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Old Testament Research and Criticism
Michael D Magee
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19 Pages
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Second Temple Judaism,
Persian Culture,
Achaemenid, Parthian, and Sasanian History; International Relations and Diplomacy between Roman-Byzantine and Persian Empires,
History of Judaism In Antiquity
The growth of Protestantism against Catholic dogma loosened the tethers that stopped free enquiry into the bible for a thousand years. Enlightenment and science led to the Higher Criticism of the bible. Julius Wellhausen showed that the law of Moses was misplaced in sacred history. It had to come at the end of the evolution of …read more
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It is likely that a peripatetic altar, the *rk, which had once travelled ceremonially from shrine to shrine, before (erusalem was made the only (ewish cult center by the!ersians, was the focus of the procession around the temple, and remained so evenunder the !ersians. #he cantors sang the accession psalms to proclaim the kingshipof :ehouah, the whole drama being essentially hardly changed procedurally, under!ersian rule, from what it had always been when the procedings were purely concerned with fertility, but now they were being reinterpreted to stand for the wholeof time culminating in the restoration of the original good creation by God at the $ndof #ime. @amuel % %ooke was one of those who traced the elements of the festivalfrom pre9!ersian into much later times when the magical ualities of the divine king were transformed into the !ersian notion of the @aoshyant, to yield the later (ewishconcept of the /essiah as a saving king.#hus it was that the annual ceremonies came to represent the whole of historicaltime, the world year, as well as the agricultural year, all reduced into a twelve day long festival. #he puzzle is that no such ceremony is mentioned in the (ewish law books, but much of these were written or rewritten by the $gyptians in the thirdcentury ”, when they seem to have e-punged all legal references to the paganceremony, leaving its traces only in the psalms. It was remembered by the (ewishsects that remained most loyal to the !ersian original, notably the $ssenes.#he notions of holiness, the sacred and the soul came from the basic idea of the totempower. #he soul was the totem power as it impelled individual human behaviour. It was not, at first, considered something separate from the person. It was closer to ouridea of the personality, it was the person embodied, the body mobilized into life by the breath of God. #he presence or absence of the totem spirit, the soul, reflecteditself as blessing, honour, or shame, or souls were thought to have had those ualitiesin greater or lesser amounts. @omeone with a blessed soul conveyed happiness and joy to the tribe. @uch a man was likely to become a 2ig /an3, in later times a chief and later still a king.#he absence of blessing left people unhappy and brought sorrow. %onour keeps thesoul righteous. @hame was the absence of honour, lack of courage and neglect of duty to the tribe or clan. %oliness or the sacred, what was at first reserved for communalactivity, became what was reserved for venerating the totem power. #hereafter, it wasa space or object which contained the totem power itself, then the god or the uality that accompanied the god+s presence. God conferred this uality, just as %e conferred blessings, so a blessed soul was a holy soul. *ll of this meant that human beings, at an early stage of the evolution of religion, didnot think of themselves individually. #hey thought of the group, the clan or the tribeas being the prime entity. #hey as individuals were simply a unit of the tribe. It was what /ar- had called primitive communism. #he soul was an element of the tribaltotem power, part of the tribal soul, and was impotent when separated from the othersouls that comprised the tribe. 1iving righteously was living according to the cultureof the tribe handed on from birth. * human being devoid of other human contact andcommunity cannot develop proper human characteristics because we are socialanimals, and indeed
do
depend on society0on its culture0to make us what we are.#hat is why the individual soul was considered to depend upon the tribal soul for itse-istence. #hose who were antisocial lacked blessings or might even have been cursed with madness. 1oners were not normal human beings. 1iving communally was to
Old Testament Research and Criticism7
share with others in fellowship, and therefore to share their blessing. !eople wholived together were whole and so at peace,
salem
in the @emitic world of the bible.#he name &avid is the one who is loved, and @olomon the one who is at peace, two vital ualities of successful societies. @uch societies are righteous0honest andhealthy. #hose who were personally upright lived harmoniously with others in thegroup.
Anthropological Studies
%erman Gunkel, following the methods of /ommsen and Bon 7anke, wanted toe-amine statements made in the bible as facts to be treated purely as historicalsources before any further philosophical or theological interpretations are placed onthem. $-amining the myths pertaining to first and last things, Gunkel concluded thatthe source of these motifs was outside the bible. #hey e-isted in abylonian sources.7emarkably biblical analysis previously had ignored anything outside the bible thatmight have been relevant. It was considered a world of its own. :et many biblicistsstill continue to make fertile analyses based entirely on biblical 2facts3 and2chronology3 unsupported outside the bible itself. #hey might as well have beenanalysing
The Lord of the Ring
. * most important discovery, made in <FF, was that of the #ell el *marna tablets, thediplomatic correspondence of $gypt with abylon, *ssyria, @yria and !alestine in theperiod of *khnaten. #hey showed that these countries, though they had their owncharacteristics, had more in common than anyone had suspected. 7udolf 4ittel took up the task of showing the importance of e-tra9biblical evidence, concluding that thepeople of the !alestinian hills were intimately connected with the common culture of the *$. @ophisticated religions had preceded the writing of the (ewish scriptures, sothat the biblical authors were not inventing new theologies but were drawing uponmany religious conceptions more profound than any biblicists had considered,hidebound by the notion that God+s revelation must have been some vastimprovement on anything that had gone before.@o, %ugo Winckler tried to relate the history of the (ews to that of neighbouringcountries, believing that a abylonian cultural hegemony e-isted throughout the *$, and that had influenced the biblical stories. 8riedrich &elitzsch concurred, anda controversy described as 2ible versus abel3 arose. #he pan9abylonians wereright, though the culture they called abylonian was much older than the ew abylonian empire scholars assume is what the bible means by abylonia. #hepan9abylonian culture came to abylonia
via
@umeria and *kkadia, and was shared by *ssyria, and, from the hegemony of these great empires over several millenia ”,and the trade and e-ample they set, the whole of the *$ was influenced0perhaps$gypt least, but, even there to some e-tent, and especially when the !ersianscontrolled and revised the works kept in the schools of life. #he situation was muchas it is today with most people in the world modeling themselves on the H@*. ut theobvious case of it in the bible came to (udah0previously in the $gyptian sphere of influence0largely from the fifth century !ersian colonists, called in the bible the2returners from e-ile3, who were under directions to 2restore3 an ethical religion in :ehud, and themselves mainly came from the banks of the upper reaches of the$uphrates and its tributaries, and had a thoroughly /esopotamian0iepan9abylonian0culture.
Old Testament Research and Criticism8
Gunkel had noted from the *marna tablets that the abylonian creation myth wasfamiliar to the “anaanites of the fourteenth century ”. y assuming the dependenceof
Genesis
on it, it was possible it had been written in the second millennium, andtherefore by a /oses then living. Gunkel, however, realized that the
Genesis
we now have is a much later composition, and had lost several of the key elements of theabylonian myth, even if not completely. #he monster of chaos, #iamat, haddisappeared from the later work to leave God victorious over an abstract chaos ratherthan a symbolical representation of it. ote too that a victory over chaos to bringabout the creation is not a creation
ex nihilo
.@imilarly, %ugo Gressman saw that the @yrians had a 21ord of %eaven3 in the ninthcentury, certainly the storm god, aal %adad, but the more abstract notion of auniversal God of %eaven was a later construct introduced to replace aal %adad by the !ersians, modeling him on their own universal god of heaven, *huramazda.#here are plenty of instances, particularly in
Psalms
where :ehouah has thecharacteristics of a storm god like aal. @o, it is hard not to believe that :ehouah isaal by another name, the name preferred by the !ersian colonists. Interestingly, the!ersian name for the wind spirit is
wahu
and for good thought is
wohu
.!eople in our rapidly changing world cannot conceive of the amazingly conservative,essentially static nature of ancient times. /ost of eveyday life did not change formillennia. In the *$, maurauders and imperialist armies passed through causinghavoc from time to time, but then eveything resumed as it was until it happenedagain. @ignificant and widespread change began with the *ssyrians and wasconsciously pursued by the !ersians, and even more effectively by the Greeks. *nd, of all institutions, religion is among the most conservative and static, so it is hardly surprising that theological concepts should have a long lifetime.#he cultures of successive /esopotamian empires were essentially the same but oneof the changes was that later overlords, like the !ersians, forced their vassals toconform more closely with the imperial culture. #hey introduced cultural imperialismas well as political and military hegemony. #hey forced monotheism on to theirconuered subjects, but did it while pretending to restore a local religion to its correctearlier form. In @yria, the !ersian satrapy of *barnahara, whose people were called%ebrews, the temple state of :ehud was made the religious center, and the colonialssent there were made into priests and ta- collectors. #hus traditional religious tales of @yria were changed to be monotheistic, and so words like
elohim
meaning 2gods3 became God;Of course, monotheism was not unknown in the *$. It was not even unpopular, for,in practice, many worshippers opted for a favorite god or goddess of those available.#hey were effectively monotheistic personally. /oreover, each imperialist state had anational god0*shur in *ssyria, /arduk in abylon, @in in @yria and *rabia, and *huramazda in !ersia where Doroastrianism made monotheism obligatory for a while, at least among the nobility. In those cases, and that earlier on in $gypt of the *ten, the national god was considered of cosmic significance, and, according toruno aentsch, the priests thought of all the gods of the pantheon as manifestationsof the same cosmic power in the universe0the totem power of the old tribes madeuniversal in an imperial age. *s usual with biblicists, even scholarly ones, they have an agenda, and aentsch was
Old Testament Research and Criticism9
trying again to revive the antiuity of the (ewish scriptures and religion. #he priestsof the !alestinian shrines of the *marna age had been influenced by abyloniantrends towards monotheism, or that was his 2theory3 meant to defend a fourteenthcentury /oses writing the books of the
Torah
, as the bible suggests contrary to allhistory. In any case, /oses did not deny that other gods e-isted beside :ehouah, any more than Doroaster did, or “hristianity still does. It was simply that Israel had onesingular god of their own, just as Doroastrians did and “hristians still do. Other gods were simply the irrelevant gods of other nations, eventually redefined as demons orfalse gods. #hey were not denied an e-istence.It is not monotheism but monolatry, as W 7obertson @mith said. #he biblicalIsraelites did not deny the e-istence of other gods, but they had no choice themselves,as henotheists do. #he so9called polytheists of abylon, $gypt and India could pick the deity they preferred from among the pantheon, so were often more henotheistthan polytheist. Indeed, /a- /ller coined the word when puzzled by the way the Bedic hymns to different %indu gods often called the god 2supreme3 or 2#he One3.%e realized that the worshippers of each god often thought of them as the supremeone or the only important one, and addressed them thus in the hymns they wrote inpraise of them. Wellhausen had pointed out that biblical history was not history but historiography written with the purpose of propagating a theology. #he people to whom it wasaddressed, the people of *barnahara, the %ebrews, were depicted as being chosen by God and favoured by %im as long as they remained righteous, meaning law abiding;
Rudol !ittel
7udolf 4ittel also referred back to the fourteenth century ” el *marna letters, andto !hJnician usage, in support of the antiuity of the bible in their use of
elohim
as aso9called plural of majesty0a word of plural form used as a singular to give a granderimpression. * sounder inference is that 2gods3 stands for a concerted power, thepower behind the gods0the tribal totem power universalized0acting through themall at the same time, and therefore inescapable by appealing to any favoured one of them. #he conception of such a power behind the gods, 4ittel thought, was itself atendency towards monotheism.4ittel knew that the “anaanite high god was $l, the king of the heavenly court of gods, and the bible itself suggests what % 8 %ahn ‘
The Old Testament in Modern Research
, <=K>) calls 2a nearly suppressed memory of $l worship3, so here was/oses+s e-alted idea of God in embryo. #he /osaic idea of God was that of a king, a judge and a lawmaker, a notion 4ittel thought was uniue. *ctually it seems to be just what any god would be e-pected to be, especially the high god who was the king of the gods. * mortal king was a ruler, a judge and a lawmaker, and he stood for thenational god on earth, so how could the king of the gods not have the same dutiesL4ittel has no uniue case at all, but a commonplace one, and surely that gives him a better case for an early date for the
Torah
. #he trouble is that 4ittel then tries toe-plain the behaviour of the Israelites for centuries after the supposed early innovations of /oses by claiming that the e-alted idea was forgotten by all bar a few true believers as soon as the tribes were perverted by the “anaanites0whose idea of god, aal, was not so lofty0after conuering and settling in their land. #he Israelites
Old Testament Research and Criticism10
had a better concept than the “anaanites of God, like that of the “anaanite $l, butabandoned it for the lower concept of the “anaanite god, aal. Only the faithfulfollowers of the /osaic concept of god as $l struggled on in the shade for centuries,protesting occasionally as prophets, until the prophetic movement finally established(udaism.It is hardly scholarly, is it, even though it is the sort of nonsense believers will believeL *nd where does :ehouah come into it when the “anaanites had an e-altednotion of god in $l that could have evolved into the biblical idea of GodL 4ittel thinks$l, aal and :ehouah were worshipped in “anaan and Israel all at the same time. @o,objectively, there was nothing to choose between “anaan and Israel. Israel waschosen by God in the scriptures, but nothing bears out such a history. It is muchmore parsimonious to accept that the Israelites were “anaanites, and that the religionof !alestine was always “anaanite religion until at a time much later than the settingof the /oses myth a change occurred.4ittel in seeking to defend sacred history e-poses how false it is. #he postulatedspiritual minority who soldier on against the odds is a creation of the bible0thee-ample of how chosen people should be. It is the very theme of the &euteronomichistorian, unverified in reality, but 4ittel falls for it. $ventually, the religion of “anaan was changed when the !ersians ruled the country and wanted it as a bastionagainst $gypt. #hey set up the nation of priests by sending in colonists to restore thereligion to how it was meant to be, setting up a temple state to be the focus of loyalty of their subjects.In <=?=, more tablets were found at 7as @hamra, ancient Hgarit, which showed somesimilarities between rituals described in the bible and those of the ancient”anaanites, including words used for sacrifices, and methods of slaughter asdescribed in the !riestly “ode. #he tablets also confirmed what 4ittel had surmisedabout $l, and the similar characteristics he had with :ehouah. $l was a distant god,father and king of the gods themselves, depicted as a bearded old man seated on athrone and called 28ather of :ears3 ‘cf *ncient of &ays). #he main difference is that :ehouah is now considered an only god, even though the bible in places does notsuggest %e is. $ffectively, the 7as @hamra tablets suggest that aspects of the god of the bible were based on “anaanite precedents, but %e had transfigured from”anaanite polytheism into biblical monotheism./oreover, they show that aal was not a generic title for a variety of Hgaritic gods, but stood for one important son of $l. #hey also include a myth about the slaying of amonster, paralleling passages in the bible where a monster called 7ahab or 1eviathanis defeated. #hey supported /owinckel+s hypothesis of a cult myth celebrated at aew :ear festival. !aul %umbert ‘<=MK) showed that
Genesis
< was chanted as part of the liturgy of a ew :ear festival. (ohannes !edersen similarly showed that thee-odus story was the cult myth created as a new interpretation of the !assoverfestival0once a harvest festival of the “anaanites0and the @inai events justified aew :ear celebration at (erusalem which dramatized a theophany, the sealing of acovenant, and the ordination of divine commands, according to @igmund /owinckel.#he theological beliefs of the “anaanites of Hgarit and those of the !alestinian hills, whether called %ebrews, Israelites, or (udahites in the bible, were apparently assimilar as can be e-pected in descriptions separated by almost a millennium of history, and major cultural changes brought on by different overlords, notably that
Old Testament Research and Criticism11
implemented by the !ersian shahs.#he scholars who had suggested a pan9abylonian culture across the fertile crescent were also vindicated. #he 7as @hamra te-ts contained most of the core elements of this pattern of belief, and evidently the pre9!ersian religion of !alestine conformed with it. Once this is accepted, it is clear that the prophetic tradition of the bible, andthe &euteronomic law signified a peculiar break with a long lived and widespreadtradition. #he tension between two opposites present in the (ewish scriptures, noted by $rnst @ellin, is the tension between the old “anaanite tradition, traces of whichstill remain in the bible, and presented as sinful or wicked, and a completely new concept imposed on to it, and presented as righteous.
“orm Criticism
Gunkel assumes that the Old #estament0he began with
Genesis
0is compiled froman oral tradition passed down for centuries. #hese forms, or elements of tradition,could be identified, seuenced and thus yield the history of the whole book. %e endedup with categories consisting of brief stories about heroes, then complete legends,and lastly story cycles, each skilfully woven into a continuous narrative. #hough animportant step forward in biblical criticism, much of Gunkel+s form criticism dependson internal analysis that is self9referential and therefore worthless without e-ternalconfirmation, but he was not fooled into believing that his method produced anythingtruly historical. :es, he believed he could discern the levels of structure, but realizedthe material that constituted them was mythical and poetical to the e-tent that any 2kernal3 of historic truth in them was smothered by fiction.#he fact is that the process of compiling the alleged forms of oral 2history3 amountedto the rewriting of them, whence the skilful weaving of the elements into a continuousnarrative. Once that is accepted, the strata Gunkel supposes will have been largely smoothed over. Gunkel might have been discerning units of structure deliberately setin the narrative to be easily recollected, like the 2hooks3 of modern popular songs.#he reason was that the material was written to be read out to the throngs of worshippers assembled in the temple, e-hortations meant to e-tol the law andrighteousness among the citizenry, and so the authors wanted episodes to bememorable, to be retold and remembered in conte-t. *mong them will have beene-tant tales used to illustrate a law that was presented as being traditional, butreuiring restoring to a pristine original; Otherwise, much of form criticism isillusion. /ost significant was Gunkel+s summary0the compilation was skilfully edited into a continuous narrative, and the narrative itself is only semi9historical. Infact, form criticism upheld Wellhausen.Gunkel observed that the religious poetical forms used in the scriptures had a longhistory, but he thought they had reached their zenith before the !ersian period.#ypically, he wanted to date the psalms0allegedly authored by king &avid0as early as possible. #he religious poetry of $gypt and abylon compared with some of thosein the bible, again evidence of the wide spread of the common culture of the *$.!enitential biblical hymns were similar to the same sort of hymns from abylon, andthe thanksgiving hymns similar to those of $gypt. @o, these types were not original inthe (udaeao9″hristian bible, but the 7as @hamra tablets showed that the (ewishscriptures were not direct imitations of superior cultures, for the parallels in the
Old Testament Research and Criticism12
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