Christianity is commonly regarded as anti Semitic because Jesus Christ calls the Jews of his day evil and promises the total destruction of their city and way of life.
"The Jewish Bible appeared out of whole cloth from the library of Alexandria circa 250 BCE, written in Greek. "
But wasn't Deuteronomy, the "Second Law" (the first being oral), read by the Levites, who were the authors, to the people in the Temple at Jerusalem in the 7th Century BC?
According to the Bible (2 Kings 22:8), the Torah was discovered by the newly schismatic Jews circa 622 BC (Deuteronomic reform). YHWH then gave the Jews 35 years to start following the Torah. But they persisted in their wickedness, so YHWH sent Nebuchadnezzar to destroy Jerusalem and imprison the Jews in Babylon in 587 BC.
Is the Bible itself the only source that tells us how the Torah was discovered by the Jews? Is there any more reputable source that indicates the Jews possessed the Torah before 250 BC? I have approached this question from a literary historical perspective and I have learned that there are zero examples of Biblical scriptures that date before the Septuagint.
The true start of this affair occurred on a day in 458 BC which this narrative will reach in its sixth chapter. On that day the petty Palestinian tribe of Judah (earlier disowned by the Israelites) produced a racial creed, the disruptive effect of which on subsequent human affairs may have exceeded that of explosives or epidemics. This was the day on which the theory of the master-race was set up as “the Law.”
At the time Judah was a small tribe among the subject-peoples of the Persian king, and what today is known as “the West” could not even be imagined. Now the Christian era is nearly two thousand years old and “Western civilization,” which grew out of it, is threatened with disintegration.
The creed born in Judah 2,500 years ago, in the author’s opinion, has chiefly brought this about. The process, from original cause to present effect, can be fairly clearly traced because the period is, in the main, one of verifiable history.
The creed which a fanatical sect produced that day has shown a great power over the minds of men throughout these twenty-five centuries; hence its destructive achievement. Why it was born at that particular moment, or ever, is something that none can explain. This is among the greatest mysteries of our world, unless the theory that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction is valid in the area of religious thought; so that the impulse which at that remote time set many men searching for a universal, loving God produced this fierce counter-idea of an exclusive, vengeful deity.
Judah-ism was retrogressive even in 458 BC, when men in the known world were beginning to turn their eyes away from idols and tribal gods and to look for a God of all men, of justice and of neighbourliness. Confucius and Buddha had already pointed in that direction and the idea of one-God was known among the neighbouring peoples of Judah. Today the claim is often made that the religious man, Christian, Muslim or other, must pay respect to Judaism, whatever its errors, on one incontestable ground: it was the first universal religion, so that in a sense all universal religions descend from it. Every Jewish child is taught this. In truth, the idea of the one-God of all men was known long before the tribe of Judah even took shape, and Judaism was above all else the denial of that idea. The Egyptian Book of the Dead (manuscripts of which were found in the tombs of kings of 2,600 BC, over two thousand years before the Judaist “Law” was completed) contains the passage: “Thou art the one, the God from the very beginnings of time, the heir of immortality, self-produced and self-born; thou didst create the earth and make man.” Conversely, the Scripture produced in Judah of the Levites asked, “Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the Gods?” (Exodus).
I like Reed even though we obviously differ in some interpretations. For me, the question is, at what point do we treat the Jewish Bible as a reliable historical document? If there was no Solomon, was there a Josiah?
The Babylonian captivity is critical in this regard - did it really happen? Unlike Solomon's Temple, there is extra biblical evidence of the captivity. But even this does not validate the Biblical version of events. Nebuchadnezzar may have imprisoned the Judahites from Israel, but if these people were not "Jews" in the sense of being Yahwist monotheists who were familiar with the Torah, then the Bible story is a fiction.
There's no good excuse for the lack of Jewish scriptures before 250 BC. Supposedly these scriptures were translated identically by 70 different scholars locked in 70 different rooms - meaning there should have been at least 70 copies of the older Hebrew language version, none of which survived. We can blame book burning for the loss of competitive history and mythology, but the Jews have always had an interest in claiming antiquity, so if there were older Hebrew scriptures the Jews would have had a major incentive to preserve them. Instead, the full Hebrew/Aramaic text of the Jewish Bible did not appear until after 1000 AD.
The oldest Hebrew language scriptures are from the Dead Sea Scrolls which were all created after the publication of the Septuagint. The Septuagint is written as if it is the end of Jewish history, when in fact it was the beginning.
If I'm understanding you correctly, and what you say is true, this would require a radical shift in thinking. So let me make sure I'm understanding you correctly. You're saying that the Greek translation of the Torah done in Alexandria wasn't actually a translation but an original document? Or at least not a translation of any written document? That the first Hebrew scriptures were written in Greek?
Wasn't there already a Jerusalem Talmud by this time?
Any written Talmud comes from AD. The Jerusalem Talmud consists of notes on the Mishnah, ie the "oral Torah" that became the first Talmud. Jesus criticizes an oral law of the Pharisees, but on the other hand his teachings directly contradict the written Torah itself. There is of course no archaeological evidence of an oral tradition. It is legendary, supposedly given to Moses along with the stone tablets.
And yes, you have read my thesis correctly. It would mean that the diaspora itself is a foundational myth - the Jews weren't swarming Alexandria because they were banished from Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, but because that's where the Jewish religion was born, in the Greek language, circa 250 BC. This is the same time that the modern Hebrew language was born, transforming from the old Phoenician script of the Israelites into the modern "square script" of Hebrew.
The real history of Judaism would go Ptolemy-->Seleucid-->Maccabee-->Herod-->Rome, lasting only about 300 years before Titus quelled Jerusalem. When exactly the "second" temple appeared in all this is unclear, but it was Herod who built the temple complex (Fort Antonia, named after Marc Antony) to "protect" the temple. Titus of course stripped the "second" Temple down to the ground leaving us again, conveniently with no evidence.
If we remove the old testament as a reliable historical resource, the history of the Jews in Israel, along with the Hebrews and the Semites and Adam and Eve, goes up in a puff of smoke. I would certainly moderate my thesis if there were any evidence that any Bible scriptures existed before 250 BC. But as far as I can tell, there is not. If Solomon's Temple never existed it is only logical that the Torah did not exist at that time either.
Two points that Reed emphasizes are the "movable government" of Jewry and Jewry's ability to induce gentile leaders over and over through the centuries to subordinate the interests of their own people to the interests of the Jews. From Cyrus reinstalling the Levites in Jerusalem to Lord Balfour committing Great Britain to the establishment of Israel, you see this and other unique characteristics of the Jews manifesting themselves in whatever age, country, or language "the center" appears.
Typically, we would ascribe these characteristics to some cultural effect of the religion itself, and that's probably true in this case as well, but it seems to me there is a sort of singleness of purpose--a grand design--behind these characteristics that argues they aren't just the predictable results of the perverse teachings in the Talmud.
For example, in 1903, when Max Nordau predicted *the future world war" would result in Great Britain's commitment to establishing the Jews in Palestine in their own state, WWI was still eleven years away and humanity had never witnessed a "world war." But, he turned out to be right and that's what happened. That kind of foreknowledge can't be explained by a quirk of the religious teachings.
Whatever "it" is that can explain the apparent design, I have felt for a long time that it came out of Babylon, and any writing it produced would be exceedingly hard to discover, especially for a gentile, especially after so many centuries.
Makes you want to throw it all in a rubbish bin doesn't it?
"The Jewish Bible appeared out of whole cloth from the library of Alexandria circa 250 BCE, written in Greek. "
But wasn't Deuteronomy, the "Second Law" (the first being oral), read by the Levites, who were the authors, to the people in the Temple at Jerusalem in the 7th Century BC?
According to the Bible (2 Kings 22:8), the Torah was discovered by the newly schismatic Jews circa 622 BC (Deuteronomic reform). YHWH then gave the Jews 35 years to start following the Torah. But they persisted in their wickedness, so YHWH sent Nebuchadnezzar to destroy Jerusalem and imprison the Jews in Babylon in 587 BC.
Is the Bible itself the only source that tells us how the Torah was discovered by the Jews? Is there any more reputable source that indicates the Jews possessed the Torah before 250 BC? I have approached this question from a literary historical perspective and I have learned that there are zero examples of Biblical scriptures that date before the Septuagint.
I've long used this passage, but now I see I had my dates wrong anyway. These are the first paragraphs from Douglas Reed's Controversy of Zion
https://www.unz.com/book/douglas_reed__the-controversy-of-zion/
The true start of this affair occurred on a day in 458 BC which this narrative will reach in its sixth chapter. On that day the petty Palestinian tribe of Judah (earlier disowned by the Israelites) produced a racial creed, the disruptive effect of which on subsequent human affairs may have exceeded that of explosives or epidemics. This was the day on which the theory of the master-race was set up as “the Law.”
At the time Judah was a small tribe among the subject-peoples of the Persian king, and what today is known as “the West” could not even be imagined. Now the Christian era is nearly two thousand years old and “Western civilization,” which grew out of it, is threatened with disintegration.
The creed born in Judah 2,500 years ago, in the author’s opinion, has chiefly brought this about. The process, from original cause to present effect, can be fairly clearly traced because the period is, in the main, one of verifiable history.
The creed which a fanatical sect produced that day has shown a great power over the minds of men throughout these twenty-five centuries; hence its destructive achievement. Why it was born at that particular moment, or ever, is something that none can explain. This is among the greatest mysteries of our world, unless the theory that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction is valid in the area of religious thought; so that the impulse which at that remote time set many men searching for a universal, loving God produced this fierce counter-idea of an exclusive, vengeful deity.
Judah-ism was retrogressive even in 458 BC, when men in the known world were beginning to turn their eyes away from idols and tribal gods and to look for a God of all men, of justice and of neighbourliness. Confucius and Buddha had already pointed in that direction and the idea of one-God was known among the neighbouring peoples of Judah. Today the claim is often made that the religious man, Christian, Muslim or other, must pay respect to Judaism, whatever its errors, on one incontestable ground: it was the first universal religion, so that in a sense all universal religions descend from it. Every Jewish child is taught this. In truth, the idea of the one-God of all men was known long before the tribe of Judah even took shape, and Judaism was above all else the denial of that idea. The Egyptian Book of the Dead (manuscripts of which were found in the tombs of kings of 2,600 BC, over two thousand years before the Judaist “Law” was completed) contains the passage: “Thou art the one, the God from the very beginnings of time, the heir of immortality, self-produced and self-born; thou didst create the earth and make man.” Conversely, the Scripture produced in Judah of the Levites asked, “Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the Gods?” (Exodus).
I like Reed even though we obviously differ in some interpretations. For me, the question is, at what point do we treat the Jewish Bible as a reliable historical document? If there was no Solomon, was there a Josiah?
The Babylonian captivity is critical in this regard - did it really happen? Unlike Solomon's Temple, there is extra biblical evidence of the captivity. But even this does not validate the Biblical version of events. Nebuchadnezzar may have imprisoned the Judahites from Israel, but if these people were not "Jews" in the sense of being Yahwist monotheists who were familiar with the Torah, then the Bible story is a fiction.
There's no good excuse for the lack of Jewish scriptures before 250 BC. Supposedly these scriptures were translated identically by 70 different scholars locked in 70 different rooms - meaning there should have been at least 70 copies of the older Hebrew language version, none of which survived. We can blame book burning for the loss of competitive history and mythology, but the Jews have always had an interest in claiming antiquity, so if there were older Hebrew scriptures the Jews would have had a major incentive to preserve them. Instead, the full Hebrew/Aramaic text of the Jewish Bible did not appear until after 1000 AD.
The oldest Hebrew language scriptures are from the Dead Sea Scrolls which were all created after the publication of the Septuagint. The Septuagint is written as if it is the end of Jewish history, when in fact it was the beginning.
If I'm understanding you correctly, and what you say is true, this would require a radical shift in thinking. So let me make sure I'm understanding you correctly. You're saying that the Greek translation of the Torah done in Alexandria wasn't actually a translation but an original document? Or at least not a translation of any written document? That the first Hebrew scriptures were written in Greek?
Wasn't there already a Jerusalem Talmud by this time?
Any written Talmud comes from AD. The Jerusalem Talmud consists of notes on the Mishnah, ie the "oral Torah" that became the first Talmud. Jesus criticizes an oral law of the Pharisees, but on the other hand his teachings directly contradict the written Torah itself. There is of course no archaeological evidence of an oral tradition. It is legendary, supposedly given to Moses along with the stone tablets.
And yes, you have read my thesis correctly. It would mean that the diaspora itself is a foundational myth - the Jews weren't swarming Alexandria because they were banished from Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, but because that's where the Jewish religion was born, in the Greek language, circa 250 BC. This is the same time that the modern Hebrew language was born, transforming from the old Phoenician script of the Israelites into the modern "square script" of Hebrew.
The real history of Judaism would go Ptolemy-->Seleucid-->Maccabee-->Herod-->Rome, lasting only about 300 years before Titus quelled Jerusalem. When exactly the "second" temple appeared in all this is unclear, but it was Herod who built the temple complex (Fort Antonia, named after Marc Antony) to "protect" the temple. Titus of course stripped the "second" Temple down to the ground leaving us again, conveniently with no evidence.
If we remove the old testament as a reliable historical resource, the history of the Jews in Israel, along with the Hebrews and the Semites and Adam and Eve, goes up in a puff of smoke. I would certainly moderate my thesis if there were any evidence that any Bible scriptures existed before 250 BC. But as far as I can tell, there is not. If Solomon's Temple never existed it is only logical that the Torah did not exist at that time either.
Two points that Reed emphasizes are the "movable government" of Jewry and Jewry's ability to induce gentile leaders over and over through the centuries to subordinate the interests of their own people to the interests of the Jews. From Cyrus reinstalling the Levites in Jerusalem to Lord Balfour committing Great Britain to the establishment of Israel, you see this and other unique characteristics of the Jews manifesting themselves in whatever age, country, or language "the center" appears.
Typically, we would ascribe these characteristics to some cultural effect of the religion itself, and that's probably true in this case as well, but it seems to me there is a sort of singleness of purpose--a grand design--behind these characteristics that argues they aren't just the predictable results of the perverse teachings in the Talmud.
For example, in 1903, when Max Nordau predicted *the future world war" would result in Great Britain's commitment to establishing the Jews in Palestine in their own state, WWI was still eleven years away and humanity had never witnessed a "world war." But, he turned out to be right and that's what happened. That kind of foreknowledge can't be explained by a quirk of the religious teachings.
Whatever "it" is that can explain the apparent design, I have felt for a long time that it came out of Babylon, and any writing it produced would be exceedingly hard to discover, especially for a gentile, especially after so many centuries.