Plato’s Timaeus and the Biblical Creation Accounts [Gmirkin]

[StephenGoranson]

Some may see that Genesis through Deuteronomy was not written all at once.

[ABuddhist]

Some may see that Genesis through Deuteronomy was not written all at once.

And some may see otherwise. Each side has evidence which it has presented which can be reviewed and possibly refuted.

[neilgodfrey]

Some may see that Genesis through Deuteronomy was not written all at once.

Aw come on, now Stephen. You got that from reading Russell's books, didn't ya! That's what he (Russell) says -- the author/s of Genesis 1-11 were not the same as those of the rest of Genesis, for example, and different authorial hands are found in the Pentateuch. (After all, he does not propose that just one scribe was sent to Alexandria!) Admit it, you really have read Russell's works and all of your vendetta is a mere show of feigned ignorance, right?!

[neilgodfrey]

I would add that Newsom's article for Torah.com contained nothing in principle that is not well-known among scholars and certainly nothing in it in the slightest has any bearing on Gmirkin's thesis.

Why not? Gmirkin's thesis is that there was a single Torah created relatively recently for the Jews.

Newsom's article addresses variant ideas that were read into the various books we find in the Bible -- including variants to the Pentateuch. It is no secret that in what we refer to as the second temple era there were ongoing efforts to "rewrite" many of the biblical books. Nor that changes were added here and there to the "received texts". That is all subsequent history to the first appearance of the Torah.

By the way, Russell Gmirkin points to several different hands in the composition of the Pentateuch -- something that Stephen Goranson would know if he had read any of his works. I am having a harder time believing his earlier plea that he actually once read any of Gmirkin's books and subsequently lost his notes on them. (Yeh, right -- one does not throw out notes relating to someone with whom one is engaged in an ongoing vendetta. Maybe he has genuinely convinced himself after all these years that he really did read Gmirkin's book on Berossus and Manetho, but everything he has said about that book and Gmirkin's thesis more generally simply testifies to his ignorance of its contents and RG's arguments.)

Maybe he skimmed a blurb or part of a review here and there, but nothing more, -- at least until Stephen can demonstrate a genuine knowledge of Gmirkin's argument. Up till now, every point that Stephen has posted that he thinks undermines Gmirkin's argument has been based on ignorance of what Gmirkin has actually written.

(Nor do I find it easy to believe SG is a qualified librarian despite having worked in some capacity at a library -- he appears ignorant of how the publishing world works (saying "anyone can publish anything as if Routledge would publish unscholarly nonsense) and how to search out sources in response to requests (relying on misreadings of abstracts and not being able to go beyond sources spoon-fed to him).)

[StephenGoranson]

I do not wish to attempt to reply to all distortions, but select a few.
My requested example, given earlier, from Emanuel Tov, 2015, page 85 does not fit the characterization above. My education at Brandeis and Duke, my research for publications, editorial work, and my teaching led me to my view of Torah composition.
I did xerox and read the Berossus and Manetho book, years ago. One reason I xeroxed it was because Duke did not then have a copy. A friend from another school brought me a copy, which I was obligated to return quickly. I indeed recycled it later. As already mentioned, I have other things I would rather read anew or read again. Some poems, for instance, imo, merit rereading.

And, if I may, a reminder. The title of the recent article, cited and linked above, by Prof. Carol A. Newsom is
"There Was Never One Version of the Bible."
Never [just] One.
Never

[neilgodfrey]

I do not wish to attempt to reply to all distortions, but select a few.
My requested example, given earlier, from Emanuel Tov, 2015, page 85 does not fit the characterization above. My education at Brandeis and Duke, my research for publications, editorial work, and my teaching led me to my view of Torah composition.
I did xerox and read the Berossus and Manetho book, years ago. One reason I xeroxed it was because Duke did not then have a copy. A friend from another school brought me a copy, which I was obligated to return quickly. I indeed recycled it later. As already mentioned, I have other things I would rather read anew or read again. Some poems, for instance, imo, merit rereading.

And, if I may, a reminder. The title of the recent article, cited and linked above, by Prof. Carol A. Newsom is
"There Was Never One Version of the Bible."
Never [just] One.
Never

The example you gave from Tov was not what was requested at all. You should read the response from RG explaining why.

But I do give you full marks for being able to read the title of Newsom's article.

Stephen, any normal reader would understand that Newsom is talking about the idea of a stable text. No text was ever considered final by everybody --- hence the well-known phenomenon of "rewritten bible", etc.

Here's a hint: read the whole article. Not just the title. (Like last time you only read the abstract and wound up trying to tell us Barkay said the exact opposite of what he said in the article -- you never read below the abstract and your bias led you to assume the abstract was suggesting a point it was not!)

[yakovzutolmai]

I've often wondered whether Judaism as we know it around the turn of the common era was not a product of the Maccabean revolution and Simon's "popular election" as king.

Appian mentions that Ptolemy leveled Jerusalem and its temple. The proto-Maccabean debate seems to have been over whether to fully Hellenize the temple, or keep it Egyptian.

This adds texture to the understanding of second temple Judaism.

[yakovzutolmai]

I know there's one discussion about Hellenic influence on Genesis in terms of textual genealogy.

However, as a separate discussion, isn't it possible that the cosmology of Timaeus did not originate with Plato?

I recall reading about aboriginal Chinese mythology which has some VERY familiar motifs (seven suns shot by the hunter vs seven headed serpent felled by the hunter). One such motif has to do with a cosmic egg, which is related to the dying of eggs to be red in Chinese festivals (very oddly similar to Easter traditions in the West).

The cosmic egg - and I've lost track of the paper discussing this - really does vaguely resemble some Gnostic language which I see echoing out of or in parallel to Timaeus. In the Chinese tradition, the egg is a kind of Omphalos stone, which some chaos serpent eats as a propitiation.

The aboriginal Chinese are related to the aboriginal Taiwanese rather than the Confucian, Han legacy. The solar goddess derived from this tradition is the basis for Japanese myths. Japan has early local traditions where their solar goddess is a dragon, and what we are seeing here is a version of the Atlas/Atalanta the merfolk/sea serpent legacy of the early bronze age Med. Oceanus and so forth.

Susanoo, brother of the solar goddess, has a few very strong parallels to Yam of Canaan. And the bawdy, drunken dance of the goddess to entice the solar goddess out of her cave (Zeus in the cave) is very reminiscent of Egyptian festivals related to Sekhmet (in both cases, appeasing the passions of the solar goddess with raunchy, inebriated revelry).

The idea of a common mythological source for Chinese and Mediterranean legends, which must go back at least 5,000-10,000 years or more, is hard to stomach. Without proposing any historical conspiracy theories, let's just say these parallels are quite strong and worth investigating.

Timaeus also discusses Atlantis.

If I had to guess, while this may not be Atlantis proper, there was a Persian Gulf civilization (destroyed around 4000 BC by a meteor and flood) which spread these traditions to both Egypt and China. In any event, if very parallel stories are showing up in China, then it's completely reasonable to ask if Plato got these ideas from an external source, and is not their author.

We can treat him as their popularizer, but we can't discount that Solon's Egyptian sources didn't pass their information to others, and the Hebrew Bible draws from these, not Plato.

Atlas has his tree of apples guarded by the serpent Lodan. I still maintain that Adam and Even are merely Logos and Sophia, in Greek, Coeus and Phoebe. The fruit of the tree is Leto. Atlas is of course another iteration of Coeus/Polus.

This last part is so obvious to me I can't fathom why it hasn't been discussed more commonly.

[Secret Alias]

Surely though it is difficult to explain why Hebrew Deuteronomy would reflect (a) a later Hebrew but (b) one which adopts explicit Persian loanwords which (c) don't appear in the Greek Deuteronomy.

The explanation that the Greek translator came across the Persian loanword and didn't understand what it was or what it meant was because he lived in an age where Persian had been forgotten and wasn't important to Jews and so freely made up a 'guess' as to what it might mean IS A BETTER EXPLANATION than the reverse or any other explanations.

Couple that with the likelihood that a Samaritan not a Jew wrote the Pentateuch IN HEBREW and Samaritans always maintained a close relationship with Persia and Persian culture. The whole idea of a 'Jewish-Samaritan collaboration' seems less likely than a Samaritan invention of the Torah in Hebrew (the name 'Samaritan' after all is Hebrew not Greek). It's that simple.

The difficulty with this theory is that it is based (in spite of the author's later revisionists efforts to the contrary) on the tradition notion of a JEWISH AUTHORSHIP of the Pentateuch. That's where the theory goes off the rails it would seem. The Samaritans were called 'Samaritans' because they wrote in Hebrew. The Pentateuch does not mention 'Jerusalem' and makes Judah the Jewish forefather of subordinate significance to Joseph, the 'Samaritan' forefather. Clear indications again of Samaritan authorship of the Pentateuch.

[Secret Alias]

I enjoy these parlor games. So don't mistake me for someone 'defending' the status quo. Another difficulty. The Hebrew etymology of the names going unmentioned in the Greek. In the gospels we have the use of Hebrew or mostly Aramaic words and an immediate attempt of the author's (or editors) to explain those names to their (intended?) Greek audience(s). There are no explicit attempts as far as I can remember of the LXX explaining the Hebrew and when Philo goes on to interpret the LXX he consulted onomastica to know what the names meant. Do you think that the onomastica went back to the original authors of the Pentateuch? The traditional supposition is that Philo lost touch with Hebrew. But surely it would be expected - like the gospels - that if the Pentateuch was written in the Great Library of Alexandria in the neighborhood of 270 BCE there would be an attempt to explain the names of at least some of the Hebrew names. For instance Benyamin is preserved as Benyamim in Samaritan copies of the Pentateuch and even Philo knows of the Samaritan explanation 'son of days.' It helps makes sense of the story. It's odd to assume that onomastica (varied as they were) could go back to the original authors or that Greek speaking audiences wouldn't need or want to know the meanings of these names or the gematria of names such as Moses (= 345), shemah (His name), Shilo (both 345) and 'I am that I am' (543). The 318 men too. You'd think these things would have needed to be explained to a Greek audience somehow.