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Posted: Fri Mar 01, 2024 11:50 pm
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Investigating the roots of western civilization (ye olde BC&H forum of IIDB lives on...)
https://earlywritings.com/forum/
I'm uneasy with the idea of an early Hellenistic 'ideological power' deciding that problematic texts should not be preserved.neilgodfrey wrote: ↑Sat Mar 02, 2024 12:10 amThe model you describe suggests that a particular ideology that dominated at one time was at a much later time out of date and replaced by a new ideology. But if that was the case why was Samuel-Kings preserved by the new dominant ideological power?andrewcriddle wrote: ↑Fri Mar 01, 2024 3:20 am One General issue is that the works in the Old Testament that would often be regarded as early Hellenistic like Chronicles are revising an earlier pre-Hellenistic text (Samuel-Kings) in the light of later ideology. (Yes this does treat Samuel-Kings as pre-Hellenistic but it does IMO seem considerably prior to Chronicles.) There is less evidence of creation of large scale narratives de-novo in this period.
Andrew Criddle
That both ideological literatures were preserved would suggest, would it not, that the different ideologies were contemporary and co-existing.
I think we may have to clarify what exactly a Hellenistic origin for the Pentateuch means.neilgodfrey wrote: ↑Fri Mar 01, 2024 5:05 pm Here is a crux of the matter. I raised it in another discussion in relation to the Flood narrative in Genesis.
Imagine a redactor, R, familiar with source A.
R discovers a second source, B, about the same event.
R has a certain ideological viewpoint that A has illustrated in some fashion. B does not reflect the same ideological viewpoint or even the same factual details.
R therefore decides to edit B to make it conform more suitably to A, creating a new text, with some added details, C.
A century later another redactor familiar with C encounters another source, D. . . .
And does the same thing. What we would expect to find is a redacted final product that has been rewritten multiple times to conform to the story as known or preferred by each redactor. (As one scholar noted, that's exactly what we see in the history of 1-2 Chronicles -- a redactor as rewritten previous sources to make a new work that meets the new ideological requirements.)
But that's not what we have in the Primary History.
Instead we have a series of narratives that are often within themselves incoherent, contradicting one another, and so forth. Instead of the diachronic model described above, would not a synchronic model have better explanatory power?
Synchronic model:
Different "Judeo-Samarian" communities are collaborating to produce a common text. Different community representatives write down their traditions or stories about this or that, and a "chairperson" works to combine them all into one story so that the interests of all are represented. The result may not be the kind of literature we think of as "classical", but it does the job.
Do we have evidence of scholars engaged cooperatively under the guidance of a leading scholar, each member of the group working independently and then comparing their results with the others, in Hellenistic times. Yes, as was the way of Aristotle and the grammarians at Alexandria. Do we have a time when different Judean-Samaritan interest groups did exist in harmony? Yes, we do, but it broke down in later Hellenistic times.