Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

The camel anachronism issue is well known ... The persistence of this claim is unfortunate. (It was even referenced in recent years on the sitcom The Big Bang Theory .) The claim was refuted more than seventy years ago by Joseph Free, in his article "Abraham's Camels," in the Journal of N...

So whether or not there is any direct relationship between the post-70 CE Mourners for Zion and the pre-70 CE Dead Sea Scrolls sect and Jewish Christians, they appear to have at least been cut from the same cloth and were opposed by Rabbinic Judaism I don't know that it's safe to say the Mourners w...

Greeks could read and quote Homer as a work of relevance to questions of how they lived day to day. Could you elaborate on this point a bit? I'm not sure I follow. I'm aware of the use of Homeric lines for charms and amulets, particularly within the Greek Magical Papyri, but then I'm not sure that ...

Neil, I'm not sure I'd agree with everything you've said thus far. To my knowledge, the ancients (Jewish and Christian) believed biblical prophecy was always predictive, while it was the language or mode of prediction that changed or varied.* Some prophecy was self-evidently predictive, such as the ...

There seems to be a Jewish exegetical continuum that Christians viewed themselves as being part of. I think that's correct. Like the Qumranites and the Christians later on, rabbinic Jews also took the supposed prophetic character of the Psalms for granted. The Targum Psalms sometimes has David writ...

This involves describing the departing of Ba'al and the response of the other gods in ways deliberately modeled on the Ugarit liturgy for mourning the death of the (human) king. The background to this appears to be a parallel drawn between the disappearance and return of Ba'al and the replacement o...

Third (C), one of the wedding guests (only one??) happens to have arrived without the proper attire and is summarily given the maximum penalty, despite having been literally dragged in off the streets. How many people would be wearing wedding attire in such an impromptu situation? FWIW Ecclesiastes...

Ba'al [/b] Yahweh [/b] Jesus [/b] sometimes regarded as a son of El sometimes regarded as a son of El regarded as the son of God rider upon the clouds rider of a chariot of clouds comes with/on the clouds a storm god a storm god stills a storm conquers the sea conquers the sea treads upon the sea d...

On the more general point about Messiah ben David's request for life in Suk 52a, Himmelfarb interprets this request ... Neil, just out of curiosity, does Himmelfarb accept that the Ben David pericope in Sukkah 52a is from the tannaitic era? It's written in Hebrew, meaning it's supposedly tannaitic ...

It's the Messiah ben David who receives eternal life in the targum on Psalm 21. O Lord, in your strength the King Messiah reigns ... You have given him the desire of his soul ... He asked of you everlasting life; you gave him length of days, for ever and ever. (The designation "King Messiah&quo...