AN INSANE SHORT STORY COMPILATION
If I were God, and I were to write, or at least inspire, a Holy Book, I wouldn’t use citations.
I feel that, if were God, I would probably be able to get away with stating stuff without adding quotations from academic authorities in support. The God of the Israelites, however, did quote authorities.
It’s remarkable if you think about it. Modern Christianism is more flexible on the subject but, for millennia, the Hebrew Bible (the “Tanakh”) was held as a direct translation of God’s will: a text at least inspired, if not written, directly by God. And yet the text itself acknowledges that it’s relying on earlier materials.
Some of these materials previously belonged to the oral tradition, while others were written on the basis of earlier chronicles. Some of the sources for the popular biblical books of Kings and Chronicles include the “Book of the history of the days of the kings of Judah” and the “Book of the history of the days of the kings of Israel,” lost compilations that may have been heavily influenced by Babylonian annalistic.
This, as anyone with a passing familiarity with the subject will know, is just the tip of the gigantic iceberg that is the history of how the Bible came about.
To summarize a long and complex matter that is still heatedly discussed by scholars, the first books of the Bible were written/compiled/transcribed in the 6th century BC, after the Jews were allowed to return to Palestine by the Persians (ancestors of the Iranians), having earlier been exiled by the Babylonians (ancestors of the Iraqis).
That is: the Bible, as a written text, is not only more recent than all of ancient Egyptian literature and much of ancient Chinese literature: it’s also more modern than Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and much of ancient Greek literature, including the poems of Sappho, or at least (given the citations I referred to earlier) contemporary with these works.
Of course, the origins of the Bible go way back, to the second half of the 2nd millennium BC. The first of many Biblical short stories about Jewish history that has even a modicum of truth and historical evidence is that of Moses and the exile in Egypt. In reality, it’s almost certain that the Jews weren’t really a thing back then, and the Bible is describing the Egyptian adventures of the Hyksos, Asiatic immigrants/violent invaders of Egypt who moved in with beasts of burden, women and children and essentially took over the country’s governance for a couple of centuries, much to the native Egyptians’ chagrin.
The Hyksos were not a single ethnicity but, like the much later Sea Peoples, a mishmash of charioteers, auxiliary warriors, slaves, servants, clients and related families, coming together in large, often victorious bands of wandering raiders. They probably had a significant Amorite component, with displaced Hurrians and Mesopotamians added, and a not-irrelevant sprinkling of non-Semitic Indo-Europeans[1], most likely Luwians and Hittites, and perhaps some Cretan pirates. They appear to have spoken mostly Semitic languages to understand each other, and to have worshipped Semitic gods.
On one hand, the Hyksos had a relatively minor impact on the long run of Egyptian society and politics. On the other, they may have had a huge impact on world history through at least part of their component populations: those who arrived in Egypt from Palestine, and traced their ancestry back to Ur and to a single tribal chieftain named Abraham.
The Jewish Bible refers to the "Children of Israel" as Israelite descendants of a common ancestor Jacob, himself a grandson of Abraham, whose nomadic travels centered on Hebron[2]. The Children of Israel, in this account, consisted of twelve tribes, each descended from one of Jacob's twelve sons, all of whom settled in Egypt during a famine early in the 2nd millennium, but whose descendants ended up enslaved in Egypt.
This mythological account fits very well with Egyptian history. When their etymology can be established, all private and royal personal names of known Hyksos in Egypt derive from West Semitic languages. These names appear associated to multiple occupations. Even though many arrived in Egypt as slaves, or the progeny of slaves, many others were allowed in the country, or forced their way into it[3].
By around 1800 BC, Hyksos represented the majority of the population of Avaris, an Egyptian trading center on the eastern-most branch of the Nile delta, equidistant from Tjaru and the Great Bitter Lake. Avaris slowly but surely became an Hyksos power center. Over the next century, locals erected a new temple to honor Set, a local Egyptian deity that was adopted and modified by the Hyksos so that it became their Egyptian version of the Semitic Baal[4].
Eventually, the Hyksos were expelled from Egypt into Palestine, where they remained at the mercy of attacks by the Egyptian empire, now in its period of greatest strength. This would explain why there was a long transitional period, between approximately 1500 BC and 1000 BC, between the Hyksos exodus and the creation of the first Jewish kingdom under King Saul.
Of course, there were no plagues brought by God upon the Egyptians – other than the Hyksos’ yoke itself – and no Moses, at least not as described in the Jewish tradition. The story about the alleged savior of the embattled Jews was almost certainly concocted by Biblical writers on the basis of the Egyptian story of “Osarseph”, first told by the ancient historian Manetho in his lost book Aigyptiaca, extensively quoted by Flavius Josephus.
Osarseph, almost certainly as fictional as its Jewish version, tells the story of the title character, depicted as a renegade Egyptian priest who leads an army of lepers and other unclean people against a pharaoh named Amenophis. The pharaoh is driven out of the country and the leper-army, in alliance with the Hyksos before Amenophis returns and expels them. Osarseph then changes his name to Moses, which at the very least hints at the fact that somebody important existed at the end of the Hyksos period with that name.
An influential study by Egyptologist Jan Assmann has suggested that the legend represents a conflation of several historical traumas, notably the religious reforms of Akhenaten (Amenophis IV), post-dating the Hyksos. It appears clear that the Osarseph story is a late concoction of multiple incidents, possibly including composite characters, that describe foreign Hyksos rule in Egypt and the consequent deterioration of local customs, laws and religion, until the true kings of Egypt return to rid the country of the hated foreigners and their local allies; these people, such as the traitorous Osarseph, stand for Egyptians friendly to the Hyksos and who benefited from their rule.
Generally speaking, defeated Hyksos and their families settled the land, already inhabited by earlier Semitic inhabitants with their own languages[5], some of which probably were close kin, bringing a series of new traditions, technologies and concerns to the table: a worship of the composite god Set/Seth, an elevated opinion of their great ancestors who were once unfairly kicked out of Egypt, a certain admiration for the underdog and the vanquished that would later become a curious, almost unique feature of early Jewish culture[6], and a sense that any adversity is a temporary setback that can be overcome if tribal bonds are maintained, and defeat is accepted with a brave face until victory is within reach.
This explains the consistent Biblical hostility towards the “Philistines,” remnants of the Sea Peoples who controlled much of coastal Palestine for centuries, Jews' arch-enemies only capable of sustaining military dominance because of their monopoly of iron weapons. Genetic studies of the populations in the ancient port of Ashkelon indicate without a doubt that these were mostly Indo-Europeans who had migrated as part of the great wave of raiding that is sometimes described as the Bronze Age Collapse.
Conflicts over polytheism are another early thread in the Bible, which often refers to competing gods and idols among the Jews. The Philistines certainly were polytheists, and the Bible records no shortage of battles and strife between them and the Canaanites/Jews, including Philistine victories that weakened the monotheist cause, however significant it was at the time.
This frequently hostile relationship with the Philistines was the first Canaanite encounter with the European other and wasn't a happy one; the Bible is so scornful of the Philistines and so uninterested in their foreign, stinking historiography, that it calls all Philistine kings by the same name: Abimelech[7].
This is a presage to centuries of tensions between Jews and Greeks late in the 1st millennium BC, and later, similarly troubled relationships with Romans and multiple other Indo-European nations (the inexact term that Adolf, you know, that Adolf, preferred was “Aryan”) in Palestine and elsewhere, leaving a huge mark in the Jewish tradition and religion.
It's no wonder that the Canaanites were conservative, distrustful of foreigners, given to fight hard and long for small plots of arable land, quick to take offense, and prepared to sacrifice themselves for the greater good of their tribes. King Saul, supposedly the first King of Israel and Judah[8] but most likely just the most prominent Canaanite warlord of his generation, may have taken large swathes of the land controlled by the Philistines in the north, and he still committed suicide sometime in the mid-11th century BC, to avoid capture after three of his sons were killed in a battle against the hated enemy.
The civil war that followed Saul's death left David, his son-in-law, as victor. With his conquest of Jerusalem – a largish, strategically-located stronghold, smack on the crossroads between the main route between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea, and the road leading to Egypt across the Sinai – around 1000 BC, David can actually claim the title of King of the Jews. He can also claim responsibility for the establishment of an official monotheistic priesthood centered on a tent he set on that city to house the Ark of the Covenant – a gold-covered wooden chest containing the Ten Commandments that God supposedly handed to Moses.
The construction of a temple to replace the tent was left to David's son and successor, Solomon (r. 970-931 BC), who hired Phoenician experts for the task. Like the tent, the First Temple, as it would be known in future Jewish history, was almost certainly on the Temple Mount hill where the Second Temple would also rise. There's no clear evidence of its size or shape, but it probably was large since, due to the country's agitated history, it would end up housing altars for the worship of competing gods such as Asherah, Baal and Aten/Sun in centuries to come. It’s probably from Solomon’s era too that smaller Yahweh cultic centers, characterized by the absence of physical representations of the one Jewish god, sprung across the land.
More refined than his father – who went as far as having a general killed to sleep with the deceased's wife, and had no qualms about employing Cretan mercenaries – Solomon gained recognition of sorts from Egypt's pharaoh Siamun (r. 978-959 BC), who sent a daughter to marry the King of the Jews and remove the Sinai border from the list of his headaches.
In the event, Solomon did maintain a peaceful relationship with the pharaoh, but it's unclear how much influence his Egyptian wife had on that policy, since the Bible – no doubt with some exaggeration – attributes to Solomon 700 wives and 300 concubines altogether. “His wives turned away his heart,” the writer of 1 Kings explains, before he goes on to detail the many foreign gods that Solomon worshipped publicly.
At this point in Jewish history, the Bible briefly goes into chest-pounding mode. At a time when the traditional big powers of the Middle East – Egypt, Assyria, Babylon – were all in some kind of trouble, the Jewish state could present itself as a real player, a mover and shaker. True, this involved contortions: even a weak pharaoh of Libyan extraction, Shoshenq, was able to easily defeat the Jewish army. In the Bible, he's described as Shisak, evil pharaoh who sacked Jerusalem and exerted considerable influence over Jewish affairs after Solomon's death.
To do this, Shoshenq took advantage of disputes in Solomon's court, and provided refuge for the exiled rebel Jeroboam, whom he sent back to Palestine upon Solomon's death – to become king of the northern tribes and founder of the Kingdom of Israel, where he built more cultic centers to counter Jerusalem’s influence. He’s said to have ordered that two young bulls of gold be placed in two of those small temples that later led learned Jews to debate whether they were meant to represent Yahweh, or to serve as bases where the invisible deity stood.
The now-called Kingdom of Judah in the south remained under the sole control of Rehoboam, Solomon's son and heir, but not for long. Much weakened by the schism, Shoshenq was able to sweep over Judah and for the sacking narrated in the Bible, around 926 BC.
Rehoboam replaced the First Temple’s lost treasures with brass ones, a gesture that likely emphasized the spiritual rather than material value of the goods; he may also have married one of Shoshenq's daughters, in a gesture of vassalage that kept him on the Jerusalem throne. His grandson Asa (r. 911-870 BC) had a key role in maintaining the monotheistic flame alive after a successful campaign in Philistine territory and using his popularity to eliminate pagan religious practices, mostly of Phoenician influence that may have revolved around the cult of Astarte.
Eventually, the biggest military power of the region, Assyria, showed up in Palestine to do its own plundering, during the reign of Shalmaneser III (859-824 BC).
Shalmaneser didn't really make much headway in the region and withdrew his armies after securing some tribute, and the Jews’ recognition of Assyria’s dominance. The circumstances of his involvement are extremely intriguing, though, and shed some light on a region where monotheism, as later displayed in the Bible, was still far from triumphant and widely accepted.
The whole affair began with a coup d’etat, in which a garrison commander named Jehu marched his troops from Ramoth Gilead, in northern Transjordan, to Samaria, and personally killed king Jehoram with an arrow shot with such force that it went right through his chest; he then seized the throne of the northern kingdom of Israel in about 842 BC.
Jehoram’s mother, the Phoenician queen Jezebel/Jezabel – infamous in the Bible – had been widely credited with the institution of Baal’s and Astarte’s worship across Israel during the reign of Jehoram’s father Ahab; after her son’s death, she was defenestrated, that is, to be semantically precise: thrown off a window (by three eunuchs commanded by Jehu), before horsemen trampled on her corpse, and stray dogs ate her flesh.
In the end, Jehu killed the whole royal family, all Phoenician priests and anyone even remotely related to the king. His purge was remarkable because it displays so many features of later reactionary excesses driven by prophets of the desert: his supporters sought after a nomadic ideal, living in tents, growing no crops, owning no property and drinking no wine. They called themselves Rechabites, after their exemplarily ascetic leader, the late Rechab.
Jehu managed to do all this because he had the backing of the army, of the poor and of prophets such as Elisha[9], who had gained much power since priests took on a quasi-royal role as protectors of the Yahweh cult early in the 9th century BC; thus emboldened, religious men came to oppose the royal house and sought to extirpate the Tyrian cult of Baal, which they hated since it was strong competition to that of Yahweh, from Israelite religious life.
Once in power, Jehu purged the cult by destroying the god’s temple, turning it into a latrine. His forceful measures mostly got the land rid of Baal worshippers, since – just a few decades later – ostraca from Samaria written in archaic Hebrew record the delivery of wine and oil to dozens of named individuals apparently working in some sort of palace, with almost all the recipients described as Yahweh worshippers, and practically all of the senders described as Baal worshippers, likely living in Phoenicia and Egypt. However, Jehu’s coup also weakened the triple alliance of Israel, Judah and Tyre, a situation that the Arameans of Damascus tried to exploit. It was then that Jehu turned to Assyria for help, paying Shalmaneser III a rich tribute recorded on the so-called Black Obelisk[10].
The Assyrians soon returned, when the Jewish King Hezekiah, emboldened by an alliance with Egypt, stopped paying tribute. The Bible reports a divine intervention through the use of an angel that destroyed Sennacherib’s army. Historical reality begs to differ: Hezekiah submitted to Sennacherib, probably after his army took Lachish, Judea’s then-second-largest city, using a massive earthen ramp[11] not unlike that built by the Romans centuries later to subdue Masada.
The Assyrians, given to rape and mass murder, were difficult overlords, as the Bible concedes, but it was their successors as leading Middle Eastern power, the Babylonians, who really got under the Hebrew skin: an ill-timed anti-Babylonian rebellion in 601 BC met swift revenge. Jerusalem was taken in 597 BC, the First Temple was pillaged and the Jewish court and many of its most prominent citizens and craftsmen were sent to exile by the rivers of Babylon.
The trauma of the Babylonian exile was never forgotten, and it marked a watershed in Jewish history in several ways. One of the leaders during the later return from Babylon, the scribe Ezra, is believed to have been the first to write down the books of the Torah, the first five books of the later Bible and first part of the Tanakh, soon after his arrival on the Promised Land. He did so in a new script, a form of the Aramaic alphabet adopted by scholars in exile that replaced the Hebrew script previously used[12].
As the Bible was compiled, all sorts of material were crammed in there. Material such the “Visions of Iddo the seer about Jeroboam” and “Vision concerning Hezekiah” as well as “History of Uzziah,” were traditionally attributed to Isaiah, the 8th century BC prophet, and extensively reworked before being included in the canon – for example, to have Isaiah predict that the great King Cyrus II would save the Jews from an exile that was still in the distant future when Isaiah died, since it was all in God’s plan.
Post-exile Judaism laid greater emphasis on adherence to strict monotheism, influenced by Persian Zoroastrianism before and during the exile, but in many senses the Torah is a compilation of earlier Jewish creation myths, including the familiar story of Adam and Eve, who disobeyed God to secure knowledge and, like Prometheus and Tityos among the Greeks, were punished for their impertinence.
The Books of Samuel and Judges may date to the same 6th century BC, as they again hinge on the idea of an evidently successful godly plan for the wayward Israelites despite their lapses into idolatry. The story of Amalek and in his descendants the Amalekites, hereditary enemies of the Jews who apparently lived on the Negev, is carefully described in Samuel: not just as a piece of history to be remembered, but as an injunction to persecute and wipe the brutes off the face of the Earth[13].
This extreme jingoism gave us the wonderful word “shibboleth,” an ancient agrarian Hebrew term that gained great importance, as Judges, Chapter 12, states when the pious inhabitants of Gilead had to find out Ephraimite refugees escaping into their lands: as people were found crossing the River Jordan border, they were asked to pronounce the word, since they knew that the Ephraimite dialect resulted in a pronunciation that, to Gileadites, sounded like “sibboleth.” Those caught with such pronunciation were killed to a man[14]. The later Book of Numbers, perhaps from the 5th century BC, was just as violently ethnocentric[15].
It was also in the momentous 6th century BC that the hugely influential “Book of Job” was completed. Possibly influenced by the Babylonian 13th century BC “Poem of the righteous sufferer,” this book would be much quoted and discussed for centuries; its acceptance as a canonical work was indeed described by the 19th century AD theologian G.K. Chesterton as a momentous decision that saved the Jews “from an enormous collapse and decay."
Towards the end of this book, Job complains to God about his unjustified sufferings, and God speaks to him from a whirlwind. His speeches neither explain Job's suffering, nor defend divine justice, nor enter into the courtroom confrontation that Job has demanded; God simply contrasts Job's weakness with His own divine wisdom and omnipotence: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?"
Job makes a brief response, but God's monologue resumes, never addressing Job directly: God, the Catholic Chesterton concludes, avoids the later Protestant trap of claiming that prosperity is the reward of virtue, which unavoidably gave way to the idea that prosperity is then a symptom of virtue.
For a while, the Jews lived as happy subjects of the Persians, which led to the first pogrom in history: in 410 BC, the Jewish temple in Elephantine was destroyed amid an anti-Persian revolt, as local Jews were perceived as supportive of the foreign oppressor; by 407 BC, the Jews were requesting help against the brutish Egyptians in a letter to the Persian emperor.
This somewhat happy state of affairs was disturbed by the stupid Greeks. Between the 6th and the 4th century, the Greeks had ascended from European primitives on the edge of things to Hellenistic lords of everything, and Alexander the Great gained control of Palestine just as the Jewish holy book was receiving its final touches. This, too, is evident in the Bible, since it does reflect on the tangled history of Greeks and Jews.
In “The Lesbian Lyre,” (2016), Jeffrey M Duban observes that Homer and the Bible seem peculiarly, perhaps fatedly, to have “tracked” each other throughout time: the Trojan War and Hebrew Exodus are both dated to the mid-thirteenth century BC; and the formative phases for both cultures/civilizations, involving the biblical prose development and Homeric oral tradition, are dated to the ninth and eighth centuries BC. To boot, the most renowned English translations of both sacred books – Chapman's Homer (the first complete Homer in English) and the King James Bible – were both published in 1611.
It’s worth stressing that Christians and Jews who accept the Bible as the word of God must then accept that God himself was in awe of Alexander the Great, the young man who “went through to the ends of the earth, and took spoils of many nations, insomuch that the earth was quiet before him; whereupon he was exalted and his heart was lifted up,” as the First Book of the Maccabees put it[16].
It was, in fact, under Greek influence that Jewish sages came upon the idea of Scripture, after they interacted with Greek thinkers working in Alexandria’s Museion, like Zenodotus and Aristarchus of Samothrace, as they worked towards standardizing texts and making authoritative editions of the Homeric poems. From such scholars, the idea came to Jews that certain texts should be defined as the definitive holy scriptures of the Jewish people: that these books (and no others) constituted “the Books” (Greek: ta Biblia)[17].
That’s why it’s only from this same era do we find a specialized word for those writings that made up scripture or the scriptures (graphe, singular, or tes graphes, plural). And why several books of the Bible composed long before the Hellenistic era bear Greek names that reflect their translation to Greek during these years, commonly the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC: works like Genesis, Exodus, and Deuteronomy. The list of approved texts was described by using the Greek word “canon,” whereas other works were “hidden,” or “apocryphal.”
These influences are evident in the work of Ezekiel the Tragedian, a Jewish dramatist who wrote in Alexandria, likely in the 3rd century BC, the earliest known Jewish play: Exagoge, a five-act drama in the classic Greek-language iambic trimeter, tells the Biblical story of the Exodus in a Greek style, with Moses as the main character[18]. Another such example of early Hellenistic-Jewish encounter is the account of a banquet at the court of Ptolemy II, described by a Jewish writer who called himself Aristeas[19], in his Letter to Philocrates (267 BC).
In the event, the pharaoh supposedly asked 70 learned Jewish sages from Palestine for advice on how to ensure harmony between all the different races in the kingdom, and received the non-committal reply that he must adopt “the appropriate attitude to each, making justice one's guide.” More importantly, the sages provided him with a Greek translation of the Jewish Septuagint (“the work of 70”) for storage in the Great Library in Alexandria.
The translation work owed something to a desire to inform Gentiles, non-Jews, about the Jewish religion, and yet by far the most important audience was educated Jews themselves, who found it difficult to read in Hebrew or Aramaic, and much easier to read in Greek, after Alexander the global language of knowledge in the Mediterranean lands.[20] A century later, in 160 BC, this Greek translation was the main biblical source used by Eupolemus, believed to have been an ambassador sent by Judah the Maccabee on a diplomatic mission to Rome that had no tangible success[21].
In fact, the Septuagint went almost unread by non-Jews, and the first quotation of the Bible by a Gentile philosopher was only recorded late in the 1st century AD[22]. For centuries, the Septuagint was the primary means by which Jews read the Bible, and that translation was the foundational text of early Christianity. The New Testament would be incomprehensible without grasping its very frequent references to the Old Testament, whether through direct quotations or by more subtle recollections and reminiscences. And the Old Testament is always quoted in the New through the Septuagint, that is, through an Egyptian Greek translation.[23]
The translated, easily-accessible Bible also made possible the worship revolution later brought forward by Christianism: where earlier religions relied heavily on public rites and holidays, Christianism was able to rely on the written word of God, read aloud and explained to the faithful every Sunday, for centuries to come. No wonder that the extremely successful innovation was copied by Islam, when it come up with its own sacred text inspired by God Himself.
From those Greek Bible translations, much of the modern religious vocabulary of the Jewish and Christian eras to come is derived: “blasphemy,” “diaspora,” “idol,” “paradise,” “holocaust,” “devil” and “proselyte.” Even Jewishness itself was only clearly defined because of Hellenism in Palestine, under the rule of the Greek Other, the ancient rival that begat the Philistines that gave their Graeco-Roman name to the Jewish lands themselves; the older books of the Tanakh include the word “Yehudi,” but it is only in the Book of Esther, written during the 3rd or 2nd century BC, that the word takes on the full ethno-religious meaning of “Jew,” as it would be understood for centuries to come[24].
Was this a happy ending, an example of cultural cross-pollination and overcoming cultural divides for the betterment of all? Of course not, silly. Jewish elites, wary of the influence of Hellenism particularly on the educated urban classes, as a rule hated the Greeks with a passion.
That is evident in the Bible’s description of the so-called Maccabean War, named after the “Maccabee” Jewish rebels fighting pro-Greek compatriots and Seleucid Greeks. This is a war looms large in Hebrew imagination and history: the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah commemorates the revolt to this day[25], while the Jewish Bible directly blamed Antiochus IV’s pilfering of the Temple at Jerusalem for his later death in 164 BC[26].
Antiochus IV’s passing when he was about fifty resulted in the rise to the throne of his younger son Antiochus V, a long episode of humiliation for the Seleucids since he was a nine-year-old on accession; the new king was such a puppet that he allowed a Roman embassy to travel through Syria destroying Seleucid ships and hamstringing Seleucid elephants. Under such conditions, it’s no wonder than Judaea eventually gained semi-independence from the Seleucids, at first under Roman and Ptolemaic protection and later under Seleucid tolerance, resulting in a surge of support for the old Hebrew priesthood and the beginning of the end for Jewish Hellenizers.
The Books of the Maccabees added to the Bible corpus to celebrate the victory against the Seleucids, through sacrifices such as those of suicide-warriors who stabbed elephants from underneath and were then crushed by the beasts, became wildly popular through the land. The second Book of Maccabees, just by itself, invented the word “Judaism” (with “Hellenism,” coined to define its rival)[27]. Some words, like “rabbi” and “synagogue”[28] were invented to describe new institutions of a developing faith. Some partisan or sectarian labels, such as “Zealots” and “Pharisees,” also entered general usage.
The surviving Hellenistic state of Egypt, later to produce the famous Queen Cleopatra, remained the main source of interactions between Jews and Greeks. And, boy, were they colorful: Josephus, in Jewish War, 7.10.2–3 and Jewish Antiquities, 13.3.4, tells a similarly intriguing story, of how Ptolemy VI, around 150 BC when he was effectively overlord of Palestine, was called in to decide a dispute about the rival historical claims of Jews and Samaritans.
A person named Andronicus championed the cause of the Jewish Temple, and the Egyptian king deemed him the winner. Ptolemy then executed the rival Samaritan debaters. Religion, an ornament in so many Mediterranean societies, remained a matter of life and death in Palestine – and Egypt.
This story didn’t make the Bible, sadly. By this time, the canon was almost closed, just in time to be appropriated by the Christians, that startup sect that came up with a glorious idea – let’s make the Tanakh be APPLICABLE TO EVERYONE AND NOT JUST THE JEWS – and got seed funding from increasingly disenchanted upper-class Romans and Greeks.
To a large extent, early Christianity was a triumph of Hellenized Judaism, and Hellenized Jews like Paul of Tarsus: centuries of struggle between Semitic purists (the pharisees often mocked and attacked in the Christian scriptures) and worldlier Jews willing to accept deep religious reforms ended with what amounted to a refurbished, watered-down Jewish religion for gentiles.
Thus, an admittedly enjoyable collection of tribal vendettas and ethnocentric obsessions became the guiding light for spiritually-challenged pastors in Scandinavia and Chile. If this sounds like a bit of a travesty, let’s reflect that God, perhaps, wasn’t surprised.
There’s a moment in the Bible when He Himself is caught telling a lie. Three angels have appeared at Abraham’s tent and told the centenarian that his wife Sarah will bear him a son and heir; Abraham is incredulous and asks God whether his wife laughed at the mere possibility of having a son at their age, and God, not wanting to upset Abraham, denies that Sarah laughed, although we know she did[29].
In Jewish tradition, as in the Greek tradition, lies were understood as a necessary part of the larger truth. God wanted, needed Abraham to feel reassured about His wider plan, so he did what was required, even if it entailed a lie. Greek gods lied to humans all the time.
The important thing is that people were told to behave, were given good reasons to do so (you don’t want to go the Hell, young man/woman). Everyone, sadly, ended up obsessed with Jerusalem and the importance of controlling that particular piece of real estate, but that’s a collateral effect, a story for another day.
[1] See “The Genomic History of the Middle East” by Mohamed A. Almarri et al, BioRxiv (2020) for evidence for the arrival of Indo-European genes in Egypt, around this time.
[2] This led to the establishment of the Cave of the Patriarchs, one of Judaism's holiest sites, as his burial site in Hebron. The importance of the Jacob in Jewish history also helps to understand the nature of early Jewish tribes, which wasn’t probably very dissimilar from their neighbors’: that is, brutal and unsparing. The tale of Dinah, a daughter of Jacob (in Genesis 34) is very illustrative: she was kidnapped and raped by Shechem, from the Hivite tribe, but the man later fell in love with her and married her; this violent twist on the archetypical romance story ever since (in which the worthy woman gains the heart of the alpha male and tames him) wasn’t accepted willingly by her brothers, who forced the Hivites to circumcise themselves and then hand over their own single women so they could marry them and “become one people.” Soon after the Hivites cut their penises, when they still had them sore as the Bible informs, they “came upon the city boldly, and slew all the males… and spoiled the city, because they had defiled their sister.”
[3] In their 2020 paper “Who were the Hyksos? Challenging traditional narratives using strontium isotope (87Sr/86Sr) analysis of human remains from ancient Egypt,” published in PLOS One, Chris Stantis et al argue that strontium isotope (87Sr/86Sr) ratios of human tooth enamel (n = 75) from Tell el-Dabca show an influx of non-locals can be observed in the pre-Hyksos period since right after the turn of the millennium, “during the constitution of this important harbor town, while the number of individuals already born in the Delta is larger during the Hyksos period. This is consistent with the supposition that, while the ruling class had Near Eastern origins, the Hyksos’ rise to power was... an internal dominance and takeover of foreign elite. There is a preponderance of non-local females suggesting patrilocal residence.”
[4] Both Egyptians and Hyksos likely pronounced the name “Set” as “Seth,” which reinforces the obvious connection between this Egyptian deity and Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve in the Jewish Bible, ancestor of Noah, the builder of the Ark.
[5] The oldest Canaanite-language inscription dates to about 1700 BC, is engraved on an ivory comb and it includes a spell against lice. See “A Canaanite’s Wish to Eradicate Lice on an Inscribed Ivory Comb from Lachish,” a 2022 paper by Daniel Vainstub et al, Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology, 2:76-119.
[6] “Do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know how it feels to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt” (Exodus 23:9); “When an alien lives with you in your land, do not ill-treat him. The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt” (Leviticus 19:33–4).
[7] Confusingly, the same name is used for the Jewish son of Gideon and king of Israel that destroys and salts the rebel city of Shechem in the Book of Judges.
[8] Israel traditionally corresponded to modern-day and classical-era Samaria, with Judah as the land to the south.
[9] Featured in 2 Kings 9:1–3.
[10] One of the main surviving Assyrian artifacts, discovered in Nimrud in 1846, and now in the British Museum. The obelisk displays 190 lines of text distributed above and below five rows of reliefs that wrap around the four-sided stone. This text describes the major events in 31 military campaigns conducted by the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III. The tribute that Shalmaneser exacted from five kingdoms is highlighted in the five rows of reliefs on the obelisk, with one row devoted to each tributary. A line of text above each relief identifies each panel. The reliefs in the second panel from the top on each face of the obelisk, according to the caption, depict “The tribute of Jehu, son of Omri,” an event dated to about 841 BC. This tribute comprised “silver, gold, a golden bowl, a golden vase with pointed bottom, golden tumblers, golden buckets, tin, a staff for a king [and] purukhti fruits.” Since Jehu was a usurper, not descended from King Omri (882–871 BC), the phrase “son of Omri” is interpreted as a short way of saying “son of the house of Omri,” which was a conventional form meaning “Israelite.” The first panel shows Jehu, or one of his representatives, bowing before Shalmaneser. Standing behind the bowing man and continuing on the other panels in the row is a long line of tribute bearers.
[11] See the 2021 paper “Constructing the Assyrian siege ramp at Lachish: texts, iconography, archeology and photogrammetry” by Josek Garfinkel et al, published by the Oxford Journal of Archeology.
[12] Paleo-Hebrew, the older alphabet, fell in disuse after the Babylonian exile.
[13] The Amalekites allegedly attacked the vulnerable Hebrews during the Exodus which, as explained before, never really happened as described in the Bible. Leaders such as Samuel, Saul, and David waging wars of extermination upon these unfortunates. In all, the Amalekites are mentioned in nine separate books of the Old Testament. One survivor pops up centuries later in the Book of Esther as the bad guy Haman, the prime minister of Persia; unluckily for them, Haman, his ten sons and 75,000 followers were slaughtered in the counter-pogrom celebrated annually at Purim. To this day, three of the 613 commandments attested to by Orthodox Jews are: to remember the treacheries of the Amalekites; to never forget the perfidies of the Amalekites; to wipe out the descendants of the Amalekites.
[14] Similar verbal shibboleths were used in later history. To this day, French-speaking Haitian migrants into the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic often are identified by border patrol when asked to say Spanish words with the hard “r” that the average French speaker can’t pronounce properly. The French language again proved troublesome in the 1282 Sicilian vespers, when suspected Frenchmen were asked to pronounce the word “ciciri,” chickpeas, which they struggle to handle. Dutch migrants unable to say “bread and cheese” properly were murdered during the 1381 Peasant’s Revolt in England. After the 2022 Russian invasion of the Ukraine, suspected Russian infiltrators were asked to say the Ukrainian word palyanytsya, a type of bread, which Russians find hard to pronounce.
[15] In Numbers 25, when the Israelites intermarry with the idolatrous Moabites, God sends a plague. After 24,000 people die, a man named Phinehas kills the leader of those who strayed outside of the Jewish clans, and the plague ends.
[16] Much the same must be said of Muslims, because Alexander appears both in the Bible and the Quran. In the Muslim’s holy book, Sura XVIII, there’s an account of the Macedonian conqueror’s exploits, and he’s describe as first going westward: there he found the sun setting in a black muddy spring; and then he journeyed eastward and discovered that below the two mountains between which he was standing lived people who could scarcely understand speech. They implored Alexander to set a rampart between them and a wicked people called Yajaj and Majaj, which he did.
[17] See Philip Jenkins’ “Crucible of Faith” (Basic Books, 2017).
[18] This work survives in fragments copied by Christian scholars, amounting to about 25% of the entire text of the play.
[19] Perhaps after the 7th century BC Greek poet.
[20] Jenkins, Op. Cit.
[21] Eupolemus wrote a history entitled “Concerning the Kings in Judea,” though its scope was actually much broader. He was concerned with glorifying Israelite history and elaborated the biblical narrative with additional legendary details. He presents Moses as a culture-bringer, specifically as the inventor of the alphabet, which in his telling was later borrowed by the Phoenicians and the Greeks (which is of course absurd). The influence and splendor of the Israelite kingdom under David and Solomon was a particular theme of the book. See Carol A. Newsom, “The Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Jewish Literature,” in The Oxford Study Bible (1992), pp. 108-110.
[22] This was Longinus in “On the sublime,” possibly influenced by the teaching of the rhetorician Caecilius of Calacte, a Jew. Momigliano (“Alien Wisdom,” Op. Cit.) writes that the Septuagint “was bad Greek.”
[23] Some scholars go much further in suggesting Hellenistic influence, to the point of claiming that much of the Bible as we have it was written in this period. See the debate in Lester L. Grabbe, ed., Did Moses Speak Attic? (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001).
[24] It’s significant that this one of just two books in the Tanakh that doesn’t include the word “God.” The Book of Esther is a pretty crude attempt at agitating for ethnic solidarity at a time of growing Hellenistic influences, widely seen as dangerous at best by the priestly elite. It later became the core of the Purim festival, which commemorates the purely fictitious trickery of Esther, an apparently ahistorical Jewish Queen of Persia, to avoid a genocide of all the Jews in the Achaemenid Empire; that plan had supposedly been conceived by an Amalekite official called Haman, according to the eponymous book, and as a consequence it was Haman, his sons and other 75,000 people across the Persian empire were murdered instead. Purim later had a long and picturesque tradition – a Festival of Santa Esterica was invented by former Jews forced to convert to Catholicism who moved to Latin America, as a replacement of Esther’s Jewish festival, and in the 21st century is still celebrated by some.
[25] In particular, the restoration of worship at Jerusalem’s Second Temple in 164 BC, after all Greek statues were removed from the site.
[26] However, for the Seleucid king neither Judaea nor the war against Jewish rebels were very important matters, since he left the region in control of his lieutenants and took his army off to fight more important battles: when he died, he was in the middle of a successful Armenian campaign against his Parthian enemies. On this subject Flavius Josephus, a Hellenized Jew, had an interesting argument with the Greek historian Polybius, whom he greatly admired: for the Greek Polybius, Antiochus IV's sudden death was caused by the fact that he had 'wanted' to rob the treasures of the temple of Nanaia in Persia; Josephus on the other hand held that divine vengeance had struck him down, not because he had wanted to despoil a temple, and failed, but because he had in fact succeeded in ransacking the temple of the Jews.
[27] The second Book is an historical curiosity: and Greek-language abridgment of an earlier, multi-volume history of the revolt in Hebrew. That this work, which at best can be described as a well-informed memoir and could also be described as a novelistic retelling, ended up as a sacred text really is quite astonishing.
[28] Of obvious Greek origin.
[29] The episode is in Genesis 18.