Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Well, my major problem with Gmirkin's model is that if the Pentateuch was inspired by Plato and was an attempt to fuse Greek learning with Hebrew culture, why did the Pentateuch portray a flat Earth when Plato accepted that the world was spherical? Did the Pentateuch's authors regard a flat Earth a...

To be accurate, I quoted Gabriel Barkay (who discovered and published the amulets) and the epigrapher Ada Yardeni's statements that the priestly oral formula recorded on the silver amulets from Ketef Hinnom was not indicative of when the Torah was written. See Gmirkin 2006: 27-28. So it's not my cl...

The entity posting as ABuddhist wrote above: "...Because Neil, Mr. Gmirkin, and I have all told you how those amulets prove nothing about when the Torah was written." Are you actually not aware that you three claiming X does not necessarily make it so? And why the fake, egotistic (?), nam...

In the Pentateuch there is only fear of the Lord. There is no "education" or instruction in any sense of the word other than terror. There is no equivalent in Plato. Come on you know better than this. There is an entirely different "spirit." Start with the fact that the most com...

Plato clearly is not individualistic in the sense of having any sympathy for individual human rights. However the city of the Laws is intended (according to the Athenian stranger) to make its citizens virtuous and not just compliant. The prologues are put forward as providing genuine valid reasons ...

There is an interesting discussion of the deep tension within the Laws in this article by Diamond . Andrew Criddle Diamond’s analysis is deeply flawed by his projection of modern notions of individualism into Plato’s philosophy. Diamond correctly portrays the First City as one of totalitarian, auto...

The War Scroll and other such materials from Qumran are clearly derived from the ideas of the Pentateuch, they aren't the products of people trying to "twist" Judaism into something that it was not in order to deal with real-world conflicts. Instead, the Qumraric writings foment conflict ...

Nice! This is of course about Oded Lipschitz and fellow-archaeologist Shua Kisilevitz's announced 2020 discoveries at Tell Motza. Here's another link (which works): https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-new-iron-age-temple-discovered-near-jerusalem-oded-lipschits-tickets-528521731727 See also a summary o...

Michael Langlois dates, by palaeography, some Qumran mss copies earlier than, say, the 270s date for Torah-writing that RE Gmirkin has asserted by conjecture. Sources? And how reputable is Michael Langlois in this conclusion? Stephen, as is his habit, misrepresents matters. Michael Langlois is a hi...

Still, Adler's reception has on a whole been very positive. The criticism has been very mild, and predictably from those who haven't yet read his book. A criticism that has as yet been unanswered is the fact that I asked Adler about the quantification of the chalk vessels. <snip> <snip> The idea th...