bekaybe

Thanks for the input.

I should say, I was using the term "Philosophy" loosely to describe contemplation of God by the Bible.

The fact that it's a collection of stories already told seems to support my assertion.

To the extent that I made authorship sound like 1 guy, I apologize. That wasn't my intention.

Amedeo

The Bible is a book of memories wrapped in fables to indoctrinate chilchen, and distorted from generations to generation, and added to for the greater glory of Israel.

Amedeo

As a book of memories -- obituaries and tales of heroic exploits [in the Heroic Age of manking that developed after the formation of farms and cities ]--, the Bible contains a lot of ethnological information, that is, the customs and beliefs therein described, just as the Iliad and other ancient books do.

Many of those memories of names ( of gods, peoples, individual humans, giants and talking serpents can be placed in historical perspective by those of us who have some knowledge of the real world [acquired through Caucasian researches into human history and into the universe since the 6th century B.C.].

gurugeorge

I share spamandham's view of the Bible (specifically) as above.

I'd also add another factor to your theory (which is more like a general theory about how holy books might arise out of oral traditions, it seems to me): people can have "visions" (which are like dreams, but had while awake, a bit like hallucinations, but with "mythic" content that's a bit more coherent than dreams ordinarily are), in which it seems to them, for all the world, like they are actually conversing and interacting with discarnate intelligences (i.e. intelligent beings that don't have bodies made of flesh). These are often incorporated into the ongoing narrative too, interwoven with the kernels of "tribal history", etc. The visions might be explanatory of the historical events (with the entity purporting to show some kind of "behind the scenes" machinery, in terms of interacting deities and their wills, etc.). The point to bear in mind about visions is that they can seem very real, as real as everyday material events, to people who have them, so they seem to them not to be part of a "different" world (as we would think now, with our modern understanding of the mind, hallucinations, etc.), but part of the "same" world as the physical world (i.e. even though the entities that people who have visions talk to don't have physical bodies, but bodies that seem to be made of another kind of "stuff", they seem as real as entities with physical bodies, and that "stuff" seems to be part of the same world as physical stuff).

There's also an element of genuine mysticism in most holy books - i.e. the "stories" may be seen as illustrative of highly abstract but very deep principles in the universe arising out of "non-dual" or "oceanic" mystical experiences (where the mystic has a profound sense of being the Universe, God, the Absolute, etc., etc.).

Or there might be a mixture of your causes plus these two I'm highlighting: a mystic might have a unification experience in the course of a vision about some event in the tribe's history, so the narrative will encode: A) history, B) a vision elucidatory of that history in some moral way, or a story about it given by a "god", and C) the non-dual mystical experience itself. So it can be genuinely "multi-layered".

Another thing I'd say is that you get quite a good idea of how myths and religions mutate, and a good explanation of their complexity, if you think about how comics, particularly Superhero comics work in modern day times, particularly the concept of "retroconning". People enjoy discussing heroic tales, and if two versions of the tale disagree, they will try and "harmonize" the apparent contradictions, eventually the harmonization will itself become another version of the hero's saga.

So in the end you can have 4 or even 5 things at work, the 3 mentioned above, plus "retroconning", and then at the end of it all, simple confusion, error, misremembering, copying errors, etc., which later get incorporated into the text.

gupwalla

For the origins of the early biblical texts (Torah, books of the judges, histories), I'd encourage you to read Richard Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible? (or via: amazon.co.uk). (And when I say 'bible' in this post, unless otherwise stated these are the bits I'm talking about).

For me, the most elucidating comment to explain how the bible developed wasn't about the bible at all...it was about New Guinean aborigenes. Jarrod Diamond recounts a story that even today, two NGs meeting one another for the first time while hunting will sit down and recite their genealogies. If they find a relative in common, they embrace and go about their business. If they can find no common relative, then they fight to the death.

Many otherwise arbitrary or confusing parts of the bible make a great deal more sense when read as an attempt by a confederated group of tribes to explain how the current political relationships are, and to suggest that they have always been thusly. (Which is always important to the folks at the top of the political ladder, and they tend to be the ones writing the official records of events across all cultures.)

This body of largely oral history developed over time to include these sorts of relationships. For example, the twelve tribes of Israel become symbolically related to each other by tracing their geneaologies back to single important figures, all of whom were decendants of Jacob. In another version, the twelve tribes are represented by the chiefs of Joshua. In one version, Joshua is the founder of Israel by uniting the tribes, and in another version, a group of Hebrew people immigrate from Egypt and bring their own legend of Moses.

As the culture began to gel and centralize into more permanent cities with 'modern' (for the times) beaurocracies, a literate priest class developed. This class preserved the oral traditions in writing, possibly shifting some bits around in order to add the weight of history to the current monarch's policies. During the divided kingdom, there were two separate priest classes, so many of the common stories ended up moving in different directions as they were put to paper. At various points, the texts were "rediscovered" or lost portions were "found," so that contemporary criminal, administrative, and temple law was found to be nearly exactly the same as that delivered way back in the time of Moses!

The histories, from the kingship of David onward, tend to be much more accurate and believable as straight history (or as straight as any history of the time was; when you're the chosen people of God, your religion and your history are not separate things but one thing). Most probably, they were so accurate because they were based not on oral history but on contemporary administrative records kept by the priests acting in their administrative capacity in the king's court. The story of David (post-Goliath) is particularly compelling, and is either the work of an eye witness or else the most ingeneous early example of the psychological novel.

When Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians, the priests carried off the entire library into Exile, where it went through one or two last edits (depending on whether the Deuteronomist finished his work before or after Jerusalem fell; text dating and other clues suggest that he may have been an eye-witness to the Exile). The last edit was done by the priestly class that gave rice to the Saddeuceans, who were the official priests during the Greek and Roman occupations of Palestine.

This final editor had the distinct responsibility, as had never fully existed before, of uniting all the exiled Jews under one common text and history, so he had to painstakingly piece together some of the more divergent prior stories. The writings were the last remnants of the older Hebrew culture, so the editor had to keep as much as possible in the text, which gave rise to some fairly big contradictions--some of which were blended better than others.

Amedeo

My recent Bible studies, in the midst of a virulent atmosphere, are contained in the following threads, while they last -- for those who want to learn a few things about the nature of the Bible:

I Need Backup
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...48#post4412148
Chiefs and Their Councils
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...03#post4397303
The Greek and Levantine Essenes
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...28#post4419728
Genesis:1 or Foreign Elohim?
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...73#post4386513
Pyramids and All That
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...36#post4433236