Most are in Hebrew, many in Aramaic and some in Greek which doesn't mean much as Aramaic was the common spoken language and the upper classes all spoke Greek.
A lot of them are copies of religious texts and some are quite general in nature.
You know, you can transcribe between related languages with a fair degree of justice to the original text, say Italian and Spanish as an example. However, when you start with English to Chinese you can get some bizarre translations. There are web sites dedicated to fucked up advertising slogans of English rendered into Chinese.
I suggest that Greek and Hebrew were different enough that easy translation back and forth would have been difficult but probably not impossible.
Right, but we now know that is horseshit because the chain of evidence is that the villages which arose in the eastern hill country and which grew to be Israel and Judah were not founded until around 1200 BC at the start of the Iron Age. But that does not mean that there might now have been some folklore recollection of the Hyksos expulsion among the Canaanites. Remember the name of the pharaoh who chased them out was Ahmose... which is pretty close to Mose ( or Moses ) in English. When the Egyptians controlled Canaan there might have been some control on the story of how Ahmose chased the Hyksos out and conquered Canaan. My guess is the story was more popular with the Egyptians than the Canaanites! But once the Egyptians are gone who knows how the story could have been garbled or edited to suit the needs of the powers that be?
When Egypt had the power to control Canaan in the LBA she did so, for 4 centuries which included the reigns of Amenhotep II and Thutmoses III, the absolute peak of Egyptian imperial expansion was attained. As can be judged from the Amarna letters, Judah was an unimportant backwater. After the arrival of the Sea People, mainly the Philistines, Egypt had only two periods of short-lived military expansion into Canaan and they could not consolidate their gains in either case. Finkelstein's assertion that the gist of the story was used at the end of the 7th century to motivate the nation against Necho makes sense inasmuch as it is the only time, prior to the arrival of the Greeks, when Judah and Egypt were in expansionist mode at the same time. Its a compelling argument but it has nothing to do with "Judaism." Yahweh was the local boss hooter anyway in Jerusalem. As Dever discusses there was a perpetual power struggle between the traditional Canaanite religion in the countryside and the new Yahweh Is Cool school in Jerusalem. What better P.R. for ole Yahweh than to assert that he helped the nation escape from the big bad Egyptians once before? We all know that priests lie like rugs!
A lot of them are copies of religious texts and some are quite general in nature.
You know, you can transcribe between related languages with a fair degree of justice to the original text, say Italian and Spanish as an example. However, when you start with English to Chinese you can get some bizarre translations. There are web sites dedicated to fucked up advertising slogans of English rendered into Chinese.
I suggest that Greek and Hebrew were different enough that easy translation back and forth would have been difficult but probably not impossible.
Quote:So we have a story called Exodus about a bunch of people who fled Egypt then founded the nation of Israel
Right, but we now know that is horseshit because the chain of evidence is that the villages which arose in the eastern hill country and which grew to be Israel and Judah were not founded until around 1200 BC at the start of the Iron Age. But that does not mean that there might now have been some folklore recollection of the Hyksos expulsion among the Canaanites. Remember the name of the pharaoh who chased them out was Ahmose... which is pretty close to Mose ( or Moses ) in English. When the Egyptians controlled Canaan there might have been some control on the story of how Ahmose chased the Hyksos out and conquered Canaan. My guess is the story was more popular with the Egyptians than the Canaanites! But once the Egyptians are gone who knows how the story could have been garbled or edited to suit the needs of the powers that be?
When Egypt had the power to control Canaan in the LBA she did so, for 4 centuries which included the reigns of Amenhotep II and Thutmoses III, the absolute peak of Egyptian imperial expansion was attained. As can be judged from the Amarna letters, Judah was an unimportant backwater. After the arrival of the Sea People, mainly the Philistines, Egypt had only two periods of short-lived military expansion into Canaan and they could not consolidate their gains in either case. Finkelstein's assertion that the gist of the story was used at the end of the 7th century to motivate the nation against Necho makes sense inasmuch as it is the only time, prior to the arrival of the Greeks, when Judah and Egypt were in expansionist mode at the same time. Its a compelling argument but it has nothing to do with "Judaism." Yahweh was the local boss hooter anyway in Jerusalem. As Dever discusses there was a perpetual power struggle between the traditional Canaanite religion in the countryside and the new Yahweh Is Cool school in Jerusalem. What better P.R. for ole Yahweh than to assert that he helped the nation escape from the big bad Egyptians once before? We all know that priests lie like rugs!
