Side note. "The Talmud (Menachot 64b and 65a) relates that [Mordecai's] full name was "Mordechai Bilshan" (which occurs in Ezra 2:2 and Nehemiah 7:7, albeit likely as two separate names in sequence). Hoschander interpreted this as the Babylonian "Marduk-belshunu" (๐ญ๐ซ๐๐๐๐ก, dAMAR.UTU-EN-ลกu-nu, meaning "Marduk is their[sic] lord."
A simpler interpretation of the name Mordechai could be "Marduk Lives"
Basically, what became "organized Judaism" was done by the wholesale plagiarism of the Babylonian religious texts by the Hebrew priests. The Chaldean creation myth adopted by the Babylonians became "Genesis." The book of Exodus is entirely fictional, if one takes the fact that while the Pharoah Ramese II - commonly thought to be the Pharoah in power at the time of the alleged events - produced a lot of written material, which has been found and translated over the past 100+ years by Egyptologists; there are no documents that tell of any events even remotely like the events told in Exodus. One would think the death of first-born males in the country over one night would at least have made it into a paragraph in the Royal Annals. There is no account of any Pharoah disappearing with his army in the Red Sea. At best, Exodus is the account of a tribe of Bronze Age nomadic herders of their entry into what is now called "The Holy Land." That the alleged "gift" from what you term as Moses' "Storm God" is considered the Deed of Ownership to the Holy Land, over which so much death and destruction has occurred in disputes over that Deed of Ownership, demonstrates that we are an irrational species who invent what we need to justify taking what we want.
I visited Jerusalem for the first time in 1975 for a wedding. When I visited the Old City and went up to the Temple Mount to see the two Mosques (you could do this back in those days), I could not figure out why this small piece of real estate has been fought over for 2000+ years. For me God has died so many deaths of failure (save the inspiration given to the Italian Renaissance painters and J.S Bach) that the enigma of religion will never be solved.
Among people who study the history of the Bible, a group that includes some people I know, it is common knowledge. Not the stuff the practiciners want people to know about the "Inerrant Word of God."
Me: How much of the Book of Genesis is based on a Chaleon creation myth?
ChatGPT: There is no direct evidence to suggest that the Book of Genesis in the Bible is based on a Chaldean creation myth. The Chaldeans were a group of people who lived in the southern part of Mesopotamia, and they had their own religious beliefs and myths. However, it's important to note that there were various cultural and religious influences in the ancient Near East, and some similarities can be found in creation stories across different cultures.
The creation story in Genesis shares certain thematic elements with other ancient Near Eastern creation myths, such as the Enuma Elish, a Babylonian creation myth. These similarities include the idea of a divine creator, the shaping of the world, and the creation of human beings. However, the specific details and theological messages of each story are distinct.
The influence of neighboring cultures and the exchange of ideas in the ancient world likely contributed to some shared motifs in creation stories. Still, it is challenging to pinpoint direct sources or confirm that Genesis is specifically based on a Chaldean creation myth. Genesis is a complex text with its own theological and literary characteristics, and scholars continue to study its origins and connections with other ancient texts.
I've often wondered about this. Perhaps the blue stone of the tablets Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai offer a clue. Some of the oldest alphabetic writing is found in ancient turquoise mines in the Sinai. They were a joint Egyptian and Canaanite venture. The Egyptians provided the capital and access to a market. The Canaanites provided the labor. There are signs of ancient Egyptian and Canaanite worship on site with inscriptions, including the names of Canaanite gods written in an alphabetic script based roughly Egyptian hieroglyphs. (Yeah, this is controversial. Look up Orly Goldwasser. Brace for flames.)
Obviously, this is at best suggestive: the confluence of possibly the first alphabetic script, a blue stone in a Bible story, the meeting of Egyptians and Canaanites in the Sinai. Just about every literate society keeps some sort of journal whether it is carved in stone or preserved on palm leaves. Many of these cover centuries, but the Bible may claim the longest run, from the Late Bronze Age to the age of Alexander.
This may well be a result of the exiles. You can't take a stone wall or side of a mountain with you when you are ordered to pack up and move, but you can pack up your scrolls, then keep copying them and adding to them.
P.S. Does anyone know why they call Jews the people of the book? If you've been to a synagogue, the Bible there is written on a scroll. (This isn't a big secret like the whereabouts of the Ark.)
A personal note. On Christmas Morning I opened a package from my daughter, a book, and started reading at random. "Hum ... this sounds like that Substack post by Brad Delong, I was telling you about." Sure enough, it was the same (and no, the book had been purchased before the Substack post).
"how writing was utilized by ruling elites to solidify and maintain social order"
Are you familiar with Yonatan Adler's book "The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal"? I was fascinated by it, though of course I am not qualified to judge its quality, nor do I know how Adler is regarded in his scholarly community. The argument is internally coherent, though, and it appears well-sourced. Adler himself seems very well credentialed. If you don't want to spend the necessary time to read the book, you can get the elements of the argument from one of his YouTube lectures.
Anyway, by "Judaism", Adler means a broad cultural practice; he is explicitly not interested in an intellectual or religious history. He argues that in the 1st century CE, there is good textual evidence that Jews were practicing Judaism in this cultural sense: observing the Sabbath, various high holidays, dietary restrictions, using purification pools etc. If you were somehow able to go back in time and observe Jews living their lives, you would have no trouble identifying them as Jewish. His method is to start from there and see how far back you can trace evidence for these practices. For instance, there is positive archaeological evidence for tefillin, mezuzot, purification pools, and chalk culinary vessels. There is also negative evidence: lack of the bones of proscribed animals in middens, the lack of representation of animals and especially people on e.g. coins, etc. (One interesting example has a blob of text *describing* the authority under which it was issued, in place of the customary *depiction*.)
Tl;dr, the evidence peters out sometime in the middle of the 2nd century BCE. Jump to the 4th century BCE, and there is a lot of positive evidence for Jews *not* practicing Judaism - they were eating a lot of carp and engraving depictions of people and animals on their coins. The first five chapters take you through all this evidence, and are presented as firm and objective. The 6th chapter is interpretation. To cut to the chase, Adler suggests that Judaism was introduced by the Hasmoneans to legitimize and establish their rule. Under that interpretation, if it were not for an interregnum between the control of Israel and Judea by rival Hellenistic kingdoms, Judaism might never have existed.
But... but... but... how could Judah the Hammer and company have succeeded in their ethnic revolt if something like **Judaism** had not already existed?
That's a bit like asking how Trump and company could have succeeded in their revolt if something like Trumpism had not already existed. There is an origin for everything, and it is seldom made of whole cloth. This doesn't strike me as a very serious objection to Adler's speculation - which is not to say that there aren't any.
Hasmoneans were priests who ended up ruling an independent kingdom after the revolt. It is possible that before winning political control, their religious practices were mostly kept by a priestly elite and not hoi polloi (or the Hellenized Judean elite they also overthrew) and only regularized to the masses after they won. But of course they looked back at religious texts that dated to at least the Babylonian exile and likely long before, and were preserved by the likes of Ezra. The Holiness Code in Leviticus is certainly more ancient than the Hasmoneans, even if the ordinary people of the land didn't keep it in First Temple times.
I kinda thought that scripture-oriented Judaism was created by the Exiles in Babylon, rather than by the Returnees of Ezra and Nehemiah, or by the Hasmoneans. But I have no idea why I thought that...
Certainly the prophets (whether contemporaneously rebuking late second temple Israel/Judah or retconning those warnings into texts by the rivers of Babylon) didn't see the political/religious elite, or the common man, as particularly committed to the exclusive worship of the God of Israel.
The returnees needed a Law by which to establish their society, and Ezra/Nehemiah were in some position to provide them with instruction in that law, to which they were mostly unfamiliar. But of course they were reaching back to something preexisting. And of course the majority of exiles and their descendants did not return, and kept up a practice and culture of Judaism in Mesopotamia.
I do find it interesting that Judaism continues to persist, where other religions, particularly the Egyptian religion did not. Egypt, with its wonderous monuments and rich culture and history, continues, but not the religion. There must be a reason at the level of the Hebrew of education system and intertwining of clerical texts. They too kept a large library until destroyed, such as that in Qumran and others.
Side note. "The Talmud (Menachot 64b and 65a) relates that [Mordecai's] full name was "Mordechai Bilshan" (which occurs in Ezra 2:2 and Nehemiah 7:7, albeit likely as two separate names in sequence). Hoschander interpreted this as the Babylonian "Marduk-belshunu" (๐ญ๐ซ๐๐๐๐ก, dAMAR.UTU-EN-ลกu-nu, meaning "Marduk is their[sic] lord."
A simpler interpretation of the name Mordechai could be "Marduk Lives"
Basically, what became "organized Judaism" was done by the wholesale plagiarism of the Babylonian religious texts by the Hebrew priests. The Chaldean creation myth adopted by the Babylonians became "Genesis." The book of Exodus is entirely fictional, if one takes the fact that while the Pharoah Ramese II - commonly thought to be the Pharoah in power at the time of the alleged events - produced a lot of written material, which has been found and translated over the past 100+ years by Egyptologists; there are no documents that tell of any events even remotely like the events told in Exodus. One would think the death of first-born males in the country over one night would at least have made it into a paragraph in the Royal Annals. There is no account of any Pharoah disappearing with his army in the Red Sea. At best, Exodus is the account of a tribe of Bronze Age nomadic herders of their entry into what is now called "The Holy Land." That the alleged "gift" from what you term as Moses' "Storm God" is considered the Deed of Ownership to the Holy Land, over which so much death and destruction has occurred in disputes over that Deed of Ownership, demonstrates that we are an irrational species who invent what we need to justify taking what we want.
I visited Jerusalem for the first time in 1975 for a wedding. When I visited the Old City and went up to the Temple Mount to see the two Mosques (you could do this back in those days), I could not figure out why this small piece of real estate has been fought over for 2000+ years. For me God has died so many deaths of failure (save the inspiration given to the Italian Renaissance painters and J.S Bach) that the enigma of religion will never be solved.
If Genesis was based on a Chaldean creation myth, I think that would be common knowledge.
Among people who study the history of the Bible, a group that includes some people I know, it is common knowledge. Not the stuff the practiciners want people to know about the "Inerrant Word of God."
Me: How much of the Book of Genesis is based on a Chaleon creation myth?
ChatGPT: There is no direct evidence to suggest that the Book of Genesis in the Bible is based on a Chaldean creation myth. The Chaldeans were a group of people who lived in the southern part of Mesopotamia, and they had their own religious beliefs and myths. However, it's important to note that there were various cultural and religious influences in the ancient Near East, and some similarities can be found in creation stories across different cultures.
The creation story in Genesis shares certain thematic elements with other ancient Near Eastern creation myths, such as the Enuma Elish, a Babylonian creation myth. These similarities include the idea of a divine creator, the shaping of the world, and the creation of human beings. However, the specific details and theological messages of each story are distinct.
The influence of neighboring cultures and the exchange of ideas in the ancient world likely contributed to some shared motifs in creation stories. Still, it is challenging to pinpoint direct sources or confirm that Genesis is specifically based on a Chaldean creation myth. Genesis is a complex text with its own theological and literary characteristics, and scholars continue to study its origins and connections with other ancient texts.
I've often wondered about this. Perhaps the blue stone of the tablets Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai offer a clue. Some of the oldest alphabetic writing is found in ancient turquoise mines in the Sinai. They were a joint Egyptian and Canaanite venture. The Egyptians provided the capital and access to a market. The Canaanites provided the labor. There are signs of ancient Egyptian and Canaanite worship on site with inscriptions, including the names of Canaanite gods written in an alphabetic script based roughly Egyptian hieroglyphs. (Yeah, this is controversial. Look up Orly Goldwasser. Brace for flames.)
Obviously, this is at best suggestive: the confluence of possibly the first alphabetic script, a blue stone in a Bible story, the meeting of Egyptians and Canaanites in the Sinai. Just about every literate society keeps some sort of journal whether it is carved in stone or preserved on palm leaves. Many of these cover centuries, but the Bible may claim the longest run, from the Late Bronze Age to the age of Alexander.
This may well be a result of the exiles. You can't take a stone wall or side of a mountain with you when you are ordered to pack up and move, but you can pack up your scrolls, then keep copying them and adding to them.
P.S. Does anyone know why they call Jews the people of the book? If you've been to a synagogue, the Bible there is written on a scroll. (This isn't a big secret like the whereabouts of the Ark.)
A personal note. On Christmas Morning I opened a package from my daughter, a book, and started reading at random. "Hum ... this sounds like that Substack post by Brad Delong, I was telling you about." Sure enough, it was the same (and no, the book had been purchased before the Substack post).
"how writing was utilized by ruling elites to solidify and maintain social order"
Are you familiar with Yonatan Adler's book "The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal"? I was fascinated by it, though of course I am not qualified to judge its quality, nor do I know how Adler is regarded in his scholarly community. The argument is internally coherent, though, and it appears well-sourced. Adler himself seems very well credentialed. If you don't want to spend the necessary time to read the book, you can get the elements of the argument from one of his YouTube lectures.
Anyway, by "Judaism", Adler means a broad cultural practice; he is explicitly not interested in an intellectual or religious history. He argues that in the 1st century CE, there is good textual evidence that Jews were practicing Judaism in this cultural sense: observing the Sabbath, various high holidays, dietary restrictions, using purification pools etc. If you were somehow able to go back in time and observe Jews living their lives, you would have no trouble identifying them as Jewish. His method is to start from there and see how far back you can trace evidence for these practices. For instance, there is positive archaeological evidence for tefillin, mezuzot, purification pools, and chalk culinary vessels. There is also negative evidence: lack of the bones of proscribed animals in middens, the lack of representation of animals and especially people on e.g. coins, etc. (One interesting example has a blob of text *describing* the authority under which it was issued, in place of the customary *depiction*.)
Tl;dr, the evidence peters out sometime in the middle of the 2nd century BCE. Jump to the 4th century BCE, and there is a lot of positive evidence for Jews *not* practicing Judaism - they were eating a lot of carp and engraving depictions of people and animals on their coins. The first five chapters take you through all this evidence, and are presented as firm and objective. The 6th chapter is interpretation. To cut to the chase, Adler suggests that Judaism was introduced by the Hasmoneans to legitimize and establish their rule. Under that interpretation, if it were not for an interregnum between the control of Israel and Judea by rival Hellenistic kingdoms, Judaism might never have existed.
But... but... but... how could Judah the Hammer and company have succeeded in their ethnic revolt if something like **Judaism** had not already existed?
That's a bit like asking how Trump and company could have succeeded in their revolt if something like Trumpism had not already existed. There is an origin for everything, and it is seldom made of whole cloth. This doesn't strike me as a very serious objection to Adler's speculation - which is not to say that there aren't any.
Hasmoneans were priests who ended up ruling an independent kingdom after the revolt. It is possible that before winning political control, their religious practices were mostly kept by a priestly elite and not hoi polloi (or the Hellenized Judean elite they also overthrew) and only regularized to the masses after they won. But of course they looked back at religious texts that dated to at least the Babylonian exile and likely long before, and were preserved by the likes of Ezra. The Holiness Code in Leviticus is certainly more ancient than the Hasmoneans, even if the ordinary people of the land didn't keep it in First Temple times.
I kinda thought that scripture-oriented Judaism was created by the Exiles in Babylon, rather than by the Returnees of Ezra and Nehemiah, or by the Hasmoneans. But I have no idea why I thought that...
Certainly the prophets (whether contemporaneously rebuking late second temple Israel/Judah or retconning those warnings into texts by the rivers of Babylon) didn't see the political/religious elite, or the common man, as particularly committed to the exclusive worship of the God of Israel.
The returnees needed a Law by which to establish their society, and Ezra/Nehemiah were in some position to provide them with instruction in that law, to which they were mostly unfamiliar. But of course they were reaching back to something preexisting. And of course the majority of exiles and their descendants did not return, and kept up a practice and culture of Judaism in Mesopotamia.
I do find it interesting that Judaism continues to persist, where other religions, particularly the Egyptian religion did not. Egypt, with its wonderous monuments and rich culture and history, continues, but not the religion. There must be a reason at the level of the Hebrew of education system and intertwining of clerical texts. They too kept a large library until destroyed, such as that in Qumran and others.
The Wright book is on my Kindle and I need to read it next. Adam Gopnik had a thoughtful review in The New Yorker this past August.