Then why did you claim the opposite?
no, YOU claimed the opposite. you said the philosophy pervalent at the time of the authorship of genesis was something very close to modern social darwinism. i said it would have to have been something closer to the divine right of kings. neither philosophy is an accurate description of their society.
Yes, obviously so. You've just acknowledged that above by recognising the difference bnetween this and divine right.
you're honestly insisting that social darwinism goes back to the bronze age?
LOL, are you now reduced to the role of a biblical literalist, claiming if the bible doesn't mention it it couldn't possibly happen? Ha ha. Sigh. I've already shown you the echoes of this ideology in the bible...
newflash. i AM a literalist. i think the bible literally means what it says, even if it's wrong. and it's wrong alot. the echoes that you showed are the opposite ideas. in the nathan and david story, what's david's reaction? is it "well, maybe the poor guy deserved it?" no, it's "i'll kill the rich guy!" the actions of the rich man in nathans metaphor are unthinkable to david. and then... then he turns it on david and applies to a societal level.
now, tell me, how does that NOT disprove your point two different ways? there's a difference between "if the bible doesn't say it, it didn't happen" and "the bible says exactly the opposite, stop making stuff up."
Actually you know at this point actually repeating the asrgument again is not going to help. You are clearly committed to this nonsense from some position, but mere logic is not going to detach you from it, it seems.
anecdotal story: i brought this up to my mother the other night. she holds a masters degree in classic (greek and roman) literature. her house is filled with books in latin and greek, and books about greco-roman culture. i told her that someone was insisting that bronze age people had no idea of a collective form of hospitality. you know what she did?
she laughed.
then she started going on about how in the odyssey, telemechus orchestrates the slaughter of a whole group of suitors who have been hounding his mother for the past twenty years, because they have violated the host-guest relationship.
God, fish in a barrel should at least swim about a bit to make it challenging. Pay close attention now: if its a RHETORICAL qestion, then he knows his audience are already familiar with the situation he addresses, right? Right.
actually, that doesn't follow logically. but even if that's the case, it does not show that such a stance was the majority position. most of the evidence in the bible is a very tolerant position of the poor, as you yourself admitted.
Thats nonsense - I have already told you that I have done my own search for hospitality myths and so forth, and all I found was people making this argument. Thats what makes me think it is an urban myth. And I am confident of my position because I have already used many myth archives on the net, and there should have been hits.
i have too. and you know what, the internet is useless. did you look up the BOOK i told you to look up?
This whole argument, as I pointed out at the beginning, is anachronistic in its context. Thats what attracted my attention.
yes, and i've already pointed how lots of other bits of genesis are anachronistic to the context as well. genesis is clearly written much later. that means your argument is pointless.
Yes, thats right, repetition is going to make ALL the difference. Show us some specific examples of whole cities being levelled for inhospoitality. Can't, can you?
yeah, about 10 pages back in this thread, actually, two examples were given. you've essentially said "i don't agree" and ignored what the stories said, and the majority of academic scholarship.
Ha ha - so what the hell does the LAST modification data have to do with the origin of the content. Last modified is last modified, not created. Thats totally irrelevant. Presuambly th8is is used as the earliest safe date that can be attributed to a text, but that does not rule out an earlier existance.
you are showing your ignorance of the field.
last modified has to be the effective date for authorship, because that's when the last changes were made. originating in old folk tales and first written down in 600bc, and copied from older manuscripts in 600bc are essentially no different, because whoever did it changed stuff, like adding camels, chaldeans, kings in israel, iron, and maybe in this case hospitality.
it's entirely plausible that the story originally said something else until 600bc.
Only tangentially relevant - Mesoamerica was a bronze age society till the 1500's. The Celts ha d aHeroic cutlure with highly developed ironwork. Study something, please.
uh, completely irrelevant. mesoamerica is not mesopotamia. and the celts didn't live in israel last i checked. the bronze age in mesopotamia went until about 1200, roughly the traditional time of moses. you study something, please.
How do you know? Thats a completely invalid assumption - you DON'T know and whats more you should know you don't know.
no, i do know. i've explained REPEATEDLY that genesis is full of anachronisms that ALL indicate an iron age society wrote it. every last one of them. so a verse about someone working iron, while not striking on its own, is just one more verse on that pile.
in fact, in the first seven books, all supposedly about bronze age people, the word for iron is used 21 times. usually in the context of tools or tooling. whoever put these books together lived in a culture that was using iron tools.
that leaves your next argument:
The middle east is amongst the earleist of metal-using regions; bronze refineries there produced the worlds first industrial landscape. It is very very possible indeed that it had early iron working. You are talking aout of your arse.
possible but presumptious. and remember, as was just pointed out to you above, their bronze age did end 300 years before most other peoples.
And? Have I ever claimed such expertise? No I have not. But then again - its not a textual criticism I'm advancing, I'm pointing out that it contradicts other elements of the regional culture. Perhaps you should broaden your expertise?
know what else contradicts the elements of the regional culture?
one god.
changing your tune, i see. you said bronze age. shall i quote you?
Yes, please do - you could do with the exercise in keepeing concepts in mind. I pointed out that this was a heroic culture, as is common for bronze age socities, and therefore hospitality cannot be a colective virtue. Appealing to nomadism only reinforces the case for the heroic culture further.
quote:
And, I have already explained why this does not constitute a rebuttal: my claim is not "generalisation never happens", it is that "hospitality is not generalisable in bronze age societies". You are attakcing a straw man again - please stop doing so and stick to the issue.
and one more time: the people who wrote genesis were
NOT nomadic.
sounds like you could use an exercise or two in keeping concept in mind.
No I have not - I have seen two individuals rewarded. As you well know. Why don't you support your argument with other examples? Oh yes - there aren't any. Oh dear.
two individuals rewarded AND THE REST OF THE TOWN PUNISHED. are you still missing that part of the story? it's rather important.
and two other examples have been pointed out: troy in the iliad, and penelope's suitors in the odyssey. how many examples will be enough?
Well, fine - if you want to explore alternatives, I'm happy to assist. But that does not appear to me to be what you are doing - you are asserting a case that is not in evidence. And as to whether anything at all fits a GENERAL pattern of a hospitality myth depends on there actually BEING a general pattern - which you have not shown and cannot show. And while it might be plausible to us to see a criticism of a cities treatement of foreigners, it is totally without precedent in the region - Pharoah, after all, is memorialised primarily for smiting foreigners and bringing them home in chains,
that's nice, but we're dealing with the hebrews, not the egyptians. and look at how pharoah is depicted in the hebrew literature, for his treatment of foriegners. there, oh look ANOTHER example, because of his unfair treatment of the foriegners (the israelites), he's punished with plaque after plaque, ending with every firstborn in egypt dying. now, do tell me how that's not example of "collective" inhospitality being punished?
also: in egypt pharoah's had things called NAMES. only in the hebrew literature is he just refered to as "pharoah."
and the city of Persepolis has huge carvings showing processions of defeated peoples. This proposition is a non-starter, I'm afraid.
the issue is apparently not defeat, but treatment afterwards. not paying attention again? i said during the exile, not the battle that lead to it.
No - the statement that quite large chunks of the bible have been verified does not imply you can request material evidence for every jot and tittle written in the bible anywhere. Don't be silly.
i would hardly call KING DAVID a jot or tittle.
but ok. how about:
abraham?
isaac?
jacob?
joseph?
moses?
aaron?
joshua?
saul?
where are:
the ten commandments?
the ark of the covenant?
noah's ark?
the tabernacle?
these are pretty important parts in the narratice of the origin of the hebrew people. surely, we must have SOMETHING, right? what do we have? we have a few cities that don't quite match the descriptions in the bible, and a rock with the words "ben david" on it. oh, and few things that show the bible is far from complete, like king jehu kissing the feet of shalmanessar iii in defeat, which is NOWHERE in the bible. so tell me, what does exactly verify the bible in archaeology?
Yes, and Saving Private Ryan was a work of fiction, but it would be a bit stupid to therefore conclude that there was no WW2, wouldn't it?
yes, it would. and i've used this very example in other threads. a long with titanic and leonardo dicaprio, the recent king arthur movie, and the iliad and the trojan war.
i'm not saying these things didn't happen, or that these places weren't real. just that stories themselves are fiction. and we need to remember that with sodom. sodom probably was a real place. and something probably really happened to it. however, we've been talking ONLY about the story.
Remember what the position is that you are attacking: it is that I can easily accomodate the existance of the story as being merely the record of an event, and this objection fails to challenge that position.
but it is NOT merely the record of an event. it's saying something. everything in genesis is saying something. this story is condemning a whole group of people. WHY? what does the FICTION on top of the fact SAY?
Or perhaps, Sodom was a place, even if there was a story with the same name.
that's basically what i said. we're looking at the story, not the place. although, granted, the thread is supposed to be looking at place and not the story.
So what? There are manifest discrepancies in the Iliad too, notable among which is that the Greeks who wrote it clearly did not understand how chariots were used by the people of Ilium. But the chariots are a necessary part of the story, and became great status symbols in the Hellenic world. So in fact this error serves to validate the story, because the story is clearly preserving elements from an oral past that are no longer clearly understood by the authors who wrote it down.
that's great and all, but camels were not domesticated in the middle east until a certain of time. you seem to know everything about societal context, you should know that.
you also should know that chaldeans did not exist before a certain point, let alone ruling the city of ur, which they did from 900-600 bc.
and you should know that israel did not always have kings.
it's not that they didn't understand these things. these are actual markers of time. in your example, it'd be like if the trojans hadn't invented the wheel for their chariots when the war actually took place.
Oh for gods sake - in fact Cattle Lords & Clansmen is about an iron age culture, because that is what the Celts were. In fact, they were famous for the quality of their ironwork, and probably invented chain mail. They were still a Heroic culture though, obviously enough.
that's nice, but you said bronze age, and recomended two books on bronze age economics. which doesn't apply. you're changing your argument now.
None the less this demonstrates that your request for references is wholly dishonest - you have no intention of doing any research, any more than you did before.
because i refuse to look up books on THE WRONG SUBJECT? christ, man.
And you are being very silly indeed about the bronze age, as if the people living then had any idea of this change. Thats nonsense, these terms are primarily archeological and simply cannot be treated as the hard cutoff you would like to employ. Get real.
we're talking about a difference of SIX HUNDRED YEARS. that's well past any "hard cutoff" especially in the state of israel. traditionally, in 600 years, they went from exiled, to nomadic, to official state, to TWO official states in civil war, to double exile. those are all major social changes. being off by a few hundred years changes the entire identity of these people. it's not that i care about the difference between bronze and iron age, i'm pointing out that you're talking about entirely the wrong timeframe.
Seeing as you already know I dispute your interpretation, why don't you give me any other of the thousands of similar myths to exanine to reinforce your point? Oh yes, you have none.
so you can dispute every last one? no lets get the facts on ONE straight, first. one transitional fossil at a time, here.
Greek gods are whimsical, not Just - there need not have been any specific thing.
still haven't read genesis, have we? tell me, what about bab-el was just? i would CRINGE to call the god of genesis just.
Thats why some alleged lesson would have been lost on a greek audience - all this story says is "it pays to curry favour with the powerful".
except that baucis and philemon didn't know they were gods, did they? they thought they were two travellers. sure, it might have been lost on the average greek, but it more accurately says "it pays to curry favour with EVERYONE because you never know who might be powerful."
also, similarly, genesis seems to be lost on people even 2600 years later. doesn't mean the authors didn't know what they were talking about. most people traditionally get their religion (mythology) from a priest, or some sort of leader. this whole bit about reading it and thinking for yourself is relatively new. martin luther started it, and it still hasn't quite caught on.
so yes, one more anachronism in your thought process.
Well thats quite possibly a subsequent introduction. But it was traditional to take the cult statues of the gods of defeated cities back to the conquoring city so they could be placed under the auspices of the victorious city's god. And this also means that rival claims to overlordship were always justified by appeals to the city god, and to the gods of soveriegnty. This hostility would be common in a military conflict.
well, the point is that genesis does NOT condemn other religions. a condemnation of a religious practice would be quite out of place in the book, even if it's not in the bible. quite confusing the point.
Sigh, back again around the circle. No, specifically NOT of outsiders, because outsiders are fair game to all the city-states. I mean, these are not even necessarily polities with a concept of territorial governance.
that's great but that's not what the story SAYS. lot specifically says the outsiders are NOT fair game.
One of the properties of Inanna is that she "covers the sides of mountains with fire". I suspect, reasonably enough, that this is the attribution of a volcanic eruption to Inanna. Similarly, the natural disaster that wiped out Sodom would have been incorporated as "obviously" a divine act, being so large and striking. This is then attributed to god in order to glorify that concept. The very absence of a clear criticism suggests that the authors might not have had any sin in mind, but deduced that there must have been some provocation to god unknown to them.
yes, and if anything i think this story is probably a play on foriegn mythology, like the bab-el story. and it's quite possibly an attempt to justify such a disaster, or even modifying another culture's attempt to justify such a disaster.
but, now, see, i've caught you in a contradiction: "Greek gods are whimsical, not Just - there need not have been any specific thing." by implication (since we were discussing the differences in the greek and hebrew stories) the hebrew god IS just.
so what was his justification? the specific thing that set him off? because although the authors seem to imply that city is rotten for many different reasons, they only show one of them.
LOL. So quite obviously, Lot is appealing to his status as a citizen with rights in his own home, NOT to universally binding laws of hospitality.
no, lot is conflict with the city, if you remember. i'm not talking about any universally binding laws, but they take issue with him telling them what they cannot do, since he is an outsider. he never mentions being a citizen in his argument. he just says "MY roof." the citizens do not appear to consider him a citizen either. it's arguable whether or not the author did either.
Indeed, you SHOULD try reading it some time, and they materials I have suggested for research.
you mean the ones on entirely the wrong society at the wrong time?
think you are going to struggle understanding how the Celts could use physical coercion for law enforcement without a government to exercise it.
no, not really. but we're still not talking about celts.
What it says is, god blew up this city for reasons unkown.
genesis does not make unclear accusations. it makes baseless accusations that are VERY clear. even in genesis 6, when it calls all men wicked, it elaborates on the idea, saying that every plan they devised was to do harm. and that's the least clear accusation the book ever makes.
it's not "shit happens." it's "this is what these people did, god hates them."
On the basis of the bibles other content, giving the Israelites lip would have been enough to qualify.
sure, if it were, say "judges." but it's not. it's in genesis. tell me you see the difference?
they may only have deduced the fact they MUST have been sinful from the "fact" that god destroyed them.
yet it portrays them DOING something.
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