Re: Is exclusive Yahwehism even plausible prior to the Hasmonaeans?
Posted: Wed Mar 01, 2023 12:15 pm
All valid points Neil, but I'm talking about the writing of the scriptures. Yes, it is true that many Jews found ways to live as a Jew is a tolerable way. But that has never come from adhering to the principles of the Torah, rather from finding ways to minimize aspects of the Torah.
But whoever wrote the Torah was laying out a religion of intolerance and conquest. That later Jews found ways to ignore parts of what the Torah says doesn't really have anything to do with it.
The question is, under what circumstances would one write a work like the Torah?
I hate to use this example and it is not meant to be in poor taste, its just an obvious example. Mein Kompf isn't a work that would have just been written "at any time". it speaks to a particular set of conditions. My argument is that the Pentateuch also speaks to a particular set of conditions, and those conditions are not the conditions of living under Persian rule.
Again, not to be crass, but I see the Pentateuch as a work like Mein Kompf, the Communist Manifesto, A People's History, Atlas Shrugged, Animal Farm, etc. It is an ideologically motivated work and it has an agenda.
I would argue that one should be able to locate roughly when each of these works were written, even if one had no knowledge of when the books were actually published.
But whoever wrote the Torah was laying out a religion of intolerance and conquest. That later Jews found ways to ignore parts of what the Torah says doesn't really have anything to do with it.
The question is, under what circumstances would one write a work like the Torah?
I hate to use this example and it is not meant to be in poor taste, its just an obvious example. Mein Kompf isn't a work that would have just been written "at any time". it speaks to a particular set of conditions. My argument is that the Pentateuch also speaks to a particular set of conditions, and those conditions are not the conditions of living under Persian rule.
Again, not to be crass, but I see the Pentateuch as a work like Mein Kompf, the Communist Manifesto, A People's History, Atlas Shrugged, Animal Farm, etc. It is an ideologically motivated work and it has an agenda.
I would argue that one should be able to locate roughly when each of these works were written, even if one had no knowledge of when the books were actually published.