Robert Tulip

Speaking of feet of clay, Jesus and Moses are worse than Josiah.

Israel has had periods of independence in between its rule by Assyria, Egypt, Babylon, Greece, Rome, Arabia, France, Turkey, Britain and the USA. The period Biblically ascribed to Josiah, the seventh century BC, is one period of such independence.

Rejection of the hypothesis of Josiah requires a better alternative hypothesis. We have better hypotheses for the historical Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus, ie that they are pure myth, constructed for political purposes, as a gradual encrustation of stories that people wanted to believe.

I am not aware of a superior hypothesis for Jewish history in the period the Bible claims that Josiah ruled and got rid of the Asherah and associated female myths. We know Israel was not then under foreign suzereignty, so it must have had a king. The coin record corresponds to the cultural shift the Bible describes for Josiah. I will believe in Josiah until someone comes up with a more convincing historical explanation.

This Josiah claim is far better than the evidence for Moses or Jesus, whose dating and role are utterly imprecise by comparison, and better explained as myth.

outhouse

If King Josiah were a few hundred years earlier, I'd say you had a point. But these legends were not written hundreds of years later after this period. There are way to many details even if only biblical, that came forward in a short period of time.

To date, I have not heard a decent replacement hypothesis for the legends. Your's isn't bad and its night and day better then the rubbish from others.

Someone in control did these reforms, I see absolutely no reason to create a fall guy or a hero, so why recreate a average Joe?

Minimalist

That's the story in the OT. There are great stories in the Iliad and the Odyssey, too. Were they real?

andrewcriddle

If you mean that Josiah is only recorded in the Hebrew Bible and works based upon it, then you are right.

However Josiah is recorded in a number of different books of the Bible particularly in Jeremiah. Some of the Jeremiah references are part of the later editing of the book and may be based on Kings but I doubt if the references to Josiah in Jeremiah 22 can be treated as later additions.

(I'm not really interested in arguing with the position that Jeremiah is entirely post-exilic. I'm just suggesting that if Jeremiah is partly pre-exilic and partly post-exilic then some of the references to Josiah are pre-exilic.)

Andrew Criddle

outhouse

Because most all ancient people wrote in mythology, doesnt mean it all is mythology.


Again, what we tend to see with Jewish literature, is that when they are talking about hundreds and hundreds of years in the past, we see mythology.

Not when they are writing in more recent characters

Minimalist

But "recent" to whom?

Who benefits from a tale of a Great Jewish Kingdom in the past? Certainly not the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian or various Greek overlords? Dismissing the childish fiction of the "Davidic Empire" we have only two periods in the entire first millennium when there was a more or less independent state based in Judah. As Finkelstein notes, the first time was towards the end of the 7th century BC when the Assyrian empire was crumbling and again at the end of the second century BC when the Hasmoneans actually created an independent state which attained a degree of regional hegemony before it collapsed in dynastic squabbling and was swept away by the Romans.

Better than grasping at the straw of "recent" it is better to ask the legal question, cui bono?

outhouse

Which does not really address, that people were writing about king Josiah within a lifetime. Ezra?


can you post something that would show a better reason for them to lie about the biblical reform that did take place towards monotheism?


The Davidic empire, Yes throw it out. It was people writing about a possible man hundreds of years before, who might have existed as a rebel. And then building identity they wished to have to represent them.

We are talking about a community of people who were constantly crushed and ran over by everyone for hundreds of years.

semiopen

I thought that perhaps Mini had even descended into Josiah denial.

I don't think that there is a question that Josiah existed.

However there is a striking lack of archaeological evidence for the reforms of Josiah.

Josiah’s reforms: Where is the archaeological evidence?

The link goes into some depth. There is also a section dealing with Josiah's religious reforms. This is an extremely easy thing to refute from an archaeological standpoint, even undergraduates can write devastating papers about this view.

Anyway, this doesn't mean that there might not have been a fragment of Deuteronomy that was written at this time, but F&S go a little too far to the right in this case.

semiopen

I've cited a few good sources in the past about Josiah.

Here's another one - wish I could tell who the author was before saying how good it is.

The high places (bamot) and the reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah: an archaeological investigation.

[Note: despite the notice above, the link is good. Try copy & paste.]

Regarding the writing of Deuteronomy -

Yet if the historical reality of Josiah's reforms is doubtful, so is the historical reality of an historian who wrote contemporaneously to them. It is more likely that a single Deuteronomist lived in Judah at the time of his people's restoration to the land and during his Temple's reconstruction. This historian would have been able to write of an eternal Davidic dynasty, an eternal Temple, an eternal Levitical priesthood, as well as of a punitive exile . He may have written his history to serve as a warning and example to Zerubbabel, God's new signet ring (Hag. 2:23).

Minimalist

I'm not sure where you are getting that.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Ezra#Date


458 BC is 150 years after "Josiah," well beyond a lifetime and even that date is not certain. But the most important line is the first. This stuff was heavily edited. Add in that it may have existed originally as oral tales rather than a written document and the whole thing gets even cloudier.

Recall that the earliest written evidence we have of this stuff is the Dead Sea Scrolls which date - coincidentally again - to the Hasmonean Period at the earliest. I don't like coincidences.