Plato and the Pentateuch

[andrewcriddle]

IMO it is exhorts obedience in a very different way than the Pentateuch.

Andrew Criddle

Before I take the time to reply more fully with references to specific passages in Laws, one questions that comes to mind with such a reply is this:

Where does this leave the prologue to the laws in the Pentateuch? How is that to be explained given its uniqueness against any other legislation prior to the Hellenistic era in the region influencing Judea-Samaria?

I think my answer is that I'm not sure that the mixture of genres in the Pentateuch really amounts to a prologues to legislation and legislation itself in the way we find in Plato's Laws.

We have a mixture of legislation and material about Yahweh, the history of Israel and the interaction between Yahweh and his people Israel. This non-legislative material clearly provides the context in which Israel can be plausibly persuaded to obey the legislative material, but it is not IMO a prologue in Plato's sense. IMO the mixture of materials in the Pentateuch is at least as much to do with the disparate sources put together in this work as it has to do with a need to persuade as well as command in Plato's sense.

Andrew Criddle

[andrewcriddle]

<SNIP>

There are less tensions in Plato’s Laws than Diamond suggests. Indoctrination is not the same as education, compliance as the result of propaganda and persuasion is not the same as understanding. The Second City was not as noble as Diamond portrayed. Diamond was correct that Plato equated theocracy with autocracy. He was the straight-up philosopher of totalitarianism that Popper described. He admired Sparta’s police state, but believed that a supplemental program of life-long propaganda for the purpose of social engineering was an improvement. I think most philosophy students are too benevolent or naïve or modernistic to comprehend this.

I agree with you that a thoroughgoing attempt to implement the Laws would be in practice totalitarian. However, I am unsure whether this is Plato's intention. There is not only the question as to how far Plato realised the consequences of the proposals of the Athenian stranger, there is also the question as to how far the reader is supposed to regard the Athenian stranger as reliable.

As an extreme alternative to regarding the Athenian stranger as Plato's mouthpiece we have the recent proposal of Altman in Guardians on Trial that the Athenian stranger is alternative reality bad Socrates. The Socrates who did not out of loyalty to Athens submit to death at her hands, but who (as advised by Crito) ran away and ended up proposing a totalitarian colony in Crete.

Altman's position may seem improbable but it does explain some problems in Plato's attributed works such as the relation between the Laws and the Epinomis.

I've put this issue in a separate post because, whatever Plato meant, early 3rd century BCE Platonists took the Athenian stranger as speaking for Plato. So whether or not Plato himself supported the agenda of the Laws his early 3rd century BCE followers would have tended to do so. I'll do another post on your criticisms of Diamond.

Andrew Criddle

[andrewcriddle]

There is an interesting discussion of the deep tension within the Laws in this article by Diamond.

Andrew Criddle

Diamond’s analysis is deeply flawed by his projection of modern notions of individualism into Plato’s philosophy. Diamond correctly portrays the First City as one of totalitarian, autocratic theocracy on the model of Sparta—which Plato portrays as the ideal! The Second City he incorrectly portrays as one in which the rulers “educate” the citizenry in the meaning and benefits of the laws and they willingly comply out of rational “understanding”. The (hypothetical) Third City Diamond portrays as a (for him, disappointing) form of totalitarian government in which only the divine rulers of the Nocturnal Council understand the laws and the citizens under this theocratic rule have no rational or philosophical understanding but are obedient anyway, kind of an unfortunate (for Diamond) regression back to the totalitarian Spartan model.

Diamond’s portrayal of the Second City in Laws is inaccurate, and the Third City illusory, because in the Second City it is clear that the rulers are not “educating” the citizenry but “persuading” or indoctrinating them; in multiple instances Diamond rephrases or paraphrases Plato to replace Plato’s language of persuasion with that of education. Persuasion or indoctrination is here a sophisticated tool of totalitarianism. There is a system of universal education, yes, but its central aim is clearly that of persuasion, so that the citizens would not comply with the law merely out of brutal militaristic force, as in Sparta, which might not always work, but would be mentally programmed to obey like tame sheep through lifelong, cradle- (actually, fetus-)to-grave indoctrination. Likewise the aim is not rational “understanding” but persuasion or propagandization; the aim is not rational knowledge (episteme), but correct beliefs and opinions. This is especially brought out in the instances where the persuasive introductions to the laws involved myths, especially myths about rewards and punishments in the afterlife, which Plato acknowledged to be false but which he advocated as useful in creating compliance in the superstitious masses. There was never an intention to disseminate actual rational philosophical knowledge to the masses, as Diamond idealistically suggests; only such limited indoctrination (partly rational, partly appealing to myth) as would encourage compliance.

Philosophical education in Laws was restricted to a few elite citizens who showed intellectual promise as truly rational, who were admitted as junior members of the Nocturnal Council. The institution of the Nocturnal Council was where knowledge would reside among the educated ruling class philosophical and theological elites. They were to indoctrinate the masses and direct their beliefs for the benefit of the State.

There are less tensions in Plato’s Laws than Diamond suggests. Indoctrination is not the same as education, compliance as the result of propaganda and persuasion is not the same as understanding. The Second City was not as noble as Diamond portrayed. Diamond was correct that Plato equated theocracy with autocracy. He was the straight-up philosopher of totalitarianism that Popper described. He admired Sparta’s police state, but believed that a supplemental program of life-long propaganda for the purpose of social engineering was an improvement. I think most philosophy students are too benevolent or naïve or modernistic to comprehend this.

Plato clearly is not individualistic in the sense of having any sympathy for individual human rights. However the city of the Laws is intended (according to the Athenian stranger) to make its citizens virtuous and not just compliant. The prologues are put forward as providing genuine valid reasons for obeying the laws and the penal policy is intended not just to discourage crime but make 'curable' criminals better people. (This policy would in practice involve a terrifying prospect of being educated out of thought crimes but is is presented by the Athenian stranger as genuinely educative.)

There is less difference between the actual and potential members of the Nocturnal Council and the ordinary citizen than in your account. The ordinary citizen knows a large amount of mostly accurate pieces of information about how to live. The members of the Nocturnal Council see these separate pieces of information as the unity they really are in a way that the ordinary citizen is incapable of. (It does not seem plausible on Plato's own terms that the sort of education and training proposed for the members of the Nocturnal Council would give them the insight they are supposed to have, but the Athenian stranger is optimistic on the point.)

Andrew Criddle

[Russell Gmirkin]

Plato clearly is not individualistic in the sense of having any sympathy for individual human rights. However the city of the Laws is intended (according to the Athenian stranger) to make its citizens virtuous and not just compliant. The prologues are put forward as providing genuine valid reasons for obeying the laws and the penal policy is intended not just to discourage crime but make 'curable' criminals better people. (This policy would in practice involve a terrifying prospect of being educated out of thought crimes but is is presented by the Athenian stranger as genuinely educative.)

There is less difference between the actual and potential members of the Nocturnal Council and the ordinary citizen than in your account. The ordinary citizen knows a large amount of mostly accurate pieces of information about how to live. The members of the Nocturnal Council see these separate pieces of information as the unity they really are in a way that the ordinary citizen is incapable of. (It does not seem plausible on Plato's own terms that the sort of education and training proposed for the members of the Nocturnal Council would give them the insight they are supposed to have, but the Athenian stranger is optimistic on the point.)

Andrew Criddle

Plato’s aims were by no means educational in the modern neutral reasonable sense.

What is important to understand about Plato is his distinction between knowledge, which could only be achieved by philosophers with the divine capacity of reason, and the beliefs of ordinary humans, whether good or bad. Plato advocated the use of myth and rhetoric within a system of mass education (that can accurately be described as mass propaganda) in order to induce desirable opinions that would encourage good behavior, but even what Plato described as “true opinions” were only a semblance of knowledge. Virtuous opinions led to compliance to laws and a semblance (but not substance) of virtue. Only divine philosophers who grasped episteme or actual knowledge were capable of actual virtue, not those who only held positive doxa or opinions.

Plan A was to induce virtuous beliefs to make citizens “docile” and compliant, like tame animals. If that didn’t work there was reeducation camps, and if that didn’t work there was summary execution for the good of the polis. It was not as benign as a superficial reading might indicate.

There was also a sharp divide between the members of the Nocturnal Council and the ordinary citizenry. The Nocturnal Council was composed of divine individuals, members of the golden race whose superior reason and philosophical training set them apart from the irrational masses. In Laws he set out a plan for the initial philosophical and theological training of the first generation of members of the Nocturnal Council by the Stranger’s associates, and a plan whereby this Platonic training (using Plato’s Laws itself) would be passed down to future generations by each member acting as a mystagogue for a junior members being groomed for admission into their ranks. The NC thus functioned like a university, like the Academy itself.

[Secret Alias]

In the Pentateuch there is only fear of the Lord. There is no "education" or instruction in any sense of the word other than terror. There is no equivalent in Plato. Come on you know better than this. There is an entirely different "spirit."

[Russell Gmirkin]

In the Pentateuch there is only fear of the Lord. There is no "education" or instruction in any sense of the word other than terror. There is no equivalent in Plato. Come on you know better than this. There is an entirely different "spirit."

Start with the fact that the most common word for law is "torah" = "teaching" and do some reading/research from there.

[StephenGoranson]

Torah, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (online), is defined as "The teaching or instruction, and judicial decisions, given by the ancient Hebrew priests as a revelation of the divine will; the Mosaic or Jewish law; hence, a name for the five books of the law, the Pentateuch." Also from OED: "Etymology: Hebrew tōrāh ‘direction, instruction, doctrine, law’, < yārāh ‘to throw’, in Hiphil ‘to show, direct, instruct’."

If I understand correctly, the main issue of this thread is whether Plato was a basic influence on the Pentateuch. I think not. I have tried to give some reasons. That unanimous ancient Hebrew (and Samaritan) priests would accept the Alexandria scenario that R Gmirkin proposes strikes me as absurd. The Letter of Aristeas, apparently, had to do with concerns about whether any Greek translation sufficed, rather than with Hebrew composition. (Btw, for a Jewish writer to attempt a major comparison of Greek Philo and the traditional Hebrew one waits until Azariah de Rossi?)

Further, the 270s proposal is probably excluded on chronological grounds. Hebrew and Aramaic were written languages many centuries earlier and some oral traditions evidently were written and combined over considerable time. (And some variants continued after the 270s.)

Among other things, such as known texts and paleo-Hebrew copies, I did point to (not "suppress") palaeography and radiocarbon.

For paleography I mentioned M Langlois' opinion that a Qumran Torah text (copy not autograph) in his comparative analysis is probably from fifth or fourth century. Yes, indeed, he adds that it could be later--or earlier: "...fifth or fourth centuries BCE; an earlier date is not impossible but lacks clear parallels, whereas a date in the third century is possible but unnecessary." I admit that I am not sure what he means by "possible but unnecessary"--I had taken it to mean, more or less, a vanishingly small chance of, say, 290 or so, but am open to clarification. If so, this Torah copy, in his view, is earlier than 273. Of course, he could be mistaken. Others more familiar with paleography than I will eventually decide.

Already, the view of most Torah experts of whom I am aware is that the 270s proposal--available since 2006--is not accepted.

Suggested parallels can be misleading: did Egyptian and Mayan pyramids have a causal relation, or merely both use a basic shape (even if not Platonic solids)?

On carbon 14 dating, more will be welcomed. Suffice it to say that some 1-sigma date ranges--already--include ranges before 273. Of course, one could look the other way and say none of the mss copies actually date in those portions of the ranges--could say, by special pleading.

[ABuddhist]

Further, the 270s proposal is probably excluded on chronological grounds. Hebrew and Aramaic were written languages many centuries earlier and some oral traditions evidently were written and combined over considerable time. (And some variants continued after the 270s.)

With all due respect, this portion of your post, which is otherwise very well made, I thought, is very weak. There is no necessary connection between the antiquity of a system used in order to write a language and and the antiquity of a famous famous early work of literature written using that writing system; for example, the Book of Documents, which is the oldest collection of Chinese prose literature, dates from at least 500 years after the invention of the Chinese writing system. Admittedly, the Book of Documents is claimed to compile older sources (akin to the modern standard understanding of the Pentateuch), but my point still remains.

Furthermore, the assertion that the Pentateuch is a collection of oral tradition is unsupported by you; the Pentateuch's oral origins are not as obvious as, for example, the works attributed to Homer or the Pali Tipitaka in Buddhism. Similarly, you provide no evidence that the compilation of oral traditions into the Pentateuch did not occur rapidly, as with Elias Lönnrot's Kalevala.

[StephenGoranson]

Previously mentioned: earlier attested portions of Torah.

[ABuddhist]

Previously mentioned: earlier attested portions of Torah.

Would any of those portions not be the inscribed silver amulets? Because Neil, Mr. Gmirkin, and I have all told you how those amulets prove nothing about when the Torah was written.