StephenGoranson wrote: ↑Fri Dec 16, 2022 9:22 am
I am familiar with several iterations of the c. 273-272 Torah creation in Alexandria proposal.
For example:
“Plato’s program of creating a mythic past in which the divine laws of the nation had been established in distant antiquity faced an obvious practical difficulty, namely the living memory of the new colonists. Plato fully recognized this problem and sought to overcome it by devising strategies to erase the nation’s memory of any other way of life, like erasing a tablet and starting with a clean slate. In order to erase the cultural memories of the past and replace them with new memories, the rulers would exercise complete control over the nation’s education, literature, public speech and cultural contacts with other nations…” (Gmirkin 2017 = Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible, 255.)
Mr. Gmirkin wrote that that "took place exactly."
R. Gmirkin Vridar-blog-commented, 2022-10-03 21:24:27 GMT+0000 at 21:24:
"Yes, the replacement of earlier national memories based mostly on oral traditions was replaced by a new official national memory in the form of the Hebrew Bible in 270 BCE and thereafter. This took place exactly according to the literary agenda laws out in Plato’s Laws.
But note that a handful of written sources existed from earlier times: the royal annals of Judah and Israel, authentic prophetic oracles (Haggai) and some Persian Era official correspondence (Ezra) preserved in the temple. Possibly a few psalms and proverbs. Not a lot. I have also written about in various books and articles which you should track down and read. I don’t believe you have read Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible in which many of these issues were extensively discussed."
My (SG) questions now:
In the Gmirkin scenario:
Did the proposed delegation bring traditions?
Were those traditions erased?
Were newly-invented "traditions" made as replacements?
Was the delegation complicit in the above?
Oh, I see Goranson is still harassing me here as well as on the ANE-3 discussion group. My response there, just posted, was as follows:
First, as a matter of accuracy, Stephen Goranson has not read any of my books or articles on the Hellenistic Era dating of the Pentateuch in the 15 years since my first book Berossus and Genesis in 2006, and is thus not familiar with my research as he claims, despite incessantly posting on it on various internet forums, including this one. Had he read Gmirkin 2017 or 2022 his questions would have been answered, since I thoroughly discuss these issues in the final chapter of both books.
Unfortunately, due to his harassment here, I will have to take time from my schedule to answer his queries. I apologize to the list for the unavoidable length of this posting.
Both ancient Jews and ethnic Samarians were autochthonous people, so it is evident that their foundation stories of their ancestors having migrated from Babylonia and later colonizing the Promised Land from Egypt as narrated in the Pentateuch are fictional. I would say this is the position of most biblical scholars, other than fundamentalists, today, although whether these fictions are grounded in national memories and traditions or invented out of whole cloth is a matter of study and debate.
I have argued that the Babylonian origin story is relatively ancient, an “authentic” tradition reflecting the actual origins of Babylonian educated elites brought to the Neo-Assyrian province of Samerina by Sargon II in 710-709 BCE (Zadok 1976; Na’aman and Zadok 1988: 44-46). These ethnic Babylonians were an important component among the Samaritans who participated in the creation of the Pentateuch as a literary project conducted under royal invitation at Alexandria in ca. 270 BCE and were a source of many Mesopotamian traditions embedded in the Hebrew Bible (Gmirkin 2020). The Babylonian origins of Abraham thus reflects their memories and traditions.
The story of the children of Israel as a colonizing expedition from Egypt led by the Moses draws on the much later fictional ktisis or foundation story in the Aegyptiaca of Hecataeus of Abdera, dated to 320-315 BCE, a positive account which contains the first documented mention of Moses in any language (as argued in Gmirkin 2006: 34-71; 2017: 222, 226). Other details in the biblical account also draw on (and vigorously respond to) Manetho’s negative stories of Judea and Jerusalem’s temple as foundations by the Hyksos and other later undesirables (ca. 285 BCE). On the biblical foundation story of Genesis–Exodus as a classic example of a Greek ktisis, see Gmirkin 2016; 2017: 225-231; Weinfeld 1993.
The creation of the fictional biblical foundation story directly followed Plato’s advice at Laws 7.798a-b that for the constitution and laws of a new nation to be successful and last down through time, the citizens must be persuaded “by any means possible” that their laws were ancient, divine, and unchanged since having been given to the original founding generation. At Republic 2.382a-e, Plato stated that members of the ruling class were permitted create fictional accounts of the ancient past, prior to the existence of historical records, for the benefit of the citizenry, so long as they portrayed the gods in a positive light. Plato’s doctrine of the “Noble Lie” or “Noble Fiction” is well known and much discussed in modern scholarship. Plato gave one example to illustrate the “Noble Lie” at Republic 3.314b-d, a fictional story of the foundation of Athens in which the gods who created the first Athenians mixed the souls of of ruling class of Guardians (the philosopher-kings) with gold, the Auxiliary warrior class with silver, and agriculturalists and craftsmen with iron and bronze. In Timaeus and Critias he expanded on this Athenian foundation story with the famous fictional tale of the ancient war between heroic Athens and the fleets of Atlantis, another example of a “Noble Lie” set in ancient times. (On the biblical use of Timaeus and Critias in Genesis 1-11, see Gmirkin 2022.) In Plato’s Laws 8.848c-d (and other scattered passages) he gave a third fictional foundation story of the proposed colony of Magnesia as a return of the descendants of the ancient Magnesians (although Plato knew otherwise), and the new colony as a divinely established restoration of the ancient nation. The fictional foundation story of the Exodus is of the same character as these fictionalized foundation stories in Plato’s writings, as I discussed in detail in Gmirkin 2017 and elsewhere.
Plato acknowledged that the traditions and historical memories of the initial generation would conflict with the new myths regarding the ancient divine origins of the nation and its laws. To counteract this he proposed an ambitious literary agenda in Plato’s Laws whereby the legislators, after creating their new laws and constitution, would subsequently supervise the creation of a new national literature, consistent with the divine national origin story, combining carefully censored, edited and revised older writings (systematically removing any objectional profane or unholy content) with new compositions as needed, of all genres, for exclusive use by the nation in their system of universal education and public national holidays. With only this literature to inform them, and carefully isolating them from foreign cultural contacts, Plato estimated that within a generation or two the old traditions and memories would be erased from the national consciousness and replaced by these new carefully constructed memories found within their sacred national literature. Indoctrinated since their youth, they would come to firmly believe their legal system was both ancient and divine. The origins of the Hebrew Bible has been a long-standing unsolved problem among both biblical scholars and students of Ancient Near Eastern literature and libraries, but I argued in Gmirkin 2017: 250-299 and elsewhere that its creation was a direct implementation of the literary agenda laid out in detail in Plato’s Laws, and that its success as a national charter and the lasting loyalty of the biblical readers to the laws of Moses down through time exactly corresponds with Plato’s predictions.
All this information has been laid out with extensive footnotes and documentation in my published research. I don’t think it should be necessary to take time away from other more important projects to spoon-feed this information on this or other forums to Goranson, whose reading on this subject is apparently largely confined to the internet, despite his employment as a stacks librarian at Duke University.
Gmirkin, Russell E., Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch. Library of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 433. Copenhagen International Series 15. New York: T & T Clark, 2006.
—“Greek Genres and the Hebrew Bible.” Pages 91-102 in Ingrid Hjelm and Thomas L. Thompson (eds.), Biblical Interpretation Beyond Historicity. Changing Perspectives in Old Testament Studies 7. London: Routledge, 2016.
—Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible. New York–London: Routledge, 2017.
—“‘Solomon’ (Shalmaneser III) and the Emergence of Judah as an Independent Kingdom.” Łukasz Niesiołowski-Spanò and Emanuel Pfoh (eds.), Biblical Narratives, Archaeology and Historicity: Essays in Honour of Thomas L. Thompson (Library of Hebrew Bible / Old Testament Studies series; London: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2020), 76-90.
—Plato’s Timaeus and the Biblical Creation Accounts: Cosmic Monotheism and Terrestrial Polytheism in the Primordial History. New York: Routledge, 2022.
Na'aman, Nadav and Ran Zadok, “Sargon II's Deportations to Israel and Philistia (716-708 B.C.),” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 40 (1988), 36-46.
Weinfeld, Moshe, The Promise of the Land: The Inheritance of the Land of Canaan by the Israelites. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Zadok, Ran, “Geographical and Onomastic Notes,” JANESCU 8 (1976), 113-26.
Best Regards,
Russell Gmirkin
Portland, Oregon
RussellGmirkin.com
--- What is speculative is the 1985 publication (McConville's work on Deuteronomy) is that the Israelites were ever a nomadic people who eventually settled in the land of Canaan. The archaeological evidence addressed in the literature more often since 1985 is that the Israelites were indigenous to Canaan, were never from "outside". The feasts of Passover etc were in existence long before any associations with biblical stories which do not appear in the record until the Hellenistic era.