Made in Alexandria: The Origin of the Yahweh Cult

[A_Nony_Mouse]

Not that he is the most reliable of historians but you should read Josephus ( mainly because he is all we have).

To speculate he claims he got all his rewards because of a prophecy of victory. He must have been damned hard up for prophecies to have rewarded that. I would rather suggest he was rewarded for betraying his army to save his own ass.

Sidebar: Wikipedia will not accept anything he wrote insisting upon maintaining the Christian mythology from Maccabes onward.

Alexander Jannaeus after his campaigns in the north almost immediately turned south and after a long siege took Gaza in 96. This set off a chain of events which saw him at war with both the Ptolemies and the Seleucids - although they did not cooperate with each other. Jannaeus suffered a serious defeat and there was a rebellion among the Jews against him as well. He survived by the skin of his teeth but the rest of his reign was a cruel repression of his own people. How much time he could have spent instilling "judaism" in Galilee is debatable based on the subsequent events which threatened the kingdom.

As mentioned elsewhere the whole instilling thing was sending in armed priests to collect temple taxes from all of the Yahweh cult. How did they know? Circumcised of course. Naturally circumcision was the first thing imposed. And by the rules of the day the priests could have collected that tax any place in the Greek or Roman empires.

Then there was the required annual trip to Jerusalem to sacrifice at the temple. A huge financial burden for most but a windfall profit for the priests and the capital of the city-state of Judea -- as in Athens the capital of the city-state of Attica. And an odd note here, the young Jesus in the temple in the gospels is only found there. The Bar Mitzvah was invented in the late 1800s. Consider it a christian sacrament for Jews. The idea that bible-time Jews has to be literate for the Bar Mitzvah ceremony is so much BS. It did not exist.

As for the rest of it, the Judaeans do not seem to have accepted converts or "forced converts" as "True Jews" ( probably the first known usage of that particular fallacy.) Certainly Herod's family was never accepted by the nobility and the priests as legitimate rulers because they were not of the Hasmonean family. The Samaritans, living just to the north of Judaea, are likewise rejected as True Jews and make it into the NT on several occasions.

Which is why the later concept of forced converts does not apply. The conquered were forced to circumcise (be taxed for life) and adopt Judean ritual customs. That being the Torah and the penalty for violating the required rituals and taboos is generally summary public execution. The idea of "true Jews" does mean only true Judeans. Others could never become Judeans. (Josephus Jew==Judean) They could become members of the Yahweh cult by virtue of conquest.

So all this holy horseshit about Galilee seems to be a later xtian misunderstanding about these various peoples. BTW, the True Jews may have been right about Galilee. When Josephus' rebel army moved into the region the two largest cities - Sepphoris and Tiberias - shut their gates to him and called for Roman assistance.

And the infamous terrorists operating out of Masada, the locals demanded Rome do something about them too. No one backed the Judeans. Of course since the Masada folks were raiding the locals for provisions and kidnapping boys for their army they were not doing anything to win hearts and minds.

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And the myth of Babylon captivity.

Well, we do have reference in the Babylonian Chronicles to Nebuchadnezzar's assault on Jersualem and his reduction of it to tributary status. Archaeology shows that the entire population ( as the bible claims with customary exaggeration) was not deported but the upper classes probably were.

Archaeology does not show "probablies." The Babylonian account says one king was replaced with another. It does not say anyone was taken to Babylon. Such silences are golden. Diplomatic hostages of the ruling families most likely but only because that was the custom at the time. They would not have been a significant number and certainly no basis for the bible claims.

There is another inscription mentioning the wheat rations. Believers take that and divide by the number of people it could support and get a big number they love. However Babylon's taxes were wheat and were the only thing to disburse. If the captives lived naked in the streets then the division is legitimate. But as the reasonable assumption is the wheat allotment paid for food, shelter, clothing, servants, and other necessities appropriate to the families of kings it would support very few people.

Another is the Persian liberation saying sacred things were returned to their places. Believers claim that meant people. Fact is the Babylonians took the local uncarved stones representing the gods of the conquered to Babylon. Persia merely returned them.

Of course "graven images" like the Greeks used were forbidden. Uncarved stones were fine and that is what the commandment intends. In Gabilelus's short rule as emperor he brought his uncarved stone to Rome with him.

As a matter of fact records were discovered in Iraq which showed that Judahite names were mentioned prominently in high office in the Babylonian empire. There is a book called "A View From Nebo" which contains a discussion of these finds. The "exiles" were not slaves. As a matter of fact they seem to have been doing quite well for themselves.

Of course, these people were Judahites, citizens of the kingdom of Judah. There is nothing to indicate that at the time they were anything resembling "Jews" as we now understand the word.

I have not come across that. Got a URL handy? But the idea of a type of name being limited to a trivially small bit of geography does not appear reasonable to me. If someone is going to run with a name style I expect local identification of them with some far away place. What naming styles the various authors of the Septuagint chose and their inspiration for them is a separate issue.