The Elephantine manuscripts refer to Yahweh’s asherah . So, at some point in time (this manuscripts are are quite late), some people believed that Yahweh had an “Asherah” too. Perhaps he inherited her from El after both gods have been conflated, though.
I don’t want to hijack this thread, it’s all too cool for school.
Withal, I intuit that there are those on this thread who can expand upon the following:
It is my understanding that when the sort of scholarship previously devoted to the new T. (ie, the Jesus Project, etc) is applied to the Old T., to date there is no archeological confirmation for the Egyptian captivity or for Solomon’s Temple.
Is this correct?
(BTW, if they had to have a cranky old jew for a god, they could have had my grandfather on my mother’s side…)
nevermind.
just saw cite in # 17.
will return more knowledgable with new questions.
This is fascinating. I had read just a few hints of this previously.
Where in Ezekiel is the divorcement presented? And where is all this spoken of with regard to Adam, Noah, Moses and the others listed?
And also, apparently, opposed by the authors of the Books of Kings in the Old Testament. Kings goes on and on, over and over again, about the “evil in the eyes of Yahweh” committed when various kings of Samaria and Judah allow the locals to set up Asherah poles, or don’t tear the existing Asherah poles down.
I hadn’t read through the whole page that you linked when I posted. I was clearly in error about this.
With regard to the review of the Finkelstein and Silberman book, I have some questions for anyone who knows about this stuff.
This seems very flimsy. If people were living there then why couldn’t an army pass through, too?
Hardly surprising if the North was “poor and backward”, isn’t it?
Isn’t it possible that the (Biblical) dates are wrong? And how accurate are carbon-14 dates at a 3000-year remove?
I don’t know enough about carbon dating to answer the last question but I think you’re misunderstanding something about the first two questions.
Judah was the south not the north. Judah was poor, backwards and undeveloped at a time when the north, the region supposedly conquered by David, was much wealthier, more powerful and more developed. What Finkelstien and Silberman are saying is that Judah (i.e. David’s kingdom) did not have the requisite manpower or resources to conquer the north, and that there was no flow of resources from the rich northern kingdom into David’s poor southern kingdom. There is simply no evidence that the northern areas were ever under the control of Judah. Why would a conquered region be more rich and powerful than a conquering region and why would the conquerors carry nothing back to the south?
No, there are none. Actually, there’s no confirmation of the existence of Solomon himself.
I don’t think thats what he meant. Trops could have passed through. But they wouldn’t have been able to have such an army at the first place, by lack of ressources. At least, that’s what I understood.
[quote]
Hardly surprising if the North was “poor and backward”, isn’t it? [/qute]
It’s the south which is told to be “poor and backward”. IIRC the content of the article, this was mentionned as contradicting the biblical mentions of wealth pouring in after the supposed conquest.
The fact that biblical dates are wrong is precisely the author’s point. The general idea being that at the biblical dates, there’s no way to find something looking like an affluent and powerful kingdom in this area.
I wouldn’t know about the accuracy of carbon-14 dating.
On a peripheral topic of some interest in view of recent real estate tension in and around Jerusalem…
How does the reiterative slighting of the elder for the younger heir echo, if at all, in these stories.,
viz.
Abe stiffs the elder son Ishmael, in favor of Isaac.
Isaac’s younger son jacob slicks esau, with similar result vis a vis primogeniture.
The, en masse, the story goes, the original holding is abandoned, for 300 years, pending a reaffirmation of the divine entitlement via moses ’ survey (from hebron ?)
jQuery: 1. why did not the covenant with abe & seed run to the benefit of ishmael’s as well as isaac’s descendants?
2. 'Why is the title derived from the forcible displacemnt of the indigenous canaanites that is so enthusiastically celebrated in the old t. morally superior to the title inherited by England from the ottomans pursuant to which they divided the country? (ie, in that they both derive from conquest as opposed to self-determination.)sorry :tghe connection to op:
I have recently read somewhere (NYRB?) that the purpose of the Abraham story (ie, the removal from Ur of the Chaldees ) was to buttress the claims of the indigenous hebrew tribes as against other canaanite locals. hence the rising up and convenent and all that jazz.
That was the point (one of the points) of Silberman and Finkelstein’s book. The idea that ancestral occupation forms the most legitimate claim to an ethnic group’s control of a given territory is a modern one. In ancient times, the best claim was right of conquest. The Hebrews were actually native to Canaan, but at some point their propagandists made them out to be a race of foreign invaders (coming into Canaan originally from Mesopotamia, and later from Egypt) to bolster their claim to rule over the land and all its other races.
You’re right, I misunderstood what they were saying.
I still think that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Couldn’t David and Solomon have been tribal leaders whose role was later inflated by good PR to make them rich builders of temples, etc.?
To look at the question from the other side, if there was never a unified kingdom, them why do the later traditions of both the north and the south look to Jerusalem as the political and religious center? The Samaritans, for instance, accepted the Pentateuch as Scripture.
Going back to the question of Asherah, a web page which I unfortunately cannot find again points out that the evidence is not so clear-cut as it is sometimes presented. The reading of the Kuntillet `Ajrud inscription is disputed, as is its association with the figures above it. Some scholars think the figures are cattle, not people/gods! Asherah, at least at times, seems to be a term for a tree or pole that represented the god or his/her power.
In fact, there seems to be a remarkable consistency of use from the 9th-century Kuntillet `Ajrud inscription (as usually read), through the 5th-century Elephantine papyri and the into the OT: the references are to “Yahweh and his Asherah”. The posessive “his” can’t be used with a proper name. From this page:
There doesn’t seem to be anything that requires “his Asherah” to refer to a Goddess (although the author of the cited page thinks it does), rather, it could refer to the cultic tree/pole or to Yahweh’s power. The Yahu-Anat references at Elephantine seem to be definitely specifying a goddess. But how is this goddess linked to “Asherah”?
From the same page cited above there is this:
This is certainly suggestive. But if Yahweh had a consort-goddess, why is she never named? Why are the Asherah references in the OT so ambiguous?
[QUOTE=FriendRob]
You’re right, I misunderstood what they were saying.
I still think that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Couldn’t David and Solomon have been tribal leaders whose role was later inflated by good PR to make them rich builders of temples, etc.?
To look at the question from the other side, if there was never a unified kingdom, them why do the later traditions of both the north and the south look to Jerusalem as the political and religious center? The/QUOTE]
Somewhat peripherally,
what has been the response of the hard core Yahwists to all this scholarship?
I have to say, I think of myself as, if anything, overeducated, and all this shit was way below my radar. to my mortificaetion.
Is it horribly new, or am I hortribly out of the loop?
The roots of these ideas go back at least to Julius Wellhausen . He died in 1918, so I think “out of the loop” is a fair statement. But there have been many new archeological discoveries, especially in the 70’s and 80’s. In particular, the Ugaritic texts from Ras Shamra have thrown much light on the Canaanite religions.
As for your other question:
I assume by “Yahwists” you mean Christians and Jews? I don’t know much about it, but not surprisingly there are many who reject this scholarship. It’s not hard to do, you:
- question the reading/interpretation of the inscriptions
- claim that they represent “heterodox” Judaism, not mainstream
- quote scholars who come to different conclusions
Here are two pages which deal with different aspects of the question.
That’s pretty much exactly what Finkelstein and Silberman say, although there isn’t any direct confirmation that they were real historical figures. There is an inscription which refers to the “House of David” but its meaning is disputed. There is no corroboration at all for Solomon.
Here is a pretty good article from Salon which summarizes a lot of the history of the research and debate and what the poular fallout has been in Israel. The reality of current Isreali archeology does not seem to have made it’s way into American consciousness, though.
Gahh, what an abortion of coding that was. Here it is all nice and pretty so you can read it.
That’s pretty much exactly what Finkelstein and Silberman say, although there isn’t any direct confirmation that they were real historical figures. There is an inscription which refers to the “House of David” but its meaning is disputed. There is no corroboration at all for Solomon.
The Northern Kingdom was destroyed by Assyria in 722 BCE. A century after that the Southern Kingdom was sacked by Babylon and the Babylonian exile began. The “exile” probably was limited to a few noble families rather than a full scale deportation but after Persia conquered Babyon and ended the exile there was a kind of “dark ages” in Palestine. A lot of history and knowledge had been lost. The only real source for history and identity left to them was the Bible.
Pretty much what you’d expect. A lot of it is still based in arguments from absence rather than positive evidence (e.g. “You stll haven’t proved that it *couldn’t * have happened” rather than “here is proof that it did happen”).
Here is a pretty good article from Salon which summarizes a lot of the history of the research and debate and what the poular fallout has been in Israel. The reality of current Isreali archeology does not seem to have made it’s way into American consciousness, though.
Dio, thanks for the Salon page.
I finally started reading the F&S book, and I’m finding it rather frustrating - a mix of really interesting points and weak or contradictory ones.
For instance, on pp. 59-60, they argue that the system of forts on Egypt’s eastern border would have made the Exodus an impossibility in the 1300s BC, and cite a papyrus record monitoring :“the entry of the tribes of the Edomite Shasu…” into the country. Yet seven pages later they argue that Genesis must have been written after the 6th-7th century attacks on Egypt by the Assyrians because Gen 42:9 implies that Egyptians were worried about an attack from the east. Surely a system of forts and monitoring of foreigners is enough to explain a single verse that worries about “spies”!
Also, it’s very unclear on what basis they split the highland archaeological sites into “northern” and “southern” ones, other than frequency and wealth. They admit a similarity of culture and language.
The Salon article implies that their conclusions are by no means universally accepted by archaeologists. It will be interesting to see how the debate develops over the next decade.
FriendRob, I wouldn’t recommend the F&S book too highly.
The problem with it, as with many secular bible books, is that rather than addressing what the Bible and/or Biblically-based tradition actually SAYS, it addresses an adjusted version of the Bible. They base their conclusions on certain chronologies and/or assumptions that are not actually shared by Bible believers, and which, if actually viewed through the eyes of Biblical tradition, would accord quite well with the evidence they unearthed.
Have you actually read the F&S book? Just curious.
What chronologies or assumptions do you think they have altered?
What has been unearthed which would accord with the Exodus or the conquest of Canaan?
What has been unearthed that would suggest that monotheistic worship existed in Israel before Josiah?