The argument as to whether it actually happened or not is, at this point, fruitless - the actual evidence is too scanty.
What is inarguable is that there are parts of the OT which glorify ethnic conquest and extermination of whole peoples.
I say “parts”, because the OT is by no means a unified whole. In a historical and anthropological sense, it is a redacted collection of writings, parts of which may be very ancient.
In my opinion, the parts detailing conquest and extermination are probably found in the “older” bits of the OT, though again actual evidence is scanty. They pretty accurately reflect an essentially primitive society and morality common in the ancient world and by no means limited to ancient Hebrews - what makes this account special is that, unlike that of most maurading nomadic peoples, this account survived. [By “primitive” I mean one lower on the scale of social, intellectual and cultural evolution than that which was to come]
The OT also contains bits that reflect a far greater level of social and intellectual development than the angry genocidal tribal diety depicted in these bits of the OT. In essence, the trajectory of the development of Judaism as a religion is as follows:
a. Angry sky-god, specific to Judaism alone: comands death to non-Hebrews standing in their way. Hebrews a relatively primitive nomadic tribe (compared with their city-based contemporaries). God speaks directly to tribal leaders and personally resides in actual tribal war-emblems (the Ark).
b. Organized kingdom of Israel; non-Judaic “Caananite” religion seen as dangerous internal competition. Notion of “god” becomming more abstract; age of those alleged to speak in the name of god gradually ends, as does actual alleged miracles performed by god in battle.
c. Destruction of Temple, Judaism ceases to be centralized. Religion much more influenced by philosophy, Greco-Roman or not; age of the Rabbis. “God” is now considered a universal deity, much abstracted from its origins.
By the age of the rabbis, Judaism as a religion has in essence dropped the notions appropriate to the earliest stage; while they are not per se removed from the OT, their contemporary relevance (like that of the innumerable Temple rules, also contained in the OT) has been intellectualized away.
This is not necessarily the case with newer religions who re-discovered the OT (specifically, some forms of Protestant Christianity).
It’s using religion as an excuse to commit adultery. If you think adultery is bad (as Judaism does), then it’s bad.
To my modern liberal way of thinking, it’s also bad if any of the prostitutes have been coerced into being prostitutes. Human Rights Watch says that happens among devadasis in India, which is one of the few remaining examples of temple prostitution.
It’s using religion as an excuse to do something evil (commit adultery or sell your child into prostitution), which is what I think the command about not taking God’s name in vain is actually prohibiting.
I think that using children as suicide bombers in the name of religion, evil as that is, isn’t quite the same thing as human sacrifice. For one thing, conquering a group is an effective way of stamping out large-scale human sacrifice (for example, the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs). It isn’t effective against suicide bombers (for example, in Iraq).
To elaborate on this a little bit, it was a tribal situation. We have very little direct evidence about what was happening in Canaan circa 1400 B. C., but we can speculate that it was similar to other tribal situations that are better documented. Among the Mongols, for instance, there was a constant state of warfare. So in the Ancient Middle East it was probably a tribe-eat-tribe situation. Whenever one tribe had enough power to defeat its neighbors, they did so. In that manner various tribes were wiped out, probably including a great number that we’re not even aware of.
The Jews, on the other hand, managed to survive and maintain their culture in this environment for many centuries. Every empire that messed with them–Egyptians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Seleucids, and Romans–found them particularly difficult to deal with. The Jews had a certain penchant for freedom, which motivated them to fight back against conquest and assimilation. What distinguished their attitude from that of your garden-variety tribe was the Law of God, which forbade them from simply adopting to circumstances by borrowing stuff from other cultures.
And the end result is the unique role that the Jews played in the history of the world, as explained in Thomas Cahill’s book “The Gift of the Jews”. Of course I personally believe that I certain carpenter/wandering preacher played a role in that too, but that’s a different thread.
Bad enough to kill people for it? To kill their children for it? You’re imposing an anachronistic definition of “adultery” on the Hebrew Bible, by the way. The Deuteronomic definition of adultery for men is “lying with a woman married to a husband.” Not all extramarital sex was adultery for men. Participating in cultic prostitution was forbidden as a religious transgression (it was considered idolotrous), not as an adulterous one.
So the solution is to kill the prostitutes? There is no evidence I’m aware of that Canaanite temple prostitutes were coerced, but the Bible doesn’t view them as victims in any case, but calls them toh’ebah – “abominable” to God.
Not only that, but the Bible endorses sexual slavery, forcible marriage and raping the women (girls really) of slaughtered tribes (only the virgins, of course, non-virgins had to be killed). It’s not exactly concerned with the rights of women. Whatever problem they had with cultic prostitution, it had nothing to do with any sympathy for the prostitutes.
Although I have no quarrel with your last point, I think it conflicts with any notion tht other people should be killed for not adhering to your own religious proscriptions, and while your concern for coerced prostitution is valid (though unproven in the case of the Canaanites), it’s nonsensical to say that the remedy is to kill the victims (and that IS what the Bible says).
They were actually quite easily handled by all those groups with the exception of one Seleucid, and their “attitude” was no different than any other people of the time. They were no more or less “difficult” than anyone else. It’s also not true that they didn’t assimilate or borrow from other cultures. A great deal of Jewish theology (and Christian as well) was taken directly from Persian Zorastrianism.
What role would that be? Name one philosophical, ethical or theological ideal that was unique or original to Judaism.
They survived with their culture through some pretty amazing odds. The survival of Judaism in diaspora is pretty amazing.
This game is so pointless and tedious as if original ideas are the only way people impact history. :rolleyes: I wish intelligent people would come to the realization that this line of argument isn’t worth even typing out, much less responding to.
What’s so amazing about it? Is it more amazing than the survival of Romani culture?
But Cahill makes a number of assertions in his book (with its grandiose subtite, How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels) that Judaism changed the world with new ideas. That’s HIS claim (and a claim endorsed by ITR upthread. Every claim that Cahill makes about certain ideas originating with Judaism (a linear view of history, universal brotherhood, egalitarianism, justice, even romantic love.) are false. Not only are none of those views original to Judaism, for many of them, it’s an exaggeration to say they’re really part of Judaism (especially as expressed in the Torah) at all.
Cahill is also ignorant of current history and archaeology (his academic credentials are in Literature), and he thinks that Biblical characters like Abraham and Moses were real people, and Bible stories are actual history. It’s a religious book, not a scholarly one, and he makes a lot of grand, sweeping claims with no support.
The survival of Romani culture is also amazing. Still the Jewish Diaspora is different - both in length of time, in breadth of dispersion, and in the variety of ways in which Jews have become part of other cultures while still maintaining a distinct identity of their own.
As to the place of Jewish thought in influencing the course of human ideas …
I am sure you can find multiple henotheistic religions throughout history. Maybe even a few prior examples of monotheistic ones. But clearly modern monotheism was birthed by that particular tribe - for better or worse.
Also human sacrifice was the norm prior to Judaism, even if not uiniversally practiced. The significance of the binding of Issac was not the fact that God was asking for Abraham to sacrifice Issac, but that the sacrifice was stopped and that the prohibition against human sacrifice was established.
The idea of arguing with God(s) as a good thing - and sometimes winning the debate - that was not something often done before.
God of Torah was a mean mutha - and a fertility god and several other characters all woven together into a narrative mishmosh - but that mishmosh has had profound impact on the development of the world’s ideas for all its failings.
What’s so great about monotheism? As far as I’m concerned, all it did was make religion more divisive. Cultures used to be able to recognize and accept the gods of other pantheons as being analogous to their own – basically the saem deities with different names. Monotheism shut down that ability for cultures to assimilate, and there’s nothing about monotheism that is ethically superior to polytheism (or atheism, or pantheism or henotheism or any other theistic paradigm).
This is not even close to the truth. It had already become extremely rare and mostly reviled long before Judaism ever came into existence, and the Jews didn’t have anything to do with stopping it.
You know that story is fiction, right? Human sacrifice had already ceased to be much of a practice in the Levant long before that story was written.
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People fought with gods in Greek and Hindu mythology, and some of what’s depicted in the Bible about it is held over from pre-Judaic, Canaanite mythology. The Biblical descriptions of humans occasionally arguing, or trying to barter with Yahweh, while a genuinely interesting characteristic of that literature, do not represent anything that’s had any impact on world culture.
I would say that the cultural impact of the Bible is an incidental byproduct of Christianity becoming the politically dominant religion of the west over the last two millennia, not because it’s content is really all that special. I completely disagree that it’s had any ethical impact. Ethical progress has usually been made in spite of it, not because of it.
You did read the "for better or worse " line, didn’t you. I am not per se passing judgement. Merely noting the influence on ideas and on creating what we now call morality and ethics either by explicit endorsement or rejection. You seem to be endorsing a view that there is some objective measure of ethical superiority that does not fall back on accepting axiomatic truths, and viewing particular religious viewpoints from that perceived objective standard - that standard being your revealed truth - which you seem to believe just appeared. A bit of an odd position to take.
Please tell me which contemporaneous faiths explicitly forbade it and explain the various examples of faiths that practiced it before and after referenced in my cite.
And you do know the purpose and importance of myths to cultures, right? You do know that myths create and reflect the values that the culture has or wants to create? When speaking about culture and ideas myths are more telling than history.
Well there is no way that I know of to prove or disprove the importance of that Biblical trope on subsequent cultural developments, but I believe you are very mistaken.
I’ll leave it this way: the lens that you judge Biblical stories through is a lens shaped to no small degree by the very myths contained within it and by the cultural developments inspired by and in reaction against it. The very idea that you accept implicitly of believing that a biblical God is mistaken can trace its intellectual antecedents to those stories that you dismiss.
The impact of Torah on the Western world was huge in both direct and indirect ways.
Well, the word “faith” is kind of anachronistic here, because religious traditions were not rigorously codified, but it was not practiced at the time Judaism as we know it came into existence by any major cultures in the Levant – Egyptians, Greeks, Assyrians, Persians – and while it may have been practiced by some Canaanites (though this is indeterminate), that does not make it “the norm,” as you characterized it earlier.
To be sure, the Isaac story was probably formulated to separate Israelite practices from other Canaanites, but they were hardly unique in not practicing human sacrifices, and they certainly wern’t the first to stop, nor are they the reason anyone else stopped.
I don’t accept this at all. The kind of skeptical intellectual antecedents you’re talking about owe more to Greek philosophy than anything else. There’s no systematic or analytical thought in the Bible.
The dominant culture in the Middle East contemporaneous with the establishment of the Hebrew Kingdom was that of the Phonecians and they did engage in human sacrifice at that time. Moreover I would ask that you show me any other culture before or soon after that of the Hebrews that had a myth that specifically laid out the message that the god or gods of the culture did not want human sacrifice.
Nice that you attribute the intellectual tradition to the Greeks and indeed they took the tradition much farther than the little tribal kingdom of the Hebrews took it, but do really think that they created it de novo? The Hebrew tradition of doubt and argument predated it at a point that Greek culture was mostly stories warning against hubris and fairy tales about folk science. Greeks and Jews had contact dating back to before the eighth century BCE. Hebrews then went to Babylon and influenced Phonecian thought (and from there into Greek tradition indirectly) and also became part of Greek cultures including a common role as teachers. Whether or not the first true philosophers of Greece had direct exposure to Torah is debatable, but it is indisputable they they were exposed to those ideas.
Yes, Greek culture was different, and it came back round via Paul to recombine with the Jewish tradition in a whole different way as well…
What difference does it make if they had a myth about it? They just didn’t do it. Can you show any evidence that Judaism had anything to do with stopping other cultures from doing it?
Yeah, pretty much. It was a Greek innovation. They sure didn’t get it from the Jews (the influence there was pretty much all Greeks influencing Jews). Greek philosophy was the seed for all western science, medicine and systematic philosophy (all of which was more encumbered by the Bible than advanced by it). It was also the seed for western democracy. Classical Greek thought has had a far more significant, beneficial and long reaching impact than Bible stories.
Funny, that description fits the Hebrew Bible to a tee.
Judaism didn’t even exist before the 8th Century BCE. Where are you getting this stuff? Judaism didn’t really become Judaism until after the Babylonian exile (during and after which it basically adopted Zoroastrian theology from the Persians). Josiah had imposed (for political reasons) henotheistic Yahwism in the 7th Century BCE, but that was still essentially a sacrificial tribal cult, similar to other Canaanite tribal cults (using a god from the same pantheon), and not yet fully developed as Judiasm
I do not practice homosexual acts. Is that the same as me condemning it? The myths that a culture decides to tell inform us about what values a culture deems important. The Hebrews did not just not practice human sacrifice; they made it clear that their version of God did not want it.
You also keep claiming that there were no human sacrifices within other contemporaneous cultures yet that is far from established. While it is debated many scholars believe that there is good evidence that both the Phonecians and the Philistines, and likely many of the smaller Canaanite tribes engaged in occasional human sacrifice around the time that the Hebrews were establishing their own cultural identity. Apparently the Greeks, while condemning the human sacrifices they claimed were performed by the Phonecians, were not beyond resorting to it themselves:
Still the human sacrifices at Salamis were supposedly stopped as it was made clear that an ox was preferred - allegedly this happened around 400 BCE but it may be mythic. I wonder where the inspiration for that myth came from?
You really believe that the Greeks just created everything out of thin air? They didn’t. They took ideas from other cultures and developed them as no one else had before, but the ideas they developed had their intellectual antecedents. The Phonecians had already developed much of the math and the astronomy (Pythagorus’s Theorem was first expressed in Babylon back in 1900 BCE, for example). And certain ideas were first expressed in Hebrew culture that the Greeks then had exposure to in many ways and were then seen in expanded forms in Greek thought.
You are a bit off base here. Okay. Way off base here. We are talking about the influence and importance of the ideas expressed in Torah and that were part of the culture of ideas of the Hebrews through to the Jews of the Diaspora.
Let’s visit a historic timeline.
Around 1200 BCE is when scholars belief Israel began as a loose confederation of tribes in Canaan. Most scholars accept that they were composed to no small degree of native Canaanite tribes despite the mythic stories of conquest that inspired this thread.
By 1100 BCE they were developing a more unified culture - accepting a single God (although they may have been more henotheistic that monotheistic at that point), celebrating national pilgrimage holidays, creating a common literature, and establishing a common law code.
By 1000 BCE Saul had led this emerging tribal kingdom to some victories against the Philistines and David followed uniting much of the region by conquest. He and the Phonecian king Hiram form a treaty. Solomon’s reign follows and a solid kingdom is established with its own mythology, laws, and cultural identity.
All well and good until 722 BCE when the Assyrians kick Israel’s butt. Those deported then were the origin of the storied “Ten Lost Tribes.” They probably became assimilated into the cultures they were deported to, but no doubt they brought some ideas with them.
Then in 586 BCE Nebuchadnezzer destroys the Temple and exiles all but the poorest. By most scholarly accounts Jews in Babylonian exile worked in concert with other Jews, both those in Israel still and elsewhere to create the Torah as a unified piece of literature.
By 538 BCE Cyrus defeats the Babylonians and Jews are permitted to return to Israel and a kingdom is restored over the next several decades.
It is around this time, while Jews were dispersed and intellectually engaged consolidating the ideas of their culture into a cohesive text, communicating with each other across distances, that Greek intellectual culture was born. Within the century Greece was in its intellectual “golden age.”
Did Exile influence Jewish thought? Of course. Was there an influence of Zoroastriaism? Maybe. Maybe even probably. But the myths and ideas that we have been discussing predate exile and it is not true that Judaism begins post exile. If one really wants to date the birth of what is now considered Judaism you really should go later even - to the Diaspora - that’s when Jewish thought really gets more interesting. But that is neither here nor there. The concepts evolved and other cultures were exposed to them.
Your claim that Judaism has contributed no unique or original philosophical, ethical or theological ideals and that ethical progress was made “in despite” of Torah is incorrect.
They got some stuff from the Egyptians and Mesopotamian cultures, yes, but nothing from the Jews, and systematic, analytical philosophy was all Greece. Trying to claim that they got the idea from a few people arguing with God in Jewish literature is not supported by any evidence at all. It’s not even really the same thing.
Name one.
No. They were still completely polytheistic at this time. You’re citing mythology here, not history. Israelite culture did not become henotheistic until the 7th Century BCE under Josiah.
More mythology. The archaeology of the region shows no such kingdom, and no monotheisc or henotheistic practice during that alleged era.
They mostly went south into the highlands of Judah, which is when proto-Judaism really started to percolate. Now is when they become officially henothesitic (though in popular practice, still pretty polythestic).
The Torah was probably assembled and syncretized under Josia. Are you mixing up the Torah with the entirety of the Tanakh? Some other Biblical books were probably written then, but the Torah probably already existed.
This is when the Israelites fused their old Canaanite tribal henotheism with Persian Zorastrianism to synthesize Judaism – an event which had no impact at all on the Greeks.
It’s a certainty.
Some did, but there;s no evidence they had any influence on the Greeks.
Rabbinic Judaism, yes, which is decidedly different from the original Temple cult, but which is ostensibly only temporary (until the Temple gets restored).
Exposed to them and largely ignored by then until Christianity came around and Constantine gave it a gun.
I said the Bible, not just the Torah.
Cite an unique philosphical, ethical or theological ideal which did not pre-date Judaism.
Cite an example of ethical progress made because of the Bible.
Well, while I hate having to perform acts of contrition, I do love the fact that the process of debate here forces me to learn things.
My main source is a far from mythic history book on my shelf but it was published in 1991. Dio, you are referencing, I think, material popularized later in a 2001 book, The Bible Unearthed, of which I was unaware.
I stand corrected on the matters of the historic accuracy of the magnitude of the Hebrew kingdom under Saul, David, and Solomon.
That book apparently makes a quite persuasive argument that Saul and David never amounted to much more than powerful local chiefs. Per that cite both of us are wrong about the syncretism of Torah - not during Josiah, and not during Exile, but after the return of the Exiles as a means to unite the populations that had returned from Exile with those who had never left, under a single national identity with a single central authority. Again however the threads and various narratives that were woven into the Torah at that time, and the whole of the Tanakh sometime over the next several hundred years (depending on who you believe) were mostly already extant and part of the cultural life of the people.
One other quibble with your position - the Greeks were not the first to create democracy. As to much of the rest I think we will just need to disagree about what counts as progress and what the probability was or wasn’t that various ideas contained within Hebrew and early Jewish culture filtered into early Greek thinking.