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The True Meaning of the Bible

 
 
 
Swammerdami said:
Elixir said:
Unfortunately, the next word, the, is going to be more difficult.
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I love Thailand and the Thai people. I love the Thais approach to Christianity -- it's to sing Jingle Bells (off-tune) today.

And I love the Thai language. For starters it has no word for "the." If God knew what he was doing he'd have written the Bible in Thai instead of King James's English.

I suppose the Thai people are a bit frustrated that their simple language seems to be the exception to the rule that all languages are equally complex. Thai has no word for "the", no markers for verb tense or even plurality; "King" and "God" are the same word.

To make up for this simplicity, Thais have no less than seventeen syllables that can be thrown onto the end of a sentence to express the speaker's mood or his attitude toward the listener. It has a bewildering variety of pronouns, some of which can be used as either 1st- or 3rd-person, 2nd- or 3rd-person, or even any of the three persons. Before meeting with the King, Thais need to memorize some new pronouns spoken only to him.

Maybe that's why they don't believe in Jehovah or Allah or Beelzebub or whatever His Name is. Too many new pronouns would be needed.
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I believe a number of languages, most prominently perhaps Russian, omit definite and indefinite articles. Also in Russian, the double negative is not just permitted, but required.

From what you write above it sounds like Thai is just as complex as any other language, just in a different way, given the bewildering use of all those syllables.
 
RIS said:
Jimmy Higgins said:
The true meaning of the Tanakh is a self reflection on faith and identity in the face of Babylonian captivity.

For the fan fiction New Testament, it starts off as a plea, desperately blurting out "We're not a cult!" and tries to justify their cult's existence much more than that of their alleged prophet.
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Uh-huh.
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I'm sorry if this doesn't fit in with your "understanding" of the Tanakh or Fan Fiction Testament.

When I was studying the Tanakh in college, I pinpointed the time most of the Tanakh was written without actually being taught it explicitly, simply because the text in the Tanakh pointed that way. People often read too much in the message of the words (or worse yet, their own interpretation of the words) instead of the message/intent of the author.

The Tanakh is the holy book of a beaten people.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
I'm sorry if this doesn't fit in with your "understanding" of the Tanakh or Fan Fiction Testament.
Click to expand...

That alright, sir, it makes no difference to me. Not sure about the Fan Fiction reference. Sarcastic analogy?

Jimmy Higgins said:
When I was studying the Tanakh in college, I pinpointed the time most of the Tanakh was written without actually being taught it explicitly, simply because the text in the Tanakh pointed that way. People often read too much in the message of the words (or worse yet, their own interpretation of the words) instead of the message/intent of the author.
Click to expand...

The problem with higher criticism is that it's so terribly unsophisticated, but what you were taught is pretty simply destroyed with one Hebrew word. Pim. They didn't have a clue what the word meant until 1907 when it was excavated in the ancient city of Gezer. Translations older than that like the KJV translated pim as file at the one place it occurs, 1 Samuel 13:21. It isn't a file, it's a weight measure. The weight system in question was discontinued when the kingdom of Judah fell in 607 BCE. In other words the word was forgotten until 1907.

William G. Dever, professor of Near Eastern archaeology and anthropology, says: “[It] cannot possibly have been ‘invented’ by writers living in the Hellenistic-Roman period several centuries after these weights had disappeared and had been forgotten. In fact, this bit of biblical text . . . would not be understood until the early 20th century A.D., when the first actual archaeological examples turned up, reading pîm in Hebrew. . . . If the biblical stories are all ‘literary inventions’ of the Hellenistic-Roman era, how did this particular story come to be in the Hebrew Bible? One may object, of course, that the pîm incident is ‘only a detail.’ To be sure; but as is well known, ‘history is in the details.’”
 
RIS said:
Jimmy Higgins said:
I'm sorry if this doesn't fit in with your "understanding" of the Tanakh or Fan Fiction Testament.
Click to expand...

That alright, sir, it makes no difference to me. Not sure about the Fan Fiction reference. Sarcastic analogy?
Click to expand...
It certainly isn't canon, so it is fan fiction.
RIS said:
Jimmy Higgins said:
When I was studying the Tanakh in college, I pinpointed the time most of the Tanakh was written without actually being taught it explicitly, simply because the text in the Tanakh pointed that way. People often read too much in the message of the words (or worse yet, their own interpretation of the words) instead of the message/intent of the author.
Click to expand...

The problem with higher criticism is that it's so terribly unsophisticated, but what you were taught is pretty simply destroyed with one Hebrew word. Pim. They didn't have a clue what the word meant until 1907 when it was excavated in the ancient city of Gezer. Translations older than that like the KJV translated pim as file at the one place it occurs, 1 Samuel 13:21. It isn't a file, it's a weight measure. The weight system in question was discontinued when the kingdom of Judah fell in 607 BCE. In other words the word was forgotten until 1907.

William G. Dever, professor of Near Eastern archaeology and anthropology, says: “[It] cannot possibly have been ‘invented’ by writers living in the Hellenistic-Roman period several centuries after these weights had disappeared and had been forgotten. In fact, this bit of biblical text . . . would not be understood until the early 20th century A.D., when the first actual archaeological examples turned up, reading pîm in Hebrew. . . . If the biblical stories are all ‘literary inventions’ of the Hellenistic-Roman era, how did this particular story come to be in the Hebrew Bible? One may object, of course, that the pîm incident is ‘only a detail.’ To be sure; but as is well known, ‘history is in the details.’”
Click to expand...
Who said the Tanakh was written during Roman years?
 
As I MIGHT have mentioned in another thread, the ancient measures of silver intrigue me. Both the 5000(?) year-old Sumerian system AND the 1000+ year-old English system define weights of silver as multiples of the weight of a standard grain of barleycorn! IF we assume -- counterfactually! -- that the barley grain weight was constant, then 1 shekel = 7.5 pennyweights and there are 32 shekels per troy pound.

Jimmy Higgins said:
RIS said:
The problem with higher criticism is that it's so terribly unsophisticated, but what you were taught is pretty simply destroyed with one Hebrew word. Pim. They didn't have a clue what the word meant until 1907 when it was excavated in the ancient city of Gezer. Translations older than that like the KJV translated pim as file at the one place it occurs, 1 Samuel 13:21. It isn't a file, it's a weight measure. The weight system in question was discontinued when the kingdom of Judah fell in 607 BCE. In other words the word was forgotten until 1907.

William G. Dever, professor of Near Eastern archaeology and anthropology, says: “[It] cannot possibly have been ‘invented’ by writers living in the Hellenistic-Roman period several centuries after these weights had disappeared and had been forgotten. In fact, this bit of biblical text . . . would not be understood until the early 20th century A.D., when the first actual archaeological examples turned up, reading pîm in Hebrew. . . . If the biblical stories are all ‘literary inventions’ of the Hellenistic-Roman era, how did this particular story come to be in the Hebrew Bible? One may object, of course, that the pîm incident is ‘only a detail.’ To be sure; but as is well known, ‘history is in the details.’”
Click to expand...
Who said the Tanakh was written during Roman years?
Click to expand...

This discussion caught my eye. A typical modern translation of the cited Tanakh verse reads "The fee [for sharpening] was a pim (two-thirds of a shekel) for the plowshares ...", so a pim weighed 120 grains; all is consistent. KJV mistranslates pîm: "Yet they had a file for the mattocks ..."

It was somewhat before the time of the Captivity that the Greek world began using drachm and stater as units of silver weight, though these were still nominally related to the 180-grain shekel. IIUC, Judah still used shekel at the time of the Hasmonean dynasty.

Unfortunately none of this sheds light on the question of when the pîm coin or term fell into disuse. But I did want to contribute what little I could.

ETA: To be clear, the 1 pîm = ⅔ shekel identity does not seem to be in dispute. What is weird (coincidence?) is that the most ancient Sumerian shekel and the earliest Phoenician shekels weighed only about ⅔ (i.e. 1 pîm) of a standard 180-grain shekel of Canaan. Scholars have no agreed explanation for this discrepancy beyond the guess that the link to barleycorn weights was only "nominal."
 
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The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. -Thomas Jefferson

There is in the literature of ignorance no more perfectly absurd and cruel story than that of the deluge. -Robert G. Ingersoll

All that we call progress -- the enfranchisement of man, of labor, the substitution of imprisonment for death, of fine for imprisonment, the destruction of polygamy, the establishing of free speech, of the rights of conscience; in short, all that has tended to the development and civilization of man; all the results of investigation, observation, experience and free thought; all that man has accomplished for the benefit of man since the close of the Dark Ages -- has been done in spite of the Old Testament. -Robert G. Ingersoll

I admit that there are many good things in the New Testament, and if we take from that book the dogmas of eternal pain, of infinite revenge, of the atonement, of human sacrifice, of the necessity of shedding blood; if we throw away the doctrine of non-resistance, of loving enemies, the idea that prosperity is the result of wickedness, that poverty is a preparation for Paradise, if we throw all these away and take the good, sensible passages, applicable to conduct, then we can make a fairly good moral guide -- narrow, but moral. -Robert G. Ingersoll

It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals, and some execrable morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies. -Mark Twain

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends, which are nevertheless pretty childish. -Albert Einstein

There's no Hell mentioned in the Old Testament. The punishment of the dead is not specified there. It's only with gentle Jesus, meek and mild, that the idea of eternal torture for minor transgressions is introduced. -Christopher Hitchens
 
Swammerdami said:
As I MIGHT have mentioned in another thread, the ancient measures of silver intrigue me. Both the 5000(?) year-old Sumerian system AND the 1000+ year-old English system define weights of silver as multiples of the weight of a standard grain of barleycorn! IF we assume -- counterfactually! -- that the barley grain weight was constant, then 1 shekel = 7.5 pennyweights and there are 32 shekels per troy pound.

Jimmy Higgins said:
RIS said:
The problem with higher criticism is that it's so terribly unsophisticated, but what you were taught is pretty simply destroyed with one Hebrew word. Pim. They didn't have a clue what the word meant until 1907 when it was excavated in the ancient city of Gezer. Translations older than that like the KJV translated pim as file at the one place it occurs, 1 Samuel 13:21. It isn't a file, it's a weight measure. The weight system in question was discontinued when the kingdom of Judah fell in 607 BCE. In other words the word was forgotten until 1907.

William G. Dever, professor of Near Eastern archaeology and anthropology, says: “[It] cannot possibly have been ‘invented’ by writers living in the Hellenistic-Roman period several centuries after these weights had disappeared and had been forgotten. In fact, this bit of biblical text . . . would not be understood until the early 20th century A.D., when the first actual archaeological examples turned up, reading pîm in Hebrew. . . . If the biblical stories are all ‘literary inventions’ of the Hellenistic-Roman era, how did this particular story come to be in the Hebrew Bible? One may object, of course, that the pîm incident is ‘only a detail.’ To be sure; but as is well known, ‘history is in the details.’”
Click to expand...
Who said the Tanakh was written during Roman years?
Click to expand...

This discussion caught my eye. A typical modern translation of the cited Tanakh verse reads "The fee [for sharpening] was a pim (two-thirds of a shekel) for the plowshares ...", so a pim weighed 120 grains; all is consistent. KJV mistranslates pîm: "Yet they had a file for the mattocks ..."

It was somewhat before the time of the Captivity that the Greek world began using drachm and stater as units of silver weight, though these were still nominally related to the 180-grain shekel. IIUC, Judah still used shekel at the time of the Hasmonean dynasty.

Unfortunately none of this sheds light on the question of when the pîm coin or term fell into disuse. But I did want to contribute what little I could.

ETA: To be clear, the 1 pîm = ⅔ shekel identity does not seem to be in dispute. What is weird (coincidence?) is that the most ancient Sumerian shekel and the earliest Phoenician shekels weighed only about ⅔ (i.e. 1 pîm) of a standard 180-grain shekel of Canaan. Scholars have no agreed explanation for this discrepancy beyond the guess that the link to barleycorn weights was only "nominal."
Click to expand...
Or as time went on humans continued acting as a selection pressure on the barley, and eventually the size of a grain of barley shifted.
 
Jarhyn said:
Swammerdami said:
What is weird (coincidence?) is that the most ancient Sumerian shekel and the earliest Phoenician shekels weighed only about ⅔ (i.e. 1 pîm) of a standard 180-grain shekel of Canaan. Scholars have no agreed explanation for this discrepancy beyond the guess that the link to barleycorn weights was only "nominal."
Click to expand...
Or as time went on humans continued acting as a selection pressure on the barley, and eventually the size of a grain of barley shifted.
Click to expand...

Quite possibly. I actually exchanged e-mail with a scholar immersed in this matter. I'll just quote one paragraph from his long reply. I had asked whether wheat -- with grains roughly ⅔ the weight of barley grains -- might have been the measure. This query wasn't original as shown in his reply:
Barley is much more salt tolerant than wheat and was thus far more common in Southern Mesopotamia where the fields salinated very heavily. Wheat was more common in Northern Mesopotamia but oddly, the northern standard [shekel weight] is 9.4 grams while the southern is 8.4 (with other standards unconfirmed but possible, such as the 7.8 Ebla and the 11.4 Anatolian). The idea of '180 grains to the shekel' spreads much more easily than physical examples of weights to compare local ones to, so it seems to me that the difference in weight standards is the difference in type of grain grown in a local area. Why it seems reversed (barley being heavier but making a lighter standard in the south) I would guess is due to the ancient form of barley that we can't measure.
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In a museum of ancient Sumerian artifacts he'd found some small random-seeming pebbles, but weighing them he found that the stones weighed ⅓, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 x 1/20 shekel! The Fibonacci numbers might facilitate some weighing algorithms. It was his article on this that connected me to him in the first place. I wanted to be sure the 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 weights weren't coincidental. He replied
On your final question, the 14 small Sumerian weights I discovered in our museum were not perfectly accurate, varying in one case around 12% off the target, but in most cases around 3-6%. Given the very small mass this is quite accurate, especially considering that much larger Sumerian weights tend to vary within 5% of their target.
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Re-reading this now, I see the e-mail exchange was a bit more than 3 years ago! Time races fast these days; has anyone else noticed this?

The article I saw is no longer there -- it had to be cleared to make room for more lies, I suppose. But it's in the Waybck Machine:
 
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Elixir said:
I from what I’ve seen from RIS, getting to the true meaning of the Bible must be a word by word process. So we better get to work.

Starting with “in” as in “in the beginning” we can get there.
So - we know the in in in the beginning doesn’t mean physical containment, as there was nothing to contain. It’s more like when you’re “in” trouble. Add the context provided by the subsequent word, “ the” and the the clarifies that the in was something unique rather than recurrent.
By this method we can corral the author’s intent in using the word “in”, and thereby gain full understanding of this critical part of the Bible - the beginning, but before we go there we need to address the next word;
The.

Unfortunately, the next word, the, is going to be more difficult.
But if you’ve read this far, you know where this is going;
To TRULY understand the Bible it’s going to take an infinite number of chimpanzees with typewriters an infinite amount of time to ‘splain it to you.
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You're making interpretations based on an English translation that don't apply to the actual text of the HS, in which there are no helper propositions, just the singular word בְּרֵאשִׁית֙ aka "in the beginning", or perhaps more literally "beginningly". It concerns order of events, not a fictive "space". So your analogy to "in trouble" is apt, albeit accidentally. The trouble is your exegesis of a non-existent word. I'd have been in big trouble for that in my seminary days! Even if one is writing exclusively in English, exegesis always preserves word clusters. If "of Judah" is the word, then it will always be "of Judah in exegesis, you can't break it up. Like splitting an infinitive, it simply Isn't Done.
 
Politesse said:
You're making interpretations based on an English translation that don't apply to the actual text of the HS, in which there are no helper propositions, just the singular word בְּרֵאשִׁית֙ aka "in the beginning", or perhaps more literally "beginningly". It concerns order of events, not a fictive "space". So your analogy to "in trouble" is apt, albeit accidentally. The trouble is your exegesis of a non-existent word. I'd have been in big trouble for that in my seminary days! Even if one is writing exclusively in English, exegesis always preserves word clusters. If "of Judah" is the word, then it will always be "of Judah in exegesis, you can't break it up. Like splitting an infinitive, it simply Isn't Done.
Click to expand...
Thanks, that’s a nice paragraph, and probably does away with [the] need to repeat next time [the] word “the” comes up.
On we go. Wanna tackle “beginning”?
😊
 
Elixir said:
Politesse said:
You're making interpretations based on an English translation that don't apply to the actual text of the HS, in which there are no helper propositions, just the singular word בְּרֵאשִׁית֙ aka "in the beginning", or perhaps more literally "beginningly". It concerns order of events, not a fictive "space". So your analogy to "in trouble" is apt, albeit accidentally. The trouble is your exegesis of a non-existent word. I'd have been in big trouble for that in my seminary days! Even if one is writing exclusively in English, exegesis always preserves word clusters. If "of Judah" is the word, then it will always be "of Judah in exegesis, you can't break it up. Like splitting an infinitive, it simply Isn't Done.
Click to expand...
Thanks, that’s a nice paragraph, and probably does away with [the] need to repeat next time [the] word “the” comes up.
On we go. Wanna tackle “beginning”?
😊
Click to expand...
Now THAT's a discussion. Does "beginning" mean even remotely the same thing from one culture to another? This is one of those intractable debates.
 
Politesse said:
Elixir said:
Politesse said:
You're making interpretations based on an English translation that don't apply to the actual text of the HS, in which there are no helper propositions, just the singular word בְּרֵאשִׁית֙ aka "in the beginning", or perhaps more literally "beginningly". It concerns order of events, not a fictive "space". So your analogy to "in trouble" is apt, albeit accidentally. The trouble is your exegesis of a non-existent word. I'd have been in big trouble for that in my seminary days! Even if one is writing exclusively in English, exegesis always preserves word clusters. If "of Judah" is the word, then it will always be "of Judah in exegesis, you can't break it up. Like splitting an infinitive, it simply Isn't Done.
Click to expand...
Thanks, that’s a nice paragraph, and probably does away with [the] need to repeat next time [the] word “the” comes up.
On we go. Wanna tackle “beginning”?
😊
Click to expand...
Now THAT's a discussion. Does "beginning" mean even remotely the same thing from one culture to another? This is one of those intractable debates.
Click to expand...
So we’ve hit a wall, three words in to a big thick book. Shirtcuff math: the Bible will be about twice as old as it already is by the time we derive it’s true meaning.

Are we ready to shitcan the RIS epistemological method?
 
Swammerdami said:
RIS said:
The problem with higher criticism is that it's so terribly unsophisticated, but what you were taught is pretty simply destroyed with one Hebrew word. Pim. They didn't have a clue what the word meant until 1907 when it was excavated in the ancient city of Gezer. Translations older than that like the KJV translated pim as file at the one place it occurs, 1 Samuel 13:21. It isn't a file, it's a weight measure. The weight system in question was discontinued when the kingdom of Judah fell in 607 BCE. In other words the word was forgotten until 1907.

William G. Dever, professor of Near Eastern archaeology and anthropology, says: “[It] cannot possibly have been ‘invented’ by writers living in the Hellenistic-Roman period several centuries after these weights had disappeared and had been forgotten. In fact, this bit of biblical text . . . would not be understood until the early 20th century A.D., when the first actual archaeological examples turned up, reading pîm in Hebrew. . . . If the biblical stories are all ‘literary inventions’ of the Hellenistic-Roman era, how did this particular story come to be in the Hebrew Bible? One may object, of course, that the pîm incident is ‘only a detail.’ To be sure; but as is well known, ‘history is in the details.’”
Click to expand...

This discussion caught my eye. A typical modern translation of the cited Tanakh verse reads "The fee [for sharpening] was a pim (two-thirds of a shekel) for the plowshares ...", so a pim weighed 120 grains; all is consistent. KJV mistranslates pîm: "Yet they had a file for the mattocks ..."
. . .
What is weird (coincidence?) is that the most ancient Sumerian shekel and the earliest Phoenician shekels weighed only about ⅔ (i.e. 1 pîm) of a standard 180-grain shekel of Canaan.
Click to expand...

I should apologize for "hijacking" this thread. My autistic self found the Fibonacci-series weights from ancient Sumeria interesting, so I babbled on despite the utter irrelevance.

The topic of WHEN Biblical stories originated is more interesting and relevant. Kudos to @RIS for calling attention to the word 'pîm' as evidence for the antiquity of the Book of Samuel. It might be interesting to review scholarly debate on this item, but unnecessary: There's plenty of other evidence for the antiquity and validity of parts of the Bible.

Frankly I am baffled by the insistence that the Old Testament was all devised during or after the Captivity in Babylon, and the New Testament a fiction devised after the Destruction of Jerusalem (or even -- the latest nonsense from the Carrierists -- not until the 2nd century). It makes some atheists seem insecure that they need to deny historical facts. I oppose Hitlerism ... but I do not feel a need to pretend Hitler was fictional!

Papyrus was expensive and disintegrates easily. Literacy was uncommon. Yet Carrierists and others of such ilk contend that the absence of papyrus evidence is evidence for an absence! (What is the oldest document attesting to the historicity of Alexander the Great?) Do they think all Jews were illiterate? Their kings unable to afford papyrus?

Besides the word 'pîm' there are numerous pre-Captivity assertions that can be confirmed. Archaeologists have discovered that King Omri really did incorporate much ivory into his palaces. Hezekiah's Wall, built ca 701 BC, is now a tourist attraction in Jerusalem. That Moab paid tribute to the King of Israel is confirmed by a Moabite document from the 9th century BC.

As I reported in another thread I was astounded to learn of a possible connection between Terah of Ur of the Chaldees (alleged father of the Patriarch Abraham) and the historic Terru of Urkesh, born before 1700 BC. Recently a physical 3700 year-old document has been discovered in which Terru writes to his King: "I am always praying to my lord. I have just now left the comfort of my home and gone out to Sinah to live as a hebrew."

Do I consider the identity Terah==Terru to be a 99% certainty? No. I'm reluctant to rate it as high as 50%. But the parallels between the historic Terru and Terah of Genesis are strong. And why would the writers of Genesis bother with mentions of Terah -- which contribute almost nothing to any "biblical message" -- unless they wanted to connect their myths to historic fact?

Misconstruction and Strawmen are "all the rage" on this message-board so let me point out what I have NOT said. I did NOT say that everything in the Bible is factual. I merely suggest that SOME of the accounts in the Bible are based on fact. I have NOT said that Yahweh burned a bush without consuming it. I have NOT speculated on how drunk the wedding guests must have been to think that their water was wine.

A thread about New Testament historicity is completely dominated by Carrierists with no interest in objective analysis; so let me make a few comments about New Testament historicity here.

The writings of Tacitus confirm that Christians were a force in the City of Rome BEFORE Nero's famous Fire, so only two decades or so after the Crucifixion. Those ancient people lacked radio or safe high-speed travel; therefore such an expansion in 25 years was phenomonal. In particular, for the admiration of Jesus to spread so quickly after his death is INCOMPATIBLE with Jesus being a fiction. (Anti-Christians levied many charges, but never the charge that the human Jesus was pure invention!) To counter this and turn the story of Jesus into a fiction invented decades later the Carrierists focus attention on the idea that some translations of Tacitus render "Christians" as "Chrestians." (Never mind that Tacitus wrote in no Germanic language at all, let alone Modern English.) It might be fun to research this issue, but it would all be a game of a Whack-a-Mole.

The chronologies implied by Josephus, Hegesippus, Tacitus, Paul and "Luke" fit together like a hand fits a glove. To pretend this was all 2nd century invention would make William of Ockham turn over in his grave.

There is strong evidence that early Christian Gospels (e.g. "Q source") were written in Aramaic, but Carrierists require the stories to all be myths invented by Greek speakers. Carrier's "solution" to Josephus's "Jesus' brother James" is obviously absurd yet there have been ZERO acknowledgements of that absurdity on this message-board. Not one. I don't want to make a sweeping generalization against atheists -- I am one myself -- but the atheists on THIS message-board, mostly Carrierists or devout followers of some related ilk, seem unable to reason objectively on this topic.
 
Swammerdami said:
Swammerdami said:
RIS said:
The problem with higher criticism is that it's so terribly unsophisticated, but what you were taught is pretty simply destroyed with one Hebrew word. Pim. They didn't have a clue what the word meant until 1907 when it was excavated in the ancient city of Gezer. Translations older than that like the KJV translated pim as file at the one place it occurs, 1 Samuel 13:21. It isn't a file, it's a weight measure. The weight system in question was discontinued when the kingdom of Judah fell in 607 BCE. In other words the word was forgotten until 1907.

William G. Dever, professor of Near Eastern archaeology and anthropology, says: “[It] cannot possibly have been ‘invented’ by writers living in the Hellenistic-Roman period several centuries after these weights had disappeared and had been forgotten. In fact, this bit of biblical text . . . would not be understood until the early 20th century A.D., when the first actual archaeological examples turned up, reading pîm in Hebrew. . . . If the biblical stories are all ‘literary inventions’ of the Hellenistic-Roman era, how did this particular story come to be in the Hebrew Bible? One may object, of course, that the pîm incident is ‘only a detail.’ To be sure; but as is well known, ‘history is in the details.’”
Click to expand...

This discussion caught my eye. A typical modern translation of the cited Tanakh verse reads "The fee [for sharpening] was a pim (two-thirds of a shekel) for the plowshares ...", so a pim weighed 120 grains; all is consistent. KJV mistranslates pîm: "Yet they had a file for the mattocks ..."
. . .
What is weird (coincidence?) is that the most ancient Sumerian shekel and the earliest Phoenician shekels weighed only about ⅔ (i.e. 1 pîm) of a standard 180-grain shekel of Canaan.
Click to expand...

I should apologize for "hijacking" this thread. My autistic self found the Fibonacci-series weights from ancient Sumeria interesting, so I babbled on despite the utter irrelevance.

The topic of WHEN Biblical stories originated is more interesting and relevant. Kudos to @RIS for calling attention to the word 'pîm' as evidence for the antiquity of the Book of Samuel. It might be interesting to review scholarly debate on this item, but unnecessary: There's plenty of other evidence for the antiquity and validity of parts of the Bible.

Frankly I am baffled by the insistence that the Old Testament was all devised during or after the Captivity in Babylon, and the New Testament a fiction devised after the Destruction of Jerusalem (or even -- the latest nonsense from the Carrierists -- not until the 2nd century). It makes some atheists seem insecure that they need to deny historical facts. I oppose Hitlerism ... but I do not feel a need to pretend Hitler was fictional!

Papyrus was expensive and disintegrates easily. Literacy was uncommon. Yet Carrierists and others of such ilk contend that the absence of papyrus evidence is evidence for an absence! (What is the oldest document attesting to the historicity of Alexander the Great?) Do they think all Jews were illiterate? Their kings unable to afford papyrus?

Besides the word 'pîm' there are numerous pre-Captivity assertions that can be confirmed. Archaeologists have discovered that King Omri really did incorporate much ivory into his palaces. Hezekiah's Wall, built ca 701 BC, is now a tourist attraction in Jerusalem. That Moab paid tribute to the King of Israel is confirmed by a Moabite document from the 9th century BC.

As I reported in another thread I was astounded to learn of a possible connection between Terah of Ur of the Chaldees (alleged father of the Patriarch Abraham) and the historic Terru of Urkesh, born before 1700 BC. Recently a physical 3700 year-old document has been discovered in which Terru writes to his King: "I am always praying to my lord. I have just now left the comfort of my home and gone out to Sinah to live as a hebrew."

Do I consider the identity Terah==Terru to be a 99% certainty? No. I'm reluctant to rate it as high as 50%. But the parallels between the historic Terru and Terah of Genesis are strong. And why would the writers of Genesis bother with mentions of Terah -- which contribute almost nothing to any "biblical message" -- unless they wanted to connect their myths to historic fact?

Misconstruction and Strawmen are "all the rage" on this message-board so let me point out what I have NOT said. I did NOT say that everything in the Bible is factual. I merely suggest that SOME of the accounts in the Bible are based on fact. I have NOT said that Yahweh burned a bush without consuming it. I have NOT speculated on how drunk the wedding guests must have been to think that their water was wine.

A thread about New Testament historicity is completely dominated by Carrierists with no interest in objective analysis; so let me make a few comments about New Testament historicity here.

The writings of Tacitus confirm that Christians were a force in the City of Rome BEFORE Nero's famous Fire, so only two decades or so after the Crucifixion. Those ancient people lacked radio or safe high-speed travel; therefore such an expansion in 25 years was phenomonal. In particular, for the admiration of Jesus to spread so quickly after his death is INCOMPATIBLE with Jesus being a fiction. (Anti-Christians levied many charges, but never the charge that the human Jesus was pure invention!) To counter this and turn the story of Jesus into a fiction invented decades later the Carrierists focus attention on the idea that some translations of Tacitus render "Christians" as "Chrestians." (Never mind that Tacitus wrote in no Germanic language at all, let alone Modern English.) It might be fun to research this issue, but it would all be a game of a Whack-a-Mole.

The chronologies implied by Josephus, Hegesippus, Tacitus, Paul and "Luke" fit together like a hand fits a glove. To pretend this was all 2nd century invention would make William of Ockham turn over in his grave.

There is strong evidence that early Christian Gospels (e.g. "Q source") were written in Aramaic, but Carrierists require the stories to all be myths invented by Greek speakers. Carrier's "solution" to Josephus's "Jesus' brother James" is obviously absurd yet there have been ZERO acknowledgements of that absurdity on this message-board. Not one. I don't want to make a sweeping generalization against atheists -- I am one myself -- but the atheists on THIS message-board, mostly Carrierists or devout followers of some related ilk, seem unable to reason objectively on this topic.
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I agree with all of this bar one point:

Those ancient people lacked radio or safe high-speed travel; therefore such an expansion in 25 years was phenomonal.
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The Roman Empire was built on safe, high-speed travel. Their roads are one of their more famous attributes, but their seafaring (which obviously left fewer physical traces) was excellent too - often significantly faster, if not safer, than travel by road - and rapid travel to Rome from the remotest imperial provinces was commonplace.

They didn't have jet airliners, but 25 years is a shitload of time in the context of a journey from Judea to Rome in the first couple of centuries CE.

It would be astonishing if the news of a new cult, and even a fair number of adherents of that cult, took over a year to get from Judea to Rome. Twenty five years is an eternity in this context, it's not phenomenally fast by any stretch.

News could take weeks, even a few months at the worst times of year and in bad weather, to travel across the empire.

Not years. Certainly not a quarter of a century.
 
Elixir said:
Politesse said:
Elixir said:
Politesse said:
You're making interpretations based on an English translation that don't apply to the actual text of the HS, in which there are no helper propositions, just the singular word בְּרֵאשִׁית֙ aka "in the beginning", or perhaps more literally "beginningly". It concerns order of events, not a fictive "space". So your analogy to "in trouble" is apt, albeit accidentally. The trouble is your exegesis of a non-existent word. I'd have been in big trouble for that in my seminary days! Even if one is writing exclusively in English, exegesis always preserves word clusters. If "of Judah" is the word, then it will always be "of Judah in exegesis, you can't break it up. Like splitting an infinitive, it simply Isn't Done.
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Thanks, that’s a nice paragraph, and probably does away with [the] need to repeat next time [the] word “the” comes up.
On we go. Wanna tackle “beginning”?
😊
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Now THAT's a discussion. Does "beginning" mean even remotely the same thing from one culture to another? This is one of those intractable debates.
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So we’ve hit a wall, three words in to a big thick book. Shirtcuff math: the Bible will be about twice as old as it already is by the time we derive it’s true meaning.

Are we ready to shitcan the RIS epistemological method?
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The trouble is, it isn't meaningless if it isn't meant to address something else. I think for the Jewish, a priori or not isn't of significance. It is open to midrash, but that is about it. It is a myth used to describe a few things, give origin to the Sabbath.

It is the Evangelicals and creationists who turn a myth into a story of historical fact and put undue and unintended significance of a literary poem.
 
bilby said:
I agree with all of this bar one point:

Swammerdami said:
Those ancient people lacked radio or safe high-speed travel; therefore such an expansion in 25 years was phenomonal.
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The Roman Empire was built on safe, high-speed travel. Their roads are one of their more famous attributes, but their seafaring (which obviously left fewer physical traces) was excellent too - often significantly faster, if not safer, than travel by road - and rapid travel to Rome from the remotest imperial provinces was commonplace.

They didn't have jet airliners, but 25 years is a shitload of time in the context of a journey from Judea to Rome in the first couple of centuries CE.

It would be astonishing if the news of a new cult, and even a fair number of adherents of that cult, took over a year to get from Judea to Rome. Twenty five years is an eternity in this context, it's not phenomenally fast by any stretch.

News could take weeks, even a few months at the worst times of year and in bad weather, to travel across the empire.

Not years. Certainly not a quarter of a century.
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Good points. Well argued.

But I elided that travel time to Rome was just one factor -- a factor which, as you point out, was of minimal relevance. First we needed Peter and/or James and/or John to invent the religion. We can't reconstruct EXACTLY how the Resurrection myth evolved, but it took some time; had to be communicated to those who'd followed Jesus while alive and were likely discouraged to follow the deceased Christ UNTIL the Resurrection myth was invented AND communicated to those (now dispersed) followers. The "Palm Sunday" stories might also have been mythical -- or at least with a different true chronology -- and in need of invention. Setting the Crucifixion at 30 AD and allowing for Church founders to polish their methods, the movement might have had perhaps a hundred followers 33 AD, a thousand 35 AD. We can infer from reconstructions of Paul's bio (who supposedly saw the light on the road to Damascus by 36 AD). that at that point the followers were already considered a threat. By 40 AD the movement was spreading like wildfire and there were hundreds of followers with means and motive to travel far. These followers might visit many cities after they left Judah.

"the road to Damascus by 36 AD". ?? Too early? But this is what Google's AI tells me right now. If Google is wrong please tell us.

It sounds like bilby agrees with me. Sometime in the 40's there'd be a dozen or more followers in each of several cities, even in Greece and Italy. If the religion really caught on it could be viewed as a serious threat in the Roman Capital itself during the 50's AD.

Which agrees with inferences from Tacitus AND Paul AND Luke's Acts.

@bilby -- Do you agree with the revisionist view that Tacitus wrote about the Chrestians, who were allegedly a completely different sect from the Christians, though later Christian apologists might have usurped the evidence for "Chrestians" as their own?

-- Or are you more inclined to the parsimonious solution that the Chrestians and the Christians were the same?

I estimated, using lack of radio as one hindrance, that 25 years might be needed between the alleged Resurrection and Christians in Rome being strong enough to anger Nero. With your implied correction, 15 to 20 years might be a better guess!

But such a date would only STRENGTHEN the point I was making. With only 15 or 20 years between the Crucifixion and a VERY strong and widespread Christian congregation the historic factuality (or absence thereof) of the Crucified preacher Jesus would have been readily apparent to a large number of Jerusalem's residents and visitors. Passing off a fiction or even a relative "nobody" would have been very unlikely to succeed uncontested. Yet ZERO documents have surfaced from the early centuries suggesting that Jesus' never existed.

I suppose the early Christians might have "gotten lucky" and all but ZERO of those pointing out the counterfactual were IGNORED! But that would be unexpected and whichever of Peter/John/James/Paul created the early myths wouldn't have taken the risk of the deceit being exposed so easily. (Recall that we are arguing AGAINST the view that Christianity is based on myths concocted after 70 AD or even later.)

The mythmakers might have chosen the historic John the Baptizer for example, the alleged mentor of Jesus Christ. That martyr would obviously have been a "safer" choice than a fiction or "nobody" -- especially if we agree that the sect was groing rapidly within a decade of a fake marty's death.
 
Swammerdami said:
@bilby -- Do you agree with the revisionist view that Tacitus wrote about the Chrestians, who were allegedly a completely different sect from the Christians, though later Christian apologists might have usurped the evidence for "Chrestians" as their own?

-- Or are you more inclined to the parsimonious solution that the Chrestians and the Christians were the same?
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I am not sufficiently interested in early Christianity to have an opinion.

It seems unlikely that there were two totally unrelated cults with very similar names simultaneously, but I don't care to investigate the matter.

I assume that Jesus is a pastiche, and that most of his story is fiction, and some parts happened to different people whose tales got amalgamated, while other parts didn't happen at all. But frankly I don't understand why people seem to care so much. Unless they have a religious axe to grind, of course.

It's not my period of history, and even scholars of the period have very scant evidence compared to the vast wealth of documentary sources from the Early Modern period, in which I take a much greater interest.

I was never a Christian, so perhaps that's why I am baffled by the level of passion (pun intended) that this story evokes amongst Christian (and ex-Christian) scholars.

The Roman history I am interested by has early Christianity as a minor element, of very limited importance, until the second or third centuries. To focus on that small but growing cult seems to me to miss the big picture.
 
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