Adam's original company?

[Belacqua]

That's right! All the ancient texts are myth, allegory, fable, and just-so stories. (Up until Herodotus, and even he is a bit iffy.) So if we were to claim that J's writings were meant literally it would mean that he is a serious exception to the rule, and that would require strong evidence or argument. 

Which of the ancient texts can you point to with confidence as intended to be literal reporting? 

No, they weren't treated as such at the time.  You're retconning to defend retconning.  There are plenty of examples in Hinduism and Buddhism to illustrate the point (e.g. "For example, the colossal 18-day war in the Mahabharata is widely viewed on a literal level, but it is deeply and universally interpreted as the constant internal war between good and evil within an individual's own consciousness." - ChatGPT).  These text were not interpreted as myth, allegory, fable, or just so stories.   You're engaging in a form of presentism.

Now you're going into Hinduism and Buddhism, which are a long way from the Yahwist.

But OK, we're talking about the interpretation of ancient texts, and whether they were read as literal truth. 

Cool that you're relying on ChatGPT. They've never led anyone wrong before. 

Let's go back to your earlier claim: 

"The people who wrote the bible didn't believe in any such god of the philosophers. Starting with Augustine, it has been a long battle to reform an anthropomorphic, physical god into something more palatable to the world after Plato and Aristotle."

The "people who wrote the [B]ible" believed a lot of different things. We don't want to engage in a reductive fallacy by pretending that they all believed the same thing, and that this thing is false. The evangelist John, for example, begins his gospel by saying that in the beginning was the Logos -- a concept taken from Greek philosophy (stoic and Neoplatonic). This is different from what the Yahwist wrote. So it's better not to over-generalize. 

I am not persuaded by your repeated assertions that Bloom is wrong about J -- it seems to me very possible that J, as an educated and philosophical person, with a well-developed ability to use literary techniques other than literalism, believed in something other than the literal Old-Man-in-the-Sky God. Apophatic theology is an ancient way of approaching things, and this means that many important Jewish and Christian writers have accepted that the only accurate ways of writing about God are non-literal. 

Nor did this start with Augustine, as you claim. Origen died 100 years before Augustine was born, and he explicitly rejects literal readings of large parts of Genesis. Ambrose, Athanasius, and other Capadoccian Fathers agreed with him, independent of Augustine's writing. 

As for the battles in the Mahabharata, and the fact that some people interpret these as both real historical events and also as symbolic. Jews and Christians may also assume that a reported event was real, but that its more important meaning is as allegory. We don't really know how much of the Hebrew Bible early Christians accepted as true, but we do know that in the New Testament both Jesus and Paul are depicted as using events in the Old Testament for their allegorical meanings. There is a long history of this, and for many influential Christians it is clear that the allegory is what's important, to the point where if the historical event didn't happen at all it wouldn't change the message. Blake, for example, argued that Moses never existed as a historical individual but as a character type -- one which we may resemble, more or less, and that his importance is purely in what he represents. (Blake is an extreme case, but in the history of minority visionary Christianity he's not that unusual.) 

In short you are reducing a complex and nuanced history of biblical hermeneutics to a simplified form. If you think that all Jews and Christians had to accept Genesis as literally true, and that any other reading is "retconning" in order to bring it up to date with Plato or with modern science, you are oversimplifying.

[Belacqua]

There are two questions here.  Whether the source was compiling folklore and whether or not the places and people the source got that folklore from (or transmitted it to) believed in it literally are not the same question.  

We might ask the same of the brothers grimm....but we would be very safe in assuming that if the folklorist component of the documentary hypothesis were true the folklorist j got those stories from people who believed they were literally true, and enough people believed they were literally true after transmission for it to be worth the p sources time to make them fit centuries later for legal purposes.

I appreciate the fact that you are attempting a reasoned and balanced argument here.

I agree with you that people who came after J may have taken his writing to be literally true, while he himself did not. Interpretation is hard, and lots of people prefer the simplest version. 

The point I'm making is that it's false to say "everybody believed it was literal until science told them they couldn't believe it any more." That's not true.

[The Grand Nudger]

J wasn't writing anything those people weren't already familiar with, if j was an identitarian folklorist. I think the more salient observation here is that the jahwist sources god is the more anthropomorphic one. By the time of the priestly source and the need to believe literally and act accordingly or face penalties becoming a reality, god could no longer be some prick wandering around his mountain berry patch. Nevertheless, that's how it began, and it's fair to conclude that j the folklorist...even if he/they did not themselves believe in these stories literally...got them from people who saw no such clear dividing line between a just so story and a literally true story as we now might, using that term as a pejorative rather than a descriptive. The god who has human quarrels and human problems and human characteristics...including making boneheaded decisions like the one in question... is not only the authentic form of this god, it's one of it's defining characteristics as a theistic god in the first place. The personal, in personal and intervening. There is no question or debate as to whether either community in the 10th or 6th centuries were deists or theists. They were theists. They tell us that in their own words at every turn. Not only do they stand as their own witness to this effect, we know that their societies were powerfully organized around their explicitly theistic beliefs as a matter of internal and external artifacts.

God as an abstraction is an item of later cultural contamination. Hellenization specifically, both in the jewish and christian cases. We have some idea of how people felt about that, on account of the wars that were waged over it. Even by the time of paul the text is still saying that so much as attempting to think like these greeks with their philosophy is deleterious to faith in this god.

(to be clear, I don't think god became abstract because people got smarter or learned new facts about the world or the universe, I think that god became abstract, insomuch as it did, because concrete aspects of that god in it's literary and folk tradition became inconvenient to power)

[Belacqua]

J wasn't writing anything those people weren't already familiar with, if j was an identitarian folklorist.  I think the more salient observation here is that the jahwist sources god is the more anthropomorphic one.  By the time of the priestly source and the need to believe literally and act accordingly or face penalties becoming a reality, god could no longer be some prick wandering around his mountain berry patch.  Nevertheless, that's how it began, and it's fair to conclude that j the folklorist...even if he/they did not themselves believe in these stories literally...got them from people who saw no such clear dividing line between a just so story and a literally true story as we now might, using that term as a pejorative rather than a descriptive.  The god who has human quarrels and human problems and human characteristics...including making boneheaded decisions like the one in question... is not only the authentic form of this god, it's one of it's defining characteristics as a theistic god in the first place.  The personal, in personal and intervening.  There is no question or debate as to whether either community in the 10th or 6th centuries were deists or theists.  They were theists.  They tell us that in their own words at every turn.  Not only do they stand as their own witness to this effect, we know that their societies were powerfully organized around their explicitly theistic beliefs as a matter of internal and external artifacts.

God as an abstraction is an item of later cultural contamination.  Hellenization specifically, both in the jewish and christian cases.  We have some idea of how people felt about that, on account of the wars that were waged over it.  Even by the time of paul the text is still saying that so much as attempting to think like these greeks with their philosophy is deleterious to faith in this god.

(to be clear, I don't think god became abstract because people got smarter or learned new facts about the world or the universe, I think that god became abstract, insomuch as it did, because concrete aspects of that god in it's literary and folk tradition became inconvenient to power)

Yeah, I don't think it's at all proper to say that J's God is what you're calling "abstract" here. He's not Tillich's Ground of Being of Aquinas's Actus Purus.

Bloom makes a persuasive case that J's God is inscrutable, unknowable in any human way. He may behave at times like a person -- even like a crazy person -- but he is not something which we limited people may understand even a little bit. This is in large part because his actions seem irreconcilable from a human perspective. His basic incomprehensibility means that we have to talk about him by using poetic tropes, not the language of standard cause-and-effect.

[The Grand Nudger]

Neoplatonism doesn't arise until the third century ad. I've not read blooms work, but if you've fairly represented it in thread I'd say it probably has textual, evidentiary, and timeline challenges?

-is he one of the people who think that the tanakh as we know it is literally (or literarily, as it were) from 200bc-200ad instead of 1000bc to 600bc?

[Angrboda]

No, they weren't treated as such at the time.  You're retconning to defend retconning.  There are plenty of examples in Hinduism and Buddhism to illustrate the point (e.g. "For example, the colossal 18-day war in the Mahabharata is widely viewed on a literal level, but it is deeply and universally interpreted as the constant internal war between good and evil within an individual's own consciousness." - ChatGPT).  These text were not interpreted as myth, allegory, fable, or just so stories.   You're engaging in a form of presentism.

Now you're going into Hinduism and Buddhism, which are a long way from the Yahwist.

But OK, we're talking about the interpretation of ancient texts, and whether they were read as literal truth. 

Cool that you're relying on ChatGPT. They've never led anyone wrong before. 

Let's go back to your earlier claim: 

"The people who wrote the bible didn't believe in any such god of the philosophers. Starting with Augustine, it has been a long battle to reform an anthropomorphic, physical god into something more palatable to the world after Plato and Aristotle."

The "people who wrote the [B]ible" believed a lot of different things. We don't want to engage in a reductive fallacy by pretending that they all believed the same thing, and that this thing is false. The evangelist John, for example, begins his gospel by saying that in the beginning was the Logos -- a concept taken from Greek philosophy (stoic and Neoplatonic). This is different from what the Yahwist wrote. So it's better not to over-generalize. 

I am not persuaded by your repeated assertions that Bloom is wrong about J -- it seems to me very possible that J, as an educated and philosophical person, with a well-developed ability to use literary techniques other than literalism, believed in something other than the literal Old-Man-in-the-Sky God. Apophatic theology is an ancient way of approaching things, and this means that many important Jewish and Christian writers have accepted that the only accurate ways of writing about God are non-literal. 

Nor did this start with Augustine, as you claim. Origen died 100 years before Augustine was born, and he explicitly rejects literal readings of large parts of Genesis. Ambrose, Athanasius, and other Capadoccian Fathers agreed with him, independent of Augustine's writing. 

As for the battles in the Mahabharata, and the fact that some people interpret these as both real historical events and also as symbolic. Jews and Christians may also assume that a reported event was real, but that its more important meaning is as allegory. We don't really know how much of the Hebrew Bible early Christians accepted as true, but we do know that in the New Testament both Jesus and Paul are depicted as using events in the Old Testament for their allegorical meanings. There is a long history of this, and for many influential Christians it is clear that the allegory is what's important, to the point where if the historical event didn't happen at all it wouldn't change the message. Blake, for example, argued that Moses never existed as a historical individual but as a character type -- one which we may resemble, more or less, and that his importance is purely in what he represents. (Blake is an extreme case, but in the history of minority visionary Christianity he's not that unusual.) 

In short you are reducing a complex and nuanced history of biblical hermeneutics to a simplified form. If you think that all Jews and Christians had to accept Genesis as literally true, and that any other reading is "retconning" in order to bring it up to date with Plato or with modern science, you are oversimplifying.

No, I am not. I am pointing out that besides any allegorical dimension, these writings also have a literal dimension. You can only ignore any suggested literal dimension by arguing and providing evidence that the author's intent was exclusively allegorical. That's how logic works. And neither you nor Bloom have done so. And I am not reducing anything as I, unlike you, am not arguing for a particular dimension, the literal one, being exclusive. The charge of anthropomorphism is the claim that the physical portrayals of God are not literal and have exclusively non-literal meanings according to the author. It's the charge that these passages were never meant in any sense to be taken literally, in addition to any other senses in which they might be interpreted. Anytime you want to demonstrate this, feel free to do so. Bloom's cantankerous retconning doesn't count.

[Belacqua]

I am pointing out that besides any allegorical dimension, these writings also have a literal dimension.

Yes, of course they do. The words are not just abstract sounds, but refer to real things in the world, like plants and animals. There is a literal dimension. 

I'm not sure what you mean exactly by "these writings," but of course different parts of the Bible lean more heavily on the idea of actual historical occurrence than other parts. The historical narratives from the time of David up through the Exile, and then again in Ezra's restoration, are intended as historical reporting. It's told from a particular point of view, of course, so there's a large propagandistic element to be kept in mind. But objective historians can learn real facts from the narratives if they use careful discernment. 

Other parts of the Bible are more clearly non-literal. In the Song of Solomon, when the speaker says "Your eyes are doves," this is a metaphor. Her eyes aren't really doves. 

So of course we have to use discernment, and what historical knowledge we possess, to figure out which parts are intended to be literally true and which parts aren't. 

The scholars I have read have mostly concluded that the original writers of Genesis did not intend to write accurate accounts of real events. Did they expect the reader to swallow these tall tales as true? I doubt it, though Nudge is correct to point out that some people in history have done so. But readers in ancient times were perhaps more accustomed to fable than modern people. I don't believe that Hesiod or Apollodorus of Athens (in his Περὶ θεῶν) expected people to accept their narratives as true. The stories served other purposes, yet were still considered valuable. The first readers of the Aeneid knew that it had been made up as propaganda for Octavian. But they read it anyway and found it valuable. People still do. Much of Plato's philosophy is conveyed through myth -- we know this because he says "this part is a myth" -- yet it is still thought to convey important ideas.  

If we're speaking just about the writings of the Yahwist, then I guess we have to use our knowledge of ancient literature and the goals of writers in his time if we want to discern how literally we are meant to read them. It seems to me that a writer of his time would be perfectly willing to write myths, which his readers would readily acknowledge as myths, in order to get his points across. I believe that the majority of scholars would agree with me on this. 

Since you like ChatGPT, I asked it if the Yahwist intended his writings to be taken as literal true history. Here is what it says:

Most scholars: not writing "history" in the modern sense

Ancient Near Eastern authors generally did not distinguish history, theology, legend, and literature in the same way modern historians do. The Yahwist's apparent goals seem to include:

Explaining the relationship between humanity and God.
Explaining the origins of Israel and its neighbors.
Exploring themes such as blessing, sin, covenant, exile, and divine promise.
Providing cultural memory and identity for a community.

In this view, stories such as:

Adam and Eve
Noah
Tower of Babel

are often interpreted by scholars as mythic, symbolic, or etiological narratives (stories explaining why things are the way they are), rather than attempts at literal historical reporting.

But symbolic does not necessarily mean "fiction"

Many scholars argue that the Yahwist likely believed he was communicating truths about the world, God, and Israel's past. Ancient writers often saw myths and ancestral traditions as conveying real truth even when they were not based on verifiable historical events.

For example, the patriarchal narratives about:

Abraham
Isaac
Jacob

may preserve memories of ancient traditions while being shaped into literary and theological narratives.

Minority view: the Yahwist intended historical reporting

Some conservative Jewish and Christian scholars maintain that the Yahwist (or the author traditionally identified with these texts) intended to record actual historical events. In this perspective, symbolic meaning and historical accuracy are not mutually exclusive. The stories are viewed as both theological and historical.

A useful middle position

Many contemporary scholars would say the Yahwist was neither writing modern history nor pure allegory. Rather, he was composing sacred history: narratives about the past intended to reveal theological truths, explain Israel's identity, and connect the community to its understanding of God's actions in the world.
So if the question is whether the Yahwist intended his work to function like a modern historian's account, the scholarly consensus is no. If the question is whether he intended the narratives to communicate truth and meaning about reality and Israel's past, the answer is generally yes.

This seems very reasonable to me. For literate people, there are ways of conveying important truths which are not literally true narratives of historical events. 

I see it as unfortunate that "Some conservative Jewish and Christian scholars" hold the minority view, and assume it all has to be intended as literal reportage. It is even more unfortunate that some atheists, who should base their opinions on the best historical evidence, hold to this minority view along with the conservative Christians.

[Fake Messiah]

It is even more unfortunate that some atheists, who should base their opinions on the best historical evidence, hold to this minority view along with the conservative Christians.

Really, you don't have to tell us how the majority of Christians perceive biblical stories, we can see it for ourselves. We haven't been fooled.

And this is not even the topic of this thread, but of course that doesn't stop you from repeating the same things over and over again. I already had numerous conversations with you about how the Bible doesn't say what is a metaphor and what is not (except for maybe a few poems and stories inside of stories) and you never listen.

Not to mention that I noticed you arguing against evolution quite a few times—talk about taking the book of Genesis as a metaphor.

So what is the point anymore? How many more threads are you going to turn into your rants about William Blake, Plato, Dante, and how the Bible is really just a metaphor?

[The Grand Nudger]

It is the majority view that the jahwist -and- priestly sources did believe in a literal creation of mankind as a historical fact, with the characters of adam and eve as narrative stand-ins for all mankind. That it became the religious view that there was a literal adam and eve as individual people happened when the redactive source compiled the other two sources together as a document foundational to law and political authority for two thousand years. It remains the orthodox jewish view. It remains the official view of the rcc. It's hardly just some minor spattering of conservative christians who believe this.....even though they can no longer kill people for suggesting it's a myth.

[Angrboda]

I am pointing out that besides any allegorical dimension, these writings also have a literal dimension.

Yes, of course they do. The words are not just abstract sounds, but refer to real things in the world, like plants and animals. There is a literal dimension. 

I'm not sure what you mean exactly by "these writings," but of course different parts of the Bible lean more heavily on the idea of actual historical occurrence than other parts. The historical narratives from the time of David up through the Exile, and then again in Ezra's restoration, are intended as historical reporting. It's told from a particular point of view, of course, so there's a large propagandistic element to be kept in mind. But objective historians can learn real facts from the narratives if they use careful discernment. 

Other parts of the Bible are more clearly non-literal. In the Song of Solomon, when the speaker says "Your eyes are doves," this is a metaphor. Her eyes aren't really doves. 

We're talking about the Pentateuch, not the Song of Solomon. Thus saying that other passages outside the Pentateuch do not posses a literal dimension does not address the point.

So of course we have to use discernment, and what historical knowledge we possess, to figure out which parts are intended to be literally true and which parts aren't. 

The scholars I have read have mostly concluded that the original writers of Genesis did not intend to write accurate accounts of real events. Did they expect the reader to swallow these tall tales as true? I doubt it, though Nudge is correct to point out that some people in history have done so. But readers in ancient times were perhaps more accustomed to fable than modern people. I don't believe that Hesiod or Apollodorus of Athens (in his Περὶ θεῶν) expected people to accept their narratives as true. The stories served other purposes, yet were still considered valuable. The first readers of the Aeneid knew that it had been made up as propaganda for Octavian. But they read it anyway and found it valuable. People still do. Much of Plato's philosophy is conveyed through myth -- we know this because he says "this part is a myth" -- yet it is still thought to convey important ideas.  

Since these same scholars are accused of engaging in a form of presentism in denying the literal dimension, appealing to these same scholars is sidestepping and begging the question. It doesn't take a lot of discernment to note that J's contribution to the Pentateuch included passages describing a literal, physical God for which the only justification for treating said elements as strictly non-literal, as the charge of anthropomorphism implies, is nowhere to be found in the documents themselves. Appealing to scholars engaged in an invalid form of literary analysis, motivated by political concerns about the embarrassing nature of some of those passages simply uses the same impugned witnesses for their testimony about their impugned accounts. Can you show me where J himself implied that in describing God as he does, he was engaging in anthropomorphism and thus such passages were not meant to be interpreted as containing a literal dimension? No, you can't, because it's not there in the source documents. Appealing to scholars who are pulling shit from their ass (excuse me, "practicing discernment") to try to make the text say something it doesn't say is futile.

If we're speaking just about the writings of the Yahwist, then I guess we have to use our knowledge of ancient literature and the goals of writers in his time if we want to discern how literally we are meant to read them. It seems to me that a writer of his time would be perfectly willing to write myths, which his readers would readily acknowledge as myths, in order to get his points across. I believe that the majority of scholars would agree with me on this. 

As already noted, while they were likely capable of it, it was not the habit of ancient writers to write pure fiction, which is what you're claiming. Even the most mythological examples were intended to at least allude to some historical truth even if it was not an explicit historical reference, much as while King Arthur may have been fiction, the figure of Arthur was intended to reference a real historical king who was lost to time. This is a common practice in ancient literature. You can find plenty of examples throughout Asia where what we suspect now were mythical figures are mixed in with historical ones with the implication that the mythical figures were just as real as the identifiable historical ones. This exactly parallels the bible and J wherein acts of God and portrayals of God which may have been mythical were presented alongside accounts and portrayals of God which were intended to be accepted as historical.

To completely remove the historical foundation of the Pentateuch, or even just J's contribution to it, is to do great harm to its original purpose and intent in the name of modern sensibilities which are uncomfortable with the actual history of the God they inherited. This is pretty standard literary analysis and is deeply rooted in the fact that the accounts in the Pentateuch served as more than stories but carried implicit theological weight as well, theological weight which ends up cut from its moorings when you try to interpret the Pentateuch as purely ahistorical. Are there passages in the Pentateuch which are ahistorical? Of course. Just not the passages in question. There is no suggestion in the text itself that God didn't have a physical encounter with Israel, or that God's backside was intended as a metaphor. That you can find scholars who support reinterpreting the Pentateuch by the light of their own sensibilities rather than by the sensibilities of the original authors cuts no ice. It's because their corrupt practice is what is being called into question.

Since you like ChatGPT, I asked it if the Yahwist intended his writings to be taken as literal true history. Here is what it says:

Most scholars: not writing "history" in the modern sense

Ancient Near Eastern authors generally did not distinguish history, theology, legend, and literature in the same way modern historians do. The Yahwist's apparent goals seem to include:

Explaining the relationship between humanity and God.
Explaining the origins of Israel and its neighbors.
Exploring themes such as blessing, sin, covenant, exile, and divine promise.
Providing cultural memory and identity for a community.

In this view, stories such as:

Adam and Eve
Noah
Tower of Babel

are often interpreted by scholars as mythic, symbolic, or etiological narratives (stories explaining why things are the way they are), rather than attempts at literal historical reporting.

But symbolic does not necessarily mean "fiction"

Many scholars argue that the Yahwist likely believed he was communicating truths about the world, God, and Israel's past. Ancient writers often saw myths and ancestral traditions as conveying real truth even when they were not based on verifiable historical events.

For example, the patriarchal narratives about:

Abraham
Isaac
Jacob

may preserve memories of ancient traditions while being shaped into literary and theological narratives.

Minority view: the Yahwist intended historical reporting

Some conservative Jewish and Christian scholars maintain that the Yahwist (or the author traditionally identified with these texts) intended to record actual historical events. In this perspective, symbolic meaning and historical accuracy are not mutually exclusive. The stories are viewed as both theological and historical.

A useful middle position

Many contemporary scholars would say the Yahwist was neither writing modern history nor pure allegory. Rather, he was composing sacred history: narratives about the past intended to reveal theological truths, explain Israel's identity, and connect the community to its understanding of God's actions in the world.
So if the question is whether the Yahwist intended his work to function like a modern historian's account, the scholarly consensus is no. If the question is whether he intended the narratives to communicate truth and meaning about reality and Israel's past, the answer is generally yes.

This seems very reasonable to me. For literate people, there are ways of conveying important truths which are not literally true narratives of historical events. 

I see it as unfortunate that "Some conservative Jewish and Christian scholars" hold the minority view, and assume it all has to be intended as literal reportage. It is even more unfortunate that some atheists, who should base their opinions on the best historical evidence, hold to this minority view along with the conservative Christians.

Nowhere have I suggested that J was writing history. Thus your encounter with ChatGPT is besides the point as it addresses a strawman of my position. Maybe you should practice some actual intelligence in framing your AI queries.

Again, none of this is the question at issue which is whether the scholars in question are engaged in malpractice by reading into the text an ahistoricity which isn't there. There is nothing in the text itself which indicates the writers of the Pentateuch did not intend such things as Genesis to be read as possessing some historical core and precedent. Adam and Eve were meant to reference actual historical realities, to say otherwise is to make the theological meaning of the account vacuous. No ancient author with a theological point wrote in the way you suggest, conveying theological points which did not have some ground in something real and historical.

And as long as we're on the subject, since you implied with your rhetorical question that ChatGPT might be wrong in stating that the war in the Mahabharata is viewed as having a historical referent, are you disputing that this is the case? If you want to dispute the AI text I quoted then do so explicitly. Rhetorical questions which are just snide ad hominems in disguise are a poor substute for a substantive accusation. Either you believe ChatGPT was wrong and need to say so, or you should shut up with the snarky comments and avoid making implied claims that you can't sustain.

And finally, your AI friend agrees with me when it says, "Many contemporary scholars would say the Yahwist was neither writing modern history nor pure allegory." Maybe you should try quoting an AI who doesn't confirm my point.