Syro-Palestinian Archaeology

[kbs2244]

Sorry for the typo
Should have been 500 BC

[Minimalist]

Yeah...that helps. Makes a big difference. No argument from anyone about 500 BC. The divisive issue, for a while now had been the United Monarchy c 950 BC (and, therefore "Solomon's" Temple). Recent C14 dating seems to have caused even Amihai Mazar to back away from the idea of a United Monarchy covering all of Palestine at that time so it will be interesting to see where the next bone of contention sticks.

Without going into too much detail, Finkelstein and his boys will call for some sort of Temple around 720 under King Hezekiah, who presided over the big expansion of Jerusalem after Israel fell to the Assyrians. There HAD to be a temple prior to the exile because the Babylonians (and the OT) say the Babylonians sacked it and carried out the temple treasures. So, when both sides agree, it seems fairly safe to assume that it did happen.

What Davies and the other minimalist scholars are saying is that we have no idea exactly what was worshipped in that temple because the OT we have was re-written at least after the exile and maybe after the Maccabaean revolt.

[Ishtar]

An interesting addition to this Sin business:

Sin, the moon god, was important to the Israelites because their calendar was essentially and originally lunar, only gradually becoming more solar as these desert nomads settled down into a more agricultural way of life. We think that they practised sidereal astrology which is also more moon-based than its Western sun-based counterpart.

In addition, the moon was the emblem of Israel in Talmudic literature and Hebrew tradition. In Pagan Rites in Judaism, Theodor Reik says:

"The mythical ancestors of the Hebrews lived in Ur and Harran, the centres of the Semitic moon-cult."

Hebrew moon worship is also echoed in the Birkat Lewana, which means 'sanctification of the moon'.

Having observed this ritual carried out by his pious grandfather, the young Theodor Reik believed that he had performed 'an ardent act of worship of the moon'. He goes on to say:

"The experts assure us that the observance of Rosh Chodesh, the first of the month, was once a major holiday, more important than the weekly Sabbath. They also say that this festival was a reminder of the cult of the moon god. ...

"All Semites had a cult of the moon as supreme power. When Mohammed overthrew the old religion of Arabia, he did not dare get rid of the moon cult in a radical manner ... Before Islamic times, the moon deity was the most prominent object of cults in Saudi Arabia. Arab women still insist that the moon is the parent of mankind.

"In the Old Testament ...the moon appears as a power of good. (Deut 33:4) or of evil (Psalm 12:16). Traces of ancient moon worship were energetically removed from the texts by later editors. A few remained, however, ...siuch as Jeremiah 8:2. The Lord predicts that the bones of the Kings and princes of Judah will not be buried, but spread "before the sun and the moon, and all the host of heaven, whom they have loved, and whom they have served, and whom they have worshipped."

So I'm beginning to wonder - and forgive me if I'm just reinventing the wheel - whether all the great battles and wars in the OT are primarily about lunar cults fighting solar cults, and the solar cult winning.

[Minimalist]

Eilat Mazar has, in spite of her family's reputation in the field, backed herself into a corner because of the people who are financing her dig. She started a few years ago by claiming she had found "David's Palace" in East Jerusalem and later the "temple" although it seemed to be the same structure. Then she claimed she had found Nehemiah's Walls but she convinced no one and finally the Archaeology Dept. at Tel Aviv University released a report, just this month, which ripped her a new asshole over that whole deal.

This last thing is turning into another fiasco because she seems to have misread the text on the seal. The only thing which 'dated' this seal to the post-exilic period was the supposed name of the family which returned from Babylon. Subtract that and the seal could be anyone's from virtually anytime after the development of literacy. So, given the fact that there was a Babylonian presence in the middle of the 6th century it seems quite likely that Babylonian gods would have been worshipped. While Mazar's employers missed out on yet another "biblical nail" for their wall they have also averted the problem of Temple servants worshipping pagan gods inside the temple. When they stop pissing and moaning, they will be very glad of that fact as it would have undercut their entire claim to monotheistic history.

[kbs2244]

Wasn’t there some strata evidence supporting the dating?
There is going to be a whole lot of “No way in Hell.” going on with this one.
If true, it supports one group very well, and has to be discredited by the other side.
And, of course, the other side has to back it al the way.

[kbs2244]

Ish;
I don’ know if this belongs here of over at your Jesus as a allegory thread.
You are getting into the difference between “Official Doctrine” and what the common people believed and practiced. (Kind of like “good Catholic’s” and birth control.)
For instance, there is little doubt that good Spanish Catholic families had “family traditions” that were real Judaic.
So what we do for the public to see and what we do behind closed doors doesn’t always match.
The good Hebrews (Jews) have always had trouble with the story in Geneses where Rachel carries off the “Teraphim” (clearly idols) with her when Jacob took her home as a bride.
What they don’t understand is that the Ten Commandments proscription against idols came much later,
So, If you have the Sun Fighting the Moon, who wins?
Even today, I would have to say it is a draw.

[Cognito]

Without going into too much detail, Finkelstein and his boys will call for some sort of Temple around 720 under King Hezekiah, who presided over the big expansion of Jerusalem after Israel fell to the Assyrians. There HAD to be a temple prior to the exile because the Babylonians (and the OT) say the Babylonians sacked it and carried out the temple treasures. So, when both sides agree, it seems fairly safe to assume that it did happen.

What Davies and the other minimalist scholars are saying is that we have no idea exactly what was worshipped in that temple because the OT we have was re-written at least after the exile and maybe after the Maccabaean revolt.

Min, I believe the OT was compiled by Jewish scribes in the Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh circa 650bc. They apparently lifted some of their material from Akkadian and Sumerian works which were being actively collected and cataloged. Plagiarism was alive and well in Assyria at the time.

[Minimalist]

Of course, the OT was not a unified work. It was compiled and edited and re-worked at different times for a lot of reasons over the course of several centuries. The Book of Daniel, for example, dates from about 167 BC.

Finkelstein dates the Deuteronomistic History to about 630 BC because it was at precisely that point in time that Judah and Egypt found themselves rivals for the same territory which had recently been vacated by the Assyrians.

[Ishtar]

Min, I believe the OT was compiled by Jewish scribes in the Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh circa 650bc. They apparently lifted some of their material from Akkadian and Sumerian works which were being actively collected and cataloged. Plagiarism was alive and well in Assyria at the time.

That makes perfect sense to me, but can you back it up with anything, Cogs. At the moment, it just sounds like an unsubstantiated opinion. It would help enormously to have evidence on this.

For instance, I've been attributing the similarity of the Bible and Sumerian stories to the fact that the Canaanites came from Ur and so already have that mythology running through their veins.

So your simpler explanation sounds great. But it needs substantiating...that's all.

[Ishtar]

Ish;
I don’ know if this belongs here of over at your Jesus as a allegory thread.
You are getting into the difference between “Official Doctrine” and what the common people believed and practiced. (Kind of like “good Catholic’s” and birth control.)

I agree with you that the astrology and the Zodiac was almost certainly a proscribed activity by the Priestly class as well as the (later) writer who represented them known as P. This is why there are so many anomalies in the Bible. It looks like the priests completely rewrote the existing texts to suit their own agenda, and in order to do so, they turned allegorical teaching stories into 'history'.

Here's just one example of how they did it, in my opinion:

As you know, the original stories were written by the writer known as E (after El as God is known in the early OT) in the northern territory of Israel, and the writer known as J (after Jahweh or Yahweh, the name God becomes known by at Exodus) in southern Judea. These writers are conservatively dated to between c900 and 700 BC.

El was the main godhead of the Canaanites. Now, the esteemed linguist Frank Moore Cross says that ‘El’ means ‘God’ or ‘god’. Simply that. And pagan gods have different attributes. So that’s why in Genesis 17:1, we have:

“Yahweh appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am El Shadday”. Shadday being an attribute of El, God.

According to Cross: “The [Canaanite] epiphet sadday proves to mean ‘the mountain one’.

So El Shadday means God of the mountains* and in Exodus 6: 2, E writes:

“And God spoke to Moses and said to him, “I am YHWH. And I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as El Shadday, and I was not known to them as my name as YHWH.”

So here is God, revealing himself for the first time to the Hebrews with this real name of YHWH.

However, there is a discrepancy here, because we also have in J's writing in Gen 4:26, God referring to the generations before the Flood, saying explicitly: “Then it was begun to invoke the name YHWH.”

So in other words, could the Yahwehists (J and P) have rewritten these stories when putting together the Bible to look as if Yahweh had always been known to the Israelites as Yahweh, thus whitewashing the El reference. However, they didn't take out E's reference to El Shadday only revealing himself as Yahweh in Exodus - and my guess it was because it was a shabby compromise in a smoke-filled room aimed to placate all parties at the table.

* If El Shadday means 'God of the mountains', could Mount Sinai means Mountain of Sin, in which lies the Wilderness of Sin?

[kbs2244]

Again, the problem with that argument is that it ignores the concept of a story teller, when telling an old story, using terms that a the current audience would understand.

[Ishtar]

Again, the problem with that argument is that it ignores the concept of a story teller, when telling an old story, using terms that a the current audience would understand.

My point exactly, KB. They're stories! But as you pointed out with Job, they're not necessarily about Hebrews, and in fact, in some cases, are Sumerian. So we can never date these stories. We can never be sure that we've found the original.

[Cognito]

My point exactly, KB. They're stories! But as you pointed out with Job, they're not necessarily about Hebrews, and in fact, in some cases, are Sumerian.

As agreed, much of the OT was lifted from earlier writers (Akkadian and Sumerian) and given a twist. We do the same thing today. The earlier writers were recounting stories, some of them quite ancient. Jewish scribes used literary license to develop legitimacy as the Chosen People of God. Nice myth and very effective for an outdated Middle Eastern genocidal cult.

[kbs2244]

Genocidal?

[Minimalist]

JS 8:22-25 With the Lord's approval, Joshua utterly smites the people of Ai, killing 12,000 men and women, so that there were none who escaped.

JG 21:10-12 "... Go and smite the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead with the edge of the sword and; also the women and little ones.... every male and every woman that has lain with a male you shall utterly destroy." They do so and find four hundred young virgins whom they bring back for their own use.

1SA 15:3, 7-8 "This is what the Lord says: Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass ....' And Saul ... utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword."

Genocidal is a fair word for a culture that puts such events in its 'holy' book.