Made in Alexandria: The Origin of the Yahweh Cult

[A_Nony_Mouse]

This is fascinating stuff.

A_Nony_Mouse, at first I thought this was more of a challenge or thought experiment, but I get the impression that you seek to get people to strip away all of the baggage that has been attached to the Bible for centuries (millennia?) and work with what is there. For someone like me, raised in religion and finally breaking away from it, it helps to realize that even now I still tend to work backwards when thinking about the Bible and its history.

Precisely! In fact I may start describing it that way. Baggage == religious tradition. But baggage is a more easily understood colloquial term.

As to the baggage, from the writings of Josephus, a priest of the Yahweh cult, it is a clear inference he did not consider the stories either authoritative or canonical. His only use of them as "true" I can find is in giving the oldest example of the false claim people hate the Judeans/Jews.

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The silver scroll is so amusing. May his light shine upon you. How can it be more clear that is talking about a sun god and from the time frame most likely Ra of Egypt?

For those who don't know, the Silver Scrolls were two tiny rolled up strips of silver found by Gabriel Barkay in a tomb near Jerusalem. They contain two variants of the same, rather generic, prayer...a prayer which was fleshed out and is now written in Numbers. The scrolls were written in paleo-Hebrew. In the translations I have seen that phrase does not appear clearly. There is some speculation by the translators as they try to help it along but the inscription itself is in execrable condition and much is illegible.

I'll see about re-writing what I lost.

Point in fact paleo-hebrew is BS. The inscriptions in the region of that age are Phoenician and later Aramaic. How do they divide the finds into "paleo-Phoenician" and "paleo-Hebrew"? They get out the bible and see if the bible folk are said to have ruled the region where it was found. In other words, circular reasoning.

Here is another fact. When they talk about the changes in Hebrew over time they are talking about dating the books of the bible. There are not enough examples of any inscriptions from the mountain region of Palestine to fill an index card or two if you write large and that includes the tunnel inscription. Again circular reasoning.

Of course if I were wrong consider the museums in Israel would have their collections of inscriptions as central evidence of the zionist claims. The same for Christian museums around the world. They would be easily googled. They would be on tour. Instead, nothing at all or at most claims that it all exists but a refusal to present evidence it exists. Is a URL so hard?