Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible

Discussion about the Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, pseudepigrapha, Philo, Josephus, Talmud, Dead Sea Scrolls, archaeology, etc.
andrewcriddle
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Re: Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible

Post by andrewcriddle »

Solstice wrote:But notice that the very first law from the Cot7 is "Follow God" which is singular. Perhaps they meant a supreme God like Zeus? And the plural gods in #3 pertains to minor gods - as would have also been in the Ugartic pantheon?
http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/MSm ... eism.shtml

Also notice that the 10C's have the first 4 laws pertaining to God, and the remaining for humanity. The Cot7 also has this pattern with the first 3 for God (assuming "the law" in #2 is divine) and then the rest are for humanity.

Also notice that in both lists the very first humanity commandment pertains to parents.
It is unlikely that Nomos (original meaning that which is in habitual practice, use or possession) means here the law of God.

Andrew Criddle
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DCHindley
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Re: Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible

Post by DCHindley »

Russ,

I don't mean to delay, but my recent surgery is making things difficult for me. Today I'll plan to cobble together a couple Amazon gift cards I've received as birthday and Father's day gifts from my kids, and buy that kindle edition of the book, steeply priced as it is.

However, I had managed to snag a copy of your book on Berossus and Manetho being the sources for the Pentateuch stories about Judean origins. I am about halfway through it, reading a bit during breaks and lunch at work (as I am temporarily working exclusively in the too-hot office ... can't wait to get back on the road though). Very interesting stuff indeed!

Give me a bit longer and I'll try to post something intelligent on the most recent book above.

I am especially interested in the hypothesis that Judeans had created myths about their origins in the 3rd century BCE, not the 900s BCE as assumed by most interpreters of the sources identified in the Documentary Hypotheses. I think you have done a good job establishing that there are no independent accounts of a Judean set of Law books, by Moses or anyone else, before about 270 BCE.

I have long felt that the "peculiarity" of Judean tradition was hyped by the Maccabees in response to Antiochus IV's push to Hellenize completely around 170-160 BCE, and it became a national obsession. Fact is, Judaism had already been fairly Hellenized by that time as is recognized by many specialists and can even be found in the Book of Watchers (Aramaic, 3rd century BCE). I think, though, that Antiochus had pushed his agenda in a way that reversed that trend completely.

Oh yes, I did finally figure out what brought you to my attention years ago, it was your posts on the Orion list about the weaponry of the War scroll in the late 1990s. I also believe I had previously perused a library copy of your Berossus book, as many of the things you stated I seem to recall, but maybe I picked up on it by means of discussion lists you were posting on ca. 2004-2006.

Until then ...

DCH
Solstice
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Re: Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible

Post by Solstice »

Congratulations to Russell Gmirkin - someone posted a link to a press release in r/books and it went viral generating over 2500 responses. There's even a few posts asking for an AMA

https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments ... ?limit=500

I found this while doing a search on Reddit and had no idea that it was posted about 3 days ago. I haven't responded to the thread. Reddit has a strange upvoting system, so sometimes it's helpful to re-sort a discussion this big according to chronology by either oldest or newest first:

https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments ... &limit=500
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments ... &limit=500

Interesting that the very first post which was a simple plea that it hopefully be irrefutable was heavily downvoted. Apologists? I can only guess that this thread made it to the first or second page of reddit which would expose it to a more mainstream audience outside of r/books, including people who aren't used to having their religious beliefs critically challenged. Although there's a lot of supportive posts, there's also a lot of the usual (apologist) logical fallacies like "he doesn't have enough credentials/Phd" or "the scholarly consensus disagrees" or "there was a previous oral tradition that can't be dated" - the usual stuff. I would hope that Gmirkin is ready for these if he does an AMA (which I hope he does).
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DCHindley
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Re: Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible

Post by DCHindley »

Solstice wrote:Congratulations to Russell Gmirkin - someone posted a link to a press release in r/books and it went viral generating over 2500 responses. There's even a few posts asking for an AMA

https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments ... ?limit=500

I found this while doing a search on Reddit and had no idea that it was posted about 3 days ago. I haven't responded to the thread. Reddit has a strange upvoting system, so sometimes it's helpful to re-sort a discussion this big according to chronology by either oldest or newest first:

https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments ... &limit=500
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments ... &limit=500

Interesting that the very first post which was a simple plea that it hopefully be irrefutable was heavily downvoted. Apologists? I can only guess that this thread made it to the first or second page of reddit which would expose it to a more mainstream audience outside of r/books, including people who aren't used to having their religious beliefs critically challenged. Although there's a lot of supportive posts, there's also a lot of the usual (apologist) logical fallacies like "he doesn't have enough credentials/Phd" or "the scholarly consensus disagrees" or "there was a previous oral tradition that can't be dated" - the usual stuff. I would hope that Gmirkin is ready for these if he does an AMA (which I hope he does).
Well, they are right that Gmirkin does not appear to have a degree relating to the fields of Biblical Studies or History. He is also not associated with any Colleges or Universities that I can see. One of his profiles online makes him owner of Gmirkin Communications, whatever that may infer, but my guess is there is a "normal" business to which he is employed or operates himself that serves as the revenue generator to finance his research, which has to be a drain on his time & money.

Maybe you can flesh out your background, Russell.

If you are indeed an amateur like many of us who lurk these type halls, you seem to have done way more than a "credible" job reading and organizing all those source documents and all the things they say. I wish I had that kind of mental acuity, as my abilities seems to erode a little more each year.

:cheers: DCH
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neilgodfrey
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Re: Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible

Post by neilgodfrey »

I have begun posting my notes on Gmirkin's latest, Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible.

The first is Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible, introductory stuff;

and the second starts to get into the nitty gritty of chapter 1, a comparison of Greek constitutional literature with the interests of the Pentateuch and beyond: The Pentateuch’s Debt to Greek Laws and Constitutions — A New Look.
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austendw
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Re: Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible

Post by austendw »

Clive wrote:... if the Pentateuch was originally finally edited together in Greek and secondarily, but probably at the same time, translated for a much smaller Hebrew speaking audience.
There are countless word-plays and puns in the Hebrew which simply don't happen in the Greek. Here are a few just plucked pretty randomly from memory:

Genesis 11:9 - The Tower of Babel
MT On this account its name was called Babylon [Heb: Babel], because there the Lord confused [Heb: balal] the languages of all the earth.

The Greek opts for this:
LXX - On this account its name was called Confusion [Gk: Σύγχυσις], because there the Lord confused [Gk: συνέχεε] the languages of all the earth,
the Greek makes sense of why the name was given but loses the play on the name of Babylon (which of course is cod etymology in the Hebrew, but must have made readers chuckle... or groan).

Genesis 21:5 - Isaac's name
Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac [Heb: Yižhaq - Gk: Ισαακ ] was born to him. 6 And Sarah said, “God has made laughter [Heb: žehoq - Gk: γέλωτά ] for me; every one who hears will laugh [Heb: yižhaq - Gk: συγχαρεῖταί ] over me.’’
Where the Hebrew has thee words all related the Greek has the name transliterated and two other different words - no attempt at word-play is possible here.

Exodus 16:15 & 31 Manna
When the people of Israel saw it, they said to one another, “What is it?” [Heb: Man hu' - Gk: Ti estin toutο ] for they did not know what it was. [… ]
Now the house of Israel called its name manna [Heb: Man - Gk: Man].
Again, the Greek doesn't even attempt to deal with the pun.

The OT is peppered with that sort of Hebrew wordplay that is lost in translation - a sure sign that the Septuagint is a translation.
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austendw
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Re: Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible

Post by austendw »

And here's another beauty I just came across - Genesis 9:27

"May God enlarge Japhet."

In LXX this reads as :
πλατύναι ὁ θεὸς τῷ Ιαφεθ / platunai o Theos tō Iapheth
In Hebrew it is:
yaphet 'elohim le-Yephet
The verb for "enlarge" and the name of Japheth have the same consonants in Hebrew. Another nice wordplay that is absent in Greek. The Hebrew must precede the Greek.
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neilgodfrey
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Re: Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible

Post by neilgodfrey »

As far as I am aware Gmirkin nowhere suggests that the Pentateuch was originally composed in Greek. His thesis is that the Hebrew Bible was in large measure, but not exclusively, influenced by Greek literature - legal, philosophical, political. The Hebrew bible was created as a form of "national literature", implying its original language was Hebrew.
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DCHindley
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Re: Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible

Post by DCHindley »

neilgodfrey wrote:As far as I am aware Gmirkin nowhere suggests that the Pentateuch was originally composed in Greek. His thesis is that the Hebrew Bible was in large measure, but not exclusively, influenced by Greek literature - legal, philosophical, political. The Hebrew bible was created as a form of "national literature", implying its original language was Hebrew.
My understanding is that the Judeans got their organizational principals for a "national literature" and for government from Plato, and the Egyptian versions of legends that were often believed to relate to Judeans from Manetho, and the Babylonian myths from Berossus, all of whom wrote in Greek.

I do not think he says that the Judean sacred writings were created out of whole cloth, but only that they modeled their national literature on Plato (in emulation), Manetho (in reaction) and Berossus (for local color). How much of it was fancy and myth and how much was "real" is anyone's guess.

He does agree that the Hebrew books of the Law could very well have preceded the Greek Lxx version, but all he can say for sure was that they both came about (in their present forms) in the 3rd century BCE, as this was when Manetho and Berossus wrote their accounts, and the parallels to these works are too numerous and striking to be explained by the other theories, like JEDP, usually used to describe the history of development of the five books of Moses.

DCH
austendw
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Re: Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible

Post by austendw »

neilgodfrey wrote:As far as I am aware Gmirkin nowhere suggests that the Pentateuch was originally composed in Greek. His thesis is that the Hebrew Bible was in large measure, but not exclusively, influenced by Greek literature - legal, philosophical, political. The Hebrew bible was created as a form of "national literature", implying its original language was Hebrew.
Absolutely so:
Further, the literary sources utilized by the Pentateuch authors were all written in Greek. Yet scholarly opinion is unanimous that behind the Septuagint there existed a Hebrew prototype, as many of the Hebraisms were imperfectly translated into Greek.
The Pentateuch was thus a document influenced by numerous Greek sources, yet written in Hebrew, and then—with the Septuagint—translated back again into Greek. (p 249)
Whether this is entirely plausible is another matter - especially given the time frame Gmirkin proposes. That's why a poster on this thread could easily express the opinion that the Greek came first: it would make somewhat more sense.
DCHindley wrote:I do not think he says that the Judean sacred writings were created out of whole cloth, but only that they modeled their national literature on Plato (in emulation), Manetho (in reaction) and Berossus (for local color). How much of it was fancy and myth and how much was "real" is anyone's guess.

He does agree that the Hebrew books of the Law could very well have preceded the Greek Lxx version, but all he can say for sure was that they both came about (in their present forms) in the 3rd century BCE, as this was when Manetho and Berossus wrote their accounts, and the parallels to these works are too numerous and striking to be explained by the other theories, like JEDP, usually used to describe the history of development of the five books of Moses.
Well he's a bit more specific than that, most of the time:
This book will provisionally adopt the years 273-272 BCE as the probable date of the Pentateuch's composition, a date which nicely accommodates all available data. (p 245 - my emphasis)
That suggests that he means the entire Pentateuch, but whether "composed" and "written" is the same thing isn't clear. He does allude to an earlier edition:
The Septuagint may be seen as a Jewish salvo in the "war of books" that began with the publication of Hecataeus's highly nationalistic account of the Egyptians around 320-315 BCE. Besides correcting misinformation about the Jews in Manetho, the new version of the Pentateuch presented the Jews as possessing a national literature of their own on a par with the Egyptians and Babylonians. We may conclude that the Septuagint was written, not merely for Alexandrian Jews, but with a wider Greek-speaking audience in mind. Literary stimulus from the royal patronage of Ptolemy II Philadelphus was thus decisive in creating, not only the Septuagint, but also the Hebrew Pentateuch that lay behind it. (p 255 - my emphasis)
Presumably he expands on this in the new Plato book, but it sounds like Gmirkin believes that the Law Code or Codes (?) appeared in writing first, presumable embedded within some very limited narrative context - as derived from Plato. Then, following Manetho & Berossus & the Alexander Romance, another group of scholars, under the patronage of Ptolemy II, wrote the whole of Genesis and the Exodus narrative as an extended preamble. Neil, can you confirm? I haven't been able to tackle the Plato book yet.

My own view is that, inter alia, a five year period from Berossus to the LXX is simply not enough to account for the literary complexity of Genesis 1-11. By this I don't mean the simple J & P division, but the clear evidence of fragmentation/stratification/elaboration within what is usually considered the J source - which Gmirkin, concentrating on the Greek texts, does not seem to notive, let alone address. (Curiously, in his chapter on the Table of Nations, Gmirkin anaylises the P material only, and mostly ignores the remaining material, which is bizarre, since though he argues it could be later than P (p.141, note 6) he doesn't attempt to actually prove this and therefore leaves himself wide open to the argument that the ignored material is indeed an earlier literary strand. Similarly, he analyses Genesis chapter 5's Sethite genealogy for it's relationship with Berossus, but ignores the Cainite genealogy in chapter 4, which is manifestly related to the P version, and therefore proves the existence of a shared source for J & P which can't be Berossus.)

Gmirkin says:
This simple chain of transmission, fully documented at every point, has obvious advantages over hypothesized mechanisms whereby various cuneiform documents migrated to Syria, their contents preserved in oral tradition down through the centuries, until written down by J and—yet further centuries later—P.
But I feel in my bones that a "simple chain of transmission" from Berossus would have resulted in an equally simple, consistent Biblical text - which is exactly what we don't have.... especially when you read the passages that Gmirkin ignores. The text of Genesis shows so many fragmented/contradictory elements and signs of cumulative supplementation and amplification, that the notion of a complex, layered, messy chain of transmission looks to me far more likely.

And the same goes for Exodus. Even allowing that the Exodus narrative is polemic against the popular Egyptian association of the Judaean with the Seth-Typhon cult (which conceivably developed at a much earlier time than Manetho's), there is really no reason to insist that Alexandrian Jewish scholars writers were unaware of this till Manetho pointed it out to them. And this longer chronology would explain why (a) the supposed literary dependences of Exodus on Manetho are so fuzzy and (b) why there are - again - contradictions and literary stratification in Exodus that Gmirkin largely ignores.
Last edited by austendw on Sun Mar 26, 2017 12:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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