So I've been reading through the Book of Genesis, and I don't think I've been giving the ancient Israelites enough credit.These people moved around a lot, as is to be expected of animal herders. Carting around a ton of animal skins containing your history & mythology wasn't really ideal. Without the refined parchment or papyrus that came in later years from a more settled society, the sort of leather that they'd be writing on would've been quite bulky and heavy. And every skin you used for recording was one less skin you could trade. So they had to be as pithy as possible, to minimize the number of skins. They had to compress a ton of nuance and meaning into a relatively small number of words, so the specific words used, their ordering and emphasis is all critically important. But then they also had to pass on the skills of *decompressing* all that nuance out of the text later on, via tradition.Maybe I'm slow on the uptake, but I'm guessing that a lot of the Jewish culture of perpetually arguing over fine details in text is just this decompression skill in action, and perhaps misfiring in the sorts of lawyerly tactics they've become infamous for.Then again, one possible reading of the etymology of Jacob, the Hebrew patriarch and the man later named 'Israel' by an angel, is 'deceiver' or 'supplanter'. So maybe the stereotype originates there.In any case, I'm much more impressed with the book now than when I read it as a teenager. Having popular translations pounded into you without any historical or philosophical context doesn't teach you anything, and is really counterproductive if you want to pass on your faith to youth. The Bible should be taught concurrent with more general philosophical topics and ancient history, as was more common in prior centuries.
>>18292778Except that didn’t happen. You really think the Torah was carried around by a traveling band of Hebrews? It was written by a sedentary, Persian-Hellenistic period urban elite scribal school. It’s just a romantic origin story, OP. Abraham is a Mesopotamian whose family resides and comes from Harran. Harran doesn’t even make sense on the route from Ur to Canaan. But it does when Abraham is based on the governor Sanballat the Harranite. Sin being the tutelary deity of Harran. And Moses? He’s based on Manasseh, the son-in-law of Sanballat who established the Mount Gerizim Temple. The original priesthood, allegedly from Aaron, is really Zadokite. The Torah is a reflection of the union of political power in Samaria-Schechem and priestly power in Jerusalem.
>>18292778The Old Testament is largely irrelevant, the New Testament is all that matters. It's simply a historical novelty and only useful to Jews or citing prophecies that Jesus referenced.
>>18292778I'm no scholar but from what I read, it doesn't sound like their tradition was passed on directly. It gives the impression Genesis was a compilation of origin stories from the time, written during one or another babylonian exile. The list of names to link ascendence to Adam is rather hastily put, the deluge is a plain imported sumerian myth, it places itself as a supreme henoteistic text, it heavily remarks "wickedness" of the people they're surrounded with, their violence and how alien they are. It convinces me it was originally written as a way to gather and organize jewish exiles in babylon into a culture, it was furthermore editted periodically as the culture solidified into religious practice.You can't possibly understand where the text came from without looking at the overall context and main power struggles of the time. Then again I don't delve deep into this and we may never know the details, but what has reached us today has been a living, evolving and aged set of traditions.
I believe current scholarship is that genesis+exodus a mythologised record of a people from the gilead and canaan hills who started making war after they forgot. Originally from north africa, part of the Ba'al religious grouping.
>>18292778The bible did not exist in its current form during the nomadic phase of Israelite culture. It is difficult to say what, if any, written tradition did exist at this early stage. Second, modern Rabbinic Jews have no more genetic continuity with ancient Israelites than do Ethiopian Jews, Karaites, Samaritans, or Palestinian Christians, nor did they preserve the ancient texts to a greater extent to any of these groups. Therefore they should not be considered as a direct continuation of the ancient Israelites.
>>18292778Everything was oral before Moses. The Jewish (God is X in contrast to something goy like sky or tree or flower) names made it way easier. You impart spiritual knowledge in order by what names they gave their children. Yes, with AI and other information tech and interactive infrastructure (learn2vibecode), it's like the Protestant Reformation's printing press that started the translation movement.
