Quote:What I meant to say is that of books that eventually comprise what we call the OT have been copied for centuries or even millennium. The fact that we don't have a copy that old does not mean that older copies didn't exist.
You are big into self-delusion, I see. Okay, so now that you admit that there is no record of this crap in written form it is time to face the reality that all we have are later traditions claimed by the Letter of Aristeas which is now regarded as merely much later apologetic nonsense.
This is the reality of the first millennium BC:
There was no glorious Davidic empire. It never existed. It is no more real than King Arthur's Camelot.
The northern kingdom became a minor regional power between 900 and 722 when the Assyrians got serious.
The southern kingdom with nothing worth defending went over to the Assyrians and did quite well as a vassal state on the growth of the Arabian trade which Assyria controlled. Hezekiah rebelled when Sargon II died but got the shit kicked out of him by Sennacharib. After that, they went back to being loyal vassals and recovered until the Babylonians rebelled against the Assyrians and the shit hit the fan.
Apparently choosing the wrong side in that war, Jerusalem was sacked and burned by the Babylonians who moved their administrative center up the road to Mizpah.
Until this time, there is no indication whatsoever of monotheistic religion in the southern kingdom. (Read William Dever's "Did God Have A Wife" if you think your 'faith' can stand the shock.)
Judah was back to being an impoverished shithole when the Persians overran Babylon and suddenly found themselves with a whole Western Empire. Unlike the Babylonians the Persians extended it by taking Egypt.
Coincidentally, or not, monotheism suddenly begins when the monotheistic Persians (good Zoroastrians that they were!) took over. The over-hyped "return from exile" in your bible seems to have involved somewhere between 400 people (Finkelstein) to 1,000 people (O. Lipshits) based on the archaeology of the Persian urban renewal project in Jerusalem.
The province of Yehud, as the Persians called it, remained loyal until Alexander the Great came rolling through the area in 332 or so. Varous Greek-based kingdoms controlled for the next two centuries and finally a successful revolt threw off the last Greek kingdom, the Seleucids c 140 BC. From 140 BC until 63 BC there was an independent, "Jewish" kingdom... although for the last 20 years or so it was riddled with dynastic strife and multiple claimants to the throne until the Romans came through and mercifully put it out of its misery.
So, you have at most an 80 year period when the propagandistic horseshit which is the OT would have made some sense to the powers-that-be. Before and after that time the region was under the control of
foreign powers.
That is reality.
