Why The Bible Began | SHOCKING Evidence

[Music] [Music] right it's the macbes who really are the ones during the second century who are going to bring the Torah to the center of the community before that even though Ezra Nehemiah says it was you know in keeping with the divine plan after they had been conquered they repent return but we know that's not the case there is a community they write to Jerusalem they have they worship Yahweh but they worship yahweh's wife too they worship other they they they give money to sacrifices to Kum and other Egyptian gods and so so forth it seems they have a lot of different things that are just clearly idolatrous and the the priest in Jerusalem and the authorities in Jerusalem say they should say we would expect them to say we have nothing to do with you backsliders we will have nothing to do with your community we are not going to support you to build a temple to Yahweh and his wife the only Temple according to the Tor is to be built in Jerusalem we go back to one family now that we're defeated and conquer we got to come together we were a family a nation that's new we don't have narratives of peoples in relation to other peoples like we have in Herodotus and through cides and in Greek history writing we don't have that in the ancient near East but we have in the Bible then the question is so what's the [Music] connection [Music] we are myth Vision welcome back to myth Vision podcast I'm your host Derek Lambert today I have Dr Jacob L Wright joining us today how are you my friend I'm doing well Derek nice to be on your show I'm excited to have you here in fact you have a book that you've just launched that is so important on answering the question of why the Bible was written period can you tell us a little bit about this book the question why is really the central question for me you know the books that we have on the Bible one of the biggest books is who wrote the Bible and it's by dick fredman Richard Elliot fredman he says you know there's a scribe under Jeremiah bar and he tries to give a name to it and I think all that kind of speculation is not helpful so who you know who wrote the Bible Well my answer is a bunch of nameless scribes generations of scribes who we know nothing about and trying to put a name on it is really unhelpful so there are a lot of books on who where when the Bible was written and that's a big part of my project and then this is also there's what question what the Bible teaches and there's this war between is the morality of the Bible something that we should adopt in our societies know the morality of the Bible is really an and so old and awful and so forth so there's that war there my question is why why was the Bible written and you know that question has never really been addressed in biblical scholarship and the reason why it's a really a a mindfield to try to explain why a text was written goes to the heart of theological questions and let's face it there are a lot of biblical Scholars who may not belong to a religious kind of affiliation but they still are Guided by presuppositions that are very theological and they avoid issues that are going to offend Believers and I'm not trying to offend Believers but I am trying to tell the truth because I think it's helpful and to explain why we have a Bible and and I hope that it helps I think it's getting a lot of resonance with people um it's one of the best five books on religion according to the publish weekly and this is a book on the Bible and it also though goes and debunks hypotheses and LGH held traditions and Theological positions and it's still getting a lot of traction among people who care Dr right your book uh is also up there for 2023 on the New Yorker so this is a very important book it's resonating with many people I hope people watching this right now will go down in the description get you a cop Cy read it for yourself and let us know what you think about it because I'm telling you this question and how we explain this I think will solve a lot of things and change a lot of things within the scholarship of the field that I've read so can you tell us at least give us the tease as to what led up to writing the Bible defeat my qu my answer that's my puppy Hank just walking out defeat is the answer answer for why we have a Bible there was a kingdom there was actually actually two kingdoms the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the southern Kingdom of Judah and they were both destroyed by Empires the Assyrian Empire and then the Babylonian Empire and because these Empires destroyed these kingdoms that's why we have a Bible we don't have a Bible because it goes back to Moses receiving Revelation a lot of people now maybe don't agree with that position but they still try to trace old texts back to King David and Solomon's court and so forth maybe we have some old text but they have been thoroughly reshaped as a road map for survival for a community that had been conquered now that's a problem for many people you can imagine right it explains all the Bible all of the theology all of the religious innovation the very fact that we have a text it explains it by natural reasons very human humanistic reasons and for people who aren't easily offended like the Adam gnik at the New Yorker they find real truth and meaning from this because the truth does help us right and um I guess religious conservatives might be offended by it I'm I get some emails quite a few every day about this um I get someone praying for me um hoping that I'll accept Jesus I'm Jewish um but um Jesus was a nice Jewish guy but I'm not going to accept any kind of stuff that doesn't get to the heart of truth and the truth uh is going to set us free I really do believe that and the truth of of my project is the Bible is a human response an ingenious one a but a human response to defeat it can be thoroughly explained by a community living on the margins who don't know how to so survive when Empires are no longer um allowing them to have kingdoms and to have territorial sovereignty and Palace and so forth and they reorient their attention from the King to a God and they reorient their attention to a text you actually are in the vein of exactly what myth vision's all about we want to solve The Riddles of ancient history in the sands of time you know with thumb prints not with abracadabra ghost and mystical kind of explanations and this is right in the vein of how do we explain this if we you know our analogy here Scooby-Doo growing up I used to watch a lot of it and there's always a ghost a demon a monster people are always searching for and at the end of the episode almost every episode we find them unmasked and there's a human behind the story of the of the that's wonderful spiritual and so we're aiming at it that way trying to explain this human wise and it was defeat that led this way your book Chronicles different texts and goes through different material over time can you kind of yeah let's lay out a bit so there are four parts of the book and in the first part I go through all of the biblical narrative side by side with the archaeological record and the historical sources and I show how the two really diverge drastically if you look at an introduction to the Bible that's being taught within colleges and seminaries and so forth they're not helpful because what they do is they begin with the narrative and try to show where overlaps but where it doesn't but it's kind of just a messy thing what we try to do as critical Scholars is to separate that separate the archaeology and let the archaeological records speak the pottery speak Pottery is the stuff that we find that's the most important stuff because it allows us to date things and uh then allow the text on its own to have its message and we try then to come back and say so when can we date this text on the basis of the archaeological record um the text that we have has been transmitted we the oldest copies we have we found me around the time of Jesus um but Scholars and everybody believes it goes they go way much they go farther back um how much farther back is the question I don't think it goes back to King David and Solomon and all these Kings like they're trying to argue and the reason why they're trying to argue that is because they don't want it to be just about defeat if it originated somewhere in the sands of time and what have you um and it's can be traced to a time of where the kingdom was Pro prospering and flourishing and all of that then uh it could be someone sitting under a tree thinking about what is true what is right and coming up with this but if it's all a response to trauma Collective trauma and a way to bring communities together that's problematic because it sounds like social engineering well social engineering happens a lot and it can be problematic and there can be good kinds of things and this is a text that has problems and there's good stuff to it but it's thoroughly human and um so in the first part of the book I go through the archaeological record and I show all these archives that we have uh going all the way back for example to the the Amana letters from Egypt that showed that Egypt was actually in the land Israel couldn't have escaped Egypt because when they go to Canaan the Egyptians are there waiting for them during that time and I look at different archives and through the history that's the first part and then I start talking about after defeat what were the steps that they took to um move their attention and orientation from a kingdom to and the palace and King David to the stuff that we have in the books of Genesis Exodus all of that stuff and that is this prehistory that they create in order to show that hey we were a people before there was a kingdom we can also be a people now and so they construct a past that is Mythic um right and you know very well that myths um do contain valuable insights but let's be honest about not trying to make them in some way mixing the kind of historicity and so forth and all of my colleagues not all of them I should have say but many of them just get fuzzy around those details and I think it's helpful I I know that you've had people on the show who are more you know Akin with my uh approach that we need to be very clear about these things we're not trying to offend people and if you are offended then maybe you should grow up I move in that second part to looking at how the Bible comes um emerges around uh the kinds of questions that emerge in this time of Imperial occupation you know the the Persian Empire is controlling the world and then there's this little Community around Jerusalem and the North and so forth and they're working out their issues and those two other parts are just looking at the different kinds of of of what are the what are the themes of the Bible let's look at various kinds of things that people are really concerned about and show how they actually are responses to Def to defeat to Conquest and I go through each one of them from theology to all of the kinds of things around books that you would never imagine were like a response to defeat and I say look it this is the best explanation this is uh really interesting to consider and think for the viewer you kind of have this repetitive theme of restoration oh crap we screw up boom Exile or some type of punishment oh boom God sends help whether it's judges whether it's prophets whether it's heroes or a king whoever it is he's trying to send him help and there's this idea of over and over Exile restoration Exile restoration all the way from Genesis really till you get to these late prophets and dealing with Persia and stuff and and I kind of wanted you to tease us with some of those examples like I'll give you an example I interviewed joh Collins right flew up there saw him the week he was retiring he handed me a bunch of books to take home I felt like a lucky guy and I asked him hey do you think the Exodus ever happened he laughs of course not I don't think the Exodus happened well what do you think it was and I would probably putting words in his mouth that I shouldn't but I think he said something like a king who was exiled from Israel was sent to Egypt he escaped during some trial or bad situation got his people were like get out and they were gonna kill him if not so he left the Egypt and then later he comes back so based on this real possible King that really had to go to Egypt to escape then comes back and he's restored um and I can't remember if this is it's in the Bible there is something like that it's in the book of Kings yeah so that was his thing he thought well it could have been then he's not certain but your point is to say post defeat here we are exiled to Babylon we get rescued notice they always give the credit to Yahweh for what Marduk if you actually look at the uh the sources it's like Muk was the one who actually did these things but Yahweh gets the credit and then they're coming back to restore and build Jerusalem and it's always the elites who are writing this stuff do you think the Exodus with Moses is actually a Persian potentially post Persia even Greek invention of of a of a story like you said they're mythical history of the past good question so what Professor Collins says you know where he tries to come up with a scenario is I think helpful um yes The Exodus story is very much a product of the Persian period and later especially the way we know it the book of Exodus we can see it being shaped in the Persian period um there what Collins is saying is that there has always been this escaping the Levant Canaan and going down to Egypt because Egypt was a place of Asylum and then coming back and that's a rout routine that we see all the way through the Bible and also an extra biblical sources so the idea of an exodus is really not that new it's just a common thing of people who live in in Egypt moving out and coming back in and all of that and the Bible picks up on that we've made a big deal about it and the reason why we made a big deal about it it's about salvation Christians love the idea of The Exodus because it means God saved a people from bondage and they spiritualize it and if the Exodus didn't happen then it's possible that Jesus also did will not you know and um and that salvation I explain but is very much a an attempt to to say no our kings were not the ones who did this our God is the one who did this why because our Kings no longer exist right the kingdom has been wiped out so they have to say well they don't have to but they come up very creatively with this um they say that um long before we ever had a kingdom we were in Egypt it's a common thing a lot of us come from Egypt we were there in slavery and who brought us out who saved us the word is salvation saved us yesha um same name as Yeshua Jesus Savior um but the one who saved us was according to Christians uh Jesus's father Yahweh and um and that is like I said an attempt to say well we can who the real center of our community is our Transcendent God not a political institution like that has been wiped out by the empire and you know you say that too often you get emails you get some real death threat type emails um because you know why it makes sense it really resonates people read this and say yes that makes sense I have to say that when I read started to read in this stuff when was in college it really was eye opening too and I expected that Scholars would continue along in that vein but it's so uh strange that they still are trying to be fuzzy trying to say oh let's this be clearcut Conquest is the point of departure for the Bible not davidic conquest of other peoples like they say but the davidic dynasty being conquered and um there are two conquests one is from 722 by the Assyrians that's the northern kingdom and so that kind of move towards responding to defeat and moving away from the palace is already embedded there a little bit but it would be wrong to say that the Bible goes back to 722 or ear around that time because whatever that was was just an idea very maybe a little bit of text but very little what really um snowballs into the Corpus that we have is in the Persian period and in theistic Period and it's not minimalism that I'm trying to argue for necessarily but I think we need to be a little bit um more courageous in stating the the facts and the facts are the bible really is through and through a survival manual for a community that no longer has a kingdom you know this Kingdom idea I hear many scholars debate whether or not there was ever a United Kingdom initially or if there were two dispart kingdoms side by side I must ask you my friend what is your stance on United Kingdom is um the United monarchy the United Kingdom is probably not what we use because it's too much like England but the United monarchy is um a huge thing for people I never understood it why is that so important and I think it's a lot about David and I wrote a book on David too and it's like I never quite understood with uation with David I try to show David he was just a warlord kind of an early mafioso who had his band and he went around and he carved out a little kingdom and there was nothing about Goliath and nothing about Israel in it either he's totally judan that really pissed people off that David has nothing to do with Israel and I developed that idea in my book uh this book we're talking about so the United Kingdom or the United monarchy is an an attempt I try to show of Judah right there's two kingdoms Judah tries the judan kingdom and thereafter tries to say we were already at one time connected Jerusalem was the capital that our God chose the davidic dynasty was the one that he chose to be um the ruler over the nation and um it's all an attempt to bring people to Jerusalem to the de devic Dynasty and say the reason we have two kingdoms was because Israel sinned the northern kingdom sinned and they left us you can that resonates with people really well too because it just makes sense it makes sense to say we're not trying something new we're going back to the way it was before right and that's the same kind of principle that we have with the penet with the five books of Moses we're not we were we can be a people without a kingdom because we were in the past and so they create a Mythic past in order to say what we're doing in the present is not new because no one wants to try out something new and so the davidic kingdom idea the United monarchy well the kingdoms can be joined because they were already joined long time ago in the most glorious period of our history and then they broke apart and divided well the archaeological record makes that very problematic there are there's nothing to support a United monarch and you have all these guys arguing and some of them are critical Scholars occupying huge positions at public universities um they have religious backgrounds you have to look at some of the professors where they come from in their training and you see that many of them came from Seminary and they still have religious affiliations and so forth they're not barans they haven't left the fold of that they still hold on to that at some level the way they do it is just to make things fuzzy to say well it could be a smaller United Kingdom or David it's like it's just such a neat principle to let set out this is by the davidic dynasty to say that we are the ones who are supposed to rule we already did it at the beginning we broke apart and we need to go back to the god ordained plan as it was all along and that that principle is been picked up in a later Point by the people who are trying to say the Covenant Sinai the laws the Commandments Genesis all of that that is where we're going back to even though that's a Mythic past that is even more grandios than the one about the United monarchy two things come to mind with what you just said powerful is post Persia going into the helenistic period let's just say Persian helenistic for the sake of argument because I think it's a fuzzy area in terms of fully knowing how to I they're basically the same you have an Empire that had been um conquered by Alexander the Great and basically things are the same so it's very hard to distinguish between Persian and helenistic stuff and so I'm looking at this and two things I think of and one of them will I think we'll tackle before we address this issue about the United monarchy idea I'm curious to know post defeat they're looking at these massive Empires who have a working political system that seems to be better than what they have so I don't know about you but I imagine people in Failure are not only probably living with let's just say animosity toward the larger people but also they have to compete in order to even be anybody they got to compete and they see it's working so they model stuff off of the empires in which conquered them but also they they want to spin it they want to give their own twist on it they create a mythical past a history and I think about the amans and I think about the Jews we hear this United monarchy I wondered and this is complete speculation I wonder if they invented some ancient Unity between these two groups by saying we had a northern southern United monarchy meaning you Samaritans from Samaria and us judeans we actually we got along in the ancient past and so they're trying to craft this story as if two Yahweh worshipping sects sometime later fth 4th Century BCE crafting an ancient history where they were United I don't know no that's that's the area that I work on on Ezra Nehemiah where we have this conflict between Samaria and Jerusalem emerging in the first place I mean it goes back to these two kingdoms um that existed in the Iron Age and the the Northern Kingdom Israel was just 10 times greater than the judan kingdom the Bible is a Judean product but it's from a kingdom that is 10 times smaller and 10 times less significant than the northern kingdom so during the Persian period and helenistic period you have them reemerging and Samaria is still stronger Judah um becomes is is trying to take that position still and they're trying and many of them are fighting with each other and want to break apart and some of them are trying to come together and so the book of Chronicles which is clearly a helenistic book I mean we have colleagues who trying to say it's a Persian period but it's so clearly helenistic because it presupposes the end of the Persian period um like Ezra Nehemiah Ezra Nehemiah tells the whole story of the Persian Empire you can't say that's from the Persian Empire because it's reflecting back on it so and it's trying to in the helenistic Empire trying to say this is how we succeeded during the Persian times we can succeed now and the conflict between North and South continues on and Samaria versus je Jerusalem and all that and uh you know the the parable of the Good Samaritan from the gospels I'm not a new testament scholar I don't know where it is but I I do write on it in the book I just forgot right now but um it it is that I don't know if you've developed that on your own work have you have you thought about that when Jesus the parable the Good Samaritan is like it's an answer to who is my neighbor mhm and then Jesus tells the story about the Samaritan who's better than the levite who's better than the judeans and so forth who takes care of this guy right and that is an attempt to say my neighbor We Are One People the North and the South we can so Jesus was very much about there is a larger Community it's not just about judeans it's not just about Jews there's a larger kind of concept of a more broader people of Israel if you will and um a lot of people have read the good Samaran Parable as you should love everyone or everyone is our neighbor but Jesus didn't tell a story about the Roman soldier it's not like trying to say we should love the Roman the Roman soldiers are our neighbors the the you know no it's the Samaritans they're our neighbor and that is a just continues the kinds of text that we find in the book of Chronicles and so forth that try to show you know Judah must treat Samaria better Samaria must treat and it's just all one way that develops things yeah and it kind of also tells me as someone who sees it all the way here in this late first century material possibly early second depending on the book is that there's still a struggle between these two category of people and so this goes on for centuries where they're competing and I imagine there are other versions of Jud it it really what what's the truth behind your position is that it really starts to emerge under the person and holistic period in a new way so there are these kingdoms that fought with each other but there was no struggle because the northern King was just strong and didn't even care about Judah the northern kingom gets wiped out it's Judah the southern Kingdom who cares about trying to usurp that position usurp that tradition and trying to make it their own so Jerusalem after samaria's gone Jerusalem's trying very hard once the but that all of it is very much a part of after the both of them gone now Judah and Samaria are struggling and so much of the biblical record in the Hebrew Bible is belongs to the same conversation that is in the New Testament and a lot of Scholars want to say oh there's the Old Testament and the Old Testament period ends and then there are these centuries the inter testamental period and then the new test as if there's this big gap my scholarship is saying there's no inter testamental period it's the intertestamental period is when the Bible emerged in the first place wow wow drop your mic all right that was powerful um there's so much that your book gets into in covering I love that you bring up Ezra Nehemiah you're talking about a lot of these later books and reshaping earlier ones I I think this is like the most clear profound way of approaching why the Bible was written and I wondered this is a little speculative I understand their scholarship like then uh Yan VM vasilius I butcher these names wrote um proposing whether or not this is true it's still an interesting hypothesis the nine books of Herodotus his histories were possibly competitor kind of narratives because we know that it's writing about Persia and Greece and what happened between Xerxes and um King Cyrus which is a huge player in the Bible so we have these huge players that connect the dots between Herodotus histories with these really well-known Persian kings and to them they're significant he even paints their Divine narratives all that kind of stuff from the Greek perspective of explaining the Persian Empire then you have the biblical and for crying out loud Cyrus is the Messiah what are your thoughts about this whether or not he's completely right on they modeled their mythical past of history and comparing it and try to create like a new histories Herodotus kind of thing what do you think about this weird thing happening here with herodicus and the biblical narrative and this pivotal point with persan okay so um that's not uh my field of expertise by any means um Herodotus is something I use quite a bit but there are other Scholars who are trying to show the connections uh between the kinds of his writing we have like in the Bible in Herodotus and in some cases they're not um they may be conservative Scholars uh one of them was Gary kers a blessed memory and he was in some ways a conservative scholar but he was an expert on the Greek stuff and he really shows how much of it is in the Bible against his intentions not that he was a fundamentalist by any ways he grew up a fundamentalist but um but his scholarship really makes a case for that um it's something that I have not worked on uh in that kind of Direction and that um objective but some of the stuff that we're seeing in the biblical record in terms of trying to create a narrative trying to connect the dots that's new we don't have narratives of people's in relation to other people's like we have in Herodotus and through cides and in Greek history writing we don't have that in the ancient near East but we have it in the Bible then the question is so what's the connection what's the connection between the Greek history writing and the biblical narratives because the biblical narratives stand out in their West Asian Canaanite right environment and I think this confuses many academics I'm sorry budding in I just think this good conversation with you Dr Wright you're you're right on you're so open-minded but also very careful and I respect your ision on not even jumping to conclusions but you're doing what I love and that is thinking and having our audience think with us so this interesting point you bring up it is very easy to pin the tail on the donkey for the Bible when you see you know uh what looks like Canaanite ugaritic names for deities possible Acadian lone words I mean all of that stuff really points to this West semetic or Southwest Asian context and yet it's structured and modeled in a way that is competitive and even similar in many ways to how Greeks narrate in so so many ways so my question and I'm throwing this to see what spaghetti sticks to the wall with you is is that you know could we be taking old traditions like you said rewriting them under the context and pin of someone educated with the Greek awareness of how they write their literature yet giving their heritage citic background avoiding Greek loone words as much as often as possible all of that I I think you're right and it's like um schar go through the text with a fine tooth comb trying to find a aadan loan word or some kind of evidence for an an iron age dating which means like before defeat they're very interested in the Iron Age because once again they want to get away from defeat they don't because that makes it all human thoroughly human human Al human um as n said and um and so you you have to remember that in our own languages and our own traditions we have lone words that are very or sayings that are very ancient we don't even know where they come from they could be centuries old that doesn't mean if somebody in a thousand years from now found one of our letters or our text or whatever and we make we use some kind of expression that actually emerged 3 or 400 years ago that someone could make a case well this text on this iPhone that we found actually we're gonna have to date the whole iPhone 300 years earlier because it has this word in it and that's a that's almost what they do like well there's one word in this text therefore we're going to date it all 300 years earlier than what critical Scholars say and even critical Scholars do that it's hard we should talk sometime about what how the field works because yeah there's the the Society of biblical literature is this huge Guild of Scholars there's evangelicals there are Jews there are critical Scholars there are there's a whole spectrum of where they my point is that the critical Scholars that are really useful to read they still kind of make things fuzzy by by saying here are some lone words we have to be skeptical about late datings maybe maybe not but this lone word shows that it could be early and it's like that's not helpful because the whole picture just fits so well and I think I lay that out uh in a new way so that people it resonates with people um and you'll have to see how I do it and I think that's good listen the the reception is really good by non-biblical Scholars it also is by biblical Scholars but I think that the biblical Scholars kind of go from it because you think that's because it's competing it's almost like how dare you steal my thunder uh you're you're no it's not about that I'm just like popularizing that's not what I'm doing actually the book I did not expect it ever to take off I didn't write a popular book it's by Cambridge University press someone sent it to gnik who's this like literary critic in New York who only reviews several books a year and he picked it up and said damn and he wrote a review of it in the New Yorker which blew me away blew everybody away and there's other people who are doing that because they they don't have any vested interest in this I wrote this book actually for other for Scholars and for students I did not write it for every it's easy to read because I don't like to write things in a complex matter because a part of scholarship that I think you appreciate is taking very complex matters and making them easy to understand stand and I have I think a knack for that at least in the writing I'm not sure I do it in communication as well in oral communication but in the writing I do that I think pretty well and what they're mad about is that it's setting out so easily for h a broad audience an idea that may something that they may have been worried about but no one had really developed and taken all the way there was one guy the Germans right the Germans are still the best I think in terms of critical reason search not only biblical stuff but in wide array of things this wonderful universities where they don't have they have total freedom from the religious institutions so that they really are supposed to be Scholars without any kind of and that lends to Cutting Edge research so this guy Julius VH house like around 1900 he's he came up with the idea or didn't come up with it but he developed a bit about defeat and once again kind of of fuzzy but pretty clear he had to leave the theological faculty for it he had to go to another school and teaching it and velh Housen is for many people my field um respected but kind of seen as the devil and why why is he the devil because he just lays out things that people say damn that that makes sense but I'm going to work my whole care career to show that it's more complicated than what he says and if I can just add a little bit of nuance to it people might just throw him all the way out with the bath water and um I don't think VH housing gets it right in many ways and I I try to really show that it's much um much more concert much more concerted effort after defeat he has a lot of stuff that goes he has stuff that goes all the way back to Moses but right in the 1900 that's forgivable right right right and you're 100 and I read some of that 10th Century 11th century BCE and I'm like you know I breathe I mean when he was saying that it was Radical because he left some stuff that may go back to Moses or whatever but he took so much away from Moses and from David and from all of them that he got in a lot of trouble and uh today I take everything away from them and um yeah well other than possibly and I say possibly a memory and and but even then like you can't prove anything based on a memory and if the archa and I'm talking about the memory of a dynasty or a people but the fact that they constructed this narrative and it goes against archaeology you know you're really like your book is going to show like you're really barking up the wrong tree of assuming this is what actually happened as it's documented is there a name of a guy from way back probably could be that's but at that point what's the important point it's really the story that you're reading rather than could they have known a name from 500 years ago that's Southwest Asian in in Heritage or something or a dynasty of a tribal people you know all these interesting things I think that also if I might add um this point is that there there have been Scholars who like down dat everything make it to the Greek period and it's they're often they're often very simplistic right and what makes my work controvers IAL is that no one has ever said Jacob right is simplistic there's a lot of nuance there's a lot of archaeology um one of the most respected biblical scholars in Hebrew Bible I teach at the top program in PhD studies at em un all of that um so it's not somebody who has an agenda to kind of just make debunk the Bible right I'm an intellectual and I want to be honest about it because I think we learn a lot about how humans respond to catastrophe and we're facing catastrophes right now we're arguing with each other as if we have all the time in the world but we're if you could see where we are we're on the brink of disaster like bu to fall over a cliff and I think we need truth in our time and and we need good Scholars to do this and Scholars have courage and it showed me also the reception which is nice that if you have the courage and you write with beauty and Clarity um it will gain traction among people who I really care about you know like Adam gnik and not worrying about what my colleagues in the field who are going to nitpick with me I don't care about the meting well let me ask you this about the book and if you could tease us with a few examples off the top of your head that you could think of early in the book The Bible I'm speaking of can you hint at some key elements among these books that tell us or hint at us so what are some of the motifs that say Hey this happened after the destruction of Babylon or post Persia or something is there there certain theme that we well we talked about the Exodus right so that's a big one and as I said you know there there's a long-standing move between Egypt and other places but what we have in the Exodus story of the book of Exodus of the Bible is very much an attempt to say we did it without the king we no longer have a king and therefore it's all you know our God and we can be still saved you know now what about Genesis that comes before Exodus well Genesis is very hard for people to understand well how is that a response to defeat it's just about you know Abram and Sarah and everybody just making a family and growing and all the family disputes what the Book of Genesis is about is that we have to remember that Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the children and all the women themselves represent different communities different regions different territories these are not just stories about people they are myths about ancestors and the and the communities are often named after the ancestors so all of the 12 sons of Jacob those are names of tribes in a regions they have nothing to do with individual figures until the biblical authors make them into some kind of ancestors that were connected and names that they have are the ones that they give to their posterity but that's all an attempt to say all of these communities we go back to one family now that we're defeated and conquered we got to come together we were a family a nation um emerging way back in the midst of the the whatever the the the in the in the ancient world whatever you get the point way back in early history we were we came together in a family emerged and we can do that now today um and that is very much an attempt to say that before we had a kingdom right once again the Kingdom's not there what brought us together was our worship of one God of this Yahweh and that is their attempt their theological attempt to connect the dots meaning connect all of these different regions and say let's come together around this and but they do it also in a family story a family story that is remember Abraham is chosen by Yahweh Abram and Sarah and so the narrative is much is very much about a deity and a people who emerg into a family and that story then lays the groundwork for families in the post exilic period meaning after the destruction to kind of return to that model of we can still be a a larger family if you will our communities can come together because we did it long ago and I'm not making that all up it sounds like well what evidence do you have for that we can find all of these names and different things in the older sources as well as extra biblical sources and they have nothing to do with the book of Genesis right and the Book of Genesis is what creates a narrative out of them so you have family bonds or Mythic narratives constructing how these other tribes and various groups actually connect in our family uh which is interesting it's a genealogy you also see a lot of those genealogy kind of moves with the Greeks the way that they have genealogies as well um but I think of the Sumerian Kings list but it's not quite the same that's really it's those are all Kings and so what I find interesting about what you're saying is you got let's create a past for these tribes you also are saying this is post Monarch so now you're you're meaning or better yet this is post us having Kings yeah which is why the Nar mention this yeah go ahead yeah go ahead go ahead the Samaran King list um I talk about that and it's um so there's this narrative one king to the next king to the next king and we have them the Bible from one king to the next and the Samaran King list is very very old right older than the Bible but you couldn't make a case that the the Bible's old on that basis because the way the Samaran King list works is all about the Kings and the biblical sources are saying yes there's some Kings and there's dynasties and so forth but they're way that that they're not at the beginning of our history right they create a Mythic prehistory right and that goes for most of the Bible from Genesis all the way to The Narrative of just to remind you is from Genesis to the book of Kings the book of Kings ends with the destruction of Jerusalem we don't have that INR Christian Bibles but in the Jewish Bible and you can see it a little bit in the Christian Bibles that's the original narrative it ends with defeat and that narrative only has one book really maybe two books the book of Samuel and kings that talk about this all the other stuff that people read today no one reads the book of Kings right no one teaches the book of Kings maybe a few stories about Elijah and Elisha but it's not really stuff that people get there most of the theology from they get the theology from penet from Genesis from all of that stuff and all of that stuff is very easy to see as a way to preface this history with all of these things that are going to be essential strategies for survival for communities who no longer have that Kingdom and once again go ahead you know I was gonna say the judges condemns the idea of Kings like you know they're already pointing toward the the the IDE of kings are coming and and you're going to see why that that isn't good but at the same time you're also seeing Promises of like later so they can't let go of the memory or the idea of us one day the Messiah will come and one day you know we'll have this kingship that'll be ruled by God where God will actually come in so can't they kind of don't want to let go of that but they also have to explain why we don't have that yeah and one of the more uh important points about this is that you have people who are looking at the Book of Genesis and they find these parallels and they're trying to make a a a story about how things come together let's say in ancient you know oral tradition and this goes way back and so forth and I'm trying to show it's not oral tradition that makes these stories it's not something that goes way back it's the attempt by scribes so to answer the question of like who wrote the Bible it's attempt by nameless scribes over generations to connect various communities together in a literary way through text not through oral Traditions not through things that people knew all the time there is one kind of new approach the documentary hypothesis right goes back to vhouse and he was the one who really popularized it it's the J epd I don't know if yes um your viewers will know a lot about that but it's it's not useful anymore to know because that um theory is really doesn't hold water very much we have to we have to ex that that theory says all these sources go back to the Kingdom Period or early even the like the latest Source the priesty source is like free exilic that if that's the case and most Americans kind of Follow that if that's the case then my whole thesis is wrong I'm saying everything is a response to defeat and there's a new a Neo documentary hypothesis um and it's defended by some Scholars at Big schools throughout the us and it tries to argue that actually these sources they knew not nothing of each other so there's the one source that tells about the ex's and another story that tells about the ex's but they don't know each other the sources the whatever how you imagine that and it's the problem with that is they can make a claim that because these sources are telling about the Exodus independently of each other that there must have been a common tradition about the Exodus right right so our approach that I learned from Germany and my work in Germany I spent most of my studies there is no there is a text it's like a snowball and it grows in each generation so there's this kind of early idea about this Exodus and it just emerges or the early idea about maybe some ancestors but you can't get back to it very much but you can see how it grows in each generation it's not a bunch of independent sources that were compiled like these Neo documentarians say they were compiled by one editor these are older historical sources they may not tell the history but what they do show us is that everybody kind of agreed on the basic outline of Israel's history and I try to show the basic outline of Israel history is a construction a construction by very intelligent scribes but they're doing it with an eye to their communities bringing together unifying them trying to give them something that will hold them together when they no longer have a palace to do so so just to emphasize this I'm glad you went into more weeds here because people on my channel are very sharp they love the the deeper more critical what let's get into the mechanics of Dr Wright's position here because he's saying something it resonates what he's saying makes sense it explains this broader picture but what do we do with this this Juggernaut I'll call it in scholarship that is almost I'm going to use it's gonna upset some of my friends who are Scholars might watch this but almost a Dogma that you have to regurgitate an American scholarship of you know documentary hypoth is is the gospel and you start challenging that you're fighting against you know your community of AC oh yeah they're very vicious um a lot of the scholars who are defending this documentary hypothesis they can get very personal in their attacks uh it's just um I don't know what rides on it I don't know why they're so personally invested in it some of them claim not to be religious very much at all but once you start I think once again it's like with the reception of the book things just make sense very very much and because if it weren't compelling at all they wouldn't worry about it right we get angry about the things that are closest to home and closest to the truths if it's so outlandish who cares well that when there's some validity to it and it seems coher it and it could be true oh man you're gonna have to take that down and start getting ad hominum and all kinds of stuff and it's just a mess well let's let's pick apart a few things if I can with you just to get your thoughts and some of this keep M I'm sure is in your book or would take longer than our video would allow you have a lot of the JP and E whatever uh hypothesis out here that wants to put stuff way way back and they have this kind of idea that well you might find Jay uh way way back here or D they say all the way to think David or Solomon right and much of them will go eighth ninth tth Dynasty on some of these sources and or sorry not Dynasty Century BC and then some of them they'll say is Persian or you know granting this like Final Touch in the Persian and you're saying actually my friends we're crafting Persian onward the whole picture not saying they're not using ancient sources or ideas that might be there but this Evolution this snowball rolling way way back here of these materials and then there's like composite materials that are simultaneous Traditions that contradict so the question I have about that and I know that we're way in the Weeds on trying to do this in a video but what do you do with doublets triplets when there's contradictory material like how do you explain what you think's happening whereas they see it and they go we've got a creation account Genesis 1 we've got a creation account Genesis 2 and they're two completely different accounts one's 300 years before the other you know they'll throw numbers around we don't know but then I come to another scholar and I'm I'm giving both sides of the coin here and they say actually if you look in Plato's tus for example he has a cosmological ultimate crafter Narrative of the the Divine creation of all cre like all the Earth and heavens and all and then you have a generation of guos Gia and and Eros Heaven and Earth it's a second creation where the Lesser gods are actually able to create Mortals it's a separate creation story side by side in Plato So you have t which is giving you two creation accounts side by side and then you have this idea that like actually Genesis 1 contradicts Genesis 2 so much they're two separate completely different despar Traditions that some later scribe can put together what where are you leaning and how would you answer some of these problems that they try to solve yeah so doublets um are not an indication of two different sources um they can be in in in some cases but they're not necessarily so and those were the like you point out if there's parallels and they tell the same thing then it must be two different sources here it's an easier explanation to use aam's razor aam's razor is if you can explain it with fewer uh factors then go with that you don't need to uh multiply the factors right if you can explain this evolved from da d that you don't need to go to God to explain it right that's just not helpful and by the way I I lay that out in my book of you know a lot of religious people why do we have a Bible well God wanted us have a Bible ask why did we have trees well trees you know right we we we don't make that kind of if if the wildlife biologist said well we have trees or the bot is that we have trees because God wanted us to have trees we wouldn't be going to that bot in reading right and um so we have to look for the more immediate reasons and on the two sources the easiest way the aams razor is there's an older story not old story an older an earlier one it's in Genesis 2 and Genesis 1 is a new attempt to tell that story and it gets preface to it so instead of two sources you just have a text that is it's like a snowball by the way Genesis 2 is itself very late very late but whatever it is you have a text and then you have text growing around like a snowball as it rolls down the hill it's not the reason why the whole documentary hypothesis emerged was not because they were trying to defend the authority of scripture necessarily they they they were doing this just um because they had to explain the D the doublets and so forth all the duplication this goes way back into the 1800s um but it has become within uh scholarship in the last 50 years a conservative position because one could use it to say there is the IND there are independent sources and they tell the same story roughly that God created the Earth and um that there was an exodus that there is Abraham there are two sources that mentioned Abraham and it's like no there is an older story that tells about Abram and there are new additions to that story and the older story itself is not very old because by the way Jacob is the older Jacob is Israel right and what they want to do with Abraham by saying Abraham was Jacob's grandfather was to create a new figure at a very late point that would unify Jacob remembers Israel the North and if it's all the northern Traditions the judeans need somebody who says this is our ancestor and he was before Jacob and Abraham if you remember he's down in Hebron and in Judah in the South so they use a southern ancestor and he's a late invention he there are Greek in influences there too Thomas RoR a very respected scholar um talks about Moses and Abraham by comparing Greek sources and by the way we know so much about Moses or we have a lot of stories about Moses from late helenistic about how he's a warrior and so forth and you see how Moses in this period in the helenistic period is really getting a lot of traction and um so to put it simply there is an earlier story not an old old story but earlier story and then there are responses to it and there are attempts to say well let's do a new version of that and they grow in the they started that that task post-destruction so the older story may have actually been one of the earliest things they had initially started postd destruction yeah and then it rolls from there is that your exactly and and um so it's not like when I say older that it goes all the way back to some kind of historic memory or something it's just an attempt to connect the dots and to create a a myth that will unify dispersed exiled communities and say listen we were connected already back then um and then people say let's Nuance that a little bit more and add some other things and they tell the story twice and the story that comes before it is the one that gets preference because the best way to reorient a work is not to add a new appendix to it because no one will get to it it's always to add the introduction and there's a great scholar Sarah milstein who talks about redaction through introduction meaning you take a text and you redact it by putting a new introduction so that one when one read reads everything after it one reads through the lens of that new text and that can be demonstrated by Across the Bible but a lot of uh other kinds of materials from the ancient worlds I was gonna ask you like when we get into King David's story right you have a whitewashed version it seems and then you have a version that's like this guy was like a murdering crazy like this guy did some horrible things and I know that um like Joel benen and others who've written on that try to so you have to start out you know first Samuel 17 is the story of David and Goliath where he's just a hero he trusts in Yahweh his brothers are scared he's he has a lot of Courage but 1st Samuel 17 is one of the latest texts of of David right and we have the Greek version the septu version which is even simpler and we can see how the Hebrew version is later than the Greek version and and it's a late text to kind of say before David actually became this reprobate he started out um as a pretty good guy and so that's an attempt like through introduction to say we can actually be nice to David because his he went off the wrong way but he began well oh my gosh okay so bonus material for you viewers who've made it this far and I'm glad you saw the teaser in the beginning of this uh video of some of the things we discussed elephantine I need to talk about this very very controversial settlement a Jewish settlement a yahwist Jewish settlement with their own Temple that is not Central as Deuteronomy wants to put it in Jerusalem they're writing letters to Jerusalem asking to rebuild it Egyptians burn it down because there's I think if I'm not mistaken they're sacrificing certain animals that they found sacred and holy and there might even be hints in The Exodus I heard from one scholar saying that there's so this is Exodus and its final redactions are happening so late that there might be henset elephantine in that material trying to say like hey the Egyptians are not okay with you guys killing these certain animals in your temple I don't know that uh for there is a lot to that and um tell us about I'm an expert on the Persian period um and my first book was on Ezra Nehemiah and all that and Ezra Nehemiah talks about about okay the Jews after the destruction during the time of Cyrus and the Persian Empire and all the kings that came after they returned and they finally got their together they finally came together and started refocusing their life on the Torah on the law on the temple on obedience and service to Yahweh and that's the ideal period because that's where the community is fully devoted to the Bible in a certain sense right the Bible doesn't exist yet but their text they call the Torah the Books of Moses and everything after that is just commentary right all the religion Christianity and Jewish Jewish Judaism and so forth is just kind of Builds on that what is true about that is yes Judaism Builds on Ezra Nehemiah and Christianity and so forth a community that comes together and wants to have the text read like in church services today um it builds on that but that's all aspiration of the scribes that's a kind of vision for the that was not the case in the Persian period even in the Persian period in the late Persian period the the text from elephantina from this little Colony down on the Nile guarding the Persian Empire there were Jewish soldiers there and their families they're guarding the the borders of the Persian Empire and we have all kinds of text most amazing stuff we we don't have any archive for a community that was related to Judah anywhere else like that to that amount of detail so we know very well about how they lived and thought and you know what they write to Jerusalem about questions around their Temple and about their how they should do sacrifices and so forth no one ever says we looked for the Torah we look for the Books of Moses not only ntina but the priest Jerusalem they don't even seem to presuppose the exist the existence of a Torah not that the Torah is not growing there but it's kind of a side project it's a it's a plan B it's a Minority Report if you will it's not the main thing even in the Persian period so Ezra Nehemiah has to be a kind of fiction a kind of aspiration maybe we should go there these are scribes imagining a community that gathers around there writing technology text and Scrolls but the elephantina evidence shows that there is a community they right to Jerusalem they have they worship Yahweh but they worship yahweh's wife too they worship other they they they give money to sacrifices to Kum and other Egyptian gods and so forth it seems I don't want to get into all the details but there they have a lot of different things that are just clearly idolatrous and the the priests in Jerusalem and the authorities in Jerusalem say should say we would expect them to say we have nothing to do with you backsliders we will have nothing to do with your community we are not going to support you to build a temple to Yahweh and his wife the only Temple according to the Torah is to be built in Jerusalem that's what the Bible says only the one place where well we have the evidence we know all about it the Temple's destroyed they're trying to rebuild it they're riding to Jerusalem for help and no one ever thinks to say you you guys are backsliders you guys are doing evil stuff no they accept what they do and so this all shows that this mentality of monotheism of text of Torah of Commandments of everything we take for granted in the Bible that it might have existed but it was a very small little project among scribes a few circles and it was just getting going and it doesn't gain traction until centuries later right it's the macbes who really are the ones during the second century who are going to bring the Torah to the center of the community before that even though Ezra Nehemiah says it was you know in keeping with the divine plan after they had been dis conquered they repent return but we know that's not the case we know that's just once again an attempt to create a Mythic past to say that this is what what we're doing now is the way we were doing it back then when we got our stuff together ladies and gentlemen you have to get a copy of why the Bible began an alternative history of scripture and its Origins Dr Jacob elright you've been fantastic I love you as a guest I want to have you back I likeing with it we need to do it again it's fun I swear everybody in the chat go down get a copy drop a comment on this discussion I I loved this and I know that people will as well Dr Wright may just take a gander and look through the comments and see the praise and stuff so show him some love we'll have him come back as well this book is fantastic I've never read anything like it the way that you've wrote it I hope this thing reaches the moon my friend well thank you Hank is ready to go for a walk Hank you ready to go for a walk can you see he's he's so tired of hearing about the Bible every time he hears the Bible he like lies down and takes a nap or gets up and goes down to the basement the word bible is like I really really though seriously appreciate your time and I hope that your dog uh doesn't hate me yet and that Ben Aaron he's a he's a priest but let's do this again and maybe the audience will have some ideas once they've read the book can tell us what they'd like to see us discuss further or elaborate that they thought was amazing about the book and tease the world with but I to come on and talk about more about the eltina stuff or the archives because that's we'll get us into the needs but in a very concrete way we talked a lot about kind of the theories and the setting and how this all works within biblical scholarship where we expect them to be much more critical than they are and they're not but we need to um talk about the heart people need to be equipped with knowing about here are three archives and these archives make it very difficult to accept the biblical narrative but they help us understand why we have a Biblical narrative right we we can appreciate the story when we understand it's not history wow and I think that's where the power of it is it's in the story it's not in the reality of it actually being the case uh that we watch movies like that all the time so any final words from you Dr Wright well I appreciate all you're doing to bring scholarship to a wider um uh audience and also bringing scholarship that is critical and it's it's weird that we can have these conversations um with you that we can't really have within the guild because people are just always trying and it's nice just to like we say in Yiddish let's talk tacas let's just get it right out and just knock it out and that's going to be helpful because we want to do business maybe myth Vision will become a scholarly therapist session for Scholars who really want to say what they really think and not have to worry about a thing in this very safe environment that you create for us thank you I try to be all things to all men and do it better than Paul did so uh you know bear with me well I appreciate you brother thank you and ladies and gentlemen uh sometimes you know it's a human thing that we you know have our memory sometimes lapse or cognitive dissonance maybe sometimes we're sleepwalking but in case you are let me help you out never ever forget we are myth vision

Channel: MythVision Podcast

Views: 226,504

Keywords: mythvision, mythvision podcast, Bible, Why the bible, WHo wrote the bible, why the bible was written, Hebrew Scriptures, LXX Bible, Jewish history, history, Israelites, Israel, Judea, bible story, Dr. Jacob L. Wright, Dr. Jacob L. Wright mythvision, the bible, archeological finds, archeological discoveries, Bible scholarship, Derek Lambert

Id: 60mDWLRIAU4

Length: 72min 19sec (4339 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 14 2023