neilgodfrey wrote:As far as I am aware Gmirkin nowhere suggests that the Pentateuch was originally composed in Greek. His thesis is that the Hebrew Bible was in large measure, but not exclusively, influenced by Greek literature - legal, philosophical, political. The Hebrew bible was created as a form of "national literature", implying its original language was Hebrew.
Absolutely so:
Further, the literary sources utilized by the Pentateuch authors were all written in Greek. Yet scholarly opinion is unanimous that behind the Septuagint there existed a Hebrew prototype, as many of the Hebraisms were imperfectly translated into Greek.
The Pentateuch was thus a document influenced by numerous Greek sources, yet written in Hebrew, and then—with the Septuagint—translated back again into Greek. (p 249)
Whether this is entirely plausible is another matter - especially given the time frame Gmirkin proposes. That's why a poster on this thread could easily express the opinion that the Greek came first: it would make somewhat more sense.
DCHindley wrote:I do not think he says that the Judean sacred writings were created out of whole cloth, but only that they modeled their national literature on Plato (in emulation), Manetho (in reaction) and Berossus (for local color). How much of it was fancy and myth and how much was "real" is anyone's guess.
He does agree that the Hebrew books of the Law could very well have preceded the Greek Lxx version, but all he can say for sure was that they both came about (in their present forms) in the 3rd century BCE, as this was when Manetho and Berossus wrote their accounts, and the parallels to these works are too numerous and striking to be explained by the other theories, like JEDP, usually used to describe the history of development of the five books of Moses.
Well he's a bit more specific than that, most of the time:
This book will provisionally adopt the years 273-272 BCE as the probable date of the Pentateuch's composition, a date which nicely accommodates all available data. (p 245 - my emphasis)
That suggests that he means the entire Pentateuch, but whether "composed" and "written" is the same thing isn't clear. He does allude to an earlier edition:
The Septuagint may be seen as a Jewish salvo in the "war of books" that began with the publication of Hecataeus's highly nationalistic account of the Egyptians around 320-315 BCE. Besides correcting misinformation about the Jews in Manetho, the new version of the Pentateuch presented the Jews as possessing a national literature of their own on a par with the Egyptians and Babylonians. We may conclude that the Septuagint was written, not merely for Alexandrian Jews, but with a wider Greek-speaking audience in mind. Literary stimulus from the royal patronage of Ptolemy II Philadelphus was thus decisive in creating, not only the Septuagint, but also the Hebrew Pentateuch that lay behind it. (p 255 - my emphasis)
Presumably he expands on this in the new Plato book, but it sounds like Gmirkin believes that the Law Code or Codes (?) appeared in writing first, presumable embedded within some very limited narrative context - as derived from Plato. Then, following Manetho & Berossus & the Alexander Romance, another group of scholars, under the patronage of Ptolemy II, wrote the whole of Genesis and the Exodus narrative as an extended preamble. Neil, can you confirm? I haven't been able to tackle the Plato book yet.
My own view is that, inter alia, a five year period from Berossus to the LXX is simply not enough to account for the literary complexity of Genesis 1-11. By this I don't mean the simple J & P division, but the clear evidence of fragmentation/stratification/elaboration within what is usually considered the J source - which Gmirkin, concentrating on the Greek texts, does not seem to notive, let alone address. (Curiously, in his chapter on the Table of Nations, Gmirkin anaylises the P material only, and mostly ignores the remaining material, which is bizarre, since though he argues it could be later than P (p.141, note 6) he doesn't attempt to actually prove this and therefore leaves himself wide open to the argument that the ignored material is indeed an earlier literary strand. Similarly, he analyses Genesis chapter 5's Sethite genealogy for it's relationship with Berossus, but ignores the Cainite genealogy in chapter 4, which is manifestly related to the P version, and therefore proves the existence of a shared source for J & P which
can't be Berossus.)
Gmirkin says:
This simple chain of transmission, fully documented at every point, has obvious advantages over hypothesized mechanisms whereby various cuneiform documents migrated to Syria, their contents preserved in oral tradition down through the centuries, until written down by J and—yet further centuries later—P.
But I feel in my bones that a "simple chain of transmission" from Berossus would have resulted in an equally simple, consistent Biblical text - which is exactly what we
don't have.... especially when you read the passages that Gmirkin ignores. The text of Genesis shows so many fragmented/contradictory elements and signs of cumulative supplementation and amplification, that the notion of a complex, layered, messy chain of transmission looks to me far
more likely.
And the same goes for Exodus. Even allowing that the Exodus narrative is polemic against the popular Egyptian association of the Judaean with the Seth-Typhon cult (which conceivably developed at a much earlier time than Manetho's), there is really no reason to insist that Alexandrian Jewish scholars writers were unaware of this till Manetho pointed it out to them. And this longer chronology would explain why (a) the supposed literary dependences of Exodus on Manetho are so fuzzy and (b) why there are - again - contradictions and literary stratification in Exodus that Gmirkin largely ignores.