Belief and Knowledge
The physical evidence is conclusive. It is impossible for the Old Testament to have been written in bibleland prior to the arrival of Greeks and for all practical purposes not for a century or more later.
All the physical evidence points to the Septuagint, aka Old Testament, having been written in Egypt no earlier than the mid 2nd c. BC when the Egyptian empire sponsored the Maccabean revolutionaries against the Seleucid empire. This was created as a backstory to legitimize Maccabean rule as priest-kings.
Knowledge comes from what is experienced by the physical senses. Belief comes from what we are told by other people who have no physical evidence to support what they tell us. Only knowledge matters. Belief is not knowledge. Belief is worthless.
Regarding knowledge one needs explain observed facts. An explanation of facts is called a theory. If you like it can be called an hypothesis, sort of a theory in waiting, until it is discarded as false or confirmed and elevated to a theory.
A theory must explain all the available facts. If there are different theories for different facts then both are wrong.
When it comes to theories which explain facts the simplest is most likely correct. A basic theory which explains some facts and then has added complications to explain other facts is trumped by a single theory which explains all the facts.
No matter how impressive a theory a single contrary fact demonstrates that it is at best incomplete and most likely wrong. That is what Einstein said about his theories. Extraordinary evidence is not required. A single fact will do.
That the Yahweh cult was created in Alexandria in the mid 2nd c. BC is the simplest explanation and explains all the available facts and is contradicted by no physical evidence.
On the contrary every other explanation fails to explain all the evidence and are also all contradicted by well known physical evidence which their proponents simply ignore, pretending it does not exist, hoping no one will notice, pretending imaginary future discoveries will vindicate them.
Arguing towards a pr-conceived conclusion is a logical fallacy.
Any argument against the following cannot assume religious traditions are correct as part of the argument. The who point of this exercise is to point just how much is not more than unprovenenced religious traditions for which there is no evidence.
Things everyone thinks they know that no one really knows
We might warn a child, "Don't eat that. You don't know where it came from." It is just as important to warn an adult "Don't believe that." for the same reason.
Back on the home page I gave a list of seven items which are only beliefs. They all refer to beliefs that have been with us for centuries but are only religious traditions not knowledge. We don't know where they came from. Take the same good advice you would give to a child.
Religious traditions pretend to claim replace "no one knows" with "everyone knows" even though there is no physical evidence to support what everyone is supposed to know. This supposed knowledge is nothing more than worthless belief.
No one knows why the books of the Old Testament books were written.
You can read every word of the Old Testament and discover there is not one single statement as to why they were written. There is no statement Yahweh ordered it. There is no statement as to who commissioned them.
The very nature of the historical books indicates they were written after the 5th c. BC when the Greeks invented writing history. One cannot write chronological history until it is invented. Anachronisms are not allowed.
No one knows who wrote them.
At one time there was a tradition that Moses wrote the first five books, the Torah, the books Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy and Leviticus. This is a long discarded idea save for some few very benighted fundies. Back when this was believed all kinds of internal evidence was found to show they were older.
These days it is more popular to believe they were written after the return from the (mythical) captivity in Babylon but even then there is no statement as to who did it. They just sort of appear in this belief system but retain all the indications of the Torah being older that were invented to explain differences under the belief that Moses wrote them.
No one knows when they were written.
As with the above, the "when" varies from Moses and then forward in chronological order starting with Moses to the bulk of them at one time after the mythical return from Babylon. The former is absurd and the latter presents its own problems. The most obvious is back when everyone declared Moses wrote them people saw signs of the language evolving. Now that they were all written at once the signs of evolving are still there. The differences require an explanation that does not involve centuries of change.
This brings up a requirement for an explanation of the facts, a theory. An explanation must apply to everything. Mutually exclusive explanations are not permitted. If one invokes creation after the return to explain one problem it is not permitted to invoke Moses and creation over centuries to explain a different problem. Only one can be correct.
Thus it is an absolute test of the plausibility of an explanation, a test of a hypothesis, to apply it to all aspects of the Old Testament. If it creates more problems than it answers, if contradicts other explanations rather than explaining them all then it is back to the drawing board.
Mutually exclusive explanations are required because it is the only way to force fit the stories into the religious tradition that they have some relation to real events.
If one wants to salvage the idea they were created in bibleland it is required to produce a theory which explains the "evidence" of an evolving language and the fact they were all written at the same time by the same people. Hypothesizing the oldest five were transcribed legends does not explain why the written versions are different.
No one knows the original language in which they were written.
By rights had the first five been written by Moses they would have been written in Egyptian. If we go by the written language in bibleland they would have been written in Phoenician or in Babylonian if the authors had recently "returned" from captivity there. If they were written later then Phoenician would have been replaced by Aramaic.
If they were written after the arrival of Alexander and Greek rule they would have been written in Greek. Unsurprisingly the oldest known version of the Old Testament is the Septuagint in Greek.
As what is called Hebrew is a pidgin of Aramaic and Greek the simplest explanation for the differences which once indicated age differences are simply translations of the Septuagint by people with varying mastery of Greek. This neatly accounts for all of the Koine Greek constructions that are found in "Hebrew." See, Hebrew is Greek by Joseph Yehuda, Becket Publications, Oxford, 1982.
Before Koine Greek was discovered in Alexandria in the late 19th c. only classical Greek was known. Believers pointed to the "Hebraicisms" in the Septuagint to show it was a translation from Hebrew. After Koine Greek was discovered it was clear the "Hebrew" was derived from Koine Greek. The "proof" the Septuagint was a translation now proves the Hebrew is the translation.
Note this has been known for over a century but some believers will still cite the Hebraicisms as though it had never been discredited. Note also this suggest the suspicion or perhaps belief that the Septuagint was the original existed long enough ago for believers to "refute" the idea by pointing out the Hebraicisms. In other words my conclusion is far from original but goes back well over a century, long enough ago that it was at one time refuted. I have yet to find evidence for this.
No one knows when the idea they were religious works started.
Take two Hollywood examples. The Clash of the Titans and The Ten Commandments. While both are entertaining only the latter could be considered religious. The references to the Septuagint from ancient times indicate it was considered in the category of Clash of the Titans rather than The Ten Commandments. They were just stories about gods having no more meaning or value than any other story about gods.
Without a suggestion of special importance for a religion we cannot assume they had any special importance to anyone. When Josephus tells the story of the life of Moses he tells of him leading armies and conquering Nubia. This is not particularly different from the apocryphal gospel of Jesus as a child. There is no recorded reaction, positive or negative, to either additional material in ancient times. It is a modern attitude that rejects the gospel while Disney makes a movie of the Prince of Egypt using material from Josephus. Go figure.
No one knows when they became a component of a religion.
Clearly Josephus in the late 1st c. AD does not consider them to be an important part of Judaism. While parts of his Antiquities of the Jews largely parallels the Septuagint he refers to his source as temple records rather than an existing collection. In fact his entire exercise in writing Antiquities of the Jews makes no sense if in fact the Septuagint were taken as a component of the religion as they would be the fundamental basis for and the most important of the temple records in a language other than Greek.
In the second book of Against Apion where reference to the Old Testament as authoritative is almost imperative as it trumps Apion, Josephus does not mention it at all. In the world of Josephus citing an ancient text would have carried much greater weight than it would today. If the Septuagint had existed in Apion's time it is as difficult to understand how he would not know of it as to understand why Josephus does not point that out in Against Apion.
Rather when Josephus obliquely raises the Septuagint for discussion it is with citation and quotation from the forged Letter of Aristeas. And his citation is used to promote the "miraculous" accuracy of the translation into Greek. Contrast this with later opinions claiming erroneous translations of terms such as young woman into virgin and the like in the Septuagint.
In the first book of Against Apion Josephus declares the Jews were really the Hyksos who ruled Egypt for a century which is clearly in total contradiction to the story in the Exodus. Obviously Josephus did not consider Exodus to be a "true" story in our sense of a factually correct story.
Note here regardless of your opinion of correct or incorrect translation the Septuagint dates from no earlier than the mid 2nd c. BC. Tradition holds it was created in the mid 3rd c. BC based upon the forged Letter of Aristeas. In any event it is a minimum of 2100 years ago.
If you like creation of the Torah by Moses it was "translated" only ten centuries after Moses wrote it. If you like creation after the mythical return from Babylon then it was written only three centuries after the original. No matter how you look at it and considering the early citation of accuracy of translation, that the Septuagint is so much closer to the religious tradition of an "original" text in Hebrew that its translation of intended meaning and usage at the time of translation and for centuries later is accurate. People sitting around centuries later attacking Christianity may be able to argue their much more distant meaning and usage of words but cannot claim the Greek is wrong when Jews living at the time extolled its accuracy.
The Septuagint was first adopted by Christianity in the 4th or 5th century as books to be included in collections which included the gospels and epistles. The authors of the Mishna use them as a starting point to purge the murderous and depraved nature of the Torah.
When Christians began taking note of a version of the Septuagint in a language other than Greek it was not taken as superior to the Greek merely different from it.
No one knows why any particular selection of books was made.
Josephus refers to the Jews as having only 22 holy books. While there have been some vain attempts to mix and match the Septuagint/Old Testament books into 22 there is no evidence such a grouping ever existed. The number used by both Jews and Christians is a near match to the Septuagint.
Bel and the Dragon is out which is perhaps unfortunate as it has the best stories. It is unclear if the Book of Enoch was ever in the Septuagint. It was very popular up through the 3rd c. AD. In this light the earliest uses of the books by the people appear to have been as entertainment.
The book of Ester is included even though it has no religious content whatsoever but is purely about human intrigue. No, it does not tell of a god looking after his people as there is no god mentioned nor credited. It is all a Cinderella story of the power of a beautiful woman over a man. As such it is clearly entertainment.
Save for Ester they were simply god stories like the stories about the Greek gods not to be taken seriously. If a more entertaining story came along it was the more truthful story even if it contradicted the previous. The more powerful the story the more truthful it was in those days. They did not view physical evidence as the sole criteria for what is true.
For example the issues I raise in this work are largely of fact. They are all asking what really happened. Raising such issues two thousand years ago would have elicited a blank "why does it matter" stare. However a dialog on whether the trials of Moses or those of Hercules were truer should not have been hard to start. Neither would the king of Egypt as a tragic hero in the Moses story or as tale of brother against brother, sibling rivalry is a perennial favorite theme. The discourse would be on the aesthetic qualities of the stories in accordance with the standards of the day.
This is something we have read of many times in our own history. Prior to modern times questioning the occurrence or even existence of person or event was far from common. Rather the great debates were over conflicting stories and which was truer to the nature of the story's theme.
Matt Giwer © 2011
The physical evidence is conclusive. It is impossible for the Old Testament to have been written in bibleland prior to the arrival of Greeks and for all practical purposes not for a century or more later.
All the physical evidence points to the Septuagint, aka Old Testament, having been written in Egypt no earlier than the mid 2nd c. BC when the Egyptian empire sponsored the Maccabean revolutionaries against the Seleucid empire. This was created as a backstory to legitimize Maccabean rule as priest-kings.
Knowledge comes from what is experienced by the physical senses. Belief comes from what we are told by other people who have no physical evidence to support what they tell us. Only knowledge matters. Belief is not knowledge. Belief is worthless.
Regarding knowledge one needs explain observed facts. An explanation of facts is called a theory. If you like it can be called an hypothesis, sort of a theory in waiting, until it is discarded as false or confirmed and elevated to a theory.
A theory must explain all the available facts. If there are different theories for different facts then both are wrong.
When it comes to theories which explain facts the simplest is most likely correct. A basic theory which explains some facts and then has added complications to explain other facts is trumped by a single theory which explains all the facts.
No matter how impressive a theory a single contrary fact demonstrates that it is at best incomplete and most likely wrong. That is what Einstein said about his theories. Extraordinary evidence is not required. A single fact will do.
That the Yahweh cult was created in Alexandria in the mid 2nd c. BC is the simplest explanation and explains all the available facts and is contradicted by no physical evidence.
On the contrary every other explanation fails to explain all the evidence and are also all contradicted by well known physical evidence which their proponents simply ignore, pretending it does not exist, hoping no one will notice, pretending imaginary future discoveries will vindicate them.
Arguing towards a pr-conceived conclusion is a logical fallacy.
Any argument against the following cannot assume religious traditions are correct as part of the argument. The who point of this exercise is to point just how much is not more than unprovenenced religious traditions for which there is no evidence.
Things everyone thinks they know that no one really knows
We might warn a child, "Don't eat that. You don't know where it came from." It is just as important to warn an adult "Don't believe that." for the same reason.
Back on the home page I gave a list of seven items which are only beliefs. They all refer to beliefs that have been with us for centuries but are only religious traditions not knowledge. We don't know where they came from. Take the same good advice you would give to a child.
Religious traditions pretend to claim replace "no one knows" with "everyone knows" even though there is no physical evidence to support what everyone is supposed to know. This supposed knowledge is nothing more than worthless belief.
No one knows why the books of the Old Testament books were written.
You can read every word of the Old Testament and discover there is not one single statement as to why they were written. There is no statement Yahweh ordered it. There is no statement as to who commissioned them.
The very nature of the historical books indicates they were written after the 5th c. BC when the Greeks invented writing history. One cannot write chronological history until it is invented. Anachronisms are not allowed.
No one knows who wrote them.
At one time there was a tradition that Moses wrote the first five books, the Torah, the books Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy and Leviticus. This is a long discarded idea save for some few very benighted fundies. Back when this was believed all kinds of internal evidence was found to show they were older.
These days it is more popular to believe they were written after the return from the (mythical) captivity in Babylon but even then there is no statement as to who did it. They just sort of appear in this belief system but retain all the indications of the Torah being older that were invented to explain differences under the belief that Moses wrote them.
No one knows when they were written.
As with the above, the "when" varies from Moses and then forward in chronological order starting with Moses to the bulk of them at one time after the mythical return from Babylon. The former is absurd and the latter presents its own problems. The most obvious is back when everyone declared Moses wrote them people saw signs of the language evolving. Now that they were all written at once the signs of evolving are still there. The differences require an explanation that does not involve centuries of change.
This brings up a requirement for an explanation of the facts, a theory. An explanation must apply to everything. Mutually exclusive explanations are not permitted. If one invokes creation after the return to explain one problem it is not permitted to invoke Moses and creation over centuries to explain a different problem. Only one can be correct.
Thus it is an absolute test of the plausibility of an explanation, a test of a hypothesis, to apply it to all aspects of the Old Testament. If it creates more problems than it answers, if contradicts other explanations rather than explaining them all then it is back to the drawing board.
Mutually exclusive explanations are required because it is the only way to force fit the stories into the religious tradition that they have some relation to real events.
If one wants to salvage the idea they were created in bibleland it is required to produce a theory which explains the "evidence" of an evolving language and the fact they were all written at the same time by the same people. Hypothesizing the oldest five were transcribed legends does not explain why the written versions are different.
No one knows the original language in which they were written.
By rights had the first five been written by Moses they would have been written in Egyptian. If we go by the written language in bibleland they would have been written in Phoenician or in Babylonian if the authors had recently "returned" from captivity there. If they were written later then Phoenician would have been replaced by Aramaic.
If they were written after the arrival of Alexander and Greek rule they would have been written in Greek. Unsurprisingly the oldest known version of the Old Testament is the Septuagint in Greek.
As what is called Hebrew is a pidgin of Aramaic and Greek the simplest explanation for the differences which once indicated age differences are simply translations of the Septuagint by people with varying mastery of Greek. This neatly accounts for all of the Koine Greek constructions that are found in "Hebrew." See, Hebrew is Greek by Joseph Yehuda, Becket Publications, Oxford, 1982.
Before Koine Greek was discovered in Alexandria in the late 19th c. only classical Greek was known. Believers pointed to the "Hebraicisms" in the Septuagint to show it was a translation from Hebrew. After Koine Greek was discovered it was clear the "Hebrew" was derived from Koine Greek. The "proof" the Septuagint was a translation now proves the Hebrew is the translation.
Note this has been known for over a century but some believers will still cite the Hebraicisms as though it had never been discredited. Note also this suggest the suspicion or perhaps belief that the Septuagint was the original existed long enough ago for believers to "refute" the idea by pointing out the Hebraicisms. In other words my conclusion is far from original but goes back well over a century, long enough ago that it was at one time refuted. I have yet to find evidence for this.
No one knows when the idea they were religious works started.
Take two Hollywood examples. The Clash of the Titans and The Ten Commandments. While both are entertaining only the latter could be considered religious. The references to the Septuagint from ancient times indicate it was considered in the category of Clash of the Titans rather than The Ten Commandments. They were just stories about gods having no more meaning or value than any other story about gods.
Without a suggestion of special importance for a religion we cannot assume they had any special importance to anyone. When Josephus tells the story of the life of Moses he tells of him leading armies and conquering Nubia. This is not particularly different from the apocryphal gospel of Jesus as a child. There is no recorded reaction, positive or negative, to either additional material in ancient times. It is a modern attitude that rejects the gospel while Disney makes a movie of the Prince of Egypt using material from Josephus. Go figure.
No one knows when they became a component of a religion.
Clearly Josephus in the late 1st c. AD does not consider them to be an important part of Judaism. While parts of his Antiquities of the Jews largely parallels the Septuagint he refers to his source as temple records rather than an existing collection. In fact his entire exercise in writing Antiquities of the Jews makes no sense if in fact the Septuagint were taken as a component of the religion as they would be the fundamental basis for and the most important of the temple records in a language other than Greek.
In the second book of Against Apion where reference to the Old Testament as authoritative is almost imperative as it trumps Apion, Josephus does not mention it at all. In the world of Josephus citing an ancient text would have carried much greater weight than it would today. If the Septuagint had existed in Apion's time it is as difficult to understand how he would not know of it as to understand why Josephus does not point that out in Against Apion.
Rather when Josephus obliquely raises the Septuagint for discussion it is with citation and quotation from the forged Letter of Aristeas. And his citation is used to promote the "miraculous" accuracy of the translation into Greek. Contrast this with later opinions claiming erroneous translations of terms such as young woman into virgin and the like in the Septuagint.
In the first book of Against Apion Josephus declares the Jews were really the Hyksos who ruled Egypt for a century which is clearly in total contradiction to the story in the Exodus. Obviously Josephus did not consider Exodus to be a "true" story in our sense of a factually correct story.
Note here regardless of your opinion of correct or incorrect translation the Septuagint dates from no earlier than the mid 2nd c. BC. Tradition holds it was created in the mid 3rd c. BC based upon the forged Letter of Aristeas. In any event it is a minimum of 2100 years ago.
If you like creation of the Torah by Moses it was "translated" only ten centuries after Moses wrote it. If you like creation after the mythical return from Babylon then it was written only three centuries after the original. No matter how you look at it and considering the early citation of accuracy of translation, that the Septuagint is so much closer to the religious tradition of an "original" text in Hebrew that its translation of intended meaning and usage at the time of translation and for centuries later is accurate. People sitting around centuries later attacking Christianity may be able to argue their much more distant meaning and usage of words but cannot claim the Greek is wrong when Jews living at the time extolled its accuracy.
The Septuagint was first adopted by Christianity in the 4th or 5th century as books to be included in collections which included the gospels and epistles. The authors of the Mishna use them as a starting point to purge the murderous and depraved nature of the Torah.
When Christians began taking note of a version of the Septuagint in a language other than Greek it was not taken as superior to the Greek merely different from it.
No one knows why any particular selection of books was made.
Josephus refers to the Jews as having only 22 holy books. While there have been some vain attempts to mix and match the Septuagint/Old Testament books into 22 there is no evidence such a grouping ever existed. The number used by both Jews and Christians is a near match to the Septuagint.
Bel and the Dragon is out which is perhaps unfortunate as it has the best stories. It is unclear if the Book of Enoch was ever in the Septuagint. It was very popular up through the 3rd c. AD. In this light the earliest uses of the books by the people appear to have been as entertainment.
The book of Ester is included even though it has no religious content whatsoever but is purely about human intrigue. No, it does not tell of a god looking after his people as there is no god mentioned nor credited. It is all a Cinderella story of the power of a beautiful woman over a man. As such it is clearly entertainment.
Save for Ester they were simply god stories like the stories about the Greek gods not to be taken seriously. If a more entertaining story came along it was the more truthful story even if it contradicted the previous. The more powerful the story the more truthful it was in those days. They did not view physical evidence as the sole criteria for what is true.
For example the issues I raise in this work are largely of fact. They are all asking what really happened. Raising such issues two thousand years ago would have elicited a blank "why does it matter" stare. However a dialog on whether the trials of Moses or those of Hercules were truer should not have been hard to start. Neither would the king of Egypt as a tragic hero in the Moses story or as tale of brother against brother, sibling rivalry is a perennial favorite theme. The discourse would be on the aesthetic qualities of the stories in accordance with the standards of the day.
This is something we have read of many times in our own history. Prior to modern times questioning the occurrence or even existence of person or event was far from common. Rather the great debates were over conflicting stories and which was truer to the nature of the story's theme.
Matt Giwer © 2011
