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Chapter 10
Who Wrote the Bible and Why?
The Ark of the Covenant and the Temple of Solomon
When considering the idea of the God “dancing all night” in the
round temple of the Hyperboreans, our mind naturally turns to that
most remarkable of incidents in the Bible where David danced before
the Ark of the Covenant - in his underwear, no less!
Another curious
item is the fact that there is a tableaux on one of the porches of
the Chartres Cathedral of Melchizedek, the “king-priest of Salem”,
and the Queen of Sheba.
Equidistant between them is the Ark of the
Covenant in a cart. Melchizedek is holding a cup that is supposed to
be the Holy Grail. Inside this cup is a cylindrical object of stone.
Of course, one wonders what Melchizedek is doing with the Queen of
Sheba who is supposed to be contemporary with Solomon, but there are
many mysteries here.
The Ark of the Covenant: that most mysterious and powerful object
that we are led to believe was the object of the Templars sojourn
and searches in Jerusalem. What do we really know about the Ark?
In order to come to any idea about the Ark, we will naturally have
to make a careful examination of the religious structure in which it
is situated: Judaism. When I began to study the issues that
concerned me: religious questions, philosophical problems, and so
on, I really had no idea that I would uncover something so horrific
and far reaching as what I came to realize about religions in
general and monotheism in particular.
Please don’t misunderstand me
or think that I am promoting paganism or any other form of worship
of “Gods” or images of God. I am quite convinced that the source of
all existence is consciousness, and that this consciousness is, at
its root, what we would call God, or Divine Mind.
What we are
concerned about here is the imposition of monotheism in the form of
any one group claiming that their version of who or what God is or
is not is the only correct one. And the further result of this is
that Judeo-Christian monotheism prevailed with its twisted
conception of linear time borrowed from Zoroastrianism.
People have
been reading the Bible for ages. It has achieved a status in our
culture assigned to no other single body of text. There are more
copies of the Bible on the face of the planet than any other single
book. It is quoted (and misquoted) more often than any other book.
It is translated into more languages than any other book ever
written as well. More people in recorded history have read it,
studied it, taught it, admired it, argued about it, loved it, lived
by it, and killed and died for it.
It is the singular document at
the heart of Judaism and Christianity, and yet the common man doesn’t really seem to ever ask: Who
wrote it, really?
They think they know: it is divinely dictated,
revealed or inspired.
In spite of what the average person believes about it, many
investigators - mostly theologians - have been working on this
question for about a thousand years – when they aren’t being burned
at the stake for even asking it. What is ironic is the fact that
most of them have only been seeking closer communion with God by
trying to get closer to the original text “from the Hand of God", so
to say. When one studies literature in a classroom setting, it is
important to also study the life of the author, even if only through
the clues of the literary works under examination.
One is enabled to
see significant connections between the life of the author and the
world that the author is depicting. In terms of the Bible, these
things become crucial. Nevertheless, the fact is, when we are
talking about such “fuzzy” things as religion and history, we
immediately come up against a certain problem. Historians, when
writing about history, not only discuss the theoretical facts that
are being proposed as the timeline, but also the means by which they
arrived at their ideas. Generally, they draw their conclusions about
history by reading “sources”, or earlier accounts of the matter at
hand. In some cases these are eyewitness accounts, in others,
accounts told to a scribe by a witness, and so on.
Historians try to
make a distinction between sources as “primary” and “secondary”. A
primary source is not necessarily an eye-witness account - though it
would be nice if it was - but is defined by historians as one that
cannot be traced back any further and does not seem to depend on
someone else’s account.
Secondary sources are those that are
essentially copies or “re-worked” primary sources. Often, they
consist of material from several sources assembled together with
commentary or additional data.
Well, obviously this could present a problem if the primary source
is completely falsified.
Primary sources can legitimately require interpretation and
assessment; this is the role of a good secondary source, providing
the distinction between source and interpretation is made clear.
Indeed secondary sources - analyses - are vital to the average
reader who may not have the necessary linguistic, historical and
cultural background to assess the primary sources. But, all too
often, historians deal with their sources exactly as J. K. Huysmans
has described:
Events are for a man of talent nothing but a spring-board of ideas
and style, since they are all mitigated or aggravated according to
the needs of a cause or according to the temperament of the writer
who handles them.
As far as documents which support them are concerned, it is even
worse, since none of them is irreducible and all are reviewable. If
they are not just apocryphal, other no less certain documents can be
unearthed later which contradict them, waiting in turn to be
devalued by the unearthing of yet other no less certain archives.
[Huysmans,
1891, Ch II].
In the early years of the 20th century,
M. M. Mangasarian, a former
Congregationalist and Presbyterian Minister, who studied at
Princeton Theological Seminary, and very early in his life renounced
his Christian affiliation to pursue a remarkable career as a
proponent of Free Thought wrote:
The Bible is an Extraordinary Book: A book which claims
infallibility; which aspires to absolute authority over mind and
body; which demands unconditional surrender to all its pretensions
upon penalty of eternal damnation, is an extraordinary book and
should, therefore, be subjected to extraordinary tests.
But it
isn’t.
Neither Christian priests nor Jewish rabbis approve of applying to
the bible the same tests by which other books are tried.
Why?
Because it will help the bible? It cannot be that.
Because it might hurt the bible? We can think of no other reason.
The Truth is that The Bible is:
A Collection of Writings of Unknown
Date and Authorship Rendered into English From Supposed Copies of
Supposed Originals unfortunately Lost.245
Recently, Richard Dawkins,
author of the Blind Watchmaker, suggested that religion was a virus.
Dawkins argued that the widespread presence of religion - despite its
lack of obvious benefits - suggests that it was not an evolutionary
adaptation. [...] Society provides a breeding ground for the “virus”
of religion by labeling children with the religion of their parents.
Children, in turn, absorb these beliefs because they are conditioned
to do so.
Though it is universal, Dawkins said, religion is not widely
beneficial. Rejecting the theory of many of his contemporaries,
Dawkins argued that religion has not helped people to adapt or to
survive.
Beyond acting as a source of solace, religion provides no
protection against diseases or physical threats.
“A person who is faced with a lion is not put at ease when he’s told
that it’s a
rabbit”, Dawkins said.
Religion, in Dawkins’ view, not only provides
false
comfort - it is actively divisive and harmful. Designated as Christians or
Muslims
by their parents, children are apt to face the discrimination
associated with these
labels, Dawkins said. Dawkins pointed to the example of Protestant
fundamentalists
in Belfast spitting at young Catholic girls merely because their
parents labeled them
Catholic. 246
245 The Bible Unveiled, M.M.
Mangasarian, 1911; Chicago: Independent Religious Society
246 ASYA
TROYCHANSKY, Harvard Crimson, Thursday, November 20, 2003
Dawkins is right in many respects. Even if I do not agree with his
ideas that
promote existence as solely the consequence of the “accidental
mechanicalness of
the universe”, I have to say that he has zeroed in on the crucial
element of religion - or cult - as it is known in our day: that it is a virus, and a
deadly one at that.
One thing that Dawkins said that I disagree with
is,
“A person who is faced with a lion is not put at ease when he’s
told that it’s a rabbit”.
As it happens, that is exactly the problem
we face when we consider our reality. Many people are “put at ease”
by being told that the lion is a rabbit. It doesn’t help them to
survive, or to solve the problems of humanity, but it distracts
their attention away from asking uncomfortable questions about our
reality that the Powers That Be do not want them to ask.
As to why
people believe the lies of the Monotheistic Cults, Dawkins points
out rather succinctly that religion is a societal norm that stems
from children’s psychological tendencies.
“It is their unique
obedience that makes them vulnerable to viruses and worms”, Dawkins
said.
Their unique obedience. Religion is a form of coercing obedience a
la Machiavelli.
As the reader might know,247 I spent a number of years as a hypnotherapist as part of my search for answers in the “realm of
mind”. That work gave me a unique perspective on just about every
other branch of study I have followed since. The main thing I
learned from this is that most, if not all, human perspective is
rooted in emotional thinking. Emotions have a curious tendency to
“frame” and “color” what we see, experience and remember so that
what we think becomes, very often, a matter of “wishful thinking”.
247 See: St. Petersburg Times Magazine section on February 13, 2000
for a 20-page article on my work as a hypnotherapist and exorcist,
written by Pulitzer Prize winner, Thomas French.
The problem with the subject of the Bible and History is that there
are so many fields that can contribute data - archaeology,
paleontology, geology, linguistics, and so forth - these types of
things provide DATA, which are discarded in favor of “wishful
thinking”.
On the other side we have mythology and history. They
are, unfortunately, quite similar because, as it is well known, the
“victors write history”. And people are prone to do many evil deeds
in difficult situations, which they later wish to cover up in order
to present themselves in a more positive light for posterity.
The oldest extant texts of the Old Testament in Hebrew are those
found at Qumran which date only to two or three centuries before
Christ. The oldest version before the Qumran texts were discovered
was a Greek translation from about the same period!
The earliest
complete Hebrew text dates only from the tenth century AD! Something
is wrong with this picture.
It is generally believed from textual analysis, that a very small
part of the Old Testament was written about 1000 BC and the
remainder about 600 BC. The Bible, as we know it, is the result of
many changes throughout centuries and is contradictory in so many
ways we don’t have space to catalog them all!
There are entire
libraries of books devoted to this subject, and I recommend that the
reader have a look at the material in order to have some foundation
upon which to judge the things I am going to say.
Biblical scholars generally date Abraham to about 1800 - 1700 BC.
The same scholars date Moses to 1300 or 1250 BC. However, if we
track the generations as listed in the Bible, we find that there are
only seven generations between and including these two patriarchal
figures! Four hundred years is a bit long for seven generations.
Allowing 35 to 40 years per generation, places Abraham at about 1550
BC and Moses at about 1300 BC. This obviously means that there are a
few hundred years not accounted for in the text.
Tracking back to
Noah, using the generations listed in the Bible, one arrives at a
date of about 2000 to 1900 BC - about the time of the arrival of the
Indo-Europeans into the Near East. The geological and archaeological
records do not support a cataclysm at that time, though what could
be described as a global discontinuity of cataclysmic elements is
supported right around 12,000 years ago. In this case, we have lost
8,000 years, give or take a day.
In a more general sense, using the Bible as historical source
material presents a number of very serious problems, most
particularly when we consider the “mythicization” factor.
There are
many contradictions in the text that cannot be reconciled by
standard theological mental contortionism. In some places, events
are described as happening in a certain order, and later the Bible
will say that those events happened in a different order. In one
place, the Bible will say that there is two of something, and in
another it will say that there were 14 of the same thing.
On one
page, the Bible will say that the Moabites did something, and then a
few pages later; it will say that the Midianites did exactly the
same thing. There is even an instance in which Moses is described as
going to the Tabernacle before Moses built the Tabernacle! (I guess
Moses was a time traveler!)
There are things in the Pentateuch that pose other problems: it
includes things that Moses could not have known if he lived when he
is claimed to have lived. And, there is one case in which Moses said
something he could not have said: the text gives an account of
Moses’ death, which it is hardly likely that Moses described. The
text also states that Moses was the humblest man on earth! Well, as
one commentator noted, it is not likely that the humblest man on
earth would point out that he is the humblest man on earth!
All of these problems were taken care of for most of the past two
thousand years by
the Inquisition, which also took care of
the Cathars and anybody else who did not follow the
Party Line of Judao-Christianity.
For the Jews, the contradictions were not contradictions; they were
only “apparent contradictions”!
They could all be explained by
“interpretation”! (Usually, these interpretations were more
fantastic than the problems, I might add.) Moses was able to “know
things he couldn’t have known” because he was a prophet! The
medieval biblical commentators, such as Rashi and Nachmanides, were
very skillful in reconciling the irreconcilable!
In the 11th century, a real troublemaker, Isaac ibn Yashush, a
Jewish court physician in Muslim Spain, mentioned the distressing
fact that a list of Edomite kings that appears in Genesis 36 named a
few kings who lived long after Moses was already dead. Ibn Yashush
suggested the obvious, that someone who lived after Moses wrote the
list. He became known as “Isaac the Blunderer”.
The guy who
memorialized clever Isaac this way was a fellow named Abraham ibn
Ezra, a 12th century rabbi in Spain. But Ibn Ezra presents us with a
paradox because he also wrote
about problems in the text of the Torah.
He alluded to several
passages that appeared not to be from Moses’ own hand because they
referred to Moses in the third person, used terms Moses would not
have known, described places that Moses had never been, and used
language that belonged to an altogether different time and place
than the milieu of Moses.
He wrote, very mysteriously,
“And if you
understand, then you will recognize the truth. And he who
understands will keep silent”.
So, why did he call Ibn Yashush a “Blunderer”? Obviously because the
guy had to open his big mouth and give away the secret that the
Torah was not what it was cracked up to be, and if the truth got
out, lots of folks who were totally “into” the Jewish mysticism
business would lose interest.
And keeping the interest of the
students and seekers after power was a pretty big business in that
day and time. More than that, however, we would like to note that
the entire Christian mythos was predicated upon the validity of
Judaism, being its “New Covenant”, and even if there was apparent
conflict between Jews and Christians, the Christians most
desperately needed to validate Judaism and its claim to be the
revelation to the “chosen people” of the One True God.
It was on
that basis that Jesus was the Son of God, after all. In short, it
could even be said that Christianity created Judaism in the sense
that it would have faded to obscurity long ago if there had not been
the infusion of validating energy during the Dark Ages.
In 14th century Damascus, a scholar by the name of Bonfils wrote a
work in which he said,
“And this is evidence that this verse was
written in the Torah later, and Moses did not write it”.
He wasn’t
even denying the “revealed” character of the Torah, just making a
reasonable comment. Three hundred years later, his work was
reprinted with this comment edited out!
In the 15th century, Tostatus, Bishop of Avila, also pointed out
that Moses couldn’t have written the passages about the death of
Moses. In an effort to soften the blow, he added that there was an
“old tradition” that Joshua, Moses successor, wrote this part of the
account. A hundred years later, Luther Carlstadt commented that this
was difficult to believe because the account of Moses’ death is
written in the same style as the text that precedes it.
Well, of course, things were beginning to be examined more
critically with the arrival of Protestantism on the world stage and
the demand for wider availability of the text itself. The
Inquisition and assorted “Catholic Majesties” tried, but failed, to
keep a complete grip on the matter. But, it’s funny what belief will
do. In this case, with the increase in literacy and new and better
translations of the text, “critical examination” led to the decision
that the problem was solvable by claiming that, yes, Moses wrote the
Torah, but editors went over them later and added an occasional word
or phrase of their own!
Wow. Glad we solved that one!
A really funny thing is that the Catholic Index blacklisted one of
the proponents of this idea of editorial insertions, who was only
trying to preserve the textus receptus status of the Bible. His work
was put on the list of “prohibited books”!
Those guys just kept
shooting themselves in the foot.
Well, finally, after hundreds of years of tiptoeing around this
issue, some scholars came right out and said that Moses didn’t write
the majority of the Pentateuch. The first to say it was Thomas
Hobbes. He pointed out that the text sometimes states that this or that is so to this day.
The problem with this is that a writer describing a contemporary
situation would not describe it as something that has endured for a
very long time, “to this day”.
Isaac de la Peyrère, a French Calvinist, noted that the first verse
of the book of Deuteronomy says,
“These are the words that Moses
spoke to the children of Israel across the Jordan...”.
The problem
was that the words meant to refer to someone who is on the other
side of the Jordan from the writer. This means that the verse
amounts to the words of someone who is west of the Jordan at the
time of writing, who is describing what Moses said to the children
of Israel on the east of the Jordan. The problem is exacerbated
because Moses himself was never supposed to have been in Israel in
his life.
De la Peyrère’s book was banned and burned. He was arrested and told
that the conditions of his release were conversion to Catholicism
and recanting his views. Apparently he perceived discretion as the
better part of valor. Considering how often this sort of thing
occurred, we have to wonder about the “sanctity” of a text which is
preserved by threat and torture and bloodshed.
Not too long after this, Baruch Spinoza, the famous philosopher,
published what amounted to a real rabble rousing critical analysis.
He claimed that the problem passages in the Bible were not isolated
cases that could be solved one by one as “editorial insertions”. but
were rather a pervasive evidence of a third person account. He also
pointed out that the text says in Deuteronomy 34 “There never arose
another prophet in Israel like Moses....”.
Spinoza suggested, quite
rightly, that these were the words of a person who lived a long time
after Moses and had had the opportunity to make comparisons. One
commentator points out that they also don’t sound like the words of
the “humblest man on earth”!248
Spinoza was really living
dangerously because he wrote,
“It is […] clearer than the sun at
noon that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, but by someone
who lived long after Moses”.249
248 Friedman,
Richard Elliot, Who Wrote the Bible, (New York: Harper & Row 1987).
249
Quoted by Friedman.
Spinoza had already been
excommunicated from Judaism; now, he was in pretty hot water with
the Catholics and Protestants! Naturally, his book was placed on the
“prohibited books” list, and a whole slew of edicts were issued
against it. What is even more interesting is that an attempt was
made to assassinate him! The lengths to which people will go to
preserve their belief in lies are astonishing.
A converted Protestant who had become a Catholic priest, Richard
Simon, undertook to refute Spinoza and wrote a book saying that
Moses wrote the core of the Pentateuch, but there were “some
additions”. Nevertheless, these additions were clearly done by
scribes who were under the guidance of God or the Holy
Spirit, so it was okay for them to collect, arrange and elaborate on
the text. It was still God in charge here.
Well, you’d think the Church would know when it was ahead. But,
nope!
Simon was attacked and expelled from his order by his fellow
Catholics. Forty refutations of his work were written by
Protestants. Only six copies of his book survived burning.
John
Hampden translated one of these, getting himself into pretty hot
water. He,
“repudiated the opinions he had held in common with Simon
[...] in 1688, probably shortly before his release from the
tower”.250
250 Ibid.
In the 18th century, three independent scholars were
dealing with the problem of “doublets”, or stories that are told two
or more times in the Bible. There are two different stories of the
creation of the world. There are two stories of the covenant between
God and Abraham. There are two stories of the naming of Abraham’s
son Isaac, two stories of Abraham’s claiming to a foreign king that
his wife is his sister, two stories of Isaac’s son Jacob making a
journey to Mesopotamia, two stories of a revelation to Jacob at
Beth-El, two stories of God changing Jacob’s name to Israel, two
stories of Moses’ getting water from a rock at Meribah, and on and
on.
Those who simply could not let go of the a priori belief that Moses
wrote the Pentateuch, tried to claim that these doublets were always
complimentary, not repetitive nor contradictory. Sometimes they had
to really stretch this idea to say that they were supposed to
“teach” us something by their contradictions that are “not really
contradictions”.
This explanation, however, didn’t hold up against another fact: in
most cases one of the two versions of a doublet would refer to the
deity by the divine name,
Yahweh, and the other would refer to the
deity simply as “God”, or “El”.
What this meant was that there were
two groups of parallel versions of the same stories, and each group
was almost always consistent about the name of the deity it used.
Not only that, there were various other terms and characteristics
that regularly appeared in one or the other line of stories, and
what this demonstrated was that someone had taken two different old
source documents and had done a cut and paste job on them to make a
“continuous” narrative.
Well, of course, at first it was thought that one of the two source
documents must be one that Moses had used as a source for the story
of creation and the rest was Moses himself writing! But, it was
ultimately to be concluded that both of the two sources had to be
from writers who lived after Moses. By degrees, Moses was being
eliminated almost entirely from the authorship of the Pentateuch!
Simon’s idea that scribes had collected, arranged and elaborated on
the textus receptus was, finally, going in the right direction.
I would like to note right here that this was not happening because
somebody came along and said, “hey, let’s trash the Bible”! Nope. It
was happening because there were glaring problems, and each and
every researcher working on this throughout the centuries was
struggling mightily to retain the textus receptus status of the
Bible!
The only exception to this that I have mentioned in this
whole chain of events is our curious guy Abraham ibn Ezra, who KNEW
about problems in the text of the Torah in the 12th century and
enjoined others to silence!
Remember what he said?
“And if you
understand, then you will recognize the truth. And he who
understands will keep silent.”
What do we see as the result of this
silence? Over eight hundred years of Crusades, the Inquisition, and
general suppression, and in our present day, the wars between the
Israelis and Palestinians based on the claim that Israel is the
Promised Land, and that it “belongs” to the Jews. Which brings us to
another startling bit of information.
The great Jewish scholar, Rashi de Troyes, (1040-1105), makes the
astonishingly frank statement that the Genesis narrative, going back
to the creation of the world, was written to justify what we might
now call genocide. The God of Israel, who gave his people the
Promised Land, had to be unequivocally supreme so that neither the
dispossessed Canaanites nor anyone else could ever appeal against
his decrees.251
251 Ashe,
Geoffrey, The Book of Prophecy, (Blandford, London 1999) p. 27.
Rashi’s precise words were that God told us the
creation story and included it in the Torah,
“to tell his people
that they can answer those who claim that the Jews stole the land
from its original inhabitants. The reply should be; God made it and
gave it to them but then took it and gave it to us. As he made it
and it’s his, he can give it to whoever he chooses”.
The fact is, the Jews are still saying this, with the support of
many Christian Fundamentalists whose beliefs are being pandered to
by George Bush and his purported Christian cronies for their own
imperialist and economic motives. This leads us to another
interesting point: the establishing of “one God” over and above any
and all other Gods, is an act of violence no matter how you look at
it.
In The Curse of Cain, Regina Schwartz writes about the
relationship between Monotheism and Violence, positing that
Monotheism itself is the root of violence:
Collective Identity, which is a result of a covenant of Monotheism,
is explicitly narrated in the Bible as an invention, a radical break
with Nature. A transcendent deity breaks into history with the
demand that the people he constitutes obey the law he institutes,
and first and foremost among those laws is, of course, that they
pledge allegiance to him, and him alone, and that this is what makes
them a unified people as opposed to the ‘other’, as in all other
people, which leads to violence. In the Old Testament, vast numbers
of ‘other’ people are obliterated, while in the New
Testament, vast numbers are colonized and converted for the sake of
such
covenants.252
Schwartz also writes about the idea of the “provisional” nature of a
covenant: that it is conditional.
“Believe in me and obey me or else
I will destroy you.”
Doesn’t sound like there is any choice, does
there? And we find ourselves in the face of a pure and simple Nazi Theophany.
In the 19th century, Biblical scholars figured out that there were
not just two major sources in the Pentateuch; there were, in fact,
four. It was realized that the first four books were not just
doublets, but there were also triplets that converged with other
characteristics and contradictions leading to the identification of
another source. Then, it was realized that Deuteronomy was a
separate source altogether. More than that, there was not just the
problem of the original source documents, there was the problem of
the work of the “mysterious editor”.
Thus, after years of suffering,
bloodshed and death over the matter, it was realized that somebody
had “created” what Westerners know as the Old Testament by
assembling four different source documents in an attempt to create a
“continuous” history, designated at different times as Torah, as
well as additional “edited” documents. After much further analysis,
it was concluded that most of the laws and much of the narrative of
the Pentateuch were not even part of the time of Moses.
And, that
meant that it couldn’t have been written by Moses at all. More than
that, the writing of the different sources was not even that of
persons who lived during the days of the kings and prophets, but
were evidentially products of writers who lived toward the end of
the biblical period!
Many scholars just couldn’t bear the results of their own work.
A
German scholar who had identified the Deuteronomy source exclaimed
that such a view,
“suspended the beginnings of Hebrew history not
upon the grand creations of Moses, but upon airy nothings”.
Other
scholars realized that what this meant was that the picture of
biblical Israel as a nation governed by laws based on the Abrahamic
and Mosaic covenants was completely false. I expect that such a
realization may have contributed to a suicide or two; it most
definitely led to a number of individuals leaving the field of
Theology and textual criticism altogether.
Another way of putting their conclusions was that the Bible claimed
a history for the first 600 years of Israel that probably never
existed. It was all a lie.253
252 Schwartz, Regina M., The Curse of
Cain, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1997).
253 Of
course, by now the reader has realized that it is not really a
“lie,” properly speaking. It is just a highly mythicized account of
the doings of some people in a certain historical context. But after
the mythicization, and the imposition of the belief in the myth as
the reality, as well as the passage of a couple of thousand years,
figuring out who is who and who really did what is problematical at
best.
Well, they couldn’t handle this. After years of being conditioned to
believe in an upcoming “End of the World”, with Jehovah or Christ as
saviors of the chosen during this dreaded event, the terror of their
condition, that there might not be a “savior”, was just too awful to
bear. So along came the cavalry – Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) - to
the rescue.
Wellhausen synthesized all of the discoveries so as to preserve the
belief systems of the religious scholars. He amalgamated the view
that the religion of Israel had developed in three stages with the
view that the documents were also written in three stages, and then
he defined these stages based on the content of the “stage.” He
tracked the characteristics of each stage, examining the way in
which the different documents expressed religion, the clergy, the
sacrifices and places of worship as well as the religious holidays.
He considered the legal and narrative sections and the other books
of the Bible. In the end, he provided a “believable framework” for
the development of Jewish history and religion.
The first stage was
the “nature/fertility” period; the second was “spiritual/ethical”
period; and the last was the “priestly/legal” period. As Friedman
notes,
“To this day, if you want to disagree, you disagree with Wellhausen. If you want to pose a new model, you compare its merits
with those of Wellhausen’s model”.254
254 Friedman, op. cit.,
pp. 26-7.
I should also note at this
point, that even though Wellhausen was trying to save the buns of
Judaism and Christianity from the fire, he was not appreciated in
his own time. A professor of Old Testament, William Robertson Smith,
who taught at the Free Church of Scotland College at Aberdeen, and
who was the editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica, was put on trial
before the church on the charge of heresy for promoting the work of Wellhausen. He was cleared, but the tag “the wicked bishop” followed
him to his grave.
Nevertheless, analysis of the Bible has proceeded. The book of
Isaiah was traditionally thought to have been written by the prophet
Isaiah who lived in the eighth century BC. As it happens, most of
the first half of this book fits such a model. But, chapters 40
through 66 are apparently written by someone who lived about 200
years later! This means that, in terms of “prophecy”, it was written
after the fact.
New tools and methods of our modern time have made it possible to do
some really fine work in the areas of linguistic analysis and
relative chronology of the material. Additionally, there has been a
veritable archaeological frenzy since Wellhausen! This
archaeological work has produced an enormous amount of information
about Egypt, Mesopotamia, and other regions surrounding Israel,
which includes clay tablets, inscriptions on the walls of tombs,
temples and habitations, and even papyri.
Here we find another
problem: in all the collected sources, both Egyptian and west Asian,
there are virtually no references to Israel,
its “famous people” and
founders, its Biblical associates, or anything else prior to the
12th century BC. And the fact is, for 400 years after that, no more
than half a dozen allusions can be deduced. And they are
questionable in context. Yet the fundamentalist Orthodox Jews cling
to these tattered references like straws in the hands of a drowning
man. Oddly, the Fundamentalist Christians just simply close off any
awareness to the entire matter by the simple expedient of the
execution of the 11th commandment: thou shalt not ask questions!
The problem of the lack of outside validation of the existence of
Israel as a sovereign nation in the area of Palestine finds
correspondence in the Bible itself. The Bible displays absolutely no
knowledge of Egypt or the Levant during the 2nd millennium BC. The
Bible says nothing about the Egyptian empire spreading over the
entire eastern Mediterranean (which it did); there is no mention of
the great Egyptian armies on the march (which they were); and no
mention of marching Hittites moving against the Egyptians (which
they did); and especially no mention of Egyptianized kinglets ruling
Canaanite cities (which was the case).
The great and disastrous
invasion of the Sea Peoples during the second millennium is not even
mentioned in the Bible. In fact, Genesis described the Philistines
as already settled in the land of Canaan at the time of Abraham! The
names of the great Egyptian kings are completely absent from the
Bible. In other places, historical figures that were not heroic have
been transformed by the Bible into heroes as in the case of the Hyksos Sheshy (Num. 13:22). In another case, the sobriquet of
Ramesses II is given to a Canaanite general in error.
The Egyptian
king who was supposed to assist Hosea in his rebellion of 2 Kings
17:4 has “suffered the indignity” of having his city given as his
name. The Pharaoh Shabtaka turns up in the Table of Nations in
Genesis 10:7 as a Nubian tribe!
The errors of confirmed history and
archaeology pile higher and higher the more one learns about the
actual times and places, so that the idea that comes to mind again
and again is that the writers of the Bible must have lived in the
7th and 6th centuries BC, or later, and knew almost nothing about
the events of only a few generations before them. Donald B. Redford,
Professor of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Toronto, has
published extensively on archaeology and Egyptology.
Regarding the
use of the Bible as a historical source, he writes:
For the standard scholarly approach to the history of Israel during
the United Monarchy amounts to nothing more than a bad attack of
academic ‘wishful thinking’. We have these glorious narratives in
the books of Samuel and 1st Kings, so well written and ostensibly
factual. What a pity if rigorous historical criticism forces us to
discard them and not use them. Let us, then, press them into service
–what else have we? – and let the burden of proof fall on others.[…]
While one might be unwise to impute crypto-fundamentalist motives,
the current fashion of treating the sources at face value as
documents written up in large part in the court of Solomon, arises
from an equally misplaced desire to rehabilitate the faith and undergird it with any arguments, however fallacious.[…]
Such
ignorance is puzzling if one has felt inclined to be impressed by
the traditional claims of inerrancy made by conservative
Christianity on behalf of the Bible. And indeed the Pentateuch and
the historical books boldly present a precise chronology that would
carry the Biblical narrative through the very period when the
ignorance and discrepancy prove most embarrassing. […]
Such manhandling of the evidence smacks of prestidigitation and
numerology; yet it has produced the shaky foundations on which a
lamentable number of “histories” of Israel have been written. Most
are characterized by a somewhat naive acceptance of sources at face
value coupled with failure to assess the evidence as to its origin
and reliability. The result was the reduction of all data to a
common level, any or all being grist for a wide variety of mills.
Scholars expended substantial effort on questions that they had
failed to prove were valid questions at all. Under what dynasty did
Joseph rise to power? Who was the Pharaoh of the Oppression? Of the
Exodus? Can we identify the princess who drew Moses out of the
river? Where did the Israelites make their exit from Egypt: via the
Wady Tumilat or by a more northerly point?
One can appreciate the pointlessness of these questions if one poses
similar questions of the Arthurian stories, without first submitting
the text to a critical evaluation. Who were the consuls of Rome when
Arthur drew the sword from the stone? Where was Merlin born?
Can one seriously envisage a classical historian pondering whether
it was Iarbas or Aeneas that was responsible for Dido’s suicide,
where exactly did Remus leap over the wall, what really happened to
Romulus in the thunderstorm, and so forth? In all these imagined
cases none of the material initially prompting the questions has in
any way undergone a prior evaluation as to how historical it is! And
any scholar who exempts any part of his sources from critical
evaluation runs the risk of invalidating some or all of his
conclusions.[…]
Too often “Biblical” in this context has had the limiting effect on
scholarship by implying the validity of studying Hebrew culture and
history in isolation. What is needed rather is a view of ancient
Israel within its true Near Eastern context, and one that will
neither exaggerate nor denigrate Israel’s actual place within that
setting.255
255 Redford, Donald B., Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times,
(Princeton: Princeton University Press 1992), pp. 301, 258, 260-1,
263. (Italics ours)
Please take careful note of Redford’s comment:
“any
scholar who exempts any part of his sources from critical evaluation
runs the risk of invalidating some or all of his conclusions”.
The
seriousness of this cannot be understated. You see, people have died
by the millions because of this book called The Bible and the
beliefs of those who study it. And they are dying today in
astonishing numbers for the same reasons!
In the end, if those who read and/or analyze this book and come to
some particular belief about it are wrong, and they then impose this
belief upon millions of other people, who are then influenced to
create a culture and a reality based upon a false belief, and in the
end, it is wrong, what in the name of God is going on? (No pun
intended!)
The problem with using the Bible as history is the lack of secondary
sources.
There is considerable material from the various ancient
libraries prior to the 10th century BC, “grist for the historian’s
mill”, but these sources fall silent almost completely at the close
of the 20th dynasty in Egypt. Thus, the Bible, being pretty much the
only source that claims to cover this particular period, becomes
quite seductive; never mind that the archaeology doesn’t really
“fit”, or can only be made to fit with a large helping of assumption
or closing of the mind to other possibilities.
But, might there be a reason for this silence of other sources?
That’s one good question about “what is”.
The person who is using the Bible as history is forced, when all
emotion is taken out of the picture, to admit that he has no means
of checking the historical veracity of the Biblical texts. As Donald
Redford noted above, the scholars who admit, when pressed, that
rigorous historical criticism forces us to discard the Biblical
narratives, nevertheless will use them saying “what else do we
have”? Again, I ask: why?
In older times, we know that the many books written about the Bible
as history were inspired from a fundamentalist motivation to confirm
the religious “rightness” of Western Civilization. In the present
time, there is less of this factor involved in Biblical Historical
studies. Nevertheless, there is still a tendency to treat these
sources at “face value” by folks who ought to know better! I could
go on about this in some detail, but I think everyone reading this
is with me here in having a clue about what I am saying, even if
they don’t agree.
But, the point is, again, “Who wrote the Bible and
why?”.
We come back to that curious assertion of Rashi’s that the Genesis
narrative was written to justify genocide. If we put that together
with Umberto Eco’s implication in his book, The Search for The
Perfect Language, that validation of the Hebrew Bible was supported
by early Christian scholars primarily to validate Judaism, which was
necessary in order to then “validate” Christianity as the “one true
religion”, we begin to get the uneasy feeling that we have been
“had”.
What this amounts to is that we are all “Christian” so that
the “rights” of the Jews, the unappealable decrees of
Jehovah/Yahweh, could be “inherited” by the Christian
Church as
instituted for political reasons by Constantine!
Nevertheless, by
the very act of validating Judaism, and “creating” Christianity in
the form of the Egyptian religion, the Western world, in its greed
for power, may very well have taken a tiger by the tail.
During this very period when the New Testament came into being,
(incorporating some older texts, based on internal evidence, but
highly edited and mostly a “cut and paste” job), we find the Western
world in the midst of the dark ages from which, again, very few
secondary sources survived.
Isn’t that strange?!
The Old Testament is written about a Dark Age,
though a few hundred years after it, and the New Testament is
written about a Dark Age, also a few hundred years after it. Both of
them incorporate some probably valid stories though mostly they are
edited, cut and pasted, with a lot of glossing and interpolation
from the perspective of a definite “political” agenda. Do we see a
pattern here? Could there be a reason?
At the end of it all, what we observe is a basically Draconian,
monotheistic system in place over most of the globe. It is the
wellspring from which nearly every aspect of our society is drawn.
It has been the justification for the greatest series of bloodbaths
in “recorded” history. Could there be a reason for this? Considering
this, one would think that the knowledge of who wrote the Bible, and
when they probably did it, would be considered crucial to anyone who
wishes to be better equipped to make decisions of faith and belief
upon which every aspect of their lives may depend.
As we have already discovered, what began as a search for answers
about the puzzling contradictory passages in the Pentateuch led to
the idea that Moses didn’t write them. This then led to the
discovery that several widely divergent sources were combined into
one, and that even this was done at different times, in different
ways. Each of the sources is clearly identifiable by characteristics
of language and content. New breakthroughs in archaeology and our
understanding of the social and political world of the time have
helped enormously in our understanding of the milieu in which this
document was created. Because, in the end, the Bible’s history is
really the history of the Jews.
The Old Testament is a book that is a combination of several
sources, J (Yahweh), E(lohim), D(euteronomy), P(riestly) and the
final editor who combined all of these and added his own touches.
It is theorized, based on the evidence, that the E version was
written by a Levite priest advocate of the Mosaic line of priests at
Shiloh, and J was written by an advocate of the Aaronic line of
priests and the Davidic royal house at Jerusalem. The conclusion is
that they were each written down from oral sources of myth and
legend with some history mixed in after the purported split of the
two kingdoms, and then recombined after the Syrian conquest during
the reign of Hezekiah.
However, it is also entirely likely that
there never was a united kingdom of Israel in Palestine, but that
these stories of a great kingdom were tribal memories of something
else altogether. The author of J is estimated to have lived between
848 and 722 BC and the author of E between 922 and 722 BC. Thus it
is that E is probably the older document and J represented either a
different perspective, or changes that were added.
In the Bible, the story of the unification of the tribes of Israel
under David, followed by the great reign of Solomon, followed by
schism in the reign of Solomon’s son Rehoboam, is the central theme.
The “hope of Israel” is based on the idea of reunification of Judah
and Israel under a Davidic king. Of course, all of this is based on
the giving of the land to the Children of Israel when they were
“brought out of Egypt” by the hand of God during the Exodus to begin
with. Moses represents the divinely inspired leader who revealed the
God of the patriarchs to the nation as the “Universal Deity”. Does
the testimony of the spade support the Exodus on either side of the
story?
The Exodus story describes how a nation enslaved grows great in
exile and then, with the help of the Universal God, claims its
freedom from what was then the greatest nation on earth: Egypt.
Powerful imagery, yes? Indeed! So important is this story of
liberation that fully four-fifths of the central scriptures of
Israel are devoted to it.
The fact is: two hundred years of intensive excavations and study of
the remains
of ancient Egypt and Palestine have failed to support the Exodus
story in the
context in which it is presented.256
256 Ibid.
The House of David
From the earliest times, Israel was composed of a poorly
distinguished and variable number of “city-states” (more like tribal
towns) whose population was a melting pot from all areas of the
Mediterranean. The specific location that is identified as Israel
proper was a more or less backward, rural buffer zone between the
civilized Syrians and the nomads of Arabia.
The “culture” of this
region was a mixture of the advanced cultures surrounding: Egyptian,
Assyrian and Babylonian. These “city states” rose and fell, fighting
each other incessantly. A retrospective view seems to suggest that
acquiring plunder was seen as more productive than agriculture. In
another sense, these petty wars were seen as the conflict between
the Gods of one tribe against the Gods of another. As we will
discover, this concept may not have been too far from the truth.
What about the Kingdom of David and Solomon?
The books of Samuel tell us that the anointing of David, son of
Jesse, as king over all the tribes of Israel was the culmination of
the promises that had begun with the covenant between Abraham and
“God”. Never mind that the first choice for king had been the heroic
and dashing Saul from the tribe of Benjamin, it was David who became
the “folk hero” of early Israelite history.
The endless stories in praise of King David were claimed by the
Bible to be so widespread that it passes understanding how they were
not known in the “external world” of Egypt, Greece, Assyria and
Babylon - if they were true. But, as we will discover, perhaps they
were - under a different name and title. The only question is: which
versions are the most accurate? Did the Hebrews co-opt these stories
to their own “history”, or was there something about their history
that was borrowed by the later sources? And in either case, what is
the actual historical setting of these stories? Were they an overlay
of myth on an actual historical series of events?
Or was a
historical series of events manufactured out of myth? In any event,
just as Perseus slew the Gorgon and cut off her head, David slew the
giant, Goliath. They both had “wallets” and “stones” were important
elements of both stories. David was “adopted” into the royal court
because he was a famous harpist and singer in the manner of Orpheus.
Like Hercules and other Greek heroes, David was a rebel and
freebooter, and like Paris stole Helen, he stole another man’s wife - Bathsheba. He also conquered the great citadel of Jerusalem and a
vast empire beyond.
The stories of David’s son and heir (from Bathsheba), Solomon, tell
us that he was the wisest of all kings. He was also the greatest of
all builders. The stories tell how he was so brilliant and how his
judgments stand as a model for all time. What is more, his wealth
was beyond anything else in the known world, and most particularly,
he constructed the great Temple in Jerusalem.
For millennia, readers of the Bible have discussed the days of David
and Solomon in Israel as though they actually occurred exactly as
described. Even people who are not Christian accept that the Temple
of Solomon existed, and the plan of this temple has been developed
and discussed endlessly by esotericists for centuries. Endless books
and legends and secret doctrines have been based on the stories of
the Temple of Solomon. Pilgrims, Crusaders, visionaries and even
many modern-day books about human origins and the origins of
Christianity, have all spread fabulous stories about the
magnificence of David’s city and Solomon’s Temple and the supposed
treasures contained within.
Our entire Western culture has a heavy,
vested interest in these stories being true. What are we going to do
with this vast body of literature, including such things as Masonic
and Magical lore if it turns out that there never was a “Temple of
Solomon”?
But, the fact is, that seems to be the case. At least, there was no
Temple of Solomon in the terms described in the Bible.
One of the first quests of archaeologists in Palestine was the
search for the remains of Solomon’s Temple and the great empire of
David. It would be tedious to go through all the descriptions of the
many excavations, the results, the assumptions, the wild claims of
“I’ve found something that proves it!”, which were then followed by
sober science demonstrating that it wasn’t so. The reader who is
interested in deeper knowledge in this area can certainly read both
sides of the argument, and then look at the scientific evidence and
come to the same conclusion we have: The Kingdom of David and the
Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem never existed as described by the
Bible.
Even though there were remains of some sort of “kingdom” found at
Megiddo, Gezer and Hazor, it was later determined that this “empire”
was actually something altogether different than might initially be
supposed as we shall soon see.257
257 Finkelstein,
Israel, and Silberstein, Neil Asher; The Bible Unearthed, (New York:
The Free Press 2001).
What is important, however, is the
fact that the area that was specifically claimed as the “homeland”
of David and Solomon - Judah - was “conspicuously undeveloped”
during the time of the purported empire of Solomon. The facts are
that the culture of this region was extremely simple. Based on the
evidence of the spade, the land was rural - with no trace of written
documents, inscriptions, or even any signs of the kind of widespread
literacy that would be necessary for a functioning monarchy. What is
more, the area was not even homogeneous.
There
is no evidence of any kind of
unified culture, nor of any sort of central administration. The area
from Jerusalem to the north was densely settled, and the area from
Jerusalem to the south, the land “in question”, was very sparsely
settled in the time that David and Solomon were supposed to have
lived. In fact, Jerusalem itself was little more than a typical
highland village.
Archaeologically, nothing can be said about David
and Solomon. Yet the legend endured. Why? The important thing to
remember at this point is the fact that the evidence supports only a
gradual emergence of a distinct group in Canaan at the end of the
thirteenth century BC, not a sudden arrival of a vast number of
Israelite settlers.
And, as noted, the ones who were present in the
land were not very organized or “civilized” in the area that was
claimed as the great kingdom of David and Solomon.
Ahab and Jezebel: Solomon and Sheba?
Biblical historians and biblical archaeologists have long attempted
to take the biblical account of the rise and fall of the united
monarchy at face value. They have assumed an original ethnic unity
and distinctiveness of the Hebrew people reaching into the primeval
past. They took for granted that the united monarchy of David and
Solomon, and its tragic collapse, were facts belonging to Israel in
terms of the land of Palestine at a particular period in time.
Further, it was assumed that, since Judah and Israel, the two
kingdoms, had originally been one, when they split, they both
inherited fully formed institutions of church and state. At that
point, they were believed to have engaged in competition with one
another on a more or less equal footing.
However, intensive archaeological work in the hill country of Israel
in the 1980s put those ideas to rest. Curiously, what the
archaeologists found was that there had been three waves of
settlement activity. The first was between 3500-2200 BC. The second
was around 2000-1550 BC. The third was 1150-900 BC. We recognize
these time windows as being previously related to possible
cataclysms.258
258 Baillie, Mike, Exodus to
Arthur (London: B.T. Batsford 1999).
In any event, during these three periods of
settlement activity - periods when new people arrived and left
evidence of a distinct cultural norm, the northern and southern
“kingdoms” always seemed to be separate in these terms. The northern
settlement system was always dense and possessed evidence of complex
hierarchy of large, medium, and small sites. These sites were
heavily dependent on settled agriculture.
The southern “kingdom”, on the other hand, was sparsely settled in
small sites, with only evidence of a population of migratory
pastoral groups. We have, then, a division between agriculturalists
and shepherds right from the beginning.
During the early period of settlement, these northern and southern
regions were each dominated by a single center that was probably the
focus of regional politics, economics, and most likely, cultic
activity. In the north, it was the area that was later occupied by a
city that the Bible calls Tirzah. This became the first capital of
the northern kingdom. In the south, the main center was Ai, located
northeast of Jerusalem.
In the Middle Bronze Age, there was the second wave of settlement,
again, the north was dense and agricultural and the south was sparse - with tiny settlements - and a lot of evidence of wandering
pastoralists. But, by now, the central site of cult and economy was
Jerusalem - a heavily fortified city that gives evidence of being
part of the Hyksos Empire.
This matches Manetho’s account of the
Hyksos leaving Egypt and building a city and temple in Jerusalem.
The only problem is: it’s the wrong date to have been built after
the Hyksos left Egypt, so most archaeologists just assume that there
was a Hyksos presence in Canaan that was contemporary to the Hyksos
in Egypt. Nearby was Hebron; also heavily fortified. In the north,
the center of activity had moved to Shechem. Apparently, Shechem
possessed significant fortifications and a massive temple.
Regarding this particular period of history, there is also external
evidence from Egypt as to who was who and what was what. These
consist of what are called the “Execration Texts”, the Egyptian
version of voodoo. The Egyptians would write curses on clay figures
of their enemies and then smash them and ceremonially bury them. The
idea was, of course, to symbolically smash the object of the curse.
What is important about the Execration Texts is that they give us a
clue as to who the Egyptians felt to be most threatening.
The
Execration Texts mention a large number of coastal and lowland
cities of Canaan, but only two highland centers: Shechem and
Jerusalem.
Keeping in mind the probable link between the Hyksos in Egypt and the Canaanites in Palestine, we can conjecture
why the Egyptians were feeling so hostile toward Shechem and
Jerusalem. The important thing is that the execration texts, which
purportedly date back to at least 1630 BC, mention Jerusalem,
Shechem, and Hazor, but none of them ever mention Israel.
Another
Egyptian inscription, which records the adventures of a general
named Khu-Sebek who led an expedition into the Canaanite highlands,
purportedly in the 19th century BC, refers to the “land of Shechem”,
and compares Shechem to Retenu which is one of the Egyptian names
for all of Canaan. Interestingly, the Egyptians also referred to the
Hyksos as “princes of Retenu”. This indicates that as early as 1800
BC there was a territorial entity in northern Canaan and that an
important center of this territory was Shechem; further, that it did
indeed have a close relationship, at some point, to the Hyksos in
Avaris, and it wasn’t Israel.
The Tell el-Amarna letters confirm that there is, at some point late
in this period,
a southern territory of some significance to Egypt, with the city of
Jerusalem as an
important center. A number of these letters refer to the rulers of
these two citystates - a king named Abdi-Heba who reigned in Jerusalem; and a king named
Labayu who reigned in Shechem. Each of them controlled a territory
of about a thousand square miles. This was the largest area held by
a single local ruler since all the rest of Canaan was divided up
into small city-states. It is also curious to note the similarity of
these names to “Abraham” and “Laban.”
The problem is, as Redford notes, that “one has the sinking feeling
in approaching this period that a most significant page is missing
in the record”. And indeed there is.
The bottom line is: archaeological evidence suggests that despite
the biblical claims of richness and glory, Jerusalem was little more
than a village in the time assigned to David and Solomon. In the
interim, during the “missing page period”, the former fortified city
had long since disappeared. In other words, the northern kingdom
that was supposed to have “broken away” from the rule of Jerusalem
was well on its way to major state status while Judah had been
returned to a condition not unlike a backwater sheep station.
At the same time that the northern highlands were outpacing the
southern highlands during all the three periods of settlement, the
coastal city-states were leaving both of them in the dust. They were
busy, thriving, cosmopolitan, and wealthy. Archaeologists think that
what made possible the initial independence of the highlands was the
fact that the city-state system of Canaan suffered a series of
catastrophically destructive upheavals at the end of the Late Bronze
Age. The archaeologists are uncertain as to the cause of this
“cataclysm”, suggesting it to be the invasion of the Sea Peoples or
other such propositions. We have an idea already that it was
probably more than that.
What seems to have happened is that the coastal city-states
recovered from the “cataclysms”, had been rebuilt and were thriving,
when suddenly they were destroyed a second time in a rather short
period, this time - supposedly - by military onslaught and fire.
Whatever it was, the destruction was so complete that the Canaanite
cities of the plain and the coast never recovered. The source of
this destruction is thought to have been the military campaign of
Shishak, founder of the twenty-second Dynasty.
This invasion is
mentioned in the Bible where it says that,
“In the fifth year of Rehoboam, Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem; he took
away the treasures of the house of the Lord and the treasures of the
king’s house; he took away everything. He also took away the shields
of gold that Solomon had made”.
Shishak/Sheshonq commissioned a triumphal inscription to commemorate
the event on the temple walls at Karnak. This inscription lists
about one hundred fifty towns and villages he wiped out in his
“march to the sea”, so to speak. The targets of the Egyptians seem
to have been the great Canaanite cities of Rehov, Bethshean,
Taanach, and Megiddo. A fragment of a victory stele bearing the name
of Shishak was found at Megiddo.259
259
Unfortunately, it had been dumped in the trash at the archaeological
site so its precise provenance is unknown.
Thick layers of ash and the
evidence of the collapse of buildings bear mute testimony to the
rage of Pharaoh, which led to the sudden death of the Canaanite
territory in the late tenth century BC. There is very
little evidence of this
assault in the hill country, the main campaign being directed at the
cities of the Jezreel valley. If there was a “Temple” that was
plundered by Shishak, it wasn’t in Jerusalem.
Nevertheless, it is suggested that this raid of Shishak’s created an
opportunity for the people of the highland to expand into the
lowlands at the beginning of the ninth century. Meanwhile, the
archaeological records show that, far to the south, Jerusalem
continued along as a regime of dispersed villages and pastoral
shepherds.
This is the evidence of the spade at the time of the supposed end of
the united monarchy around 900 BC.
In the northern kingdom, regional administrative centers were built
in the early ninth century. They were heavily fortified and complete
with elaborate, luxurious palaces. These cities include Megiddo,
Jezreel, and Samaria. Similar constructions appear in the southern
territory only in the seventh century. Yet, even when the
construction methods moved south, the buildings were smaller and the
construction was of a poorer quality.
In short, it can be said that the northern kingdom of Israel,
supposed to have been the “bad boy breakaway” from the great united
kingdom of David and Solomon in the south, was actually a fully
developed state while Judah was still a country cousin.
Yahweh was present in both kingdoms, however - among many other cult
Gods. And it is certain that peoples of both kingdoms shared similar
stories about their origins, though in different versions, and they
most certainly spoke a similar language. By the 8th century BC, they
also both wrote in the same script. The chief thing about them,
however, is that the two kingdoms had a different experience of the
world around them. Their demographics were different. Their economy
was different. Their material culture was different. How they
related to their neighbors was different.
In short, they actually
had quite different histories and cultures.
The question we should like to ask is: why does the Bible tell the
story of the schism and secession of Israel from Judah when that is
clearly not supported by the evidence of either archaeology or
history as known to external sources? Why were the two kingdoms
systematically portrayed as twin offspring of a single great empire
that was headquartered in Jerusalem? There was a reason, as we will
soon see.
In actual fact, the first great king of Israel was Omri. The Bible
gives a very sketchy and confused history of the first period of the
Northern kingdom after its supposed defection from unity. The sordid
tale of violence and treachery culminates in the suicide of a
usurper, Zimri, in the flames of the royal palace at Tirzah. Omri,
the commander of the army is invited by the people to become king,
and he naturally obliges. It was a good choice. Not only that, the
story bears some resemblance to the selection of David - a military
commander - for kingship over the heirs of Saul.
Omri built a new capital for himself at Samaria and laid the
foundations of his dynasty. After twelve years, his son Ahab came to
the throne. Ahab made a brilliant marriage to the daughter of the
Phoenician king Ethbaal, King of Tyre, so we have again a curious
reflection of the Bible story of Solomon and his friendship with “Hiram, King of Tyre”. Was this
Ethbaal the real “Hiram”?
In any event, Ahab built magnificent
cities and established one of the most powerful armies in the
region. He conquered extensive territory to the north and in the Transjordan, and Israel enjoyed wealth and extensive trade
connections. The kingdom of Israel was finally something to notice!
However, the character of this kingdom was markedly different from
the tiny kingdom of Judah. Ahab was about the most hated individual
in all the Biblical texts. What Ahab did that caused him to be so
viciously vilified, according to the editor of the Bible, was that
he committed the greatest of Biblical sins: he introduced foreign
Gods into the land of Israel and caused the priests and prophets of
Yahweh to be put to death. What’s more, he did it because of the
influence of that wicked Phoenician princess he had married:
Jezebel.
The Bible dwells long and pruriently upon the sins of this famous
couple. Nevertheless, we ought to note that these very same sins
were attributed to Solomon, who was, however, transmogrified into a
southern kingdom monarch, and was, therefore, forgiven even if
Yahweh was determined to punish his family. One gets the
disorienting feeling that the stories of Omri and Ahab and David and
Solomon are, essentially, the same. Jezebel was most especially
hated because she tossed the prophets and priests of Yahweh out on
their ears. Solomon was also recorded to have ejected the priests of
Shiloh, so again, we have a cross connection.
In the Bible, the heroes of the story of Omri and Ahab are the
prophets Elijah and Elisha - no doubt priests of Shiloh (which will
become quite significant rather soon) - since it was recorded as the
home of the prophet Ahijah in 1 Kings, 14:2. A great demonstration
of the power of Yahweh is said to have been engineered by Elijah in
his confrontation with Ahab, and the result was that the people
seized the prophets of the foreign God, Baal, and slaughtered them
at the brook Kishon. Jezebel, naturally, went on a rampage, and
Elijah felt it was time to get out of Dodge.
He headed for the hills
in the wilderness and talked to God on Mount Horeb just like Moses
was supposed to have done. Yahweh pronounced a dire prophecy against
Ahab, but curiously gave him a few more chances to redeem himself as
evidenced by his victories against Ben-Hadad, king of Aram-Damascus.
Yahweh, apparently, was willing to relent if Ahab would kill
Ben-Hadad. However, Ahab decided to make peace instead, and a treaty
was arranged. On and on the account goes, vilifying Ahab and
Jezebel.
After his death, Elisha anointed another general in the
army to be king, Jehu. This guy was more to Yahweh’s liking,
apparently, and Yahweh saw to it that Jezebel suffered a terrible
death, thrown from a window and devoured by dogs. Jehu then sent for
all of Ahab’s sons, (there were reportedly 70 of them), by any
number of wives or concubines, and had them all slaughtered and
their heads piled up in a mound at the gate of the city to inspire
awe and confidence in the new king, not to mention Yahweh. The Bible
says that Jehu brought down the Omrides, yet there is evidence that
this is probably not true.
In 1993, an inscription was found that is believed to have been
produced by Hazael, king of Aram-Damascus. From the inscription, it
seems that Hazael captured the city of Dan around 835 BC and refers
to the “House of David”. Hazael’s invasion was clearly the one that
weakened the power of the northern kingdom. The text of the Dan inscription links the
death of Jehoram, the son of Ahab and Jezebel, to an Aramaean
victory.
Hazael boasts:
[I killed Jeho]ram son of [Ahab] king of Israel and [I]killed
[Ahaz]iahu son of [Jehoram kin]g of the House of David. And I set
[their towns into ruins and turned] their land into[desolation].
Thus it is that the likelihood that the violent destruction of the
“Solomonic” palaces that was long ascribed to the Egyptian raid led
by Pharaoh Shishak in the late 10th century BC, actually took place
around 835, and was due to Hazael and not Jehu. Thus ended the
Omride dynasty.
Let me emphasize that the Omride dynasty is referred to by Hazael as
the “House of David”.
-
Why?
-
Was Omri, in fact, the “Beloved” of
Yahweh?
-
Or was the House of the Beloved originally the
Beloved of
another “God”?
Nevertheless, we begin to see how Elijah’s terrible
prophecy on the fate of Ahab was fulfilled: by twisting the facts
after the fact. Of course, as we will see, an awful lot of Yahweh’s
other prophecies were “fulfilled”, after the fact and only during
the writing of the Bible. The invasion of Ben-hadad, who Ahab was
supposed to kill and didn’t, and thus angered Yahweh, actually took
place much later in the history of the northern kingdom.
So we find, again and again, when the anachronisms and historical
inaccuracies are removed from the story, there is really nothing
left of the Bible proper except a tedious tale of threats by Yahweh
and fulfillment of those threats all designed to establish Yahweh as
the Universal God. Never mind that this process includes twisting
and distorting the facts all out of recognition.
What the record of
the spade shows about the Omrides is a great kingdom and a time of
general prosperity for all. It provides, in fact, a model of the
Davidic and Solomonic kingdom of Israel in all respects except for
the worship of Yahweh. That is why it was damned by the writers of
the Bible and retold in a “new version” that promoted Yahweh as the
God who had made Israel great, and whose abandonment had brought it
to its knees.
The facts are exactly the opposite. Israel never achieved anything
under the rule of the priests of Yahweh except constant suffering
and exile because of rulers who kept shooting themselves in the foot
with their two-faced politics and religio-cultural isolationist
policies.
The Omrides were a militarily powerful family of rulers reigning
over one of the strongest states of the Near East during that period
of time. It was only then that the rest of the world began to sit up
and take notice of Israel. A stele from this time says that, “Omri
was king of Israel, and he oppressed Moab.” Moab was a vassal state
of Israel. The stele continues by telling us how Mesha, the king of
Moab responsible for the stele, expanded his territory in rebellion
against Israel. We learn from Mesha that the kingdom of Israel
reached far to the east and south of its earlier domain in the
central hill country.
The Bible stresses the Omride’s military embarrassments repeatedly,
but it seems that they were sufficiently competent that they could
assemble a force that impressed the heck out of the great Assyrian
king Shalmaneser III, and sent him home in a hurry. Naturally,
Shalmaneser boasted of his victory in what is called the Monolith
inscription.
But it was found in Nimrud, not Israel, which testifies
to who really prevailed! The
Bible mentions an “Aramaean army” besieging Samaria; it is clear
that it was the Assyrian army and that Israel held their own. The
many archaeological finds in Palestine that were at first loudly
proclaimed to have been evidence of the reigns of David and Solomon,
actually turned out to be the building projects of Omri and Ahab.
Thus it is that if there was a David and Solomon of Israel, it was
Omri and Ahab, the dynasty that established the first fully
developed monarchy in Israel.
It is evident that the building projects of Omri employed
sophisticated earthmoving operations to turn small hilltop
settlements into significant fortresses. Where did the power and
wealth come from? What occurred to enable the northern kingdom to
grow into the Omride state? With the limited resources of the hill
country being only sufficient to maintain relatively small towns and
villages, what happened to nurture expansion?
Well, as noted, there was a wave of destruction of the cities of the
lowlands at the end of the 10th century BC, prior to the destruction
of the “Solomonic palaces”, of the Omrides and it is now thought
that this opened the way for a strong man with brains and ambition
to grab the reins and create an empire.
Apparently Omri was such a
man. He wasn’t responsible for the destruction of the “Philistines”,
as the Bible claimed about David, but he was certainly the man of
the hour who knew when his star was on the ascendant. He expanded
from the original hill country into the heart of the former
Canaanite territory at Megiddo, Hazor, and Gezer. He enveloped the
territories of southern Syria and Transjordan. He established a vast
and diverse territorial state that controlled rich agricultural land
and held sway over a busy international trade route. What was even
more significant: his territory was a multi-ethnic society. This was
another reason the authors of the Bible demonized him.
When the northern kingdom of Israel united the Samarian highlands
with the northern valleys, it amounted to the integration of several
ecosystems including the heterogeneous population. It is very likely
that the core territory in the highlands would have identified
themselves as Israelites, but the peoples of the lowlands, the
valleys, were the indigenous Canaanite population. Farther to the
north were those whose ethnicity was Aramaean. Toward the coast,
Omri ruled over peoples who were Phoenician in origin. The
archaeology shows that the cultural roots of each group were
consistent through this period, and thus were apparently not
disturbed by Omri.
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