Daniel is a weird book. It starts out like a perfectly ordinary biblical text, and then falls down a rabbit hole into bizarre stuff. The first time i read it, i wondered what was up, and iirc, the weird stuff is in Aramaic and the normal stuff is in Hebrew. So it’s almost certainly two texts that were glued together. Or a Hebrew text that got supplemented later.
I would think one of the incorrect translations that had major impact is in the ten commandments. “Thou shall not kill” is a mistranslation from the original “Thou shall not murder”. Murder is very specific in that it is an unjustified (or extrajudicial perhaps) killing. It doesn’t include deaths in war, executions of people who have committed various crimes, or self defense. Indeed, the Bible is full of righteous people doing lots of killing.
Nonetheless, “Thou shalt not kill” has been used by pacifist Christians to oppose things that are killing but not murder.
I don’t know how firm that could be when the main story of the Hebrew books is the struggle of the Jews to worship and obey only yhwh. Polytheism vs monolatry/monotheism is the story. It’s like when an emperor signs a bull that bakers should not sell tainted bread, then does the same five years later, then the next three emperors all pass a law punishing the sale of tainted bread. We don’t conclude “Damn, these guys must have had some really clean bread!”
Yes, the people who redacted/compiled them were on board with spreading the message that we, now, don’t worship other gods, just this one. But they were priests and political leaders (same thing) of that era whose interests relied on people fearing only the one god whose gates they kept. It’s easy for the bosses to stay on the same page about the proper beliefs when they’re the beliefs that keep them in power.
I don’t think polytheism was a tiny speck in the rearview mirror during the time of the collection of the Hebrew Bible. I would be shocked if there weren’t any asherah, household idols, Jewish inscriptions to other gods, et cetera in our museums found from that same time period.
Miss Manners would agree with you. I heard an interview with her years ago. She collects old etiquette books as a hobby, and points out that they tell you what people were doing at the time. So, she has one that instructs the reader not to use their host’s tablecloth to blow their nose. Modern etiquette books don’t include that advice, because today, no one does that.
Oh, certainly there were some who called themselves Jews who, contrary to the teachings of their religious leaders, worshiped other gods. There are some today who call themselves Christians who do the same thing. But that’s a statement about those individuals, not about their religion.
So, what, they were just bad Jews? That’s an easy out. We’re talking about the origin of Judaism.
Babylonian captivity - Wikipedia Israeli philosopher and Biblical scholar Yehezkel Kaufmann said “The exile is the watershed. With the exile, the religion of Israel comes to an end and Judaism begins.”[30]
It’s like saying “Some people say that children love playing Nintendo Switch all the time, but according to parents, kids may only play Switch on weekends.”
So maybe Hezekiah tore down all the nehushtan and asherah hundreds of years before. But maybe Jews of the time were saying “No he didnt; there’s one over there! You just wrote that down yesterday.” I’m not arguing the latter; this is only an example of the kinds of things that were going on. Like the binding of Isaac: the kid dies in the first version, later it’s changed, and today some people interpret it as a story about how God told Abraham that he’s against child sacrifice. Ascribing an idea about a cultural hegemony much earlier because, frankly, it’s easier and more comfortable.
So, yes, true Scotsmen worshipped only Yhwh during the exilic period.
My understanding is that there is a pretty clear division in the pre Babylonian exile to post exile texts. An entire generation lived under the influence of the Babylonians, and the Zoroastrian religion. Post exile a lot of Zoroastrian ideas appear in the biblical texts that were never present in pre-exile texts. The good versus evil battle and the presence of angels and daemons seems to have been assimilated as a lump during the exile.
These ideas pervade all the Abrahamic religions. And there is a lot more added later. The pre-exile religion is much simpler. An entire neo-Platonic cosmos appears and a huge amount of mysticism appears later, with continued expansion almost into the present day.
Wow, this has to be a personal record for longest a thread has gone after it was answered in like the 3rd reply:
Also the most mind blowing thing to me is it was also answered in the opening scene of Snatch:
I think it was Robert Heinlein (Lazarus Long?) commenting on assorted American morality laws who said - “If you want to know what people were in the habit of doing back then, look at what they have laws against…”
OTTOMH IIRC It was a species of locust. The Torah was oral tradition before it was ever writen down. For a while there was an oral tradition and a text. The oral tradition explaining what ‘kind’ of locust was kosher has been lost.
Correct but there have been updates. Basically, the Yemenite, Morocan and Algerian jews kept a Mesorah (tradition) of which species it was. Many orthodox jews are theoretically willing (I say theretically as there is a strong cultural ‘ick’ factor to eating insects) to consume the nominated locust.
There are a few species (Schistocerca gregaria and Locusta migratoria and maybe others).
If you are interested in this rabbit hole, here is information; Can We Eat Locusts? - by Natan Slifkin
Another confusing thing is that “malach” means both “angel” and “messenger”. So in Genesis 32:4, most translations say that Jacob sent human “messengers” to Esau, because that seems to make more sense in context. But Jewish tradition says that since in the preceding sentence Jacob was talking to unmistakably angelic “messengers”, it makes sense to assume that they are the same “messengers”, and he just asked them to drop by Esau’s on their way back to HQ. In English translation it just looks like 32:3 is the end of one story and 32:4 is the beginning of another and you would have no idea this is even a controversy.
Sure, also in Greek “angelos” means a messenger. Looking at the English translation in the NIV, Gen. 32:1 indeed says Jacob met “angels of God” (“malakhei elohim”) while the next sentence says he sent to Esau otherwise unspecified messengers, using the same word “malakhim”/“angelo(u)s”. I have no idea if anyone has tried to “fix” this problem in English by, for example, avoiding the word “angel” and just uniformly referring to messengers, envoys, etc.
The English words “messenger” and “missionary” are cognates ultimately from Latin with similar meanings.
The JPS translation (nondenominational Jewish) also translates it as “angels” in one line and “messengers” in the next. Artscroll (Orthodox) uses “angels” for both.
In most of these cases it’s a disagreement over the translation that isn’t necessarily Jewish vs. Christian – it’s just Good Translation vs. Bad Translation, or cases where more recent knowledge supplies a better translation. The sole example of a Jewish/Christian split occurs in the verse in Isaiah about the “virgin”/“young woman”. In that case interpretation of the verse in light of its use as prophecy in the Gospel of Matthew affected the way the verse was translated in, say, the KJV. But the Revised Standard Version and the New English Bible restored the proper sense. although there was controversy over the change in the RSV – see here:
A more interesting case, to me, is the case of “Gog and Magog”. :
Although I note that here, it was Jewish tradition that turned a man and his land into two people. The Christians just ran with it.
There used to be statues of warriors named Gog and Magog in London. They show up in some of Hogarth’s prints (extreme upper left):
Although to me, Gog and Magog will always be the Evil Robots in the 1954 3D science fiction film Gog. well, if you’re going to name your robots after allies of Satan, you gotta expect things like that (although I note it wasn’t their fault – the robots’ programming was hacked by enemy (obviously Russian) pilots and they were turned against the Good Guys.
Magog also shows up as a gritty ‘superhero’ in Alex Ross’ Kingdom Come. His flashy golden costume deliberately looks like an idol. I recommend the series. besides all else, all the members of Mr Mind’s Monster Society Of Evil make cameos.