austendw wrote: ↑Sun May 21, 2023 10:36 pm The point I was making was that intercultural connectivity could explain the transmission of a lot other literary motifs, genres and shared cultural customs.
My turn to express some confusion, now. --- as you said, we are doing our heads in with too much stuff...
I had another look at the Origins of Foundation Stories article by Darshan (is that the one you are referring to in your last comment?)
My reading of it suggests to me that the only cultural source for that genre of literature would have been the Greeks -- but not directly, according to Darshan. Is that the point -- "not directly" -- you have been trying to stress? On page 10 Darshan writes:
The number of literary parallels between the Greek and Israelites foundation stories and the absence of this genre from the literature of the great ancient Near Eastern empires makes it difficult to assume that the affinities between them are coincidental or merely reflect similar patterns of thought. At the same time, the similarities cannot be the consequence of direct literary influence in either direction.
Why cannot the similarities be the consequence of direct literary influence?
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?
As far as I am aware we have only the hypothesis that the Pentateuch records or adapts traditions that originate at that time.
The 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.
It 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.
Once we step outside the hypothesis that Darshan is working with, then there is no reason to claim, as he does, that
The similarities cannot be the consequence of direct literary influence in either direction.