Celsus

Firstly, it does not stand or fall on Golan/Lemaire's frauds. I think we've been a little carried away in explaining the minimalist paradigm. Friedman does have some basis for his claims: Arguably, there was an Israelite monarchy, and it could have been responsible for authorship of the bible. My claims, and spin's, and Finkelstein's, and Van Seters', are all in the minority of the spectrum of Biblical scholarship. However, my purpose, at least, is to expose the question-begging that mainstream scholarship has engaged in, and has only recently begun to come to terms with. Other scholars still want to keep their heads buried in the sand. If you get at least that much out of the thread, then I'm happy.

You can still go on to read archaeological work that does support (to an extent) Friedman's views, such as Mazar's Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, or Dever's Who were the early Israelites?, but with a critical eye to the issues exposed.

Just to be fair, etc.

Joel

capnkirk

Just go back and read the paragraph immedialely preceding the one you took the quote from. Never mind, I'll do it. And I'll even red-letter the reference (which occurs both before and after the excerpt you pulled).Or did you perhaps stumble over the word "conquest", thinking that I had changed the subject to the alleged Hebrew conquest of Canaan? I can understand how you could have done that, since my comparative reference in the next sentence was to the most famous battle of that "conquest". That reference was intended only to establish an absolute upper limit for what historicity could be drawn from any of the OT accounts of that conquest (The limitations I imposed serve to illustrate that almost nothing of the OT account of the "conquest of Canaan by Joshua, et al, should be taken as historical.), and to implicitly argue for a much lower realistic probability. I used that example to preface the following statement concerning how much of Hezekiah's version of events were supported by his opponent's version, and what was clearly not.

I could have been more clear. My apologies.

butswana

As far as I know, the only extra/biblical reference to David is the stele fragment. Is there any thing else? If not and the stele turns out to be a fake, that pushes the first verifiable king to Solomon. How about Solomon? What evidence supports his historical existence? What do Mazar & Dever say about this slim evidence?
According to (that goddamn)Finkelstein(shit kid), There is no physical evidence prior(biblical timeline) to the David reference.
If that is indeed the case, why does the bible suddenly become a reliable source of history once the phrase "House of David" is found on a busted up monument?
The practice of telling the Sam/Kings cronology as history without much evidence just bugs me.
I don't know. Maybe I should just read the rest of the damn book.

DrJim

CaptKirk:
True, Fiedman's goal is to determine who wrote the Bible. To prove his case for who did that, he needs to produce a relatively detailed history of early monarchic Judah's political circumstances to get the background for find writers with the coresponding point of view to each source. He obtains this history by a naive reading of Samuel Kings. This weakens his main point about writers in the two subsequent monarchies considerably. That is my point. Please note: I am not reading Freidman as a history of Judah and Israel, I am critiquing the historical premises upon which he bases his source critical analysis. As I said, I'm withholding judgment on the source delineation till I can read it in detail, but his approach to the historical question which grounds the study is not of a very high critical standard, and this will undoubtedly have consequences for the reliability of his analysis, especially regarding the dates and political circumstances of the writers (If his history of early monarchic Israel was not important to his analysis, why include it?).

Spin:
I've been toying the idea of Graeme Auld's notion ("Kings without Privelege", T & T Clark) of a common source for Sam-Kings + Chronicles for a while: Auld was my thesis supervisor in Edinburgh. I'm not to sure where I stand on that right now: He caught a lot of flak for it, at least in details which were elevated to a rejection of the whole idea. I do remember he told me "Don't go down in MY sinking ship", so I went off to drill a few holes in a barge of my own invention. It felt good...

Your point is well taken, and I should revise, rephrase and clarify: I think it is poor historical methodology to take details in the Sam-Kings account at more or less face value, especially about the political / economic policies of Davidic/Solmonic state, since we can't definitely prove its existence. IT is not a simple matter to assume that such an entity existed with a government structure as depicted in the Biblical accounts, let alone saw the kinds of political intrigue narrated in those texts.
As far as the sources employed in Sam-Kings, even if they are adopted with minimal change (albeit with supplementation) we don't know their history can't assume their reliability in the kinds of details that Friedman needs to produce the political and religious climate in which he finds his writers of the biblical sources.

All told, Friedman's use of Sam-Kings to provide solid information about the early monarchy is tenuous at best. It is a bit curious how he simply assumes objective historical information in those narratives which in turn provides a historical setting to isolate the subjectivity of the narrative's writers. In the quote from Freidman I made in my previous post, this is pretty plain.

JRL

Celsus

You're getting a little confused: The Mesha stele (Moabite Stone) has a line in it that says bt...d or b...wd (I forget which). Our ever-reliable Andre Lemaire thinks that it is refering to byt dwd or "House of David". The Tel Dan inscription clearly mentions "House of David" and has nothing to do with Lemaire (it was discovered in situ by Avraham Biran, a reputable archaeologist), but it is used as a political label (think "House of Lancaster" or "Tudor", etc.) It could have started off as a specific reference to David's dynasty, but there is no conclusive way to prove this. As for Solomon, several gates found at cities like Megiddo, Hazor, and I forget where else are ascribed to him, but these are disputed. If Shishak/Shoshenq's invasion is to be correlated with the Iron II layers that Mazar et al. believe it to be, it still doesn't actually prove the historicity of Solomon, only that the Biblical chronology can now be fixed (and does not consider problems about whether one should or shouldn't rely on biblical chronology).
It doesn't. It only says that we can now conclusively prove that someone or something called dwd existed prior to the inscription in the 8th century.

Joel

P.S. Here is a good page

capnkirk

DrJim:

I am not suggesting that Friedman's presumed foundationational assumptions be accepted without reservation. Rather, I am suggesting that those assumptions be conditionally accepted as valid in the absence of exclusionary counter-evidence, as a working model to begin our search for historicity from. I will stipulate that Midrash was alive and well both before and during the periods being examined here, and that it necessarily colored the OT account. The task is to determine the extent of this coloring. Further, I would assert that there is no hope of establishing a complete historical consensus without significantly more archaeological evidence than has thus far be discovered. The best that we can presently expect is that some historical anchors can be ascertained that can be used to either support, modify or exclude the scenario that currently represents the best distillation of events available within the OT accounts. Central to that process is to determine what impact each archaeological find has on Friedman's literary model; which suspected errors are incidental, which are injurious, and which are fatal. The final product will necessarily be composed of parts that are historically certain, others that are probably true, still others that might be true, and exclude those parts that cannot be true.
I agree...with the following caveat. To discredit his analysis on the basis of Friedman's naivite, one must also demonstrate that similar naivete did not extend to the writers (by virtue of earlier midrashic editing). For example: Presuming the "fact" of a Deuteronomist author by virtue of the demonstration of a body of writing which clearly belongs to an unkhown author permits one to derive a POV from that body. Whether that POV was historically sound is an entirely different matter, but one must assume that the "D" author believed it was true, or that he committed midrash himself to support his POV. In either case, he certainly had an itentifiable POV. It is certainly a valid point of investigation to attempt to determine to what extent he adjusted the historical information available to him. It is also a valid point of investigation to attempt to determine what political reality would inspire him to write at all. But unless one could present archaeological evidence that would preclude the existence of such a political reality, then Friedman's analysis should remain in the category of "conditionally" accepted.
I am saying that Friedman makes no pretense of claiming a historical basis (in any archaeological sense), and to elevate his conditional acceptance to the status of "historical basis" is to erect a strawman argument. At most, he is saying that this is the most accurate account that the OT can offer. Any and all archaeological evidence, either in support or refutation of that account is most welcome. Unless you can offer evidence that Friedman intentionally ignored archaeological information that would damage his case, then he has committed no error to be faulted for. Independent archaeological evidence can and should be used to support or refute the OT account, but that in and of itself does not refute his literary analysis. If you were given a body of literary work that you knew to be full of interpolations, and set about to determine the authorship of that work, I believe that you would consider that refutations that impugned your analysis, based on a lack of historicity of the literary account itself to be unfair. THAT is the point I am making.
As I said, he never asserts that his study is grounded in a historical question. That is the gounding for YOUR study, not his.
If the historical grounding of the account is faulty, it surely will have consequences for the reliability of the account itself, and fault would be rightly placed there. For example he makes no assertions about the historicity of the creation or flood stories; his interest is in who wrote them down, and why there are multiple versions included. Why do you hold him to a different standard when it comes to inclusions that are less obviously mythical? By all means, USE his analysis to attack the account, but don't fault him for not doing it for you.

Amlodhi

Hi Celsus,

The primary focus of the "Friedman on Myths and Documentary Hypothesis" thread seems to have relocated here. And since I have already presented (here) some of my questions regarding your previous post, I thought it might be best to consolidate the remainder of my responses here as well rather than maintaining two threads on basically the same topic. Also, since this thread is more current, it may generate more contributions from other posters regarding the questions presented here.

Briefly then, I will just say that I do agree with you regarding the tendency of many authors to make unwarranted conjectures based on a minimum of objective evidence. This tendency, I think, is especially prevalent in the field of textual criticism.

However, I also think that there are morphological markers that can provide clues as to where invention can be separated from (at least the basics) of historical narrative. For instance, you mentioned the story of Ai, and it is (as you said) a good case in point. The term "Ai" translated means "heap" or "ruin". And while this cannot be taken to be conclusive in itself, it does provide a literary clue that what was written as historical narrative, actually informs us that a legendary Israel was busily attacking what was already a heap of ruins.

In addition to such literary clues, Finkelstein makes a good case that the demographical backdrop of the exodus and conquest narratives, rather than reflecting the demographic circumstances of the LB, more accurately depicts the situation as it stood in the 8th/ 7th century.

What is compelling to me here, is the conflation of these methodologies. It is only in the 8th/ 7th centuries that the (basic historical) biblical narratives begin to be corroborated by archaeological and extra-biblical evidence. Narratives of alleged events occuring before this time are rife with literary anachronisms, demographical anachronisms and a lack of archaeological and extra-biblical corroboration.

This is not to say that embellishment added to these narratives (early or late) is factual any more than the boasting stelae of foreign kings need necessarily be the unvarnished truth. Still, the basic political interactions of the kings and countries as depicted in the biblical narrative (regarding the 8th/ 7th centuries onward), match fairly well with the extra-biblical records we have from Assyria, Egypt, Babylonia, and etc.

Alphabet soup notwithstanding, it is hardly disputable that there are (at least) two parallel traditions in many of the early biblical narratives. Yet, I don't think that the events described in the united kingdom narratives can be used as causative factors in the north/south orientation of the respective sources (I suspect the UK tales are more a result than the cause). Nevertheless, for the independent reasons given above, an 8th/ 7th century placement for these sources enjoys a natural and intuitive explanation for their north/south orientation, i.e. the divided kingdom.

Thus, I have two basic reservations concerning the theory of post-exilic sources. The first is: why? We can see from the Assyrian records that Judah (in the late 8th/ 7th century) and Israel (even earlier, perhaps late 9th/early 8th century) certainly had the culture and the resources to record the political, (basically) historical, and legendary narratives of their respective countries(rather than merely their day-to-day domestic transactions). What indication is there that they didn't?

And the second reservation would be: if it wasn't until the exilic or post-exilic period that these records began to be recorded, why does the literature seem to switch from legendary to recording a (basically) historical account at precisely the time when the archaeological record indicates they could (i.e., again, 8th/ 7th century)? Also, why would the earlier legendary narratives appear to anachronistically reflect the demographical situation just as it existed in the 8th/ 7th century? It seems unlikely that this would be the case for sources written in the mid 6th/ 5th century and based on collective memory.

Again, this is an interesting subject to me, and I will be interested in your (and everyone's) responses.

Amlodhi

Celsus

Just a quick response since I have to run (will get back to this in time):
If you are refering to J and E, then this is very much in dispute, and the search for E has mostly been abandoned. If you are talking about J and P, no one will strongly disagree, but probably wouldn't term them "parallel". I will try and say something about Finkelstein's correlation later on (and it won't be nice).

Joel

spin

I humbly have to admit that I've read nothing by Auld. I came at the situation in an effort to see how Josephus used Sam/Kgs and Chr., and the evidence was quite strange. Josephus usually has the tendency to work with a single document as a source and work in bits and pieces from others as he goes, always sticking to his one source. With Sam/Kgs and Chr, though I can't really find any of the unique material from Chr, I do find passages that apparently flit from one to the other at a paragraph level -- sometimes even at a phrase level -- which doesn't represent the way he worked in the bulk of his material. My conclusion was that he may have been using a source which was different again, but possible the same source as the other two used. But then there are complications with that idea, eg Josephus uses Ishbosheth and Mephibosheth, so perhaps he did use Sam/Kgs or some intermediate text.

Still from other grounds I can't imagine when Sam/Kgs was written if it were before the Hasmonaean era because I can't justify priests writing or preserving such texts which show so little interest in the priesthood and which give priestly rights to the king.

We must remember -- and I can't stress this too much -- the only people who could sustain a scribal community through the second temple period before the Hasmonaeans were the priests, so fundamentally the priesthood had a monopoly over religious texts. To get an idea of the prestige of a scribe, see Ben Sira 38:24-39:11. At the same time it should be noted that the community based on Jerusalem was basically just that, just Jerusalem and little more, for much of the time down to the Hasmonaean expansion, so there was no-one else to be able to support a non-earning member of society. It took years to train a scribe without any recompense, so it took a lot of wealth to "create" one. Again the only people who had such wealth besides a few rich merchants were the priests.

I think therefore that any consideration about what was or was not in texts, when they were written and by whom needs to consider who was capable of commissioning new texts or redaction of old ones or just duplication of old ones.


spin

DrJim

Spin:
Good points: I will have to come back to them again when I'm not so busy! Maybe a new thread one day on it will be useful. Now I have to get a lecture on Hindu Bhakti in order. I keep having images of Homer Simpson dressed up as Ganesha at Apu's wedding running through my mind...