Quote:Abaddon_ire
Um no. Fredds link gives a date of approx. 1300 BC slap bang in the middle of the bronze age.
Here are some quotes from the wikipedia page:
Quote:...an archaeological analysis of the patriarchal, conquest, judges, and narratives [shows] that while there is no compelling archaeological evidence for any of them, there is clear archaeological evidence that places the stories themselves in a late 7th-century BCE context.
Archaeological discoveries about society and culture in the ancient Near East lead the authors to point out a number of anachronisms, suggestive that the narratives were actually set down in the 9th–7th centuries:
The book comments that this corresponds with the documentary hypothesis, in which textual scholarship argues for the majority of the being written between the 8th and 6th centuries.
So there are a few things which will be clear. First, the redactors of the stories, whoever they were, were not illiterate. They had to be literate to select, edit, and re-write the stories.
If we accept the quotes from the book above, and from other sources, the Torah was edited together in the 8th to 6th centuries. The redactors did so for specific political and religious aims, probably to form a united group in reaction to attacks on Israel from the stronger northern empires.
If this is reasonable, we can see that in fact the age of the stories is not crucial here. Whether they were in fact originally dreamed up by nomads or not, the redactors selected them for their own reasons. They re-wrote them with certain goals in mind, and they excluded equally old stories which didn't help them with their goals.
There is ample precedent for this. The best case I can think of off hand is the ancient trope of a journey of katabasis. The oldest one known is in Gilgamesh, but of course very similar stories are found in a dozen Greek myths, in Homer, Virgil, the Christian Harrowing of Hell, Dante, Blake, and others. In all these cases, the authors use similar narratives to get across very different messages.
Persephone's katabasis, for example, is probably a nature myth, to explain the seasons. The katabasis of Odysseus is different. Neoplatonists such as Proclus, in his commentary on Homer's cave of the nymphs gives an entirely different reading, which almost certainly would have been unthinkable to the author of Gilgamesh.
Anyway, I am sure you can think of lots of similar examples. Milton used Bible stories to get across political and theological messages that the original authors of the stories, whoever they were, could not have imagined.
Just because a writer uses an old story, doesn't mean that his thinking is stuck in that ancient time.
In our own time this tradition continues. Off the top of my head I can name Adam Phillips, Slavoj Zizek, Pierre Badiou, and Martha Nussbaum as interesting thinkers who have retold stories from Shakespeare or Greek drama to get across their own contemporary messages. You don't have to be Derrida to think that no one can read the original story -- we all read the story plus all the interpretations which have come since.
Thus even if the redactors of the Torah were using older stories, there is no reason to think of them at the intellectual level of illiterate Bronze Age goat herders. They were clearly not like that. You don't have to like the stories, or give them any importance in your own life, but condemning the redactors for being something they're not is bad scholarship.
