Chris Weimer

What kind of support from the DSS would you expect, and why?

Chris Weimer

Baseless assertion and argument from faith. You, sir, have no evidence, so much that you have to resort to the Bible warning us not to read books and instead rely on the Lord? No way. You can have your preaching and your <edit> religion and I'll take real scholarship.

Steven Avery

When hundreds of journal articles and books build on some supposition of straw, that is not real scholarship and the scripture admonition applies quite well.

Shalom,
Steven

Chris Weimer

Do you ever back up anything you say, or are you merely content to babble nonesense continually until we fall over and die from your utter lack of evidence?

Damn, checking my irony meter, you just broke it. :down:

RUmike

Prax, you offer no evidence against the DH, and won't even clearly state your own stance. Do you believe in Mosaic authorship? And if so, could you give your reasons, or at least a few?

Apikorus

Why should we even believe that there was a Moses? Moses is as historical as Odysseus.

Chris Weimer

Less so. There really was a king of Ithaca. There was, however, no leader of a Hebrew exodus from Egypt, since it didn't exist.

Homer 1
Bible 0

rob117

Who Wrote the Bible? is an introduction. Friedman acknowledges the conflation between El and Yahweh in both that book and others (he explains this very early in Who Wrote the Bible?, he later makes a statement about the transformation of Yahweh from a national god to a universal god in the exilic period in that book, and he makes a statement as to the debate on when monotheism began to develop in the appendices in The Hidden Book in the Bible); the statement of "The god of Israel was Yahweh" is a simplification, but even in Israel's polytheistic period it can be fair to say that Yahweh, after being conflated with El, was both the national god and the chief god in the pantheon, as the inscriptional evidence from Palestine attests (i.e., "Yahweh and his Asherah,"; the Mesha stele in which Moab talks about taking the vessels of Yahweh for Chemosh; the relationship of Yahweh to pagan Israel was probably similar to that of Chemosh to Moab- not the only god, but nobody would object to calling Chemosh the "god of Moab.").

I think you're reading too much into his slips of the tongue.

Well, there may have been a small exodus in which the escapees settled among the native Israelites. If so, even the date proposed for the Song of the Sea (sometime around 1050-900 BC, usually), is enough time (200 years) for that small migration to morph into a myth of enslavement. If there was no exodus at all, then the myth is just that- a myth, that people believed and made a song about.

hallq

praxeus-

Ultimately, it matters very little whether contemporary secular theories on the Torah are correct or not.

Consider: what if a decade from now, scholars realized that everything we had ever thought about the authorship of the Homeric epics was wrong? Would that mean that the Trojan war, with divine intervention, and the marvellous things of Odysseus' voyage actually happened? No! We have no reason to suppose that these are anything but legend, and this would remain true even if scholars have made major mistakes about these epics. The same goes for the Torah.

The question is not the amount of support for current hypothesis. The question is whether we have any reason to suppose stories that look like legends and quack like legends are anything but legends.

Loomis

I don’t think these are “slips of the tongue.�

I don’t think Friedman had all the facts when he wrote Who Wrote the Bible.

I don’t think he understood that El was Israel’s god, and that there are plenty of stories about him in the OT.

Do you mind if we get specific?

In the very first chapter he draws an artificial line between El (described as ‘the old pagan god’) and Yahweh (described as ‘the God of Israel’).

When I google define pagan the first hit I get is this:

Whether you like it or not, Friedman is describing the relationship of the gods El and Yahweh to the stories in the Bible. He could have remained neutral on this issue (for example – he could have talked about baseball), but instead chose to make a few allegations.

Friedman is asking us to believe that the god named El did not belong to the stories in the Bible, and that El was NOT worshipped by ‘real’ Israelites. Friedman says that El was a pagan god and that Yahweh was Israel’s god (exclusive of all other gods including El).

That … is the part that I object to.

That … is the part that is ignorance and unequivocally wrong.

Like I said in my other posts – it is misleading and irresponsible because it denies the syncretic way the religions and stories in the Bible evolved. And that is the very subject at hand. (not baseball)

If the purpose of Who Wrote the Bible is to explain why some authors referred to their god as ‘Yahweh’ while other authors used the name ‘El’, then the reader is entitled to know that El was a separate god. El was the original god of Israel. Israelites worshipped El. Real ones. Yahweh was the god of Judah. Some of the stories in the OT are about El. There is no reason to think that the authors who wrote about the god El knew who Yahweh was or worshipped him.

This is simply not always true. Why not admit it?

And if Friedman understands the facts then why is he asking us to believe it?

Sometimes ‘the name of God in the Bible’ is El. And its not because it’s the same god with a different name. It’s the El we all know and love: father of Shachar, Shalim, and Yahweh/Baal. The El who used to get drunk at parties.

I don’t think Friedman was being malicious when he wrote this; he was just clueless like most folks. The difference being that Friedman was asking for some amount of undeserved repect on the issue.

If the Documentary Hypothesis demands that The name of God in the Bible is Yahweh because of what Friedman wrote, then the Documentary Hypothesis should die. :devil: