Doctor X

I will note, en passant, no rebuttal to Friedman's theories or evidence of knowledge of them.

Those that wish to speculate on what someone has or has not read should probably consider demonstrating that they have done their own reading first. It would be the honest position.

--J.D.

Celsus

The formal debate offer remains open, where we can see how well or not I know Friedman's theory. What I have objected to all along is you continuing to argue by proxy.

Joel

Doctor X

There remains no response to Friedman's theories. We have claims that they are inadequate. Yet, for some reason, they are never actually addressed.

I will waste my time no further.

If someone has a actual rebuttal to Friedman, which includes discussing his arguments, someone kindly contact me.

And like THAT . . . he's gone!

--J.D.

Celsus

You still don't get it?
That's exactly what's on offer. I will provide the rebuttal to Friedman, but only in a formal debate (i.e. with clearly defined parameters and fair-use clauses) with you, so that you do not play fast and loose with bibliographies or argue by proxy, as you have done extensively in this thread, and has already been explained to you repeatedly, is the reason why no one is taking you seriously. Like you are so fond of telling your theist opponents, it's time to put up or shut up.

Joel

Doctor X

Maybe if I type slower. . . .

I am not advocating Friedman.

I am not defending Friedman.

I want someone to, as the individual put it so ineligantly, "put up or shut up" regarding arguments against him.

Period.

If I had questions about Earl Doherty, would I have to begin a "formal debate" to learn about arguments against him, particularly when individuals claim such exist without actually giving them?

The individual's argumentum ad hominem aside, he has not given any such arguments. He is then afraid that if he gives them--"only in a formal debate"--that the respondent will bury him "by proxy." Apparently he wishes to limit the sources for rebuttal.

I can "understand" that because, apparently, by his silence he has nothing to offer. I can only conclude that he fears rebuttal. He should not.

He should simply state his rebuttal if he has one. I am afraid I am not a big proponent of blind faith, so I will not have faith that he has one that he just does not want to reveal to us.

--J.D.

Amlodhi

Hello Spin, Celsus & Doctor X,

Had a minor computer crash & then needed to make a long response to a poster on another board, so I have only now had a chance to catch up to this thread.

I really regret to see it deteriorate. This question is precisely the type of thing I would like to see more discussion about, as opposed to, say, the "does God blow his nose one nostril at a time" type of thing.

So I hope everyone doesn't go away just yet. I'm not interested in a formal debate; actually I'm not interested in a debate at all, because I've no vested interest in the outcome one way or another. But I would like to participate in some continued discussion on this topic.

I do agree with spin that primary sources should always be consulted when they are available. But this doesn't preclude reading the opinions of certain people who might be in a better position to evaluate the evidence than one's self. No one knows everything or even most of it, and if the evidence were heavily weighted to one side or the other there would likely be a lot less difference of opinion. Virtually everything any of us know, we learned from someone else.

It's been a long day & I'm tired, so rather than try to rival the confessions of Augustine here, I will present one question that I wanted to pose to either Celsus or spin.

One of the difficulties I see with post-exilic sources is that along about the mid- to late 8th century, the history as outlined in the OT, though embellished, squares fairly well with the extant inscriptions we have from Assyrian, Babylonian and various other records.

As spin finds it difficult to believe that the Judeans carried written material with them to Babylon, (and there is some merit to that point), I find it difficult to believe that the Judeans sat down in the mid- to late 6th century (or later) and recounted c. 200 years of national history (with some degree of accuracy), without recourse to some type of source material.

Am I misrepresenting you here, or is this what you think happened?

As always, Namaste'

Amlodhi

spin

I will always happily listen to anyone's evidence.

The main information we get about Hezekiah is his resistence to Assyria, a remarkable situation in which, during what seemed to be an inevitably disastrous siege of Jerusalem, the Assyrian king was called back to Mesopotamia to deal with urgent business -- and what is the siege of yet another minor realm? How long do you think it would take the descendents of the survivors to forget that? How long has it taken the descendents of the founding fathers to forget the "salvation" for which they'd inaugurated Thanksgiving Day?

Manasseh, the bad king, gets cliched bad king press, and the writer knows nothing real about Manasseh under whose reign it seems that Judah recovered from the Assyrian depredations and expanded into a sizeable kingdom. And Amon gets a stock Kings non-description except for a brief recounting of his assassination.

Next we get the Josian reign, yet how much of it reflects the period? I think the story of the finding of the book to be very late -- as I have noted a number of times, the Dead Sea Scrolls seems to think that Zadok found the book, so obviously the Hilkiah version didn't exist. What we learn is that he did things that John Hyrcanus did and that he died while confronting Necho II.

What is there that takes a lot to remember?

One of the things I have noted from the book of Ben Sira, written circa 180 BCE, is that the writer knows nothing about good kings other than David, Hezekiah and Josiah: "Except for David and Hezekiah and Josiah, all of them were great sinners." Now Ben Sira, a scribe with obvious access to the literature available knew nothing about the other good kings. Kings like Asa and Jehoshaphat get passed over as though Ben Sira had no access to Kings. Easiest explanation: there was no book of kings, at least as is today, available to him. So, Ben Sira still bears withness to what was available to those who started recording the royal traditions of the house of Judah.


spin

Celsus

There are both similarities and differences as well. I do not date the books as late as spin does, but I do see them being written in Babylon at the earliest, and compiled in the Persian. That means that, yes, there are probably some authentic memories (in my view), but they are not sufficient to give us an accurate picture (the portrayal of Jehu, Omri, Hezekiah, etc. all being too scant in Assyrian/Babylonian monuments to tell us anything about the accuracy of the biblical picture). I also feel that it is nearly impossible to sort the fact from the fiction (demythologising is simply not enough).

Likewise, the archaeological evidence for a Judahite kingdom prior to 722 is practically non-existant. If Judah didn't exist in a form similar to the Bible prior to 722, then simply put, J couldn't have been written then. And frankly, the regions of "Judah" in the 9th and 8th centuries are nothing like the Biblical portraits, nor can one even establish ethnicity yet. Fritz's "symbiosis" is very much along these lines: Canaanites and Israelites living alongside each other in the Iron I, with Israelites finally subsuming them into "Israelite" culture over the centuries (I happen to disagree with this because I simply think this is evading the question of ethnicity, but I don't think clearly identifiable "Israelites" emerge until at least the 9th century, and Judahites after). Similarly, Finkelstein's new chronology would push the formation of the Israelite state back by some hundred years (late 9th century), and this would only mean a later Judah again. I also happen to have problems with his new chronology, but it cannot be simply falsified, and it (to me) begs less questions than earlier models. Dever criticises minimalist biblical scholars for not coming to terms with archaeological evidence--the same can be said for his allies like Friedman. Maybe that's enough of a teaser for Doctor X.

Much of the discussion of the united monarchy has been circular and naive. You can have scholars like Carol Myers describing the tribal confederation of Israel and the wars of David and Solomon based purely on the Biblical text, just because others have found some coincidences there before. This sort of scholarship is irresponsible, and just plain wrong. As the texts get closer to the exile, though, I expect to see a closer correlation to the Bible than before, simply because my view is that the long period of time between events and recording is sufficient to question their historicity. Spin of course dates things later than myself, so his version is that they are much more fully fictional, although there may well have been founding father myths still about.
If that source material was oral, how far would you trust it? Oral histories, for example, remember prominent names very well, but the facts not so well. So it's rather unsurprising to find an ancient reference to the House of Omri elsewhere, or even House of David (this is disputed, and Andre Lemaire and other proponents are hardly neutrals), at least to me. If, on the other hand, it said "House of David that ruled over all Israel from Sinai to Golan and suppressed the Philistines, Moabites, and Edomites", I would be extremely surprised.

Joel

Celsus

And just to throw in a theory made up in the last 5 minutes:

What if the Jews in exile had lost their language in Babylon, but were encouraged to recover it under Persia (the Persians did that sort of thing: recovering lost religions, languages, etc.)? They would then have searched for old materials, but not understood it well, and then developed a scribal school to recover and preserve these "histories". Along the way, they may have discovered Herodotus and therefore realised what ancient historiography is all about, and then rewritten once more in that light. By the time they were done, they were burying them in caves around the Dead Sea.

or

What if the Jews in exile were searching for theological explanations for their plight? They knew little of what is going on, though perhaps had some contact with Egypt, and perhaps a discussion ensued (and Jeremiah was invented based on their Egyptian correspondent). What little they knew was pieced together over this correspondence, giving an exilic date of composition.

or

What if the Jews were trying to create a history to match the standards of ancient Greece and Persia out of nationalistic pride? Inventing from whole cloth would have been embarassing, but they didn't have very many sources (perhaps a king list), and none of those pesky foreigners knew the history other than that they had once been captured in Babylon. Recovering "history" was not practiced until Herodotus anyway--all inscriptions we have found are records of contemporaneous events (though with the occasional scrubbing off of a name and replacing with another).

As you can see, it is bloody well easy to invent theories (and just as easy to invent histories when no one can check your sources). Blenkinsopp's Pentateuch as a Persian constitutional document is possibly the best one out there (to me). It, however, is conjectural, just like any of the three above.

Joel

Amlodhi

Hello Celsus, spin & Doctor X,

Thanks for the informative replies. Eventually, I would like to be able to come to a reasonable understanding of just when the first significant source materials were compiled and what they may have (basically) consisted of.

I do understand your point here, however, I'm not sure that it warrants your conclusion. The writings of Jesus ben Sirach are (as I'm sure you know) wisdom genre and, as such, have their own objective. Because these writings (which seem to be primarily based on the proverbs) appear to be a sort of proto-Rabbinical exegesis, what may be included or omitted does not necessarily reflect what may be available as source material. And what is included could easily be cast in more "black and white" terms than any source material would warrant.

David, Hezekiah and Josiah, for instance, while not the only kings regarded as "doing that which is right in the eyes of the Lord", in the HB, were exalted as having a level of piety well above any others.

Celsus & spin:

While I agree that there is not exactly a plethora of genuine historical material contained in the HB, I also think that what is contained there cannot be discounted. While it might be possible that subsequent generations of Judeans might have a collective memory of such a significant event as the siege of Jerusalem by Sennacherib, I can scarcely imagine it going beyond that. I can only surmise that if the U.S. (as a society) had no written source material, the collective memory of George Washington would likely extend no further than a mere name isolated in time and space. I strongly suspect that the memories of subsequent events and new heroes would so strongly overshadow those previous, that specific places and incidents (such as crossing the Delaware, Valley Forge, etc.), would be lost completely. It is only from written documents that we retain these particulars, their degree of narrative embellishment notwithstanding.

How then would the Judeans of the late 6th century retain a fairly accurate picture of the geographical and demographical landscape surrounding Jerusalem? Remembering and accurately locating various surrounding cities and kingdoms, many of which were reduced to rubble in the post-exilic period.

Through the subsequent events of the destruction of Jerusalem and the captivity, how (and why) would the Judeans retain the collective memory which would be required to place such personages as king Mesha or Necho accurately in historical place and time?

How and why would they (some 300 yrs. later) recall and include such details as Ahab building a house of (or to store) ivory (which seems to be supported by archaeological excavations in Samaria)?

In addition, regardless of one's preferred brand of alphabet soup, it does seem reasonably apparent that several of the accounts in the Pentateuch have been woven together from (at least) two separate and independent traditions. It would seem (to me) that this conflation would be reasonably understandable if the independent source traditions were created in the era of the divided monarchies. But what could possibly explain the creation of two independent and often contradictory recensions of these stories in the post-exilic era? And then their subsequent conflation?

Celsus: I'm unsure of exactly where you place the chronological window for the creation of these source documents, but I think perhaps we are not separated in this to any large degree. I do agree with you that the southern Judahite kingdom saw no significant existence until c. the mid-8th century (though the northern kingdom of Israel appears to have been an affluent nation as early as the Omride dynasty in the 9th century).

However, it is also clear that by the end of the 8th century, the Judahite kingdom consisted not only of an urban Jerusalem but also outlying fortified cities such as Lachish. It is also my impression that Jerusalem (at this time) was not only strong enough to withstand a siege of Sennacherib's army, but was also affluent enough to (eventually) submit to significant payment of tribute to Assyria.

While it is likely true that Sennacherib left off the siege of Jerusalem to attend to more pressing matters elsewhere, it also remains that Jerusalem withstood a significant assault. From the prism inscription of Sennacherib we read:

And farther down in the same inscription:

Sennacherib (as like most kings) had a tendency to spin the accounts of his exploits in the most favorable light. Sennacherib's statement here that he confined Hezekiah "like a bird in a cage" is the spin that sounds good. However, it would never have been Sennacherib's intention (in bringing up battering rams) to confine Hezekiah in a cage. His intention would have been to breach the walls and possess the city. Yet, regardless of his reason for eventually leaving off, this he was unable to accomplish.

Thus, we can be reasonably sure that by the mid-8th century, the Judahite kingdom contained not only significant fortified urban cities, but also an affluence sufficient to support a scribal retinue. And for the northern kingdom, this affluence would have been obtained as early as the mid-9th century.

Thus, it seems to me that placing the creation of these source documents somewhere in the neighborhood of the 7th - early 6th century in Judah provides the most reasonable explanation for the nature of their construction, with documents created in the northern kingdom possibly dating somewhat earlier still.

With, of course, a subsequent editing process that could have continued to as late as the 2nd century b.c.

Celsus & spin: But do understand, I'm not joined at the hip to this theory. It is not my intention to debate this issue or claim that anyone is "wrong". Though I would like to examine it in some depth with you.

Doctor X: Help us out here.

Namaste'

Amlodhi