On the subject of Hell and Salvation

[Deesse23]

 It is divinely inspired no one man could put together a book like the Bible, let lone many mean over a few thousand years.

Its not one book but many, and no two christian denominations can agree on which books exactly should be part of The True Canon. There were multiple councils and synods to determine which books are "in" and which arent. As far as i know, God wasnt part of any of those. If you wanna claim that all those people were divinely inspired, coming up with different canons, go ahead.

And....those books were written within a mere one thousand years, not more. Is age or duration a yardstick for determining the veracity of religious claims for you?

[Abaddon_ire]

Addendum: I've done a bit of looking . All I can find is religious Jewish opinion, which is questionable as a source. At this point, I'm unable to state categorically, that the oral tradition of the Torah goes back to bronze age. Nor am I convinced this is not the case.  As a result, I will no longer refer to the tribes who became the Jews as 'bronze age'.   Yes, I admit, the rhetoric has a nice ring. However, I can no longer use it as it I can't prove I'm correct using the term.

I suspect that some of the stories have deep roots. But since illiterate Goat Age bronze herders didn't write stuff down, that's hard to say.

Hammurabi predates your magic book and was literally written in stone. The chinese kept written records all the way through your magic global flood without noticing it happened at all, speaking of which, the holey babble plagiarised that from the earlier Epic of Gilgamesh. Do you even make a vague attempt to address such glaring fuckups? No. You glom onto the hyperbole of "bronze age" in order to distract from the glaring inconsistencies and flat out lies in your big bumper book of bullshit.

I've heard the phrase a lot on sites like these, and I find it amusing that people pissed off by the historical inaccuracy of the Bible use a historically inaccurate insult. 

Perhaps the insult is inaccurate. So what? The buybull is an extravaganza of insanity. Pointing and screaming "Look, squirrel" does not make that go away.

But, again, if we're all just waving hyperbole around, I guess anything goes. As I've said a billion times.

If one carefully traces the bible fables origins, technically they do go as far back as the bronze age. The bible writers simply plagiarised the writings of much earlier folks. I find it risible the those who believe in the buybull are so colossally ignorant of it's actual history.But hey, these are people who have no problem with Moses attending his own funeral as an observer. That is next level nutty.

[Deesse23]

I've heard the phrase a lot on sites like these,

What are "sites like these"?

[Belacqua]

If one carefully traces the bible fables origins, technically they do go as far back as the bronze age.

I was interested to see that the book fredd bear linked us to dated the stories to several centuries after the Bronze Age. Of course some of the stories have deep roots, as I wrote in a later post. 

Which of the stories can be traced with confidence back to the Bronze Age?

[Abaddon_ire]

If one carefully traces the bible fables origins, technically they do go as far back as the bronze age.

I was interested to see that the book fredd bear linked us to dated the stories to several centuries after the Bronze Age. Of course some of the stories have deep roots, as I wrote in a later post. 

Which of the stories can be traced with confidence back to the Bronze Age?

Um

The pentatuch was composed in or around 1.000 BC and the bronze age ended about 1,200 BC i.e. 200 years earlier. The Noachian imaginary flood was plagiarised from the epic of Gilgamesh WRITTEN a full on thousand years before that at minimum.

All of this information is freely available.

I am forced to conclude that one of the following is true

A. Your google is broken
B. You don't grok research.
C. You are a hypocrite.
D. You are an intentional liar
E. You are simply another useless internet troll
F. You really are that stupid
G. You have been religiously brainwashed from birth
H. WT actual F?

Right now, given evidence to date, I am betting on F but I could be persuaded otherwise.

[Belacqua]

The pentatuch was composed in or around 1.000 BC

The summary of the book fredd linked us to gives a much later date. Of course the book may be wrong.

You are right that at least one of the stories is based on a very old source. 

Also I was interested to know how we can be sure that illiterate people, with a terminus ante quem of 1200BC, composed stories that weren't written down until centuries later, and which contain details that they couldn't have known. If a story can be found in another literate culture that constitutes evidence, but illiterate goat herders tend not to leave behind written records. 

I've downloaded the book, and I'll compare it to the reference materials I have on hand.

[fredd bear]

but illiterate goat herders tend not to leave behind written records.

Indeed.


I don't think I said or implied that. My claim was that the oral tradition was composed by illiterates, which is the reason for the creation of oral mythology. Oral traditions can be passed down for millennia before being written down.

The simplest example I can think of is of one culture I've actually studied formally; Australian aborigines have the oldest culture on earth, at ca 50,000-years. This is a rich complex culture, with an ancient and equally rich oral mythology. (aborigines had no written language)

The 'bronze age' comment is not something I really want to argue. It's pedantic and not central to my position, which is that at the time of concoction/cobbling together the future Israelites were an illiterate people. I may be wrong with this notion, and will accept evidence to the contrary.

[Belacqua]

but illiterate goat herders tend not to leave behind written records.

Indeed.


I don't think I said or implied that. My claim was that the oral tradition was composed by illiterates, which is the reason for the creation of oral mythology. Oral traditions can be passed down for millennia before being written down.

The simplest example I can think of is of one culture I've actually studied formally; Australian aborigines have the oldest culture on earth, at ca 50,000-years.  This is a rich complex culture, with an ancient and equally rich oral mythology. (aborigines had no written language)

The 'bronze age' comment is not something I really want to argue. It's pedantic and not central to my position, which is that at the time of concoction/cobbling together the future Israelites  were an illiterate people.  I may be wrong with this notion, and will accept evidence to the contrary.

That's interesting about the Australian aborigines. I don't know anything about them. Of course I've read the standard stuff about oral traditions leading up to Homer, so I know that the stories can be floating around a long time before they're recorded. 

What I've read in the past is that literate Hebrews wrote or edited together the stories for ideological and political reasons. The dates given by the book you linked us to are in agreement with what I'd heard before. 

To what extent the editors relied on ancient oral tradition is more difficult to piece together, of course. Nothing is ever invented from zero, but I also wouldn't want to assume that these editors took over old stories unquestioned. They were obviously literate people who were influential at the time. 

As much as possible, I think it's best to stick with the things that serious scholars have reason to conclude. Flood narratives from nearby cultures, for example, were obvious sources. But making assumptions about things overall is something I want to be careful about.

[Abaddon_ire]

The pentatuch was composed in or around 1.000 BC

The summary of the book fredd linked us to gives a much later date. Of course the book may be wrong.

Um no. Fredds link gives a date of approx. 1300 BC slap bang in the middle of the bronze age. Out of generosity, I granted a later date of 1000 BC just enough to take it out of the bronze age and demonstrated that it actually is bronze age superstition. For reasons unexplained, you seem to think that 1000 BC is earlier than 1300 BC. What fucked up peculiar mathematical trajectory brings you to that is anyone's guess. Fredds citation was for a much earlier date than I granted ad arguendo. Having argued against a bronze age date you are now arguing for a bronze age date This is sufficient for me to conclude that you have no clue what it might be that you believe, let alone anyone elses belief's.

Let me carefully explain it to you 1300 BC happened 300 years before 1000 BC. What part of this is difficult for you? The domain of integers appears to be a sealed strange papery scary object that the rest of the world calls a book.

You are right that at least one of the stories is based on a very old source.

One? Really? Just one? That was an exemplar, and with that you have demonstrated that not only have you not read your magic book, you haven't read any book, ever.
25-30 years ago, I used to teach and I learned a simple fact that I truly hate. Confronted with the facts, I couldn't deny what was straight up in my face.I really really fought against this with every fibre of my being because I was ideologically driven to believe it was true. Finally, I had to fold and concede intellectual defeat. I had to concede that there really are irretrievably stupid people out there in real life. I found it rather disturbing to stand at the head of a class teaching the finer points of Z80 programming only to have a "wwjd?" question fired from the eaves. At first, I went with the "Relevance" question., then on to slight engagment, then right along to flinging the wingnut right out. When I was an educator I found it to be a thankless job. Except for those precious moments. I have twice had a spontaneous standing ovation. I have no idea if either were deserved. Both involved ejecting a religious wingnut

Also I was interested to know how we can be sure that illiterate people, with a terminus ante quem of 1200BC, composed stories that weren't written down until centuries later, and which contain details that they couldn't have known. If a story can be found in another literate culture that constitutes evidence, but illiterate goat herders tend not to leave behind written records. 

I've downloaded the book, and I'll compare it to the reference materials I have on hand.

Oh really? Thats a load.

[Belacqua]

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:

...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.