Did the flood really occur?

[Minimalist]

I am familiar with Israel Finkelstein's argument about monotheism emerging during the reign of King Josiah.

I think Finkelstein is one of the great voices of modern archaeology and his The Bible Unearthed is a well-researched and evidenced book....right up until the end. By his own admission there is no archaeological attestation for anyone named "Josiah." Yet, at the end he deviates from his own procedure and starts using the biblical text as authoritative. Josiah is a King Arthurish figure who appears reeking of virtue, doing exactly what the fucking priests want him to do and embracing Yahweh and the bible and who wants to expand the nation into areas vacated by the retreating Assyrians. How very special.

I belong to an email list actually on biblical studies but it includes some of the biggest names in the minimalism school: Thomas Thompson, Philip Davies and Niels Peter Lemche. I was chatting with Lemche one time about this very point and using the "there must have been a king in Jerusalem at the time because every other state had kinds what's wrong with calling him 'Josiah?' line of thought and Lemche made a very clear point. The problem is that if you use bible terminology then you get stuck into the habit of picking up all the other biblical bullshit that goes along with it. Other than what is written in the bible - and it was written much later - we have no indication that Judah was particularly "Jewish" at this point in time as we now understand the word. William Dever makes a great case for a religious struggle between the people in the countryside who worshiped the old Canaanite gods and priests in Jerusalem who were pushing Yahweh as the chief god but this tendency toward henotheism was going on all over the ANE ( Marduk became the chief god in Babylon ) at the time.

So I think Finkelstein goes off the tracks a bit at the end because he does not stay true to his principles. There WAS a king in Jerusalem. The dynasty was undoubtedly an Assyrian vassal and may well have seen an opportunity to assert themselves as the Assyrians were more and more consumed by their war with Babylon. Egypt under Necho allied itself with Assyria and moved northwards to confront the Babylonians. The bible's initial tale is that Necho summons "Josiah" to a meeting and has him killed. Such an unglorious end for such a glorious character! (So inglorious in fact that the later writer of Chronicles invents a battle for Josiah to be killed in. )

Realistically, we have a small weak state caught in a power struggle between larger forces. The power politics of our own days shows that governments are replaced to suit the needs of the larger powers. We know that in such states there are factions which tend to one side or the other and so the idea that kings would be named and replaced at the whim of the major powers is not unusual. Assuming that Necho was not stupid enough to leave an unfriendly king in his rear we can suppose that a ruler friendly to the Egyptian-Assyrian interests was put on the throne and may have still been there in 605 when Babylon crushed the alliance.
That certainly explains the Babylonian interest in crushing Judah a few years later on.

And, Pap, yes. Another book, In Search of Ancient Israel by Philip Davies he does suggest that the "exiles" returning were nothing more than a handful of rulers sent to establish Persian authority over Judah so that Persia could concentrate on more important issues. These "rulers" were given a doctrine that has them being the priests of Yahweh, freed from captivity - with all the kings and their families conveniently dead - restored by the grace of Cyrus to "return" their country to Yahweh who looks suspiciously like the Persian creator god, Ahura Mazda.

Would the peasants care? As far as they were concerned they were trading one group of overseers ( Babylonian ) for another ( Persians masquerading as Jews!) Would they really care which hand held the whip?


As far as Ugarit goes, try this:

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsou...20155.html

Ugarit was a town in Syria which was done in by the Sea People.

I'll drop in at AF and see what's going on but everytime there is a find of ancient writings you can bet your ass that xtian morons will come out of the woodwork insisting that "proof" has been found for their fucking bullshit stories. It rarely works out that way.

They pulled the same crap with the Ebla tablets ( which have nothing to do with "Israel" and everything to do with central Syria and the DSS which xtians were POSITIVE would prove their god boy and there is not a single mention of the fucker.