Fact-Checking the -- Tannakh -- what about those hemorrhoids?

 If you remember, on the Fact-Checking the Torah page, I posted this, identifying the Pelishtim with the Ahiyyawa, that is, the Pelishtim were pre-Hellenic Greeks known to the Egyptians, and known to the Hittites as Ahiyyawa. As such, they lived in the Peloponnese as part of the Palace Culture which used the undeciphered Linear A script, while the Pelishtim are known to have written in Linear B which represents an Indo-European language.

They're all Greeks to me

Now another part of the puzzle. Read Samuel I 5-6, the story of what happened to the Pelishtim after they captured the ark of the covenant.

Everybody will tell you that the five capitals of the Pelishtim were struck with hemorrhoids. Now that we know who the Pelishtim were, we know something nobody in the history of Bible studies knew, and that nobody now has connected up. Except me. Again.

The main god of the Pelishthim/Ahiyyawa was Apaliunas. He was also the patron of Troy, a city founded by the Gutian Teucer:

Philology

Teucer, according to a Greek poet of the 700s BCE, also founded a temple in the Troad to Apollo Smintheus, usually translated as "Mouse Apollo". The Greeks did not understand the word smintheus but said it was a Pelasgian word. How it got to mean "mouse" is tortuous; Teucer's people were told to build their temple where they were attacked by the "earth-born". There is a long-standing tradition in ancient Anatolian culture that makes its way into Talmud, that mice are born from earth and if you catch them at the right point in their "development", you will find them to be half mouse, half earth. The poet goes on to say that mice ate all the leather of the military equipment and that's where the temple was built.

But the ancients were also fond of bad philology and false friends. "Earth-born" also means "autochthonous", like the warriors born of the earth in which Qadmos planted the teeth of the dragon he slew. Qadmos (cognate to Semitic words for "eastern") founded Thebes in the Peloponnese, a city of the Palace Culture. IOW Teucer was going to be attacked by Anatolians already living in the Troad and he would have to conquer them to be able to build a temple. Which he did.

So how does the story in Samuel relate? Well, the Pelishtim who worshipped Apaliunas had settled in their famous Pentapolis, before attacking the famous Troy VIIb layer. They worshipped Dagon, which closely resembles the Hebrew word dagan, which relates to a word dagah meaning be fruitful, the way grain reproduces manyfold. So basically the Pelishtim were adopting the west Semitic Ugaritic language and adapting its cuneiform to their language, and they helped destroy Ugarit at about the same time as Troy.

Now, mice are also something that dagahs a lot, something else that has been known for millennia, and they will swarm into your grain bins and clean you out if you don't catch them first. So you need somebody to guard you against them, and apparently this was one of Apaliunas' roles. His statue at his temple on the Troad had a mouse underfoot.

But the way the Iliad brings Apollo Smitheus into it, is that when the Greeks refuse to give up the daughter of his priest, the priest invokes a plague on them. And a plague also falls on the Pelishtim who capture the ark. And Apollo was responsible for a plague that struck down Phrygian (Anatolian) Niobe's seven pairs of children when she slammed Apollo's mother for having only one pair. 

The Pelishtim were struck bafolim in Samuel I 5:1-12, and afolim is spelled starting with ayin, a letter that shows up at the start of a number of Hebrew names borrowed from foreign languages. Amorah, the sister-city of S'dom, is another example. So is efron, the man who eventually sells Makhpelah to Avraham.

The letter b' is a preposition meaning "by means of" in some cases. So the Pelishtim were struck by means of their patron god Apaliunas for trying to import a foreign Gd's artifact, the ark, into his temple. At the same time, that foreign Gd struck the Ugaritic/K'naani god Dagon whom the Pelishtim had also adopted.

But Apollo is also the healer god who taught Cheiron the centaur, who taught Asclepius the famous healer, and his son Podalirius who was physician to the Greeks  in the Trojan War. 

So the next part of the narrative is that after three (remember Olrik's Law of Three) of the cities in the Pentapolis are struck by Apaliunas in the same way, the Pelishtim decide to get rid of the ark in chapter 6. They put it on a cart and on the cart they also put five (a magic number for magic and mystery) golden statues of Apaliunas and five golden mice. They yoke to this cart two heifers who have never been used for work and set the heifers wandering to wherever the god directs.

This following of a cow to a god-designated place is also part of the Qadmos story. Apollo's oracle at Delphi tells him to follow a cow to exhaustion and build a city where she lies down. The city was Thebes. He wanted water but a dragon kept destroying his water-bearers. Qadmos killed this dragon, sowed its teeth, and saved himself from the warriors who sprang up except for five who became his guardians. 

Now, how did afolim get to be glossed as hemorrhoids by so many commentators? Babylonian Talmud Masekhet Megilla 25b says it, with an attribution to rabbanan, meaning that it was a widespread ancient opinion; it is repeated in Tosefta 3:20 for that page, as well as Rashi's Talmud commentary. Tosefta dates to the 100s CE and Rashi lived in the 1100s CE. Rashi connects it to the mice saying they created disease in the Pelishtim. 

The connection to mice no doubt comes from chapter 6, not from chapter 5. None of the Jewish commentators knew anything about Apaliunas or Apollo Smintheus. Neither did non-Jewish commentators know anything about the connection between the Pelishtim and the Achaean attackers of Troy. It only comes together when you know 21st century archaeology.

And that's why you can't rest on outdated archaeology if you want to understand Torah or its extensions into Nakh.