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By Dominic Montserrat
…a fascinating study on how different times and cultures have viewed Akhenaten, and their own biases for the way they view him and the ways they attempt to use him…
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by Jan Assmann
The Mind of Egypt presents an unprecedented account of the mainsprings of Egyptian civilization–the ideals, values, mentalities, belief systems, and aspirations that shaped the first territorial state in human history. Drawing on a range of literary, iconographic, and archaeological sources, the renowned historian Jan Assmann reconstructs a world of unparalleled complexity, a culture that, long before others, possessed an extraordinary degree of awareness and self-reflection.
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by Erik Hornung
The renowned Egyptologist Erik Hornung here studies the ancient Egyptians’ conceptions of god, basing his account on a thorough reappraisal of the primary sources.
There is a school of thought that Solomon may have been a past king of Jerusalem, back when the main cult was Salem or some such. At any rate, the naming similarities are too close for some scholars to completely disregard. This is probably the best single bit of evidence for a possible Solomon, the name itself.
That said, while the stories of King David suggest he was aware of and worshipped YHWH, this may not be the case at all. The few “good” kings that verifiably ruled Jerusalem were dealt with harshly by neighboring superpowers, leading me to speculate that YHWH worship was NOT the lead deity during most of the time. I see the Bible as mostly telling us that plainly, though they blame the harsh treatment by neighboring superpowers on dead and gone kings who were polytheistic. All this to say the cult of Salem (or some such) may have still been around during David’s time.
IT seems more likely that Solomon was a legendary king from the distant past, far preceding the kings of the Bible times. No evidence to support his actual existence but who knows.
A couple of people may have filled the slot that Solomon filled, with responsibility over the region described as being Solomon’s, neither directly after the time David supposedly ruled. A subordinate or governor of Egyptian territory is one possibiity. Others point to an Assyrian king ruling a similar territory. My favorite is the hittite king with a similar name in English, and whose son was promised to marry an Egyptian princess but was killed en route to collect said princess.
FocusMyView
There is a school of thought that Solomon may have been a past king of Jerusalem, back when the main cult was Salem or some such. At any rate, the naming similarities are too close for some scholars to completely disregard. This is probably the best single bit of evidence for a possible Solomon, the name itself.
Steefen
Reference some articles and/or books to that effect.
Steefen said
FocusMyViewThere is a school of thought that Solomon may have been a past king of Jerusalem, back when the main cult was Salem or some such. At any rate, the naming similarities are too close for some scholars to completely disregard. This is probably the best single bit of evidence for a possible Solomon, the name itself.
Steefen
Reference some articles and/or books to that effect.
Grabbe “What we know about Israel and how we know it”
Solomon crowned king after outwitting, with his mother’s help, the old and feeble king David. He took the crown from his older brother.
Sound familiar? Jacob and Esau?
Solomon had other older brothers as well. Amnon who raped his half sister Tamar. Amnon was then killed by Tamar full brother Absalom.
Absalom declares himself king and rides into Jerusalem victorious.
Let go of historicity first and just look at the stories surrounding Absalom and Solomon, brothers who at one time were declared king of Jerusalem. Look at the names. Ab-Salom. Solom-on. Jeru-Salem. Of course Jerusalem is mentioned in 1200 BCE in the Amarna tablets, so it far predated Ab-Salem and Solom-on, but fables about founding fathers are not usually chronologically accurate anyway. And the chronology of the entire OT does not develop until someone is putting the pieces together.
Just looking at it from a literature perspective it would seem to my untrained eye that Solomon is a fiction. That does not prove anything, though.
Steefan, We have the Amarna letters, and we can see the startling resemblances between Labaya and Saul. But how did it get into the Bible?
I’ve been reading a number of books about Caananite archaeology, and I think they’ve determined that Jerusalem at the time of Solomon was really just a small town of a few thousand people, and that there was not really a large temple or many foreign wives or all of the other mythology associated with Solomon. The consensus seems to be that there were a couple of kings like that in Israel (rather than Judah), but since the kings of Israel were almost universally described as evil, some of their attributes got transferred to Solomon in Judah after the fall of Israel as a state. What is certain is that during the time of David and Solomon the Hebrews worshipped several gods, not just Yahweh, so as the sccriptures point out, Solomon’s temple would have been devoted to a number of gods. During that time period gods were represented by statues in temples, and believers thought that the god actually was present in the statue, thus in scripture we have people paying to look at god’s face or whisper in god’s ear. However, there were no written scriptural texts during the time of David and Solomon–that all came much later when Hebrew borrowed an alphabet from Syria. So all of the stories of David and Solomon would have been oral tales. There is speculation that in the first commandment when Yahweh commands that the Hebrews not have any gods “before” him, the law meant specifically not to have statues of other gods in Yahweh’s temple where he had to look at them. Of course, Exodus and Deuteronomy were written well after the time of David and Solomon.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
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