Of course, “Iovis” isn’t pronounced with a “v” sound in Old Pronunciation. Think “Yoh-wis” if you think in Modern English phonics.
After the Flood states “…we find that the early Greeks worshipped him as Iapetos , or Iapetus , whom they regarded as the son of heaven and earth, the father of many nations.” (pg.199) The book also points provides names and references from antiquity that line-up with Japheth’s son Gomer, and grandson’s Aschenaz, Riphath, and Togarmah.
Gomer’s people are referred to as Gimirraya by Esarhaddon (681-668 BC). The Assyrians have an inscription of the tribe “Askuzza” participating in a 7th century BC revolt. Pliny, Melo, and Solinus record the name of Riphath as Riphaei, Riphaces, and Piphlataei. And there is a Hittite document naming the city of Til-gari-manu , which in the region where Togarmah would have settled.
I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m flacking for the book, because I’m not. It’s just that the author brings up lots of interesting “facts” (which he does footnote at length) and it would be nice to hear some point/counterpoint from the many talented Straight Dope readers and Research Staff. There’s not much hope in that without everyone reading what is an admitedly very obscure book. Oh well. It still worth hearing others contributions on these nuggets.
I’m waiting, hoping that someone else will know whether this Bill Cooper is accurate. I am suspicious, since I think that if this were accurate, we’d have heard about it from other sources. The absence of such references makes me dubious.
Unfortunately, any area where the bible makes some sort of statement, you can find loonies trying to prove that it’s literally so.
No sweat, histybuff, we understand you’re not selling the book but just asking about its veracity.
The book is ten years old, and not available at Amazon, but the author has created a freely-accessible, online version.
He lists his address as a PO Box for the Creation Science Movement, which gives one doubts about his objectivity, and therefore credibility, but reading is believing.
In regards to the ‘problem’ that Noah’s reaction seems over the top for Ham merely having seen him nekkid…
Somewhere in the Bible you will find the story about one of the Prophets (I want to say Elijah but I’m not sure) being laughed at by some children because he was getting bald. This ‘worthy’ man judged the proper response for this offense was to call on God to have a bear tear the children to pieces, and evidentally God agreed because he indeed sent the bear.
The point being, our view of what is a ‘reasonable’ punishment doesn’t have to agree with those of people a few thousand years ago. If giggling at a prophet can justify having children slaughtered by a bear, well then, cursing your grandsons and his descendents forever for your son having seen your peepee is probably no more outrageous.
So I don’t see the need to invent a deeper and darker ‘crime’ to justify Noah’s have cursed Ham, or to explain why his contemporaries judged him to be noble man despite doing that.
The rules were different then, that’s all.
I’m beginning to feel like a broken record.
Once again: Starving, you and others are free to interpret the story any way you’d like, given (your) modern understanding of very ancient peoples.
The whole point of the Staff Report is that the story was written around 1000 BC (perhaps as early as 1250 BC, perhaps as late as 600 BC). We do not know what the audience of that time thought of the story, we do not know (although we assume) what was left out, we do not understand the contemporary understanding.
The commentators writing around 100 BC to 200 AD were many centuries removed from the original author. They felt that Noah’s curse on Ham was too strong, and so they tried to read various interpretations to explain it.
What you think today, and your skepticism, doesn’t have any impact on what they thought 2000 years ago. They’re long dead, and you’re not going to change their minds. The Staff Report is endeavoring to explain a 3000 year old story, and 2000 years of commentary on that story.
THERE IS NO SINGLE “RIGHT” ANSWER to what the story means. There is what the story probably meant to the audience of 1000 BC. There is what the story meant to the rabbis of 100 BC - 200 AD. There is what the story meant to the early Christian fathers of 50 AD - 400 AD. There is what the story meant to the Muslim commentators of 650 - 800 AD. There is what the story meant to the slave traders of the 1500s. There is what the story meant to the pro-slavery politicians of the 1800s. There is what the story means to archaeologists. There is what the story means to poets.
You think you understand what the story meant to the audience of 1000 BC? That’s great, I’m delighted to have someone posting here who has more knowledge of ancient peoples than do most archaeologists, biblical scholars, and historians.
Thanks for providing the link. I picked up the book sometime back, noticed the CSM connection on the book jacket, and decided to go ahead and peruse it. If nothing else he does do a pretty good job of dragging up facts that support his case and for the most part sites the source document. I wouldn’t even have bothered with the book if all he had done was site his own previously published works or things from only that publishing house.
He may not be objective, but he doesn’t appear to be making stuff up (unlike a poorly written book named after an Italian genius) just to make the point. The appendix looks like he spent some time draggin through the dusty stuff. It would be really interesting to hear someone else’s take on it after they get a look at the sources. I’d love to do it myself, but a year-long visit to London just isn’t in my future.
Maybe with your link, one of the SD folks (London branch) will come through for us.
Thanks also for responding. After reading this a while back it left me wanting to chat about it, but it’s not exactly book club fodder or a chat at the copy machine topic. The Noah article was my first chance to share it.
Strangely, I was trying to make pretty much the opposite point : We DON’T know what the drunken Noah story meant to the people of 1000 BC and therefore we shouldn’t say “the story doesn’t make sense to our modern sensibilities as it is written, and therefore there must be more to it.” Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t.
I was pointing out (at least trying to) that there were other stories in the Bible that don’t fit with modern sensibilities, where the punishments don’t fit the crime to our way of thinking. At least, I feel fairly sure that to most of us killing children because they made fun of a religious leader would NOT be considered righteous/just/fair/whatever. Maybe there are other parts to that story, too, that were so generally understood then that they weren’t included and if we knew them we’d understand why it was right for those children to be killed…but maybe not. Maybe the stories as written simply reflected a view of How Life Should Be that has simply changed radically between then and now, creating a false sense of ‘but there must be more to explain it’ in our minds.
Here’s some documentation against Wellhausen’s philosophy:
“In Pentateuchal criticism it has long been customary to divide the whole into separate documents or ‘hands’…But the practice of Old Testament criticism in attributing these characteristics to different ‘hands’ or documents becomes a manifest absurdity when applied to other ancient Oriental writings that display precisely similar phenomena…”—K. A. Kitchen; quoted in The New Bible Dictionary, p. 349
“The Wellhausen school started with the pure assumption (which they have hardly bothered to demonstrate) that Israel’s religion was of merely human origin like any other, and that it was to be explained as a mere product of evolution.”—A Survey of Old Testament Introduction, by Gleason L. Archer, Jr., 1974, p. 107.
See also The Jewish Encyclopedia, 1909.
“Like [Catholicism], higher criticism removed the Word of God from the common people by assuming that only scholars [educated expositors] can interpret it…” –A.T. Pierson, quoted by Timothy P. Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, 1979, pp. 36-37.
While hundreds of years ago the hierarchy could rely on general illiteracy and their own power to keep the common people away from the Bible (cf. Himmler), now a learned expositor has been interposed between one and the other (cf. Goebbels).
All that is “documented” by any of those quotes is that fundamentalists believe in fundamentalism, a proposition that, while no doubt true, is not particularly enlightening.
The final remark (which appears to be your own) is, on the other hand, a direct insult, not only to educated readers of the Bible, but to everyone who perished under Hitler.
Moderator speaketh: dougie, a discussion of the authorship of the bible is not appropriate in this thread. There are Staff Reports aplenty on this, start with Straight Dope Staff Report: Who wrote the Bible? (Part 1). And there are several old threads on this, too. Let’s not get the Noah story blogged down in who wrote it. Regardless of who wrote it or when, the interpretations that have come down to us are clearly dated beginning around 100 BC - 200 AD, no one disputes that.
Author of Staff Report Speaketh:
You’re missing the point. The argument that the story doesn’t “make sense to our modern sensibilities as it is written” were made in the period from 100 BC - 200 AD. OK, they didn’t use the words “modern sensibilities.” The whole bit about “doesn’t make sense and so needs explanation” arose 2000 years ago. Yes, they were already 600 - 1000 years after the Noah story was written down, so their sensibilities were already different from the ancient text.
It’s not WE who are saying, “This curse seems harsh”, it was the commentators back then.
Clear? the point of the Staff Report is to summarize what commentators have said over the last 2000 years (and Part 2 describes some of the dreadful consequences of those commentaries.) These are not “modern” thoughts, these are ancient thoughts that have had lasting impact.
I think we all get that, Dex. The problems are:
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The Staff Report makes it unclear where you are reporting ancient opinions and where you are presenting your own opinions based upon currently available scholarship; and
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Current scholarship among archaeologists, biblical scholar, and historians seems to agree with Starving Artist and myself that the stories say what they mean and are fully explainable with the knowledge that in that culture Ham was expected to protect his father’s honor, not gossip about it. Many ancient and traditional interpretations of Scripture have been discarded and are no longer accepted by scholars or religious leaders. This is one of them. See my cites above.
Yeah, that’s why I said earlier “I objected to the “So he got drunk and engages in some sexual hanky-panky, in the privacy of his tent.” It appears, to me, in the context of the staff report, to not be someone else’s speculation, but an assertion of fact on your part.”
D*ng, now we have two broken records
Let me put it this way: There are several threads in this post which mention “J,” or “P,” or whatever, as alleged sources for the Pentateuch. I’m sure that if the people who posted those threads omitted the letters–referring to the alleged “Priestly Codex,” the alleged “Yahwist Codex,” and the alleged “Elohist Codex”–their arguments would have been severely undermined.
Oh–and to John W. Kennedy, spare me the “fundamentalist” shtick. The first quote I posted was of an archaeologist. Then again, you could be using the label “fundamentalist” for anyone who fails to agree with you on this issue. Well, name-calling doesn’t prove anything.
In fact, no, you’re wrong. There are NO posts in this thread that mention J or P or whatever. There is one reference to a line in the Staff Report:
The Staff Report does, twice, make the point that authorship is irrelevant. The entire story is by one author, regardless of who you think that author was. Thus, I repeat, a discussion about authorship is not appropriate for this thread.
Please note that I am speaking here as Moderator of this forum. I do wear two hats, since I’m also the author of the Staff Report (aside from the bits that were redacted.) However, when I speak as Moderator/Administrator, that’s Official. Discussion of authorship is perfectly acceptable in other threads, but not here. There’s enough to discuss about Noah, without getting into larger issues.
Right!
The famous Tetragrammeton would be tranliterated into English usage as
YHWH if you are speaking classical Hebrew
YHVH if you use the Shephardic pronunciation
JHWH or JHVH if you are German.
Religious Jews and one of my Hebrew teachers (a Methodist) never pronounce the NAME. The substitute ‘Adonai’ which means ‘the Lord’. Hence our English translation as the Lord in small caps so you know it’s special. Attaching the vowels of Adonai to the consonants JHVH gave us ‘Jehovah’. If those early Protestant scholars had only asked a rabbi.
We can construe the NAME as a verb(!!) – third person masculine singular hiphil indicative of the antique verb HWH (to be). So we could translate the NAME as “he causes being; he is the reason for what is” which is kind of cool if you think about.
Previous comments on ‘Jovis’ are correct. Latin and Greek are in the Indoeuropean family of languages. Hebrew is Semitic. An resemblance of words is pure coincidence. Closing with the only two Hebrew words used in English: Hallelujah! Amen.
This report sure generated a lot of comment. But I hope everyone admits the Staff did a terrific job of doing the homework. Really researched and covered the relevant issues. Nice job!
Aren’t “seraph” and “cherub” Hebrew, also? And “nephil”? Plus a great many proper names (Michael, Daniel, Rachel, etc.)
Technically, it’s “our Lord”
What’s that observance that Jews observe every seventh day?
In addition, the word “sandal” appears numerous times in the Mishna; with the same meaning that it has in English.
I would not be surprised if there weren’t others that I just can’t think of off the top of my head.
Zev Steinhardt
Or sometimes “ha Shem” (“the Name”) or sometimes even “ado-shem” (which is nonsense). Many Orthodox Jews even avoid writing the English word, preferrring to spell it “G-d”.