Greg2003

Interesting thoughts. I agree with you and Celsus that there must be other influences. Perhaps the Redactor was post Ezra and R emphasised more of the independant nationalism. However, I would mention in regard to your comments that it is interesting that the divine promise is to control the whole Levant, but NOT Persia or Egypt. Why not include these territories as well, if god is so powerful. I suggest that this is a further clue to two of the main influences on the people building mythology. Both peria and egypt had profound infuences on the text. Both empires were threats to each other at some point. Both needed a buffer between them that would resist the dominance of each others empire, but would also not have a strong centralized monarchy capable of putting up effective resistance to either. So the jews get a mythology that borrows a lot of great empire rhetoric but without the emphasis on kings. Persia's influence seems more pronounced than egyptian since they had the last say between the two. Of course greek influence followed, but neither Alexander nor any of the other empires that followed would play as significant a role in the mythmaking, since the temple centered national identity was already established. Anyhow, those are just my impressions reflecting upon what I've read. I could be wrong. But, I feel less inclined to entirely dismiss the role propaganda played in developing the jewish mythology.

Answerer

What about Abraham, is he a monotheist? I thought that he should be the oldest example.

DrJim

This is a good point, and one well worth thinking hard about. One can, however, find not a few instances in which all the nation are said to come flocking to Jerusalem to worship the 'one' true god alongside all the other references to all the foreign nations being wiped off the face of the earth. There is a lot of ink spent on predicting the downfall of Egypt, but I don't think Persia is the object of too much prophetic ill-will. Some folk would see biblical referneces to Assyria and even Babylon as cyphers for denunciations of Persia, but I don't think we have to go that far.

I would not dismiss it either, and I agree that the Persian had a whole lot of influence on the thought expressed in the Hebrew Bible. Maybe where we differ is the degree to which we see a direct role of the imperial propagandists, as opposed to the 'middle managment' propagandists, with regional, class and internal axes to grind, not to mention jockying for position within (and, for the brave, in spite of) the empire.

Celsus has asked me to provide some summaries of the Watts, 'Persia and Torah' collection, and as time permits I will. I have some notes and quotes from Blenkinsopp's peice almost ready, and I think I could have some more done soon, but itme is short, the inlaws are coming, and I must be sociable (I'm wondering, If a can get some writing done on the book, should I post these to another thread with a more apt subject title?)


I also have another book I must do a review on very soon, D. Smith-Christopher's, A Biblical Theology of Exile. I don't usually read theology, but this book sounded very interesting, and has not disappointed. It touches on some of the points I've been making, that there can be a veiled rhetoric of resistance, if only on a symbolic level, to imperialism despite of there being, on the surface level, acceptance of political subjugation.
Perhaps I am overly influenced by this idea, but I think it is worth throwing into the mix.

Anyway, I'm really enjoying the conversations on I.I. and especially this thread. Its making me think about a lot of important issues. I'm the only OT person at this university, and the NT guy is off on Sabbatical. There is a very conservative Christian 'Miracle Channel' on TV (this is the Bible Belt of Alberta), so this forum is really a breath of fresh air.

lpetrich

If there was a historical Abraham, probably not. If he had been an early worshipper of the Biblical God, he would have worshipped that entity alongside of other deities, as was done during the monarchy period. For him, the Biblical God would have been some protector of the tribe, as the Moabites' Chemosh had been.

The various accounts of the patriarchs have various anachronisms, like them using herds of camels as pack animals. That became common only in the 1st millennium BCE, while Abraham had lived in the early 2nd millennium BCE.

So Abraham as a strict monotheist would likely have been a similar sort of back-projection.

I think that Abraham and his immediate descendants had been about as mythical as Hercules or Odysseus or Helen of Troy. And here's what I think is a good reason:

Each of the twelve tribes of Israel has a single patriarchal-era couple as its ancestors, which is not how ethnicities are known to emerge. There are two good examples of such emergence in that same part of the world over the last century:

The modern-Israeli ethnicity
The Palestinian-Arab ethnicity

Both of the emerged from pre-existing groups of people, and not from some single founder.

The modern-Israeli one emerged from Jewish settlers who were looking for some place where they would not be less-than-welcome guests, as Jews had been for the last two millennia.

The Palestinian one emerged from those Arabs that were besieged and displaced by the Israeli settlers.

Vorkosigan

Thanks Celsus and DrJim! New stuff for me to think about. Dr J, you should check out our library, interesting reading. We don't have enough discussion of the OT here, so I hope you'll stick around and stimulate more contributions from Celsus, Apikorus and the others interested in the OT.

Vorkosigan