Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

It's not a 'belief.' It's an argument you haven't address. You've just done what scholars do. Just throw up distraction.

You see I am complementing you as a 'real scholar.'

I AM SAYING that the Pentateuch is not just an open-ended myth.
I AM SAYING that the Pentateuch is an "IKEA instruction manual" to establish a sacrificial religion.
I AM SAYING that the myth in Genesis of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is to help contextualize that 'set up' place as Gerizim.

The Book of Joshua knows that intent of the author(s) of the Pentateuch and re-confirms it.

I don't think any of your points have any relevance to the question I originally raised. You were the one who contextualized the discussion as "what scholars of Samaritanism" believe or say. But this seems to be disingenuous for reasons I'd rather not go into as you will undoubtedly take it as an insult and leave the conversation.

If you think that Jerusalem was the original place sacrifices were established it is incumbent on you to explain why Jews (or "Judaeans") would establish their collective patriarchs as setting up the original altar in "someone else's (i.e. non-Judaean) backyard." If you want to talk about something else then just say so. But for me it's disappointing.

Secret Alias wrote: ↑Sun Nov 06, 2022 12:39 pm ...If you think that Jerusalem was the original place sacrifices were established it is incumbent on you to explain why Jews (or "Judaeans") would establish their collective patriarchs as setting up the original altar in "someone else's (i.e. non-Judaean) backyard." If you want to talk about something else then just say so. But for me it's disappointing.

You keep on attributing positions to me that I don’t hold. It’s one of the reasons I rarely engage in discussions like this. For instance, if you ever have a chance to read my article “‘Solomon’ (Shalmaneser III) and the Emergence of Judah as an Independent Kingdom” in the Thomas L. Thompson Festschrift you will learn that I have argued, based on archaeological and inscriptional considerations, that the Yahweh cult sprang from Samaria and the original temple at Jerusalem was constructed by the Samarians in the ninth century BCE when Samaria controlled the region in the period before the emergence of Judah as a political entity ca. 735 BCE.

That said, I’m going to abandon this thread because there is a consistent unfortunate pattern in which you will not actually discuss evidence that might conflict with your prior beliefs/opinions. When I talk about “beliefs,” I’m not saying that you belong to a religious group that looks favorably on Israelites and negatively on the Jews (although I don’t rule that out, and it’s your business if you do), because the views of various scholars and academicians also often amount to definite belief systems that filter out conflicting information (both Maximalism and the Documentary Hypothesis spring to mind). My knowledge-based approach is to lay out all the relevant primary evidence and use careful argumentation to draw reasonable conclusions. Belief systems take the opposite tack and basically start out with a pet theory or conclusion and filter out dangerous facts accordingly. I gotta say, that’s what appears to be going on here, which is OK. But maybe I’ve mentioned some facts that you will consider and process and maybe shape your future opinions. In any case, (1) I wish you well, and (2) other participants have been exposed to some of the latest interesting research on Samaritans as authorial contributors to the Hexateuch. Take care.

Russell Gmirkin wrote: ↑Sun Nov 06, 2022 12:01 pm

rgprice wrote: ↑Sun Nov 06, 2022 10:48 am What if it was created by neither Samaritans nor Jews. When did these distinctions come into existence?

It seems a bit like asking if the Pauline letters were originally written by Christians or Gnostics. Of course they may have been written by neither.

As of ca. 400 BCE in the Elephantine Papyri, the priests of Elephantine sought appealed to both Judahite and Samarian authorities for support for rebuilding their temple of Yah. Going from memory, both Kratz and probably Granerod interpreted this to show that Judah, Samaria & Elephantine shared a common religious heritage. And clearly no-one claimed there could be only one legitimate temple of Yah[weh] at that time.

Samaritan and Jew were originally geographical/political references to the lands of Samaria and Judah, not to distinct religions. The mythos of "twelve tribes of Israel" clearly embraced an essential unity between north and south as co-religionists, in support of your question. At some point there was a religious rivalry and schism between Jews and Samaritans and their respective temples, but this was clearly after the creation of the Pentateuch. I think it is more productive to speak of the Hexateuch as a Yahwistic creation rather than Jewish or Samaritan, since it appears there was no real religious distinction between Jews and Samaritans when the Hexateuch was written. Gerizim was more prominent than Jerusalem in the text, but they were all quite unambiguously co-religionists.

That's sort of what I was getting at. Was there actually a distinction between these groups at the time of the composition? It seems like the answer is no. And really, neither Jerusalem nor Gerizim feature prominently in the Pentateuch. It almost sounds like debating the Trinity based on the NT texts, which never actually clearly lay out any description of the Trinity, its something that is inferred or derived from the text by later readers.

Russell, you have made the easy and true point that I have not read everything you have written.
I may venture that you have not read everything I wrote.
More to the point, I and others--maybe you can't disqualify all of us--are not persuaded by your 270s proposal, even if you find such hard to imagine.

I don't know if I ever heard of it being sufficient to say "I am not persuaded" as a scholarly response to an argument until I ventured to explore the world of biblical studies. I can understand that response in an informal discussion over a few drinks. But should not the scholarly response be to demonstrate that one has understood the proposed argument by encapsulating it and then breaking it down into its parts, and then offering a point by point reasoned and evidence-based rebuttal of each or any of the points?

Simply saying "I am not persuaded" does sound a bit like intellectual laziness, does it not? An all too easy cop-out when one doesn't want to accept an argument just because.

rgprice wrote: ↑Sun Nov 06, 2022 10:48 am
What if it was created by neither Samaritans nor Jews. When did these distinctions come into existence?
It seems a bit like asking if the Pauline letters were originally written by Christians or Gnostics. Of course they may have been written by neither.

• Or, perhaps written by [other, third] Group A and used and modified by Gs and [then] Cs

eta:
I note part of Russell's reply:

Russell Gmirkin wrote: ↑Sun Nov 06, 2022 12:01 pm ... I think it is more productive to speak of the Hexateuch as a Yahwistic creation rather than Jewish or Samaritan, since it appears there was no real religious distinction between Jews and Samaritans when the Hexateuch was written. Gerizim was more prominent than Jerusalem in the text, but they were all quite unambiguously co-religionists.

eta2

rgprice wrote: ↑Sun Nov 06, 2022 1:35 pm That's sort of what I was getting at ...

• 'co-religionists' might, in fact, describe " 'Christians' and Gnostics' "

My cherry-picks for posterity (I initially misspelt that 'cheery-picks' ):

Russell Gmirkin wrote: ↑Sun Nov 06, 2022 9:43 am
... every recent study I have run across has claimed that the Samaritans were the dominant authorial group behind the Hexateuch.The evidence is pretty clear, as many prominent scholars now note: the prominence of Gerizim, Ebal and Shechem, and absence of Jerusalem as religious sites in Deuteronomy and Joshua; the prominence of “Israel” (i.e. the Northern Kingdom) and Joseph in Genesis; the minor and sometimes negative role of the patriarch Judah, etc., etc. This is pretty much standard scholarship today. So, for instance:

• Nihan, Christophe, “The Torah between Samaria and Judah: Shechem and Gerizim in Deuteronomy and Joshua.” Pages 187-224 in Gary N. Knoppers and Bernard M. Levinson (eds.) Pentateuch as Torah: New Models for Understanding Its Promulgation and Acceptance (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2007)

• Kratz, Reinhard G., “Temple and Torah: Reflections on the Legal Status of the Pentateuch between Elephantine and Qumran.” Pages 77-104 in Gary N. Knoppers and Bernard M. Levinson (eds.) Pentateuch as Torah: New Models for Understanding Its Promulgation and Acceptance (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2007), 98-101.

• Knoppers, Gary, Jews and Samaritans: The Origins and History of their Early Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

• Knoppers, Gary, “The Northern Context of the Law-Code in Deuteronomy,” Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel 4.2 (2015): 162-83.

• Hjelm, Ingrid “Northern Perspectives in Deuteronomy and its Relation to the Samaritan Pentateuch,” Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel 4.2 (2015): 184-204.

• Gmirkin, Russell E., Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible. London: Routledge, 2017.

• Bergsma, John S., “A Samaritan Pentateuch?: The Implications of the Pro-Northern Tendency of the Common Pentateuch,” in M. Armgardt, B. Kilchör and M. Zehnder (eds.), Paradigm Change in Pentateuchal Research (BZAR 22; Ðiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2019), 287-300.

• Gmirkin, Russell E., Plato’s Timaeus and the Biblical Creation Accounts: Cosmic Monotheism and Terrestrial Polytheism in the Primordial History. London: Routledge, 2022.

It is noteworthy that most of the above sources posit a joint Samaritan-Judean composition of the Hexateuch as a compromise document (which, among other things, explains why the Torah was accepted by both Samaritans and Jews)

Russell Gmirkin wrote: ↑Sun Nov 06, 2022 9:45 am
... Samaritan authorship of the Hexateuch (or major portions thereof) is now quite mainstream ...

However, there are also several important indications that Judah played a minor authorial role in creating the Hexateuch:

1. Why else would Judah be included in the twelve tribes of Israel?
2. Why else was Judah prominently allotted territory in the book of Joshua?
3. Why was Caleb, the one positively regarded spy under Moses, and the only adult Israelite who didn’t die in the 40 years wandering, assigned a major chunk of territory in Judah (Josh. 14-15)?
4. Why else would Gen. 49:10 say “The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, not a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come”?
5. Why else would Deut. 17:14-40 (“the rule of the king”) foreshadow the rise of Solomon, the king of the Jerusalem, temple city and Judah’s capital?
6. Why does there exist both a wilderness Priestly legislation P which (in my opinion) appears to stem from the Samaritans, and the Holiness Code H (Lev. 17-26) that stems from Jerusalem (based on extensive parallels between H and Ezekiel, which devotes several chapters to Jerusalem).
7. As noted above, why else did both Samaritans and Jews accept the Pentateuch as authoritative?

... I believe a joint Samaritan-Judean composition of the Pentateuch, with the Samaritans having the leading role, economically accounts for all the facts

My own original research uncovers and highlights the substantial Babylonian/Assyrian ethnic component of the Samaritans, which persisted into the Hellenistic Era...provid[ing] a channel for the transmission of many Babylonian traditions to the biblical authors. A book I am currently working on, Babylonian and Samaritan Science in the Primordial History, develops this theme as well as breaking new ground on Samaritan influences in the pseudepigrapha

Russell Gmirkin wrote: ↑Sun Nov 06, 2022 9:52 am
... the biblical covenant language reflects Greek rather than Ancient Near Eastern political practices, as I discuss extensively in Chapter 4 of Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible ...

I happen to agree that Gerizim overshadowed Jerusalem at the time of the creation of the Hexateuch, although both temples were considered acceptable centers of Yahweh worship. It is important to note that the specification of a single place of worship is found nowhere in the Hexateuch except for ONE chapter in Deuteronomy, which is probably one of the latest passages in Deuteronomy, reflecting a contest for legitimacy between Gerizim and Jerusalem, and in which—it is important to note—neither Gerizim nor Jerusalem is mentioned or identified as the place Yahweh would place his name

Finally, the conflation of Yahweh with Elohim is already present in Exodus (for instance, in the sabbath commandment of the Decalog). I don’t see the relevance of the Shema or divine names in this discussion. Since they aren’t directly relevant to the question of Samaritan/Jewish authorship of the Hexateuch, perhaps we can leave them out of the current discussion

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Secret Alias wrote: ↑Sun Nov 06, 2022 2:51 am
Let's start with lack of mention of "Jerusalem" explained. A safe topic where I apparently am in the minority. But which, when viewed with open eyes, makes the assumed position of most scholars (= the Pentateuch being written for a nascent sacrificial cult at Jerusalem) untenable

My position is, as you may have discerned, the lack of mention of "Jerusalem" is because Gerizim was the traditional cultic center. "90%" (I have no clue the exact number) of the Abraham, Isaac and Jacob narrative that is set in "the Land", so to speak, takes place in the northern "Land"

Russell Gmirkin wrote: ↑Sun Nov 06, 2022 10:02 am I agree totally, except to add that this has now become fairly standard scholarship, unless there has been a backlash against Samari(t)an authorial contributions to the Hexateuch that I am not aware of

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Russell Gmirkin wrote: ↑Sun Nov 06, 2022 12:01 pm ... I think it is more productive to speak of the Hexateuch as a Yahwistic creation rather than Jewish or Samaritan since it appears there was no real religious distinction between Jews and Samaritans when the Hexateuch was written. Gerizim was more prominent than Jerusalem in the text, but they were all quite unambiguously co-religionists

Russell Gmirkin wrote: ↑Sun Nov 06, 2022 1:27 pm ... [in] my article “‘Solomon’ (Shalmaneser III) and the Emergence of Judah as an Independent Kingdom” in the Thomas L. Thompson Festschrift...I...argued, based on archaeological and inscriptional considerations, that the Yahweh cult sprang from Samaria and the original temple at Jerusalem was constructed by the Samarians in the ninth century BCE when Samaria controlled the region in the period, before the emergence of Judah as a political entity ca. 735 BCE

StephenGoranson wrote: ↑Sun Nov 06, 2022 1:43 pm Russell, you have made the easy and true point that I have not read everything you have written.
I may venture that you have not read everything I wrote.
More to the point, I and others--maybe you can't disqualify all of us--are not persuaded by your 270s proposal, even if you find such hard to imagine.

I am reasonably informed with your published body of work, based on your home page at Duke University, your Academia.edu page, and miscellaneous encounters with other articles over the years. Publications I have read include:

• Your 1990 thesis on Joseph of Tiberius for the Department of Religious Studies at Duke University that landed you a cushy job at the library.
• Your unpublished 2005 article on “Jannaeus, His Brother Absalom, and Judah the Essene”.
• A couple articles you wrote on echoes of the Essenes and/or Dead Sea Scrolls in Revelation.
• A couple articles on the Copper Scroll.
• Your JJS article on “Posidonius, Strabo and Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa as Sources on Essenes”.
• Your 1993 article for Biblical Archaeology Review on the inkwells at Qumran (which you might want to add to your Academia page or your page at Duke).
• Your other articles on etylomologies or dictionary entries in the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary are not of sufficient passing interest to me to read, but I know where to find them.

What is really important—and what distinguishes the two of us—is that if I ever wrote about whether or not I found any of these articles persuasive, I would assuredly have read them first. You apparently find that step unnecessary. When you say "I have not read everything you have written," what you are desperately avoiding to say is that you have not read any of my many articles and books subsequent to my first book in 2006 and are thus unqualified to comment on my later research or my research as a whole. I don't mind your 2006 Amazon review on Berossus and Genesis, which you did actually read, but it is academically dishonest to post your uninformed opinions on my later body of work. How can one be persuaded or unpersuaded by a book that one has never read?

neilgodfrey wrote: ↑Sun Nov 06, 2022 4:27 pm I don't know if I ever heard of it being sufficient to say "I am not persuaded" as a scholarly response to an argument until I ventured to explore the world of biblical studies. I can understand that response in an informal discussion over a few drinks. But should not the scholarly response be to demonstrate that one has understood the proposed argument by encapsulating it and then breaking it down into its parts, and then offering a point by point reasoned and evidence-based rebuttal of each or any of the points?

Simply saying "I am not persuaded" does sound a bit like intellectual laziness, does it not? An all too easy cop-out when one doesn't want to accept an argument just because.

It’s more than intellectual laziness, it’s frankly dishonest, given that he constantly claims that “I am not persuaded” by books he has never read (namely anything of mine after 2006). It is ironic that he also enlists the support of other scholars who have never read my books but whom he claims are also “not persuaded” by my research.

RG wrote, above, in part:
" It is ironic that he [SG] also enlists the support of other scholars who have never read my books but whom he claims are also “not persuaded” by my research."

I, SG, have tried to write clearly. I'll try to make a few points clear.

As to Konrad Schmid, part of what I wrote, in the DH thread:
"Again, I cannot speak for Konrad Schmid.
I do not see how my remark was "disingenuous."....
What-all he has read I don't claim to know. I would guess the IOSOT president might have been aware of some of your [RG] publications, but just a guess."

Again, I have given reasons, including from DSS, that I consider that substantial portions of Torah were composed before the 270s.

And I have commented that discussion of possible sources may sometimes overlook Hebrew writers' creativity.

I think it is factual that some scholars are not persuaded by the RG 270s Torah composition scenario assertion. Some book reviews (beside mine) about this are rather clear.