Was the Nation of Israel really socially advanced because of YHWH's laws?

by Gill 21 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  Gill

  The Watchtower always portrays the ancient nation of Israel as far more advanced than the nations around them.

  For the last few years, the more I have read, the more I have found this not to be the case.

  Take for example this excerpt from 'By the Waters of Babylon' James Wellard, 1973:

  The Garden of Eden legend, therefore, must certainly have been conceived in the minds of these Semitic desert-dwellers who came out of the arid wastelands of the Arabian and Syrian deserts and saw before them the bright green fields and leafy orchards of the Sumerian communitites. These dersert-men, we should remember, were savages in the Roman sense; that is, they had neither settled communities, an agricultural system, nor nay form of written language.They were wholly nomadic and lived by hunting and obeyed only the law of the tribe. In contrast to these wandering bands - in contrast in fact, to the inhabitants of the rest of the Middle East and of Europe itself - the Sumerians were civilised even by modern standars. Their cities were well built and administered; their fields were properly irrigated and tilled' their arts and scineces were highly developed. And they had a furthur claim to being the most advanced people in the world - a strong sense of justic based on rational principles and not, as savages and barbarians on the law of the jungle. And so we find Sargon of Agade (c. 2350 BC) described as the 'King of Justice who rules by righteousness.' Nammu, the founder of the third dynasty of Ur (2113 BC) is called the 'King who observed the just laws of the sun-god.' A king of the Sumerian city of Larsa is termed the 'Shepherd of justice.' And so forth. In other words, the Sumerians in their emphasis upon these concepts were civilised in an ethical as well as a material sense, and it is this which makes their appearance in remote history so interesting.

  In fact, the ealiest law code of Ur lays down the first priniples of modern justice and jurisprudence: namesly the substitution of fines for the primitive law of 'an eye for an eye.' The code of Nammu which dates from the twenty second century BC specifically states that the penalty for cutting of another man's foot, whether by design or acciden, shall be ten silver shekels. It was ultimately to influence even the neighbouring Semitic peoples who were still at the stage of barbarism, with their curel jealous gods, their jurisprudence based on the lex talionis, and the national energies devoted to war and destruction. And when the Sumerian dynasty finally fell about 1850BC, they bequesthed to their barbarian conquerors a fully developed civilisation based on a respect for human gods, a code of law, economic properity, sophisticated sciences and arts, an alphabet, and an ethical system which foreshadowded many of the moral principles of future societies.'

  The early books of the Bible were written about 1513 BC and had still not abandoned the eye for an eye principles, never mind a sophisticated city, agriculture, or sciences and arts.
• 

  fullofdoubtnow

  I remember how the wts used to say the rules that jah gave the Nation of Israel on things like hygiene, eating habits etc made them healthier and further advanced than the peoples around them. These laws are in the bible, but the wts never took into account how the other races relly lived.

  I guess they used it to convince us that living by wts bible standards was the best thing to do.
• 

  Gill

  Fullofdoubtnow - Other nations were made out to be total idiots. However, the Watchtower never pointed out that these nations would not have got as far as they had if they had not been more advanced than the Israelites who basically wandered around all day....that's how much use they were to their God.

  The Israelites were still hanging onto their archaic laws as the world moved on around them. Yahweh kept them retarded by the obscure patriarchal system they followed.
• 

  fullofdoubtnow

  Yahweh kept them retarded by the obscure patriarchal system they followed.

  Nothing much has changed then. The watchtower tries to do the same thing to it's members, and is successful far too often.

  In a way, that might explain why the wts seems to hold the Nation of Israel as an example to follow, at least when they were in jah's favour anyway.
• 

  Terry

  Between Egypt and Babylon you had the unwashed and the ignorant bumping into the edges of civilization.

  The local yokels were dazzled by it all no doubt.

  I think of the guys in the backwoods of the film Deliverance. Those kinds of snaggletooth knuckle draggers.

  The Israelites were fashioned in the crucible of their encounters with their betters. They learned and copied and coped. After the fact, their mythos-history has made it a different story.
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  Gill

  Terry - You can understand why the WTBTS wouldn't want their rank and file to study up on the ancient Israelites.

  If their God, Jehovah was so great and powerful, why were his people such a bunch of numbskulls?

  His laws and instructions? Why were they less advanced than the nations around them?

  The ancient Israelites were feared for their inhumanity and total lack of mercy in war. Their Gods instructions were to kill everyone, including babies, little children, women, old folk and not just fighting men. They were brutal and retarded. There's nothing much good to be said for them.
• 

  jgnat

  I believe the Isrealites were not superior to their neighbours in the arts of war, jurisprudence, or administration. Your initial question, gill, sent me on the hunt on where the Irealites DID stand out. Very probably, it was the Hebrew habit of writing things down that makes this tiny nation's history stand above it's neighbours. Not only did they record stuff, but not all of it was stuffy agricultural reports. They wrote poetry. They made up stories and prophecies. They made literature. In this one area they stand above their contemporaries. Makes me think it might be worthwhile to carve my life story in granite before I die. Here's some excerpts from the catholic encyclopedia on the origins of the Hebrew language.

  [Hebrew]...was simply a dialect belonging to the Chanaanitish group of Semitic languages is plain from its many recognized affinities with the Phoenician and Moabitic dialects, and presumably with those of Edom and Ammon (see Jeremiah 27:3). Its beginnings are consequently bound up with the origins of this group of dialects. The existence in remote antiquity of the Chanaanitish language is vouched for by conclusive monumental evidence. Thus the Tel-el-Amarna tablets bear witness that in the fifteenth century B.C. the peoples inhabiting the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, though making use of Assyrian in their official documents, employed the dialects of Chanaan in current spoken intercourse. Furthermore, the Egyptian records, some of which go back to the sixteenth century and earlier, contain words borrowed from the language of Chanaan, though it must be admitted that these loan words are more frequent in the papyri of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. But these documents, however ancient, do not, of course, take us back to the origin of the Chanaanitish group; its beginnings, like those of the other Semitic languages, are lost in the haze of prehistoric antiquity.

  ......

  A noteworthy characteristic of the Hebrew of the Biblical period is its uniform stability. All due allowance being made for scribal alterations whereby archaic passages may have been made more intelligible to later generations, the astounding fact still remains that throughout the many centuries during which the Old-Testament writings were produced the sacred language remained almost without perceptible change-a phenomenon of fixity which has no parallel in the history of any of our Western languages.

  ..............

  Apart from its sacred character, the poetry of the Old Testament possesses the highest literary merit, and there is abundant evidence of the great influence it exercised on the religious and national life of the Hebrews. Among its literary characteristics may be mentioned in the first place its naturalness and simplicity. It knows little of fixed, artificial forms, but has a natural sublimity of its own due to the loftiness of the ideas. It deals with things concrete and is essentially subjective. It re-echoes the poet's own thoughts and feelings, and sets forth the varied phases of his own experiences
• 

  Narkissos

  By current scholarly assessment the vast majority of OT texts (especially in the Torah) were actually written much later than the WT teaches -- about one millenium later in most cases. By then Judah was a settled nation, early nomadism being nothing but an idealised (and mostly fictional) past. Many of them do reflect not only cultural but literary influence from older and bigger civilisations like those of Egypt and Mesopotamia. If we compare them to their actual peers (1st-millenium instead of 2nd-millenium BC) the similarities are overwhelmingly bigger than the differences, and the latter still don't suggest any particular "advance," except on the literary level.

  But even from this perspective, I agree with Terry's point:

  The Israelites were fashioned in the crucible of their encounters with their betters. They learned and copied and coped. After the fact, their mythos-history has made it a different story.
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  jgnat

  Oh, and by the way, I seriously doubt that the Isrealites were any better or worse than their neighbours in the brutality department. They were ALL brutal back then.

  I think we are only marginally better today. But at least we are embarrassed by it.
• 

  Gill

  jgant - Thanks for your reply. But, what I wanted to say was, that the claim by the WTBTS was that because the ancient Israelites were 'led' supposedly by Jehovah, they did 'better' than the other nations.

  I don't think they did better in anything much really. They were probably, as you say, as brutal as the others and NOT better. They were proud of their commands to 'let your eye see no pity for virgin, old man...' blah blah etc.

  They were not socially advanced in ways that you would measure social advancement, agriculture, law etc