The Trojan Horse is not mentioned in the Iliad. It is briefly mentioned as back-story in the Odyssey.rgprice wrote: ↑Thu Jul 27, 2023 11:09 am Another analogy. I would contend that the Temple is like the Trojan Horse. There may be hundreds of writings that talk about the Trojan Horse, but that does not mean that the Trojan Horse was real. And even if it was real, it doesn't mean that those other writings are rooted in real knowledge of the Trojan Horse.
The Trojan Horse is featured in the Iliad. Effectively all knowledge of the Trojan Horse comes from the Iliad. Later writers who feature the Trojan Horse in their narratives or accounts of history aren't doing so because they have independent knowledge of the Trojan Horse, they are doing so because the Trojan Horse had become an accepted historical prop.
So I would contend that writings like Jeremiah or Isaiah or whatever, that talk about the destruction of the Temple are talking about the Temple in the same way that Hellenistic Greek writers talked about the Trojan Horse. Not from real memory or real passed on information, but from the perspective of culturally accepted narratives. And, I contend, that those narratives were all developed based not on some real Temple of Solomon, but out of the desire to create a predecessor for the existing temple in Jerusalem, which we call the "Second Temple".
Andrew Criddle
