Ben Hur the novel, pt. 3

So Lew Wallace is writing about Jews without knowing anything about them. And he’s pretending that two different Gentile cultures know about them. And the question is, how would that happen? Wallace’s answer is a revelation from Gd, and Gd is also making it so that a Greek and a Hindu can talk their own languages and still understand each other. Next we’re going to get an Egyptian doing the same thing – but what language is he going to speak? Wallace’s ploy only works if he’s speaking Egyptian – either Coptic or its forebear, the language of hieroglyphs and demotic – and not the Greek of the Hellenistic period introduced by Alexander’s conquest.

Wallace claims that Egyptian writing came first. It’s not true. There was something in the air around 3000 BCE when pictographs started to become cuneiform symbols for sounds of a language. It was probably happening in China as well; the bone oracles that survive come from around 2000 BCE but, since cultures make no leaps, the script had to begin developing around 3000 BCE.

Balthasar gets to voice the Christian pretense that there was one original revelation in ancient times that became corrupted into polytheism, and that this is the same revelation made to Mosheh on the mountain. This ignores 60% of Torah which is not revelation but law. What Gd revealed to Mosheh were a) how to make the tabernacle; b) the Ten Commandments; c) His 13-part Name of Mercy after the Golden Calf incident. Judaism recognizes 613 commandments, the standard list of which was drawn up by Maimonides.

Second, Balthasar gets to give a false picture of history. There were no Persians when the two kingdoms of Egypt united for the first time. The Ethiopians had a strong culture and army and they and their allies the Sea Peoples conquered Egypt.

But one thing rings true. It would be an Egyptian who believed first in Gd being revealed in the flesh of man. The Egyptian pharaohs were the living embodiment of Osiris, as their queens were the living embodiment of Isis. The Osiris cult was strictly Egyptian; the Isis cult made converts in many places, especially in Rome. Egypt contributed hermits and the Gnostic Gospels to Christianity; Athanasius conquered Arianism in Alexandria where Balthasar claims to be from.

Now let me go back. I’ve been rewriting Greek grammar starting with the idea that it is aspectual, like other languages arising in NE Anatolia. The complications in Greek grammar books dissolve when I ditch the tense system in favor of aspect. That means I pass, and the old grammars fail, the Test of Occam’s Razor. (They also fail for lack of citations to surviving material, citations that don’t support their claims, and citations that contradict their claims.)

Acknowledging the NE Anatolian origin of the Hellenes, which is borne out by DNA, shows why there are linguistic connections between the Deucalion myth and the Noach story in the Jewish Bible. But the stories have different details and play different roles in the cultures. When I was writing the Fact-Checking part of my blog I used the work of Axel Olrik on oral traditions, and his perceptions show that when two cultures identify themselves as “us” they are going to share oral narratives. As time goes on and that identity changes, often as the cultures migrate away from where they arose as “us”, the narratives will change. But the origin of the narratives is not revelation. It starts as stories about “us”, illustrating ancestors as setting cultural behavioral standards. As time goes on and each of the daughter cultures changes, the narratives change to mirror the new habits.

It works with the Samaritan version of the Pentateuch, too. I wrote a book detailing this.

So yes, later generations had different versions of narratives that were told by the unified culture of their origin. But no, those stories don’t originate in revelation. They come from lifestyle habits and ancestral deeds.