Made in Alexandria: The Origin of the Yahweh Cult

[A_Nony_Mouse]

A little detective work is required to connect disparate pieces of evidence.
It can be a rewarding intellectual exercise BUT one must dismiss the bible bullshit stories at the outset. If you are going to insist on video evidence you are more or less stuck in the 20th century or later.

When I was getting into this it was largely an exercise in exclusion. mSomeone tell me where they think the OT came from and then I would explore the idea.

Take for example the old idea still believed by some is that Moses wrote the Torah, Pentateuch, first five books of the OT. Today one simply asks how did it get written in "hebrew" in the 15th c. BC when the language did not exist? Why not in hieroglyphs? But in the good old days that was not a serious question. Everyone knew Adam and Eve spoke and wrote the perfect language, the divine language, Hebrew. That is what everyone spoke before Babel, no? No backsies. The nonsense claim can't be taken back and refined. Any refinement is a NEW claim and has to meet the same requirement as any other new claim.

More relevant today is the claim that the people in Judea created and preserved the books of the Old Testament. To evaluate this claim one is required to look at the total cost of doing so and the consequences of doing so. There has to be scribes or what is called a scribal culture. It is well described for literate cultures. There is no indication of a scribal culture and thus a literate culture prior to the 2nd c. BC in Judea. There was no one to copy, read and preserve the books and no schools to teach reading and writing so how could they have done it?

And it is not just one thing although the absence of the ability to do so is really big one. Another is in literate cultures the most common literature deals with contracts and financial documents. Next are laws and legal decisions related to those laws. Next came government decrees. Way down towards the end is religious material. If we look at bibleland we find only religious materials. This is not indicative of literate cultures.

The costs of writing materials was enormous back then. In fact the cost of writing materials was important until the late 19th c. when wood pulp paper was mass produced. Until then the cost of writing paper and ink was found in household budgets.

Whoever was doing the copying had to pay for it all. They had to pay the total cost of the living expenses of scribes and their families, an entire social class. They had to pay for the materials and the regular copying as old ones wore out. They had to pay for places to preserve the documents and people to do it, i.e. libraries and librarians.

The bottom line is if there is a need to preserve these special religious texts all the rest of the scribal culture must exist to do so and that is a major cost.

To consider the currently popular retreat from Moses, creation after the return from Babylon, the obvious questions which arise, how in Hebrew which did not exist yet and why not in cuneiform which they would have all learned? As with Moses, why is it in a language which did not exist at the time. This is in addition to all the above. Believers tend to come up with a facetiously clever and nonsense solution for one and declare everything has been solved.

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None of the above should suggest there was any time in Babylon or a Moses or any other person or evident.

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I'm not lying about the substance of your posts. You continue to ignore all of the important points I bring up, and refuse to discuss them. Why should I take you seriously?

Your theory is that the Old Testament was written in Greek - not in Hebrew - and later translated into Hebrew. That's your theory. When I point out to you that secular contemporary scholars do not view the text that way, you ignore it. When I point out to you loanwords and transliteration as evidence for the original language you ignore that too. When I point out to you that you have to accept the carbon dating to the 4th century BC of the Great Isaiah Scroll if you're willing to ignore scholarly thought on Biblical Text, you ignore that too. You offer no explanations for any of this.

Hebrew is a much more primitive written language than Greek. What would be the purpose in translating from Greek to Hebrew?

We have multiple Greek versions, because there are multiple Greek translations. We do not have multiple Hebrew versions.

The Tetragrammaton is another piece of evidence. It doesn't appear in any MSS of the LXX. Without it the verses where God clearly gives his name is nonsensical.

On the off chance you are being honest in this post and you are not going to lead to a repeat your lies such as I have talked conspiracy theories let me repeat my opening position. I have no interest in unprovenanced religious traditions or beliefs or the opinion of so called scholars. I am only interested in physical evidence. If there is none then there is none. Believers cannot slip their traditions into the vacuum. Without physical evidence they have no merit or standing at all despite what self-declared scholars say about each other and their traditions.

Whether or not a person chooses to call himself a scholar, a word which by itself qualifies you and I as scholars, is a meaningless and superfluous description. It is a matter of historical record that beliefs have always been considered greater than facts. I could suggest the old but irrefutable evidence that Moses wrote the Torah because of the words and language style of it are so much older than the later books. WToday "scholars" have mostly retreated to saying it was written after the (mythical) return from Babylon. Were "scholars" lying when claimed to find word differences or are they lying now in not seeing the differences?

Non-specific reference to loan words is not evidence. Way back when there was a claim based upon words and phrases that the Septuagint had to be the copy because of the "Hebraisms" in the Greek. Then in the 1880s Koine Greek was discovered in Egypt. It turned out these "Hebraisms" were in fact Koine Greek. Over a century ago the "loan words" argument was upset and reversed. Yet believers are incredibly ignorant of this otherwise well known fact. How can this be?

As to the meaning of theory, it is an explanation of the facts. The more facts explained the better the theory. There is no "theory" of Hebrew being the original as it has never been more than a religious tradition. Without evidence traditions have no weight at all. Among other things this theory explains how the OT could have been created when there was no scribal culture in Judea to create and preserve it.

As to the C14 dating of the one scroll, let me repeat. I cannot find that dating claim in any credible source which would include the laboratory and citation of the publication of the results. Further I said I cannot find any proper citation of dating of any scroll older than the 1st c. BC.

The above is largely a repetition of my previous replies. The ones I have not repeated are also found in previous posts.