The Biblical God - Evolution or Revolution?

[Abdul Goatherd]

In that, I don't agree. Neither the God of Israel nor the compilators/editors of the Tanakh worried in the slightest about the morality of such actions as the killing of all the firstborns of Egypt. They were acts done by God and thus holy in themselves, and automatically righteous; but that has nothing to do with any notion of a moral code. YHWH was a warrior God ("the Lord of Hosts"), and thus he fought on behalf of His people, just as Ashur did for the Assyrians, or the Olympic gods did for their favorites in the Illiad. If anything, the grand design is to fulfill God's promise to Abraham that his descendants would inherit the Promised Land, nothing else.

To repeat: the Tanakh is a history of a people, the Israelites, not a history of God. So yes, it talks about Israelites all the time. No surprise there. But don't let that mislead you into imagining that therefore the Biblical God must just be an exclusively Israelite God of old. There is an underlying revolution in the God concept in these pages.

I insist that the expulsion of evil from the supernatural, and the reassignment of blame to Man, was the paramount contribution of the Tanakh. Man in general, not Jews in particular, are the source of evil in this world.

That "revision" of the nature of good and evil is incompatible with polytheism. It is that which necessitates relentless monotheism. There is no other god in the Bible. No trickster, demon or evil spirit to blame. All traces of them have been deliberately and carefully (and sometimes not so carefully) edited out.

Not always. In Graeco-Roman polytheism, not even the gods could reverse the proceeds of Fate; the use of magid, prayers, amulets, etc, only reached to a point, and that was a fact accepted by its followers.

Exactly. The Graeco-Roman gods are not omnipotent. There is a "higher power", a meta-universe, from which these gods come, and whose laws (e.g. fate) they must also obey.

Not so in the Tanakh. There is no "higher power", no meta-universe, no laws, above YHWH. The Biblical God comes from nothing, He has no beginning and obeys no dictates of fate. The Biblical God is omnipotent.

And, to underline, the Biblical God is GOOD. And only good. And the universe is GOOD.

In your Graeco-Roman theology, the "higher power" of fate is neither good nor evil. Both good and evil gods come from it, and both must obey its laws. Not so in the Tanakh.

Not "Man" in a universal sense, but the Israelites are portrayed as unfaithful to the Covenant, and thus as oath-breakers. This is a very primitive conception of "mankind" (only God's "chosen people") and circumscribes Israel's "sinfulness" to a very narrow field, that of the breaking of an oath. Again, I see in there no high-flying moral philosophical concerns about Good and Evil. There's very little moral duality in the Old Testament, there's just God and the Israelites, and the Israelites' continued failure at keeping their side of the Covenant.

Again, because the Tanakh is the story of the Israelites, the people. I wouldn't expect anything else.

But this "chosen" status is very conditional and repeatedly threatened. Time and again, the Biblical God warns the Israelites they are going to meet the same fate as the Canaanites. The insinuation is that the Biblical God was as much the god of the Canaanites as He is the God of the Israelites. The Biblical God just decided to destroy the Canaanites today. Tomorrow, He might decide to destroy the Israelites. And makes it clear He will do so if the Israelites go down the same faithless, evil path as the Canaanites did.

So He is not a partisan "God of the Israelites". He is God, the only God, the God of everybody. But everybody kinda sucks. It happens - merely happens - that the Israelites are the only people that have been given a single clear, narrow mission that is spoken about in detail. Who knows what mission this God previously demanded of the Canaanites? Or the Egyptians? Or the Vietnamese, for that matter?

If the Israelites are "special", they are at best a showcase for what all peoples should be like. Universally.

The written Law of Moses, as codified in Exodus, Numbers and Levitic, and condensed further in Deuteronomy, is not a moral code. It's a legal code in the narrow sense, applied to a very circumscibed group of people, and not very original in itself. The real innovation is that in it, all deviations from the Law are made not offences against the king like in contemporary legal codes (what today we would call "civil offences"), but offences against God. That's a real breakout, and one of the greatest innovations in the Old Testament, because the Law turned Israel de facto into the world's first theocracy, ruled by the Law of God.

But the Law is not a moral code, in the same sense as, for example, Justinian's Code is not a moral code. It's a book of laws, nothing else, with a divine origin. And many of its concerns have nothing to do with morality of any kind and much to do with rituals, sacrifices, contracts, etc. (and even provisory methods for choosing a new king for Israel should the need arose). I can't resist the temptation to copy here one of its pearls, Deuteronomy 25:11-12:

It is much more a moral code than Justinian. There is no preferred political arrangement - indeed, the politics change format entirely, from judges to kings.

There is what you call "legal code" but they are undifferentiated from "moral code". Both legal and moral commandments are included, undifferentiated and thoroughly mixed. Every sin is a crime, and every crime is a sin.

Offenses against God are not offenses because God is Lord of Israel. They are offenses because they alienate God, they drive God away from the people of Israel. Mounting offenses to God will eventually lead to destruction by God. That's what happened to the Canaanites. Offenses will lead the Israelite people down the same path that Canaanites went, and God will eventually deliver them a similar fate, i.e. send in the Assyrians or Romans or Nazis or some other people to wipe them off the earth.

Every offense by a naughty Israelite - whether discovered or undiscovered by the legal authorities - counts against them personally, and against the Israelites as a whole. This makes it different from a legal code, and very much a moral code. God knows who is sinning, and we all gonna pay for it. Because that's just how the Biblical God rolls. He didn't spare innocent Canaanites, and won't spare innocent Israelites.

This underlines the paramount importance of Yom Kippur - the periodic, ritual cleansing of offenses to God, by the community as a whole.

Now, admittedly, there are echoes of this in other religions. A people may offend a patron god, and the god abandons them and allows them to be destroyed. But there is a clear distinction between what are offenses to gods, and what are offenses to man, and they are tried in separate courts. Not so in the Hebrew Bible. Everything, all misbehavior listed, is offensive to God. Every evil act "pollutes" the country, and brings it one step closer to destruction.

God does not merely kill a kitten when you masturbate. He is considering mass death and genocide.

 

[Semper Victor]

To repeat: the Tanakh is a history of a people, the Israelites, not a history of God. So yes, it talks about Israelites all the time. No surprise there. But don't let that mislead you into imagining that therefore the Biblical God must just be an exclusively Israelite God of old. There is an underlying revolution in the God concept in these pages.

I insist that the expulsion of evil from the supernatural, and the reassignment of blame to Man, was the paramount contribution of the Tanakh. Man in general, not Jews in particular, are the source of evil in this world.

That "revision" of the nature of good and evil is incompatible with polytheism. It is that which necessitates relentless monotheism. There is no other god in the Bible. No trickster, demon or evil spirit to blame. All traces of them have been deliberately and carefully (and sometimes not so carefully) edited out.

The Tanakh is, from a literary point of view, the saga of the people of Israel and their relationship with YHWH. Not merely the history of Israel. As a matter of fact, the Israelites do not even make an appearance as such until Exodus. And to be more precise, the core issue is the Covenant between YHWH and Abraham, and how God fulfills it if the children of Abraham stick to their end of the deal. Any other attempts at reading anything else from this story is an exegesis of much more modern philosophical and religious traditions, which attempted to project their own views anachronistically rearwards.

And there are other gods in the Bible. Only that YHWH happens to be more powerful than them. There are also sorcerers, magicians and witches all along the tale. In Exodus, YHWH never denies expressly the existance of the gods of Egypt, only that they and their magicians and priests (who perform "magical" feats in front of Moses and Pharaoh) are far less powerful than the God of Israel.

The tale of Adam's fall, that later religious traditions have read in the way you described above, does not describe that at all. It describes how from the start Adam and Eve did not stick to their agreement with God, so that later YHWH could "renegociate" it first with Noah and later with Abraham. Rather than a moral tale (Genesis does not even describe Adam and Eve as particularly "wicked" o "evil"), it's a tale about disobedience and disloyalty towards an agreement made with God. Adam and Eve are guilty of perjury, that's their fault.

Exactly. The Graeco-Roman gods are not omnipotent. There is a "higher power", a meta-universe, from which these gods come, and whose laws (e.g. fate) they must also obey.

Not so in the Tanakh. There is no "higher power", no meta-universe, no laws, above YHWH. The Biblical God comes from nothing, He has no beginning and obeys no dictates of fate. The Biblical God is omnipotent.

And, to underline, the Biblical God is GOOD. And only good. And the universe is GOOD.

In your Graeco-Roman theology, the "higher power" of fate is neither good nor evil. Both good and evil gods come from it, and both must obey its laws. Not so in the Tanakh.

The Biblical God is neither good nor bad in a moral sense. He simply is. And in is omnipotency, whatever He allows in the Law He gives to Israel is righteous, and whatever He forbids is sinful. I agree that the concept of a God eternal and uncreated is there, but YHWH is not the Platonic source of all Goodness. His Law is brutal, and His acts are repeatedly brutal, including undiscriminate and collective punishment at will, almost just for show, in order to cower the Israelites into submission (like with the Tenth Plague). If He orders Joshua and the Israelites to massacre all the people (men, women and children) in a Canaanite city, that's righteous because YHWH orders it. But then in other parts the Tanakh He forbids parricide, and forbids repeatedly the murder of children (especially in ritual sacrifices). YHWH is above good and evil, He can do as He wishes, and the Israelites must obey and endure, like Abraham and Job.

Again, because the Tanakh is the story of the Israelites, the people. I wouldn't expect anything else.

But this "chosen" status is very conditional and repeatedly threatened. Time and again, the Biblical God warns the Israelites they are going to meet the same fate as the Canaanites. The insinuation is that the Biblical God was as much the god of the Canaanites as He is the God of the Israelites. The Biblical God just decided to destroy the Canaanites today. Tomorrow, He might decide to destroy the Israelites. And makes it clear He will do so if the Israelites go down the same faithless, evil path as the Canaanites did.

So He is not a partisan "God of the Israelites". He is God, the only God, the God of everybody. But everybody kinda sucks. It happens - merely happens - that the Israelites are the only people that have been given a single clear, narrow mission that is spoken about in detail. Who knows what mission this God previously demanded of the Canaanites? Or the Egyptians? Or the Vietnamese, for that matter?

If the Israelites are "special", they are at best a showcase for what all peoples should be like. Universally.

YHWH is defined explicitly as the God of Israel. The Tanakh says nothing about how should the Egyptians, Aramaeans or Assyrians worship. The way that He is presented in the Tanakh couldn't be more ethnocentric than that. Hell, even today orthodox Jews don't accept conversions to Judaism, because the essence of Judaism is the Covenant between God and the children of Israel, understood in the narrowest, biological sense.

And He is partisan all along the tale; He must be partisan because that's what He's commited Himself to in the Covenant. If anything, YHWH is always true to His part of the deal, it's the Israelites who fail repeatedly. It's very important to understand this from an ancient point of view: in ancient and not so ancient, mostly illiterate societies, an oath, or even a given word, was sacrosant, and something of the utmost importance. People who gained a reputation as liars or oath breakers were promptly shunned away from families and village communities. And YHWH is presented as the ultimate example of truthfulness in an oral covenant, something that everybody in an ancient middle eastern society could immediately relate to, and respect inmensely: a God who stuck true to His word for centuries!

Ancient Israelites, and the writers of the Tanakh, did not care about a universal, Platonic God. They wanted a God that led them in battle to victory upon their foes, a God who secured their land (which had been given to them by Him) from being seized by enemies. In how many battles does God intervene in the Bible? And even if not in battle, how many times does YHWH intervene directly on the Israelites' behalf, stricking their enemies with the most terrible punishments? There are countless references in the Tanakh about YHWH as Israel's champion in war:

The Lord is a man of war: the Lord is his name. Pharaoh's chariots and his host hath he cast into the sea: his chosen captains also are drowned in the Red sea.

Who is this King of glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle.

Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.

The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool. The Lord shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion: rule thou in the midst of thine enemies.

Et cetera. Frankly, I don't see how YHWH can get more partisan than that (Psalm 110, known in the Latin tradition as the Dixit Dominus, is a particularly warlike hymn to the Lord of Hosts, Dominus Deus Sabaoth).

It is much more a moral code than Justinian. There is no preferred political arrangement - indeed, the politics change format entirely, from judges to kings.

There is what you call "legal code" but they are undifferentiated from "moral code". Both legal and moral commandments are included, undifferentiated and thoroughly mixed. Every sin is a crime, and every crime is a sin.

Offenses against God are not offenses because God is Lord of Israel. They are offenses because they alienate God, they drive God away from the people of Israel. Mounting offenses to God will eventually lead to destruction by God. That's what happened to the Canaanites. Offenses will lead the Israelite people down the same path that Canaanites went, and God will eventually deliver them a similar fate, i.e. send in the Assyrians or Romans or Nazis or some other people to wipe them off the earth.

Every offense by a naughty Israelite - whether discovered or undiscovered by the legal authorities - counts against them personally, and against the Israelites as a whole. This makes it different from a legal code, and very much a moral code. God knows who is sinning, and we all gonna pay for it. Because that's just how the Biblical God rolls. He didn't spare innocent Canaanites, and won't spare innocent Israelites.

This underlines the paramount importance of Yom Kippur - the periodic, ritual cleansing of offenses to God, by the community as a whole.

Now, admittedly, there are echoes of this in other religions. A people may offend a patron god, and the god abandons them and allows them to be destroyed. But there is a clear distinction between what are offenses to gods, and what are offenses to man, and they are tried in separate courts. Not so in the Hebrew Bible. Everything, all misbehavior listed, is offensive to God. Every evil act "pollutes" the country, and brings it one step closer to destruction.

God does not merely kill a kitten when you masturbate. He is considering mass death and genocide.

A moral code is a broad set of guidelines based on an understanding that some acts are moral and other acts are inmoral. Moral codes cannot cover each and every possibility that appears in everyday life in society, and are usually transmitted in an oral, informal way. A legal code is usually a written code which covers very specific cases and deals very specific punishments for each case. Usually, legal codes are based on moral codes, but historically many laws were considered inmoral even at the times they were written.

In the Tanakh, only some sparse fragments can be considered as moral codes, like the Ten Commandments, which later Christian tradition has exalted as the culminating point of the Biblical tale but which are actually rather unimportant in the Biblical text and in later Jewish tradition (the Tanakh actually has two different and slightly different versions of them, probably another editing mistake). What fills several of the books of the Torah (Numbers, Leviticus and Deuteronomy) is written law, pure and simple. And that was the important stuff for ancient Israelites: a legal code dictated by an authority that could not be abrogated or tinkered with, and which, as you noted, turns any infraction against the Law automatically into a sin an an offence against God Himself (with the associated dangers). And as I wrote in a previous post, this was truly revolutionary stuff.

But I simply can't see any attempt at stating a moral code in most of the Law, only on those specific parts which deal with acts that were already considered crimes in societies other than the Israelites: murder, theft, adultery, blasphemy, etc.

The majority of the Law deals with issues such as debts, inheritance, priestly purity, religious festivals, the maintenance of the Ark of the Covenant and the lithurgy associated with it, sacrifices and offerings, food laws, and even prescriptions for choosing a new king for Israel in case that the need arose.

Notice also that this was a Law for Israel, not for anybody else. It's not an universal law, and one of the most important characteristics of moral codes is that they are deemed to be universal, because a moral distinction between Good and Evil (the basis of morality) is what anthropologists call a huma universal, present in all known and studied human societies.

The Biblical tale, in its description of the usually stormy relationship between YHWH and His people, repeats again and again the same story, in different ways: YHWH has a covenant with Israel, and He's always kept His word; it's the Israelites who keep breaking theirs, which includes worshipping God and obeying His Law. It's as simple as that, and it's later, more sophisticated religious traditions rooted in the Tanakh which have done an exegesis of its text projecting much later concepts and values in a text that was written in very different times, and for people who thought differently. As the Tanakh is such a lengthy, convoluted and at times contradictory text, it's relatively easy to make allegorical or metaphorical interpretations out of it, but it was a text written (in its final form) between the VII and V centuries BCE (excluding the Maccabees), and it's still full of concepts and attitudes commonplace in the Middle East of that time.

 

[Barsoom]

The Tanakh is, from a literary point of view, the saga of the people of Israel and their relationship with YHWH. Not merely the history of Israel. As a matter of fact, the Israelites do not even make an appearance as such until Exodus. And to be more precise, the core issue is the Covenant between YHWH and Abraham, and how God fulfills it if the children of Abraham stick to their end of the deal. Any other attempts at reading anything else from this story is an exegesis of much more modern philosophical and religious traditions, which attempted to project their own views anachronistically rearwards.

And there are other gods in the Bible. Only that YHWH happens to be more powerful than them. There are also sorcerers, magicians and witches all along the tale. In Exodus, YHWH never denies expressly the existance of the gods of Egypt, only that they and their magicians and priests (who perform "magical" feats in front of Moses and Pharaoh) are far less powerful than the God of Israel.

The tale of Adam's fall, that later religious traditions have read in the way you described above, does not describe that at all. It describes how from the start Adam and Eve did not stick to their agreement with God, so that later YHWH could "renegociate" it first with Noah and later with Abraham. Rather than a moral tale (Genesis does not even describe Adam and Eve as particularly "wicked" o "evil"), it's a tale about disobedience and disloyalty towards an agreement made with God. Adam and Eve are guilty of perjury, that's their fault.



The Biblical God is neither good nor bad in a moral sense. He simply is. And in is omnipotency, whatever He allows in the Law He gives to Israel is righteous, and whatever He forbids is sinful. I agree that the concept of a God eternal and uncreated is there, but YHWH is not the Platonic source of all Goodness. His Law is brutal, and His acts are repeatedly brutal, including undiscriminate and collective punishment at will, almost just for show, in order to cower the Israelites into submission (like with the Tenth Plague). If He orders Joshua and the Israelites to massacre all the people (men, women and children) in a Canaanite city, that's righteous because YHWH orders it. But then in other parts the Tanakh He forbids parricide, and forbids repeatedly the murder of children (especially in ritual sacrifices). YHWH is above good and evil, He can do as He wishes, and the Israelites must obey and endure, like Abraham and Job.



YHWH is defined explicitly as the God of Israel. The Tanakh says nothing about how should the Egyptians, Aramaeans or Assyrians worship. The way that He is presented in the Tanakh couldn't be more ethnocentric than that. Hell, even today orthodox Jews don't accept conversions to Judaism, because the essence of Judaism is the Covenant between God and the children of Israel, understood in the narrowest, biological sense.

And He is partisan all along the tale; He must be partisan because that's what He's commited Himself to in the Covenant. If anything, YHWH is always true to His part of the deal, it's the Israelites who fail repeatedly. It's very important to understand this from an ancient point of view: in ancient and not so ancient, mostly illiterate societies, an oath, or even a given word, was sacrosant, and something of the utmost importance. People who gained a reputation as liars or oath breakers were promptly shunned away from families and village communities. And YHWH is presented as the ultimate example of truthfulness in an oral covenant, something that everybody in an ancient middle eastern society could immediately relate to, and respect inmensely: a God who stuck true to His word for centuries!

Ancient Israelites, and the writers of the Tanakh, did not care about a universal, Platonic God. They wanted a God that led them in battle to victory upon their foes, a God who secured their land (which had been given to them by Him) from being seized by enemies. In how many battles does God intervene in the Bible? And even if not in battle, how many times does YHWH intervene directly on the Israelites' behalf, stricking their enemies with the most terrible punishments? There are countless references in the Tanakh about YHWH as Israel's champion in war:









Et cetera. Frankly, I don't see how YHWH can get more partisan than that (Psalm 110, known in the Latin tradition as the Dixit Dominus, is a particularly warlike hymn to the Lord of Hosts, Dominus Deus Sabaoth).



A moral code is a broad set of guidelines based on an understanding that some acts are moral and other acts are inmoral. Moral codes cannot cover each and every possibility that appears in everyday life in society, and are usually transmitted in an oral, informal way. A legal code is usually a written code which covers very specific cases and deals very specific punishments for each case. Usually, legal codes are based on moral codes, but historically many laws were considered inmoral even at the times they were written.

In the Tanakh, only some sparse fragments can be considered as moral codes, like the Ten Commandments, which later Christian tradition has exalted as the culminating point of the Biblical tale but which are actually rather unimportant in the Biblical text and in later Jewish tradition (the Tanakh actually has two different and slightly different versions of them, probably another editing mistake). What fills several of the books of the Torah (Numbers, Leviticus and Deuteronomy) is written law, pure and simple. And that was the important stuff for ancient Israelites: a legal code dictated by an authority that could not be abrogated or tinkered with, and which, as you noted, turns any infraction against the Law automatically into a sin an an offence against God Himself (with the associated dangers). And as I wrote in a previous post, this was truly revolutionary stuff.

But I simply can't see any attempt at stating a moral code in most of the Law, only on those specific parts which deal with acts that were already considered crimes in societies other than the Israelites: murder, theft, adultery, blasphemy, etc.

The majority of the Law deals with issues such as debts, inheritance, priestly purity, religious festivals, the maintenance of the Ark of the Covenant and the lithurgy associated with it, sacrifices and offerings, food laws, and even prescriptions for choosing a new king for Israel in case that the need arose.

Notice also that this was a Law for Israel, not for anybody else. It's not an universal law, and one of the most important characteristics of moral codes is that they are deemed to be universal, because a moral distinction between Good and Evil (the basis of morality) is what anthropologists call a huma universal, present in all known and studied human societies.

The Biblical tale, in its description of the usually stormy relationship between YHWH and His people, repeats again and again the same story, in different ways: YHWH has a covenant with Israel, and He's always kept His word; it's the Israelites who keep breaking theirs, which includes worshipping God and obeying His Law. It's as simple as that, and it's later, more sophisticated religious traditions rooted in the Tanakh which have done an exegesis of its text projecting much later concepts and values in a text that was written in very different times, and for people who thought differently. As the Tanakh is such a lengthy, convoluted and at times contradictory text, it's relatively easy to make allegorical or metaphorical interpretations out of it, but it was a text written (in its final form) between the VII and V centuries BCE (excluding the Maccabees), and it's still full of concepts and attitudes commonplace in the Middle East of that time.

Informative as usual, but I think you're overstating your case. The Hebrew Biblical canon was set after the Maccabees; while the editors wanted texts written before the time of Ezra, they did accept a couple of books of later composition, Jonah and Daniel. That may be because their stories were set before Ezra but the books themselves were clearly written later.

Interestingly, both of these concern prophets speaking to non-Israelites. You can perhaps explain that away because both Jonah and Daniel were dissuading enemies from attacking Israel but at least in Jonah's case, he is sent because their behavior is immoral generally: "and should not I [God] have pity on Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand, and also much cattle?" (I admit the cattle bit always throws me off.) The story of the tower of Babel also talks about non-Israelites' behavior, and of course Adam and Eve are considered the progenitors of all humanity. At the very least the Biblical text recognizes that the covenant between God and Abraham is not the first contract, and not the only running even today (Genesis 9:17), though it clearly is the one that most interested the editors.

Finally, there is plenty of evidence that Judaism was once a proselytizing religion: the conversions of Idumea, Adiabene, Yemen, the Berbers, and the Khazars, not to mention the incredible growth rates of Jewish communities in Egypt (some of them unfamiliar with key parts of the scripture) and around the Mediterranean. If Judaism had been limited to biological descendants of other Jews, it wouldn't have been so successful; it is much more likely that the relation is the other way round, that the descendants of converts were eventually regarded as members of a Jewish people. It's not just orthodox Jews who don't like this notion, Israeli nationalists also view it as undermining their claims to the land of Israel; but while they've insisted (on the basis of inconclusive DNA evidence and dubious historiography) that today's Jews are descendants of Israelites, they can't deny that Judaism did once proselytize and win converts, they're just claiming that the converts apostasized first so that the Jewish communities which remained were the biologically pure core. We needn't be concerned with the last 18 centuries but we should recognize that, during the time of the Tanakh's final composition, the exclusiveness of its message was not a given but instead a fiercely contested issue.

 

[Semper Victor]

Informative as usual, but I think you're overstating your case. The Hebrew Biblical canon was set after the Maccabees; while the editors wanted texts written before the time of Ezra, they did accept a couple of books of later composition, Jonah and Daniel. That may be because their stories were set before Ezra but the books themselves were clearly written later.

Interestingly, both of these concern prophets speaking to non-Israelites. You can perhaps explain that away because both Jonah and Daniel were dissuading enemies from attacking Israel but at least in Jonah's case, he is sent because their behavior is immoral generally: "and should not I [God] have pity on Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand, and also much cattle?" (I admit the cattle bit always throws me off.) The story of the tower of Babel also talks about non-Israelites' behavior, and of course Adam and Eve are considered the progenitors of all humanity. At the very least the Biblical text recognizes that the covenant between God and Abraham is not the first contract, and not the only running even today (Genesis 9:17), though it clearly is the one that most interested the editors.

Finally, there is plenty of evidence that Judaism was once a proselytizing religion: the conversions of Idumea, Adiabene, Yemen, the Berbers, and the Khazars, not to mention the incredible growth rates of Jewish communities in Egypt (some of them unfamiliar with key parts of the scripture) and around the Mediterranean. If Judaism had been limited to biological descendants of other Jews, it wouldn't have been so successful; it is much more likely that the relation is the other way round, that the descendants of converts were eventually regarded as members of a Jewish people. It's not just orthodox Jews who don't like this notion, Israeli nationalists also view it as undermining their claims to the land of Israel; but while they've insisted (on the basis of inconclusive DNA evidence and dubious historiography) that today's Jews are descendants of Israelites, they can't deny that Judaism did once proselytize and win converts, they're just claiming that the converts apostasized first so that the Jewish communities which remained were the biologically pure core. We needn't be concerned with the last 18 centuries but we should recognize that, during the time of the Tanakh's final composition, the exclusiveness of its message was not a given but instead a fiercely contested issue.

All those conversions that took place out of the original Palestinian homeland date to the period between the II century BCE and the I century CE, well after the core of the Tanakh was written. The conversion of the Idumeans was done at sword's point by one of the Maccabee kings (I don't remember it exactly, but I think it was John Hyrcanus), and it arose lots of protests among a group of Jewish scholars that would later become the Pharisees, who disagreed totally with it. Later, Herod the Great would have to deal with lots of disdain from his Jewish subjects because he was of Idumean descent. The appearance of large Jewish communities in Egypt, and especially in Alexandria, dates also from the first kings of the Ptolemaic dinasty (although there's evidence of a Jewish garrison in the island of Elephantine in Upper Egypt from the time of Persian rule over Egypt), and the conversion of the royal house of Adiabene (not of their subjects) dates from the I century CE.

But even at the time, these conversions out of the "biological" fold of Israel were polemical, and such problems have arrived to this day. Jews in Jesus' times did not consider proper Jews any of the newly converted communities that neighbored their Palestinian homeland (their attitude towards Samaritans is well attested) and the reason is easy to understand, it's because textually the Tanakh talks about a Covenant between YHWH and the children of Israel (Jacob), whose descendants will inherit the Promised Land. The text cannot be more crystal clear.

In later Biblical texts, like the boks of Daniel and Jonah, written after Ezra's time, we see how some of these attitudes begin to change, but still we don't quite see a proselytizing Judaism there. Daniel makes no efforts at converting the Persian king, and neither does Esther. They just speak as advocates of their people, and God sides with them and helps them. Jonah is perhaps the only clear case of a proselytizing attitude in the whole Old Testament, although to be frank I'm not sure if it's included in the accepted Jewish canon.

 

[Barsoom]

All those conversions that took place out of the original Palestinian homeland date to the period between the II century BCE and the I century CE, well after the core of the Tanakh was written. The conversion of the Idumeans was done at sword's point by one of the Maccabee kings (I don't remember it exactly, but I think it was John Hyrcanus), and it arose lots of protests among a group of Jewish scholars that would later become the Pharisees, who disagreed totally with it. Later, Herod the Great would have to deal with lots of disdain from his Jewish subjects because he was of Idumean descent. The appearance of large Jewish communities in Egypt, and especially in Alexandria, dates also from the first kings of the Ptolemaic dinasty (although there's evidence of a Jewish garrison in the island of Elephantine in Upper Egypt from the time of Persian rule over Egypt), and the conversion of the royal house of Adiabene (not of their subjects) dates from the I century CE.

But even at the time, these conversions out of the "biological" fold of Israel were polemical, and such problems have arrived to this day. Jews in Jesus' times did not consider proper Jews any of the newly converted communities that neighbored their Palestinian homeland (their attitude towards Samaritans is well attested) and the reason is easy to understand, it's because textually the Tanakh talks about a Covenant between YHWH and the children of Israel (Jacob), whose descendants will inherit the Promised Land. The text cannot be more crystal clear.

In later Biblical texts, like the boks of Daniel and Jonah, written after Ezra's time, we see how some of these attitudes begin to change, but still we don't quite see a proselytizing Judaism there. Daniel makes no efforts at converting the Persian king, and neither does Esther. They just speak as advocates of their people, and God sides with them and helps them. Jonah is perhaps the only clear case of a proselytizing attitude in the whole Old Testament, although to be frank I'm not sure if it's included in the accepted Jewish canon.

The conversions didn't stop in the first or second century, they went on until at least the 9th century in areas where Christianity or Islam didn't put a stop to them. Himyar and the Berbers were converted when Jewish proselytization within the Roman Empire was already banned; the Khazars were converted after Islam too banned it. Also, according to Josephus, the Jewish community in Adiabene was substantially larger than just the royal family. But I'm guessing your point is not to date it from the back end but from the front end, after all the Jewish Bible was finished by the 2nd century at the latest. The answer is we simply don't know when Jewish proselytization began. The community in Elephantine may have descended from a garrison sent their from Judea by their Persian overlords. We can pretty sure that Ezra and Nehemia put some effort into getting the local population to observe the Jewish laws after their return from Babylonia but then, in their view, they would have been bringing back into the fold Jews who had lapsed during the time when their leaders were absent. You're right that firm evidence of proselytization dates from the time of the Maccabees.

I'm not buying your argument about "the core of the Tanakh", though. First, I agree that many books now included were written before the Maccabees. But, some were not and, more importantly, the selection of what to include was made after. What got included and what didn't was not decided by the writers but by the editors. It's them that emphasized the exclusive covenant and they did so at a time when rivalry with the Christians was already fierce and the Roman Empire was already cracking down on proselytization. The final edit thus didn't simply confirm a feature that was always there, it decided a controversial issue, and even then didn't completely overwrite evidence of the defeated side.

Considering that the evidence you cite is from texts which were already extant at the time of Jewish proselytization, you may well ask how that activity squared with an ethnically limited covenant. The first answer to that is that parts of the Bible (or any other scripture) get ignored all the time, even by people who claim to be firm believers. Specifically, you only have to read passages about the seed of Israel metaphorically to get around that restriction. In fact, whichever side of the proselytization dispute you come down on, you have to explain away troublesome passages supporting the other side (such as Jonah's mission from God). Second, ethnicity has always been much more fluid than biological descent. Stories of mythical ancestor heroes are common throughout history but are not to be taken literally by historians; I don't see why we should make an exception for the Jews. Third, there is clear evidence of a two-tier community at some times, particularly within the Roman Empire at the time of the rise of Christianity. Besides proper Jews, there were large groups of Godfearers. My best guess is that in normal times such Godfearers would have become Jews in due time but the specific circumstance of the Roman ban on proselytization kept the two groups artificially apart (thus opening the way for Christian proselytization specifically aimed at this group).

 

[Semper Victor]

The conversions didn't stop in the first or second century, they went on until at least the 9th century in areas where Christianity or Islam didn't put a stop to them. Himyar and the Berbers were converted when Jewish proselytization within the Roman Empire was already banned; the Khazars were converted after Islam too banned it. Also, according to Josephus, the Jewish community in Adiabene was substantially larger than just the royal family. But I'm guessing your point is not to date it from the back end but from the front end, after all the Jewish Bible was finished by the 2nd century at the latest. The answer is we simply don't know when Jewish proselytization began. The community in Elephantine may have descended from a garrison sent their from Judea by their Persian overlords. We can pretty sure that Ezra and Nehemia put some effort into getting the local population to observe the Jewish laws after their return from Babylonia but then, in their view, they would have been bringing back into the fold Jews who had lapsed during the time when their leaders were absent. You're right that firm evidence of proselytization dates from the time of the Maccabees.

I'd be quite careful about some of those examples of later proselytization. The only sure cases are the royal house of Adiabene, the royal house of Himyar (and to be specific, one king of that house) and the royal house of the Khazars. We don't have in either case, or in the alleged case of some Berber tribes, archaeological evidence for the practice of Judaism on a large scale in these areas; the only territory outside of Palestine for which there's sure textual and archaeological evidence is middle and lower Mesopotamia. Elsewhere there's only evidence of scattered communities and later literary references that currently are unconfirmed; for example, early Arabic texts state a Jewish majority population for the Persian city of Isfahan at the time of the Muslim conquest, but currently there are no traces of Jewish worship in the area in Sasanian times.

I'm not buying your argument about "the core of the Tanakh", though. First, I agree that many books now included were written before the Maccabees. But, some were not and, more importantly, the selection of what to include was made after. What got included and what didn't was not decided by the writers but by the editors. It's them that emphasized the exclusive covenant and they did so at a time when rivalry with the Christians was already fierce and the Roman Empire was already cracking down on proselytization. The final edit thus didn't simply confirm a feature that was always there, it decided a controversial issue, and even then didn't completely overwrite evidence of the defeated side.

Judaism has lacked from its start a centralized and unconstested religious authority like Catholics have. So, it is to be expected that, just like today, Jews of old were divided in multiple sects and branches. Josephus himself draws a picture of bitter sectarian conflict within Palestine in Jesus' times, and considering that in Palestine there was at least the Sanhedrin with the full support of the Herodian royal house or the Roman governors, the situation outside of Palestine must have been even more fiercely divided. The amount of texts left out of both the Jewish and Christian Old Testament canons is staggering, and discoveries of ancient documents in the XX century have only made this even more evident. But it should be remembered that the problems with Christianity within the Roman empire did not begin until the IV century CE, and that these problems did never exist in Mesopotamia as far as we know, as Parthian and later Sasanian kings were generally very tolerant with Jews. As for Romans, Jews were never prosecuted for being Jews, they only had problems when they revolted openly against Rome, but other than that, there are archaeological remains of synagogues from Lusitania to Dura Europos under Roman rule, and we know of high ranking Roman officials who were Jews.

Rabbinical Judaism (what we currently undestand as Judaism) is defined by the Talmud. Its earlier part, the Mishnah, dates from the I-II centuries CE, the newest part, the Gemara, was compild separately in ywo traditions. The older (Palestinian Talmud) was put in written form in the IV century in Galilee, while th newest one (Babylonian Talmud) was put in written form around the year 500 CE; although in both cases they were compilations of earlier oral traditions. The Palestinian Talmud shows signs of incomplete and sloppy redaction, and this has been atributted indeed to the increasingly hostile policies of imperial Roman authorities towards Judaism after Constantine's conversion. But the Babylonian Talmud shows no signs of it, and as far as we know proselytism was not forbidden to Jews in the Sasanian empire. The only religions which we know firmly to have been persecuted and its proselytism forbidden in Eranshahr are Manicheism and later Christianity between the reigns of Shapur II (due to the conversion of Constantine) and Yazdgird I, after which the Nestorian church of the East became an accepted religion and its patriarchs became recognized representants of Persian Christians in front of the Sasanian kings. Yet Babylonian and Palestinian Jews ended up accepting the same canon and the same attitudes towards proselytism.

Considering that the evidence you cite is from texts which were already extant at the time of Jewish proselytization, you may well ask how that activity squared with an ethnically limited covenant. The first answer to that is that parts of the Bible (or any other scripture) get ignored all the time, even by people who claim to be firm believers. Specifically, you only have to read passages about the seed of Israel metaphorically to get around that restriction. In fact, whichever side of the proselytization dispute you come down on, you have to explain away troublesome passages supporting the other side (such as Jonah's mission from God). Second, ethnicity has always been much more fluid than biological descent. Stories of mythical ancestor heroes are common throughout history but are not to be taken literally by historians; I don't see why we should make an exception for the Jews. Third, there is clear evidence of a two-tier community at some times, particularly within the Roman Empire at the time of the rise of Christianity. Besides proper Jews, there were large groups of Godfearers. My best guess is that in normal times such Godfearers would have become Jews in due time but the specific circumstance of the Roman ban on proselytization kept the two groups artificially apart (thus opening the way for Christian proselytization specifically aimed at this group).

Of course that it can be read metaphorically, all religions do that. But again, what is being discussed here is the text itself and what was intended by the people who wrote them. And I insist again, the text and its meaning are crystal clear. That's why it's become an issue again and again in Jewish tradition. It's like the explicits instructions about circumcision or the consumption of pork; one could try complicated metaphorical ways to circumvent them, but they are so clearly stated that they come to the fore again and again.

The one who substituted a clear covenant between two sides with clear obligations for the two parts involved by a mystical "covenant" involving ethereal concepts like the faith in a resurrected God who'd been born in the flesh was Paul of Tarsus. Such a theology leaves lots of free ground for speculation, and the history of early (and later) Christianity if full on intestine doctrinal disputes due to that.

But the Old Testament is much clearer than that in its main points, and leaves much less space for theological acrobacies.

 

[Barsoom]

the text itself and what was intended by the people who wrote them.

This is the nub of it: in my view, that's two different things. Writers and editors worked with pre-existing materials which wouldn't bend completely to their will. The resulting text is therefore full of small contradictions, and some larger ones, and continues to contain evidence of positions which the last set of editors wouldn't have wanted to endorse.

I'm a bit surprised actually that you're insisting so strenuously on authorial intent. Weren't you arguing in favor of the Bible as an evolutionary text? I agree that the concept of a covenant is central in the Tanakh, it was reinforced in all of the big redactions, though with different emphases at different times. I stipulate that I agree that this also holds for the final edit. All I'm saying is that none of the redactions entirely wiped out evidence of divergent views, which include a more universalist tendency in Judaism, which I think always carried some support but which was clearly prominent during at least the Maccabean era.

 

[Semper Victor]

This is the nub of it: in my view, that's two different things. Writers and editors worked with pre-existing materials which wouldn't bend completely to their will. The resulting text is therefore full of small contradictions, and some larger ones, and continues to contain evidence of positions which the last set of editors wouldn't have wanted to endorse.

I'm a bit surprised actually that you're insisting so strenuously on authorial intent. Weren't you arguing in favor of the Bible as an evolutionary text? I agree that the concept of a covenant is central in the Tanakh, it was reinforced in all of the big redactions, though with different emphases at different times. I stipulate that I agree that this also holds for the final edit. All I'm saying is that none of the redactions entirely wiped out evidence of divergent views, which include a more universalist tendency in Judaism, which I think always carried some support but which was clearly prominent during at least the Maccabean era.

The original OT was not as much a discussion about the textual evolution of the Tanakh and its many layers of redaction, but a discussion about the concept of God and its relationship with mankind that emerges from its pages; it was rather more a philosophical or theological discusion, rather than a historical one. Although of course the many contradictions in the Biblical text arise confusion, my point was and still is that the concept of God that the core of the Tanakh contains (or to be more precise, the Torah and the books collected and redacted before Ezra's death, leaving aside later additions like Daniel, Maccabees, etc) is still not the God of later Rabbinical Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Abdul disagrees, mainly because of what I understand as an exegetical lecture of the text influenced by later philosophical and theological concepts, while I keep insisting on reading the text as it was written, in its current, final redaction, without projecting onto it anachronistically concepts that did not appear in Abrahamic religious discourse at the very least until 300 or 400 years after Ezra's time.

Perhaps the core issue should be framed differently: is an exegetical reading intrinsically necessary when reading the Tanakh, or not, in order to extract religious or theological conclusions out of it? (leaving textual criticism and historical concerns aside, if that's even possible).

 

[bz249]

That implies a conscious will by Paul's to start a sort of cult with shady intentions. I've read theories defending that position, and I find them quite unconvincing. In my opinion, what emerges from the lecture of Paul's undisputed epistles is a man who was sincere in his beliefs, as they were based in some sort of deeply personal, mysthical experiences ("visions") that for Paul had been entirely real. He attributed them to the (by then) dead Jesus of Nazareth, and became convinced that as he'd been the only man who the Risen Christ had talked directly to after his "earthly" death in his divine epiphany, that his version of Jesus' message was "superior" to the one known by those who had known Jesus in the flesh, during his "earthly" life (basically the original apostles and their followers, by then still centered in Jerusalem and led by Peter/Cephas and James the Just).

His epistles reflect Paul's somewhat unsuccessful attempt at bridging the chasm between his understanding of Christ's message as "revealed" to him in his visions (deeply innovative and which marked a radical break from Judaism) and the earthly Jesus' preachings as still recalled and recorded by the Jerusalem community, who considered Jesus and themselves still as Jews, and as bound to the observation of the Law as understood by the Pharisaic tradition (with an oral Torah which complemented the written Torah of the Scriptures), and to the Final Judgement as preached by Pharisaic and Essene rabbis.

I do think that Paul was shady or scheming... simply his interpretation had the most potential (it would also make sense from the divine revelations point of view; he was given the tools to spread the message very succesfully).

And indeed this is indeed "revolutionary" (and you have mentioned why i could have happened)

The extension of God's grace and the possibly of salvation from eternal damnation in the Last Judgement, which Pharisees and Essenes believed was restricted strictly to Jews, was extended by Paul to all mankind, but probably not as part of a cynical marketing plot, but because Paul, having been born in a cosmopolitan Greek.speaking town in Cilicia and having lived all his life among gentiles and knowing Greek culture and philosophy, was a man of less provincial leanings than the original apostles (and Jesus) who, for all we know, had never left Palestine and were only interested in Jewish culture and religion. Contrary to them, Paul probably felt more at home in Ephesus, Antiochia or Corinth than in Jerusalem.

 

[Barsoom]

The original OT was not as much a discussion about the textual evolution of the Tanakh and its many layers of redaction, but a discussion about the concept of God and its relationship with mankind that emerges from its pages; it was rather more a philosophical or theological discusion, rather than a historical one. Although of course the many contradictions in the Biblical text arise confusion, my point was and still is that the concept of God that the core of the Tanakh contains (or to be more precise, the Torah and the books collected and redacted before Ezra's death, leaving aside later additions like Daniel, Maccabees, etc) is still not the God of later Rabbinical Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Abdul disagrees, mainly because of what I understand as an exegetical lecture of the text influenced by later philosophical and theological concepts, while I keep insisting on reading the text as it was written, in its current, final redaction, without projecting onto it anachronistically concepts that did not appear in Abrahamic religious discourse at the very least until 300 or 400 years after Ezra's time.

Perhaps the core issue should be framed differently: is an exegetical reading intrinsically necessary when reading the Tanakh, or not, in order to extract religious or theological conclusions out of it? (leaving textual criticism and historical concerns aside, if that's even possible).

I agree with most of this. Not the last bit within brackets: I don't think that's possible, that's why I brought in the various redactions. In my view, the different layers in the text testify to different concepts of God and His relation to mankind. The point where I jumped in, you argued strongly against a universalist theology in the Tanakh, while I think there is in fact at least substratum of that. Now, if you specify a time before the Maccabees, the evidence is indeed very slight but I understood OP to be about the text as finalized during or after that time.

 

[Sabotage13]

But even at the time, these conversions out of the "biological" fold of Israel were polemical, and such problems have arrived to this day. Jews in Jesus' times did not consider proper Jews any of the newly converted communities that neighbored their Palestinian homeland (their attitude towards Samaritans is well attested)

Samaria was the religious center of the Northern kingdom of Israel so not exactly a "newly converted community". I think the hostility between Jerusalem and Samaria would have a lot more to do with animosity between two rival priesthoods claiming the same priviledged status within the wider area of Palestine.

 

[Semper Victor]

Samaria was the religious center of the Northern kingdom of Israel so not exactly a "newly converted community". I think the hostility between Jerusalem and Samaria would have a lot more to do with animosity between two rival priesthoods claiming the same priviledged status within the wider area of Palestine.

The "official" Jewish stance about Samaritans is that they descended from the settlers sent to the Northern kingdom after Sargon II destroyed Samaria, and thus they were not "real" Israelites; even if in all probability they were just Israelites that kept a non-orthodox form of worship not approved by the Jerusalem priesthood who got to write the Tanakh. According to the "official" version, these "newcomers" practised a poor mimicry of "proper" Jewish worship that was thus an "abomination" in God's eyes.

 

[Maestro Ugo]

I refer you to the following concepts:

• Breakdown voltage of a capacitor
• Arc length
• Conductivity, or lack thereof, of air, wood, and dry leather

How do you know the electricity obeyed the same physical laws in biblical times as it does today? Is there any proof of this?

 

[gagenater]

How do you know the electricity obeyed the same physical laws in biblical times as it does today? Is there any proof of this?

the fact that there were plants and animals, rocks and soil, water and all the other ordinary things we take for granted is proof enough of this. If you are going to posit that fundamental laws of physics have changed in the last 5,000 years, you might as well go all the way into insanity and assume that all of history before your birth is a simulation implanted into reality and your consciousness by aliens conducting a sociological experiment. This and the idea that electricity was somehow 'different' in the very recent past are equally valid.

 

[Herbert West]

the fact that there were plants and animals, rocks and soil, water and all the other ordinary things we take for granted is proof enough of this. If you are going to posit that fundamental laws of physics have changed in the last 5,000 years, you might as well go all the way into insanity and assume that all of history before your birth is a simulation implanted into reality and your consciousness by aliens conducting a sociological experiment. This and the idea that electricity was somehow 'different' in the very recent past are equally valid.

Surely you mean "before Last Thursday", not "before your birth"

 

[gagenater]

Surely you mean "before Last Thursday", not "before your birth"

It might be after next wednesday - who knows? Who can know anything about anything - perhaps you are having this conversation with your other personalities today?

In all seriousness - we have LOTS of ordinary physical objects that are more than 5,000 years old. Every one of them would come apart in some way if the elemental forces of electricity had changed sometime between their creation/formation and the present day.

 

[Boblof]

It might be after next wednesday - who knows? Who can know anything about anything - perhaps you are having this conversation with your other personalities today?

Herbert was referencing "Last Thursdayism".