duaneep said
answer: they wrote the book.
If they wrote the book, they sure told on themselves – which proves to me that this really isn’t so.
We can take their own Scripture – the Torah – and show that the Law at Sinai was given for all who abide in the Declarations of God… as a “multitude of nations” left Egypt with Israel – were present at the mount – and were still with Israel when the entered the promised land. In the Instructions, God made distinctions that are not to be taken casually.
So when the Jews say Gentiles only need to keep the laws of Noah – which they did invent – they testify against what God actually said.
In Exodus 9:20-21 is noted those who believed, feared, and obeyed the word of God – this is why many came to believe in God and left Egypt with Israel to serve God as their God, and that when “all the people” were at Sinai, God said the commandments were for them all – not just Israel. Review of Exodus through Joshua will show that they were still with Israel as they entered the promised land. See Exodus 12:38,49; 13:18; 15:13, 16, 17; 16:4-5; Exodus 12:38 clearly says a multitude of nations left Egypt with Israel. Joshua 1:2 says “Moses My servant has died. Now, arise, cross this Jordan, you and this entire people, to the land that I give to them, to the children of Israel.” All “this entire people” crossed over, but the land was promised as the possession of the descendants of Abraham, and God was faithful to His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their descendants after them, as well as in blessing those of other nations through them – because they also feared and obeyed God.
Can this be set aside for cause? If so – do tell!
The Exodus as reported in the Hebrew Bible is highly unlikely. For one thing the historical/archeological evidence is lacking. Such an immense migration of peoples would have certainly left traces. We have traces of much smaller migrations in the same area so there certainly should be traces of a much larger migration. The Egyptians mention nothing in their historical records about such events as supernatural plagues and mass slave migrations. The pharaoh of the Exodus according to the scripture, Ramses the Great, did not die in the Red sea. His body is preserved and on display in the Cairo museum. I’ve seen it myself. The accounts of the “Conquest” in Judges and Joshua contradict each other. Many of the places cited in these texts did not exist at the time the Exodus was supposed to have taken place. Many of the places named that did exist, like Jericho, show no evidence of destruction at that time. It’s hard to argue with archeology.
It’s possible and even probable there was Egyptian influence on the culture and civilization of the ancient Hebrews. Look at a map – how could there not be? Moses’ very name reflects this influence. Look at the name of Ramses. RA + MOSES, “son of Ra”. Moses is likely an Egyptian name that has had it’s divine prefix removed from the name. The Exodus story is a construct shaped to make a theological point using pre-existing legendary materials.
Finally, the evidence from Palestine is that the Ancient Hebrews were indigenous Canaanites who separated themselves from their fellows by their cultural practices.
But don’t take my word for it. See ** you do not have permission to see this link ** for two different but overlapping views of current scholarship.
In the 21st century, one could be forgiven for thinking that this anachronistic religious belief in a “chosen people” would have long ago been consigned to the category of “things we used to believe but no longer do” (like a flat earth at the center of the universe). Unfortunately, wherever religion is concerned, people are suddenly given a license to be stupid, and to believe whatever they want. I never cease to be amazed at how utterly and unabashedly stupid people can be once religion enters the picture. Most of the truly ugly elements of religion, like human sacrifice, have been done away with by now, but there still are other, less visible dangers inherent in certain religious foundational myths. The myth of a chosen people is one such insidious belief that still influences our culture, politics, and relations with one another today, and contains within itself the potential for great violence. I think it’s long past time to consign this idea to the dustbin of antiquated cultural notions – it may once have served a purpose as a culturally cohesive force for a people threatened with destruction and dispersal from all sides many centuries ago, but in the modern world it should no longer have a place.
Stephen said
The Exodus as reported in the Hebrew Bible is highly unlikely. For one thing the historical/archeological evidence is lacking. Such an immense migration of peoples would have certainly left traces. We have traces of much smaller migrations in the same area so there certainly should be traces of a much larger migration. The Egyptians mention nothing in their historical records about such events as supernatural plagues and mass slave migrations. The pharaoh of the Exodus according to the scripture, Ramses the Great, did not die in the Red sea. His body is preserved and on display in the Cairo museum. I’ve seen it myself. The accounts of the “Conquest” in Judges and Joshua contradict each other. Many of the places cited in these texts did not exist at the time the Exodus was supposed to have taken place. Many of the places named that did exist, like Jericho, show no evidence of destruction at that time. It’s hard to argue with archeology.It’s possible and even probable there was Egyptian influence on the culture and civilization of the ancient Hebrews. Look at a map – how could there not be? Moses’ very name reflects this influence. Look at the name of Ramses. RA + MOSES, “son of Ra”. Moses is likely an Egyptian name that has had it’s divine prefix removed from the name. The Exodus story is a construct shaped to make a theological point using pre-existing legendary materials.
Finally, the evidence from Palestine is that the Ancient Hebrews were indigenous Canaanites who separated themselves from their fellows by their cultural practices.
But don’t take my word for it. See ** you do not have permission to see this link ** for two different but overlapping views of current scholarship.
Yes, there are issues, and the later prophet Ezekiel or Elijah spoke of the lying scribes. However, the theme of doing as God instructed good and spurning what He called evil remains. As for evidence, we should consider the findings of Ron Wyatt – and evidence does exist for the Exodus and Sodom. Scholarship hasn’t told us the real message since before Jesus’ days – let alone those who believe the Greek text to be correct or superior. The teachings of Jesus in Matthew hold the key, and to date I have yet to find them to oppose any instruction or commandment of God or the conditions of the Everlasting Covenant at Sinai. Note some passage notes on my web site to see the complete alignment of the Sermon on the Mount to the Torah, Psalms and Prophets. onediscipletoanother.org Comments welcome…
The intent behind the question was not about the validity of the text, it was to consider the claim that God had chosen the Jews as his favored people instead of other tribes or groups that had formed in those times. Did God somehow inform the non-Jews that s/he had thought it over and decided that they were the out groups and the Jews were his/her favored group? I doubt that any Philistine or other contemporary author from any other tribe or group would concede that the Jews were the chosen. I contend that only Jews would make such a claim. Since they wrote the book if follows they would make such a claim. The adage about victors being the ones who write the history of the war could be applied. Quoting Dan Brown “History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, ‘What is history, but a fable agreed upon?”
Since those early times Christians and Muslins developed newer texts and each claimed theirs as an improvement and better authority than the Hebrew’s Bible. The Mormons make a similar claim about their Book of Mormon. Each claims a superior authority for their own texts. It’s the old ‘us versus them’ set up.
BenZoma said
The Talmud says God issued a call to all humanity, but only Abraham responded!
The Talmud also says that Job committed a sin in his silence towards Pharaoh, when Pharaoh was deciding whether or not to commit a genocide against the Jews. The problem is that the Book of Job clearly states that Job was a righteous and upright individual.
The Talmud, while offering very interesting interpretations, is really just Jewish apologetics. When it comes to the Hebrew Bible, the offering it supplies (that God reached out to humanity and only Abraham responded) seems somewhat ridiculous in retrospect, given that the Bible is rather clear that only Abraham had the vision, and then explained it to his family. His father, Terah, then coordinated the minor exodus into Canaan.
Further, when we look at other people groups we can see how much God just curses them to be inferior to their Israelite brothers. Example: Canaan (son of Ham) is cursed to be a perpetual slave to his brothers, the Moabites and Ammonites are said to be the products of incest from Lot and his daughters (therefore inferior), the Edomites are from the shunned lineage of Esau (whose birthright was stolen in favor of Jacob aka Israel), etc.
It is a classic example of mythological ethnocentrism, which is common throughout most ancient myths. Ancient people loved to say that all life revolved around or originated with their own ethnic group, and that every other people group is cursed and inferior. Not only did it justify their intense blood feuds with other people, but it was a ideological justification for war and religious conflict as well.
There is of course, the traces of polytheism still in the Bible. I am reminded of a passage that calls Israel YHWH’s portion. In other words, long before the monotheistic redactors it seems people understood that their were a host of gods, each of which had been given their area of control.
So even in polytheistic terms Israel was “married” to YHWH, for better or worse. `
If anybody paid attention in Intro to Anthropology, they’d know that every single tribe that ever came into being, however tiny and isolated, considered themselves ‘The People’, referred to themselves as such, and still do to the extent we’ve allowed them to go on existing. Their creation myths were equally ethnocentric and self-centered, and equally full of important truths moderns would be stupid to ignore (and of course moderns can be incredibly stupid, not to mention narcissistic, but we mainly don’t have tribes, so it’s all about us as individuals, or nation-states, or ‘races’–and it’d be hard to say which is worse).
The difference was that unlike most tribes that either got destroyed and/or swallowed up by larger agglomerations of humanity, the Jews 1)Wrote it down and 2)Remained a distinct group, with all the advantages and disadvantages that came with that uniqueness. They retained a distinct collective sense of self that has survived unending changes of venue.
And even those who are not believers retain a certain sense of a unique relationship with God–often antagonistic in nature, but that was true thousands of years ago, and that very combativeness made it vital and creative–and without it, nobody would talk about the Jews at all. Without it, there wouldn’t be any Jews at all. To definitively end the Jewish religion would effectively be genocide.
Does that answer the question? Questions like that are never definitively answered. But my question would be will those who hate religion ever get past the contradiction of hating Christianity for anti-semitism (among other things), but refusing to deal with the fact that they themselves hate the Jews for giving birth to Christianity and Islam?
If they’d never existed it would have just been something else. We are what we are as a species, and only fools think that changing your beliefs changes who you are down deep.
And who did it ‘behave well by’?
Most of the peoples the Jews were rubbing up against back then are basically gone. Their genes are still around, but genes are not a people.
Let me see how many I can name off the top of my head:
The Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Chaldeans, the Hittites, the Philistines (I guess they live on as a sort of cultural epithet hurled by Frasier Crane types), the Canaanites–anybody else? There’s still an Egypt, a Greece, a Syria, a Persia (under another name) and an Italy, but a far cry from what existed in ancient times. The gods they worshiped then are all long gone.
Bearing in mind that the promises made by Yahweh to the Jews were written by Jews, I think we can say that the idea of being a Chosen People did play a role in them not only continuing to exist as a people, but in continuing to exist as an influential and creative people. With some quirks. I think everybody admits the quirks. But judge not lest ye be judged. Some Jewish guy said that.
Has there ever been a people the world has tried harder to get rid of?
And here they still are. Chosen for something, that’s for damn sure.
Btw, in terms of the actual myth structure that produced the idea of being Chosen: they were Chosen by God because they chose God (as opposed to gods). It was a mutual thing. The idea was that earlier polytheistic religions were false, and the Jews had moved away from that, so God chose them. But it was conditional on them remaining faithful, and many times they backslid, because polytheism was (and is) a durable form of belief, and a lot of Jews probably hedged their bets, continued to sometimes worship other gods, sacrifice to idols, etc. The OT was written pretty much entirely from the perspective of monotheists who were angry at fellow Jews who were reluctant to give up the old ways entirely. You don’t have to assume the OT tells the whole truth–it doesn’t–but it’s important to understand a POV if you’re going to critique it. Furthermore, it was never racial–Jews who fell from the true faith were not saved by their race, and people of other tribes who joined the faith became Chosen as well.
It’s hard to maintain group cohesion if your beliefs are all over the place. There has to be some unifying principle. In that time, it was generally based on religion. Even the Romans expected you to sacrifice to the gods of the polis, whether you believed in them or not. The Jews could never accept Roman rule because this would mean giving up their core principle as a people, which would mean gradually ceasing to exist as a people. It took Christianity to take some of the basic Jewish ideas and make them accessible to all, which led to Christianity and Rome basically absorbing and subsuming each other. Judaism remained separate from any nation (other than the idea of Israel, which has now become manifest in reality, and it hasn’t entirely worked out as planned, but nothing ever does).
godspell said
And who did it ‘behave well by’?[…]
And here they still are. Chosen for something, that’s for damn sure.
The total population of Jews in the world in 2018 was about 14.6 million. Nothing to do with Yahweh’s promise “5 ** you do not have permission to see this link **
There are 3 main reasons why the Jews have reached the 21st century with a modest but stable population over time.
1st The Endogamy. Another group that has reached our days, although much less numerous but with a specific ethnicity, are the Arcadians, as inbred or more than the Jews.
2nd Jews have always been isolated to a greater or lesser extent in host societies. And that explains the tremendous anti-Semitism in Europe, especially Central and Eastern (although in France there was also notable rejection of the Jews), for every group of inhabitants who isolate themselves or self-excludes, generates rejection in the rest of the society they live with.
3º The contribution of the Jews to Western culture, and with it, to the culture of all mankind, is disproportionate to its small population. Especially from the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalá; late 18th and 19th centuries).
The absolutely disproportionate presence of Jews or great intellectuals of Jewish origin (especially Ashkenazis and few Sephardim) on the Nobel Prize lists of natural sciences is, in truth, overwhelming and even joking could be said to be obscene.
Nor should we forget the contribution of the Jews to the creation and performance of the great musical repertoire of Western High Culture.
The Jews were not a people chosen by a divine fictional character. But that does not prevent their contribution to our modern western culture from being so large and important.
For me, this fact is much more important than the legend of people chosen by their own God, than they have presumed for centuries and centuries.
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I’d say God’s promise has been kept with interest, but of course there never was a time when there weren’t already a lot more Jews than stars visible in a dark sky, particularly when you consider the lack of modern optics, or any optics.
And bear in mind, this is a magazine for amateur astronomers, with high quality binoculars and telescopes. If you’re just using your eyes, gazing up in wonder at the cosmic realm at night–
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It seems like a lot, and in reality (with radio telescopes) it is exponentially more than this planet could ever support, if each star became a human being. (Honestly, if you want to argue there’s no higher power in the universe, don’t spend too much time contemplating it).
So really, it’s just poetry, imagery, a simile–a way of saying that by the standards of their time and place, they shall be a numerous and prosperous people, when previously they had been a few small nomadic tribes.
And as we should all realize, the writer of that passage was promising what had already happened by the time of writing. Most biblical writing of this type is understood to be referring to events taking place very long ago, when God still addressed his people directly. The myths are the Greeks are more realistic and science-based? No they ain’t.
I think I made it pretty clear I don’t think there was any verbal contract, or that God prefers one group of humans to another (I don’t think God, whatever that may be, even prefers humans to other life forms), but again we see that bible debunkers are often just as literal-minded as bible believers.
It’s amusing.
😀
The idea of a chosen people or a people set apart has many strands or layers to it, and is open to interpretation by anyone who bothers to look into it (or even to embrace it without any attempt at investigation).
The intense focus of Judeans such as Isaiah or Jeremiah at “being” Israel is fascinating to me. Isaiah is thought by many to have lived during the destruction of Israel. But later writers call the people of Judah “Israel” because they believe they are part of the original twelve tribes. Archeology seems to suggest the Israel and Judah developed independently, with no indication that they were ever one kingdom. The Song of Deborah in Judges chapter 5, for example, mentions a Machin as one of the tribes and does not mention Judah at all. This is important because the Song of Deborah is thought to be one of the oldest parts of the Bible.
So it appears that those in Jerusalem adopted the idea of being Israel at some point. Perhaps it was an influx of Israelites from the north after Sennecherib’s destruction there, idk.
Yet belonging to Israel has very distinctive markers for archeologists, one of them being a lack of pig bones in waste piles. So there were ritual purity norms in effect as far as food is concerned. (this later spreads to the south in Judah).
What I am trying, and failing, to flesh out here is when did a people, Israel or Judah or both, convince themselves that they were chosen?
It is easy to read passages in the Bible referring to past covenants as part of the Jews being chosen by the One God, but really any of these covenants could be read through polytheistic lenses as contracts between a people and a god.
Ethnocentrism may paly a role, but that argument runs into difficulty in the southern Levant. Comparing the idea of being “the people” to mythologies in Egypt, Babylonia, and later Greece is comparing large super empires to tiny city states with little or no autonomy. Take Babylonia, for example. It was a collection of cities united under one ruler at times since the ancient Sumerians. These conquests and alliances predated writing systems. We have no idea if the ethnocentrism ran through the separate cities of Ur, Uruk, Larsa and Nippur, or if it was a later part of a story of a unified people.
We think of Egypt as a unified monolithic political structure that survived for 3000 (or 5000) years since being brought together by Menes. But many think their array of gods comes from the uniting of the kingdom of many “peoples.” It would not be until much later that we have a mythology where Egypt is the founding race of peoples.
Adding to the complexity of the formation of a “people” is the fact that the primeval history is not particularly Judah centric. The Garden of Eden is placed between the Euphrates and the Tigris. Noah lands the ark on Mt Ararat and plants the first wine vineyard there. The Tigris and the Euphrates both have tributaries from the region of Mt Ararat. This is a regional primeval history. It is evidenced in ancient Babylonian myths and Ugarit tablets.
Now lets look at the covenants. There is Noah, that means all peoples. Then Abraham. This is a broad swath of people that includes those closely related to the later Judeans, including the later Itureans and Nabateans with their high priest rulers. It includes the Moabites, and the Edomites as well. People pointing to the covenant with Abraham as the point of the “chosen people” must realize that these people were not forced to convert to Judaism until the Maccabean era, with the Nabateans never converting.
Then there is a covenant with Jacob, which means “supplanter”, also named Israel, which means “fights with God.” This is yet another level of “chosen” people?
Everybody knows that the Greeks referred to all non-Greek speakers as ‘barbarians’, right? That’s where the word comes from. Because they thought when these people talked, it sounded like ‘barbar’.
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So yes, ethnocentrism was pretty widespread. You can find it in China, going back a very long way.
The question of when exactly the story of a covenant between God and the Jews began is impossible to answer definitively. But we’re talking about the third millennium BC. Before that, the Jews believed God had made covenants with all of humankind, which were still in place–such as the one made with Noah and his children. But it was the covenant with Abraham, the symbolic patriarch of all Jews, that was perceived as the true beginning of the Jews as a distinct people with a distinct covenant with God.
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