Made in Alexandria: The Origin of the Yahweh Cult

[A_Nony_Mouse]

Point in fact paleo-hebrew is BS. The inscriptions in the region of that age are Phoenician and later Aramaic.

Christopher Rollston disagrees....and as one of the foremost paleographers of our generation I do have to go with him rather than you.

http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily...-language/

There is your first mistake. Go the the home page http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org and do some clicking and quickly learn it is run by the publisher of the Biblical Archaeological Review, a popular magazine for believers, not a journal or academic resource in any sense of the word. So much for its bias. The .org means nothing. My website is a .org.

But what exactly do you present as the disagreement in that article? What is lists as the four possible oldest they are a significant fraction of the total number found which gets back to the index card or two of words.

Then there is "In his study, Christopher Rollston distinguishes between purely Hebrew script and other visually similar alphabets while examining relationships between alphabets and languages." What believers call "visually similar" we, today, call fonts. We have English fonts that "look" more different than the believers consider to be the alphabets of different languages. Consider the letter G.



When each city state would have its own scribe schools and no concept of standardization this grasping at straws. You can find similar arguments on spelling but the idea of standardized spelling did not exist either.

"Old Hebrew script derived directly from Phoenician, and Christopher Rollston contends that Old Hebrew script did not split off from its Phoenician predecessor until the ninth century B.C.E. The Hebrew language existed well before then; the oldest extant Hebrew language texts are recorded in Phoenician script." That is an example of several things. The biggest is that believers will make all kinds of ad hoc arguments but never follow through on the universal implications.

For example, IF the "language existed well before then" it was either the language of ancient Ur, Abraham's home town, or Egyptian where they spent centuries or is just a language of Palestine. You will never find the claim of Hebrew existing before then to prove Genesis and Exodus are BS. But if they are BS there is no excuse to call the language Hebrew without the uniqueness of Abraham and Exodus.

In admitting it is so closely related to Phoenician it negates the possibility it is of separate origin. It can only be called Palestinian. Archaeology finds no "Philistines" or "Canaanites." They are bible inventions. And you can find the phonetic cuneiform of the Ugarit library to be older than either. And it contains some of material later incorporated into the OT.

The idea of calling it Hebrew when there were no Hebrews is bible thumper crap. But if there are no Hebrews it is definitive Genesis and Exodus are BS. This is an ad hoc argument to a conclusion that Hebrew exists without making it universal in its implications. This is not permitted in any field that is considered academic.

Consider this one. "The five-line Qeiyafa Ostracon** has garnered a great deal of attention since its 2008 excavation at Khirbet Qeiyafa, the fortified tenth century B.C.E. Judahite city located on the border of Judah and Philistia." As there is no archaeological find of any peoples called either Judahites or Philistines or who called themselves by those names it is a LIE to use that description of where it was found. And that lie prejudices the determination of the language in which it is written. And those names for the location are only determined by use of the bible. That is the circular argument I described. You found exactly an example of what lead you to look for information in the first place but it confirms the use of the logical fallacy of circular reasoning.

The rest is the same. I am not going to screw with it -- the premises are false -- unless you have some particular interest.

Another site notes,

The name YHWH is not in the modern Syriac squared Hebrew letters, but in the paleo-Hebrew.

http://www.lebtahor.com/Archaeology/insc...scroll.htm

There were people living in Judah during the 7th century BC. They had a language and rudimentary literacy - mainly for record keeping

One cannot call it Judah without reference to the bible. Again circular reasoning. As for the claim of literacy and more humorously "mainly record keeping" in no academic field is it permitted to claim something for which there is no evidence. Show me the records. If no records then the statement is BS. As the statement is BS there is no more evidence of literacy than that the place was called Judah.

but the Silver Scrolls indicate that they were moving in the direction of actual literature

Absent evidence of literacy and of the name of the location and knowing the oldest mention of YHWH is as a minor local god on the Ugarit tablets dating to about 1100 BC and noting it is written in Phoenician it is unreasonable to assume it is other than a Phoenician scroll. Believers are not reasonable people.

- and they were stomped on by the Babylonians as the destruction layer in "Jerusalem" (or whatever it was called) attests.

Such as the "destruction" layer is it indicates nothing more than a large fire which has never been uncommon.

Nothing we have found suggests that they were "Jews" in any sense of the word we understand.

Nor that they were Hebrews or Israelites in any sense we understand. And as they were none of the above they were simply hillbilly Palestinians living the the shadow of the Phoenician, Syrian and Egyptian civilizations.

Yahweh may have been their chief god...and a shitty job he did protecting them from the Babylonians...I guess Marduk had a bigger dick than Yahweh. Forgetting the later bible bullshit we have records from the Babylonians themselves telling us what they did.

When I pointed out it clearly refers to a sun god that was all. Chief god? No evidence. Protector god? Not in the text. That the Ugarit name is used is interesting but unsurprising.

In fact, my only complaint with Finkelstein is that he abandons his own methodology at the end in order to enshrine Josiah and some sort of Jewish "revival." There is no archaeological attestation for Josiah. He is a figment of the bible writers' imaginations. There can be a political crisis between Judah and Egypt in the 7th century without inventing a whole new fucking religion to be the basis of it. (Judah lost.)

To claim there was a Judah as you do is solely based upon bible stories. In real history the land in called Palestine, a name unrelated to the invented word Philistine. Herodotus mentions the Palestinians by exactly that name in the 5th c. BC when he traveled there and met them. The idea there would be a political crisis between Egypt and illiterate Palestinian hillbillies is a rather humorous idea. It could be no more than Egypt caring to stomp on them and then getting around to it.

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Lots of the baggage is not even knowing it is baggage. Using bible names like Judah is baggage. Another category of baggage is talking about bibleland in bible terms instead of the same terms as all other contemporary cultures.

For example, Athens was the capital of the city-state of Attica. It is common to call Athens a city-state but those are the two terms of reference. Therefore Jerusalem is the capital of the city-state of Judea. Of you can call Jerusalem of city-state. Those would be correct terms in the 1st c. BC.

Also in that century Rome was a city-state with an empire that included the Mediterranean less Egypt and moved into Gaul. Similarly the city-state of Judea ruled an empire that consisted of Samaria, the Galilee and Idumaea. But because of the bible the Judean empire is talked about as the remnant of previously powerful kingdom and the conquered peoples as though they were all always Judeans. It is the same bible nonsense that calls any region of Palestine Judah or any other invented bible name.

Among the forms of historical fiction exemplars of two of them are Spartacus and Game of Thrones. The OT is in the latter category.