Is the Jesus story an astrological allegory?

[Ishtar]

KB - one of the things that gardeners and farmers used to plant and sow according to was the phases of the moon. They knew they would get the best crops by planting root plants at one phase, flowering plants at another, leafy plants and so on. Even until fairly recently, gardeners used almanacs of the moon phases to work out these times.

Interestingly, Shane (my son-in-law from the Henge thread) carried out an experiment. One year, he followed the moon phases in a special gardener's almanac for planting vegetables in the garden. That year, they had a bumper crop. The second year, because of other pressures, he couldn't do it so he just planted stuff when it was convenient. I would say that his crop for that year was half what it was the previous year.

Here's some info about how it works: http://www.gardeningbythemoon.com/

So I would guess that at least they would want to know the phases of the moon, and knowing the importance they gave to astrology, I would expect that other astronomical movements were also brought into it.

[Ishtar]

Er...Dig, I think you meant to put that in Henge thread?

[Minimalist]

I'd like to see a demonstration that neolithic man could scrape together enough manpower to move a big rock at all. Such demonstration to include at least one move up a ridge and one down a ridge and must cross at least one stream....sans bridges.

[Beagle]

Folks here in Tennessee swear by the almanac as well.

[Digit]

Damn! You spotted my deliberate mistake Ish, no prizes though I'm afraid.
I'll move it.
As regards planting by Moon phase I think it was the RHS who tested that idea years ago and substantiated it.

[Ishtar]

As regards planting by Moon phase I think it was the RHS who tested that idea years ago and substantiated it.

Thanks Dig. That's useful, as there are fewer more conservative, august and respectable bodies than the Royal Horticultural Society!

[Ishtar]

From my research, it looks very much to me as if the whole Exodus story was developed from Canaanite and other pagan myths.

In addition, as discussed in the Syria Palestian thread, the original name in the Bible for God was 'El' and this was also the name of the main Canaanite God. Later on, there was iconography of Yahweh riding a bull. The Canaanites also had El riding a bull.

This extract from Wiki says that some Biblical scholars thinking is also going that way:

John Bright and William F. Albright have suggested that contact during the early Isin-Larsa period of Amorite states lies behind the Abraham stories of the patriarchal traditions. However, since the critiques of Jon Van Seters and Thomas L. Thompson, these views have failed to find a consensus.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canaan

But even more interestingly, from this same Wiki extract, I learned that the Canaanites were probably originally Sumerians and even after settled in Canaan, were influenced in their thinking (and thus, their mythology) by the Sumerians and Akkadians as they belonged to that empire.

(my bolding)

The urban development of Canaan lagged considerably behind that of Egypt and Mesopotamia and even Syria, where from ca. 3500 BC a sizable city developed at Hamoukar. This city, which was colonised, probably by people coming from Uruk [Sumerian city], perhaps saw the first connections between Syria and Southern Mesopotamia that were repeated throughout history.

Urban development again began, culminating in the Early Bronze Age development of sites like Ebla, which by ca. 2300 BC was incorporated once again into the Akkadian empire of Sargon the Great and Naram-Sin of Akkad (Biblical Accad).

Sumerian references to the Mar.tu (Amorite) country West of the Euphrates date from even earlier than Sargon, at least to the reign of Enshakushanna of Uruk. The archives of Ebla show reference to a number of Biblical sites, including Hazor, Jerusalem, and as a number of people have claimed, to Sodom and Gomorrah mentioned in Genesis as well.

The collapse of the Akkadian Empire saw the arrival of peoples using Khirbet Kerak Ware pottery, coming originally from the Zagros Mountains, east of the Tigris. It is suspected by some ]that this event marks the arrival in Syria and Canaan of the Hurrians, possibly the people later known in the Biblical tradition as Horites.

This Sumerian connection has led some scholars to believe that the Canaanite Godhead El was a development from the Sumerian Godhead Enlil.

Thus we can trace a possible development from the Sumerian Enlil, to the Canaanite El to the El (and Elohim) of the Old Testament who eventually became Yahweh when he announced himself thus to Moses.

[kbs2244]

Warlock:

My point about farmers and calendars and priests and anthropologists was the disconnect between social classes.

It is changing now, but for decades the archeologists and anthropologists only studied the impressive temples and palaces of the upper class. Understandably, the writing they found told how important the inhabitants of these buildings were, and how they had to tell the common people when and what to do because the gods communicated through them.

So, the people that studied the people that kept the calendars got the idea that the common farmer didn’t know when to plant until a priest told him.
Then the modern scholars got the mistaken idea the calendars were needed for crop planning because that is what they read in the books.

However, my point is that a common, even uneducated, but in touch with the environment, farmer knows when to plant or harvest, or whatever without being told by some bureaucrat.

Now, I am open to the idea that the keepers of the calendars were, in addition to justifying their existence, mentioning the farming procedures as a kind of cross reference. This would be so that someone reading, but without a background in stellar movement, may have a real world idea of the time of year being mentioned.

This all has to do with the solar calendar. Solstices, equinox’s, etc.
I don’t want to get into the lunar calendar, planting according to moon phases, etc. That has been studied and commented on ad nausum.

[Digit]

However, my point is that a common, even uneducated, but in touch with the environment, farmer knows when to plant or harvest, or whatever without being told by some bureaucrat.

The times I've made that point KB. Early calenders only make sense as a religious tool IMO.

[Ishtar]

Just a small recap before continuing:

We're trying to establish if the story of the worshipping of the Golden Calf was actually an allegorical story told to mark the change of ages between Taurus and Aries.

It’s quite easy to make the case for it being an allegory (and I will do so in the next post). But is it an astrotheitical allegory based on knowledge of the precession of the equinoxes, an astronomical phenomena that dictates the changing of the astrological ages – that’s the question of this thread.

In order to figure this out, we needed to find out if the Sumerians knew about precession And if they did, whether the Chaldeans inherited it from them and, if so, whether the Hebrews in turn, got it from the Chaldeans.

Well, short of teleporting myself back 3,000 years (and my shamanic skills are not yet that good!), I don’t think we will get the answer to that question. Not easily, anyway.

But we can make some assumptions based on some quite firm ground:

So far, I’ve found that it is widely thought that the Sumerians did know about precession because they measured time in units of 60.

There is more in the post about that on this page: http://archaeologica.boardbot.com/viewt ... &start=285

We’ve also found that the Greek mathematician, Hipparchus, of the 2nd century, widely credited with discovering precession, relied heavily in his work on Sumerian astronomical documents.

More here:
http://archaeologica.boardbot.com/viewt ... &start=285

We know that Chaldeans did inherit their astronomy and astrology from the Sumerians. But whether or how the Hebrews got it from them is anyone’s guess right now.

However, we may be approaching this from the wrong angle, so I will be taking another tack in the next posts.

Firstly, I will show the inconsistencies in the Exodus story, and commonalties with Sumerian/Akkadian and Canaanite myths, to help to make the case that it almost certainly was not a true story.

Secondly, I will posit a new alternative route to this being a precession story other than the Hebrews learning precession from the Chaldeans.

[Ishtar]

I’m going to start to post few anomalies in the Exodus story for anyone who's interested. And I'll also show some commonalities with other mythologies, notably the Sumerian/Akkadian.

This first post is about the Sunday school story: “Moses in the bulrushes’.

We are asked to believe the Bible story that the baby Moses is put into a reed basket and hidden in the bulrushes of the Nile by his mother who was trying to save him from an infanticide by the Egyptian king.

But this infanticide story – the killing of males, or firstborn males – is a common mythological motif:

King Kamsa kills all the babies in the hope of one of them being the baby Krishna in the Indian Srimad Bhagavatham. We also, of course, have the same story told about Jesus and Herod in the New Testament. There is also the Greek myth of Medea's infanticide.

But more notably, there is also an Akkadian story told about Sargon, ruler of Akkad (2333 - 2279 BC) that is very similar:

A Neo-Assyrian text from the seventh century BC purporting to be Sargon's autobiography asserts that the great king was the illegitimate son of a priestess. In the Neo-Assyrian account Sargon's birth and his early childhood are described thus:

“ My mother was a high priestess, my father I knew not. The brothers of my father loved the hills. My city is Azupiranu, which is situated on the banks of the Euphrates. My high priestess mother conceived me, in secret she bore me. She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid. She cast me into the river which rose over me. The river bore me up and carried me to Akki, the drawer of water. Akki, the drawer of water, took me as his son and reared me. Akki, the drawer of water, appointed me as his gardener. While I was a gardener, Ishtar granted me her love, and for four and […] years I exercise kingship.

So it looks more likely that the story of the baby Moses being put in the bulrushes and rescued by an Egyptian princess is mythological and not a literal story.

[Minimalist]

We're trying to establish if the story of the worshipping of the Golden Calf was actually an allegorical story told to mark the change of ages between Taurus and Aries.

In fact, we don't know if the tale of the Golden Calf ever happened or if it was merely a literary device employed later on. The Egyptians continued worshipping the Apis bull long after the Age of Taurus. This would have been common knowledge to the authors of the tale.

[Minimalist]

Yup...and then there is this, courtesy of Titus Livy, on the birth of Romulus and Remus.

To Numitor, the elder, he bequeathed the ancient throne of the Silvian house. Violence, however, proved stronger than either the father's will or the respect due to the brother's seniority; for Amulius expelled his brother and seized the crown. Adding crime to crime, he murdered his brother's sons and made the daughter, Rea Silvia, a Vestal virgin; thus, under the presence of honouring her, depriving her of all hopes of issue.

[1.4]But the Fates had, I believe, already decreed the origin of this great city and the foundation of the mightiest empire under heaven. The Vestal was forcibly violated and gave birth to twins. She named Mars as their father, either because she really believed it, or because the fault might appear less heinous if a deity were the cause of it. But neither gods nor men sheltered her or her babes from the king's cruelty; the priestess was thrown into prison, the boys were ordered to be thrown into the river. By a heaven-sent chance it happened that the Tiber was then overflowing its banks, and stretches of standing water prevented any approach to the main channel. Those who were carrying the children expected that this stagnant water would be sufficient to drown them, so under the impression that they were carrying out the king's orders they exposed the boys at the nearest point of the overflow, where the Ficus Ruminalis (said to have been formerly called Romularis) now stands. The locality was then a wild solitude. The tradition goes on to say that after the floating cradle in which the boys had been exposed had been left by the retreating water on dry land, a thirsty she-wolf from the surrounding hills, attracted by the crying of the children, came to them, gave them her teats to suck and was so gentle towards them that the king's flock-master found her licking the boys with her tongue. According to the story, his name was Faustulus. He took the children to his hut and gave them to his wife Larentia to bring up.

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/txt/ah/Livy/Livy01.html

[Ishtar]

Thanks Min. That's an interesting point.

And also, as usual, there are, shall we say, questionable aspects about the story of the Golden Calf:

The Lord told Moses that his people had corrupted themselves, and that he planned to eliminate them, but Moses argued and pleaded that they should be spared (Exodus 32:11); the Lord relented. Moses went down from the mountain, but upon seeing the calf, he too became angry. He threw down the tablets upon which God's law had been written, and broke them. Moses then burnt the golden calf in the fire, ground it to powder, scattered it on water, and forced the Israelites to drink it.

However, gold cannot be burnt and neither would the Israelites have had the technology to grind it.

On top of that, P makes no mention of this story...hardly surprising as E, in his version, has their pet Aaron as the one who had built an altar before the calf for the Israelites to bring their offerings to. E didn't like the Aaronites.

[Ishtar]

Yup...and then there is this, courtesy of Titus Livy, on the birth of Romulus and Remus.

It's almost as if to qualilfy to be a god or an incredibly famous historical person, you have to be chucked in a river as a baby first to survive an infanticide, and be brought up by someone other than your mother - preferably werewolves!