21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 5:25-27: Metushelach

I apologize for not posting yesterday, I put my brain in backward when I got up and worked on a future blog thread instead.

You know M’tushelach; he lived the longest time of anybody in the Bible.

כה וַיְחִ֣י מְתוּשֶׁ֔לַח שֶׁ֧בַע וּשְׁמֹנִ֛ים שָׁנָ֖ה וּמְאַ֣ת שָׁנָ֑ה וַיּ֖וֹלֶד אֶת־לָֽמֶךְ:

כו וַיְחִ֣י מְתוּשֶׁ֗לַח אַֽחֲרֵי֙ הֽוֹלִיד֣וֹ אֶת־לֶ֔מֶךְ שְׁתַּ֤יִם וּשְׁמוֹנִים֙ שָׁנָ֔ה וּשְׁבַ֥ע מֵא֖וֹת שָׁנָ֑ה וַיּ֥וֹלֶד בָּנִ֖ים וּבָנֽוֹת:

כז וַיִּֽהְיוּ֙ כָּל־יְמֵ֣י מְתוּשֶׁ֔לַח תֵּ֤שַׁע וְשִׁשִּׁים֙ שָׁנָ֔ה וּתְשַׁ֥ע מֵא֖וֹת שָׁנָ֑ה וַיָּמֹֽת:

M’tushelach must have lived 187 years -- he sired Lemekh --

M’tushelach must have lived, after his siring Lemekh – 782 years – for he sired sons and daughters.

All the years of M’tushelach were 969 years; he died.

Now for another urban legend. Some people will tell you that these genealogies are copied from the Sumerian kings list.

Not even close.

The kings list is available on line. There is no match in any of the names or ages.

The history of the Sumerian kings list is this: about 2000 BCE, when Utu-Hengel shoved the Gutians out of Mesopotamia after they had ruled for a century or two, he commissioned that the kings lists of all the cities be collected and consolidated. The result was found early in the 20^th century and it had two puzzles in it.

One is that all the kings seem to have reigned consecutively, but an additional tablet turned up later which showed that some of them had reigned concurrently, each in his own city. The scribes fudged the dates to fit the concept of consecutive reigns.

The second was that the great city of Lagash had no representatives in the final list. We don’t know why. It certainly was an important city; one of its rulers, Eannatum II, took over all of Mesopotamia about 2500 BCE and appropriated the name “King of Kish”  to show how important he was. He was defeated by the grandson of a woman king of Mesoptamia, Kug Bau. Her grandson was followed by the famous Sargon of Akkad.

About 1700 BCE, the kings list was expanded with a prequel. In the prequel were names from Mesopotamian literature, like Utnapishtim and Gilgamesh and Dumuzi.

The kings list was first composed when the ancestors of the Jews were already living in the Holy Land, more than three centuries after the destruction of the Cities of the Plain.  When the prequel  was added, they lived in Egypt, about a century before the Exodus.  I discuss this timing on the Fact-Checking page.

What’s more, the kings list originated and was maintained in cuneiform. The Jews didn’t read cuneiform. Their ancestors didn’t read cuneiform. Heck, the scribes didn’t read cuneiform very well. Cuneiform scholars point out problems in the second kings list that identify changes in the understanding of the language since the first kings list, such that the scribes didn’t understand what they copied and made mistakes.

These are the same sort of mistakes that would have occurred if Jews living at the end of the Babylonian Captivity had tried to compose new material using the Biblical Hebrew that they knew only from scripture, not from speaking it on the street: spelling errors, fractured idioms, and so on.

The Jews who wrote Neo-Babylonian at the end of the Babylonian Captivity used the “square” lettering now known as the Hebrew alphabet. The Mesopotamian scribes wrote Neo-Babylonian in royal decrees and religious texts, using cuneiform. The standard “Dick and Jane” for cuneiform was a pagan work, Gilgamesh. The only way Jews would have known Gilgamesh was to get accepted to cuneiform school. There’s plenty of room to doubt that, in an up-and-running monotheistic culture, Jews applied to cuneiform school, where they would be exposed to paganism. It was much easier to learn the square script which had the same number of symbols as the “paleo” Jewish script and recorded the same sounds.

The same argument applies to all Mesopotamian literature that has been found only in cuneiform so far, and that includes Enuma Elish and Hammurabi’s code, as well as Gilgamesh and the kings list.  For a more detailed discussion, see the Fact-Checking blog.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- why philology doesn't work

About 1905 a famous cuneiform scholar named Sayce wrote a pamphlet claiming that Shabbat developed out of Mesopotamian practice documented on cuneiform tablets from the time of Cambyses II.  (Remember what I just said about cuneiform.)

About 1910-1915 two other famous cuneiform scholars showed that Sayce misrepresented what the Cambyses-era tablets said.

The first three verses of Genesis 2 tell about the first Shabbat and Gd’s rest from the melakhah that He performed.  The usual translation of melakhah is “work,” but that’s far too vague a term.

In Jewish law, melakhah is the forty less one, or 39, categories of things that are prohibited to be done on Shabbat, either for pay or for free, for oneself or for others, whether it’s your normal occupation that you get paid for or not.  The only time this prohibition can be violated is to save any human life that is in imminent danger.

The one thing that is not prohibited on Shabbat is avodah, the sacrificial service in the temple or tabernacle.  Torah requires avodah on Shabbat.  The confusion is that in modern Hebrew and in some places in the Bible, avodah is indeed used for something that falls in the category of melakhah.  That doesn’t change the fact that the “m” word not only appears in the creation story, but also in the Ten Commandments where Shabbat is discussed.  Melakhah and Shabbat are almost indissolubly linked.

Sayce looked at an inscription that discussed a prohibition on work and claimed that it was equivalent to Shabbat.  The inscription doesn’t use anything even approaching the “m” word; it also did not use a cognate of shabbat that meant a cessation from work.  There was no such word in Sumerian, Akkadian, or the Aramaic used in Babylonia in the time of Cambyses.  (Note that restriction on provenance.)  Except what was introduced into Aramaic from Jewish culture, by for and about Jewish culture.  A concept I will bring up again much later.

Clay and Barton showed, within 5 years, that the cuneiform text limited the prohibition to kings, seers, and physicians, and didn’t apply it to the entire population.  Sayce committed the famous “quoting out of context” fallacy, both textual and cultural, that I used in summing up urban legends about Jewish law.  In fact Shabbat applies to all Jews.

The tablets with such prohibitions applied them to specific dates of the Mesopotamian month: 7, 14, 19, 21, and 28.   Sayce performed sampling bias by ignoring the 19^th.  He also ignored the legal definition of Shabbat, which has nothing to do with specific days of the month but with every 7th day, no matter what day of the month it falls on.

Sayce probably combined the dates of the prohibitions with a tablet which prescribed sacrifices on the same specific days of the month, except for the 19^th.  This tablet prescribed sacrifices at specific phases of the moon; the Mesopotamian religious calendar was based on the lunar cycle.  The 19^th is not the date of a specific lunar phase.  Again, the requirement for avodah on Shabbat is tied to the seventh day, not to specific days of the Jewish month, even though the Jewish month is tied to the lunar cycle.

Clay and Barton pointed out that no known Mesopotamian legal system prohibits work by commoners on specific days.  The code of Hammurabi had just been discovered and translated when Sayce wrote; it, too, does not record a prohibition for commoners to work.

Clay and Barton pointed out that the Mesopotamian term shabbatum to which Sayce cited, strictly applied to the full moon on the 15^th day of the month.  No relationship exists between shabbatum and words for stopping work in the languages I referred to earlier. 

The oldest known references to Shabbat in Jewish literature, ignoring arguments about the age of Torah itself, are from Amos and Hoshea.  Amos and Hoshea wrote in the Holy Land 2 or 3 centuries BEFORE Cambyses II ruled.  Whatever the Jews of their time thought about the origin of Shabbat, the reference precedes the provenance of the Cambyses tablets and presumes that the audience is familiar with the term, otherwise there’s no point in bringing it up.  (I’ll say more about this concept much later on the blog.)

What Sayce did was common for the times and involves the study of philology, which still leads researchers to draw false conclusions from words taken out of verbal or historical or cultural context.  But we’ve seen that before, so it should not surprise you.  And you’ll see it again much later.

Since the rest of the argument about Enuma Elish involves material I’m not ready to present to you yet, I’m going to move on to the second episode in Torah.  For next week, read Genesis 2:4 to 3:24.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Sourcing creation

Now there are two problems with thinking that the Jews copied their Genesis story from a copy of Enuma Elish in the libraries of either Ashurbanipal or Nebuchadnetsar.

One is the modern idea of what a library is.

A lot of nations nowadays have free circulating libraries where people can go, check out books, take them home, read them, and be influenced by them. 

Two hundred years ago, libraries were a cross between this and a bookstore.  The proprietors charged a subscription and the people who paid could come see the latest publications.  The proprietors could use the subscription to pay printing costs for works they felt were important.  Also writers could go around and convince patrons to pay a subscription directly to the writer to pay these costs.  In the first case the profit over and above the printing costs belonged to the shop owner.  In the second the profit went to the writer.  The only way to access material for free was to have the run of the library belonging to a rich person or a minister.  This situation is amply documented in novels written from about 1780 through about 1820 CE and in diaries like that of Fanny Burney.

Before the printing press, people had to pay for a monk or somebody else to make a hand-written copy of a work that was desired for a library.  This is more the scenario of royal libraries and also the Alexandrian library whose destruction was such a catastrophe.  You had to have access to the royal library to read what was in it.

First you have to tell me how Jews got access to the royal libraries.  If you’re thinking that Ezra could have done it, keep reading.

Because the other problem is reading the material once you get to it.

The classic material of Mesopotamia was written in cuneiform from the first use of that writing form up until about 100 CE.  Cuneiform training was restricted to the upper classes, and the only way to join the upper classes was by marriage if you weren’t born into them.

Jews of the Babylonian Captivity served in the military.  Some of them were scribes.  But they wrote Aramaic, the language of Nabonidus, who conquered Babylon and went on to conquer Assyria and its empire.  Not cuneiform.

So the Jews didn’t have access to Enuma Elish, or Gilgamesh, or the Kings list, or Hammurabi’s Code, or anything else written in cuneiform, not when the ancestors of the patriarchs were still living in Mesopotamia, and not during the Babylonian Captivity.  I’ll come back to this again many posts from now.

How hard could it be?  Go.  Read.  I’ll be here when you get back.

Leonard King’s “Easy” Cuneiform Inscriptions https://archive.org/details/assyrianlanguag00kinggoog

Gadd’s Sumerian Reading Book  https://ia600802.us.archive.org/23/items/ASumerianReading-book/Gadd-ASumerianReading-book.pdf

Friedrich Delitzsch’s Assyrian Grammar https://archive.org/details/assyriangrammar00kenngoog

That’s one urban legend down and about 60 more to go.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- they went that-away and that-away

In Torah, Noach is not a copy of Gilgamesh.  First, there’s the cuneiform thing.  In fact, Gilgamesh was THE basic school text for learning cuneiform, and that’s why it shows up so many places.  They all had cuneiform schools.  And one thing that we have some reason for believing, is that the ancestors of the Jews didn’t go to cuneiform school.

Then, although they both have a flood story, the Gilgamesh version is a version of the one in Atra-Hasis, and our copies of both date at earliest to the 1700s BCE. 

Noach’s flood begins when people behave badly and after a long period (in earthly terms) of trying to think of a solution, Gd decides to wipe out everybody with a flood, except for Noach “who was righteous in his generations.” In the Mesopotamian story, people behave badly – they make too much noise – and the gods try a famine to reduce the noise, but people reproduce fast enough to bring the decibels back up to an uncomfortable level.

Noach builds his ark of a specific kind of wood that we can’t identify any more.  In the Mesopotamian story, wood isn’t just lying around to be used in an ark.  Atra-Hasis and Utnapishtim have to tear down their houses for wood to build the ark.  (Which is pretty strange because in Mesopotamia, houses have always been built of mud brick.)

Noach takes aboard two of every kind of life, a male and a female – except that he takes aboard seven male-female pairs of tahor animals.  We know which animals these are.  Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 tell us which ones they are (or rather are not).  They are suitable for sacrifice, in accordance with the meaning of tahor as suitable for a given purpose, which I discussed in the legal part of this blog.  Atra-Hasis and Utnapishtim take aboard animals but the tameh/tahor distinction is absent, of course.

Noach takes aboard his three sons, their wives, and his own wife.  Atra-Hasis and Utnapishtim take aboard their workers as well as their families.

When the flood waters abate, Noach’s ark lands on Ararat, a version of the name Urartu for a place in the Lake Van region, near where proto-Semitic developed.  Utnapishtim’s ark lands on Omar Gudrun in the Zagros mountains between Ararat and, say, Kish.  We don’t know where Atra-Hasis landed; that fragment is missing.

Noach tests whether the land is ready to occupy by sending out first a crow, and then a dove three times.  Utnapishtim sends out a dove, a sparrow, and then a crow.  This part of Atra-Hasis is missing.

When Noach leaves the ark, he offers a sacrifice, a reach nichoach l’****.  This phrase in the Jewish Bible is always used of sacrifices properly offered to the Jewish Gd.  Now we know why Noach needed seven pairs of tahor animals.  If he only had one, he would have to sacrifice the male, but if the female wasn’t pregnant at the time with a male, then the entire line would be wiped out.  No more sheep or cattle or goats or whatever.  Utnapishtim and Atra-Hasis also offer sacrifices but this survival problem is never discussed.

I’ll discuss the sequel next week.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Cecil B. deMille

I think you already know where I'm going. The Ten Commandments. It looms large in movie history. And like anything else about Jews by Gentiles, it has mistakes.

The most obvious one is the first Passover. What is Aaron handing out at the first Seder ever? Pita! Pita is not unleavened, it is leavened flatbread such as many cultures have. 

The second one is painting the blood on the outside of the door frames. Mekhilta d'Rabbi Yishmael 12:7:1-4 assumes that the blood is supposed to go on the inside, thus it's a warning not to go out of the house. Halakhah is that whereever you eat the Seder, there you stay until you go to shul the next morning. Gd doesn't need to see it, He knows which house belongs to Israelites and won't send the Destroyer to it.

The third one is a little more hairy. Joshua did not need to paint the lintels for Lilia. Everywhere that firstborns have the law applied to them, they are males not females. Exodus does not specify that the Egyptian male firstborns died, but it is added in brackets on Sefaria. Nevertheless as an Israelite, Lilia was not at risk. Dathan on the other hand, as the leader of his part of the Reuvenites, might have been at risk. But his role in the movie was invented by deMille.

And now to the fourth mistake. I realized this when I saw some still shot of Moses (well, Charlton Heston) holding the tablets of the law. The writing is in the Gezer script, which dates to the 800s BCE.

Now, if you read this blog, you know that one of my mantras is "culture makes no leaps". We know the Gezer script had to be older. How much older?

Well, if it developed out of Ugaritic cuneiform, Ugarit was destroyed by the Sea Peoples just after 1200 BCE. Most people think the Exodus was in the 1200s BCE but I've already tackled that. My claim allows the Israelites to have contact with Ugarit for 300 years before its destruction, plenty of time to start using Ugaritic cuneiform, and then 300 years to morph it into the Gezer script. This is similar to the destruction of Ebla and of Naram-Sin setting the west adrift and letting Ugaritic and Hebrew develop out of the western dialect of Akkadian. Which also happened by 1200 BCE.

Aha, you're saying, what about the Tell Amarna cuneiform tablets? Well, look at them here, at the Met. They come from the 1300s BCE when Akhetaten was the capital of Akhenaten for about 30 years. This is plain old straight-up cuneiform, not something that is halfway to being the Gezer script. This is what the Canaanites used in diplomatic and trade exchanges with Egypt. If the Israelites didn't arrive in the Holy Land until the 1200s, they still had 300 years to develop the Gezer script from what they learned from the Canaanites. And that would have happened during a period of isolation.

Which, as I said, did happen. But not until a century after Akhenaten, at a time when Merneptah knew of Israelites living in the Holy Land and sent raiders to get grain. The Israelites were isolated on their hilltops developing the Gezer script a century after most people think the Exodus happened, and they refused to communicate with the Canaanites in the lowlands. So Charlton Heston could not have written the tablets in the Gezer script.

The question is always, could X have known about this subject, and the answer is yes. The Amarna tablets were published 40 years before deMille made the Charlton Heston movie. The Gezer script was published about the same time. That was shortly before deMille made his silent film of Ten Commandments. If he had time to look up the Gezer script, deMille had time to look up the Amarna tablets. He might have done, and rejected it because he wanted something Israelite, not Canaanite. 

But he still got it wrong.

If stuff like this matters to you, let me know cos I can also do Ben Hur the book, but I'll have to do it from the start and you know, it's pretty long.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- passing the test

This week I’m going to talk about something you probably already know about, but given the sometimes fragmented nature of education today, I won’t assume you do.

You may have heard of Occam’s Razor.

This is a basic scientific principle which separates the big kids from the babies.

William of Ockham, a monk of the 1200s CE, formulated the principle that there should be a single explanation that covers all the facts. 

Isaac Newton said that as long as two situations have similar features or effects, we can assume they have similar causes as long as the assumption is sufficient to explain both and explains both of them accurately.   Newton was involved in the debate whether light was a wave or particle phenomenon, but wave physics covered only part of the observed phenomena connected with light, and particle physics covered everything wave physics didn’t. 

Einstein showed that quantization applied to energy, that waves delivered energy in packets of a certain size, which were the so-called particles of energy transfer like the photon.  And de Broglie showed that waveforms exist for all particles, and the mass of the particles calculates to the energy of this waveform.  So matter and packets of energy both have a dual wave/particle nature.  Heisenberg provided the rest of the solution to the puzzle.  What you test for affects your results.  If you use tests that focus on the particle aspects, you get particle results.  If you use tests that focus on the wave aspects, you get wave results.

The problems that Occam’s Razor causes for archaeology relative to Torah are at least two.

One is that archaeologists will quantify the scientific facts about a find and then try to apply it to part of Torah.  But they use a translation which is inaccurate, or they quote out of context which, as you already know, is a fundamental error, or they commit other fallacies. Identifying shabbatum as the genesis of Shabbat ignores both the details about shabbatum and the details about Shabbat.  It doesn’t cover all the facts.

The other problem is confusing an explanation that seems simple with an accurate explanation.  One example of this is deciding that because Hammurabi’s code has laws about battery, and Torah has laws about battery, the one must be copied from the other.  Things contributing to confusion are fallacies and hidden assumptions.  For example, when this conclusion was drawn, Akkadian and Assyrian had both been deciphered by westerners, and it was a short step from believing that because specialists in cuneiform knew what it said, anybody could know what it said.  But the cuneiform specialists didn’t deal with the limitations of access to the material, access to the training, and low literacy in the 1700s BCE.  That all contributes to a fallacy called presentism saying that the conditions applying now applied in the past.  They were looking for characteristics of their own culture in a past culture, simply because they learned how to read its writing. 

Claims that Torah copied from Mesopotamian literature also drew on a belief that all culture originated in one place and disseminated from there.  (In a way this is true, but the original belief was about Classical Greece; the proponents would have made fun of anybody who said the place was Africa.)  Van Dongen’s thesis about “The Song of Going Forth” partakes of this belief.  He assumes not only that the material had to disseminate to Greece for Hesiod to write his Theogony (seven centuries later) but also that it disseminated in text.  That text would have to be cuneiform for a millennium until the development of Linear B, and another half millennium until the Greek alphabet developed.  In the meantime the proto-Greeks would have to go to cuneiform school, etc. etc.  I’ll give the solution toward the end of this blog.

Next week I’ll discuss something that all sciences use but that doesn’t seem to have been expressed.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Sooo history -- clearing up a lot of ignorance

In light of the false information going around on the web, mostly with anti-Semitic screeds, I thought it was time to give some information I didn't give on my Fact-Checking blog. The supporting data is in the bibliography. 

There are two reasons for most of the ignorance. One is simply that schools don't teach Jewish history, even in AP courses, and that history is never a required subject. The other is that courses dealing with Jewish history do not use post-1995 data like I did, ignore DNA evidence, and know nothing about the intersection between the Bible and Olrik's work. That's aside from the fact that academic writers are so ignorant about Biblical Hebrew and Jewish classics.

So here's the real deal.

By 4000 BCE the Semitic language parent had developed in eastern Anatolia south of the Caucasus mountains, distinct from the nearby ergative isolate Hurrian or its ancestor, and also the Indic languages. A Jewish ancestor is set in this location at this time, when wine grapes were being domesticated and meteoric iron was being used. The J1 and J2 Neolithic Y-chromosome subclades begin to develop at this time in NE Anatolia, and they are the main subclades in men descended from Jewish males.

The Jewish culture begins about 2500 BCE with a small nucleus of people who move west, after environmental changes dessicate the edin which used to be watered by four rivers, of which only two survive today. At the time smelted iron was coming into use. 

About 2350 BCE, the Hebrews of Ur have migrated west to the crossroads trading city of Haran, then southwest along the trade routes to the region of Numeira which is now in Jordan. Akkadian was used in diplomacy and trade all over southwest Asia. 

By 2000 BCE, after the destruction of Ebla and the Gutian takeover of Mesopotamia, ties between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean coast weakened. Communities in southeast Anatolia dissolved along with the trade routes that had supported them. Ugaritic, Canaanitic, and Hebrew began to develop and, coincidentally, the Indic Sea Peoples began to differentiate from each other, carrying the R1a Y-chromosome subclade of the Indo-Europeans (which also originated in NE Anatolia). Carbon steel and war chariots hitched to horses appeared by this time.

The patriarchs acquire land at Chevron and Shkhem, but have to migrate away from the latter after destroying the city’s men. The narrative behind the migration has similar elements to Greek saga, and the Achaean Greeks were partners with if not identical to the Pelishtim who settled in the Holy Land.

In the reign of Amenemhet III, the patriarchs migrate to Egypt, but are (illegally) forced into servitude when Canaanitic immigrants take over north Egypt, forming the 17th dynasty,which the Egyptians called Hyksos. 

In 1628 BCE (a radiocarbon date) Thera erupts, part of a swarm of troubles during which the Israelites escape while their Hyksos oppressors try to pick up the pieces. 

The Israelites roam the Sinai Peninsula for 38 years; they consolidate a legal system that subsequently survives 35 centuries of oppression and murder and proves the advantages of common law, which reconciles local tradition with culture-wide law, over civil codes like the Roman one. Not until the reign of Henry II, in England in the 1100s CE, will another common law code arise. Radiocarbon dating places the start of the reign of Ahmose I over a reunited Egypt at about the time of the Ingress. 

Between 1500 and 1200 BCE, the Israelites begin to adapt one version of Ugaritic cuneiform to Hebrew, an easy job because Ugaritic is also a Semitic language and has already adapted cuneiform into a representation of its sound system, dropping logograms and determinants. 

Between 1400 and 1100 BCE, the Aramaeans settle in the territory that takes their name, the Ionians (Achaeans) settle in a part of the Peloponnese known as Achaia, and they also colonize the western coast of the Holy Land where they are known under their Egyptian name of Pelishtim, leaving writings in Linear B. 

About 1300 BCE is the middle date for the Time to Most Recent Common Ancestor of the Jewish kohanim according to 21st century genetics. This is the period of the central shrine at Shiloh, with a tabernacle and an ark of the covenant. Before this, people sacrificed in their settlements which were under frequent attack; that was the time of the bamot, which were prohibited in the Shiloh period.

About 1230 BCE (radiocarbon date) in a period of dessication, Merneptah of the Egyptian 19th dynasty sends soldiers to raid the Holy Land for grain, impacting both the Canaanites and Israelites. He puts up a stele about 1227 BCE which identifies them as distinct peoples living side by side.

Between 1200 and 1100 BCE, the Sea Peoples destroy Ugarit, Wilusa, Hattusas, and other cities. In the previous centuries, the Indo-European Greek/Pelishtim contingent have replaced the Linear B writing system adopted from the Palace Culture, with an adapted version of Ugaritic cuneiform they picked up during their residence in the Holy Land. 

By 1100 BCE the Pelishtim bring the Shiloh central shrine cult to an end and Israelite settlements spring up on bare ground on the hilltops. They refuse to trade with the lowlands, making their own pottery and excluding wild pig, which was part of diets of the Holy Land from Neanderthal times to 900 BCE. Wild pigs survive in the highlands of Israel into the 21st century CE. Bamot are again established. Pottery styles in the north and south differ, hard evidence of cultural differences that will lead to the split monarchy.

By 900 BCE, the Israelite hilltop settlements dissolve. After the First Temple is built, the bamot are again prohibited forever. A previously united kingdom splits into Judea and all the rest of them. 

By 800 BCE, the Jews have developed a distinctive system of writing seen on the Gezer calendar. Aramaic has replaced Akkadian as the language of trade and diplomacy. The Ionians colonize the western coast of Anatolia, unknowingly returning to their homeland, and begin shaping the Sea Peoples epic of the war they took part in that destroyed Wilusa. 

By 690 BCE, the Assyrians take over the northern (Israelite) kingdom. They deport about 22,000 of the northern nobility, then import Assyrian-speaking people to whom the Israelite priests have to adapt their oral tradition. 

By 600 BCE, the Aramaeans conquer Babylon and develop Neo-Babylonian, a hybrid of Aramaic and Akkadian. They conquer Assyria and Judea and deport about 22,000 of the Judean nobility. 

By 500 BCE, the Jews return to the Holy Land and, with authorization from Persian rulers Daryavesh and Koresh, rebuild the temple. They now have a written version of the oral tradition in the wording that developed over the preceding 35 centuries. Its language is Biblical Hebrew, their pre-Captivity vernacular. Their current vernacular is Neo-Babylonian and they will adopt its non-cuneiform script for scrolls that can legally be read from in synagogue. They use Mishnaic Hebrew when running their courts and recording its enactments. 

Jews continued to live in the Holy Land for the next 25 centuries, although they spread out worldwide. Two particular infusions were the medieval creation of the kabbalistic community in Tsfat, and the purchases of land from the Ottoman Empire after 1850. The latter is known as The Old Yishuv.

The New Yishuv happened, of course, in 1948. Immediately thereafter, the Jews of Yemen were brought to Israel, and later the Jews of Ethiopia. The Jews of India also immigrated to Israel.

The sad part is that all this information is out there on the web and nobody accesses it. A lot of it is on Jewish Virtual Library. The people who want to smear Jews refuse to learn the truth. But as I said the other week, people who don't hate Jews are equally ignorant because they, too, refuse to use the resources on the Web. We all of us need a better education and as the old saying goes, it's better to be silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt. Keep your tongue between your teeth if you refuse to study up.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- when was that?

Now I’m going to sum up another reason why Genesis, up to about chapter 12, is not based on Mesopotamian texts discussed to this point.

The oldest example of Enuma Elish that we have dates to 2200 BCE.  If the ancestors of the Jews were still in Mesopotamia at the time, they would have been exposed to the wars of Sargon and his descendants before they left.  That’s not in Torah, unlike the wine motif from Anatolia of the 4000s BCE.

The original Sumerian kings list dates to 2000 BCE.  If the ancestors of the Jews were still in Mesopotamia at the time, they would have been exposed to the wars of Naram-Sin, the Gutian invasion and the war that ended it.  That’s not in Torah, unlike the 2350 BCE destruction of the cities of the plain.

The twelve-tablet Gilgamesh and the identical flood story in Atra-Hasis, plus the revised Kings List that included Zidusura and Gilgamesh, date to 1700 BCE.  If the ancestors of the Jews were still in Mesopotamia at this time, they could not have experienced the agricultural problems in Egypt at the end of the reign of Amenemhet III in the 1800s BCE.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to bust a number of urban legends which are mutually incompatible chronologically.  Each urban legend has consequences which I will point out.  The logical or scientific reader will then have to decide which legend(s) to throw out.

For this week, it’s going to be very hard for most people to give up the claim that Jewish law is a version of Hammurabi’s law from the 1700s BCE.  That conflicts with the timing of the Egyptian slavery which ended about 1630 BCE, as I will discuss later.  Plus there has to be some chronicle or other written evidence of the destruction of the cities of the plain from which the ancestors of the Jews could get that story, and nobody has seen that yet.

The monument on which Hammurabi’s code was written about 1770 BCE, was found in 1901 and translated by 1903 by C.H.W. Johns.  To that point nobody knew of a regular law code older than the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which only hints at morality or laws by the 42 confessions the soul makes after death.  (We do now, but we’re busting an urban legend.)

The online versions of the translation of Hammurabi’s code reveal one thing: like the first aliyah of Genesis and Noach’s flood, it is over 80% different in verbiage from Jewish law and has significant rules that Jewish law rejects.  The latter include laws regulating female temple servants and priestesses.

People who want to hold onto Hammurabi’s code, therefore, have to reconcile the problem of the 2350 BCE date, 600 years earlier, for the destruction of the cities of the plain, as well as the differences in subjects of laws and effects of the laws.  Then they would have to realize that Hammurabi’s code, like Enuma Elish and Gilgamesh and the Kings list, was written in cuneiform.  Which I already said the Jews couldn’t read because they couldn’t get into cuneiform school. 

Here's hoping you understand that cuneiform texts could only influence people who could read them -- which does not include the Jews or their forebears -- the subject of the next post.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- the rest of the story

The second part of Noach’s story discusses an event from about the year 4000 BCE in the Lake Van region.  I told you to remember that date.

Noach “began to be a farmer,” and he planted wine grapes, made wine, and got so drunk he fell asleep.

I already said that wine grapes were domesticated in the Lake Van region about 4000 BCE.

Then something, we don’t know what, happens to him, something his youngest son did.

What the youngest son did is explicit in the Greek wars of the gods.  Kronos is the youngest son of Uranos and Zeus is the youngest son of Kronos, and both of these youngest sons defeat their fathers and become chief gods. 

Cham, the youngest son of Noach, does NOT become the head of the family.  He is made the lowest and the least and his descendants from his son K’naan are supposed to be bondsmen to the descendants of the elder two sons, Yafet and Shem.

The urban legend is that this justifies enslaving Africans but first, we’ve been all through the “bondsman” issue and second, we know that K’naan was not an African nation but a mighty Semitic nation of the Holy Land.  Their language shows up in marginal notes on the Tell el-Amarna tablets created for the diplomatic needs of Pharaoh Akhenaten. 

The wine motif in Atra-Hasis or Gilgamesh is limited to a party when the ark has been completed.  Atra-Hasis mentions the complaint of a goddess that since people have been destroyed, she can’t get beer any more.  In Gilgamesh, there’s a reference to Siduri, the “tavern keeper” or “ale-wife”, depending on whose translation you use.

And now we are right back to Kug Bau, because this is also her title, aside from her Anatolian name.

The cuneiform may literally mean “tavern keeper” or “ale-wife,” but obviously it’s an idiom for royalty or deity.  Not that Kug Bau and Siduri are necessarily the same people, but that they have similar ranks or importance.

Nobody falls asleep in Atra-Hasis.  In Gilgamesh, it’s Gilgamesh who falls asleep, after bragging that he won’t.  Utnapishtim plays a trick on him to prove how long he slept.

“Going Forth” has no sleep motif, just a major party with “drink”.  Supposedly the “storm god” curses the other gods, having already become supreme, but he is never named and is absolutely not Kumarbi.  No actions describe how he became supreme over Kumarbi, who gave birth to him.  But his supremacy is Anatolian in nature, not Mesopotamian where irrigation and not rainfall is the major source of water.

The same issue applies here as to the first aliyah of Torah.  The stories have some similar motifs, but some show up in stories one and two, but not three or four; make up your own table and assign your own designators.  As a result, except for the notable copying between Atra-Hasis and Gilgamesh, the wording of the stories differs for the most part.  Something else is going on here that the urban legend doesn’t cover.  The Jewish story goes back as far as 4000 BCE, but the two Mesopotamian stories existed only in cuneiform as far as we know, and cuneiform developed a millennium later.  I’ll discuss what was going on toward the end of this blog.

For now, I need to show you why I told you to read everything up to the Tower of Babel.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- can't get there

Besides getting access to Enuma Elish, which was always written in cuneiform, there’s a problem with how to turn it into the Jewish creation story in Genesis 1 plus 2:1-3.

The Jewish creation story has seven days of creation.  On the seventh day the first Shabbat was instituted, with its concept of melakhah.

The three verses about Shabbat are part of the first aliyah in Torah.  The aliyot are divisions of Torah used for the regular reading of Torah in the synagogue.  Torah is divided into 54 sections, one for each week of the Jewish leap year (short ones are combined when it isn’t a leap year) and each section is divided into 8 aliyot.  The first aliyah in Torah is the Jewish creation story, ending with the first Shabbat.   This is all discussed in Mishnah, Gemara, and halakhah.

Part of the urban legend that says the Jewish creation story comes from Enuma Elish ignores the aliyah structure. 

The urban legend requires existence of a structure set up by Steven Langton, the archbishop named to the see of Canterbury by the pope and opposed by John “Lackland” of England, leading to an interdict being placed on England so that no church services could take place.  But I digress.

The current “chapter 1” of Genesis ends at the division imposed by Langton.  It cuts off the verses about Shabbat.  That means chapter 1 discusses only six days of creation. 

Because six generations of gods are named in Enuma Elish, says part of the urban legend, these six days were derived from Enuma Elish.

The hidden assumption here is that the Jews originally had only six days of creation and later, when Shabbat became part of Jewish culture, they tacked on three verses to pretend that it was part of creation.  I’ll give a really good argument much later in this blog about why such a thing doesn’t happen.

But for now, the most important fact is that Enuma Elish doesn’t have six days of creation.  It doesn’t say when those six generations of gods came into being.  It doesn’t show how many days Marduk took in his act of creation.  Granted, the tablets have missing text and experts in cuneiform are always updating our understanding from fragments.  It’s been 170 years and the cuneiform scholars have not yet posted the timing of creation in Enuma Elish on the internet.

What happened here is that people who were familiar with Langton’s chapter divisions, and ignorant of the Jewish aliyot, viewed Langton’s division as inherent in what the Jews passed along for centuries before Shabbat existed and for millennia before Langton existed.

At the same time, it ignores the entire history of the Bible that the archaeologists inherited.  In Langton’s time and for centuries afterward, the Catholic church (the only Christian church in Langton’s time) discouraged people from reading the Bible for themselves.  The average person couldn’t possibly know about the “chapter 1” division until he read a Bible that was divided that way.  The number of people who knew about that, was restricted to those who could read, who could read Latin, and who had access to a Bible.  Until the printing press started turning out cheap copies of the Bible in the national language, that meant clergy and rich people.

By the time archaeologists discovered Enuma Elish, the mass of Protestant nations and some Catholic and non-established ones potentially had a Bible in every home, and the concepts of the archaeologists had been conditioned by Langton’s divisions.  It’s a case of Heisenberg uncertainty.  The claim that Genesis and Enuma Elish are related relies on the Bible structure people had learned all their lives without even thinking twice about it.  The Jewish aliyah structure doesn’t allow the conclusion they reached.

In fact there are no common phrases between the Jewish creation story and Enuma Elish.  Commonality of phrases frequently identifies concepts inherited by one school of thought from its predecessor; this will come up again much later on the blog.  The only concept common to Enuma Elish and Torah is the idea of creation.  Enuma Elish is closely tied to the polytheism of Mesopotamia; the Jewish creation story is monotheistic and incorporates a completely Jewish, absolutely non-Mesopotamian concept, Shabbat, which I will discuss in the next post.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

21st Century Classical Greek -- special topic 4, indirect speech and the epistemic

To quote the Brittney Spears song, "oops I did it again." I'm writing this handbook, see, and I'm going over conditionals with a fine-toothed comb because Goodwin has some categorical statements in there and I have every reason not to trust him. This is going to be a long post because I'm repeating material I've used in other places, but I'll give links to the other places that say it more in depth. 

So on page 301, section 1410, Goodwin says the future optative (our imperfective conceptual epistemic) cannot be used in the protasis or apodosis of a conditional except in indirect discourse.  He makes that exception because of a screwy claim about being able to tell the grammar of an initial remark from how it is represented by the person who passes it along. So if X says something to Y, Y can report it using a future optative in a conditional (if it follows all the other screwy rules, see page 315 section 1481 ff), but no other conditional can use it.

So here is my citation: Xenophon Cyropaedia I 5.3.

οὕτω δὴ διαπέμπει πρός τε τοὺς ὑπ᾽ αὐτὸν πάντας καὶ πρὸς Κροῖσον τὸν Λυδῶν βασιλέα καὶ πρὸς τὸν Καππαδοκῶν καὶ πρὸς Φρύγας ἀμφοτέρους καὶ πρὸς Παφλαγόνας καὶ Ἰνδοὺς καὶ πρὸς Κᾶρας καὶ Κίλικας, τὰ μὲν καὶ διαβάλλων τοὺς Μήδους καὶ Πέρσας, λέγων ὡς μεγάλα τ᾽ εἴη ταῦτα ἔθνη καὶ ἰσχυρὰ καὶ συνεστηκότα εἰς ταὐτό, καὶ ἐπιγαμίας ἀλλήλοις πεποιημένοι εἶεν, καὶ κινδυνεύσοιεν, εἰ μή τις αὐτοὺς φθάσας ἀσθενώσοι, ἐπὶ ἓν ἕκαστον τῶν ἐθνῶν ἰόντες καταστρέψασθαι. οἱ μὲν δὴ καὶ τοῖς λόγοις τούτοις πειθόμενοι συμμαχίαν αὐτῷ ἐποιοῦντο, οἱ δὲ καὶ δώροις καὶ χρήμασιν ἀναπειθόμενοι: πολλὰ γὰρ καὶ τοιαῦτα ἦν αὐτῷ.

Accordingly, he sent around to all those under his sway and to Croesus, the king of Lydia, to the king of Cappadocia; to both Phrygias, to Paphlagonia, India, Caria, and Cilicia; and to a certain extent also he misrepresented the Medes and Persians, for he said that they were great, powerful nations, that they had intermarried with each other, and were united in common interests, and that if not someone attacking them weakened them, making war upon each one of the nations singly, [they were sure] to subjugate them. Some, then, entered into an alliance with him because they actually believed what he said; others, because they were bribed with gifts and money, for he had great wealth.

The first question to ask is, whether this is reported speech and in what sense. Did Xenophon make it up, as Thucydides did, from what other people told him? Did he rework something somebody said earlier in the material? Or did he make it up out of whole cloth? If you believe the latter, then this is not reported speech, it is fiction. It uses the future optative, and nobody can say it doesn't. It takes a lot of chutspah for somebody 2000 years later who is not a native speaker to tell Xenophon he can't do this. 

Case 2, Xenophon declares at the start that he is writing, not fiction, but history. And he has two kinds of reported (indirect) speech. In Book I chapter 2, he has things that the translator puts in quotes, the way Thucydides' translator puts things in quotes. Like Thucydides’ material, Xenophon’s might be made up based on his knowledge of Koresh.

The section I cited, however, has no quotes in the translation and doesn’t read that way in the Greek. This is down and dirty reported speech, X saying that Y said whatever it was, and that’s what Goodwin is talking about.

So Goodwin probably would agree that his two claims apply to this section, but now we run into another problem. The reported speech originated with the King of Assyria; his coming war with Koresh suggests that this is Belshazzar, also known from the book of Daniel. This is not reported from direct speech. Xenophon had not yet been born and could not have heard Belshazzar say this. So that fails the test of whether it's reported speech, and see above about chutspah.

To save their position, Greek scholars could say that however many hands Xenophon heard it through, that's ok. Even if we allow that, there's still a problem. Belshazzar did not speak Greek and so there's no future optative for him to use and for Xenophon to copy at whatever hand.

Belshazzar spoke Neo-Babylonian, a 21^st century name for what some experts also call Akkadian nowadays because it was written in cuneiform. It used to be known as Aramaic because Mesopotamia had been conquered by the Aramaeans, who imported their syllabary script. This script is also known as the “square” script; it is the only legal script for Torah scrolls to be used in synagogues, and it is the script of most mass-printed Jewish literature including modern Israeli work. There’s a quote in Talmud and I’ll fish it out if you want, that says there’s an Aramaic that has “no tongue”. I’m pretty sure that means the use of cuneiform to record Aramaic. The Jews never did learn to read it.

So, since Belshazzar didn't speak Greek, what does it mean if Goodwin accepts this section as reported speech when on page 315, section 1481, he says that reported speech retains (or not) the mood and tense of the direct quote. Xenophon cannot keep the mood and tense of the direct quote because Belshazzar did not speak Greek and Xenophon did not speak Akkadian.

So somewhere along the transmission line, somebody translated Belshazzar’s Akkadian into Greek. And translations are notoriously faulty. For Goodwin to imagine that the translation was exact requires a) that he know nothing about the problems of translation, a dangerously naïve attitude disqualifying him as a linguist and b) that he knows Akkadian and how to translate it exactly into Greek. The acknowledged expert on Akkadian, Gelb, wrote his landmark grammar in 1961, by which time Goodwin had been long dead. Gelb records a subjunctive but not an optative. It may be periphrastic instead of morphological.

Akkadian was deciphered a few decades before Goodwin published his grammar, but that doesn’t mean he read about it. It’s another sign of naivete to assume that just because something was published, everybody literate immediately read it, let alone was influenced by it. For classics scholars, the presumption is even weaker; they worked in a pipeline and didn’t go outside their field. I don’t believe even Smyth recognized the problem with thinking that Xenophon is reporting speech he heard in Akkadian. Or with Xenophon reading cuneiform. Or even Aramaic square script. Most likely both Belshazzar and Koresh hired people from Greek Ionia to translate between them and Greek ambassadors.

I can cover all the facts with a simple schema: my normal explanation of nuances.

Normally our imperfective conceptual is a dead cert and you would think it wouldn’t even have an epistemic, which means the speaker isn’t sure what he’s saying is true. But look at the context. Xenophon literally says that the King of Assyria was lying. Xenophon doesn’t believe him. Xenophon doesn’t want readers believing him. All by itself that’s reason to use the epistemic, like Thucydides used it for Korinthian speeches that he didn’t want readers to believe. We don’t care how many translations the material went through before it got to Xenophon because we're not going to go behind what he wrote.

It's like a contract. If there’s a contract dispute, and there’s a writing, the court never goes behind the writing to figure out what the parties meant by the contract. So too, we are not going to go behind Xenophon to figure out what other people meant when they transmitted this material. There’s a really good reason for that, besides the translation issue.

The more people who had their hands on this material, the more it changed. Each of them put his own spin on things, however slightly. The press does this all the time; every outlet has its philosophical background, and the stories reported by OANN or Fox that are also reported on MSNBC or Axios, are all different. If the material transmitted orally to Xenophon, it was subject to all the features of oral narrative, like gossip is. And that means that what Xenophon heard from the narrator was very different from what originally happened. Let alone what was originally said. Even in the 21^st century, with all our experience of historical and modern propaganda, far too many people believe that what they read or hear has to be accurate. It would be no surprise if mentally cloistered classics scholar Goodwin was similarly naïve.

Two more bits.

If the rule allowing future optative in reported speech was made up to cover this exact section, that is called special pleading. It violates the Test of Occam’s Razor by proposing a complicated schema to cover up a problem.

Two, given the definition of optative as referring to potentiality and wishes, you have to ask yourself how this passages expresses Belshazzar’s wishes. He can’t wish these nations to take over. If you claim he’s saying the takeover is a potentiality, well, epistemic says the same thing: something is possible but not probable. The difference is that “future” in Belshazzar’s situation is only future from his point of view, not from Xenophon’s. We don’t get into these timing arguments with an aspectual system, the same as we don’t get into arguments about whether Xenophon got a good translation of what Belshazzar said. We say “Belshazzar is trying to convince people that he’s talking about a dead cert, but Xenophon verbally and through grammar says he’s lying.”

The 2019 grammar retains both of Goodwin’s problems. This section is not among their citations, which they kindly list in an appendix. They did not go looking for examples that might contradict them, so as to give explanations and remain credible. They cherry picked their data. There is a page with a table showing what's called succession of tenses which is what Goodwin talks about in section 1481. None of it is copied from surviving texts by native speakers. It's all little snippets made up by the people who wrote the book. That's a strawman argument and that's a fallacy.

Xenophon did not have to know that Belshazzar spoke Aramaic to write this section. He used the grammar he used because it got his point across: Belshazzar lied for his own purposes and Xenophon wants to give him the lie, which he does in grammar as well as wording. You can't discredit a native speaker when you are operating from ignorance and bad logic. 

There's one section of Goodwin that I'm not going to cover in the handbook and in there, I say what it is. I have no confidence that it's correct because the rest of the book is so bad. I'm going to fill in some examples and probably add an appendix, exhaustingly analyzing the examples I used. That will show me if things hang together, or I have special pleading somewhere. Which would mean I have to tear everything down and go back to the drawing board. Oh well. Keeps me off the streets during the day.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- wrapping up the digs

When you read archaeological material – from the original report not the mass media or a fringe website – and it claims to relate to the Bible, you have to be skeptical.

First, you have to make sure it’s not a weak analogy.  It has to deal with all of the Biblical words and details, not just pick out useful parts.  In the next two parts of this blog, I’ll show why it has to deal with the Biblical words in Biblical Hebrew, not in translation.

Second, you have to make sure that the writer doesn’t deny something happened just because the data don’t say it did.  The dig has to be at the right place and go down to the right level, look for culturally relevant material and evaluate it accurately compared to the situations cultures normally find themselves in.

Third, you have to make sure the material evaluates the provenance reasonably.  A report that doesn’t go through the provenance of a find but tries to claim that it relates to something in Bible cannot be relied on.  The week this post goes up, there was a follow-on to the story about the papyrus that supposedly talked about “Jesus’ wives”.  In fact, the original study did not have that phrase; it was an invention of mass media to gain attention.  Second, there was absolutely no information about the provenance from archaeology; it came from the possessor and his story keeps shifting.  The next thing that has to happen is a radiocarbon test, just like the one that proved the fabric of the Turin shroud was made in the 1400s CE.  I’m sure the possessor of the “Jesus” papyrus doesn’t want that but if he refuses, there’s no there there.   Without  provenance information from archaeology, you don’t  really have an archaeological “find” and you may not have an antiquity.  At best, you might have a curiosity, but it could also be a forgery.

The chronology of the Torah goes something like this:

Noach’s wine grapes come from about 4000 BCE in a location later known as Urartu; we don’t know what it was called in 4000 BCE, its oldest known name is Urashtu.  This is in Anatolia, where and when proto-Semitic first developed, and also near where meteoric iron was in use, and where smelted iron and carbon steel show up over the next 2000 years.

Gan Eden relates to the 3000s BCE, the Jemdet Nasr period of Mesopotamia, somewhere to the east of where the Euphrates flows now, and where it joined up with the Tigris and two minor rivers, one of which vanished from human memory and one of which is permanently dry now.

The destruction of the Cities of the Plain had to be observed by the ancestors of the Jewish people when they were near Numeira, Jordan, about 2350 BCE.  This places them far from Mesopotamia prior to the time of the Sumerian Kings List, Gilgamesh, Atra-Hasis, and Enuma Elish in the written forms we know of.  It coordinates with the end of Ebla, which traded with the Cities.  All writing in Mesopotamia was in Sumerian or Akkadian cuneiform at this time; reading and writing cuneiform had to do with royal decrees and religious material; archives were royal property, not freely open to anybody who chose to browse in them.

The Israelites migrated to Egypt in the 1800s BCE and were familiar with the conditions there at the end of the reign of Amenemhet III, the end of the Middle Kingdom.

The Israelites left Egypt about 1630 BCE, heading southeast.  The Hyksos rulers of the delta were trying to recover from the effects of the Thera explosion.  Before they had completely recovered, Ahmose I attacked and took back the north.  He chased the remains of the Hyksos rulers of the Delta northeast to Sharuhen.  Torah has the only written record currently known, relative to the Thera explosion, except for the Tempest Papyrus from the start of Ahmose’s reign.

This leaves 400 years for the period of the Judges and the cult at Shiloh.  About 1100 BCE, the Israelites established settlements throughout the Holy Land, more than 200 feet above sea level, and refused to trade pottery with the lowlands, showing that they had to be self-supporting.

They remained self-supporting, engaging in mixed agriculture, to about 900 BCE, the time of Shlomo.

The Israelites were not descended solely from the Hapiru; the two groups were not identical.

The Israelites did not copy their monotheism from Akhenaten.  Even his son didn’t copy it; Tutankhamen changed back to the original Egyptian polytheism.

The Israelites did not invent the Exodus after their culture had been up and running for centuries; it was so well known that 100 years after the hilltop settlements dissolved, Amos could talk about it to the southerners and Hoshea could reference it to the northerners, without going into a song and dance about what they meant.

Cultures like the Celts and Sea Peoples began developing 300 to 400 years before they first appeared in text from another culture.  It is no stretch to accept that the culture of the Israelite hilltop settlements goes back to at least 1500 BCE, but the geological evidence in Torah is that their ancestors originated nearly a millennium before that.

Those assigning a late date to every characteristic of Jewish culture, religion and law, are almost certainly wrong.  I’ll give more evidence for this in the next two sections.  Starting with evidence from the language itself – Biblical Hebrew.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- tying up Anatolia

And now let’s wrap some things up with a nice pink bow.  About a year ago I pointed out that the likeness between “The Song of Going Forth” and Hesiod’s Theogony is a puzzle because one time when the Hittites were in contact with the ancestors of the Greeks, they were at war and the next time that Greeks lived in Anatolia, the Hittites had been gone for almost 4 centuries.  Van Dongen’s book assumed the material passed in writing but couldn’t explain how that would happen, since the Hittites used full-up cuneiform, the ancestors of the Greeks used Linear B, and the Greek alphabet was completely different from both.

The answer now is, the ancestors of the Greeks picked up that material in Anatolia after 6000 BCE but before their motion into Aeolia, Achaia, and the rest of the Peloponnese about 2000 BCE.  After 4000 BCE, the material migrated into Mesopotamia, probably with the Akkadians, and shaped the battle of Tiamat and Marduk in Enuma Elish.

The actual Greeks differentiated out of the ancestral Indo-European tree between 1200 BCE, near the time of the attack on Wilusa that destroyed Troy VIIb, and 1000 BCE, the time when the Pelishtim occupied their marine Pentapolis in the Holy Land.  The Italics differentiate out about the same time or a little before. 

This corresponds to the joint nature of the Ionians and Pelishtim, the Teresh/Weshesh as other members of the Sea Peoples different from the Pelishtim, and the differences between Latin and Greek, as well as the separation between Ahiyyawa and the Italic Etruscans and Oscians.

The conclusion is that the Hurrian, Hittite, Akkadian and Hesiod texts are alike because they are based on Anatolian material predating the cultures, and they differ naturally as the various cultures differentiated out of the Anatolian background.

These coordinate with the results that show an Anatolian locale for the origin of both Semitic and Indo-European languages. 

Remarkably enough, right away you can see that the ancestors of the Greeks did not flee quickly ahead of an invading army.  They filtered west over several millennia, while behind them the ancestors of the Hittites immigrated into their old turf.  Then it took several more centuries for the Greek language to develop, during almost the identical period as K’naani and Hebrew differentiated .

The fact that Greek uses an alphabet ultimately derived from Ugaritic cuneiform, the same as Hebrew does, and developed over the same period, shows that both cultures were in contact with Ugarit long before the Greeks/Pelishtim destroyed it.  Maybe they were all in contact from the 1500s BCE – just before Linear B (the language of the Pelishtim) shows up in the Holy Land and the Israelites entered after their stay in the Sinai Peninsula. 

And now back to my fallacy.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- totting up

Let’s review the bidding.

Naram-sin destroyed Ebla about 2350 BCE and then went home and was destroyed himself. 

The Cities of the Plain seem to have been destroyed about 2350 BCE, an event not recorded in Ebla’s tablets, although the names of two of the cities are.

The cities are not listed in Joshua among the inheritance of any of the tribes; they are on the east side of the Jordan River.

They were re-occupied after 1200 BCE and nobody after that would have known they had been destroyed.  By the time of Amos and Hoshea people would have forgotten that the real estate was ever empty.  They would have known the same places, but under different names.

In Amos we find a reference to Sdom and Amorah as a paradigm of absolute destruction, and in Hoshea there’s a reference to Admah and Tsevoiim in the same context. 

The probability is vanishingly small that Amos and Hoshea would invent names that disappeared from history 16 centuries before they were born.

The probability is vanishingly small that Amos and Hoshea would invent names that turned up in an archaeological dig 28 centuries after they died.

The probability is vanishingly small that their audience would have understood or cared about what Amos and Hoshea said unless they either told the whole story – which is not recorded in their work – or the audience already knew the story.

The reference to the cities of the plain in Genesis 10 has nothing to do with Amos and Hoshea, it is an identification of the location, with a reference to Tsidon, the site of which was occupied before 3000 BCE.  Ebla used Tsidon’s port.

The idea that Genesis 10 has to come from the time of Ashurbanipal is not reasonable.  The cities had other names at that point in time, and Amos and Hoshea came before his period.  Anything in Ashurbanipal’s library in cuneiform was not accessible to Jews.

The idea that Genesis 10 comes from the time of Nebuchadnetsar has the same problem.  By that time, Grar itself was a memory, having been destroyed by the Assyrians.  Anything in Nebuchadnetsar’s library in cuneiform was not accessible to Jews.

The only time when the cities of the plain can reasonably be used to give directions, is in the period of Ebla, among people who were there at the time.  I’ll talk more about the issue of Grar later in two contexts.

But wait, there’s more.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved