The Problem With The Theory That the Pentateuch Was Written in Alexandria

Discussion about the Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, pseudepigrapha, Philo, Josephus, Talmud, Dead Sea Scrolls, archaeology, etc.
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neilgodfrey
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Re: The Problem With The Theory That the Pentateuch Was Written in Alexandria

Post by neilgodfrey »

StephenGoranson wrote: Tue May 23, 2023 6:16 am NG, if you are willing, try reading this again:

by StephenGoranson » Sat May 20, 2023 4:16 am

neilgodfrey asked for an example. austendw already gave such: the various law codes.

Using words such as hard-wired, embedded, and incredulity may not be a legitimate way to dismiss the example.

Especially when "ethnic" religions (relatively speaking: Judaism compared to Christianity; Hinduism compared to Buddhism) tend to preserve ancient words regarded as sacred.

For example, if I recall correctly, Parsi Zoroastrian priests chant some texts in old Avestan language, even when some of those words are not fully understood.
I did reply to the first time you wrote the above. You never responded to my engagement with your comment. You must have missed it. Here it is again:
StephenGoranson wrote: Sat May 20, 2023 4:16 am neilgodfrey asked for an example. austendw already gave such: the various law codes.

Using words such as hard-wired, embedded, and incredulity may not be a legitimate way to dismiss the example.

Especially when "ethnic" religions (relatively speaking: Judaism compared to Christianity; Hinduism compared to Buddhism) tend to preserve ancient words regarded as sacred.

For example, if I recall correctly, Parsi Zoroastrian priests chant some texts in old Avestan language, even when some of those words are not fully understood.
austendw in fact gave many examples of inconsistencies, contradictions, redactions. I also gave some extra ones, including the most classic one of all that comes from Russell Gmirkin's works: the inconsistent figures of Yahweh in Genesis and Exodus.

But such examples of different factional or ideological preferences were not what I was asking for. What I was asking for are examples of such inconsistencies that cannot be explained -- can ONLY be explained -- on a "longue durée" model of composition over many decades, a century or more.

The problem with the traditional model --- and this is where the "hardwire" and "incredulity" references come into it, because the response has been to imply I must not be familiar with the traditional arguments of Pentateuchal composition -- that problem is that if a viewpoint has been seen as invalid after a generation or more, and that new generation finds it important enough to introduce a correction to the existing documents, then we have to ask why they did not at the same time remove the older, "wrong" idea.

The response so far, as I understand it, to that question has been to say that the new generation was still faced with the presence of others who held firmly to the old view and would not allow the total revision or erasure of their beliefs from the writings.

My response has been: That is exactly the situation proposed by Russell Gmirkin and is the very case of "collaborative" engagement in producing an inconsistent set of books. So why cannot such a situation have been the very one that created the Pentateuch as a single project in the first place? Why do we have to introduce generations to explain it?

SG, your example of priests chanting archaic words they no longer understand is not relevant -- unless you can explain how it is. The question is about contradictions that are clearly understood as such in the single text.
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Re: The Problem With The Theory That the Pentateuch Was Written in Alexandria

Post by Secret Alias »

People in Ukraine are fighting for their liberty. Neil is fighting for a theory that has the remotest of possibilities. Priorities.
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Re: The Problem With The Theory That the Pentateuch Was Written in Alexandria

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Anyone who is confused after skimming through the exchange between austendw and me might find points of interest in Can the Documentary Hypothesis be Rehabilitated -- that's an article by Russell Gmikin that, in my view, goes for the jugular of the argument.

The reason I have repeatedly asked in this thread for data that can only be explained by authors of different historical periods adding their layers to the Pentauech is that I cannot escape the possibility that all the examples cited so far can even more simply be explained as evidence of collaborative authorship! That is, scribes of different ideological perspectives sitting down together and producing a document for "all parties".

One does not need to confine oneself to Gmirkin to acknowledge the evidence for such a cooperative effort.
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Re: The Problem With The Theory That the Pentateuch Was Written in Alexandria

Post by StephenGoranson »

The neilgodfrey Thu May 25, 2023 2:34 am post may have switched criteria.

If one asks for data that can only be explained by X, should one also ask for data that can only be explained by Y, and then compare?
Instead of doing that, or, better, seeking the most plausible explanation, the post switched to the criterion of "simpler" (a rather subjective term when applied to history?--is sedimentary rock forming all at once a simpler explanation?), rather than comparing evidence of X and Y proposals.

As to "One does not need to confine oneself to Gmirkin to acknowledge the evidence for such a cooperative effort,"
besides the acrobatics of defending the Gmirkin scenario while simultaneously distancing from it, and besides avoiding the evidence of long accretion of text because ancient seen-as-venerable parts tend to get retained,
there is (neither in the cited REG article nor the 2006 nor 2022 book plus more text by REG and NG) no reliable evidence (parallelomania being insufficient? Aristeas selectively relied upon insufficient?) of the proposed c. 273-272 Alexandria imagined "cooperative effort."
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Re: The Problem With The Theory That the Pentateuch Was Written in Alexandria

Post by austendw »

neilgodfrey wrote: Fri May 19, 2023 6:54 pm The focus of Gmirkin's study is a comparative analysis of the Pentateuch with Greek works and comparing this analysis with the well-worn studies that have sought comparisons with the Asian works. It is about broadening the scope of material for comparison.

That is the key point -- that time and time again the comparisons show closer affinities (more numerous, specific in detail and theme) with Greek literature than with the Asian lit. Not always, but often.

By simply ignoring this analysis we close ourselves off from the question of how to explain these affinities.
This, for me is a hugely important point. How do we explain these affinities? I think that Gmirkin and you too, to be honest, view the Levant as essentially an Asian country, for which cultural connections with the ANE are more or less normative, expected, unremarkable. And that's no surprise since, as you correctly point out, hitherto scholarship has "sought comparisons with the Asian works" for exactly the same reason: they too assumed that the Levant was "essentially Asian" - Eastern - and that this was therefore the natural direction in which scholars should be looking for answers. As a result of this approach, the biblical affinities with Greek literature have been viewed as anomalous and in need of special explanation (in one direction or another). However I think that this is a skewed way to look at the cultural landscape of the 1st millenium.

I think that the evidence of those numerous "closer affinities" in the biblical literature and Greek literature actually shows something different: that the Levant should be considered as primarily belonging to an Eastern Mediterranean cultural commonwealth that naturally includes Greece, Ionia, Syria, Phoenicia, Philistia etc (while of course recognizing that the area was frequently under the political and cultural domination of ANE empires, however marginally, so it was also part of the ANE cultural "field"). I think that this membership of/participation in Eastern Mediterranean culture has been disguised by a strong Eurocentric world view that has contructed an East/West divide between the European Greece and the Asian Levant. I suspect that this is a legacy of the ancient Greeks themselves, who considered the Levant's non-Greek speaking inhabitants as barbarians (by definition) and certainly didn't recognise (or take much interest in) the cultural affinities that connected them. But acknowledging this connexion means that some, perhaps even many, of the parallels between Greek and biblical literature can and should be understood as cases of the cultural affinity that had existed since the Greek Archaic period (if not before) and as a result, may not need any "special" circumstances at all (such as the Gmirkin's Alexandria scenario, or Waijdenbaum's anonymous super-smart Hellenistic Jewish author) to explain them.

This is not to say that there couldn't also be much later "borrowings" directly from Plato, as Gmirkin proposes, but it does raise the bar for determining whether a parallel is the result of a longstanding cultural affinity or a later borrowing. In her book Making a Case: the Practical Roots of Biblical Law Sara Milstein discusses the "quality of parallels" between CC and Mesopotamian law, and refers to Bruce Wells who "prposes the following terms for assessing the relationship beween CC and other legal traditions (in increasing order of closeness): "resemblance," " similarity," "correspondence," and "point of identicalness" - and Morrow, who "presents a helpful set of criteria for determining allusions: translaton or close paraphrase; textual oprganization (i.e., content that appears in the same order; density of criteria (i.e., multiple points of contact); uniqueness, as opposed to coincidence." This sort of precise evaluation on a case by case basis is not something Gmirkin does.

The question of the "goring ox" is a good case. The somewhat "mathematical" answer that Gmirkin gives is simple:

Goring ox: Pentateuch: Yes; ANE (Hammurabi): Yes; Greece: no; Ergo: From ANE
Killing ox: Pentateuch: Yes; ANE: No; Greece: Yes (mule); Ergo: From Greece.

But if there was indeed a shared cultural commonwealth between the Pentateuch and Greece (and the shared casuistic sacrificial regulations proves that this is the case) then that equation doesn't go without saying. It may be that the shared Eastern Mediterranean cultures developed a notion that animals that kill humans must be killed. We can't know for sure, but it is possible. Looking at the other side of the coin - ie how close are the treatments of this issue in Plato's Laws and the Pentateuch, we find that there are considerable differences. Formally, Plato's mule (not an ox, and presumably not edible), comes in a discussion of various forms of manslaying by humans, animals and inanimate objects - not casuistic cases. And there is little common detail apart from the death of an animal. In Plato, all offenders (human, animal & inanimate) are, after accusation, trial and killing, thrown "outside the borders of the land" (873b-c; 873e,874a) which has no counterpart at all in the Pentateuch. Meanwhile, though the Hammurabi Laws that are clearly close models for the goring-ox rules of the Pentateuch don't discuss the fate of the ox, another ANE law - Eshnunna 53-55 - repeated almost verbatim in Ex 21:35 expressly discusses how the cost of the offending ox is to be shared between parties. It may be that, in view of this, the (pre-)pentateuchal scribes felt that this issue similar stipultaions needed to be extended to the other, manslaying, cases too. In any case, the relationship between Plato's Laws and Ex 21:28-32 is not particularly close. However, the fact that manslaying animals are indeed killed in both books may indeed point to some shared cultural attitudes to animals, sacrifice, the repayment of blood for blood, which Marilyn Katz discusses in her essay Ox_Slaughter_and_Goring_Oxen_Homicide_Animal_Sacrifice_and_Judicial_Process ]Ox-Slaughter and Goring Oxen: Homicide, Animal Sacrifice, and Judicial Process (which Gmirkin references)

I also have difficulties with Gmirkin's understanding of how he explains the ANE motifs that he does identify in the Pentateuch. Again, he is unwilling to see them in terms of any normative cultural links to Mesopotamia and either (a) goes down the Hellenistic line (adapted from Berossus) or (b) insists that these motifs came with the Babylonian deportees to Samaria - as if Babylonian cultural motifs could only reach the Levant by means of actual ethnic Babylonians, which I think is an oddly literal attitude at the very least. [1]
neilgodfrey wrote: Fri May 19, 2023 6:54 pmThe idea of a collaborative project at Alexandria is Gmirkin's best explanation for what he finds in his analysis of the Greek influence in the Pentateuch. It coheres with the independent, external evidence -- what is and is not in the archaeological record and with other writings of the era.
Why is the command not to "seethe a kid in its mother's milk" (or "boil a suckling kid" according to another interpretation) repeated verbatim in three places (Exod. 23:19b; Exod. 34:26b; Deut. 14:21b)? Why did a "contemporary collaboration" come up with three statements of exactly the same rule, situated in three quite distinct law codes? It should be pointed out that modern scholarship no longer considers Exodus 34:11-26 as an earlier Yahwistic text makes an attempt to incorporate and conflate laws from different codes and remove (or paper over?) the conflicts between them. As one of the codes included in this is HS, and literary criticism has determined that HS is not a source independent of P, but a supplementary expansion of it, we can establish a diachronic succession: P > HS > Ex 34:11-26.
neilgodfrey wrote: Fri May 19, 2023 6:54 pmI have asked austendw for specific contradictions and duplications etc that he believes cannot be explained apart from a model of a very long -- let's say at least a generational -- process. I really would appreciate anyone positing such "evidence" for what austendw calls the "diachronic" model.

The strongest one that comes to my mind is the two natures of Yahweh: the relative "liberal" of the early chapters of Genesis and the "godfather" figure of Exodus.
Actually I don't get how you might construe the characterisation of the character of Yahweh in the two books as potential evidence of diachronicity. For me, diachronicity is primarily implied by the literary-critical evidence of stratified supplementations. A difference of view could surely, especially from a Hellenistic period perspective, be attributable to contemporaries with differences of opinion.
I would really appreciate specific examples to support your case -- what are some instances that simply defy a likelihood of different priestly groups, Judeans and Samaritans, working together, with some more Hellenistically inclined than others?
I don't argue that there wasn't textual intervention from different "interest groups" ...as it is very likely that various different strata had difference sociological origins (priests, levites, lay interests ) and different axes to grind. What I do I suggest is that this did not take the form of the scholarly collaboration or such-like that Gmirkin proposes.

I suddenly think of Deuteronomy 1-11. The repeated 3rd person introductions (1:1; 1:3; 4:44; 4:45;5:1a) and the various 1st person introductions to the laws: (4:1, 5:1b; 6:1; 8:1) which go unfulfilled until the actual start at 12:1. This suggest that there were more than one supplementation to the introduction, especially considering the self-contradicting historical reviews of various events described in Exodus-Numbers (not least that sometimes the people in Moab are expressly described as the people who heard the 10 commandments at Horeb, which learly contradicts other texts in Deut where they are the second generation - the first having died off). All this suggests repeated supplementation by scribes - not necessarily the result of huge conflicts between sociological groups but different, differently motivated additions.

NOTES:

[1] This peculiar understanding of a culturally inert Judea resurfaced when Gmirkin and I were discussing of his analysis of the biblical account of the assassination of Sennacherib in 2 Kings 19, where Gmirkin suggested it was "special pleading to imagine [that] these distant events were known in Judea" - revealing an assumption that Judea was some sort of cultural "backwater" that for some reason couldn't have heard accurate details about a major Assyrian political event until they read about it centuries later in Berossus.
Last edited by austendw on Thu May 25, 2023 11:01 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Problem With The Theory That the Pentateuch Was Written in Alexandria

Post by austendw »

neilgodfrey wrote: Mon May 22, 2023 5:10 pmWhy cannot the similarities be the consequence of direct literary influence?
Well, its clear that Darshan doesn't accept the paradigm that the Pentateuch was written in the Hellenistic period, but a somewhat earlier period, prior to a time when one can imagine direct access to all those Greek literary and this follows from that. Circular? Maybe, but everyone has to start from somewhere. Gmirkin starts from the assumption (please don't tell me he has proven this point because he really hasn't) that the Pentateuch was written in 273 BCE and takes it from there...
neilgodfrey wrote: Mon May 22, 2023 5:10 pm Οn page 15 Darshan explains, if I understand him correctly:

The majority of the foundation narratives I have presented thus far— relating to the Israelites, Dorians, Aramites, Philistines, Edomites, Moabites, Ammonites, and the kingdom of Que— belong to societies which became states at the end of the second millennium and beginning of the first millennium B.C.E. with the collapse of the great kingdoms in the region (Egypt, Hatti, and Mycenae).

But the question I have been asking is: What evidence do we have that Israel, around the turn of the millennium, around 1000 BCE, adopted a Greek-like foundation story of migration and settlement into their land?
Noone is saying that they adopted the fountation story in 1000 BCE. Only that they were one of a swathe of Levantine states in existence between then and about 700 BCE, all of whom apparently told foundation stories that suggested they originally came from somewhere else. And I'm not sure Darshan is saying that they or any of the other states "adopted" a pre-existing story since we don't know precisely who was the first to write them, only that they were common at that time and later.

And, if you want to be exact you should extend your highlight above to include the "Aramites, Philistines, Edomites, Moabites, Ammonites" because all of their migration stories are derived from biblical references (Deut 2:12, 20-23 & Amos 9:7). If you discount them because you think the Pentateuch and Amos (even the dry historiographic statements that appear in Deut2:12, 20-23 which to my diachronic eyes look like bookish supplements to the basic narrative) are of no historical value (ie Hellenistic and fictive) then the only external evidence of these story-types is indeed Greek evidence about Dorians, Phoenicians & Que and there really is little left to discuss.
neilgodfrey wrote: Mon May 22, 2023 5:10 pmAs far as I am aware we have only the hypothesis that the Pentateuch records or adapts traditions that originate at that time.
Yes. Having said that, however, Lemche himself seems not to find this a major problem, and in this article (I haven't read it in full as it isn't freely available) gives "examples to show how the Pentateuchal stories rely on traditions ... with a very old history of their own" (which sounds interesting, though I have no idea what detailed cases he gives without reading it). He also says: "... the idea of the “Endprodukt” coming from a special period says little about the date of its individual parts."
neilgodfrey wrote: Mon May 22, 2023 5:10 pmThe archaeological evidence that we have of Samaria from that time and right through to the end of the Persian period offers us no support for any hypothesis that distinctive Pentateuchal ideas were known or practiced throughout that time. Samaria's Yahweh worship appears to have been no different from other forms of Yahweh worship among other peoples throughout that era.
Not sure I know what evidence archaeology could really provide to support the existence or non-existence of "ideas," distinctive or not, let alone a text. What would you expect to find that could support the existence of a text one way or another (barring a copy of the text itself, of course)?
neilgodfrey wrote: Mon May 22, 2023 5:10 pmIt is only with the Hellenistic era that we find our earliest independent (independent of the Pentateuch itself) evidence for the existence of the Pentateuchal literature.
Just for the avoidance of doubt, what precisely is the earliest independent evidence and what its date is? Is it fragments of the Pentateuch in the DSS? This isn't a sarcastic question... I just realise I don't know what it is.

I hope to discuss the so-called Passover Letter at some point, because that fragmentary letter has been reconstructed speculatively (and all but certainly wrongly) and then interpreted to support all sorts of arguments about the state of Yahwism and the Pentateuch in the late 5th Century BCE - on both sides of The Debate (the one we're having now, I mean). But I may need to take a break from this after I've posted all the answers I've been cooking over the past few days.
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Re: The Problem With The Theory That the Pentateuch Was Written in Alexandria

Post by StephenGoranson »

In case it helps some readers of the austendw » Thu May 25, 2023 7:54 am post above,
CC refers to the Covenant Code in Exodus.
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Re: The Problem With The Theory That the Pentateuch Was Written in Alexandria

Post by austendw »

neilgodfrey wrote: Tue May 23, 2023 6:58 am The problem with the traditional model --- and this is where the "hardwire" and "incredulity" references come into it, because the response has been to imply I must not be familiar with the traditional arguments of Pentateuchal composition -- that problem is that if a viewpoint has been seen as invalid after a generation or more, and that new generation finds it important enough to introduce a correction to the existing documents, then we have to ask why they did not at the same time remove the older, "wrong" idea.
First let me say that (if you are referring to me) I am not implying that you are unfamiliar with the "traditional arguments of Pentateuchal composition", if that covers the Documentary Hypothesis, but I do genuinely wonder how familar you are with detailed contemporary arguements of European scholars like Kratz, Schmid, Römer, Dozeman, Otto. They aren't "traditional" by my definition of the word, since they have all broken with the DH, but they may be traditional in your usage, in the sense they have not aligned with either the Copenhagan school or Gmirkin. But please correct me if you think I've misrepresented your views.
neilgodfrey wrote: Tue May 23, 2023 6:58 amThe response so far, as I understand it, to that question has been to say that the new generation was still faced with the presence of others who held firmly to the old view and would not allow the total revision or erasure of their beliefs from the writings.
Again, you may not be referring to me, but I don't see it in terms of disjunction between generations - major rifts between "the old view" and "the new view". I am not talking about "erasures of beliefs" but adjustments - sometimes piecemeal, sometimes more systematic - that build upon, revise, tweak, added to existing material to extend its meaning. Yes, the original stratum's meaning is subtly changed, but it's expressed as a natural and therefore justified extension of the original ideas.

Here's an example = Exodus 20:3-5:
3 "You shall have no other gods before me.
4 You shall not make for yourself a graven image - no likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth; 5 you shall not bow down to them or serve them.
Looks straighforward enough, because we are familiar with it. But in fact careful reading shows that while vv 3 & 5 refer to the outlawed entities in the plural, verse 4 refers to the graven image in the singular. So v.5 cannot refer to the graven image of v.4, but v.3, showing that v.4 is a later addition:
3 "You shall have no other gods before me...
  • 4 You shall not make for yourself a graven image, not any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth;
5 ...you shall not bow down to them or serve them;
I see the added passage in red as an extension of the original, a modification of it, one that's based on and developed from the base layer. The earlier strand is monolatrous (though some interpret the outlawing of other gods "before me" as a command not to have other gods above me" - less a demand for monolatry than a demand for Yahweh to be the chief God) but the supplement goes a step further and has an aniconic programme. Not a revolution that required the elimination of the earlier stratum, but an intensification, pushing it into new cultic territory.

When you ask for...
examples of such inconsistencies that cannot be explained -- can ONLY be explained -- on a "longue durée" model of composition over many decades, a century or more.
... my answer is: I'm afraid you aren't going to get that from me. There is no smoking-gun proof. If there were, we would all have heard of it by now. For me, it's not about proof, it's about plausibility. And the bottom line is that I take Gmirkin's chronologically tight solution to be far less probable, far more speculative than the notion of a more gradual progression of successive scribal interventions. That isn't a view heavily freighted with ideology... it's just that I find Gmirkin's theory both bedevilled by a lot of really flawed arguments (his analysis of the Letter of Aristeas; the notion that the slavery of the Hebrews in Exodus 1 is derived from a single passage in Manetho, come to mind but there are others)
neilgodfrey wrote: Tue May 23, 2023 6:58 amMy response has been: That is exactly the situation proposed by Russell Gmirkin and is the very case of "collaborative" engagement in producing an inconsistent set of books. So why cannot such a situation have been the very one that created the Pentateuch as a single project in the first place? Why do we have to introduce generations to explain it?
We don't have to, but trying not to gives rise to weird implausibilities. For example, why would a "collaborative engagement" produce three separate sets of laws about murder and manslaughter, all worded differently.... but more or less saying the same thing? Bear in mind that Gmirkin insists that the murder and manslaughter rules are all derived from Plato's Laws. So by what "collaborative model" would it ever have been necessary to produce those three sets of parallel laws in three different books of the Pentateuch?

Now actually, this is an interesting case, because without ever mentioning that there are three separate sets of laws, Gmirkin argues that the Pentateuch uniquely follows Plato's concern for the state of mind of the killer in having three different categories of killing - accidental killing, intentional but unpremeditated killing and premeditated murder - unlike any of the ANE law codes. To do this, he quite idiosyncratically (and I think quite incorrectly) interprets Ex 21:13 as describing a case of intentional killing.[1] Perhaps even more importantly, when one looks at the three separate law codes (Ex 21:12-14; Num 35:15-25; Deut 19:2-12), it becomes apparent that each code has only two categories: accidental and intentional killing, with only two corresponding "punishments": refuge for unintentional killing and death for intentional killing. The supposed smoking-gun evidence that the Pentateuch must have got its laws from Plato - and nowhere else - is simply not true. It only appears to be correct when you (a) ignore the textual context of three law codes entirely, effectively conflating them' (b) ignore the parallels between them; (c) simplify Plato's four categories & four punishments [2]; and (d) rely on a questionable interpretation of a text.

And there are other similar cases where close attention to the Biblical text reveals just how quirky some of Gmirkin's intepretations are, and how tenuous the supposed parallels with Plato are. I'll be honest with you: reading his Plato's Law book was a dispiriting experience. I can't tell you the number of times I looked up references and found myself thinking "Oh Jeez, not another one" . I got the strong feeling that Gmirkin was reading the biblical text though the Greek text and thus creating a Platonic-Pentateuchal parallel that isn't there; not so much looking at the Pentateuch with Greek eyes, as looking at it through Greek filter lenses. I've previously been reluctant to say this quite as plainly, because it's unkind [3], but I guess I've said it now.

[1] Gmirkin relies on a problematic NKJV translation of Ex 21:13, but the construction Gmirkin puts on it is completely in disagreement with how the LXX, targumin, and other ancients understood the verse and how I believe all other scholars have understood it since. Gmirkin makes no attempt to engage with such scholarship or to defend his interpretation. Actually, the simple parallelism with the other two law codes, and the parallel punishments in all three, shows that Ex 12:13 describes unintentional killing, rather than intentional heat-of-the-moment killing.

[2] Plato actually has two types of intentional unpremeditated killing and so a total of four different punishments: accidental (865e), intentional unpremeditated but remorseful (867c), intentional unpremeditated and unrepentant (867d), premeditated murder (871d).

[3] And because Russell might have been reading such comments, which makes me feel bad - Even though he probably thinks my criticisms are of zero value.
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Re: The Problem With The Theory That the Pentateuch Was Written in Alexandria

Post by Secret Alias »

The window is so tight for this hypothesis to be true. It involves "cherry picking" the elements from Aristeas that "agree" with the hypothesis (i.e. the absolute beginning of the Hellenistic period) and ignoring everything else which doesn't agree with it (i.e. that it was a translation). At bottom why would Genesis imagine Eden to be in the shape of Persian garden in the Hellenistic period? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_garden Why is that a better fit than a Persian garden being conceived in the Persian period?
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Re: The Problem With The Theory That the Pentateuch Was Written in Alexandria

Post by austendw »

neilgodfrey wrote: Fri May 19, 2023 5:52 pm It's a major part, if not the major part, of his proposal of a collaborative effort of multiple interested parties in the composition of the Pentateuch. It's hard to miss. There is more than a "few Hammurabi-like bits" in the Pentateuch and Gmirkin addresses many of them.
Well, I've read both the Manetho/Berossus book and the Plato "Laws" book (I've only read of the Plato "Timaeus" book through "Vridar"), and I've certainly missed it. By which I mean that I don't think I've seen any clear definition of a reasonably precise "tri-partite" division of the Pentateuch into (1) sections derived from/influenced by Plato (2) sections derived from/influenced by ANE literature direct & (3) native Syro-Levantine texts. I'm also not sure Gmirkin has explicitly identified these "interested parties" explicitly, or given a clear outline of which parts of the Pentateuch derive from which group - unless Gmirkin simply accepts the DH division of sources and allocates discrete social groups to each of the DH sources... in which case I'm not sure how he defines, say the J, E & D groups (as I know he considers P to have been Samaritan priests, and H as Jerusalem Priests).
neilgodfrey wrote: Fri May 19, 2023 5:52 pmSo if the different scribal schools were all in harmonious cooperation to produce the horse that looked like the camel, then why is it necessary to place them in some kind of diachronic time-line of activity? If they are in dialogue with one another, why does that have to be over a century or decades and not, rather, years? Would not a shorter time actually favour the likelihood of maintaining a long enough cooperative spirit?
Well I certainly didn't mean to say that "the different scribal schools were all in harmonious cooperation". I'm not proposing a harmonious cooperation of all the parties in some sort of scholarly symposium. I thought that was precisely what Gmirkin was proposing! I'm proposing that about two major strands of the Pentateuch Priestly & Deuteronomic schools both had a long(ish) history of development in parallel with but distinct from each other. On top of that there were a variety of other fragmentary or more extended non-priestly writings and redactions (some evidently unaware or uninterested in priestly texts, others reacting to them). Eventually - and I remain agnostic as to the date and reason - these different scribal streams came to be combined. Literary criticism has shown fairly clearly that the Holiness School was not an independent "source" but always supplemented existing material (chronologically later than P and D) and was one of the last significant scholarly schools, a sort of post-priestly group that supplemented existing material. If they were not themselves responsible for this combination of the various scribal streams they were somewhat close to those who were. HS is responsible for the promotion of the Sabbath as a holy day of rest, adding supplements to a number of other earlier P texts, including Genesis 1 and Lev 23:2-4, in neither case does this supplementation look like a contemporary discussion between P & HS but a wholesale "updating" of P with new HS material.
neilgodfrey wrote: Fri May 19, 2023 5:52 pmI'm thinking of the different ten commandments -- how the fourth commandment has two quite different rationales in different places.
This is a very interesting case. Two different reasons added to the Ten Commandments suggests two possibilities. Either (a) the Platonic writers wrote the 10 commandments without giving reasons and two different later editors added two different reasons. But if two colaboraing scholars connected with the project wanted to add two different reasons, why not attach the two reasons to the one set of commandments? That would be a good "collaborative compromise" - why create two entire accounts of the giving of the different commandments in two different books? IS that really plausible? Or (b) The original commandments were part of a received text, predating 173 BCE, and given different treatments by Platonic scholars. But this would imply that the henotheism/monolatry of the first (or second) commandment was pre-Platonic, which might be a problem for the Gmirkin theory, as Gmirkin seems to argue that monotheism itself was derived from Plato.

I think there is good reason to think that the 10 commandments were originally seven. I've mentioned the addition of the commandment not to make graven images (Ex 20:4) In the Deuteronomy version the two positive commandments come with virtual references to the fact that they came from somewhere else ("as YHWH your God commanded you" Deut 5:12,16) which I take to be virtually confessions that they've been added to a previous version.
neilgodfrey wrote: Fri May 19, 2023 5:52 pmThere were evidently traditions relating to various places in Canaan that emerge in narrative of Genesis. Gerizim had its traditions, no doubt, as did Jerusalem.
Actually, it has been argued that virtually NO Jerusalem traditions appear in the Pentateuch at all. While the references to Salem have often been interpreted as Jeru-Salem, there are alternatives. Though Gen 33:18 appears in the MT as "And Jacob came in peace to the city of Shechem" the LXX translates it as "And Jacob came to Salem, the city of Shechem" suggesting that Gen 14:18 refers to this city and not Jerusalem. Not sure about that one though. It has often been said that Gen 22:14 the naming of the place Yahweh-yir'eh- is an allusion to Yeru-salem but this is questionable, and if correct, is so cryptic as to be near imperceptible.

But while you do talk about "traditions" I don't get the feeling that you are talking about "texts". Do you believe any of these traditions were written down and then found their way into the text? Or are they all simply "recalled" in the late Hellenistic text?

A propos of which:
Passover had its traditions that were not identical to how they ended up in the Pentateuch.
That's certainly so, but this is a case where Shimon Gezundheit has made a compelling argument for the survival of a primitive Passover text, embedded within the current Exodus 12. He argues that it was successively augmented with programmatic additions (about four successive supplementations) that reshaped the sense and meaning of the early apotropaic rite (in which the blood on the doorposts was the whole point of the exercise), by conflating it with the originally separate agricultural Unleavened-Bread Feast and downgrading the original apotropaic rite, which was ultimately relegated to a one-time-only historical event. In Deuteronomy 16:1-8 the Passover rule is itself explicitly revisionary, in that it polemically characterises the Passover as a centralized temple sacrifice - and is again conflated with the Unleavened-Bread Festival by means of about four successive redactional ingerventions. This bespeaks successive literary development: not a quick collaborative compromise, but a repeated, ideologically motivated reconfiguring of the text to reconfigure the festival. And it was successful. The domestic rite did become a temple sacrifice, Passover is now the primary name of the 7-day festival, and the apotropaic blood ritual was re-characterised as a one-time-only event that was not to be repeated.
You disagree, saying the different groups existed side by side with some sort of tolerance, iiuc. But if that's the case, then why the need for a long time instead of it happening within a relatively short project time period?
I'm thinking of the literary evidence that different literary strands (some presumably but not necessarily associated with different social groups) developed diachronically acquiring successive scribal elaborations, originally quite independently of each other. For example, the non-priestly strands within Genesis 1-11 are gradually evolving texts (eg the descendants of Cain described as fathers of different crafts, oblivious to the Yahwistic flood narrative that will soon make that a total nonsense) independently of the P texts. At a later point these non-P texts are then combined with the Priestly narrative, or rather with Priestly documents (which themselves include earlier pre-P fragments), and after that acquire further supplementary additions. This is complicated but I think demonstrable.
You may accept that I, too, am starting with concrete cases, chapters, verses, etc. That would help the communication, perhaps.
Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that you weren't, I just meant that it's difficult to discuss generalizations - it's much easier to discuss concrete cases - chapters, verses etc. We may, for example, think we are discussing the same thing, very broadly speaking, only to find out that, in terms of chapter and verse, we are not talking about the same thing at all.
The Elephantine papyri indirectly indicate that there were no written festival laws comparable to what we read in the Pentateuch. There were certainly festivals, and probably some inscriptions somewhere relating to observance of them. But let's stick with the evidence.
Here I agree that Elephantine texts are very important but there are many variables in the way we can interpret the so-called (I mean mis-named) Passover Letter vis-a-vis what had and hadn't been written in priestly scribal circles. Also let's not forget that the Elephantine garrison communicated in Aramaic, not Hebrew, so writings in Hebrew - whatever date they were or weren't written - would have needed to be translated into Aramaic before they were understood in Elephantine. But we can certainly agree that there was no Pentateuch as we know it today, even in Hebrew.
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