My point is that the Romans could keep as many pigs as they wanted because they ruled the region, and the native Jews couldn’t do anything against the practice.
I suppose, but it’s likely that other groups were already keeping pigs there.
Harris’ argument, by the way, is that pigs, unlike horses, goats, sheep, and the like, can’t eat and digest grass. They eat the same things that people eat, and effectively compete with people for food. They also require a “wallow” to survive in hot areas – pigs don’t sweat ( despite the saying “sweat like pig”). All of which makes pigs a high-maintenance date in the social circle of life. If you’re living at a subsistence level yourself in middle-eastern conditions, pigs are a luxury, and groups that keep them might find themselves extinct. It’s only if you’ve got time and money to waste on pigs, or else generate enough garbage for them o live on by scavenging in the streets, that you can afford, in an overall energy-using sense, to keep pigs.
If I remember right, it’s the absence of forests. In wooded areas pigs can forage for themselves from mast on the ground like acorns. Where there’s nothing for pigs to forage, they have to be fed from agricultural crops that could otherwise be feeding humans. That raises questions of whether it’s worth keeping pigs under environmentally marginal conditions.
But Israel was historically quite decently forested until major periods of deforestation in the Roman, Crusader, and perhaps most severely Ottoman eras
Meh. The star thing is easily explained as some sort of astrological sign being interpreted. The bigger reason to think they are made up has more to do with the lack of such a story in the earliest surviving gospel (Mark), a contradiction to Mary knowing anything about Jesus being special in one story in Mark, the two mutually incompatible nativity stories, evidence that the nativities were added later, and stuff like that.
The tradition that Mary was a virgin came from that interpretation of a verse in Isaiah (filtered through the Septuagint translation using parthenos for “young woman”, then a narrative built up around that.
A better term is “maiden”. Now “maiden” doesnt necessarily mean virgin, but that is the connotation.
Hogs are excellent at converting carbohydrates into protein and fat. IF you can produce a surplus of grain then feeding some of it to hogs is a better deal than suffering from kwashiorkor.
On a similar note, one of the rabbis in the Intro To Judaism class I’ve been taking noted that Abraham’s migration from Ur to Canaan, while also probably mythical, could be a recollection of climate refugees fleeing the Tigris-Euphrates region after rapid man-made deforestation caused the water table to fill up with salt and crops to fail around 2000 BC.
That might have happened in the Bronze Age collapse previous to the one many people have heard about:
It might just about be Halley’s Comet, which returned to perihelion in 12 BC - though 4 AD - 6 AD is thought to be more likely for Christ’s birth.
Perhaps Melchior, Caspar and Balthazar were really bad at planning a road trip, and it took them 15 years to get going.
They wanted to wait until the new Buckee’s just outside Babylon opened up.
The Orthodox Church and time destroyed a lot of the early documentation but reports of early Christian churches from Israel and Syria record that they didn’t have the nativity and largely considered Jesus’ story to begin with the death of John the Baptist, with Jesus receiving a spirit from a bird that came down out of the sky or a giant angel.
And then there’s a myriad of issues with the nativity stories, from the lack of consistency to a variety of things that clash with Jewish practice and culture, possibly indicating a writer with not much knowledge of the Jewish lands or connection to anyone that knew anything.
Cite?
It’s 12,000 current-year-type months, but presumably this was 967 Jewish lunar years as neither the Julian nor Gregorian calendar was around when they wrote this. 967 Jewish years has 11,962 months in it.
No, Chronos is correct. Seven out of every seventeen Jewish years has 13 months instead of 12. That keeps the slightly shorter lunar months in sync with the solar calendar, so for any period of many years, the number of Jewish and Gregorian years counted will be almost equal.
Put another way, an “average” Jewish year contains 12.41 months. 967x12.41=12,000.
AFAIUI, though, the Jewish calendar that exists today was more or less adapted from the Babylonian calendar during the Captivity and the Second Temple era, and we have little information about what the calendar the First Temple Israelites used would have looked like. The names definitely weren’t the same, because Exodus and Deuteronomy both state that the month in which Passover occurs is called Aviv, not Nisan.
I don’t think the change in names of the months is particularly significant. The Torah clearly prescribes a lunar calendar, but it also says Passover is in the Spring, which would make no sense in a purely lunar calendar. So it seems the system of leap years in some form must go back a ways.
My understanding is that the leap year system was formalized somewhere around the 4th century and that before that it was applied on an ad hoc basis - a new month was declared when the Sanhedrin was informed that a new moon had been observed, and months would be inserted as needed to ensure that the pilgrimage holidays aligned with the seasons.
The Sanhedrin, of course, was also a product of the Second Temple era. It was probably the Temple priests who were responsible for maintaining the calendar during the First Temple days, and the length of a year would have been based on astronomical observations rather than a fixed table.
Oh, I see what you mean. That is also my impression.