Re: celebrating Passover

Alter S. Reiss wrote:

> On 18 Aug 2005 13:15:47 -0700, Joe Bernstein wrote:

> (Iron Age 2 Archaeology & History. On Topic or Off Topic? You decide!)

Well, if it's any comfort, I'm retreating this time to more meta
issues, which means, in essence, that I'm talking more on-topic.
You'll see.

Thanks for the references, though.

Oh, and I *am* snipping mercilessly.

> > Alter S. Reiss wrote:
> >
> >> On Mon, 1 Aug 2005 23:25:51 +0000 (UTC), Damien Sullivan wrote:
> >
> >>> Joe Bernstein <joe@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> >>>>Well, these days there are two camps; Thompson and his pals say
> >>>>the entire Old Testament was invented out of whole cloth sometime
> >>>>between 200 BC and AD 300 (I am making neither date up),
> >
> > which is below referred to as "minimalism" (the usual name given this
> > general approach in what passes, in biblical studies, for scholarly
> > debate),
>
> Well, I've certainly heard people giving an earlier date of that
> composition -- 400 - 600 BCE being referred to minimalists. They might not
> give themselves that title, of course.

Well, nobody gives themselves the "minimalist" title except this guy
Vince de Caen who means something completely different by it.

These days, people like Lester Grabbe and John Van Seters who believe
in an earlier and a later layer, with the earlier being written 600-400
or so, don't get called "minimalist" by anyone I see; but I'm a couple
of years out of date, so I guess "these days" is a bit disingenuous.
Anyway.

> And I'm not certain that 'the entire Old Testament' is really where the
> majority of scholarly dispute is taking place. At least in archaeological
> circles, the time whose history is in serious dispute is most that covered
> by Kings I&II, and Samuel I&II.

Yes, but my main concern is when the Torah was written. (Not my only
concern - I'm also interested in Ezekiel and at least two of the
Isaiahs. But Genesis is way more important than Samuel to the history
of fantasy, and very little else is even in the running.) And when the
Torah was written is *tightly* bound up with the debates that are going
on about the archaeology; I mean, if Judah is this hardscrabble
nowheresville, it's presumed to produce no great literature. (Hesiod
doesn't exist, see, so we *know* poor land can't produce writers.)

> Whether the text itself is composed earlier or later is outside of my field
> of expertise. The fact is, when you have fairly good archaeological
> confirmation of the narrative from, say, the seventh century on, even if
> the texts were composed based on oral narratives in tenth century spain,
> those oral narratives were preserved accurately enough that they're worth
> trusting.

I sometimes voice the opinion, on Usenet, that some oral traditions
have been shown to be extra-reliable - the ones I usually instance are
the Vedic and Irish ones. On the few occasions people comment on this,
it's usually to tell me that I misunderstand the exceptions.
Basically, you *can't* get True History based solely on oral tradition,
over more than a couple of centuries.

Whether you can prove that your tradition is not sourced to something
external is another matter. It'd be helpful if there were a signed
document from, oh, Ahab's secretary or Solomon's army chief, in that
crucial layer y'all are looking for, because that's the sort of thing
even a brilliant hoaxer would be unlikely to get from post-Alexander
archives or from inscriptions. But short of that - and we *do* have
evidence that Baruch existed, don't we? - well, I don't see this
getting solved.

> > I must admit that the last (of several) time I researched this, I wound
> > up convinced that the best recentish "book for laymen" was Amy Dockser
> > Marcus's <The View from Nebo>. Marcus is a journalist, not an
> > archaeologist, but she doesn't usually stray into things that require
> > her to know archaeology.
>
> I'd really like to be able to recommend a good archaeologically centered
> "book for laymen" at this point. Unfortunately, I can't. It's not that
> I've read the books that are out there and haven't liked them. It's that I
> have a limited book budget, which tends to go for books I need in the
> field, and for mass market SF paperbacks.
>
> In fact, I can't even recommend a good "book for experts". I mean,
> Amiran's _The Ancient Pottery of Eretz Israel_ is absolutely essential in
> the field. But it isn't very good.

Do you have problems with the two-book series the first of which is by,
um, Amihai Mazar? Given that I tend more to rad points of view, I
*wanted* to prefer <The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land>, but I
Just Couldn't.

Mazar and whoever are rather more conservative but are readable.
They're somewhere between "laymen", I guess, and "experts" - I'm
probably not a "layman" any more, but I'm also not an archaeologist,
just someone who's read a fair amount at times.

> But what I meant to say was that the problem that the minimalists were
> facing was that their narrative was opposed to the archaeological record.
>
> As I understand it, the minimalists were arguing as historians, and
> pointing out flaws they saw in the biblical narrative. To the best of my
> recollection, these flaws included:
>
> The Northern Kingdom was supposed to have split off from the unified
> monarchy. And yet, the Northern Kingdom kept the name "Israel", which was
> the name the unified monarchy had, while Southern Kingdom took the name
> Judah. Normally, when a region secedes, they take a new name, and the
> place they broke away from keeps the old, unified name.
>
> Solomon was supposed to be this massive empire builder. But we don't have
> any sign that there was widespread literacy at the time, which is necessary
> for the empire described.
>
> A general distaste for the idea that the less urbanized, poorer south would
> have ever controlled the more populous, more urban, and wealthier south.
>
> Neither David or Solomon shows up in the literature of the various
> neighboring powers, which did have a lot of written records of that sort.
>
> There are others which aren't springing to mind. Of course, there are
> answers to all of those questions, but in addition to arguing the
> individual points, a typical minimalist response is to argue from the whole
> cloth -- yes, any one of them might be arguable, but taken as a whole, the
> biblical narrative has to be rejected.

Apparently the decisive book that converted Thompson, in particular, to
"unhappy with but accepting of normal views" to "raging
no-I'm-not-a-minimalist" was Lemche's <Canaanites>. I haven't made
myself *read* <Canaanites> yet, but from skimming, the issue appears to
be that there is a single word which Lemche is absolutely certain has
to refer to people on Crete who were provably not there until sometime
in the 400s BC. I am not making that up. But to be fair, Lemche also
spends a fair amount of time basically eviscerating the Solomon-centred
historiography of the 10th century BC that still tends to dominate
discussions. (Sheesh, folks. Phoenicians and Philistines, and you
want to talk about a buncha hillmen? Show some objectivity, please!)

> >>> Highlights I recall:
> >>
> >>> Abraham is biblically said to be a camel herder, but placed way before
> >>> real evidence of camel domestication. Oops.
> >>
> >> This is an old, old point against biblical literalism. The problem is,
> >> it's wrong, and it's been established as being wrong for over twenty years.
> >> Wapnish published analysis of camel remains from the Middle Bronze strata
> >> at Tel Jemah in the mid-eighties (I can probably get a more specific
> >> citation if that's necessary), which point strongly toward domestication.
> >
> > I'd *greatly* appreciate that citation. You do realise that all kinds
> > of basic things about the history of North Africa change radically if
> > camel domestication goes back to the MBA, right?

[cite]

> Of course, the occasional camel bone, even if it was of a four year old
> male, which strongly implies domestication and use as pack animals, doesn't
> mean that they were in widespread use yet. There aren't the sort of
> numbers of camel bones that you'd expect if they had gone over entirely
> from donkeys to camels for desert caravans. But all the same --
> domesticated camels in the region.

OK. I have a general notion of the problem from once having looked at
the issue of whether there were horses in the Indus Valley
civilisation. (Something I'll have to do again sometime, but yawn.)

> And I do realize the changes that'll be made in the history of North Africa
> based on those finds -- not many. The no camels in the bronze age story
> has stuck too deep; the camel bones are going to be ignored for another
> twenty years, if not longer.

I'd like to call this pessimistic, but am not sure I can.

> > I have real problems with this whole issue. Believe it or not, my
> > interest in this is *not*, pace my name, about my own faith, but *is*,
> > stranger still, on-topic. Harold Bloom wrote this wonderful story
> > called <The Book of J> about a woman at King David's court who wrote
> > all the cool stories in Genesis. I refer to this in my article "Jewish
> > Religious Literature" in <The Encyclopedia of Fantasy>, and I would
> > *like* to go on referring to it in my book.
> >
> > But this whole minimalism thing has essentially exposed the collapse of
> > the documentary hypothesis that it was built on.
>
> I'm not entirely sure I see the problem. It's a cool story, and based on
> ideas which, while not currently in fashion, aren't exactly disproven.

Actually writing it tersely is a challenge. I don't want my whole book
to consist of stories about scholarly notions that have died; I want
room for actual books, too. We'll see what I end up doing.

> As an aside, if all the biblical texts were written by second century
> pranksters, they were really phenominal archaeologists. If they tried to
> set their mythical unified monarchy fifty years earlier or a hundred years
> later, the archaeological record would have given them the lie. They
> managed to find the one time where questions could be raised about the
> chronology to let them get away with it.
>
> I mean, this is in addition to being terrific linguists and historians.
> It's sort of puzzling why they kept screwing around with faking texts, when
> they could have just used a time machine and made history come out the way
> they wanted it to have come out.

Basically, my problem is twofold.

There is an emerging consensus in classics that Greek mythology didn't
just *turn into* a shared world fantasy (which is what I basically
said, in the <Encyclopedia>, it had become around 400 BC), but always
had been. For example, Homer's twelve Olympians have nothing to do
with real Greek religion, and there's a fair bit of archaeological
evidence behind that statement. But classicists don't *talk* about it
in these terms and it has been terrifically frustrating piecing it
together at all, so what I have is an essentially unsourced claim about
classicists' views.

Now, I don't *like* "Homer was a hoaxer". It's one of the things I
started my book hoping to disprove. But there are all *kinds* of
things that make all *kinds* of sense if you buy it; it fits. And it
gives a fairly clear picture of what a post-hoax religion is going to
look like.

I don't think you'll need two guesses to figure out whether Judaism
post-Maccabees fits this picture.

So if I had the Homer side of things solidly backed, I could say
"Great!" And use my own structures to show the improbability of the
minimalist case. But I don't. Which leaves me

a) looking for archaeological disproofs
b) looking for linguistic disproofs
c) seeing if anyone at all has any serious text-critical disproofs
d) praying I don't have to end up agreeing with them.

Joe Bernstein

--
Joe Bernstein, writer <joe@xxxxxxxxxxx>
<http://www.panix.com/~josephb/>

.

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