I need to keep that source in mind; it really does have fantastic stuff.
There’s the term I was trying to remember! – I italicized it.
I mean sure for the writings . As for the prophets well there are many parables and whatnot etc etc but I don’t count the book as history. The only historical book in the OT is Kings maybe.
It doesn’t matter to me anyway. At least to my theology.
I think that this is the crux of the matter. The word “myth” has fictitious undertones in modern parlance where as it probably had less so as you trace back the years.
What matters is not the historical accuracy but the meaning or belief that is being conveyed.
Richard
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So it doesn’t matter if God never actually saved Israel from Egypt? Only that later Jews thought He did?
That is not what I meant/or said.
Of course God actually saved Israel but the precise details may not be historical. The meaning is not affected by the details.
Richard
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And if God didn’t actually intervene in history here and there really wasn’t an Exodus, would that be a deal breaker? If Moses didn’t really exist where does that leave Christianity?
There might not be evidence for Moses simply because it is lost as he lived so long ago. Or there might not be any evidence “for the same reason that there is no evidence of the ten year journey of Odysseus” or why “there is no evidence of the quest of Beren to recover a Silmaril from Morgoth.” These accounts have fiction written all over them. If there was any core we couldn’t possibly recover it and have no idea what it was actually like and who and when was involved. The Bible constantly says God delivered Israel from Egypt. If that account is largely fiction… I think it’s not so easy to dismiss the problems that entails.
And even if there is a historical core it doesn’t necessarily do what we want it to. We can tell a story about God delivering presents to all children down their chimneys on Christmas Eve through Santa Clause. Just because Kris Kingle was real does not justify this belief in anyway. God didn’t actually do the things scripture says he did and more than he delivered presents down chimneys.
Vinnie
Why are you misunderstanding me? I was talking about details and not the basic premis of the account. Yes God saves Israel. Yes God intervened. But all the padding? There may be exageratin or even legend but the basic facts still remain.
Robin Hood is a figure of English history but his exploits… have been added to. For =a biblical examle, take David. Again, his exploits were exagerated. "Saul killed his thousands and David his ten thousands. The number have meaning not accuracy.
Richard
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I’m not misunderstanding, I am seeking clarification. So the core of the account has to be historical. If it’s not then is that a deal breaker?
That is what I meant, yes.
Richard
Interestingly the core of the Tower of Babel is historical: there was a big tower, it would have been bigger than any other, it wasn’t finished, and the work force failed because of language issues. It’s just that the language issues were there already because they lacked enough homegrown laborers and so hired from ‘out of town’.
Though Western readers misunderstand the bit about a tower reaching the heavens.
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I’ve asked you for sources on this in the past. And if none of the details of scripture are accurate, I don’t see how there being a core to the story is important.
If God didn’t confuse the languages like it says, the account is just as fictitious whether it was based on an event that happened or not.
All I remember is that the city was Eridu. I don’t know if I read it or if it was on a TV special I watched.
What I’ve learned while looking that I don’t think I knew before is that there is a class of ziggurats that aren’t pyramidal at the base but have vertical walls; these apparently originated from the practice of building a new temple on the remains of a prior one: the walls were built so when the old temple was demolished all its remnants would be contained within the walls, and then earth was added to make a solid base within the walls. From what I’ve read there was one ziggurat at Eridu which had sixteen iterations of this process, each with a wider and taller base. Sometimes rather than demolish the old temple it would instead be filled completely with tightly-packed brick. This made each new layer much taller since it began at the highest point of the previous one. Both practices made sure that material for a divine purpose was never used for anything else. Other ziggurats were constructed with high walls at the bottom to imitate these structures.
I also found a textual analysis arguing that the story doesn’t include all humans or even all Semites, and that the languages aren’t necessarily meant as all human languages; under this understanding it was one particular group of Semites who decided to settle in one place and build a ziggurat. (This is another place where translation of Hebrew eretz as “world” is incorrect; it should be “the land”.)
But no luck finding a source for what I know.
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One interesting aspect is that it is a little vague as to whether the confusion of the languages caused the scattering, or if they were scattered and that resulted in the divergence of the languages.
7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
8 So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.
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Yes – and from the information I remember about the Eridu ziggurat, the confusion of the languages was already present and when the project stopped it led to everyone scattering.
My thought on this is that any project where they were bringing in foreign workers would have had interpreters – so “confuse their language” could have just happened by taking away the interpreters’ ability to interpret.
I really wish I could find that source (or sources) again!
The last part there is interesting: the problem was the “tower” but they ended up abandoning the entire city. That fits historically as well, as Eridu was abandoned not long after the ziggurat project halted. Though “stopped building the city” is interesting because Eridu was already a city. BTW, the LXX has “they stopped building the city and the tower”, and the verb for “building” implies a dwelling place. “The tower” is likely an addition because just stating “the city” leaves a question to whether this includes the tower.
Just for the sake of flavor, the Hebrew word here is normally used to mean a watchtower. While most scholars maintain it was just the best word the Hebrews had available, I’m not so sure: In other instances when Hebrew had no good word for something they just took the word from the other language (which is how a good number of loan words made it into Hebrew – they were items acquired in trade that the Hebrews had never had before so they just used the names the traders did), so there should be a reason why they didn’t do that in this case. I wonder if they didn’t because the concept of a watchtower sort of fits here: a ziggurat provided a place for the gods to “come down” and meet with humans, but it was not a place where the gods were “on call”; they would come as they pleased . . . or not. So one of the functions of the priesthood at a ziggurat was to watch for a visit by one or more gods, thus making it a kind of watchtower.
= - = - = - = - = - = - = - =
Total trivia–
This is a portion of Eridu seen from the mound of the uncompleted ziggurat (that would have been the biggest ever if it had been completed). What caught my eye on this is the sand dune which is primarily eolian sand, i.e. formed by wind erosion. What’s interesting is that eolian sand is lousy for construction purposes since the grains are smooth, unlike coastal sand which is jagged. They had to deal with the same sand back then (though Eridu was a coastal city in 2500 BC), and one thing they did was to build a thick wall around a place they wanted a palace or temple, then fill it with sand and compact it. This accomplished two things at once: it got all that sand out of the way and it raised important buildings above the rest.
IIRC there are sites where this was done where the sand was made more firm by pouring muddy water onto it as it was put in place, and then compacted; the muddy water had microscopic flakes of clay that filled the cavities between sand grains and thus served to bind the sand together better. This was a very primitive sort of cement since the clay retained moisture which made the clay particles bind more strongly to the sand particles. This fascinates me because modern scientists have found that repeatedly flooding areas of eolian sand with water that bears clay nanoparticles increases the ability of the sand to hold water, which first of all keeps the sand in place much better but then also makes it possible to grow pioneer ground cover; the ground cover in turn effects biological activity in the nearby sand, which adds organic matter and begins turning sand to soil – beginning a cycle of ever-more-suitable soil supporting more plants which add more organic matter (to the point where trees can be planted which provide shade in which crops can be grown).
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I’d rather ask if the profoundest truths can be adequately conveyed without myth. If you restrict truth to discrete historical events, empirical descriptions and isolated facts I don’t think much of the sacred will be discerned though it is present throughout.
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Here’s a thought.
Anyone who has ever studied IT security will have come across a couple of characters called Alice and Bob. These two crop up in all sorts of different scenarios, doing all sorts of different IT-related things, and the tutorials or documents discuss the implications of their actions, what they need to do next, and so on and so forth.
Here’s the kicker: Alice and Bob do not exist. They are purely fictitious, hypothetical characters brought in to illustrate a point.
But does anyone claim that these IT security tutorials are untrue, or worthless, or whatever? Of course not! Why? Because the literal existence of Alice and Bob is not the point. The whole point is simply to illustrate different concepts in IT security.
So if by “myth,” you mean Alice and Bob type characters introduced for illustrative purposes, then it shouldn’t be a problem.
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@St.Roymond I wanted to come back to this because I am reading The Jewish Roots of the Eucharist by Brant Pitre and another seeming inconsistency in the Exodus narrative came up. He just brushes it aside but it has to do with the Israelites complaining about hunger (right before the manna from heaven).
Pitre writes: At first glance, this response seems difficult to believe. Just one chapter before, the Israelites had witnessed their deliverance by God in the waters of the Red Sea and sung the “Song of Moses” in thanksgiving (Exodus 15). Now, after being in the desert for just a short time, they begin to “murmur” against the very men who had delivered them. By doing this, they were in effect saying, “In Egypt, we may have had whips on our backs, but at least we had food in our bellies.” The irony here is, of course, that according to the biblical account, the Israelites left Egypt with “very many cattle, both flocks and herds” (Exodus 12:38). Why not just eat some of them? Although we can only speculate, perhaps it was because the Israelites still saw these cattle as “gods,” the very ones that they had worshiped (and thus refused to kill) during their stay in Egypt. Recall that it would not be long before they would make a golden calf out of their winnings and worship it as a god (Exodus 32). Apparently, God had gotten them out of Egypt; but he had not yet gotten Egypt out of them.
Seems to me another inconsistency in the narrative. Details are being exaggerated or made up for narrative purposes. The Jewish Study
bible says:
Provision of food in the wilderness. Most of this narrative is assigned to the Priestly source, but redundancies (such as God’s two responses to the people’s complaint [vv. 4–5 and 11–12]) and difficulties in the order (vv. 6–8 presuppose vv. 9–12) suggest the presence of a second source (JE) as well. Another episode in which God provides quail, which also refers to the manna, appears in Num. ch 11. These episodes are in part doublets of each other. 1–3: A month after the exodus (Num. 33.3), having left the oasis of Elim and run low on food, the Israelites turn on Moses and Aaron and begin to idealize life in Egypt (cf. 14.11–12; Num. 11.5). 4: The people’s need for food is real, but their accusatory complaint portends rebellion, so God determines to provide food subject to rules that test their obedience and trust (vv. 19–20, 25–29).
Maybe the multiple source approach would be the reason for the discrepancy.
Vinnie
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I appreciate all in this discussion. I still read the comments as I consider my own viewpoints, and am coming to accept how the Bible can contain non-historical myth but still be truth. Thanks all
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