Chuck Rightmire

Just don't get close. Damn, missed again.

CX

Even if that were the case, there is ample Sumerian and Babylonian religious mythology which clearly predates even the existence of the people we could call Israelites (at least as a coherent cultural unit) and much from that mythos which appears in the Pentateuch.

spin

If the existence of a people can be indicated by the language which they speak, the language of the Hebrews simply didn't exist much further back than say 1000 BCE. It is a language akin to Edomite, Ammonite and Moabite together with which it forms a subfamily of a group in which Phoenician also belongs though more distantly. Phoenician separated from the group earlier, as the comparative linguistics of the family shows. This means that Phoenician is older than Hebrew. We also have a nice datable body of Ugaritic texts which help fill out the family more and we should conclude that Hebrew is probably younger than Ugaritic as well. So most mythology written before 1200 BCE will predate anything written in Hebrew. Now. perhaps the traditions we see in Hebrew literature were older than the Hebrew language, but the Hebrews obviously weren't.


spin