethnic cultures that were as distinct as the Arabs and the Caucasians, but with Hebrew adjustments which may date from their formation of Israel, a distinct People, around 2000 B.C.-- certainly after the formation of Akkad and long after the formation of Canaan.

RED DAVE

From Amedeo:
I presume that this and most of the rest of what you've written is practice for your routine as a stand-up comic.

RED DAVE

Amedeo

In the old days, when the reviewing clergy approved of a work for publication, they gave a "nihil obstat" notice. The monitors of publications put depraved books in the Index of Forbidden Books

Today, when free speech is not entirely under control, the monitoring minions show their disapproval with an "obstat" notice for all to see, though in words they they can understand.

The bitter consequence of being a monitor is that, in publicly issuing their judgements, they reveal themselves.

Amedeo

P.S. to # 1

The Biblical stories that began to be told to the Hebrews by their sages (prophets) must have started not earlier than the city-state of Asshur or 2000 B.C.. as we can infer from textual points and from our knowledge of real history. And inasmuch as the Bible is the collection of memories of a people, they must be the stories that began to the told by sages to the Israelites, the people organized as a distinct society by Abraham.

When did Abraham live? According to some chronologists who employ the Bible's textual data, the Flood took place around 2304 B.C. Thereafter the 3 sons of Noah founded the nations; Abraham descends from the Shemites a few hundreds of years later. On the other hand, in "The Pyramids and all that" (# 162), I calculated that the Flood should have taken place around 1700 B.C. (which is not too far away from the Mediterranean sunami caused by the Santorini explosion of around 1630 B.C.) (The filling up of the Black Lake that became the Black Sea because of the Mediterranean sea level raised by the melting glaciers must have taken thousands of years earlier and cannot explain all the flood stories in Greek and Middle Eastern cultures.) The Santorini inundations explain a lot, including the stories that some families saved themselves by being in boats. Inland peoples were not effected by that horrendus sunami; farmers or shepherds near shores who saw it coming would have run to the hills, rather than trying to build boats. (The Noah story goes to show that Noah was not a boatman and that the little world he knew did not include shore dwellers.)

According to Matthew 1:14, there were 3 times 14 generations (42 generations) between Christ and Abraham. If a generation is about 40 years, then Abraham lived around 1680 B.C. This pushes the Flood some hundred of years (perhaps around 2000 B.C.), in which case, the flood must have been some Mesopotamian inundation, and the Biblical story may be based on Sumerian accounts of the great flood. At any rate, what is importance to us is the time of Abraham, founder of Israel, and, therefore, the rough date when the Biblical story began to be spoken forth. The Gospel-based date of approximately 1680 B.C. is correctly after the "terminus post quem" of 2000 or post Asshur.

Hence, the Bible chronicles are about real and imaginary events that were narrated (and handed down) approximately between 1700 B.C. and the last book of the Bible (Malachi's final divine oracle), at the latest, 400 B.C.

The God of the Judaeans, recorded in the Hebrew Bible, de facto terminated the convenant with Malachi. The Judeans did not add Essenic prophetic texts, since El was not their God. For the same reason, the prophetic word of Jesus, an apocalyptic whose God was El, was not added to the Hebrew Bible. Strictly speaking, Yahweh did not make any covenant; Abraham made a covenant with El. As the Essenes and the Galileans rightlt believed, they were the true People of God (El). The Judeans were schismatics and to this very day are outside the fold of Israel, even though they pretend to be the chosen people and the people to whom Canaan was promised. The myths about all the Biblical Gods aside, they pretend to be what they are not; they live a lie. But today they stand exposed before Man.

Sphincterboy

As opposed to 'fake' history?

"Must be"? This persistant habit of assuming the conclusion is amusing, briefly. It grows old quickly, though, and does little to further your cause.

When did Frodo live?

Merlin

Hello,

'EL' is not the name of any god, neither, of course is 'elohim'
El refers to a powerful one(s), which is some Biblical passages refers to men.

YHWH is the Hebrew God

Quote:

The nephilim, sons of gods [not of the Biblical Elohim] consort with human women

Actually, the text does say ben-elohim (sons-of-elohim).

Amedeo

I have studies and written a lot about Genesis-1 and Genesis-2. The Elohim of ge.1 are usually translated as God, Deity, or Godhead, in order to aboid the plural form, "gods." It is a textual fact that the Elohim created the heavens and the earth and, finally, Man in THEIR image: one male and the other female. El is the male supreme God of the Canaanites as well as of the Hebrews as well as of Jesus (from the Kingdom of Isra-EL).

In Genesis-2, you have Yahweh, usually translated as the Lord, but since the Bible uses the expression 'Yahweh elohim" -- the divine Yah or Yah the Deity -- the translators employ "the Lord God" , thus irreparably confusing Yahweh with El. At any rate, as Moses proclaimed henotheisim -- just one God for Israel, people believe that the creators in Gen.1 and Gen.2 are one and the same.

Indeed, the nephilim are called "ben-elohim" and what I meant is that the are sons of foreign god, not of the Elohim so named ion gen.1. Of course, the Canaanite Elohim had many sons, but certain no Bible prophet or narrator attributes sons to the Elohim of Genesis-1.

The creation stories, and the "supernaturals" named in the stories about the nephilim, the talking serpent, the angels and the archangels are acquired from pre-Hebrew or Pre-Israelitic cultures. (That was my original point.) There are no supernaturals that are indigenous to the Hebrew/Israelitic ethnic culture.

Merlin

Yes, the Bible says the Elohim created Adam & Eve, then it says YHWH gave them life.

In Genesis-2, you have Yahweh, usually translated as the Lord, but since the Bible uses the expression 'Yahweh elohim" -- the divine Yah or Yah the Deity -- the translators employ "the Lord God" , thus irreparably confusing Yahweh with El. At any rate, as Moses proclaimed henotheisim -- just one God for Israel, people believe that the creators in Gen.1 and Gen.2 are one and the same. [/quote]

In Hebrew, when 2 nouns are written together, they are typically connected by one being of the other.
In this case, it would seem a better translation would be YHWH, of the Elohim.


Textually, I can see no reason to saparaten these 'Elohim'


'EL' is not necessarily 'supernatural', just 'powerful'

Amedeo

Re===> Your question can be taken in two ways: If it comes from one who does not believe in the historicity of Abraham, it is a rhetorical question about a deceptive figure. I myself think that the Bible (a mythic/theistic chronicle) is like a "historical novel" -- a fusion of historical data with the writer's inventions and structuring of a biography or a history. To me, Abraham is one of the skeletal facts of the Bible-Composition by many authors since the inception of a People to be indoctrinated by the priesthood. [The Israelites or the Jews -- as people prefer saying -- are not "the people of the Book;" they are "the people of the teaching priesthood" who created a psychological ethnic solidarity that persists to our own days. Even if the pupils become atheists or performers of the most forbidden abominations, they do not lose the tribe-nationality branded on them in the form of circumcision.)