spin

I've just got hold of a book called 'Mesopotamia and the Bible", edited by Chavalas and Younger, and there I was happily browsing the book when I came across, "One must bear in mind that only a proportation of the population of the northern kingdom of Israel was deported by the Assyrians, perhaps only 5 per cent." Thus far, fine. Interesting estimate. But then the following sentence, "Since these Israelites had already apostasized from an exclusive allegiance to Yahweh, many probably had no compunction about worshipping the alien gods of their new Mesopotamian homeland." "Israelites had already apostasized"? This was Edwin Yamauchi writing. I wonder if he still believes in the exodus, the conquest and the whole kit and caboodle of Jewish traditions, that the united kingdom of Israel was once universally Yahwist. One wonders if he doesn't know about the polytheistic inscriptions of Yahweh and his Asherah at Kuntillet Ajrud, but of cource he does, but the people there were also examples of apostacy.

It just goes to show that when the opportunity arises, the Norwegian Blue will always pine for the fjords.

You always have to be on your guard reading anything written in this field we are flirting with. The religious writer will often not be able to fight "nature".


spin

Peter Kirby

I recognize that name. Yamauchi is the author of Easter: Myth, Hallucination, or History? among other articles.

best,
Peter Kirby

Toto

Mesopotamia and the Bible on Amazon.

Edwin Yamauchi is hardly a neutral scholar, it appears. CT article on the Resurrection

From this review {Well, at least they didn't capitalize "Him".}

spin

There I was ready to put my feet up and enjoy an enlightening book. It doesn't matter that it was Yamauchi or Hermann von Bedspring. You just can't relax and enjoy. You always have to have your filters on. Why can't it be like reading a serious academic book in some other field? Donald Redford writes a readable analysis of the relations between "Egypt, Canaan and Israel". Good book, but written by an Egyptologist, ie not a biblical scholar and therefore not tainted with the need to fall over one's beliefs.


spin

hum

Spin....I believe you have hit the nail firmly on the head.

Herein lies the problem for mugs like myself..... so much to read
......who can you trust ?

hum

Chris Weimer

You can't even trust the texts...always the question "which reading?" Just look for biases and question question question.

spin

The good thing is you can get two or three readings, using (N)RSV, Jerusalem Bible and JPS (kills most of the xian bias) -- most others you can forget --, and look how the text stands between them: if they are quite similar in meaning, then you have a certain amount of assurance; if you don't, then you know you have a problem text. Better of course you get to the original text, but that'as not always a learning curve available.


spin

spin

In the end it's you who does the analysis. Yes, there is so much to read, but, as in any big subject, if you are interested enough you'll read what you need to read and build up a methodological approach that you think is functional in evaluating your material. You trust only those who you have to, then doubt them anyway.

Infidel are people who are mostly in your (our) situation. For some reason or other they do not believe but are surrounded by a sea of believers. There are people who are simply not interested, who ignore the implications of belief and are therefore not infidel -- to us. Those who are concerned usually do what they can to understand better what's going on. So, it's in that ugly company you are more likely to find elements that you will be able to rely on more than outside it. They'll make all sorts of errors, but they are not falling over their beliefs so much as floundering in ignorance, because there is no easy path through the quagmire of belief.

The principles are easy though: everything that is proposed must be supported by evidence. Evidence relates directly to the subject under analysis and if it can't be related, it has no value in the current discourse. If you are dealing with a historical question, the evidence must at least relate to the period in question. We don't for example know when passages in the bible were written. Our earliest manuscripts go back only 2000 years. There is insufficient in the texts to say that the material could only have come from the period under analysis, therefore, the bible usually cannot constitute evidence in most historical discussions. This doesn't necessarily make the information incorrect, just unusable because there is no way of knowing its value.

Our job is in some manner to understand ancient texts, whose backgrounds are obscure to us and without such backgrounds we are hampered gravely in our understanding. If we use our modern understandings to read ancient texts we don't know how much we are importing from our own time into those texts. Ultimately we cannot shed all our modern understandings, because we won't have any tools left for analysis, but we must attempt to understand the texts for what the writers intended. The more we can do that the better chance we have of entering a more general understanding of such texts. The world was complex, highly structured, full of allegory, to such an extent that I don't know if a person of the period could separate allegory from reality.

We have ideas of writers telling the truth or writing lies, writing history or fiction. But history as a notion simply didn't exist, except in an evolving tradition from not long before Herodotus. And I wonder if fiction really existed as well.

We have a notion of writers and intellectual property, but they had schools and texts written within a school tradition which didn't belong to a particular writer but to a school, which may have been named after an eponymous founder, texts which may have belonged to a community rather than a school.

Shedding our modern understandings as to specific things, I think we can get to -- at least partially. The tools of logic and evidence I think will still be fundamental, though one's use of them will come from more experience with the ancient material.

Can one invest in learning the ancient language? It certainly would help you know whether you could trust translations; it would help you get a closer understanding of the intention of the writer; but it is a large expenditure of your efforts. You can make do with multiple translations when you can get them and skepticism when you can't.

It's not who you can trust in this field, it's developing the know-how to be able to rely on your own judgment.


spin

socratoad

Ya know spin, your very apt example reminds me of something I stumbled upon years ago. The used to be an author named John Gunther. He was a very readable writer and churned out quite a number of books called the inside series Inside India, Inside Africa, Australia and so on. I was quite young and very much interested in different places and cultures in this world and it was before I had done any extensive traveling myself so I hung onto this guys every word. While reading "Inside Africa" I stumbled across a little choice morsel of utter misinformation that went alone like this, and I paraphrase, " In an African country I often came across nuns who were feeding poor people. They were from the country of Quebec This came as a surprise to me a Quebec is a country just as poor as any in Africa." he went on to say.

I tossed the bloody book across the room and never read another word that man wrote. Dog knows how much shit he had written that I had hitherto taken at face value.

So your advice is very good. One must check several sources before becoming comfortable with any one writer, no matter how many initials are after their names. After a while one's natural built-in bullshit detector will allow one to sort most of the wheat from the chaff.

Chris Weimer

Heh, I was referring to the actual text and not mere translations...