The following two articles say roughly the same thing in different ways. They are the current state of my observations of what is known from the physical evidence regarding the origin of these books and the related religion. The related religion is the putative foundation for both Islam and Christianity.

I started this review some twenty years ago as a result of believers constantly intruding upon soc.history.ancient to save us us unbelievers usually regarding our failure consider the events in bibleland not only questionable but of little importance in world history. The objective was to end their disruption as quickly as possible.

It evolved from trying to explain what is believed today in light of what is known about the past, that is, how to make what is presently believed plausible despite the evidence. It took many years to give this up as the more that became known for certain and what became accepted by even the most determined believers precluded what is currently believed about these books.

With that I rejected all "knowledge" based upon religious tradition. Instead I began working from only what is known from the physical evidence. If a tradition has no evidentiary basis that is sufficient grounds for total rejection of the tradition.

In rigorously applying this criteria I found there is no basis in evidence for any religious tradition. I found the folks who make "plausible" explanations are all blowing smoke publishing nothing more than their imaginings. They are engaging in nothing but damage control to minimize harm to religious tradition.

For example while quietly admitted Moses did not likely write the Torah (avoiding saying it is flat out impossible for a different number of reasons) they assure the reader the stories were written collections of tribal traditions at various dates they fail to inform the reader there is no evidence for their imaginings either. They also fail to inform their readers their imaginings are just as impossible as Moses for several independent reasons.

In many cases I have found it possible to identify times when some fervently held traditions of today did not exist.

In the last year I have tried to put these ideas into succinct statements. The following articles are two of the attempts. The first in the most recent and the one I consider the best expression.

I offer these for your edification but more likely amusement as to why I would waste so much time on this nonsense. I have posted them in some explicitly activist atheist forums where they have been attacked for what I can only describe as a lack of reverence for the secular component of the stories. I find the religious traditions are preserved even in an atheist form as cultural wisdom even though absent any evidence at all in their favor. It has been an interesting learning experience.

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http://www.giwersworld.org/OT-HTML/not-permitted.phtml

Anachronisms are not permitted
by Matt Giwer, © 2009 [Dec 28]

In rejecting the ides of divine involvement in the creation of the bible stories, particularly the OT, the material can be fit into the spectrum of ancient literature. Fit into this spectrum we cannot have the use of a literary style before the invention of that style. A style that appears before its time is an anachronism. The dating must be wrong. The date must be changed to after the form appears in history.

The most compelling example is the literary style we call history. We have several books of the bible which are considered the historical works because they use that style. We also know when the style of writing history was invented down to a couple decades. The historical books cannot be dated prior to the invention of the style.

The style is conceded to have been invented by Herodotus in the mid 5th c. BC within a decade or so of 450 BC. He traveled in the lands east of Greece which were part of the Persian empire seeking trading opportunities. His writings are also noteworthy in that while traveling he was in the land called Palestine by the local people. They are also noteworthy they make no mention of the "Jews" or any people who could have been them.

After his books became popular other writers began books about history but incorporating their own idea of what such a book should include. Herodotus started it and the idea evolved afterwards.

As there is no significant question as to the dating of the writings of Herodotus, ca. mid 5th c. BC, this presents a problem with dating the Old Testament material. Believers date the Old Testament material no younger than the 6th c. BC and many put some of the material centuries older.

The problem is obvious. If we take the datings chosen by the believers Herodotus, the inventor of history, did not invent it. Rather unknown person or persons were the original inventors of writing history. Not only that we find in the historical books material with the type of content used by historians who came after Herodotus.

This would not present much of an issue if the origin of the Old Testament material were Mesopotamia, Egypt or Persia. These lands had traditions of writing and the invention of literary forms going back thousands of years prior to even the earliest Old Testament creation date which attributes the first five books to the mythical Moses.

Believers would attribute the creation of this material to people in the hill country of Palestine. There is no known intellectual or literary tradition of any kind in this region down to modern times. Believers require divine intervention to explain these literary accomplishments because they appear centuries ahead of their time.

The proper skeptic to the contrary observes the known invention of these literary techniques and dates the creation of the OT material containing them after they were invented elsewhere. Thus up front we have the earliest creation of the historical books of the Old Testament after Herodotus moving them to no earlier than the mid 5th c. BC.

But this requires his writings in Greek to have had immediate circulation among the intellectuals in the hill region of Palestine. As above there is no evidence of any intellectual tradition found in the region down to modern times. Because of the absence of such traditions it is not reasonable to suggest they took his idea and incorporated their own ideas of what a history should contain. Thus we have to conclude they were written after later Greek historians.

It is not reasonable to assume instant adoption of the ideas of a Greek culture. Nor is there any evidence of Greek literature or culture in the region until after Alexander who conquered the region in the late 4th c. BC. Thus the creation of the historical books can be no earlier than the 3rd c. BC. Those who want them composed earlier and in bibleland require divine intervention in their creation.

One possibility is these stories could have been created by those educated in Greek culture earlier than the 3rd c. but they would not have been the native people of bibleland unless we can show a major Greek influence in the region prior to that. There is no evidence of such an influence. In fact we find to the contrary.

When we examine the influence of Greek culture in this region and the reaction of the native population to it to see when it could have been created to eliminate this possibility. We find the reaction of the people of bibleland to Greek culture, i.e. what we consider the precursor of our civilization, to have been uniformly negative. This is adequately documented in the first three books of Maccabe. We find the influence of Greek civilization in Egypt and Syria but only in the coastal cities of Palestine. We find the hill country of Palestine, Maccabean territory to be as resistant to civilization as the Taliban of today.

There is another problem. The most common language of the Old Testament which goes by the misnomer of Hebrew. The only evidence Hebrew is other than an invented liturgical language is found in a handful of non-scriptural documents found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. That is slim in comparison to everything else written in Phoenician and Aramaic save for documents dealing with the ruling Greeks and later Romans.1

Thus we have the "Hebrew" Old Testament in a language which was never in common use. We also have the Septuagint in Greek which apparently appeared in Alexandria which has none of the problems of creation previously recited. Alexandria became the center of Greek culture. It appears to have had a significant population who identified with the people of the hill country of Palestine.

Being the repository Alexander designated for the knowledge of the world in the form of the great library of Alexandria if there was source material needed for the creation of the Old Testament it was certainly to be found in Alexandria. Nothing has been found in bibleland either in ancient inscriptions down to the Dead Sea Scrolls which could qualify as source material. Nor is there any ancient mention of the existence of such materials.

This may not appear important but any repository of documents has many times more material than would be considered important in later years as no one could know what to preserve. So it is not just the absence of source material for the Old Testament books. It is the absence of tens of times more material which in later years would turn out to be unimportant.

Searching through old records is also looking at it through the eyes of what a book on history should contain. This view of history did not appear until Roman times. In fact some could argue it did not appear until Gibbon with The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

In the final analysis we do know that our present day idea of what constitutes the history of a people requires surviving ancient records, uncovered ancient inscriptions as well as extensive archaeological finds. We know there are no relevant ancient inscriptions relative to the Old Testament to be found. The ancient people of bibleland did not invent archaeology. They could not have produced historical narratives of the region.

If people from the hill country or people who identified with the hill country had written the Old Testament there were limited languages available. If by people in the hill country then they had only Phoenician or Aramaic available. If by people who identified with the hill country, those in Alexandria, they had Greek. The anomaly is the traditional form of the Old Testament is in the language religious tradition calls Hebrew.

Relating to this matter we have only two items to guide us. The first is the religious tradition of the ancient creation of the Old Testament in Hebrew starting with Moses which we have seen to be false. The second is a known forgery, the Letter of Aristeas. From the letter comes the myth of a translation of the original Old Testament into Greek and the time frame in which it occurred.

As this letter is a forgery nothing in it can be taken as related to actual events. Among these are when the Greek translation was made, when the Greek version was known in Alexandria. Perhaps the most important things which is found only in the forgery is that the Greek version2 is a translation of an original in another language.

What this other language might have been we have no way of knowing. We know it cannot have been Hebrew as there is no evidence that language was ever in use. We do not know what script it was written in but if in the present day Hebrew script then it could not have existed until that Aramaic script came into use3. At the time given in the forged letter Aramaic was not yet in use in the hill country and of course there is no evidence Hebrew was ever in use. That leaves an unsatisfying and puzzling Phoenician as the remaining possibility.

Many explanations for this have been concocted from the absurd to the needlessly complex. These have all had the purpose of making the religious tradition of the origins of the Old Testament appear plausible. But as we have seen the religious tradition is not plausible starting with Moses writing in Hebrew.

Once that idea is eliminated there is no religious tradition left. Biblical archaeologists do not create religious tradition. Unlike real archaeologists those of the biblical persuasion concoct (the only credible adjective) explanations which do the least harm to the discarded religious tradition. Thus while they will more or less clearly state Moses did not write the Torah nor even exist much less use Hebrew they are hell bent to establish the creation of the Old Testament as far back as can be claimed with a straight face.

These days believers put it about a century before Herodotus because that is the earliest times it is even remotely possible for the existence of writing in the hill country. But for the reasons previously discussed that is a century before it was possible because writing history was still in the future. It is also several centuries before we can say it is plausible without suspending disbelief.

There is a simple explanation which can explain everything that is known from surviving records and archaeology. This requires doing what has already been done when the religious traditions of place, age and language of the original text were discredited. For place we insert Alexandria, for age the 2nd c. BC and for language we have Greek.

In this case the people who wrote the Old Testament would be those in Alexandria who identified with the hill country of Palestine writing in Greek as their daily language and using the resources of the library for their source material. This simply addresses every problem which existed with the religious tradition. It is also much simpler than the convoluted inventions of biblical archaeologists who try to do the least harm to discredited religious tradition.4

As is discussed elsewhere the Old Testament does not address the religion of the people of the hill country. It addresses a Yahweh cult which is foreign to the religion of the people who had both Astarte and Yahweh as their primary gods and the rest of the Phoenician/Ugaritic pantheon as secondary gods.

Cults can be invented easily. We have seen that in the cult of Allah by Mohamed as well as the modern examples of the Latter Day Saints and Scientology. In those times there arose the cults of Jesus, Mithra, Sol Invictus, Simon Magus and Apollonius of Tyana among others. These met with varying degrees of success. What they have in common is having arisen in the presence of many gods or in modern times many sects of Christianity for the LDS and Scientology.

In any event whether the Yahweh cult arose in Alexandria or Jerusalem is an uninteresting question so far as the rise of the cult as all differences are purely speculative. There is simply no surviving documents on the subject other than the forgery. But the forgery itself was created or introduced to support the position of Jerusalem as the origin showing at that time it was supposed the origin was in Alexandria.

The trappings of the cult, its imaginary history, its use of Greek literary and historical forms, the earliest known version of the stories first being mentioned as written in Greek and the library resources mitigate in favor of Alexandria. That the non-Greek version appears in what can only be described as an invented liturgical language using a vowelless subset of the Aramaic alphabet instead of in the Phoenician or Aramaic language is not in favor of Jerusalem. Both mitigate against Jerusalem.

The idea of the sacred books of a religion being created elsewhere seems a bit strange to us primarily because we were raised with this now discredited religious tradition. But telling the stories of another land is far from uncommon and, in the case of Atlantis, equally long-lived and devoutly believed by many and is the source of endless mystical inspiration and searching to this day. As to inspiration the story of Troy in the Iliad is equally stimulating as was the Aeneid telling the origin of the Romans. There is nothing inherently incredible about people in Alexandria inventing tales about their homeland.

As to this being a new idea, far from it. The Letter of Aristeas was forged to respond to this same idea in the 1st c. AD. Were there no question of its origin in Jerusalem there would have been no need for the forgery. It was promoted by Josephus, a priest of the Yahweh cult writing in Greek no less. As this is the only ancient source on the origin of the Old Testament the subject cannot be credibly discussed beyond this.

As to these being considered sacred works there is no evidence of that in any surviving document. In Antiquities, Josephus retells many of the Old Testament stories including material which is not longer exists such as Moses having been a prince of Egypt and leading successful military campaigns against Nubia. The idea Moses was a prince is contrary to the current version of Exodus which at best has him a grandson of the king. Josephus makes no distinction between what is presently considered sacred and the other material.

This is parallel to the known situation in early Christianity. There were literally dozens of bogus epistles and gospels and no one knows how many other types of bogus documents. But the idea of bogus does not appear to have existed as condemnation and elimination of the non-true documents does not start until the 4th c. AD and then mainly addresses gnostic materials. It is unlikely the Yahweh cultists did anything different. Both apparently prized the Book of Enoch in the 1st c. but neither included it in their canons.

1The name Hebrew is used based upon the religious tradition that Moses was a real person who wrote the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament. As Exodus concerns the Hebrews in Egypt the language of Exodus was presumed to be their language and thus called Hebrew. There are other problems with this tradition but they were not known at the time the name was given.

Because of this religious tradition the pre-Aramaic written material found in the hill country of Palestine is called archaic or proto-Hebrew instead of proto-Phoenician from which it has no substantive difference. The only two scripts used by the natives of the region are Phoenician and Aramaic. The modern "Hebrew" script and the "Hebrew" of the Old Testament is not materially different from the Aramaic script.

2Even though the letter is a forgery we can glean one interesting fact from its creation. It relates a near miraculous translation which is lauded for its accuracy and faithfulness to the supposed Hebrew original. There is no hint of erroneous translations in ancient times.

When we compare the current Samaritan holy books we find they largely agree with the Greek and disagree with the Masoretic Hebrew. Christianity also was based upon the Greek version and has doctrines such as a virgin birth, virgo v alma, and other differences between the Greek and the Masoretic. The Masoretic is the accepted form of the Hebrew bible. It first appears in the 11th c. AD. This suggests the Masoretic version introduced differences to undercut Christian doctrine.

3Phoenician dominated the region prior to Alexander's conquest of Tyre. Tyre had been the center of Phoenician trading civilization which extended across the entire Mediterranean Sea. After its fall the center of its civilization moved to Carthage where the language came to be known as Punic. So the rise of Aramaic in the region would not have been until the 3rd c. BC.

4Present day Christian, Muslim and Judaic believers and even those who started as members of them but who have progressed to agnostic or atheist are still attached to the long discredited religious tradition regarding the origin of the Old Testament. This attachment has few parallels outside of religion.

When evolution replaced creation only the religious tried to salvage creation with things like guided evolution or some mysterious point in time when a soul was added, infused I think is the proper term.

That there is a crank subdivision of archaeology known as biblical archaeology makes this perhaps the only (pseudo) scientific attempt to salvage a religious tradition which retains some measure of professional academic standing. To the impartial observer it is as whimsical creationary evolutionists.

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http://www.giwersworld.org/bible/sewer-bible.phtml

The Bible is like a Sewer
by Matt Giwer, © 2009 [July 30]

Eliminating all religious traditions and using only the available physical evidence results in an entirely different view of the Old Testament.

As the great philosopher Dr. Thomas Lehrer once observed, life is like a sewer, what you get out of it depends upon what you put into it.

Similarly what you get out of reviewing a document depends upon the assumptions you bring to the document.

If you assume the bible is what religious tradition says it is then that is almost certainly what you will find in it. Even if you are an atheist and look at it only with an eye to demolishing it what you bring to the study will influence what you find.

Given all the religious tradition that surrounds it in our culture it requires much serious thinking to realize what you are bringing to the bible no matter what your purpose is.

About a century ago something new appeared. It was called higher criticism of the bible. It changed what people brought to the bible. When people brought something new to it they got something new out of it.

But still they brought many things to it both spoken and unspoken. A thing brought universally to the bible even with this higher criticism was a stated reverence and respect for it. This may have been feigned but from what they got out of higher criticism it appears to be genuine.

Reverence and respect are among the things found only in religious tradition. It is not immediately obvious how many things about the bible exist only in religious tradition. A tradition is something for which we cannot identify a credible source for its origin.

Most people have no problem with being told the names of the authors of the gospels are traditions and that there is no evidentiary basis for the names. I know some may raise a quibble here and there and a bishop may warn against doubt but it does not cause anyone to try to reactivate the Inquisition.

There are other traditions which are a bit more profound. But before giving a few examples there is an important distinction between belief and knowledge. One may believe anything. Knowledge is based solely upon known evidence and experience. I believe John is telling the truth is much different from I know John is telling the truth because I was there and saw the same thing.

While there are traditions, traditional answers, and perhaps pious beliefs contrary to this short list of examples nothing is known in evidence to contradict them.

Also it is necessary to adopt the view of an atheist here. Beyond its general utility it helps prevent accepting, for example, an unfounded Protestant position simply because the Catholic position appears to be less founded or vice versa. It is about religion therefore no believer is correct. For a believer, any answer has to be of a religious, reverential nature. In fact no answer need be correct.

Any answer you were told about any of the following is nothing more than a traditional belief. This is not a complete list.

* No one knows why the books of the bible were written.
* No one knows who wrote them.
* No one knows when they were written.
* No one knows the original language in which they were written.
* No one knows when the idea they were religious works started.
* No one knows when they became a component of a religion.
* No one knows why any particular selection of books was made.

While there is some knowledge for a few things found in the New Testament it is not much. In fact the most important fact known is that the epistles do indeed appear to at one time have been letters. The authorship of all of them is unknown or can be contested including those of Paul. For the Gospels even less is known.

When it comes to the books of the Old Testament incomparably less is known from the evidence. There is precious little evidence available in favor of any traditional belief. And for the old testament there is a tidal wave of physical evidence from archaeology and even from surviving history that none of the traditions can possibly be true.

Take for example for most of history it was believed because of a tradition that appeared out of no where that the first five books of the Old Testament, the Torah or Tanak, were written by Moses. With the arrival of higher criticism that belief was eliminated. Rather than drop the entire tradition it was modified so they were still old stories about real events. That is a tradition we can trace as a reaction to what was had been in writing right in the face of believers for some 1500 years and more.

Archaeology began having its impact about fifty years ago and with its finds the Torah lost its antiquity and the conquest of Palestine by Joshua lost its credibility. Some thirty years ago David, Solomon, the United Kingdom of Israel followed the path of Moses into mythology. Traditional belief was again modified so that everything but those things were still true.

What started as a tradition that it was all true became a tradition in which all of the parts essential to it being considered a source of religious belief and moral behavior were no longer true. The tradition of it being a religious text still exists despite all the important parts of it as a religion have vanished.

This is the power of tradition. It is also the reason an atheist point of view is essential. When the essential religious component is eliminated by unquestionable fact it remains religious.

With all those parts eliminated what possible basis is there for considering it a religious texts? Without those opening books there is no god handing down divine law. There is no divine intervention in favor of the Israelites. There is no moral standard. Nor is there any claim that later people were divinely inspired with these religious practices and morality.

Moreover there is no pretension of profound, but anonymous, religious thinkers having created these moral precepts and should one actually read all of them one could not imagine any rational person conceiving of them.

What we do see after the elimination of the early books and of profound religious thinkers is a person or small group deliberately falsifying their own past and knowing they are doing so. We are left with incredibly dishonest people, mean spirited frauds, creating these stories knowing full well they were creating a pack of lies.

This also has a direct bearing upon when these lies were created. Prior to higher criticism when Exodus could be viewed as a memoir or diary no problem was apparent. Once it was clear Exodus did not occur and therefore Moses did not write it, the creation of the story could not come from the "time" of Exodus. An author in the 14th c. BC cannot be chronicling events in the 14th c. BC which are not happening. People would notice.

So also the age of any story cannot have been created in the time it is pretending to write about. If a person creates a story which internally dates to the time of Solomon and is writing about Solomon people around our phantasmagorical author would notice there is no Solomon.

These stories cannot in any manner be considered chronicles any more than can Exodus. One cannot chronicle what is not happening. No story can be considered a chronicle of events if archaeology or surviving mentions from history show the events could not have occurred at that time.

So when we find there is no basis for the story of the captivity in Babylon and therefore no return we know that story could not have been created in that century.

And then when we find there is no evidence for the existence of Judah/Judea prior to the 1st c. BC all previous stories come into question. When we add to this no evidence that there should be evidence in surviving documents such as the chronicles of Alexander's conquests and the histories of Herodotus it is only a religious tradition that is left. And as we have no idea what significance this collection of stories had for anyone in the 1st c. BC it is not clear what people might be trying to salvage.

From the working atheist point of view the first crack in the tradition would be sufficient to reject it completely and start over. From the point of view of a believer it is important to retreat as little as possible. Believers are now stuck in a 6th c. BC as their trailing edge of retreat in spite of the fact there is no evidence of a religious tradition for the Old Testament in the 1st c. BC.

Who could possibly have written these stories?

Absent some incredible discovery we can never know who did it. The perps are forever safe. What they were as people we can describe.

We know they knew they were creating fiction. They knew they were making it up. Why they did so also awaits that incredible discovery.

When were they created? There we have some evidence but of course must completely reject anything and everything from any tradition because we have seen tradition was rejected by believers who have created their own in their slow and painful retreat from Moses wrote the Torah.

We can look at many other ancient civilizations and when they could write we find all kinds of writings following roughly the following order of quantity. We find mainly contracts and legal documents, dull, dry and boring. Next most common are legal decrees of property and land ownership which are nearly as boring. And then in lesser numbers what might be called diplomatic followed by government and finally religious material as the smallest.

They are all not in that order. Clay outlasts papyrus. There are many factors but if we exclude the much different priorities and possibilities which followed the printing press that is roughly the order of frequency we find from ancient to pre-Gutenberg times.

In comparison we can look at the small part of the world in which the Old Testament purported arose. We are reasonably certain there were other books like those in the present Old Testament which are lost to us. We know there are books like Enoch which were not included. Why the books disappeared and why they were not included we have no idea.

But if we take the King James Version of the Old Testament we find some 600,000 words. This is in translation and English is wordier than Hebrew but still that is a lot of words. So what about all the other categories of written material we find find in much greater quantities than religious material? They are not there.

Whatever we view the books of the Old Testament to be they were not the creation of a normal society. They were the dedicated work product of people who wrote little to nothing else. They were not scribes as we find in all other ancient societies which applied the skill of writing to the many useful and desirable purposes leading to a better organized society with fewer conflicts by putting laws and contracts into writing. These were created by a society interested in doing nothing with writing but creating an historical record they knew to be false.

We then consider the very writings we find from region outside of these religious books (keeping in mind we have nothing but tradition to say they were religious works) is not in the same language as the "hebrew" version of these books. It is related. It is close. But so also is Aramaic.

The first mention of these people outside of the books of the Old Testament is also the first time there are records of these people. Were it not for the Old Testament they would first appear in mentions of Pompey of Rome dealings in the region in roughly 67 BC. Without the bible this would be all we know of them.

When Pompey arrives they are all speaking Aramaic. They are not speaking Hebrew or any variation of it. To jump forward in time the next religious text of the Jews to appear in history is the Mishna which is in Aramaic and following that the Babylonian Talmud also in Aramaic.

What is this Hebrew? Does anyone know?

One of the oddest facts is that the first appearance of the books of the Old Testament in history is the Septuagint, the LXX, which is in Greek. And there is no known reason for that. There are several guesses, speculations if you will, but no known reason. The rationale for the speculations are in fact based upon older speculations not upon any evidence.

It was not until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls some sixty years ago that there was any evidence of the stories of the Old Testament in Hebrew prior to the Masoretic text from about 900 AD. Even then the Masoretic is significantly different in important ways from the DSS. But still the oldest Dead Sea Scroll dates from the time of Pompey while the Septuagint was in circulation at that time.

No matter how we look at the physical evidence the Septuagint is older. There is argumentation that the Septuagint is a translation of an older language. This is not a tradition but a fact. The problem with this fact is that it is a known forgery, the letter of Aristeas which is dated to the early 1st c. AD. The argumentation centers on saying the translation part is correct even though all the rest is either clearly wrong or miraculous. This is another reason for the atheist attitude. An atheist would not argue to preserve one small desired truth amid a sea of lies.

So here we have a part of the middle east which has almost no surviving records until after it becomes part of the Greek empire. Some time after the Greeks rule and before the Romans rule these stories first appear in history in Greek. Also after the Greeks begin to rule the normal kind of local records start being kept but in Aramaic not Hebrew.

Upon what basis other than tradition of unknown origin can anyone plead for a prior version the Septuagint in Hebrew?

There is the argument from "semiticisms" in the Septuagint. There are some constructions in it that are obviously poor translations from some Semitic language like Aramaic. But then should an Aramaic speaker pick up Greek as a second language and attempts to write in that language it will have indications that his native language is Aramaic. Those who argue for a translation from an original Hebrew text do not explain why it has to be a translation of an pre-existing text nor why it had to be Hebrew instead of the well known Aramaic.

However it has been known for over a centuries that these 'semiticisms' were in fact found in all Koine Greek from that era. They were never of semitic origin. Yet even a century after the nonsense was exposed believers still find semiticisms.

Many will look at the squared script of Hebrew and declare it is proof positive. But this squared script is in fact the script of Aramaic. Those arguing for Hebrew as a separate language from Aramaic introduce another problem.

There are some surviving inscriptions from the early 1st millennium BC which are described as proto-Hebrew or paleo-Hebrew which use the Phoenician alphabet. If it is still correct that Hebrew was a separate language then it continued using the Phoenician alphabet until it switched to the Aramaic alphabet and yet still retained its identity as a separate language. A separate language for which there is no evidence anyone ever spoke is a difficult concept. It is even more difficult to introduce this unique example to only one people in the world and then because of its religious interest.

This brings us to another point. There are thousands of ancient documents of interest of which maybe a hundred or so merit continuing interest. Of these interpretation and explanation has change slowly but inevitably over the years for some centuries as more is known about related documents and the times in which they were created. In only one case is there a dedicated effort to argue that the oldest ideas about the document is the most correct. That is the Old Testament.

This is where the consequences of traditional beliefs show most glaringly to those who have adopted the atheist viewpoint.

* The bible is considered of special merit.
* The bible is the standard against which all other ancient material must be tested.
* Discrepancies in the bible must be explained instead of simply noted, that is, they must be of intrinsic significance instead of just dumb.
* The bible is important to something larger than itself.
* It has to be viewed as a superior religious and moral system no matter how impossible that is to justify.
* Disagreements must be resolved in favor of religious tradition.
* There is something superior about having only one god.

And then there is the pseudo-atheist tradition. This one is like starting all over again at square one over a century ago and quite frustrating to deal with.

This is like taking a copy of all the OT stories and erasing all the god references and declaring it is a record of a "people" showing their group identity and culture back to ancient times. This can also be described as the zionist tradition which invented the idea of a people independent of the religion in the 1890s. It is the idea that a person can be a Judean/Jew without being a believer in the religion.

This flies in the face of every Old Testament statement that all of the promises are for "those who keep my commandments." As they have erased the god words they are not bothered with this.

As this is not a tradition but an invented fact there is no real reason to address it. It is a recently invented fact whose origin is in the Zionist political movement.

The same considerations of the very late and obviously not as tradition says origin of the religion also applies to the appearance of a people. If the stories do imply a people they were invented after the Greeks arrived to rule the region.

The same consideration of the invention of the Old Testament stories by a small number of people during Greek times applies. A few people knowing they are creating a pack of lies does not establish a group identity for the people they are lying about. Even if they managed to successfully impose the religion on the people, and all organized religions are imposed on the people as kings are imposed on the people, it does not establish a group identity for the people in any matter save perhaps killing priests in dark alleys if they get the chance.

The people cannot be any older than the religion.

To get an idea of what the Old Testament is we look at it like an atheist.

* It describes a ritual/taboo lifestyle. This barely passes for a religion today.
* It was primitive and remains primitive compared to the other religions in the known world at the time.
* It enforced violations with the death penalty.
* It was radical in its primitiveness and attracted fanatical followers.

Today we find "religions" like this as barbaric offshoots of credible religions. Islam has its Wahabis and Ayatollahs. Christianity has it Jim Joneses. The people of the gentle Yahweh and Astarte had their Yahweh cult of murder and destruction.

Here we have a point of comparison with our well known fundamentalist cults to provide a context for this Yahweh cult. We also read it in the stories of the Maccabes. While these are questionable they do have the merit of having a single, albeit tenuous, connection to the non-fiction world. In essence it describes a conflict between civilized Judeans who had learned from the Greeks and a fundamentalist reaction to what was modern at the time. This Yahweh cult is closest to the rise of the Taliban against western civilization. The Taliban of their day, the Judeans won.

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Unvarnished
Haaretz
Jerusalem Post
The origin of the Yahweh Cult

I read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and it said it all for me.

I wish your posts were not so long. Message boards/forums are not my cup of tea for long readings.

If it can't be said in a couple clucks, well...stack 'em.

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May we All have a METAMORPHOSIS. REASON. GOoD JUDGEMENT and LOVE and ORDER!!!!!

I read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and it said it all for me.

I wish your posts were not so long. Message boards/forums are not my cup of tea for long readings.

If it can't be said in a couple clucks, well...stack 'em.

As opposed to Dawkins I do not even bother with the god part. Atheism is a given. In this I am addressing where the story collection came from. Not that I have any solid answers but I can say where and when it did not come from and give the most likely origin which is in Alexander and written in Greek in the 2nd c. BC.

Most ancient religions have not been found in narrative form. Researchers have put together vignettes and set pieces into the single narratives we prefer. The oldest single narrative is again in Greek from the 6th c. BC about their Titans and Gods. But the plethora of varied myths about those gods indicate the author did a major editing job to produce a single narrative. In any event it appears people in Alexandria with connections to bibleland attempted the same thing.

I would like to find a shorter to express the idea but because people know so many thing about the bible that are simply not true I have not been able to make short expressions. When I have I get replies of those things which are not true which leads to a complex thread going off in many different directions that is next to impossible to follow.

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Unvarnished
Haaretz
Jerusalem Post
The origin of the Yahweh Cult

after I saw the post was more than a few screens I ignored it. YOu might consider being a bit more concise with your copy/paste posts. it would even be easier if you just posted the link to the page you copied. If I want to read it I can. As it stands its annoying to read through that much copied material.

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

Equating Truth with Religion or The Bible! Now that's funny. However the beginning, the middle, and the end is put together, there ain't No Truth involved. Some is Good Readings, others Not So Good.

Looking for The Origin of Life is equally daunting. I don't think One Single Moment At The Very Beginning will ever be known, but what a Great Story since.

One Hell of A Narrative!

Egg or Chicken? The result is a Narrative Of Cluck Cluck. Stack 'em.

Equating Truth with Religion or The Bible! Now that's funny. However the beginning, the middle, and the end is put together, there ain't No Truth involved. Some is Good Readings, others Not So Good.

Looking for The Origin of Life is equally daunting. I don't think One Single Moment At The Very Beginning will ever be known, but what a Great Story since.

One Hell of A Narrative!

Egg or Chicken? The result is a Narrative Of Cluck Cluck. Stack 'em.

Consider we know the exact origin down to its publication date of Dianetics the foundation book of Scientology. We know almost as precisely the Book of Mormon. Although Luther nailed is tract to the door on a particular date the "theology" of the Lutheran Church took several decades to solidify in its general outlines, i.e., what it was for rather than what it was against. Although it took a century from the death of Mohamed to the first external copy of the Koran meaning we cannot track any massaging of its contents it does appear to have been more or less the core of the religion and its contents directly from him or from his inner circle.

When it comes to Christianity about all we know is that a large number of manuscripts circulated starting in the 1st c. BC among a Jewish sect and eventually about a fifth of those known by name became the core books of the New Testament. We know next to nothing about the selection process or criteria for selection if any. (There is no evidence to the rumor they were codified at Nicaea. The meeting records survive. There is no mention of such an activity.)

When it comes to Judaism we know nothing at all. Discounting religious tradition many books started appearing around the mid 2nd c. BC with the Septuagint as the only collection of books. Even there there are significant differences in the which books are in surviving versions of the Septuagint.

Were it not for the fact that known history and archaeology negate all the religious traditions regarding its origin this would be an uninteresting subject. It would be wildly more interesting if history and archaeology actually confirmed the traditions but that is another story. I do not mean confirm the magic and miracles simply confirmed a civilization as described in the stories had existed.

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Unvarnished
Haaretz
Jerusalem Post
The origin of the Yahweh Cult

One persons known history and known archeology is another persons lie.

Today almost everything is recorded in print, audio, and video and I know The Truth of it All will be debated ad nauseam.

I hate to refer to the usual WWII reference, but the stacked bodies from the period shown in still and moving picture is not enough to convince a certain person to The East of its Truth. Not even sworn written and now video testimony brings about an admission. If this person had actual control and power, we would have a history written as false as any Western Relgion.

Cluck Cluck and Stack 'em, stack 'em high.

One persons known history and known archeology is another persons lie.

Today almost everything is recorded in print, audio, and video and I know The Truth of it All will be debated ad nauseam.

I hate to refer to the usual WWII reference, but the stacked bodies from the period shown in still and moving picture is not enough to convince a certain person to The East of its Truth. Not even sworn written and now video testimony brings about an admission. If this person had actual control and power, we would have a history written as false as any Western Relgion.

Cluck Cluck and Stack 'em, stack 'em high.

This does not call into existence physical evidence of Judeans/Jews or of any of the stories in the Septuagint. This is an appeal to being appealing.

There is antisemitism in the world therefore the Red Sea parted.

All of the Septuagint stories are in the category of the Red Sea pedestrians.

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Unvarnished
Haaretz
Jerusalem Post
The origin of the Yahweh Cult

The Explaination of the Supernatural has always been a way for the ones in power to subjugate.

Now we have Bankers and Politicians using the Heavy Hand of Finance and other Scare Tactics to reign in the masses.

Same as it ever was.

Scholars can have all the fun they want. People have to do something. Some terrorize, some research, explain, and write books and papers. What's the diff?

We all get stacked in the end.

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May we All have a METAMORPHOSIS. REASON. GOoD JUDGEMENT and LOVE and ORDER!!!!!