Wait, are you Jewish now?

I do think the phrase "consensus of scholars" should be taken with a massive helping of salt.

There is a "consensus" among secular scholars that Yahweh was just a storm guard and part of the Canaanite pantheon prior to the Babylonian exile. This is despite the fact that we know for a fact Yahweh was never mentioned in any of the extant texts describing the Canaanite pantheon.
Those same scholars will have you believe the Torah was largely produced and redacted at that time.

It's nonsense. Its particularly insulting to the good Samaritans who have been independently and faithfully keeping the Torah for 3,000 years. Secular scholars would have you believe they waited until their cousins came back from exile, copied their Torah, changed a few words to make it more Israel centric, rewrote the entire thing in an archaic dialect, and then spent the next 2,500 years guarding and living by every jot and tittle more devotely then perhaps any religious people on earth.

They got really attached to their plagiarized forgery I guess.

No, there's not a consensus about a Canaanite storm god as the origin of the biblical God. There's quite a bit of scholarly debate about where the name came from and how it got to Canaan. Also, there are multiple names given for God. You do agree that El is in the Canaanite pantheon, right?

Not sure how the Samaritans get involved in this. Their texts are as old as the earliest Masoretic and Septuagint verses we have and the actual origins of the Samaritans are contested.

I think you are thinking of El, Baal, and ashera.

Aggrad08 said:

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I think you are thinking of El, Baal, and ashera.

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No I'm specifically thinking of Yahweh.

The Smaritan texts strongly testifies to a pre exile origination of the Torah. This would fly against most secular dating.

I'm a little surprised the two of you haven't heard it as much. I see it pop up all the time in secular discussions of the OT.

That gives me hope the theory is not as prevalent as it seems. I personally think it's ludicrous.

Silent For Too Long said:

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The Smaritan texts strongly testifies to a pre exile origination of the Torah. This would fly against most secular dating.

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It really doesn't any more than any other claim. No one said parts of the Torah weren't written before the Babylonian exile, but the composition of the whole happened after exile. And the Samaritan Torah shows clear signs of redaction into the Hellenistic period.

Sapper Redux said:

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Silent For Too Long said:

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The Smaritan texts strongly testifies to a pre exile origination of the Torah. This would fly against most secular dating.

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It really doesn't any more than any other claim. No one said parts of the Torah weren't written before the Babylonian exile, but the composition of the whole happened after exile. And the Samaritan Torah shows clear signs of redaction into the Hellenistic period.

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That's my entire point. I find it quite unlikely anything more then minor, mostly insignificant changes occurred after the exile. The fact that the script of the Samaritan pentatuach is definitively preexile, and has always been so, strongly testifies to that point.

What clear signs of Hellenistic redaction are you referring too? I have only seen very minor changes. Word clarifications. Nothing close to the wholesale changes alleged by most secular scholars.

The vast majority of the Torah existed prior to the exile. Its by far the best explanation for the two independently attested Torahs to be so similiar. Any other narrative attempting to describe its generation is inherently biased towards its keepers.

What evidence are you pointing to that proves "the Samaritan pentatauch is definitively preexile"?

Because this whole discussion really rests on that assumption which, as far as I am aware, is not warranted given the current evidence.

Sapper Redux said:

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No, there's not a consensus about a Canaanite storm god as the origin of the biblical God. There's quite a bit of scholarly debate about where the name came from and how it got to Canaan. Also, there are multiple names given for God. You do agree that El is in the Canaanite pantheon, right?

Not sure how the Samaritans get involved in this. Their texts are as old as the earliest Masoretic and Septuagint verses we have and the actual origins of the Samaritans are contested.

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El is the father of Baal in the Baal cycle. Baal trumps El to complete the cycle. This is very common on pagan practices where the father is usurped by the son.

Israelites calling Yahweh, El, is specifically a correction to the Baal cycle lie. Yahweh is El because El is what Baal calls the creator god that Baal 'defeated.' Stating that Yahweh was not defeated and is actually the creator God who is over the whole counsel is part of the religious apologetics at the time. You approach an ancient israelite and ask him, 'Did you know that Yahweh created Baal? "Yeah welcome to Genesis." Claiming God is El is a gotcha so this is just more of the same local pagan god swapping is par for the course on secular academia.

The base claim from Abraham to Orthodoxy is that there is a whole counsel of gods. Yahweh rules over the whole counsel and is the creator god of everything. El Pantheon? Yahweh is actually in charge-anything else is a deception. Hellenistic pantheon? Yahweh is actually in charge-anything else is a deception.

Ancient peoples generally understood A) there was a time when the gods had peace with one another, something happened, now the gods are war with one another B) Successionism among gods has to roll back to a creator God.

Rocag said:

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What evidence are you pointing to that proves "the Samaritan pentatauch is definitively preexile"?

Because this whole discussion really rests on that assumption which, as far as I am aware, is not warranted given the current evidence.

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The Samaritan pentatauch isn't 'pre-exile' its apart from exile. Their history isn't being exiled and coming back. They are descendants who survived Assyrian overtaking the northern kingdom and have always contested Jerusalem as not being where God's divinity would/did rest.

Textual analysis of the two pentatauch's point to the Samaritans editing over time to be more favorable to Joseph's line than Judah's line and their support of Mount Gerizim over the jerusalem temple mount.

Between the septuagint and the hebrew old testament you can see changes between the two. And then you can pull up the samaritan changes and go, 'Yeah this one isn't faithfully trying to recount the same history here'.

Also, many believe that "El" was just a generic term for God in Jewish language. "Yahweh" was a personal name for the God of Abraham and Moses.

In other words, because the Jews may have used the same word "El" as surrounding cultures does not mean that they meant the same thing by that term. The same is true today. Loan words from another culture may or may not have the same meaning as they have in their source culture.

Good point. Also, there are tons of things that God instructed that are purposefully a critique of the ancient near eastern culture's religions.

The angels above the ark of the covenant have nothing between them. Pagan practices would have an idol of their god right there. Its a purposeful a-ha moment.

The commandments being two sets of stone tablets that were both placed in the temple is a critique of local ancient kings putting their laws in both the temple and also out front of their palace (seat of authority). God is saying that he is both king and God by putting both in the temple.

Baal is a storm god who is supposed to bring rain, thus food and also fertility. God sends a drought and then has Elijah show off Gods power through lightening striking (this is the fire from heaven) and consuming all of the offerings to God.

This isn't even getting into iconography and icons like Christ being Good Shepherd over against orpheius as well as also taking on the iconographic features of Sol Invictus. Both of these have pagan roots but Christ is displaying his sovereignty here.

This is a really good youtube video about the iconography going back to second temple times.

KingofHazor said:

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Also, many believe that "El" was just a generic term for God in Jewish language. "Yahweh" was a personal name for the God of Abraham and Moses.

In other words, because the Jews may have used the same word "El" as surrounding cultures does not mean that they meant the same thing by that term. The same is true today. Loan words from another culture may or may not have the same meaning as they have in their source culture.

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El was specifically the high deity of the Canaanite pantheon and used specifically as the name for God by at least one author of the Torah. This is like living in Greece and claiming "Zeus" is just a borrowed word for a single god. It wouldn't make sense in that place in that context and no one would accept that it's just a nonspecific name.

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El was specifically the high deity of the Canaanite pantheon and used specifically as the name for God by at least one author of the Torah. This is like living in Greece and claiming "Zeus" is just a borrowed word for a single god. It wouldn't make sense in that place in that context and no one would accept that it's just a nonspecific name.

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Several questions:

• What are the sources for your first statement?
• How much do we truly know of the Canaanite pantheon?
• What are the religious writings of the Canaanites that fully inform us of their religious beliefs?
• Did the Canaanites ever refer to their high deity by other names?
• The word "Canaanite" refers to a multitude of different ethnic groups. Did they all have identical religious beliefs? Your statement implies that they did; what is your evidence for that.

And by the way, a number of very reputable scholars strongly disagree with you. Many scholars believe that the cultures we refer to as "Canaanite" also used the word "El" as simply a generic word for God. Even wikipedia disagrees with you:

El (deity) - Wikipedia

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In Northwest Semitic use, el was a generic word for any god as well as the special name or title of a particular god who was distinguished from other gods as being "the god".

However, because the word el sometimes refers to a god other than the great god El, it is frequently ambiguous as to whether El followed by another name means the great god El with a particular epithet applied or refers to another god entirely. For example, in the Ugaritic texts, il mlk is understood to mean "El the King" but il hd as "the god Hadad".[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_(deity)#cite_note-FOOTNOTERahmouni200741-15][14][/url]

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You are both correct depending on the era you are talking about. It's easy to forget how long these windows are.

El is originally a personal name for a specific deity in a specific role in Canaanite mythology. Same thing a thousand years later in Ugaric texts. Things start to meld here into a sometimes generic term.

Add another 500 years and it's a widely used generic term.

The influence of the Canaanite religion on early Jews is undeniable and the OT can only be reasonably understood as originality henotheistic. But how the term relates to the original deity and how it was used it's going to be context dependent and definitely influenced by how old a particular text is.

Rocag said:

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What evidence are you pointing to that proves "the Samaritan pentatauch is definitively preexile"?

Because this whole discussion really rests on that assumption which, as far as I am aware, is not warranted given the current evidence.

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1.) It's written in a preexile script in dialect.
2.) We have 2,000 years of history that strongly shows the Samaritans have been very, very devote in preserving the text. Their Pentatauch stacks up quite favorably against the Masoretic Text when comparing them to the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint
3.) We also know the Samaritans have been living by the text so strictly they are actually suffering from genetic difficulties. They have taken this text very, very seriously for all of recorded history.
4.) Archeological evidence shows they have been worshipping Yahweh on mount Gerizim for hundreds of years prior to the exile. If the Jews had a preexile Torah, the Samaritans would have had one too.

So...in order for there to have been wholesale changes during the exile, the Jews would have had to return from exile, go to mount Gerizim, convince a people who have been calling the Jews apostates for 500 years that the Jews have it right all along, oh and by the way the Torah has some massive upgrades. Here, why don't yall take it, rewrite it in an archaic version of Hebrew, change it to be more Gerizim centric, then protect it with your life for the next 2,500 years.


Do you really find that narrative to be more plausible then, I don't know, the Samaritans own narrative?

What evidence do you have that the Samaritans are lying?

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Between the septuagint and the hebrew old testament you can see changes between the two. And then you can pull up the samaritan changes and go, 'Yeah this one isn't faithfully trying to recount the same history here'.

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I think it merely shows the Torah from their perspective. There is also considerable agreement between the SP and the DSS where the MT is the odd one out.

I think the best explanation is the two cultures have been maintaining the text independently for 3,000 years, and the differences reflect the respective cultures.

But a further consequence of that is it shows the Torah has changed very, very little in 3,000 years. Certainly not the wholesale changes purposed by secular scholars.

Is there any actual evidence that the OT was written, or massively rewritten, post-exile other than linguistic analysis?

And aren't there some archaeological finds that show that the OT was in existence prior to the exile? I'm thinking of the Ketef Hinnom scrolls and am wondering if there's anything else, such as inscriptions, ostracons, etc.

James Hoffmeier, a noted Egyptologist, has done an amazing job using linguistics analysis as evidence that the Exodus account was written a millennium or so before the Exile. He identifies multiple Egyptian loan words used in the Exodus account that had disappeared from use in both Egypt and the Middle East by the time of the Exile.

It seems most secular scholars think something existed preexile. They just think massive wholesale changes occurred during the exile. Yahweh became more monotheistic and less storm gody for one.

I haven't seen any convincing evidence to support it. At least not with the Pentatauch. Obviously some of the OT is written during, or just before, the exile. Isaiah and the minor prophets.

KingofHazor said:

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James Hoffmeier, a noted Egyptologist, has done an amazing job using linguistics analysis as evidence that the Exodus account was written a millennium or so before the Exile. He identifies multiple Egyptian loan words used in the Exodus account that had disappeared from use in both Egypt and the Middle East by the time of the Exile.

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Indeed. It gets even more interesting when you start to realize how much Summerian influence there is on the pre-Abrahamic stories. Exactly where the Bible claims he came from.

John van Seters, who was a renowned scholar and by no means a conservative Christian, eviscerated linguistic analysis of the OT and the "documentary hypothesis". See, for example, his book "The Edited Bible" published in 2006. In that book, he not only makes the arguments summarized below, but also shows how scholars had abandoned those techniques for all ancient documents except for the OT.

AI has summarized his arguments as follows:

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• Anachronistic Application:
  Van Seters argues that the methods and assumptions of modern textual criticism, particularly those focused on identifying and analyzing supposed editorial layers within the Bible, were inappropriately applied to ancient texts. He suggests that the idea of extensive editing and redacting of ancient texts, particularly in the manner proposed by some higher critics, is a product of applying Renaissance-era editorial practices to a different historical context.
  
  
• Emphasis on Authorship:
  Van Seters emphasizes the role of individual authors, rather than editors, in the composition of biblical texts. He suggests that scholars have often overlooked the literary responsibility of the original authors in favor of focusing on the perceived contributions of later editors or redactors.
  
  
• Critique of Source Criticism:
  While Van Seters doesn't entirely reject source criticism, he favors a more "common-sense" approach and is critical of approaches that posit multiple, often conflicting, sources behind biblical narratives. He suggests that some scholars have been too quick to divide texts into sources based on perceived inconsistencies or stylistic variations, overlooking the possibility of unified authorship or deliberate literary techniques.
  
  
• Impact on Pentateuchal Studies:
  Van Seters' critique has been particularly influential in the study of the Pentateuch. He challenges the dominant Documentary Hypothesis, which posits that the Pentateuch was assembled from different, often contradictory, sources (J, E, D, P). His work suggests that the text of the Pentateuch is more likely the product of a single author or a more cohesive literary tradition than previously thought.
  
  
• Focus on Renaissance Editors:
  Van Seters highlights the work of Renaissance scholars who prepared classical and biblical texts for publication. These scholars often engaged in editing, emending, and even adding to the texts they were working with. He argues that modern scholars have mistakenly projected these Renaissance practices onto ancient authors and scribes.

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The influence of the Canaanite religion on early Jews is undeniable and the OT can only be reasonably understood as originality henotheistic. But how the term relates to the original deity and how it was used it's going to be context dependent and definitely influenced by how old a particular text is.

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I think people need to be careful with the connotations of henotheism. I think its quiet likely that as long as the name Yahweh has existed, there have been "orothodox" followers who identified Him as THE supreme being. The name itself (I am, I was, I will be) strongly suggests that Yahweh has always been identified as The OG Creator.

I had to look up the definition of henotheistic, not having ever encountered it before. Thanks for using it! I love adding cool words to my vocabulary.

Eh I don't think we can lay that out with any reasonable certainty. As far as I know you can find Ashera idols as far back as you are willing to look.

The Bible itself says the Isrealites struggled with idolatry from the beginning. That doesn't discount a Yahweh movement trying to constantly work against the idolatry which is the exact narrative that's being presented.

Unless you can prove very late and continuous Ashera poles on Gerizim and Jerusalem, which you probably cannot, I don't think you have sufficient evidence to over turn the biblical telling of the events.

At the end of the day what we can say with a degree of certainty is, a non Canaanite God came into the region and eventually converted everybody. And I mean EVERYBODY. Basically the only creator God that has been considered by the vast majority of people to ever walk the earth is this non canaanite God found in the land of Canaan.

The Bible gives us one narrative on how that came to be. I've found every counter narrative to be sufficiently lacking in comparison to the core biblical narrative.

It depends on how narrowly you describe the "core" narrative. From a basic telling of events it's can be considered demonstrably false. And I'm not talking about YEC nuttery either.

You are dramatically over stating the evidence against the biblical narrative. You can make arguments that the Exodus didn't happen, or the numbers weren't as big, but you certainly cannot demonstrate that it didn't happen.

Similarly, you can make an argument the united kingdom is exaggerated, you cannot demonstrate that it didn't happen.

Nothing in the core narrative has proven to be demonstrably false. In fact, the casual rise out of Canaan counter narrative has a massive "well then where the hell did Yahweh come from?" problem.

The argument for a literal exodus and conquest is so dead that archaeologists stopped looking for it after a great deal of trying.

The only exodus you could be left with is so small as to not leave a mark. The origin of yhwh isn't really an issue anymore than the origin of any other god you can name. I'm not sure why you think it is. No matter your beliefs, people create gods is probably one of the things you believe.

Or better yet, work backwards. Tell me around which chapter the Bible starts being reliable literal history?

Aggrad08 said:

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The argument for a literal exodus and conquest is so dead that archaeologists stopped looking for it after a great deal of trying.

The only exodus you could be left with is so small as to not leave a mark. The origin of yhwh isn't really an issue anymore than the origin of any other god you can name. I'm not sure why you think it is. No matter your beliefs, people create gods is probably one of the things you believe.

Or better yet, work backwards. Tell me around which chapter the Bible starts being reliable literal history?

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You've made this sweeping and wrong argument before. I'll challenge you on it again. There is significant evidence for both the Exodus and the Conquest, and virtually no evidence that they did not occur.

And while many archaeologists have quit looking, it's not for a lack of evidence. Rather, it's because they start with the presupposition that the Bible is wrong and untrustworthy. Why look for something you don't believe you'll find. On the other hand, some archaeologists have looked and have found quite a lot of evidence.

Throw out your facts and let's discuss them. Let's see how committed to a fact-based inquiry you actually are.

1.) There are archeologists still looking for evidence.

2.) I'm not even sure what "so small to not even leave a mark" means. At minimum, the Exodus explains not only where the Torah came from but its basically the primary narrative therein. The Torah is one of the largest marks ever left on history. The book literally that changed the world. Weird statement.

3.) No, we don't have a lot of evidence for people making up gods out of whole cloth that function completely independently from the existing theological structures of the native culture. When you add in the fact that these theoretical original Yahwehists had been profoundly influenced by both Sumerian and Egyptian cultures that would have predated any genesis by hundreds if not thousands of years, it seems pretty unlikely.

KingofHazor said:

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Aggrad08 said:

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The argument for a literal exodus and conquest is so dead that archaeologists stopped looking for it after a great deal of trying.

The only exodus you could be left with is so small as to not leave a mark. The origin of yhwh isn't really an issue anymore than the origin of any other god you can name. I'm not sure why you think it is. No matter your beliefs, people create gods is probably one of the things you believe.

Or better yet, work backwards. Tell me around which chapter the Bible starts being reliable literal history?

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You've made this sweeping and wrong argument before. I'll challenge you on it again. There is significant evidence for both the Exodus and the Conquest, and virtually no evidence that they did not occur.

And while many archaeologists have quit looking, it's not for a lack of evidence. Rather, it's because they start with the presupposition that the Bible is wrong and untrustworthy. Why look for something you don't believe you'll find. On the other hand, some archaeologists have looked and have found quite a lot of evidence.

Throw out your facts and let's discuss them. Let's see how committed to a fact-based inquiry you actually are.

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I'm also curious at what people want to find. Not saying there shouldn't be evidence, but I'm curious as to what would be expected to find. For example, estimates are the titanic will be completely gone in the next 20-50 years. A ship the size of an 80 story building will disappear in under 200 years. Clearly there is a set of conditions in the ocean that causes this, but if all photographs of the titanic ceased to exist, it's easy to see how archeologists 5000 years from now could consider the story a myth.

I think this is a wonderful question. What exactly is the kind of evidence they were expecting to find? A mound of 6 million foreskins with a stone proclaiming Moses wuz here?