Vid.....
that isn't evidence .........
What's in a name? - Israel wasn't for Yaweh !
by snare&racket 26 Replies latest jw friends
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Vidqun
Not sure what you're looking for, but here's how I see it. End Product (Hebrew-Aramaic Scriptures: Genesis - Malachi). This I view as important evidence. After reading through the individual books, you might wonder: Where did these come from? What can we learn of the authors? Under what conditions were they written? What were their purpose then? What are their purpose now?
Is this not how the secrets of DNA and RNA were unravelled (Watson & Crick)? They had the finished product, now they had to work out how life functions are controlled by and from the nucleus. So what would be necessary in this case would be to reverse engineer the language of the Biblical texts to see how and why they were written and why they were collected? Here one can make use of different tools: Textual criticism, linguistics, internal considerations (grammar, word studies), external considerations (archaeology, history, related texts), related languages, inscriptions, etc.
Definition: Textual Criticism deals with the nature and origin of all the witnesses of a composition or text, in this case the biblical books. In the course of such an inquiry, attempts are made to describe how the texts were written, changed, and transmitted from one generation to the next.
Fact: Monotheism cropped up in a predominantly polytheistic environment. Why? How? When? We have many pieces of the puzzle. Using above mentioned tools, we can start putting the pieces together. The picture that is starting to form is still imperfect, many gaps still, but it is much clearer now than it was a hundred years ago. So you don't have to look too far for the evidence. It's right there in front of you.
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Vidqun
Forgive me for going off topic for a moment. Remember our last discussion on cancer? I see Immunotherapy has emerged as a promising way to tackle cancer. In a recent paper, a scientist argued that "despite the current dogma that cancer is a genetic disease, it can also be viewed as an "immunologic disorder." In many ways the adaptive immune system is an ideal anti-cancer therapy if it can be trained to attack tumor cells that it would otherwise tolerate." Perhaps we should open the old thread again. In my mind this would be a much more effective and less intrusive way to fight cancer.
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mP
Vid:
It helps if you open your post with the nick of th eperson your addressing. Its very confusing, because who exactly is "yOU".
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snare&racket
... Erghh......
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Vidqun
Sorry mP, bad habit of mine. That was for Snare.
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dorayakii
This isn't exacty "evidence" but most non-fundamentalist Biblical scholars agree that monotheism wasn't introduced into the Judahite religion until after the Babylonian exile of 586-539 (as JWs we learned that this was the 70-year period of 607-537).
According to the archaeological digs in modern Palestine, the Judahites believed that Yahweh had a female consort called Asherah. She is referenced in the Bible in 2 Kings 23:7 where temple priestesses are described as weaving ritual clothes or pieces of cloth for her. This was almost certainly an original part of the temple, not something that so-called “bad kings” like Manasseh and Amon introduced later on. That part of history was likely later heavily edited to eliminate Asherah from history as it was embarrasing to the later monotheistic Jews. Thousands of statues of Asherah and Yahweh have been found in Palestinian archaeological digs showing that worship of these "idols" was prevelant.
The "first" temple to Yahweh supposedly built by King Solomon was probably little more than a tabernacle/tent, as there is no archaeological evidence to suggest a temple of such grandeur existed. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/solomon_qa.shtml). Admittedly though, archaological evidence is very hard to come by as the "City of David" is such a "holy" place for the Judeo-Islamo-Christianity. (As we all should know, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence).
According to the evidence, the "second" temple was probably built in 516 BC during the rule of Xerxes the Great of Persia.
This is controversial, but in my opinion, according to a lot of evidence that I've come accross, post-exilic Judaism is an almost complete fabrication by the Persians, in order to maintain control over Palestine and have them unwittingly worshipping their God Ahura Mazda, which is the first recorded monotheistic faith in history (Akenaten's so-called monotheism was more like monolatry, the worship of one god while believing in the existence of others).
In 538 BC, King Cyrus had issued the famous decree stating that all nations formerly under the Babylonians including the Judahites would be allowed to return to their homeland. Not only were the exiles released, but the Achaemenid kings also supported the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. They gave gold, silver and other materials to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish nation and religion in the image of Zoroastrianism.
Pre-exile Judah had remarkably different religious views to what we were taught. Ezra (a Persian official who dubiously claimed to have Judahite ancestry) is said to have redacted the first version of the Torah.
I wrote an article about the origin of Judaism a couple of years ago: http://aperimentis.wordpress.com/2011/08/27/indo-europeans-4/