Pre-pottery Neolithic A : Origin of Samson & Delilah story?? June National Geographic.

by hamsterbait 4 Replies latest jw friends

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  hamsterbait

  Charles C. Mann wrote an article about the "Birth of Religion" June "National Geographic"

  Did anybody notice that in the Temples at Gobekli Tepi, all the central sacred shrines had two pillars at the center?

  All the [circular temples] follow a common design. All are made from limestone pillars shaped like giant spikes or capital T's. They stand an ARM SPAN or more apart... In the middle of each ring are two taller pillars, their thin ends mounted in shallow grooves cut into the floor.

  "I asked German architect and civil engineer Eduard Knoll ... how well designed the mounting was for the central pillars.

  N.B.-

  "NOT," he said, shaking his head. " They hadn't yet mastered engineering." Knoll speculated that the pillars were propped up by wooden posts.

  Some of the sacred animals portrayed at the site are LIONS and FOXES.

  The central temple was inaccessible, no door being built. What the people thought happened to their sacrifices in there is anybody's guess.

  Remember in the story of Samson, he uses an asses jawbone as a weapon. (very primitive) -

  But in the account it tells how Jg 16: 25, 26:"When they put him among the pillars, Samson said to the servant who held his hand, "Put me where I can feel the pillars that support the Temple so that I may lean against them."

  Jg 16: 29 -30: "Then Samson reached toward the TWO CENTRAL PILLARS on which the Temple stood. Bracing himself against them, his right hand on the the one and his left hand on the other .... he pushed with all his might, and down came the temple..."

  Thus the badly engineered temples might have been subject to collapse on many occasions, some of them being when a non initiate ( were they blinded for seeing what went on in the inner sanctum??) was about to be punished, perhaps in some kind of twisted Satyr comedy involving a priestess?

  I found the article so thought provoking, that I had to find out what others think!!

  Note how near the site is to the Black Sea, inundated when the natural dam across the Bosphorus collapsed.

  HB
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  betterdaze

  Fascinating! Thanks for posting it.
  
  National Geographic article and photo gallery.
  
  ~Sue
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  hamsterbait

  Would love to know Leo's take on these discoveries....
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  ziddina

  It's extremely unlikely that these Neolithic pillars had anything to do with the story of "Samson" and "Delilah".

  Also remember that Egyptian temples often had multiple pillars, as did many other types of temples of the Bronze Age, and they would be a much more likely model [though probably not the prime example] for the "Samson/Delilah" story.

  The "Hercules" mythology is also a likely influence on the "Samson/Delilah" story, but not these pillars; which date to an age of 11,600 years old.

  These pillars - the pillar rings - existed far earlier than any hint of the Israelite culture, which would have occurred around 3,500 to 4,000 years ago - that's a span of 7,000 years between the two.

  Zid
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  Leolaia

  Yeah ziddina makes exactly the point I was going to make. The time span is way too great. In fact, looking at the stories in the OT and earlier at Ugarit, it seems probable that events from LBA were already seen as hoary antiquity in Iron II, and Early Bronze was at the limits of historical knowledge during LBA. Even in our modern age, current Inuit reminiscenes of the Norse in Greenland over 500-800 years after the fact have so thoroughly merged into pre-existing Inuit folklore that there is little historical left. Polynesian memory is more reliable, as songs and chants preserve historical memory, further, maybe to 1000-1500 years, but even then you find stories draw on general folklore. The time span between Iron II and Pre-pottery Neolithic A is vastly immense. This is the same reason I don't take the Black Sea hypothesis of the Flood seriously.