"Laughing At Religion" Meme Thread

[The Grand Nudger]

That's one of the most informative lines in the entire thing, oddly enough. It places the assumption of hill small holdings in time, which is instrumental to the later construction of magic book. The pastoralist sources would all come from the culture being established off scene - and even though it sounds absurd today, the idea that a god could be defeated by a particular set of weapons would have seemed normal and obvious to people who'd seen so many people (and their gods) defeated by superior technologies....but why that one, in particular? Well, because that's what the author was familiar with.

Incidentally, it also places the narrator in time, and not the time of narration. The narrator assumed that iron chariots would have been instrumental in some legendary battle, but nowhere on earth have iron chariots ever been a thing. The chariot had lost all military importance by the time iron was on scene. It's not the chariot itself which was "made of iron" or to be taken as much by the author, either. Just the spokes to the wheels. Iron reinforced spokes and axles were a common feature of transpo carts during the diaspora. Even more importantly, chariots and iron, though not chariots made of iron, are a positive identifier for phillistine civilization...and we're pretty sure those guys were super greek and super into chariots. One of the main gripes between the groups of canaanites was their access to iron. The people who would one day become judah were barred by law from possessing iron working implements - making them dependent on those in the valley below. People who would have been viewed as collaborators or occupiers. We're not sure how deep the blood feud went, but we know that it got all the way to gang colors territory, which is the reason for the provision against polyblend clothes in lev. The people in the valleys grew quality textiles - the small hill holding rebels had to make due with sheep.

Point of all that rambling, is that amazingly and ironically, it's moments like that..in magic book..where the authors are telling a story closest to the truth. It wasn't a battle, and there were no chariots of iron, but the superior civilization of the fertile valleys in the region would make the proto-judahites second class citizens in their own land until the entire thing came crashing down, and understanding that (though, obviously having a grasp of the facts in mere reality is not important) was neccessary to contextualize where and how the people the story is aimed at found themselves in it's own time....and...even more importantly, what they were going to do about it.