Made in Alexandria: The Origin of the Yahweh Cult

[A_Nony_Mouse]

If you are going to insist on a standard of historicity on a par with today you are bound to be eternally disappointed, Mouse.

I agree completely. When things are up to more recent standards I give them equivalent credit. And they are not so modern as Thucydides did try to meet self-imposed standards we can describe as modern. He consulted all the written records he could find. He interviewed the important participants. It was not that hard for him to see writing about fact required a best effort to ascertain the facts.

What I do not accept is taking anything available if nothing to reasonable standards is available. The obvious one to this thread is the age and origin of the OT. Specifically I object to any contending origin that has no physical evidence supporting it given any weight whatsoever.

Of course I would not expect modern standards to be applied to its origin but at the same time I object to giving tradition any weight at all as it means no standard whatsoever. But what we see in bible talk is an idea being given merit simply because it has been around for a long time but worse. They are often taken as true and better than new ideas based upon fact simply because they are old.

It is legitimate to ask why I have a problem with tradition. I do not have an objection to tradition in general. Usually they are reasonable, appear to be close enough and nothing else in contingent upon them being true. Here we have something different.

The tradition up until about 150 years ago was that Moses wrote wrote the Torah/Tanak/the first five books of the OT. Even among fervent believers today very few of them think Moses wrote them. This is separate from Moses existing and the events actually occurring. At first the retreat was to them having been written in the time of Solomon. I am sure there were other "retreats" but the most commonly accepted one today is after the return from Babylon.

So if tradition is to be given any weight, which tradition? Moses or Solomon or after Babylon? If there were only one tradition, it was reasonable (verses from Exodus found in Jerusalem in hieroglyphs dated to 1000BC or some such) and contingent things were also confirmed the idea of modern standards would not come up. They would not come up because there would be no obvious need to introduce standards.

On this subject the facts of the retreating tradition among believers themselves makes it imperative to address the subject. And given the retreat from 15th to 5th c. and that it is in fact as old as they can claim with a straight face NOT an evidenced opinion means believers to no rule this part of the discussion.

We have independent attestation of Hezekiah's existence from Assyrian records. We also have evidence of rapid population growth at Jerusalem in the later 8th century and fortifications as well as increased urbanization.
The inscription itself:

Translation

Unreadable at first due to the deposits, Professor Archibald Sayce was the first to make a tentative reading, and later the text was cleaned with an acid solution making the reading more authoritative. The inscription contains 6 lines, of which the first is damaged. The words are separated by dots. Only the word zada on the third line is of doubtful translation - perhaps a crack or a weak part.

The passage reads:

... the tunnel ... and this is the story of the tunnel while ...
the axes were against each other and while three cubits were left to cut? ... the voice of a man ... called to his counterpart, (for) there was ZADA in the rock, on the right ... and on the day of the tunnel (being finished) the stonecutters struck each man towards his counterpart, ax against ax and flowed water from the source to the pool for 1200 cubits. and 100? cubits was the height over the head of the stonecutters ...

and while it does not name Hezekiah it is rather pointless to think that such works would have been undertaken earlier when the site was little more than a miserable little shithole. There are some things which archaeology can show and some things which it cannot. But the artifacts are what they are and they are not as easily manipulated as human writings which can be made to say whatever an author ( or more importantly, the author's patron) wants them to say.

In addition to not mentioning Hezekiah it mentions nothing else in the bible story like the name of the city or the cause for digging it nor when it was dug or who paid for it.

I have to point out things like this "while it does not name Hezekiah it is rather pointless to think that such works would have been undertaken earlier when the site was little more than a miserable little shithole" are argumentation and contain unfounded assumptions of their own. For example around 1000-800 BC it was an outpost of the New Kingdom. How extensive has not been established. There are "cities" that barely qualified as large towns which had similar tunnels. I forget the name but I saw it and the dig on an arkie series episode.

Because such things are left out it is not just argumentation but argumentation to a preconceived conclusion. Simply calling it Hezekiah's tunnel means "Hezekiah lived in the Xth c. therefore the tunnel is from the Xth century and because it is from the Xth century it must be the one the bible says Hezekiah built." It does not sound circular because giving it that name avoids explaining why.

Such is the problem with the bible. It reflects a much later reality but the only place where I find fault with Davies, Thompson and the rest is in the insistence that these writings were created in the Persian period in toto. I think that if someone sat down to write a bullshit story it would have been better done than it is. What has come down to us suggests a compilation of various oral tales ( much to the chagrin of fundie lunatics you are quite right when you say there is no extant body of literature from the period in question) that was cobbled together - most likely by the Greeks and later re-copied into something called Hebrew.

I want to make sure another point got through. There is no such thing as oral history.

BTW, in the citation from Wiki above I find it curious that the inscription uses dots as word separators. That is an Aramaic usage most notable on the Tel Dan stele. Hebrew did not use word separators, nor capitals, nor punctuation...in that it was much like the Greek of the same time. Curious.

The dots are almost always used in a nonsense way. Generally the mark unintelligible letters in the original text. But then believers will carry it through to a translation but with translations that are impossible given the missing letters. That is, the mix actual missing letters with "best believer guess" translation of the readable letters. I say it is dishonest. I know I have come across examples of that but don't have one at the moment. I'll try to keep it in mind.

And Tel Dan thing. The dots clearly indicate it is talking about Davidland or Davidtown and the idea of a dynasty called a house first appears in Renaissance Italy. All the bible examples fall from the English translation not from the original words else they would flood us with examples bytdwd from the "hebrew."

Was not the Galilee quite lightly populated from time of the Assyrian conquest to the Hellenistic people.

Probably not. Compared to Judah and other regions to the south it was quite decent agricultural land capable of supporting a much larger population. As Finkelstein and others note the idea that the southern kingdom could have ever dominated the more populous and wealthy north is simply a later fiction created by the Judahite court which thought about expansion to the north and sought to establish a reason for making the claim.

And I am fairly certain the Phoenicians are Hellenes from the eastern extent in Asia Minor being the reason they appear so different from western peninsular Hellenes, the Greeks. The most obvious thing this explains is why the Phoenicians are not Hellenes when they are to the north, west and among them along the coast.