Made in Alexandria: The Origin of the Yahweh Cult

[A_Nony_Mouse]

Mouse would you clarify your argument for me? I'm not sure if you are arguing for a late date for the formulation of the Hebrew language and religion only, or for a late date for the beginnings of a Hebrew culture in general.

I am talking about what we, including modern Jews in the we, would recognize of the religion of Judaism. I mean recognize AS it not a recognizable heresy of it. And there is only a jewish religion and no jewish people.

For example, if you are walking around Roman era Jerusalem and find all kinds of temples including a prominent one to Ashara that is not Judaism. It can be considered a recognizable heresy or closely related to or some such but not the Judaism that was codified after the Bar Kokbah revolt. It is not the one we expect to find celebrated in the synagogue on Shabboth today.

Keeping in mind Hebrew is just a name indicating no relation to the mythical Hebrews of Exodus the formulation of the language can be an entirely separate topic. I sort of have to adopt one to hold the rest of the discussion. I have adopted the idea that it was more or less a local slang or pidgin mixing Greek and Aramaic. Before the DSS were discovered it was a common opinion that Hebrew was an invented, liturgical language.

I prefer the pidgin idea as it appears to explain more. Having developed as an unstandardized spoken language, that is, no schools teaching scribes how to write it, all the differences and problems with it as a translation from the Greek are easily explained as people trying to put written Greek into a written version of a spoken language. As a spoken language there would have all kinds of different dialects of it. Finding the DSS in different ones would be expected. It explains why people found differences in the Torah when presuming it was created in the 1400s BC which are still there with a 500BC creation. They are simply different dialects that can exist at the same time.

As to culture and again keeping in mind Hebrew is just a name the subject here would be both Judean and Galilean cultures. Because of their proximity we would not expect them to be much different. Nor either much different from Samaritan, Idumaean or those folks at Petra. Here I expect having to travel well into Syria to begin finding significant differences. For example cities having different patrons is not much of a difference compared to the custom of having patron gods.

Here is a good point to throw in that Athens was the capital of the city-state of Attica and consistent with that description Jerusalem was the capital of the city-state of Judea. There are other ways to express it but we are talking city-states. Thus differences between the regions mentioned in the last paragraph are the kind of thing we find between Athens and Sparta. One can generalize to a Greek culture or at a higher level to Hellenic culture but we would be down to the Sparta/Athens degree of differences to talk about Judea and the Galilee.

So one finds in the region that the city-states all had god/goddess pairs while the customs of particular city-states depending upon which pair and the region's local customs.

So with the Maccabes they produce a Yahweh only cult largely ignoring Ashara and the other gods. While we are lead to believe by tradition and bible stories that there were no other gods worshiped the evidence though not explicit is to the contrary. For example, Strato's Tower is Ashara' Temple and Herod built one in Caesarea. While we do have a problem with very few details on differences having survived the fact of so many similarities should be shocking to believers.

One of the problems explaining this sort of thing is we have forgotten what the world was like before mass communication. It was only in the mid to late 19th c. that European countries were codifying local dialects into a single national language for everyone not just the standard for the educated. There were significant difference in dialects in places just tens of miles apart. That is the situation as it was in bibleland along with different gods and worship customs.

I am also looking for better ways to express these ideas so all questions are welcome.