Re: A Few Things Which Matt and Inabon Probably Wish Did Not Exist....

Dragonblaze wrote:
On Jul 13, 1:45 am, Matt Giwer <jul...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[snip]
The archaeology in Jerusalem - yes, the current one - begins already
at the Chalcolitic. If you're leaning on Herodotus again, how
convenient that the part of his work that would have described
Jerusalem has gone AWOL.
Really? I have seven books. How many were there? Search for it on Gutenberg.
That is where I got it.

9 books. I may be mistaken about what is missing, but the work ends
very abruptly, and at least an epilogue is certainly missing, if not
several digressing chapters.

No one is going to argue against incomplete. However the mentions Palestinians are sufficient and for different reasons that there is no credible question of their existence.

But as I wrote, I am referring to Alexander defeating Tyre and then
immediately heading to Egypt without a detour to the farm town of Jerusalem.
Alexander is long after Herodotus and still no Jerusalem worth conquering..

Your sources, please.

Source for what? A negative? There are at least two chronicles of his campaign of conquest as well as many others which may or may not be derivative of the chronicles. The siege of Tyre is in them as the creation of a land bridge to get to the fortress and its surrender. From there it is reported he heads to Egypt. If I remember correctly there is some confusion over whether it was Askelon or another city where he stopped shortly to accept a formal surrender without a fight. I first came across this absence in a comment on the inability to explain this lack of mention by jewish scholars.

If this is not what you are asking, rephrase.

There is a narrative in Josephus, Antiquities 11.317-345, though its
veracity is suspect:

It is amazing how much of Josephus is suspect. I can cite him to confound believers to no end.

"So when Alexander besieged Tyre, he sent an epistle to the Jewish
high-priest, to send him some auxiliaries, and to supply his army with
provisions; and that what presents he formerly sent to Darius, he
would now send to him, and choose the friendship of the Macedonians,
and that he should never repent of so doing.

Pardon that I delete the extensive quote.

Without digressing into the conflicting and unreliable nature of the source, I know of no other case where a story that first appears four centuries after an event is taken seriously. There are numerous examples from Christianity alone where such stories, regardless of how fervently believed, are discarded on this basis alone.

Nor is this other than one more story about a fanciful place for which there is no indigenous archaeological evidence.

Addressing the source, in addition to his assertion that there were only 22 holy books in his Yahweh cult his recitation of Exodus comes either from a more complete version than is used today or Exodus was not among them or he had no problem adding material to a sacred book. One obvious example is the military campaigns of Moses in Nubia on behalf of Egypt in which a person who, assuming the foundling is successfully passed off as a real birth vice a foundling, is at best a grandson of the king is called a prince, a line of succession which 1) did not exist in Egypt and 2) is unique and 3) would have gotten him killed as a matter of course by the sons.

Believers will now try to make an issue of one or perhaps even two of the above items and assume that if even one point can be rejected by their credulous minds that everything they choose to believe is true. This is what they insist upon with the "similar name" approach. Because a name is similar in that it can be construed to be the same name then the OT's nose has gotten into the tent soon to be followed by the entire OT.

There is also the method of "Why would they ..." and then assume if there is no answer which their credulous minds cannot reject as unsatisfactory then there will be the same result, everything they choose to believe is true. This could be "Why would Josephus invent such a story?" and then refuse to accept any suggestion as to why. The simplest rejoinder is, Oswald did not kill JFK because we do not know why.

And then there is the venerable objection, you won't believe it because you hate Jews. Were all the things I do not believe were taken into consideration I would have no time to hate Jews for all my hatred of giants, fairies, ogres as well as assorted devils, demons and witches. I would not even have time to hate Christians for rejecting to the story of persecution by Nero in addition to their ubiquitous miracles.

Bottom line is as always, indigenous archaeological evidence must be produced before anything it considered seriously.

Ever note all those names incorporating -yah or -yahu? The prohibition
on mentioning the name is a very late development.
Not YHWH are they. In any event your claim of a late development is nothing
more than a way to explain away the problem to reach the preconceived conclusion.

The same name, just used as an theophoric element.

Excuse but Netanyahu is a theophoric name. The name of a god cannot be called a theophoric name. While I agree it can be the same name if one wants to assume people who clearly do not behave as Jews really were Jews I see an unlimited gullibility for glib explanations which do not bear up under scrutiny.

As regards the variants YWHW and YWH, well, since you cannot tell
Aramaic from Hebrew or recognize from which eras the texts come, your
confusion _is_ understandable. Now, guess which lot of the texts is in
which. You do have a 50% change of actually getting it right.
Different names means different gods. Why is that so hard to comprehend? Why
must you insist upon arguing to the nonsense conclusion that the polytheist
Judeans, Yahweh and Ashara, had only one male god?

Different languages use different names, _when the names mean
something_. As yhwh is the 3rd person masculine causative of hwh,
meaning "he causes to be", it also follows that the name is slightly
different in Aramaic. Also note that names change in different
languages, even when the meaning has been lost. Your name, Matt, comes
from the Hebrew name Mattiyahu "Yahweh has given", but even the full
English version Matthew is no longer spelled as in the Hebrew
original.

Matthias actually. So the source is Mattathias of the Maccabe stories. Thus there is no yahoo involved. Yes I am aware of a believer tradition of tracing it to Matitiyahu. This is not different from their insistence that 1 Maccabe was originally in "Hebrew" even though the all four books exist only in Greek. As this revolt is dated to the mid 2nd c. BC it reduces the time to change from speaking Hebrew to speaking Aramaic to less than a century.

We now have a brief pause while Matt goes into apoplexy upon finding
where his name comes from, especially as it is complete with the
theophoric elemend -yahu. ;-)

Why do silly people always think they are telling people they disagree with something new? I guess it goes along with their innate juvenile assumption of superiority along with an equally silly belief in an unprovenanced religious tradition as to the nature of the OT.

What sort of fascinates me is the "I am who am" for YHWH and "wrestles with god" for Israel does not appear to register on believers that those explanatory meanings of the names means the text could not possibly have been written for people who spoke the language. How could they not know the meanings of the names? But it makes perfect sense to give the meanings of the names for people who do not speak the language such at the Greeks. Such explanaitons fit perfectly into the Septuagint. Such explanations must be absent from the "hebrew" version if it is to be taken as the original. They are not. Why would "hebrew" names need explanation to hebrew speakers? The meaning was forgotten? Then how explain the root meanings in the name are found in the language?

Quit whining. I use modern spelling conventions, such as spelling
Cyrus instead of Kuru$ when writing about the Persian king. I just do
not try to use them as "phonetic matches" to the actual ancient
spellings like some loonies do.
If you feel free to argue variations are the same dog then you must certainly
do it without reference to the OT which is completely wrong about the
polytheist religion of the Judeans.

How would you know, since you've obviously never actually bothered to
read the book?

Upon what, other than disagreeing with traditional religious explanations you champion, do you base that assertion? It is not as though what you are espousing are your own, original conclusions. Ideas passed down from generation to generation for centuries that no one can trace to any source at all are hardly a credible response to what I have posted.

Though for some very polytheistic texts in the Bible
you do need to be able to read Hebrew, as for example Psalm 82 is not
translated correctly. In the original Hebrew it reads: 'lhym ntsb b'dt
'l bqrb 'lhym '$pt, God stands up in the Assembly of 'El, amongst the
gods he judges.

One has this image of Muslims revering the Rushdie version of the satanic verses.

You miss the big one with the 5000+ translations of Yahweh Elohim as "lord god" when clearly elohIM is plural. If one assumes the (incredible) meaning of Yahweh as I am who am (I be who be, in Ebonics) "I am who am of the gods of OH" does not bear the translation Lord any more than Elohim bears any translation to any word in the singular form.

As to needing to read "hebrew" that is where I came in. A version of the Septuagint in an original language is not mentioned until nearly three centuries after the Septuagint is mentioned in history. And the problem does not end there. The mention is "in their language." Their language at the time of these mentions was Aramaic and it is known to have been Aramaic centuries before these mentions. These mentions do NOT mention any language preceding Aramaic.


It's yhvdh. Only curious to those who do not understand the languages.
You know, there are some pretty good primers available...
So it is not YHWH or YWH at all. This is a third god?

That means Judah, as I already said. As I keep repeating, learning the
languages would be rather useful when trying to read them....

In this context you are saying Judah was a god?

....

Again we have a primary difference in our starting point. You assume an unprovenanced religious tradition to be true. I deal only from the indigenous physical evidence which could reconstruct this "civilization" without any consideration of the OT as was done in Egypt.

There is no point to this exchange without first dealing with this fundamental disagreement.

--
Jews make no bones about their desire for all Arabs to die.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 4159
http://www.giwersworld.org a1
Tue Jul 14 23:10:28 EDT 2009
.

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