Made in Alexandria, The origin of the Yahu cult

[A_Nony_Mouse]

http://www.giwersworld.org/made-in-alex ... index.html

It is much too long an article to post here. The URL is a lead to a summary of where I am coming from.

[spin]

When Yedanyah writes from Elephantine to the Persian governor of the province (Yehud) that includes Jerusalem, he writes to ask for help because the YHW temple in Elephantine has been destroyed by Egyptian supporters of the god Khnum. This is conventionally catalogued by a combined number AP 30/31, as it is now seen as the one document. The text with translation is found in James M. Lindenberger's Ancient Aramaic and Hebrew Letters, SBL, 1994, 63-68. In the Elephantine letters there are very many -yah theophoric names, eg Berekyah, Yeshobyah, Uriyah, Mauzyah and so on. There was certainly a Jewish cult in Elephantine to the god YHW. The most interesting thing in this letter for our purposes is the fact that Yedanyah acknowledges "the high priest Yehohanan and his colleagues the priests in Jerusalem". This dates a cult in Jerusalem led by a high priest with a theophoric name of Yehohanan to ~420 BCE. The little YHW temple in the far south of Egypt, "all the Jews, citizens of Elephantine", acknowledges the cult having a high priest in Jerusalem.

In a smaller collection of letters in the same book (99-116), this time from two centers, Arad and Lachish, dating circa 590 BCE, we find administrative letters with predominantly -yah theophoric names and the only deity mentioned in them is YHWH.

Made in Alexandria? Just baloney.

[Blood]

The Letter of Aristeas is a forgery therefore the Septuagint is the original

The conclusion does not follow the premise. That the attribution of the "Letter of Aristeas" is spurious is uncontroversial, and therefore "forgery" is justified. But that has no bearing on whether the LXX is the original or a translation.

[A_Nony_Mouse]

The Letter of Aristeas is a forgery therefore the Septuagint is the original

The conclusion does not follow the premise. That the attribution of the "Letter of Aristeas" is spurious is uncontroversial, and therefore "forgery" is justified. But that has no bearing on whether the LXX is the original or a translation.

That is just a statement amplified and added to in the rest of the article along with much other material in the rest of the article. The point of many statements is to get the subject out of the neutral name. It is commonly called the "letter" of Aristeas. There is an entire class of believer that will discuss it without mentioning it is a forgery. I simply call it by a name that doesn't need any additional discussion.

Correct, not in itself, the forgery does not by itself establish which is the original. It does however raise the question, What was the purpose of the forgery? Primarily it says the Greeks were impressed by Jerusalem in a time when Jerusalem was the capital of the unimportant city-state of Judea and which held no literate culture. This is in line with the efforts of Josephus to claim Judeans were some ancient great and powerful people, flying in the face of the knowledge of educated people that it was nothing but an upstart, backwater nothing until after it got political and military support from the Ptolemys in the mid 2nd c. BC for revolting against Seleucid rule.

There are no smoking guns in this. My purpose is to develop a theory which explains more of the evidence than the "religious" theories. That is what a theory is supposed to do. The most facts explained is the best theory. I suggest reading the article and some of the related articles in the links to see just how much is explained by this and how much is <b>not</b> explained by religious theories.

[A_Nony_Mouse]

If, note the if, a name is declared theophoric, and one presumes -yah is supposed to be yahu, then it is only reasonable to look for this god in archaeology and real history, not tales of magic. Thus this is a reference to the god whose oldest established mention is found in the Ugarit library. With the IF in play this letter is from their descendants in the region of Ugarit, the Phoenicians.

[spin]

If, note the if, a name is declared theophoric, and one presumes -yah is supposed to be yahu, then it is only reasonable to look for this god in archaeology and real history, not tales of magic. Thus this is a reference to the god whose oldest established mention is found in the Ugarit library. With the IF in play this letter is from their descendants in the region of Ugarit, the Phoenicians.

This is called "ignore evidence and argue from the remaining silence". There is no argument in that.

[Blood]

There are no smoking guns in this. My purpose is to develop a theory which explains more of the evidence than the "religious" theories. That is what a theory is supposed to do.

Great. A good start toward that goal is learning Hebrew and Greek.

[A_Nony_Mouse]

There are no smoking guns in this. My purpose is to develop a theory which explains more of the evidence than the "religious" theories. That is what a theory is supposed to do.

Great. A good start toward that goal is learning Hebrew and Greek.

There is no need to set the bar so high. Hundreds of thousands perhaps even millions have been doing that for centuries. It is not like any one person such as myself is going to come across anyone, such as yourself, who has attained that bar.

Most of what I have done is applied the rules of science in the matter of acceptable evidence. Translations are more than adequate for that as they are largely in agreement for Greek at least. And rather Aramaic instead of Hebrew unless there is some particular interest in the DSS or Masoretic. Very few accept this approach preferring the tedious and interminable academic, even Socratic, approach. Means nothing to me. I am a scientist so I use the tools with which I am familiar. Besides the scientific method is superior in every way as the fact were are communicating by computer is witness.

[A_Nony_Mouse]

Since the religious texts found at Ugarit were translated it has been known the god Yah or Yahu was a god in that pantheon. As this is the oldest mention of this god in evidence all presumptions which might apply to the oldest mention of other gods, e.g. Ishtar, apply. There can be no special pleading just because the same god appears in the Septuagint more than a thousand years later. It is always assumed the later mentions of the same god in the same geographic area are derivative of the oldest. That is, independent invention of a god with a similar name and characteristics is far from the simplest explanation of this.

There are many derivative names like this. Ishtar, Ashara, Astarte, Aphrodite is one related set of names for a goddess with very similar attributes. Ashara is a deity from Ugarit and is also designated the consort of Yahu in bibleland funerary inscriptions. The regions around around bibleland also had god/goddess pairs as their primary deities. It was not different in bibleland even to the temple of Ashara BYT STRT on the "temple mount" on Roman times.

[Blood]

There are no smoking guns in this. My purpose is to develop a theory which explains more of the evidence than the "religious" theories. That is what a theory is supposed to do.

Great. A good start toward that goal is learning Hebrew and Greek.

There is no need to set the bar so high. Hundreds of thousands perhaps even millions have been doing that for centuries. It is not like any one person such as myself is going to come across anyone, such as yourself, who has attained that bar.

Most of what I have done is applied the rules of science in the matter of acceptable evidence. Translations are more than adequate for that as they are largely in agreement for Greek at least. And rather Aramaic instead of Hebrew unless there is some particular interest in the DSS or Masoretic. Very few accept this approach preferring the tedious and interminable academic, even Socratic, approach. Means nothing to me. I am a scientist so I use the tools with which I am familiar. Besides the scientific method is superior in every way as the fact were are communicating by computer is witness.

I'm afraid that the bar does have to be set that high, if you want to prove that the Greek is the original version of the Bible.