RyanS2

Hmm.. and I read this thread after reading "Mythistory and Other Essays" by William McNeil which starts off with, "Myth and history are close kin inasmuch as both explain how things got to be the way they are by telling some sort of story.... a historian who rejects someone else's conclusions call them mythical, while claiming that his own views are true. But what seems true to one historian will seem false to another, so one historian's truth becomes another's myth, even at the moment of utterance.... Historians are likely to select facts that show we -- whoever "we may be -- conform to our cherished principle.. the result is mythical: the past as we want it to be, safely simplified into a contrast between good guys and bad guys."

Very good quote I think. Another is that "myth and history are inextricably bound". Almost all myths have some history to them. The myth of Atlantis was really a place called Thera. Even the most ardent of minimalists believe some of the Bible is true. The reason why some minimalists disbelieve in King David and Solomon is that they are Phoenician names of Gods found in El Shaba, (I think), around the 14th century BCE. Some people then believe that since the Canaanites and Hebrews had:

The same language
The same Gods, (YHWH used to be married to Asherah before Persian influence!)
The same pottery
Same everything

It just seems they were another group of Canaanites. The "House of David" quote is just like any other claim made by people to be descended from a God or have a God as a king. Else, it could be a man who named himself after a God, also very common.

Jayhawker Soule

You raise an interesting point, one which might play well in the Philosophy forum. I, for one, have given the definition of 'myth' little thought, but I suspect that your first quote suffers too much from relativism as opposed to, for example, As for your second quote, it is likewise true that astrology and astronomy are "inextricable bound" and all astrology has some astronomy content. This, of course, does little to validate astrology.

And this is precisely the point. The historical content of the Torah seems less and less sufficient to validate the Judeo-Christian religion. Let Sojourner553 demolish windmills with his sermons against absolutism and "100% certainty" and offer up such remarkable absurdities as: The Exodus could have been a dozen guys out of Egypt meeting up with the rest of their clan Canaanites. Technically, more than 0% of the biblical account then is still true. Clearly S553 does not understand that, "[t]echnically, [sic!] more than 0% of the biblical account" is simply not good enough.

Here, for example, is what Nahum M. Sarna says in his Exploring Exodus - the Origins of Biblical Israel:
This, and not S553's parody, is what is meant by the Exodus. This is what will be reaffirmed by millions of Jews as they commemorate Passover next week. And this is what S553, with his "dozen guys out of Egypt meeting up with the rest of their clan" chooses to treat so thoughtlessly. But what is far more relevant and interesting is the fact that

• this "essential theme",
• this "pivitol event", and
• this "dominant motif"

is precisely what is being debated by folks like Dever, Finkelstein, and Shanks and challenged in Harpers magazine as "False Testimony".

<a href="http://datadump.icaap.org/cgi-bin/glossary/SocialDict/SocialDict?alpha=M" target="_blank">*Definition found Here</a>

[ March 20, 2002: Message edited by: ReasonableDoubt ]</p>

RyanS2

Reasonable, I concur with your opinion. Perhaps I should better illustrate. What I was pointing to is that people seem to think that the Bible writers were deliberately distorting history. It might not have been so. Like medicine was once not known to be secular from mythology, (i.e. you were sick because of a demon, or God made you that way, etc.), history was once inextriceable from mythology. In other words, Christians seem to think that the writers of the Old Testament possessed super abilities that are actually very recent, one of them being a methodology for establishing fact from fiction. In "Mythistory", it talks about some of the problems that historians have had because of this in early times, not having a clear methodology. In fact, it wasn't until the 1800's whenever historians actually started developing tests besides common sense to figure out what was history and what was fantasy, (textual analysis and other things like that). Another point made was that historians preserve their image, that is, whatever they think really happened they will *make* happen in history. For instance, read Tacticus on his accounts of the Celts and the Persians. Biased? You bet. England did the same thing whenever they started colonialism in America, Australia, and India. Amazingly, they all found groups of barbarians who needed to be converted or killed. (For a good discussion, check out "Ornamentalism: How the British saw its Empire").

In other words, there are two major points about the writers of the Old Testament:

1.) They had no basis for establishing fact from fantasy, or no real methodology.

2.) They wrote with a heavy bias to turn events into what they wanted to happen, rather than what did.

As an example, compare Israel Finkelstein's reason the Omrite dynasty collapsed versus the writers of the Old Testament. Do we really think it was because God was punishing them for their wickedness?

Ed: There's a link here which verifies my point on another thread.

<a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=51&t=000168" target="_blank">http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=51&t=000168</a>

[ March 21, 2002: Message edited by: RyanS2 ]</p>

Jayhawker Soule

Or, as Levine writes in Etz Hayim - Biblical Archaeology:

This is interesting stuff when written by Finkelstein/Silberman, but it's remarkable when discovered at the back of the Etz Hayim Torah and Commentary.

boneyard bill

Posted by ReasonableDoubt:

But this is stacking the deck. The argument isn't between archeologists and theologians. The argument is between archeologists and other archeologists. Neither archeologists nor Biblical historians approach the subject from the theological "truth" of the Bible.

BTW, I want to thank all the people who have posted links to this thread. It has been an interesting debate and the links have been crucial to it.

That said, I have to ask how anyone who has read these links can still hold to the minimalist view. On the basis of what has been posted, it seems clear that there was not one exodus but many. Semitic tribes frequently went to Egypt, settled in the Land of Goshen, and departed again for Asia. Why then, should an exodus be a surprise? Of course, the Biblical numbers are surely exaggerated, and the leader of such an exodus probably did not deal directly with the Pharoah but with lesser officials. But it hardly seems justified to claim that no such exodus occurred at all.

Secondly, why should the 10th Century reference to "Israel" in the Egyptian records be discounted as "another Israel"? It would seem to coincide chronologically, in fact, with the Biblical reference to the defeat of Saul.

And thirdly, why should the united monarchy be discounted simply for lack of evidence? If the united monarchy is discounted, we have to assume that it was made up by Babylonian Jews to account for the disappearance of certain tribes which had never been a part of Jewish culture to begin with. Why should the defeat of the northern tribes be of any more significance to the Judeans than the defeat of other polytheistic tribes such as the Philistines the Moabites or the Tyrians?

A second issue centers around the origin of Jewish monotheism. Staunch conservatives would hold to the Mt. Sinai tradition while minimalists want to date it to Persian influence from the Babylonian captivity. But Persian influence wasn't strictly monotheistic. Zoroaster taught of two gods, one evil and one good, but equal in power. This certainly had an influence on Jewish thought as both the Dead Sea Scrolls and Christian writings establish. But this was not mainstream Judaism of either Josiah or the Pharisees.

Both the scriptural and archeological evidence seems to suggest that monotheism arose independently in Israel with the prophets and the reforms of Josiah. This would place it in the 7th and 8th Centuries B.C. considerably after Sinai but before Persian influence.

This may not please the Bibliophiles, but it doesn't support the minimalist position either. It seems to me that the mainstream archeologists have a pretty good take on the situation and the minimalists either have a political agenda, as Shanks claims, or they're seeking publicity with a radical, but unsubstantiated theory.

spin

Michael wrote early on, referring to Roland de Vaux the Qumran archaeologist:
-------------------------------------------
That was the guy who originally excavated at Qumran. Lots of irregularities. Now I know why.
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De Vaux was in fact a proficient archaeologist. His work was pretty textbook like. The only problem I would have with his job at Qumran is that he dug the whole site down to the bottom, leaving nothing remaining to text hypotheses.

He also dug in numerous other places and worked with Kenyon in their Jerusalem dig.

spin

Cited way back by hekeziah jones:
-----------------------------------
To answer my second question, who are these people, these revisionists, these nihilists? What drives them? To give you the names of the four best known among them, they are Thomas Thompson, Philip Davies, Niels Lemche, and Keith Whitelam. Some of them are driven, as I indicated above, by Marxism and leftist politics. Some of them are former evangelical Christians who now see the evils of their former ways. Some of them are counterculture people, left over from the 60s and 70s, whose personality includes the questioning of authority in all aspects of their lives.
------------------------------

Having met all four of the people mentioned here, I know that what is said is total scurrilous rubbish. We are dealing with three professors and an ex-professor who is now the editor of Sheffield Press.

Cited way back by hekeziah jones:
------------------------------
First, almost without exception, these individuals have no expertise in the larger world of ancient Near Eastern studies.
------------------------------

That's why we are dealing with people who can teach Ugaritic and Phoenician and have good knowledge of other Semitic languages. Who writes such ignorant stupidity?


------------------------------
Second, as you may have gathered, almost without exception, the scholars of this group are not Jewish.
------------------------------

Now we are getting crass. Let's exclude the Israeli "minimalists" from the group -- Finkelstein and Ussishkin have been branded thus and their Jewishness has been bandied about. Herzog wrote a fairly straight archaeological piece a few years ago and got the rudest response from the jerk who edits BAR. But let's not mention them, just the non-Jewish ones and make lurid aspersions. Crass. Crass. Crass.

The bottom line is that we have various people who are from various places with various ideas who have all been labeled -- arbitrarily -- as "Minimalist", because they are attempting to apply historical methods with rigour.

spin

boneyard bill:
--------------------------
Zoroaster taught of two gods, one evil and one good, but equal in power. This certainly had an influence on Jewish thought as both the Dead Sea Scrolls and Christian writings establish. But this was not mainstream Judaism of either Josiah or the Pharisees.
--------------------------

Stangely enough, the Dead Sea Scrolls are probably mainline Jewish Temple religion before the siege of the temple by Pompey. If one actually reads them one finds the leaders are priests, the sons of Zadok and the sons of Aaron. The copper scrolls talks of temple treasures. There are texts which are priestly rosters for service in the temple (called mishmarot). There are visions from within the temple (Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifices). There are rules about sacrifices (prinicpally the red heiffer), which of course were only permitted at the temple by the rostered priests (or the high priest). There is a temple scroll, a defence of temple purity (MMT), there are temple liturgies.

But the religion of the temple as found in the scrolls (even while there are a few notes against the temple clique -- at one stage, 167 BCE, the conservative priesthood left the temple to join Judas Maccabaeus against the Seleucids, but they later returned to the temple when the struggle was over) was done away with by the predominantly non-temple Pharisees.

So, the Dead Sea Scrolls were probably mainstream at the time they were written, but that religion was superceded by one and a half centuries of chaos and the ascendency of the Pharisaic religion first after Javneh and then after bar Kochba. The rabbinical heirs of the Pharisees were the ones who set down the new foundations of Judaism leading to its survival to the present time.

spin

boneyard bill:
-------------------
Both the scriptural and archeological evidence seems to suggest that monotheism arose independently in Israel with the prophets and the reforms of Josiah. This would place it in the 7th and 8th Centuries B.C. considerably after Sinai but before Persian influence.
-------------------

Archaeology seems to suggest that monotheism did not arise during what is termed the first temple. At both Khirbet el-Qom and Kuntillet Ajrud there are inscriptions to Yahweh mentioning his Asherah, a well-known goddess mentioned in Ugaritic texts and elsewhere along with the bible. So, in Judah the major evidence suggests that the Yahwistic religion was originally polytheistic.

As one cannot date the biblical texts historically to the period they imply, the texts do not fit the category of primary historical data. Yet there are a number of things hiding in that closet. Who are the hosts (or armies) of heaven? Why is Yahweh Lord of hosts? Why were asherim so prevalent in the religion? (Asherim were apparently the trees which represented the goddess Asherah, which the pillar, massebah, represented the male figure -- either Baal or Yahweh. Both the pillar and the tree are okay in Joshua 24:26.)

One interesting thing I always find about using the prophets is their almost total disinterest in such a foundational act as Moses leading the Hebrews to the promised land. The figues are 598 mentions of Moses in the Tanakh, 5 in the prophets (excluding Daniel +2, not a prophet in the Tanakh). So few would suggest editorial help.

Why does Moses come out so badly in the prophets? Probably because the exodus story hadn't been developed at that time.

The exodus is a dead letter historically. One can only live on hope of some miracle being unveiled, but they hope in vain. There was an exodus, but not of Hebrews. The Hyksos were a group of Asian peoples who slowly built up in the delta region until they became so powerful they took control, until they were driven out after about 100 years of rule, by a prince of Thebes who became the pharaoh, Ahmose. He drove the bulk of the Hyksos out of Egypt (hence there is a historical kernel to the exodus story, it's merely misplaced), chasing them out and following them with further campaigns to secure the borders around 1550 BCE. His successors followed the trend by building an empire to protect their border. They were at the time extremely xenophobic and maintained this attitude for a long period. There was a lack of foreign labour in Egypt for several generations. Their border remained secure controlled by a line of forts, which did allow nomads to pass through, but the Egyptian policy prevented any build-up of peoples.

Exodus 1 talks of two cities, Raamses and Pithom. The first was Pi-Ramses which has been uncovered and it dates (naturally enough) from the time of Ramses II, so that provides a first limit to the exodus story as told in the bible. There is a further limit, however: Pithom is a town called Pi-Atum, which also has been uncovered and dates to the time of Necho II (See Reford EC&I, p.458). This drastically moves the limit closer to us, down to after 610 BCE when Necho II came to the throne. So, we at least have a writing down of the story after 610 BCE.

Boneyard Bill's dates are highly suspect.

Jayhawker Soule

Who made up that rule? The topic under discussion is "False Testament", not "Harsh Differences Arise Despite Similarities in the Dating of the Deuteronomistic History's account of the Israelite Monarchy".

Forgive me, but I believe that to be extremely naive.

That depends entirely on what is meant by "exodus". Like Humpty Dumpty, we can always pay a word extra to mean whatever we want it to mean, but shifting from "Exodus" to "exodus" is, at best, 'shifty'. It is entirely justified to claim the "no such Exodus occurred at all".



Be that as it may, what are your views on "False Testament" and the work of Finkelstein/Silverman which no doubt inspired it?