Origins of Jewish monotheism: Gmirkin vs Isaiah...

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: Origins of Jewish monotheism: Gmirkin vs Isaiah...

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rgprice wrote: Thu Aug 25, 2022 12:16 pm I see that Gmrikin states:

gods. It appears certain that Yah (Yahweh) was worshipped alongside other gods in a prosaic polytheistic cultural environment in Babylonia,9 Egypt,10 Idumea,11 Samaria,12 and, arguably, Judah,13 especially on evidence of the Elephantine papyri.14 The old idea that monotheism emerged as a result of Persian influences thus lacks credible contemporary evidence and should be abandoned (cf. the critique by Mark Smith [2001: 165–6]).

Gmirkin, Russell E.. Plato’s Timaeus and the Biblical Creation Accounts (p. 248)

Is the evidence really so decisive?
I think so, from what I have read of the archaeology of the period -- scant though it is.

I have added the notes here. I know you have them, but for a more general interest.... (There are other works also addressing the archaeological evidence for the religious practices in "Jehud" in the Persian era.)

Note 9:
An analysis of theophoric elements in names from the Judahite exilic community in Babylonia documents polytheism in the Jewish exilic community where Yah was worshipped alongside the chief Babylonian gods (Granerød 2019: 357-62, especially 361-2, drawing on Pearce and Wunsch 2014) and demonstrates the prosaic worship of Babylonian deities alongside Yahweh throughout the Neo- Babylonian and Persian periods.
  • Granerød, Gard. “Canon and Archive: Yahwism in Elephantine and Äl-Yähüdu as a Challenge to the Canonical History of Judean Religion in the Persian Period.” JBL 138 (2019): 345-364. https://sci-hub.se/10.1353/jbl.2019.0018
Note 10:
The Elephantine Papyri of ca. 450-400 bce reflect a casual polytheism in which z ׳ Yah was worshipped alongside various other Babylonian and Syrian gods such as Herembethel, Eshembethel and Anathbethel (TAD B7.2-3; C3:127-28; Granerod 2016: 31, 244-56,2019: 352-3, 357). There is no indication in the corpus of papyri and ostraca from Elephantine, Syene and Memphis that the polytheistic culture that thrived in the Jewish-Aramean military colonies of Egypt was in any way unusual or unorthodox (Granerod 2016: 324—40, 2019: 351-7).
  • Granerød, Gard. Dimensions of Yahwism in the Persian Period: Studies in the Religion and Society of the Judaean Community at Elephantine. BZAW 488. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2016.
page 31:
An individual who calls himself “Malchiah son of Jashobiah, an Aramaean, hereditary property holder in Elephantine” (B7.2:2-3) had been accused of an unlawful entry/acquisition of a house by someone called Artafrada who was a member of another detachment. In the document, Malchiah, who clearly has a theophoric name with YHW as the divine element, expressed his willingness to declare loudly in the presence of Herembethel that he was not guilty of the accusation (B7.2:7). Moreover, the so-called Collection Account (C3.15) lists the “names of the Judaean garrison who gave silver to YHW the god” (C3.15:l). What continues to perplex scholars is that the list also accounts for the contributions to Eshembethel and Anathbethel (who probably are gods, C3.15:127-128). Furthermore, the servant Giddel blessed his lord Micaiah (cf. the element YHW) “by YHH and Khnum” (D7.21:3). Therefore, also the worship and veneration of YHW did not function alone as the main criteria for defining the Judaean community.
It's probably a bit much for me to add the full quotation from pages 324-40, 244-56 or even pages 351-7 from the 2019 title. The 2016 article is linked above.



Note 11
A fourth century bce ostraca from Idumea mentions temples both of Yaho and the Arabian god ‘Uzza, suggesting Yahwism thrived within a polytheistic en- vironment in Judah’s southern neighbor (Lemaire 2004, 2006).
  • Lemaire, André. “Another Temple to the Israelite God: Aramaic Hoard Documents Life in Fourth Century B.C.” BAR 30 (2004): 38-44, 60.
  • Lemaire, André. “New Aramaic Ostraca from Idumea and their Historical Interpretation,” in Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period. Oded Lipschits and Manfred Oeming (eds.), 413-456. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2006.

Note 12
Iconography on Persian Era coinage from Samaria shows a remarkable continuity with that of the polytheistic cultic installation at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud (ca. 750 bce), demonstrating a strong continuity with Samaria’s polytheistic heritage (Leith 2014: 275-84) and incidentally showing that Samaria’s religious culture was by no means aniconic.
  • Leith, Mary Joan Winn. “Religious Continuity in Israel/Samaria: Numismatic Evidence,” in A ״Religious Revolution” in Yehud? The Material Culture of the Persian Period as a Test Case. Christian Frevel, Katharina Pyschny and Izak Cornelius (eds.), 267-304. Gottingen: Academic Press, 2014.
Note 13
Ephraim Stem (1999, 2001, 2006) argued that archaeological remains from Persian Era Judah demonstrate a remarkable aniconography and absence of pagan cultic objects, in contrast with regional neighbors, but his analysis was disputed in the collection of articles in Frevel, Psychny and Cornelius (2014). See Grabbe 2014, Wyssmann 2014 and Leith 2014 on imagery, including foreign gods, on Samarian and Judean coins. A bearded god seated on a throne on Samarian coinage and on a winged chariot on a “Yehud” coin (Wyssmann 2014: 230-2, 246-7) is sometimes interpreted as representations of Yahweh; cf. Smith 1990: 9; Shenkar 2007-2008; de Hulster 2009. See Grabbe 2014: 34 on Persian Era incense altars and figurines in Judah, contra Stem 1999: 250-5 2001: 478-9, 488.
  • de Hulster, Izaak J. “A Yehud Coin with a Representation of a Sun Deity and Iconic Practice in Persian Period Palestine. An Elaboration on TC 242.5” / BMC Palestine XIX 29,” in Unity and Diversity in Early Jewish Monotheisms. 1-16. Göttingen: Georg-August-Universität, 2009. http://www.monotheism.uni-goettingen.de ... _tc242.pdf (last accessed on 27th Nov. 2012).
  • Frevel, Christian, Katharina Pyschny and Izak Cornelius (eds.). A "Religious Revolution’’ in Yehiid? The Material Culture of the Persian Period as a Test Case. Göttingen: Academic Press, 2014.
  • Grabbe, Lester L. “Religious and Cultural Boundaries from the Neo-Babylonian to the Early Greek Period: A Context for Iconographie Interpretation,” in A ״Religious Revolution” in Yehud? The Material Culture of the Persian Period as a Test Case. Christian Frevel, Katharina Pyschny and Izak Cornelius (eds.), 23-42. Göttingen: Academic Press, 2014.
  • Shenkar, Michael. “The Coin of the »God on the Winged Wheel«.” Boreas 30/31 (2007-2008): 13-23 https://www.academia.edu/380126/The_Coi ... ged_Wheel_.
  • Smith, Mark S. The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990. https://archive.org/details/earlyhistoryofgo0000smit
  • Stem, Ephraim. Material Culture of the Land of the Bible in the Persian Period 538-332 B.C. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1982.
  • Stem, Ephraim. “Religion in Palestine in the Assyrian and Persian Periods,” in The Crisis of Israelite Religion: Transformation of Religious Tradition in Exilic and Post-Exilic Times. Bob Becking and Marjo Korpel (eds.), 245-255. Oudtestamentische Studien 42. Leiden: Brill, 1999.
  • Stem, Ephraim. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, Volume II. The Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian Periods (732-332 B.C.E.). New York: Doubleday, 2001.
  • Wyssmann, Patrick. “The Coinage Imagery of Samaria and Judah in the Late Persian Period,” in A ״Religious Revolution” in Yehud? The Material Culture of the Persian Period as a Test Case. Christian Frevel, Katharina Pyschny and Izak Cornelius (eds.), 221-266. Göttingen: Academic Press, 2014.
Note 14
The evidence from the Elephantine Papyri shows that the religious authorities in Jerusalem accommodated the existence of other temples servicing polytheistic Jewish communities abroad. The priests of Elephantine were in close communication with the priests in Jerusalem and the Samarian authorities, both of whom sanctioned the rebuilding of their temple of Yah: not only was there no Deuteronomistic backlash from Jerusalem, there is no indication of the existence of any biblical writings that discouraged any of the historical practices at Elephantine that scholars once discounted as heterodox (Granerod 2016: 17, 204-6, 340).
  • Granerod, Gard. Dimensions of Yahwism in the Persian Period: Studies in the Religion and Society of the Judaean Community at Elephantine. BZAW 488. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2016.
rgprice wrote: Thu Aug 25, 2022 12:16 pm
Within the Hebrew Bible, a true monotheism that denied the existence of other gods is found only in Second Isaiah (Smith 2001: 179–94), written sometime in the period ca. 270–185 BCE. 15

Gmirkin, Russell E.. Plato’s Timaeus and the Biblical Creation Accounts (p. 249).

Gmirkin's note on this claim:
15 The extensive use of the Pentateuch, especially Exodus imagery in Second Isaiah, indicates a date after ca. 270 BCE.

Evidence? Firstly, this reasoning is circular. Even if there is commonality between Second Isaiah and the Torah, how does one show that the borrowing went from Torah to Isaiah and not the other way around? Secondly, what are these supposed examples of links between the Torah and Second Isaiah?
On the links:

Isaiah 40:13, 21, 22 -- God is the creator as per Genesis 1

Isaiah 43:16-17 is a reference to the destruction of Pharaoh's armies in the Red Sea at the Exodus of Israel

Isaiah 48:21 has all the appearance of a reference to Moses bringing forth water for Israel in the wilderness by striking a rock.

Isaiah 51:2 refers to the parents of Israel, Abraham and Sarah

Isaiah 51:3 references Eden, presumably only meaningful to those who knew the story of Genesis 2.

Isaiah 51:10 refers to the parting of the Red Sea so Israel could cross on dry land

Isaiah 54:9 refers to Noah and to God's promise never to send another flood to destroy everything

Rikki Watts has written a detailed account of how Isaiah's theme of a new exodus is built on the Pentateuchal account and used by the author of the Gospel of Mark: Isaiah's New Exodus in Mark. Second Isaiah's theme of a new exodus is built on the story of the first exodus, as some of the above links show.

As for the direction of the influence, given that Isaiah makes scattered references to names and events in the Pentateuch it appears that the author presumed his readers knew of the narrative to which he was referring. References to Noah, the rock yielding water, the Egyptian enemies of Israel and their armies drowned in the sea, crossing the sea as the waters parted, the reference to Abraham and Sarah --- none of those would have made any sense or meant anything to readers who were ignorant of the stories in Genesis and Exodus. So I think there can be little doubt that Second Isaiah knew and drew from the Pentateuch.

There are differences, too. Isaiah belonged to the "tradition" that opposed the polytheistic friendly narrative of Genesis 1-11. In Isaiah El/Elohim and Yahweh are no longer separated but are one and the same god. The idea that there was a chaotic mess prior to creation is also rejected by Isaiah who insists that everything was perfect from the very beginning.
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Re: Origins of Jewish monotheism: Gmirkin vs Isaiah...

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Hmm.. very interesting. Damnit, this damned book is taking too long to write because I keep having to revise stuff like this :p

I figured this part of my history was fairly safe, but I'll need to dig into this issue now as well.

But I think the mentions of Cyrus still pose questions. Why do Isaiah and Ezra place so much importance on Cyrus? Why do they give so much praise to Cyrus and practically credit Cyrus with the founding of Judaism?

Ezra and Isaiah essentially tie the legitimacy of the Temple priesthood to Cyrus and credit him with the salvation of the Jewish people. Why would writers in the 2nd century BCE put such a focus on Cyrus?

The other thing I struggle with is the fact that we know Judaism was quite extensive, with apparently millions of adherents by the first century BCE. I can accept that the Torah was produced in the 3rd century BCE and received adoption through the efforts of the Temple priesthood, but I struggle with the idea that as of the 4th century the population of Palestine was essentially polytheistic, with no concept of Yahweh as the divine Creator, no knowledge of Moses, no special importance placed on the Jerusalem Temple, and then by the end of the 3rd century Torah based Judaism was widely adopted by apparently millions of people.

The writing of the Torah is one thing. But, I had conceived the development of Judaism in a much more gradual manner than what Gmirkin is proposing now. I envisioned that at least the worship of Yahweh-only preceded the writing of the Torah, so that the worship of Yahweh-alone, and the belief in Yahweh as the Creator came first. Then, a backstory was developed in the form of the Torah.

Gmirkin now proposes that the Torah also presented the idea of Yahweh as the Cosmic Creator and marks the beginning of the worship of Yahweh-alone, all in one fell swoop. And somehow, masses of Judahites adopted this? That's difficult to conceive.

That almost sounds like someone today re-writing history to claim that George Washington founded America all by himself, that he alone wrote the Declaration of Independence, that he alone defeated the British, that he alone wrote the Constitution, that were was no Senate, that Washington was a king, etc. and entirely re-writing the early history of the discovery of the Americas and founding of the colonies, etc. and all of that just being accepted and all of the other history quickly being forgotten. That seems a far stretch...
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Re: Origins of Jewish monotheism: Gmirkin vs Isaiah...

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rgprice wrote: Fri Aug 26, 2022 4:06 am
... but I struggle with the idea that as of the 4th century the population of Palestine was essentially polytheistic, with no concept of Yahweh as the divine Creator, no knowledge of Moses, no special importance placed on the Jerusalem Temple, and then by the end of the 3rd century Torah based Judaism was widely adopted by apparently millions of people.

The writing of the Torah is one thing. But, I had conceived the development of Judaism in a much more gradual manner than what Gmirkin is proposing now. I envisioned that at least the worship of Yahweh-only preceded the writing of the Torah, so that the worship of Yahweh-alone, and the belief in Yahweh as the Creator came first. Then, a backstory was developed in the form of the Torah.

Gmirkin now proposes that the Torah also presented the idea of Yahweh as the Cosmic Creator and marks the beginning of the worship of Yahweh-alone, all in one fell swoop. And somehow, masses of Judahites adopted this? That's difficult to conceive.

FWIW:


The Septuagint may be seen as a Jewish salvo in the "war of books" that began with the publication of Hecataeus's highly nationalistic account of the Egyptians around 320-315 BCE. Besides correcting misinformation about the Jews in Manetho, the new version of the Pentateuch presented the Jews as possessing a national literature of their own on a par with the Egyptians and Babylonians. We may conclude that the Septuagint was written, not merely for Alexandrian Jews, but with a wider Greek-speaking audience in mind. Literary stimulus from the royal patronage of Ptolemy II Philadelphus was thus decisive in creating, not only the Septuagint, but also the Hebrew Pentateuch that lay behind it.

Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible, p. 255
via viewtopic.php?p=66828#p66828


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Re: Origins of Jewish monotheism: Gmirkin vs Isaiah...

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@MrMacSon That's all well and good, but I find it difficult that millions of Palestinians would have just adopted all of this and gone along with it. Of course part of the issue is that they all didn't, but there is very little that we know of today to provide evidence of any significant backlash or counter movement.

You can't just present a history and religion to a whole society that that has a different history and religion and have them all just adopt the new history and religion and totally forge the past. It just seems that there needs to be some better explanation of how we go from a polytheistic Palestinian population, who had no knowledge of Moses or Ten Commandments or David or Solomon or Twelve Tribes circa 300 BCE to millions of devotees to the Temple priesthood and people sacrificing their lives for the Torah some 50 to 75 years later?

People have wondered about how Christianity spread so quickly for centuries, but this makes the spread of Christianity look like child's play.

And why is there so little counter narrative? Why do we have no record of pre-Torah Judahite life and religion? I could understand that if pre-Torah Judahite religions was already pretty similar to what the Torah lays out, but Gmirkin is proposing a pretty major revolution, claiming that the Torah essentially created a whole new religion out of thin air with almost no precedent in Judahite traditions, and then millions of Palestinians just adopted it on the spot.
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Re: Origins of Jewish monotheism: Gmirkin vs Isaiah...

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Was it or would it have been 'millions' ??

(Christianity's real numbers until the 5th or 6th century (or even until later) are unknown too, afaik)
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Re: Origins of Jewish monotheism: Gmirkin vs Isaiah...

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MrMacSon wrote: Fri Aug 26, 2022 6:32 am Was it or would it have been 'millions' ??

(Christianity's real numbers until the 5th or 6th century (or even until later) are unknown too, afaik)

Pasachoff, Naomi E.; Littman, Robert J. (1995). A Concise History of the Jewish People. Reference, Information and Interdisciplinary Subjects Series. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield (published 2005). p. 67. ISBN 9780742543669. Retrieved 27 May 2021. By the 1st century C.E. perhaps 10 percent of the Roman Empire, or about 7 million people, were Jews, with about 2.5 million in Palestine. These population figures are very unreliable, but they are probably fairly accurate in regard to percentages. Such an explosion in population could not have been caused entirely by natural birthrate, but conversion must have played an important part.

From Gruen, Constructs of Identity in Hellenistic Judaism 2016 I have that it's estimated that between three and five million Jews lived outside of Palestine during the Hellenistic period.

It is generally agreed that the Jewish population reached a peak in the first century that was not again reached until the 19th or 20th century.

But the point is, if any of these population estimates are even remotely close, then by the first century there were millions of Jews. I already agreed that Judaism as we know it didn't really develop until the 3rd century BCE, however I envisioned that there was a community of perhaps a million Semitic Palestinians who already adhered to the exclusive worship of Yahweh led by a priesthood that controlled the Temple in Jerusalem, and whose religion was at least somewhat similar to the religion extolled in the Torah.

Maybe this religion didn't say anything about Moses or Twelve Tribes or have much of the historical backstory that we find in the Torah, but it would have had many of the holidays such as Passover and Yom Kippur, used prayers that we find in the Jewish scriptures, had a tradition that included various prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Habakkuk, etc., had origin story traditions that at least vaguely resembled what we find in Genesis, had some sense of historical ties to the Israelites, etc.

But it seems that Gmirkin is blowing even much of that out of the water. So what I have a hard time understanding is how such a significant population of people adopted so many new religious and historical elements of their identity in such a short period of time. Especially since the Torah does not really put forward what was claimed to be a new religion, rather it claims that its religious doctrines and beliefs had been part of the community for centuries.
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Re: Origins of Jewish monotheism: Gmirkin vs Isaiah...

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rgprice wrote: Fri Aug 26, 2022 8:44 am
Pasachoff, Naomi E.; Littman, Robert J. (1995). A Concise History of the Jewish People. Reference, Information and Interdisciplinary Subjects Series. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield (published 2005). p. 67. ISBN 9780742543669. Retrieved 27 May 2021. By the 1st century C.E. perhaps 10 percent of the Roman Empire, or about 7 million people, were Jews, with about 2.5 million in Palestine. These population figures are very unreliable, but they are probably fairly accurate in regard to percentages. Such an explosion in population could not have been caused entirely by natural birthrate, but conversion must have played an important part.

From Gruen, Constructs of Identity in Hellenistic Judaism 2016 I have that it's estimated that between three and five million Jews lived outside of Palestine during the Hellenistic period.

  1. I understand the worldwide population ~1 AD/CE is estimated to have been around 250m. One can 'imagine' ~25-35%+ (60-85m+) in Africa, 15-20% in the America's (37-50m), and, in most of the rest in all of Asia, 'Russia'/Siberia/Mongolia, and Europe: 120-160m (Australia only had about 1m and Oceania and Atlantic and Indian Oceans' islands would not have had many in total).

    The Roman Empire would only have been about 10-15 to 20% of the population of all of Europe and Asia (???)
    • ie. 12 to 40m (???)

      So, 10% to 25% of the population of all that land mass might have been only 12m to 32m, and the population of North Africa along the southern Mediterranean coast (& north of the Sahara) might have been, say only 10% (it's a huge continent, much bigger than maps indicate) ie. 6-8m

      So a Roman Empire population of 18 to 45m

      And the Roman Empire didn't start until the time of Augustus Caesar
    .
  2. Certainly, conversion would have had to have played a big part ...

rgprice wrote: Fri Aug 26, 2022 8:44 am
But it seems that Gmirkin is blowing even much of that out of the water. So what I have a hard time understanding is how such a significant population of people adopted so many new religious and historical elements of their identity in such a short period of time. Especially since the Torah does not really put forward what was claimed to be a new religion, rather it claims that its religious doctrines and beliefs had been part of the community for centuries.

As with early Christianity, I don't think 'how old a new religion was' would have mattered to a then present generation ...
  • Using Christianity as an example (b/c I am more familiar with propositions wrt to the start of Christianity than I am with Judaism: I haven't read Gmirkin's books yet), I think that even if, as Jörg Rüpke has proposed [somewhat tongue-in-cheek] in Pantheon, the seed of Christianity was first sown with a narrative by Marcion around ~140 AD/CE,1 one can 'imagine'/come-to-understand that by 340 AD/CE - or even earlier, say by even 200-220 AD/CE - most hearers/receivers of the narrative would not have known when the narrative first started

    ie. they'd only know that their present narrative had set a [relatively-quickly-reified] Jesus of Nazareth in the early first century AD/CE.

    1 especially if the Pauline letters were either modified or in fact [mostly] written in a Marcionite community or both

It's conceivable the Ptolemy Empire, of ~340 BCE to the time of Cleopatra in the first century BCE, was favourable to the growth and spread of Judaism, especially if -
MrMacSon wrote: Fri Aug 26, 2022 5:20 am

Literary stimulus from the royal patronage of Ptolemy II Philadelphus was...decisive in creating, not only the Septuagint, but also the Hebrew Pentateuch that lay behind it.

Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible, p. 255
via viewtopic.php?p=66828#p66828


Afterall, Ptolemy I Soter is said to have introduced the deity of Serapis into Egypt and that deity changed and continued to be popular through the years, too.
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Re: Origins of Jewish monotheism: Gmirkin vs Isaiah...

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rgprice wrote: Fri Aug 26, 2022 6:05 am but Gmirkin is proposing a pretty major revolution, claiming that the Torah essentially created a whole new religion out of thin air with almost no precedent in Judahite traditions, and then millions of Palestinians just adopted it on the spot.
I don't read Gmirkin this way. He does say there were different ideas that went into the foundation stories and that the literate classes were not in full agreement about aspects of these narratives. He doesn't say anything about a new narrative of origins (not quite the same thing as a "new religion") being suddenly adopted by the whole population. We know that there were different narratives of origins extant -- as your other thread raising the question of the origins of the Enochian ideas testifies.
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Re: Origins of Jewish monotheism: Gmirkin vs Isaiah...

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Russell Gmirkin, introduction to his chapter 8, p. 246:
It will be argued that the text of Genesis documents an attempt to introduce Platonic philosophical notions of cosmic monotheism and benevolent terrestrial polytheism to the Jewish and Samaritan peoples, but that this benevolent polytheism was rejected by the authors of Exodus-Joshua in favor of an aggressive Yahwistic monolatry that was in turn the forerunner of true Yahwistic monotheism that begins to be documented in the second century BCE.
Far from arguing for a "pretty major revolution" that "millions of Palestinians just adopted ... on the spot", towards the end of the same chapter Gmirkin writes, p. 294:
Yet the philosophy that gave birth to the novel Jewish theocratic state was, ironically, extinguished at the outset.
  • Gmirkin, Russell E. Plato’s Timaeus and the Biblical Creation Accounts: Cosmic Monotheism and Terrestrial Polytheism in the Primordial History. Abingdon, Oxon New York, NY: Routledge, 2022.
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Re: Origins of Jewish monotheism: Gmirkin vs Isaiah...

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rgprice wrote: Wed Aug 24, 2022 6:21 am I think Second Isaiah pre-dates the Torah by a lot, along with other books of prophets,

Smith claims that the material from Second Isaiah matches that of Cyrus’ proclamation to the Babylonians, which referenced the Babylonian god Marduk instead of Yahweh.

Why would Hellenistic writers produce material that praises Cyrus and calls Cyrus the messiah?

And there is no question that the Psalms are ancient Canaanite material, so clearly the priests were in possession of such older material.

Why would Ezra include:

Thus says King Cyrus of Persia: The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem in Judah. Any of those among you who are of his people—may their God be with them!—are now permitted to go up to Jerusalem in Judah, and rebuild the house of the Lord, the God of Israel—he is the God who is in Jerusalem; and let all survivors, in whatever place they reside, be assisted by the people of their place with silver and gold, with goods and with animals, besides freewill offerings for the house of God in Jerusalem.

Why would Hellenistic writers state that the Jews worshiped the God of Cyrus?
Valid questions. If I may briefly comment, it is not my position that all biblical materials were created in the Hellenistic Era. Finding verifiable earlier pre-Hellenistic sources (whether written or oral) is also a part of my broader source-critical enterprise. Some of the Psalms are pre-Pentateuchal and quite possibly pre-Hellenistic. (I have a very interesting article in the works demonstrating one biblical psalm preserved in a more ancient format in the Amherst Papyrus originated with Yahwists from Hamath in the late 700s BCE.) Some legal and calendrical materials in the Pentateuch similarly draw on earlier oral priestly traditions. But most biblical prophecy, including Second Isaiah, belong to the late Hellenistic Era of literary (that is, written) prophecy. A notable exception is Haggai, which preserves authentic Persian Era oracles preserved in the Jewish temple. Some Persian Era correspondence also from the temple documentary archives is probably preserved in Ezra (written early 2nd century BCE), though greatly altered. The Cyrus oracle appears to be an extremely rare seemingly authentic Persian Era oracle also preserved in the temple and incorporated within the text of Second Isaiah and paraphrased (with late and highly questionable amplifications) in Ezra. I haven't yet written about Persian Era documents in the pre-Maccabean temple library, so I thought it might be interesting to post my views here. You'll forgive me if I don't enter into an extended discussion.
Last edited by Russell Gmirkin on Fri Aug 26, 2022 8:55 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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