#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Dr. Barnea is a Lecturer at the department of Jewish history and biblical studies at the University of Haifa as well as a Research Fellow at “the Bible in its Traditions". SPONSORS https://irestore.com - Use code DANNY for a huge discount on the iRestore Elite. https://trueclassic.com/danny - Upgrade your wardrobe & save on True Classic. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off EPISODE LINKS https://haifa.academia.edu/gadbarnea Gad's book on Yahwism: https://a.co/d/7M4HLAX FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Studying ostraca & ancient Egypt 07:16 - Cyrus the Great's empire 14:08 - Yahwism 25:24 - Judaism came from Yahwism 36:48 - Biblical vs. extra-biblical narratives 50:44 - History's most popular religion 55:04 - The Bible is a "battlefield of ideas" 01:00:16 - Moses is not a historical person 01:06:59 - Advanced tech in ancient Alexandria 01:17:39 - Is the Septuagint originally Greek? 01:29:38 - Greek vs. Hebrew translations 01:41:16 - The problem with history 01:48:31 - Was Jesus a real person? 01:56:48 - Unsolved mysteries of antiquity 02:09:45 - Egyptian texts describe how the pyramids were built 02:19:27 - Patreon questions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:07Danny Jones?

  Dr. Gad Barnea, thanks for coming.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Pleasure to be here.

• 0:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I just got done listening to your podcast with Neil, Gnostic Conformant. It was fascinating stuff and I'm excited to chat with you about this stuff today. Can you just explain what your background is?

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Sure, so my focus is really on history of the, especially of the Iranian world, the ancient Iranian world, and the role of the Jews within that world of Jewish history, within the context of the Iranian world, the pre-Islamic, what I call the Age of Empires. So the Achaemenid Empire, the Parthian Empire, and the Sassanian Empire. So I'm focusing on these three empires, which together really kind of deeply impacted the ancient Near East for about a millennium together. So these three empires, unfortunately, in scholarship have been relatively little studied,

• 1:05Speaker 01

  little researched thus far, and so I'm trying to correct that and to focus on that particular perspective of the Iranian empires in the ancient Near East. And my main work is with the original material, the actual primary sources. So I do a lot of epigraphic work, dealing with actual papyri, leather scrolls, ostrica, and things like that. And ostrica, just for people who don't know, these are shards of jars and ancient things, you know, objects, household objects that were broken, and so people use that to write short messages on.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  And so these ostrica represent daily communications. There you go, yeah. So daily communications and short messages, these are the, that's the SMS of the ancient world, really, kind of the WhatsApp. The ancient world, these are, these are short.

• 2:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  These are short messages that were, that people handed to each other. And so you can learn so much from these documents, whether it's papyri, whether it's ostraka, whether it's other types of, of communication.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  And you can, you can read what the ordinary people, how they, what they thought about. These are people who never thought that these, that what they are writing will be studied, you know, 2,500 years later, or even two days later even. I mean, they were just written for, for someone to read at the same day or, or the, or the next. And so we learn, this is purely unfiltered data from antiquity. It's not Herodotus, which is obviously filtered data. Of course, the Bible is filtered through ideology. It's not any of that. It's really the direct record of what reality was in antiquity. And that's why it's so exciting. And I work with, with those primary documents a lot.

• 3:05Danny Jones?

  What set you in this direction from the start? Like, how did you get interested in this stuff? And what led you to specifically dig into things like this?

• 3:14Speaker 01

  It's a great question. Like, I think everyone in my field, it's, things were not necessarily planned out from the beginning this way. I, I was initially involved with some, with, with an NGO in Israel that was dealing with Jewish Christian dialogue. And from that, I started doing a lot of, we started doing conferences and I started doing lectures, but I, I really wasn't specializing in this field. And people said, well, you need to kind of really start specializing in this. And one thing led to another, and I eventually did my PhD on, on the island of Elephantine. So that's an island in Upper Egypt, meaning Southern Egypt.

• 3:59Danny Jones?

  Like in the middle of the Nile, right?

• 4:00Speaker 01

  It's in the middle of the Nile and it's an extremely important island, not just for Jewish history, but also for, I mean, mainly for Egyptian history for millennia, even before the Jews came there. It was already important for millennia. Anyway, this, this island. Which is just facing the city of Aswan, if for those who know, in southern Egypt.

• 4:23Danny Jones?

  Which is like 500 miles from Giza roughly?

• 4:25Speaker 01

  Um, in miles, I don't know, but it's very, it's really, it's really, it's not, I mean, it's about, so it's about an hour and a half by airplane from Cairo. Okay, so I did make that flight and so I can tell you it's, it's, it's far from Cairo. And, and so Egypt is a pretty large country and a beautiful place. And so Elephantine is this island just facing Aswan. You can, I mean, it's really close to Aswan. And this island was extremely important for the Egyptians' daily life, really, and for Egyptian cult. And I use cult in terms of just a synonym for religion. I don't use it pejoratively, just so you know.

• 5:06Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Um, but it was, but it was a central, a central island for Egyptian cult. It was, there were these three deities that were associated with this island that eventually became a triad of deities, Khnum, the ram, the ram god, and Satet and Anuket, two phenial deities,

• 5:31Speaker 01

  one of which was his wife and the other was considered his daughter. Anyway, this island initially was the island of Satet as the, as the main deity, but the island was seen to be, because this is the first cataract of the Nile, it was considered to be the, the source of the annual inundation of the Nile. So what happened on that island had implications for the economy of the entire country of Egypt. And it was on that island that in the sixth century before the current era, a Jewish community settled and, or was, it was actually brought there as mercenaries to, to guard what was for a while the southern border of Egypt.

• 6:16Danny Jones?

  600 B.C.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Sixth century, so around 550, according to my, to my calculations, my research, there are some, some scholars who dated much, much earlier. I mean, about a hundred years earlier than that. Um, but I I I published on this and I show that that this is the uh the most uh probable date is around five fifty. Um BCE that where they when they arrived there, five forty, five fifty. Um, anyway, so there was a Jewish community on that island and they had a temple, a fully functioning temple. Uh, they had uh priests, they had sacrifices, they, I mean, it was a temple about the same size of the Jerusalem temple and uh in a very, also a very important uh, a very important place of worship.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  So that was what I did my PhD on, on this community, and one thing led to another. Um, initially, I didn't really look to, like most of my colleagues, I didn't really look to Persia, I didn't look to uh to the Iranian uh sphere. But then I started noticing certain elements within these texts that pointed my attention more to, because of course, this was under the the already the Achaemenid Empire, was the empire ruling that area.

• 7:27Danny Jones?

  What what empire? I don't know, I'm not familiar with that empire.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  So that's the, that's Cyrus, King Cyrus, right? The uh that everyone, I'm sure, has heard of.

• 7:35Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  Cyrus the Great.

• 7:36Danny Jones?

  Except me. I know, I've heard of Cyrus.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Cyrus, you've heard. Um, so Cyrus the Great was, is considered kind of the founder of this empire. And um, and that's the, that is the first world superpower, really. Uh, it's a um, it is a um very, very important empire in the history of of humanity and certainly of Western, so-called Western civilization. Uh, the impact of the Achaemenids, so the Achaemenids is just the name of their kind of um mythological forefather of this, of this dynasty. And um, and so um, uh, this dynasty and this particular uh empire was something that the world has never seen before. Uh, we've seen, I mean, they've seen other empires before the Achaemenid Empire, but this is a superpower.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Uh, it had uh not just conquered a, an area that is greater than the Roman Empire at its greatest extent, by the way. A huge area from India all the way to, you know, to to to uh To Greece or to Macedonia and to uh and to the and parts of the Ukraine uh so I mean it's in and to Egypt and Libya today. So it's a huge, absolutely huge area um that they controlled and administered very, very effectively. And they controlled it uh with um I mean also with an ideology of of of how to rule these peoples. So it was something

• 9:01Speaker 01

  that the world has never seen and it impacted the Greek world, it impacted Greek philosophy, it impacted the Egyptians, of course, the Jews as well. Uh it really, the impact of the Achaemenid Empire is is with us to this day in many ways. Um so

• 9:18Danny Jones?

  And when did that empire start, the Achaemenid, Achaemenid, how do you say it?

• 9:21Speaker 01

  Achaemenid.

• 9:22Danny Jones?

  Achaemenid.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Achaemenid Empire, um roughly around 550, depending on how you look at it, but um some people date it from uh from the fall of Babylon to Cyrus, but really the ascension of Cyrus around 550 BCE. And um and then up to um up to Alexander the Great that um destroyed kind of uh took over. Um

• 9:45Danny Jones?

  Oh wow, that's a good map. Look, that's a lot.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:48Danny Jones?

  So all that pink, all that pink.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  All that, well, yeah, and more. I mean, even all the way to India. It this this actually

• 9:55Danny Jones?

  Holy smokes.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, this this actually shows you the different different stages. So the area in pink is just what Cyrus um the first, the first campaign uh or the first phase of Cyrus all the way up to Turkey, to the to modern Turkey. And then he went down to uh to conquer Babylon. And um yeah, so and and then, of course, the uh his dynasty um uh continued after that. Very complicated picture in in reality. But um but Cyrus uh was the one to conquer, to conquer this from the Medes, uh the Medean Empire, which was there for a short while. And um and then uh conquered uh conquered Babylon. Um and through Babylon,

• 10:40Speaker 01

  of course, he conquered, he took over the uh what was already the the Neo Babylonian Empire before him. And so that included Palestine. Um, and, um, and yeah, and he's, he was the first to kind of consolidate a, the first phase of this empire. Uh, he was succeeded by his son Cambyses, who then added Egypt and parts of Libya to this. And, um, and then Darius the Great, Darius the First actually made it into, into what it later became as this major superpower. Uh, Darius the First is truly one of the greatest, uh, greatest leaders in antiquity, uh, truly an impressive, uh, a very impressive person. Um, anyway, so, um,

• 11:23Danny Jones?

  And these writings that you were finding were in what language?

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Aramaic.

• 11:26Danny Jones?

  They're in Aramaic. Okay.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:29Danny Jones?

  Interesting. When you first started with looking at, looking in elephantine and find, you were finding these same things that were looking like fragments of vases and things with written Aramaic language on it?

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Right. So I wasn't finding the actual physical, so I'm not an archaeologist. I wasn't finding the physical, um, objects. These were already excavated in the, in the, at the beginning, most of them at the beginning of the 20th century.

• 11:54Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Um, and, um, many of them were published, but not necessarily published correctly. Uh, so several of my recent publications are correcting reading, uh, bad readings, um, or incorrect readings.

• 12:08Danny Jones?

  Like they were trying, they're getting the translations wrong?

• 12:11Speaker 01

  No, I mean, the reading was wrong, simply, uh, it's not just translation, but they weren't, um, reading, uh, the text correctly. They, they, some, in some cases, they weren't, they didn't understand the text correctly. Um, in one case that I'm, that's about to come out, um, I'm republishing in, in Ostracan, a relatively long Ostracan, um, that was first published in 1908, uh, but, uh, has been since, so for 116 years. Uh, it's been, it's been, um, it's been read, um, the wrong way. So inside out rather than, you know, so the, the direction of reading was, was incorrect for this long. Um, but this, I mean, this is part of what we do, what, what, the work of an epigrapher is extremely complex.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  It's not just reading the text. It's not just trying to say, well, this is an aleph, this is a bet, this whatever letter that is, but the context, the material, even the materiality of the object needs to be really taken, deeply taken into account. And that we've not, in my field, we've not been doing this, really up until now, the materiality was not, not given the proper place that it should have. So we look at the materiality, and that might impact the way we read the text, because we start seeing elements on the surface of the object that we didn't see before, and that might point us to a

• 13:36Speaker 01

  different letter than what we thought originally. So things like that. Epigraphy is very complex work, and it requires encyclopedic knowledge also, because some of these letters, some of these constructions, and some of the context might be, might come from a different culture. So for example, there are loan words from Persian, there are loan words from Egyptian that you need to know. It really requires a lot of, a lot of contextual knowledge.

• 14:07Danny Jones?

  So is Elephantine the first place that the idea of Yahwism developed? Or where did Yahwism come from?

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's a great question, but Elephantine is not, it's not where it initially developed. So Yahwism, well, I'll give you my definition of Yahwism first. So Yahwism is very simple.

• 14:28Danny Jones?

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• 16:25Speaker 01

  It's people who, for whom a deity by the name of Yao is the head of the pantheon. Okay, that's pretty much it. They have that element Yao in many of their names. So it's a theophoric element. Theophoric means holding the deity, holding the theos, the deity. And so a name that has a component with Yao, like Yao Xie or Yo Sha, or many other examples.

• 16:57Danny Jones?

  So if they participated in Yahwehism, or if they believed in Yahweh or Yahoo, they would incorporate his name into their name?

• 17:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that, I mean, not all of them necessarily, but this would be very, very common. And so Yahwehism is simply those people who identify for them, for their identity. For their ethnic identity and for their cultic identity, uh, the main deity, the head of the pantheon is a deity by the name of Yao. Uh, there are no, no specific, um, and unique cultic features, uh, such as commandments or observations or feasts that are necessarily unique to them. Uh, there are no special sacrifices or anything like that. They, they are very much like any other, uh, group around them.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Uh, they do the same sacrifices, they, they, they, uh, the generally speaking observe very similar feasts that are not specific necessarily to them, but are like agricultural observances that everyone is obviously, uh, going to observe around them. Right. Uh, so we don't see anything about, uh, early Yaoism that is necessarily unique, uh, except for the, the main deity that they have. Okay. Um, and so, uh, and so that's, that's really early Yaoism, very, very simple. Um, and that started, um, well, it's hard to know exactly when it started. We can only say when we start seeing it in the record. Um, now there are, there, there are debates about, um,

• 18:29Speaker 01

  where the first place that it's actually documented might be. Um, one place, um, there are two temples in what is today Sudan and what used to be, uh, southern Egypt or the extreme southern part of Egypt. Uh, two temples of Ramses the second. Uh, one is in Soleb, in a place called Soleb, and another in Amara West. And, um, and these two, uh, temples have lists of, uh, of people groups. Um, and one of, and in, in these two lists, there is a group that's called the Shasu of Yao. Now there's a question if Yao is simply a place name, is that really the deity Yao or, or not?

• 19:11Speaker 01

  I actually, for a long time I was, uh, I, I, I thought this, this could not be, uh, the deity Yao. But now I think that because of parallelism, uh, it is within this, it's in with, it's, uh, that, uh, people group is within a list. Of other groups where where there's a shasu, shasu just means the nomads. Okay, so the people who are nomads. So the shasu of Yao, it comes after the shasu of Baal, which is of course was another deity. And there's also a na, if I if I remember correctly. So you have you have parallelism with other deities, the shasu of other another deity within that same list. So it makes sense, or at least it the probability now becomes higher that this might be the deity Yahoo. And if that's the case, we're talking about, you know, 14th century

• 19:58Speaker 01

  before the common era, already the name, the name of that day of this deity. What century? 14th century. 14th century. Yeah. Whoa. So. What does Yahweh mean? Yeah, there are, we don't know. We really don't know. There are all kinds of theories for that. I had somebody in here told me it meant hail Zeus. No, no, that's definitely not. That's out of the question. That's out of the question. Yeah. But we don't know exactly what it means. I mean, of course, there is a much later folk etymology for it, which just means to be. You know, and that's we find that, of course, in in the Book of Exodus. Right. But that's a much later folk etymology for the name that explains it in as a as a name of existence.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  But but after these two, after Soleb and Amaro West in what is modern day Sudan, we don't hear about this for about this of this name for until the 9th century, the late 9th century in some stellos, like the Milsha stella and the Teldan stella.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  And Teldan is interesting because it also have has one of these theophoric names in it with Yao.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  And so these are, so for a long time, we don't, we it goes off the radar and then comes back.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  And and and what's but what's interesting is in the 8th century BCE,

• 21:22Speaker 01

  we have a person by the name of Yao Bidi.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  One of the most fascinating characters, we don't know a lot about this person, but he's, what we do know is absolutely fascinating. He was, uh, he's mentioned in the Neo Syrian,

• 21:38Speaker 01

  um, inscriptions as a king, as a Hittite, okay? And Hittite means that he comes from, you know, modern day Turkey, southern Turkey, and maybe the, the, the, um, the border with Syria. And, um, but he is a Hittite, according to the inscriptions, who is the king of Hamat, a city, an Aramean city, uh, in, um, in modern day Syria. And so he is a Hittite who rules a, an Aramean city, a non-Hittite city. And his name is Yaubidi. Now, the, um, the first, uh, component of the name Yaub is clearly the name of the deity Yahud, because in us,

• 22:18Speaker 01

  in the Akkadian language, there are, um, determinatives, there are like little drawings next to words that make sure that you understand what the meaning is. This is a person, this is a deity, it identifies. Uh, so a lot of these ancient languages had identifiers like that, or determinatives like that, that deter, that's, that told you if it, this is, if we're talking about a person, the people group, or a deity. Like they would draw little pictures next to it. Exactly, next to the, next to the, next to the noun. And so here, we, we see that there is the, the dingir, uh, it's called dingir, um, a determinative that ma, that means that this is a deity. So the Yaub component in his name is clearly the name of the deity. But he's not Judean, he's not Israelite, he's not even Canaanite, right?

• 23:03Speaker 01

  This guy is a Hittite from, um, you know, from modern day southern Turkey, uh, who was king of an Aramean, uh, city somehow. Um, and he is a Yahist. I mean, he is, for all intents and purposes, Jewish in that sense. Oh, wow. Uh, I mean, proto, proto-Jewish. Yahism is not, is not synonymous with Judaism, and we'll, I'm, I'm sure we'll get to that. But, um, but the, uh, but he is clearly a Yahist. And so, um, and that, that is fascinating. That's really all we know about him, and the only reason we know about him is that he rebelled. Against the new Assyrians and the new Assyrians captured him and killed him in a very, very gruesome way they they they describe it.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  And but the only reason we know about him is because he rebelled. I'm sure there are many others that simply did not make it into the record. But it but we do have proof that Yahwism existed outside of Judea, Samaria, or, you know, Israel. And and so and is certainly recorded up north in modern day where is modern day Syria. And so it looks like from the data that we have, the extra biblical data. In the Bible, there's other there are other hints that I think are much later and and and and and not necessarily historically anchored.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  But from what we have from extra biblical data, it looks like Yahwism started in the Aramean areas and so in the areas of of modern day Syria were were

• 24:46Speaker 01

  adopted by nomadic tribes in that area. And somehow at some point kind of migrated down to Canaan from Syria. And and so Yahwism became more

• 25:01Speaker 01

  more popular in Syria in in Canaan. But we already have we already, as I mentioned, we already have Yahwism in in Canaan already in the ninth century as well. So so the entire region already had the forms of Yahwism in it. From I'd say at least around the ninth, the ninth, eighth century before the common era.

• 25:25Danny Jones?

  And did Judaism come directly out of Yahwism?

• 25:28Speaker 01

  It's a great question.

• 25:29Danny Jones?

  Isn't that like the consensus? Or is that is that that's the like academic consensus?

• 25:34Speaker 01

  That is the the consensus and what I'm actually

• 25:39Danny Jones?

  What you're pushing back against?

• 25:40Speaker 01

  Pushing back against. Yahwism, so you're right, Yahwism is seen as kind of proto Judaism and it's and and and people usually argue that by the second century before the common era, Yahwism kind of disappears and we are left with Torah based Judaism.

• 25:58Danny Jones?

  Before when you say before the common era, you mean B.C.?

• 26:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:03Danny Jones?

  Okay, got it.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  I don't use B C A D.

• 26:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah, everybody has different thing. Every single Bible scholar, they have a different way of doing it. And I'm always confused. So that's why I try to like, figure out what you mean upfront.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:13Danny Jones?

  Because for me, it's just A B C A D.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I understand, I understand. So, uh, yeah, I just use these more objective.

• 26:21Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Objective terms. Um, so, so, um, about second, uh, second, uh, century before the common era.

• 26:29Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  We have, uh, Torah based Judaism. So Judaism per se, when you, when you really, uh, want to, uh, to talk about actual Judaism, you, you have to talk about people who are following certain commandments that are written in certain authoritative books, right? So the commandments that are enumerated in the Torah, for example, though, you know, observing the Sabbath, et cetera, et cetera. So that Judaism is, is by definition depends on knowledge of these commandments and observing these commandments.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Now, we have, we have thousands of documents from different Jewish, um, or Yahawistic, I should say, really, uh, settlements in various places in the ancient world. So from Egypt, from the southern part of Egypt, as I said, Elephantine, and all the way through, um, northern Egypt and then Palestine and then into Babylonia. Okay. Uh, we have thousands of documents, not all of them textual, some of them are coins, for example, but these are also very important.

• 27:33Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Um, but we really have thousands of documents altogether, but none of these documents, uh, betray the slightest knowledge of the Bible.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 27:45Danny Jones?

  They don't betray.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  They don't show any, they, they have no knowledge of the Bible in any of these documents. Okay. I mean, even not, uh, no idiomatic expressions, for example, that.

• 27:58Danny Jones?

  And when you say the Bible, you're talking about the Torah?

• 28:00Speaker 01

  The Bible in general.

• 28:01Danny Jones?

  In general.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  In general, but of course, the Torah is the main, is the main document that you would expect. Um, but, uh, yeah, it has absolutely zero, I mean, there's nothing, no, even the names, the personal names of people, uh, are not the names that we find in the, of, you know, the heroes of the Bible, like the 12 tribes, or Moses, or Aaron, or Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. None of the people that are. Yahists in in the this entire time period up until the beginning of the Hellenistic period, um, none of these people are named after literary heroes from the Torah or from the Bible in general, um, which is fascinating.

• 28:43Danny Jones?

  That is.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  When you when you think about this, now.

• 28:45Danny Jones?

  So so the the academic or religious viewpoint or consensus on this is that Judaism started around 1200, is that right? Or when what is the date that like Judaism?

• 29:01Speaker 01

  But you talk about academic and and religious, these are.

• 29:04Danny Jones?

  They're totally.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  These are going to be different things.

• 29:06Danny Jones?

  Right, like by and large, what what what is the idea of when Judaism?

• 29:11Speaker 01

  So the religious, I can't talk too much about the religious because there's a lot of different.

• 29:15Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  And I know that it there, I mean, like, really kind of fundamentalist religious folks would say, well, Judaism started with Abraham, really, right?

• 29:25Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  So, you know, it's about 2000 before the Common Era, somewhere like that.

• 29:30Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Um, and, you know, and then they'll they'll they'll go forward from that.

• 29:34Danny Jones?

  Um, but. So the the earliest people will say is 2000?

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Something.

• 29:39Danny Jones?

  B.C.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can't, again, I can't, I can't talk too much about the the.

• 29:42Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Religious.

• 29:44Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Perspective on this, but I think that that's what the.

• 29:46Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  What what is said in in in certain circles. Um, in academia, Judaism, I think now it's pretty much consensus that Judaism as such, meaning people who observe, who observe these commandments, uh, such as the Sabbath and the Passover and, you know, all these feasts, um, tabernacles, um, and etc., etc., and kosher, um, diet and all of that.

• 30:09Danny Jones?

  Follow the rules.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  All of these rules, second century of before the Common Era, so second century B.C.E., uh, that that's where we start to see, uh, to see people observing this extra biblically.

• 30:23Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Okay, in the Bible, that's a different story. But from what we start seeing extra biblically.

• 30:30Danny Jones?

  Outside the Bible.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  Outside the Bible. From these primary sources that I talked about earlier, right? We talked about the ostraka, we talked about the documents that are written by the simple folk. That, that, you know, they, they, they, they trade things, they, they do all kinds of activities on the Sabbath, for example, that are not permitted by the Torah. They, you know, they do a lot of stuff that is, that, that goes squarely against what is prescribed in, in, in, in the Torah, prescribed in Torah, but we don't have anything to show adherence to the Torah. We have a lot of negative examples, but we don't have anything to show that they knew anything about the Torah at all in that time period.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  So Judaism, from a purely extra biblical perspective, Judaism starts around the second, maybe, maybe late third century before the common era.

• 31:21Danny Jones?

  And if you want to not be extra biblical, you want to stay inside the Bible, when is it from?

• 31:27Speaker 01

  I mean, according to the Bible, according to certain interpretations of the Bible, we're talking about Abraham, right, to being kind of the founder of the, in, in a sense of, like, the covenant with God and things like that. Which, I mean, as a scholar, looking at this for a lot of reasons, this is, this is mythological.

• 31:47Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  And so, and I can say that with, with certainty in terms of, as a scholar.

• 31:55Danny Jones?

  When was Abraham again?

• 31:56Speaker 01

  It was supposed to be around 2000.

• 31:59Danny Jones?

  2000, got it, got it, okay.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  But the whole, the reason I'm very certain about this is that, first of all, again, we have thousands of documents, and none of them know anything about, about any of these stories, know, nothing. I mean, even the name Abraham doesn't exist anywhere within the, the sphere of, of Jewish life or Yahawistic life, anywhere. But also, the, the idea, so the, the whole concept of Abraham and the patriarchs, so Abraham, Isaac, Jacob.

• 32:26Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Is people coming from the east to establish a new nation, right? That's the whole concept of, of the patriarchs. Coming from the east, and even when Jacob and Isaac need to marry, they, they have to go back and marry someone from the east and, and bring them to Canaan. So the idea of people coming from the east and establishing a community is such a deeply hellenistic idea. So the in in the Hellenistic world.

• 32:54Danny Jones?

  When you say Hellenistic idea, what do you mean by that?

• 32:56Speaker 01

  Well, in the Hellenistic world, it was really important for a lot of these.

• 33:00Danny Jones?

  Well, what what Hellenistic means a certain timeframe, right?

• 33:03Speaker 01

  Correct. So we're talking really the the turn of the third century, late fourth century before the Common Era and really into into the the Common Era.

• 33:13Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  I mean, that's that's a that's a much wider, that's kind of Greco-Roman now that we're talking about, but it's still.

• 33:19Danny Jones?

  So like 550 B.C. is is as early as it gets, right?

• 33:23Speaker 01

  No, no, no, about 400.

• 33:24Danny Jones?

  Oh, 400, okay.

• 33:25Speaker 01

  About 400, not even not 400, about 300 and let's say 320 to to be. So the Hellenistic period around, you know, the the conquest of Alexander, Great and Forward.

• 33:37Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Uh, so about 320 ish and and into the Roman world. The Roman world that we talk, we call it Greco-Roman, but it's really still kind of continuing a lot of these Hellenistic sensibilities that they had. And so for the Greek world and for the Greco-Roman world, creating the mythology, the founding mythology of your people, whether it's a it's a Polis in the Greek world or even Rome, was someone coming from the East, which for them is always the kind of the early, the the old world, this myth, this this mystical.

• 34:18Danny Jones?

  Oh, interesting.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  World that comes from the East and establishes establishes their their country. So in several Polis in Greece were had had these legends about a this mythical founder coming from the East to establish them. And even Rome, at the height of its power, so under Augustus, or one of the of the of the heights of its power, under Augustus, Augustus commissioned Virgil to write the Aeneid, so the story, the mythological story of the founding of Rome, which is about the same size as the as the Torah, about the same.

• 34:56Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 34:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, number of verses and words as the Torah. So it's a lengthy work. Now, he had it to write it in meter and rhyme, which the Torah authors didn't have to deal with. So it's much harder. What he did is much harder. But he did that. And he also, it's called the Aniads because after Aniels, who was this mythological hero from Homer, from the Trojan War. And so they built this entire idea how he is coming from Troy, so from the east, to establish Rome. Okay, so this idea of someone coming from the east to establish a new race or a new city

• 35:39Speaker 01

  or a new settlement is something that is deeply Hellenistic.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  And we see that here. So with the story of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, these founders coming from the east. That is so, in many ways, so Hellenistic in its core.

• 35:58Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  And again, we simply have absolutely zero, zero knowledge anywhere. It's not, I mean, these patriarchs, I mean, and the names of the matriarchs either, Sarah, Rachel, Leah, et cetera, are not found in the document record at all. None of the women that are mentioned anywhere in these thousands of documents that we have are named like that. And none of the men are named after these literary heroes from the Bible. So no, there is zero, simply zero knowledge of the Bible anywhere up until the beginning of the Hellenistic era. So that's why, for these reasons and others,

• 36:44Speaker 01

  it is certainly clear to me that these things are mythological, Abraham, all of these.

• 36:49Danny Jones?

  Is this, is this new? Or has this been known for forever?

• 36:55Speaker 01

  Well, certainly not forever. And.

• 36:57Danny Jones?

  I mean, like, has this been, how long have academics been aware of this and been talking about it publicly?

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Well, not long. I mean, the fact that there is such a deafening silence before Alexandria, really.

• 37:14Danny Jones?

  Whoa, bless you. Scared the shit out of me.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Okay. So, the fact that there is this deafening silence before the turn of the third century, and I'll talk about Alexandria, I'll talk about my analysis of the historical background here, but the fact that there was this deafening silence is relatively new. Most scholars, unfortunately, are really looking, I think, too much into the biblical narrative rather than the historical narrative, rather than the primary narrative. And the biblical narrative has its raison d'être.

• 37:52Danny Jones?

  That's something I've talked about on this podcast so many times, and that's another funny thing about biblical scholars that I've had on the show. They all have different ideas of things, different opinions on events or historical texts. And I always thought it was an odd thing for someone to be a religious scholar, because typically those people, they subscribe to the very religion that they're studying and they're dedicating their work to. So, there's a built-in bias to doing this.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  That's right. I write a lot about that, about this bias, and I've lectured about this, about the problems of bias. In fact, we talked before we came on air, we'd actually talked about this astron that I'm republishing that was read the wrong way for 116 years.

• 38:41Danny Jones?

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• 39:54Speaker 01

  One of the reasons that it was read the wrong way was because of bias. Okay, because of this built in bias. Another, another article of mine that just came out a few weeks ago. In a book that I've, that I, that I edited together with Professor Reinhard Kratz from Germany, from Gottingen.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  Reanalyzes a document, a papyrus called the Passover Papyrus. Now it has nothing to do with the Passover, but the reason, but it was, it was already. Analyzed as something related to the Passover because of the date range that it, that is. Mentioned in this document.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  And so the date range, that's, that's actually a perfect example. In this document, which is very fragmentary, but we do see something related to the date, to the dates. The 15th and the 21st of Nisan, the month of Nisan, which is a Babylonian name. Month name, but it is used in the Bible a lot. And these, that corresponds to the Passover. Those dates do correspond at least to the feast of Matzot. Part of the Passover feast. So they saw these dates and like, oh, that's the Passover, right?

• 41:04Speaker 01

  But that's absolutely, that, that is not a critical approach to the text, right? Immediately you say, well, because I was raised in a Jewish or Christian background. Therefore, these dates are meaning, meaningful to me. And they mean the Passover. But if you step, yeah, exactly. If you look at this critically, you realize that these are, this is simply the first full moon of the year. Fifteenth of Nisan. Nisan is the first month of the year in, in, in, both in Babylonian and in Persian, in the Persian administration. So that's the first month of the year and the first full moon of the year. And most importantly, the beginning of the harvest. Now, in the ancient world, the harvest was the season that would dictate whether you live or die.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  I mean, if the deity, if you're about to harvest, everything that you worked on for months, planting and, and, and taking care of the year of, you know, and so you're about to harvest. And if the, if the deity is now going to, um, you know, uh, send hail down and, and destroy the crops or flooding or, you know, all kinds of storms, you will die. I mean, your family will not be able to survive for the next year. So this was an extremely important, uh, I mean, month of Nisan, the beginning of the harvest was an extremely important, uh, time for the entire northern hemisphere, not just, I mean, this is the beginning of harvest. And so, um, so looking at the dates of that, those dates in the middle of the month of

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Nisan is necessarily being related to the Passover is, is simply not, you know, not understanding the ancient world. Um, and that is, that projection is, is rampant, unfortunately, in scholarship.

• 42:44Danny Jones?

  Yes. And then there's another problem where people don't like to drift from the general narrative. They don't like to, they don't like to say things that most of their colleagues will disagree with or cast them outside of like the lane that they're supposed to be in because they had the risk of being whatever, shunned by their colleagues or their university or, or whatever it is, the institution that they're a part of. They like to be, you know, they like to be a part of the team. They don't want to go outside the box most of the time.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  That, that's true, but I think in many cases, they truly believed this because they were, they were, they were, we, I mean, I mean, when I approached this text, I also had this projection as well. I was able to step back and look at it more objectively because of other things that I was seeing. So then I started questioning this and then I was able to step back. But I also, at the beginning, had the same projection because I was also brought up in the same sphere, right? In the same... And so I think for a lot of these scholars, this is simply, this is genuine. I mean, they really think when they see these dates automatically, especially if within a Yahwehistic context. This is not a... If they see these dates in an Egyptian context, a purely Egyptian context, they wouldn't necessarily connect it to the Passover.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  But since they're seeing it within a Yahwehistic context, they're like, okay, this has to be, this has to be the Passover. But even within a Yahwehistic context, it doesn't necessarily have to be. Now, what they were, a lot of scholars up to very recently have been saying, "Well, this document, this so-called Passover letter, shows that the Passover was observed in the 5th century before the Common Era." Meaning, this is the first proof that we have extra biblically of anyone observing this particular festival. Now, every time as a historian, every time you deal with the firsts, you need to be extra careful, right? I mean, it's very different dealing with the second occurrence or a third occurrence because you already know there was a first.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Right. So you're not even asking whether such an observant even existed. But when you're dealing with a first occurrence of something, you need to be extra vigilant. And this is, according to many scholars, this would have been the first occurrence of the Passover as a festival. But then you need to step back and say, "Well, is what we are looking at really the Passover?" Okay, and my answer is no. For a lot of reasons that I talk about in this article. And actually, I connected to Zoroastrian, to the Zoroastrian cult. And again, I use cult not pejoratively, but I use this as a synonym for religion.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  But I connected to the Akhenint version, so really early Zoroastrianism, and I explain why in that article. So, in that...

• 45:45Speaker 01

  Analysis, connecting it to a Kaminid Zoroastrianism, is based on a lot of data, or, you know, on significant data, whereas there is nothing to connect this, at that stage, to the biblical Passover. Okay. So when you compare the two, the chances are much stronger that it is connected to a Zoroastrian or Zoroastrian-related observance than it is to the biblical Passover.

• 46:13Danny Jones?

  Have you received any sort of pushback, or any sort of backlash, for talking about this kind of stuff?

• 46:21Speaker 01

  I mean, I've had people disagree, of course, which is normal. Nothing really too aggressive against this, but I did have people disagree with this. But without a lot of, I mean, just people just saying, "Well, I don't buy this," without explanation, without saying, "Well, these are the reasons why," you know. I would expect people to, and I'm fine, of course, I mean, science always progresses through people seeing things differently, and disagreeing, and we all progress together. But when people just say, "I disagree," without explaining it, you know, just, "I disagree because I disagree," that's not a good, that's not a good approach. So, and I've had a lot of that. I mean, not

• 47:03Speaker 01

  a lot, but I have, I had some of that. The thing is, in the article, I really try, and in my different, you know, lectures about this in different places, I start by showing how, just how wide the Zoroastrian impact on the elefantine Yahwist community was, independently of this particular document. And then I zero in on this document after the reader already understands that this is not the only place where you find Zoroastrian influence, right? So there is a much wider context, and then we zero in on this particular document. And it's really important to go that way, in order to understand that this

• 47:46Speaker 01

  is not just a singular event. The influence of a Kaminid... Zoroastrianism was deep and very intimate to the people at Elefantine and I think to the Yahists or early Jews in general.

• 48:03Danny Jones?

  And Yahweh, back then, it wasn't necessarily like an exclusive thing to be a Yahweh. You could partake, pick and choose a dozen religions and practice them all, just like you go out to a restaurant on any given day of the week, you can pick and choose. It's not like today in Christianity and Judaism where you subscribe to one thing for life, essentially.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you're right. I mean, it was different. It wasn't exactly like this. It wasn't like picking and choosing, but it was also not exclusive. So, in the beginning, in the early period at Elefantine, the Yahristic community, we do find documents like where people bless each other by the name of Yah and Canu, who is the local Egyptian god. So, "I bless you by both deities." Or they take oaths by the local female deity goddess Satit, or other cases like that. And very common, just "I bless you by the gods," plural, all the gods. I don't mention the specific name, I just, "You're blessed by the gods."

• 49:09Speaker 01

  And so, that's very common in that period, not just at Elefantine, but in general. Just not mentioning all the gods, because there are so many, "You're blessed by the gods." And, but these are Yahists. These are Yahists. But the reason I use the word "cult" so much and not "religion" is because these are systems of adherents to specific deities for specific reasons. But religion, properly speaking, when we talk about religion, it's a system of observances, you know, like going to mass, for example, for Catholics, or going to the synagogue

• 49:50Speaker 01

  and doing certain specific, very specific and unique things for that specific religion.

• 49:55Danny Jones?

  Practices.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Practices. In antiquity, you didn't really have religion as such. You had cultic systems, but there were, a lot of them had common, they were so, so if you would go and observe a sacrifice in a Yahristic temple, and then you go and you observe a sacrifice in a Phoenician temple.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  They would be almost identical. I mean, these observances would be very, very close to one another. So you'd have cultic differences, but not really religious as such. The observances themselves were not that different. Right. The language might have been a little bit different, possibly, and things like that. But the actual practices were not that different from one another. So we don't use the word religion at that point. That's really what I wanted to say. But actually, going back to what you said earlier about Yahwehism being early Judaism or not. Yeah. And that's really important. Yahwehism as such continued, so it spawned Judaism around the third century before the Common Era.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  Judaism, so when authoritative texts that eventually became the Bible started to become, to be collected and made into a corpus of texts, which is about the third century. At that point, Judaism started to take its own route. But Yahwehism continued unabated. It continued in parallel to that. And you had Yahwehs who did not subscribe to these authoritative texts. And in Egypt and other places. So Yahwehism continued. It spawned Judaism often, then Judaism spawned off Christianity.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  But Yahwehism continued. And Yahwehism continued to be the most popular and the most important, really, the most central form of adherence to the deity Yahweh.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  While Judaism and Christianity were developed in parallel to that. And so Yahwehism, if we were to be transported back now, maybe 1800 years, 1900 years, or 2000 years back, and wanted to know what form of Yahweh Cult is the most popular. Uh, Yahwism would be the, by far, the most popular at that period, more than Christianity or the, or, or Judaism.

• 52:25Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 52:26Speaker 01

  And the reason I say that is because we find all over the Roman Empire, and even outside the Roman Empire, we find, um, texts, uh, amulets, uh, cursed texts, um, and, and, and all kinds of, um, you know, uh, magical paraphernalia that people used, um, in order to protect themselves by the name of Yah.

• 52:49Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  And so, and we find them all over the empire, all over the empire. It's much more, it is so, it was so popular that even Roman, um, Roman, um, historians and Roman philosophers wrote about, who are not Jewish, who are not Christian, um, they would write about Yah and, and his importance in the, in the Federation of the Deities. And so, um, and so Yahwism continued in parallel to the development of Judaism and Christianity. And that is something that's really unique about my research. So my research focuses on Yahwism, um, as, as, as a religion, as almost an unseen and

• 53:32Speaker 01

  unknown religion that we didn't really see before, because we are so, again, because of these projections that we have.

• 53:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  Looking back at the Bible, so there's only New Testament and Hebrew Bible, there's nothing beyond that.

• 53:43Danny Jones?

  Right, it's so crazy.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, th- these are the blinders that we have.

• 53:47Danny Jones?

  I just read this book by a guy named Thomas Paine, I'm sure you're familiar with him, but he, he lays it out in such a compelling way where he explains that like, the Bible is essentially a book of testimony. So today, in today's world, in court, if somebody has a testimony, it doesn't mean it's truth, right? It's just a testament, it's somebody's recollection of something that happened, that they, they claim to be as true. It doesn't mean it's, has to be true, it's up to the jury.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:13Danny Jones?

  Okay, now, take it and make it anonymous. So now say, we have testimony, but we don't know who the person who said this is, and we don't actually have it straight from their mouth, right? Now, take it to another level and say, "It's the most extraordinary thing you've ever heard in your life by an anonymous person, and his testimony, they said the sun and the moon stood still by the command of one person." So, like, if that's what the Bible is made up of, that's so crazy. And it's just like, it really, like, that book that he, I forget the name of the book right now, I think it's The Age of Reason, where, you know, it really, really lays out the history of the different versions of the Bible, and how it was edited, redacted, and added to over millennia.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  Right. So, yeah, so, I mean, that's, I'm not familiar, actually, with that book, but the Bible, I, the way I explain the Bible to my students and to, in general, is, and I believe the correct way to look at the Bible, is, it's a battlefield of ideas. And so, like, people often say, "Well, you, you, you, you take the testimony of Herodotus, right? And you, you, you put more weight on what Herodotus said about the history of those, that period, more over the Bible, so why do you trust Herodotus more than the Bible?" First of all, I don't. Even with Herodotus, I'm extremely critical, and I do not trust anything just blindly, even if it's Herodotus.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  But there is a big difference between Herodotus and the Bible. The Bible is a book that defined the identity of a people, and of different sects within the Jewish realm, right? So you had a lot of different sects competing for ideas. You know, the Pharisees, Sadducees, the Ascians, et cetera. You had all of these different sects competing for, and the Enochians, and we had a lot of different sects competing for, for ideas. And theological ideas, what is redemption, what is salvation, what are the end times? You know, all of these different ideas competing against one another. No one was defined, no one's identity was defined by Herodotus, okay?

• 56:27Speaker 01

  That's not, he did not, no one said, "I'm a Herodotian," right? But people did define their identity by the Bible. So that's a different, a completely different corpus, and the impact is completely different.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  Now, the reason I say it's a battlefield is because the different redactions, different additions, different uh um uh treatments that the Bible um had to go through um were different ideologies competing against one another and you see that in the text. Um you see things that are, you know, go to one direction or the other another direction. And the text, the text contains all of them. And if not, if the Bible does not contain works that did not make it into the Bible, apocryphal texts do contain them, okay? So even the addition of the Bible and eventually making the Bible into a canonical work,

• 57:23Speaker 01

  that process also is ideological, deciding which book would get in and which book is not going to be in and things like that. So the Bible is truly a battlefield of ideas. And I think that's part of the beauty of this work, the fact that it is. I mean, the Bible is a very beautiful work regardless of religious, the religious perspective. And I think the main beauty of this book is its humanity. And what I mean by that is that the power of this text comes from geography. And what I mean by that is that it was written at the place which is, if you look at where Palestine is, where Israel is, right?

• 58:08Speaker 01

  With that plot of land is, um, in the map. You see, it's the bridge between Asia, between Europe, Asia and Africa. That's the land, the only land bridge between these three continents. Every single empire, every army had to go through that region. So every, every culture in antiquity from Western Asia and Europe and Egypt, of course not China, but every, every military, every culture from those areas had to leave a mark.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  On that land and on the people and so they they shared their ideology, they shared their theology, they shared their views with the people of this land. And that's what gives, I think, the Bible its uniqueness because it just it's a big, this huge mixture of of different perspectives that were left behind by the great empires and the and the different groups that came in and out of that region. So it's really a product of the geography of where it was composed. And the beauty of it is really that we see elements that from from Indo Iranian through the Akhenites, for example, from so from the Indo Iranian sphere, we see from the Greeks, we see a lot of the Egyptian

• 59:29Speaker 01

  and the Assyrian and the Babylonians, et cetera, and the Hittites. So we see all of these different elements come in and get kind of mixed up in the in the biblical text. And I think that's what gives it a lot of its a lot of its beauty and richness. You have these all of these cultures coming together. And for my research, I I kind of reverse engineer this. So I look at that and I go back into the into the into the actual cultures and see and and look at the at the at the try to reverse engineer the original direction that they took. And and especially looking at the at the Iranian world,

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  which which had a tremendous impact.

• 1:00:16Danny Jones?

  And who who was the first person to mention Moses?

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• 1:01:07Danny Jones?

  This is one of the things I spoke-

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  Extrabiblically, right?

• 1:01:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I spoke with Neil about this.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:11Danny Jones?

  And he was explaining to me essentially that Moses wasn't ever mentioned until like a thousand years after he died.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Well, if Moses is a historical person-

• 1:01:21Danny Jones?

  If he's real.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  Which he's not.

• 1:01:22Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  Um, I mean, I'm going to say it very clearly. It's not, and we shouldn't be surprised that it's not a historical person.

• 1:01:30Danny Jones?

  And why do you say that?

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  Um, well, so I'll answer your question first. Moses is really kind of the first extrabiblical mention of Moses is found in Hecateus of Abdera. And who was the Greek writer, writing around the turn of the third century before the common era. And he talks about a Moses. Now, there are about, according to my calculation, about between 11 to 13 different Moseses in Greek, in the Greek sources. And these are very different, it's the same name, but completely different stories about this person.

• 1:02:09Danny Jones?

  Similar stories or no?

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  No, no, different stories.

• 1:02:11Danny Jones?

  Different stories.

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  Same name, but different stories. Um, and that's really, really very, very interesting. So we have Moses as this military leader, great military leader defeating the Ethiopians. We have Moses as a Egyptian priest.

• 1:02:28Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  We have Moses as the teacher of Orpheus, this great musician, you know, the great singer, musician, and the teacher of, and the reason why, because it sounds like muse, right? Moses, so he's a teacher of Orpheus. We have him as a magi, as an alchemist, as a magician. We have, so we have all, a lot of different, and we have him also as a police builder. We have him as the, as the one who built Jerusalem. We have him as the one who divided the Jewish people into 12 tribes. Things that are not in the Bible, right? I mean, you, the idea of twelve tribes does exist in the Bible, of course, but not as tribes

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  that Moses divided, you know, it's not, it's not the same story. So we have, we have, you know, eleven to thirteen different Moseses and we have about four different Exodus narratives in the Greek world around in the third century. And many of them are simply, they don't know about the Bible, about the biblical version. They're not polemicizing, they're not arguing with the biblical version, they're just saying this is the way it was. Huh. Um, how, on the flip side, actually, the biblical version is polemicizing against these, uh, these other sources. So clearly it's later, right? In order to, to, to disagree with someone, you have to come later, right? Right. You have to know about it and to, uh, so, so the biblical version of the Exodus narrative

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  is polemicizing against a lot of these Greek sources and trying to correct them and to, and to protect, um, the Jewish people from some of these interpretations that seem to be, uh, offensive to the Jewish people. Um, and so that we do find in the Bible. So the Exodus story is clearly later and clearly, uh, reacting to these, um, uh, to many of these Greek, uh, Greek sources. And that's a good reason to say this is mythological, because you have so many different Moseses and you have so many, and you have, uh, at least four different Exodus narratives. And, and the biblical version of that just polemicizes against all of these other sources. Wow. And, uh, so it comes later and it's, it's eclectic.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  It, it, it looks at all of these different directions. So, um, yeah, so that's, um, I think a very compelling argument. It's not from, a lot of people say, well, Moses didn't, didn't exist and the Exodus didn't happen because of archaeological reasons. We don't find any archaeology to support Moses existing and, and, and the Exodus of the people out of Egypt. Yeah, but that's an argument from silence. And that's true, and it's certainly true, and it's important to take into account, but, um, but ultimately people can say, well, you know. They were nomads, we might have somehow missed that particular point in time. So archaeology is very convincing up to a point, but then it's an argument from science. What I'm showing in my research is that, and I put archaeology aside, even though again,

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  it's important, but it's simply not a slum, it's not absolutely 1% convincing argument. I think when you look at the Greek sources and you see how many different views, I mean, even within all of these sources that I mentioned, there are later generations that amplify these stories about Moses and add data to it later on. So you have a lot of difference, I mean, even several generations of these stories developing in parallel to the biblical one. Oh, wow. I mean, we're talking about a very, very rich corpus about a person, a very well-known

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  person called Moses, not necessarily the Jewish, or not necessarily the biblical Moses, although he's always associated with the Jews in some point, in some way, shape or form. But sometimes he's associated with the Jews in a very offensive way. So for example, he is depicted as a leper. And he is depicted as a leper and the people, the Jewish people are a people of leper, according to this Greek, to some of these Greek sources. And that was, of course, offensive to the Jewish people. And within the Torah, they polemicize against it, they fight against that idea. And they say, well, and that's why in the Torah you see so much about leprosy.

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  There's so much dealing with leprosy and dealing with keeping pure. I mean, leprosy was a fact of daily life in the ancient world. It wasn't something you would obsess over. But the Torah deals with leprosy all over the place, even with Moses. Moses is a leper for a short period of time in the story of the burning bush. So in the story of the burning bush, he kind of puts his hand into his cloak and takes it out and it's lepers and then he puts it back in and it's healed. But then also all of the people have to deal with leprosy and there's a lot of rules about leprosy, even leprosy of the house and the leprosy of the clothes. I mean, things that are not. Natural, right?

• 1:07:29Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  And so this obsession with nepotcy, I believe, is part of the pushback against this um, this um, kind of pejorative view of cer- some of the Greek sources against the Jewish people.

• 1:07:43Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:07:45Danny Jones?

  I want to talk about Alexandria.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:48Danny Jones?

  So is it true there was, there was absolutely, so I think basically what we've already, what you've already said, um, is that there is no evidence of the Bible before the Library of Alexandria?

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  Right, I mean, more specifically before the 30th, 3rd century.

• 1:08:04Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  That corresponds to the founding of the Library of, of Alexandria as a phenomenon.

• 1:08:10Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:11Danny Jones?

  And so who, I know you explained this on Neil's podcast, I thought it was fascinating, the, the two guys who were students of Aristotle who created Alexandria?

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  Well, that's Alexander great and Thalmy.

• 1:08:22Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  Childhood friends who studied in the academy, in Aristotle's academy.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  And, and later with, I mean, Pyrrhus, who was the heir of Aristotle, uh, took over the academy and, uh, was probably the visionary, uh, for the, the Library of Alexandria or for the

• 1:08:40Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  The phenomenon of Alexandria. The reason I say phenomenon of Alexandria is that Alexandria in antiquity was truly a science fictional, uh, uh, city. I mean, it was something that the world has ever seen before. It, it wasn't just

• 1:08:53Danny Jones?

  Silicon Valley, something like that.

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  Something like Silicon Valley, but, um, but truly, I mean, what they had, uh, if you go to, I mean, it was new, a new city. I mean, it was built by, I mean, it was conceived by Alexander and, and, and, and, and, um, and, and constructed in a way to reflect the, the, the, uh, vision of Aristotle for a kind of rational city that is designed in a grid, you know, in the grid, as, as a grid. And it had the coin operated machines, for example. It had a

• 1:09:28Danny Jones?

  What?

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  Yep. It had coin-operated machines.

• 1:09:32Danny Jones?

  Like vending machines?

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  Like vending machines, exactly. No, it was truly, it was truly, it was truly ahead of its time. It had automatic doors that opened automatically.

• 1:09:44Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  Yep, yeah.

• 1:09:45Danny Jones?

  How did that work?

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  So that particular, I mean, the, not everywhere, of course, but in the temple. The automatic doors, the heat of the sacrifice that you offered before the doll, before the door of the temple, would cause this hydraulic action below the surface that would make the doors open. So you would offer the sacrifice and that would cause the doors to actually open seemingly automatically and have the, and have the deity accept the sacrifice.

• 1:10:18Danny Jones?

  That's crazy!

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  Yep, yep.

• 1:10:22Danny Jones?

  Automated, oh, this says using ropes and pulleys, okay.

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it was, it was, it was triggered by the heat of the, of the fire.

• 1:10:31Danny Jones?

  Wow. And what were the coin-operated machines for? Like, what did they use those for?

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  I don't know, all kinds of, I mean, that's very, when you have a coin, I mean, the weight of the coin didn't open.

• 1:10:41Danny Jones?

  Like a lever and a pulley, right.

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  I mean, that's very straightforward, but even you have to think about that, you know, to do it.

• 1:10:46Danny Jones?

  Oh yeah, for sure.

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, that, I mean, in antiquity, you would go, anyone would go there, it would be truly science fictional, something that you've never seen before. And now, the library, we often talk about the library, but the library was a part of a part of a much bigger

• 1:11:03Danny Jones?

  Metropolis.

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  No, no, just a complex of the palace of, of Ptolemy. And so there was this huge palace complex that included a, a temple for the muse, for the muses. This, this place where you would, you could walk around and philosophize and think and, and come up with new ideas. So these, this place, this museum.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  Which we use for museum today. But this museum, this place of the muse, had within it a library. Okay, so that's the Library of Alexandria, the famous Library of Alexandria. Now, what's unique about Library of Alexandria? Technically, we had libraries even before Alexandria. But those libraries, like the Library of Ashur, Banipal, and other great monarchs of antiquity, those libraries were really more archives than libraries. They were there in order to store texts and to train scribes. And mostly to store omen texts, texts that predict the future. And they wanted to be able to store those texts and refer back to them.

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  And so those other archives really were very different from the Library of Alexandria. The Library of Alexandria was also about storing, of course, keeping important texts stored. But the main goal there was to implement the vision of Aristotle on how to deal with texts that disagree with one another, so different manuscripts. So they had different manuscripts, for example, of Homer. And they saw that there are all kinds of contradictions between these manuscripts of the same work. And they developed the methodologies to sometimes put them side by side, the different versions,

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  sometimes harmonize them, sometimes modify them, or remove one version and keep only one. All kinds of methodologies to deal with different versions of the same story in different manuscripts. We see the same exact methodologies applied to the Bible. Okay, exactly the same. We see like, you know, we see two accounts side by side. We see harmonizations, we see the same type of editing methodologies applied to the Bible as well.

• 1:13:25Danny Jones?

  It's like ChatGPT of antiquity.

• 1:13:27Speaker 01

  If you want to look at it that way, yeah. But it's, as I said, before Alexandria, so before the turn of the third century. I should say, as a historian, I came to this from a different angle. I noticed that before the turn of the third century, there is nothing.

• 1:13:48Danny Jones?

  Nothing, what do you mean nothing?

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  No, as we said, there is absolutely no trace of any hint of knowledge of anything biblical. In all of these thousands of talk, we talked about it earlier, there's absolutely nothing. There's this deafening silence before the turn of the third century. But around the turn of the third century, we see those Greek writers starting to talk about things that are reminiscent, at least of the Bible, like Moses and things like that. Not necessarily, that doesn't necessarily mean that they knew of the biblical text. Right? Again, if we talk, if we go back to what we talked about earlier about projection, the fact that they mentioned Moses or they mentioned the 12th tribe doesn't mean that they knew about the biblical text. They might have been familiar with-

• 1:14:31Danny Jones?

  This was the source for the later biblical. This is, could have been the sources, first sources taken out of context for the later Bible.

• 1:14:39Speaker 01

  Right. What I argue is that some of the biblical text is, is kind of arguing against these Greek, these Greek sources. But they might reflect certain traditions that were oral traditions in the, among the Jews of Alexandria, for example, at the time. They, they might reflect all kinds of other, other traditions that we're not familiar with. But they don't necessarily mean that they were familiar with the biblical text, because they are not, they are not really arguing with the biblical text. That's the main point.

• 1:15:07Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  They're coming in and saying this was the case and they're not trying to show that the biblical text is wrong. Whereas the biblical text is trying to show that they're wrong.

• 1:15:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:15:16Speaker 01

  So that's, that means that, that actually hints at certain, a certain precedence here of the Greek sources over the biblical sources. And so, because when you're arguing against something, you clearly are coming later.

• 1:15:30Danny Jones?

  By the way, what, out of all of the texts that were in the Library of Alexandria, do you know like what language they were in for the most part?

• 1:15:40Speaker 01

  I mean, the vast majority, of course, is Greek. And that's, that's another thing. The Library of Alexandria was constructed in order to-

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  Organize the Greek world, the works, the great works of the Greek world and to create authoritative editions and clean editions and the most accurate editions according to the scientific standards of that day for the Greek world. Okay, so they were very Hellenocentric.

• 1:16:12Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:16:13Speaker 01

  There is in scholarship and historically, a lot of people claim that there's this idea coming from the letter of Aristaeus, a very famous document written to describe how the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek. Okay, but it's also a myth, I mean, it's not a very historical document. We call it often in scholarship, we call it pseudo-Aristaeus. And there's a lot of-

• 1:16:43Danny Jones?

  That's what we were talking about before.

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:44Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:16:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so it's a very important document, but it's not a very historically, you know, trustworthy document. But it's a very important one because it does show what the Jews wanted to show to the world in the second century of the, before the common era.

• 1:17:02Speaker 01

  To the Greek world, how they wanted to present themselves. And in it, in that document, in this letter of Aristaeus, supposedly the king Ptolemy wanted to commission a translation of the Hebrew Bible into the Greek. Okay, and in order to keep that in the Library of Alexandria. There are a lot of problems with that idea. First of all, as I said, they were not really interested in anything that's not Greek.

• 1:17:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  The idea of them commissioning a work like that is simply antithetical to how Alexandria operated. They were not this, you know, cosmopolitan. There's a much later kind of romantic idea that Alexandria was this cosmopolitan place where all cultures were treated equally and there was this great kumbaya of cultures.

• 1:17:56Danny Jones?

  Greek supremacy.

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, and a lot of that comes from, actually from the time of the French Revolution. Where the intellectuals wanted to show that Christianity is the source of all evil. And so, look at how humanity was before Christianity with this absolutely great, universal, you know, everyone was working together and then it was destroyed. But the reality was that Alexandria was very Hellenocentric. Now, another really important point that a lot of scholars miss is that the Septuagint is not Greek. As such, it's not Greek Greek.

• 1:18:34Danny Jones?

  For people who are new to this stuff, can you explain what the Septuagint was?

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  So the Septuagint is this translation of the, especially of the Torah, of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible into something that is Greek-related.

• 1:18:49Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:18:49Speaker 01

  And the reason I'm saying Greek-related because it's not, it's not actual Greek. It's Hebrew Greek, it's Jewish Greek, it's Judeo-Greek, it's kind of like Yiddish.

• 1:18:59Danny Jones?

  Judeo-Greek, that's crazy, I've never heard of that before.

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  Right, it is, so I come, I come from classical studies. And so I studied Greek, classical Greek for a long time. And so for me, coming into and reading the Septuagint or the New Testament, which is an extension of the Septuagint in terms of its language.

• 1:19:17Speaker 01

  It's, it was, it was almost shocking, it was almost uncomfortable. For anyone coming from classical Greek or from Greek Greek to read the Septuagint because it's not, in some cases even look, it seems to be wrong, it seems to be badly written.

• 1:19:33Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  Some of the terms that it's using don't make sense in Greek, but when you know the Hebrew term behind it, it's an exact translation into the Greek of the Hebrew term.

• 1:19:44Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  So it's Hebrew, it's really very much, I'm sure a lot of people listening to this know about Yiddish. So Yiddish is Jewish German, right? That's the, it's, it's, it's a German language but adopted by the-

• 1:19:56Danny Jones?

  I didn't even know that.

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, okay, so Yiddish is Jewish German.

• 1:19:59Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:20:00Speaker 01

  And it's the German, it's based on German language, but it has a lot of words in Hebrew. Also kind of, kind of sprinkled in. And, and that's the same thing with the Greek of the, of the Septuagint. It's not, so- For Ptolemy or anyone to commission a work that would be written in a Jewish Greek, not in Greek Greek, makes little sense.

• 1:20:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah, why would you create some new Jewish Greek? Why wouldn't you just make it into real Greek?

• 1:20:28Speaker 01

  Right, so that was probably the Greek that was spoken by the Jews of Alexandria. So it was written for them. It was not, so that's the language that, the Greek that they had for their own identity in Alexandria. And there was a pretty large community within, of Jews in Alexandria from the beginning, from Alexander. Alexander had Jewish mercenaries with him and he gave them land, or at least he settled them in Alexandria. And so, and so this language that it was translated into is not Greek Greek. And that's extremely important to realize. And unfortunately, a lot, in many cases, that is not really, people don't realize this as they should.

• 1:21:12Danny Jones?

  So, so when you want to compare Hebrew to Greek, how much Hebrew literature is there from that part, that time?

• 1:21:22Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a great question.

• 1:21:24Danny Jones?

  The Dead Sea Scrolls are from when again?

• 1:21:26Speaker 01

  The Dead Sea Scrolls are later.

• 1:21:28Danny Jones?

  They're like 200?

• 1:21:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, some people date really the first, first fragments to late 3rd century. I'm not sure I would necessarily subscribe to that dating. It's all based on, on the scripts and on the format of the script rather than anything else.

• 1:21:42Danny Jones?

  Like how much, like when it comes to Hebrew versus Greek, like how much, I don't know, how much philosophical texts, medical texts, legal texts do we have in Hebrew?

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  Almost nothing, as medical texts and philosophical texts as such, prior to, to the, you know, to the maybe 2nd century, before the Common Era. You know, it starts, maybe if I want to be really generous, the late 3rd century before the Common Era. But it's hard to date these things, of course.

• 1:22:13Danny Jones?

  And why do you think that is?

• 1:22:16Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, we don't really have a lot of Hebrew anywhere before, before the Dead Sea Scrolls. Hebrew was not-

• 1:22:26Danny Jones?

  Dead language?

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  I mean, that's a really great question and I, and it's not, it wasn't- Completely dead. Some people obviously knew it because they were able to write the Hebrew Bible using Hebrew. But the language that was spoken by the Yahawistic

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  people living in Babylonia or Egypt or wherever was Aramaic mostly. Most of them spoke Aramaic most of that period. In Babylonia, there was still some Akkadian that was being used, of course, even into the Persian period. But Aramaic was the lingua franca, that it was the language that was spoken all over the place and the language that for a lot of people, it became not just lingua franca, but also lingua materna, meaning the mother tongue. And so, and so Aramaic was the central language for everybody. And we do have Aramaic texts, of course, also in the, among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

• 1:23:27Speaker 01

  Hebrew was more of, I wouldn't even say liturgical language. We don't have any proof that it was liturgical language anywhere. That's an important point to make. It could have been, but we don't have any proof of that. But, but clearly it was preserved somehow because people were able to write, write the Hebrew, Hebrew text. Now, again, I'm not also, I want, it's important to point out, I'm not saying that everything in the Hebrew Bible was written in the Hellenistic period. Clearly, there were texts that were much older as well, that were compiled, that were collected and then implemented and, and, and put together as part of this enterprise of putting together

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  an authoritative source based on the, on the same methodologies that were developed in Alexandria. I'm not saying all of these texts were composed in the, in the Hellenistic period. And of course, also, I mean, I also have an article about a portion of the Book of Amos that I can date, I can date not necessarily the text, but I can date the story

• 1:24:34Speaker 01

  there to the end of the eighth century, beginning of the seventh century before the Roman era. So these are, this is a very old text and the reason I'm able to date it is because I can compare it very precisely to Neo Assyrian inscriptions that were common at the time. So every time I have an extra biblical anchor, I can, I can use that in order to date certain texts, and even then you have to be very, very careful and not assume certain things. Because even, even if there are certain parallels between, you know, texts that are extra biblical and the biblical text, doesn't mean that necessarily they were composed at the same time, because you have access to that text for centuries later, right? Right.

• 1:25:16Speaker 01

  So we have to be very careful in everything that we do in order to, to make sure that we are as objective as scientific as possible in coming to our conclusions. But in this, in the case of Amos, I also show in, in my article that there was only a very short window in which these, these idioms could have been fully understood. And I show how they were later misunderstood, so I can, I can narrow down the timeframe to roughly the first part of the seventh century before the common era for that particular, for a small passage of, from the book of Amos. Because I have these parallels. But, so there, what I'm trying to say is that there are, clearly there were texts that made it into the Hebrew Bible that were much older.

• 1:26:00Speaker 01

  Maybe eighth century, seventh century. But the, there were people, Jewish people, that were inspired by what was going on in the Alexandrian Library. It wasn't, they were not working for, under any kind of commission by the king to translate the Bible or anything like that. But they were inspired by this, by what was happening in Alexandria as others were, not just, they were not the only ones. It inspired Egyptians, it inspired other, other people in, in the, in the region. And, and they said, okay, we're going to apply this approach. The, the, the Greeks are applying this to their own corpus. We're going to apply it to our corpus.

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  And so they were able to, to get texts from various sources and apply these methodologies and compose new texts in many cases as well. And to compose the glue between different texts to put them together and, and, and also imagine, in the case of the Torah specifically, imagine all kinds of answers to the The Greek view that we mentioned earlier, like about the leprosy and all of these other things that they were they were concerned with. And so this enterprise that happened, uh, started in the third century, um, before the common era to collect, edit, redact, um, compose, harmonize, and and really kind of

• 1:27:28Speaker 01

  put together a more authoritative version of of the of the authoritative corpus.

• 1:27:34Danny Jones?

  Of history.

• 1:27:36Speaker 01

  Of, yeah, of history, theology, ideology, and all of that. I mean, they didn't think of of history as the way we think of history today, of course. That's not a that wasn't a concern at that at that time. They really weren't concerned about precise history.

• 1:27:49Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  No, no. I mean, even even Herodotus, uh, that's not history the way we do today. I mean, he basically walks around, asks people, um, about certain elements of their culture and writes it down.

• 1:28:02Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:28:03Speaker 01

  Often through a translator, so it's often even lost in translation. Um, and so he writes it down and just goes with it and he doesn't necessarily, sometimes he has critical, sometimes he's more reserved, sometimes he's just, um, you know, runs with whatever he's been told. Um, so even Herodotus is not really, he's considered to be the fa- father of history, right?

• 1:28:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  To Caditus, who came after him, called him the father of lies because of so many inconsistencies that he has in in Herodotus. But Herodotus is certainly an important source, and he is kind of pseudo-historical in many ways. Uh, we certainly have to use to use him as a source, but always with a grain of salt um, in our research. Uh, but again, in antiquity, history wasn't really a science per se. It was people writing things that they've heard.

• 1:28:54Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:28:55Speaker 01

  Sometimes asking questions, sometimes doubting.

• 1:28:57Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:28:58Speaker 01

  Um, but it wasn't really a a main concern. In the case of the Bible, it was more about identity. It was about building identity, about establishing their own kind of cocoon, ideological cocoon, um, in parallel to the Greek one, right? The Greeks were were doing the same thing with the, uh, Um, with their sources, with Hesiod, with uh, with um, Homer and other and other sources. And they were, you know, looking at this critically, at these, at these different um, critically in, in, in, for their day. Um, and, and the Jews were simply just uh, applying the same methodology to the sources that existed, or they would develop new sources.

• 1:29:42Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:29:42Speaker 01

  So a lot of this, I mean, I, according to my research, certain important layers within the Pentateuch, within the, the Torah, uh, are new, are newly written within the, in the um, in the Hellenistic period, like the, the, the, the story of the patriarch, uh, of the patriarchs that we mentioned earlier.

• 1:30:01Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:01Speaker 01

  That is so Hellenistic.

• 1:30:02Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:30:03Speaker 01

  In its, in its overall features. Um, and so, um, these were composed, um, I believe in the um, in the Hellenistic period, but, but other elements that are, um, that are, that, that found their way into this narrative are, could be older.

• 1:30:24Danny Jones?

  So, my understanding of the languages and the translation was that, is that, especially when it comes to Greek and Hebrew, is that Greek is this deep, complex language that has over a million unique words. And Hebrew only has like seven thousand unique words, give or take something around that, which is like an insane, uh, the difference between the two is crazy.

• 1:30:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:30:50Danny Jones?

  And um, when you translate, that you can't translate from something less technical to something more technical. Now, you saying that it's Judeo-Greek is a whole different, it makes it really like throws a wrench into this whole thing.

• 1:31:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:31:04Danny Jones?

  But, like, the way it was described to me before was that Greek, and this is just my analogy for it, is that Greek is like a flying saucer of a language, right? And then Hebrew is like a, a single-engine prop plane. So how do you find a flying saucer and then try to reverse engineer into a single-engine prop plane? Like, it doesn't make sense to go from something super technical and deep to something way less. Technical and deep that has way fewer words, unique words. And then in some, in some instances I've seen on a, on a debate, actually on Neil's channel, where two people were debating, debating this, is that there are words in Greek that actually take like three or two or three words in Hebrew, just to make that one word in Greek.

• 1:31:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, of course, I mean, we're talking also about different language families, right? I mean, this is Semitic and this is Indo-European. So we're talking about completely different dynamics. And so it's the comparison is, there are, and there are cases where it's the other way around. I mean, where you can say things in a Semitic language that are much more compressed compared to the Indo-European version of it. So, but I, I mean, technically the translation can happen and it did happen.

• 1:32:17Danny Jones?

  Right. And Julius Africanus also said something, I think, that I heard around the second century AD or something like that, where he looked at it and said, this looks like an original Greek work. I don't know if, I don't know if you go that far into history that late.

• 1:32:30Speaker 01

  I've read Julius Africanus, I don't know, I don't remember that particular part, but I don't know what, I mean, he said what, the original.

• 1:32:37Danny Jones?

  He said that the Septuagint looks like, it reads like a Greek original. That's what Julius Africanus allegedly said. Steven, maybe you can find that on chat.

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  I'd be surprised if he, if he did say that, because again, like I said, anyone who has been trained with actual Greek and goes to the Septuagint, it's weird. It's, it's, it's, it's, in a sense, I think for a lot of the actual, I mean, people who came from the Greek world and were exposed to the, to the Septuagint, it made them feel maybe even uncomfortable in a way, because it looks like, it looks like, parts of it look even erroneous. Parts of it are just unexpected turns of phrases and things like that.

• 1:33:21Speaker 01

  And certainly the vocabulary is different in many cases. It's, it is of course Greek, like Edith is, is German ultimately. But, but it's not, it's not Greek Greek. And it makes you feel like you're in a kind of a almost parallel universe, right? It's not. It's not even the difference, like the difference between, you know, British English and American English. It's much more than that.

• 1:33:41Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:33:41Speaker 01

  And so, um, and so, um, and it is a, a, a, in many ways, an artificial language. Uh, the, the Jewish Greek. It's the Greek that was spoken by the Jews in the Ptolemaic Empire, and especially in Alexandria, probably mostly in Alexandria. Um, and so it was written for, it wasn't commissioned by the king. I mean, the chances of a king commissioning something in Judeo-Greek rather than actual Greek, I think are slim to nonexistent. And I'm not, you can't completely discount this, but I think it, it makes little, very little sense for a work commissioned by the king to not be written in actual Greek. And you can, of course, you can, you could have translated the Hebrew into Greek Greek.

• 1:34:26Speaker 01

  You could have, but they didn't. So it is translated into Judeo-Greek, and I think it's translated for the Alexandrian Jews, who are, as I said, a pretty, pretty significant community.

• 1:34:39Danny Jones?

  And how, what, like as far as like a timeframe of when this translation took place? Like, how, how much time is there between the Torah and the subterfuge, the translation?

• 1:34:48Speaker 01

  I think very little time. Um, we're talking about the third century before the Common Era. I think in the first quarter of that, uh, of the, of that century, uh, we're talking about kind of the Hebrew texts starting to, uh, to, to come together of the Torah.

• 1:35:05Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:35:06Speaker 01

  And then the, uh, the, uh, translation was very, you know, within a decade or two later on.

• 1:35:12Danny Jones?

  A decade or two?

• 1:35:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, earlier I mentioned Virgil and, and him writing the equivalent of the Torah. That took him 10 years. That's it. It took for one person to write the equivalent of the Torah and more, because he, again, he had to write it with meter and rhyme. So it was much more work to do this, again, but the same length of text. Ten years to do, to write it. Now, he was also using existing material. He didn't invent the entire story just by himself. He was, the idea that the Romans were children of this hero, this Homeric hero from Troy, from the Battle of Troy, of course, predated him and we, we find the echoes of that

• 1:35:57Speaker 01

  already in the, in the, in the second century before the common era in Rome. Um, but he, so he's using existing material and, um, and, um, you know, re, reworking this into, to fit certain rhymes and, and certain meters and, um, and adds to it and composes this incredible work, uh, known as the Aeneid. And so, but it took him ten years to do. Now, a, a much more impressive, um, example, although, uh, from, uh, from much, from about thousand years later, um, is the Shahnameh, the, the, the, the Book of Kings in the Iranian tradition. Um, and amazing, I really recommend people look it up, the Shahnameh,

• 1:36:42Speaker 01

  probably one of the best, greatest epics of humanity, uh, ever. It's an incredible story. It's an incredible book, um, written by Ferdozi, um, this great Iranian poet, also in rhyme, in rhyme and meter. Um, that book is about one point, uh, one hundred and fifty percent more than the entire Bible. Okay, including the New Testament. Wow. It is a humongous work, okay? Um, and it took him thirty years to write. One person, also using existing material, also not inventing everything, but he, but one person for, working for thirty years, producing a, a work that is Shahnameh, there it goes.

• 1:37:23Speaker 01

  So, uh, a work that is significantly, uh, larger than the entire Bible. Okay? Wow. So yeah, the Book of Kings, it is, I really recommend people to, uh, to, to become familiar with this incredible work. Anyway, so this is one person for thirty years. So people can, if it, if there is the, uh, if there is there, if the resources are available, if the time is available, if the will is there, uh, people can write large works very, relatively quickly. I mean, within ten to thirty years, within a lifetime of a, of a single person, uh, well within the lifetime of a single person. So, um, so I, I, the work of writing and collecting the Torah, uh, could have been

• 1:38:06Speaker 01

  accomplished within a decade or two, technically. I'm not saying that it was, but you know, it could have been. And the translation could have happened even in parallel to it, because if the, uh, if the goal was, uh, to work within this Alexandrian, um, state of, um, of, of mind, I mean, if this, if this Alexandrian ideology, this Alexandrian, uh, methodology that was developed in Alexandria at the library at the time, and they wanted to follow this way of doing things, and to produce something for the people, for the Jews in Alexandria, so that they feel that their identity is also receiving the same kind of treatment

• 1:38:46Speaker 01

  as their Greek neighbors, um, the, uh, the, the translation into Jewish Greek again, uh, would have happened very quickly.

• 1:38:54Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Yeah. And even with like the, the, the Library of Alexandria, it was right on the water, right? So it was not a great place to store texts, like those, those works would get diminished by just like the, the climate and the humidity there. So like they constantly had to have people that were rewriting books, right?

• 1:39:16Speaker 01

  Copying, yeah.

• 1:39:17Danny Jones?

  And making copies of them. And like, who knows what was lost during that?

• 1:39:21Speaker 01

  Of course, we lost a lot. I mean, the, the Library of Alexandria continued for centuries later on. It was under Julius Caesar, it was, there was some kind of, um, of fire that, that, that, uh, destroyed parts of the library.

• 1:39:34Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:39:35Speaker 01

  But the library continued well, well into the common era, um, and slowly kind of diminished.

• 1:39:41Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  Later on, but we lost a lot, of course. I mean, um, yeah, it, it was a... Truly a treasure trove.

• 1:39:50Danny Jones?

  It's such an interesting thing, the way you say that they didn't look at history the same way we look at it.

• 1:39:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:39:55Danny Jones?

  And the way that people today in our culture look at history is so much different. And then when we try to fit that into our frame of view of history is crazy. You know, and when you have people doing, writing about this stuff for different motivations, whether it be just mythological, or if you want to call it historical, or if you want, if it was for, you know, any sort of economic gain, if you want to get later into like Christianity, these people writing it to develop these religions to create this sort of a like a society, like Plato's Plato's idea of this noble society, you know, he wanted to create this sort of Santa Claus

• 1:40:40Danny Jones?

  character to make people, you know, to build it around fear so people would obey. And he wanted to get rid of Homer and in like the schools and stuff. And they had just different motivations for things. And then if you extrapolate that to where we are now, like if you want to, like an example would be something we've been talking, talked about recently on recent podcasts is like Plato's Atlantis. And Plato, like up until a couple, like a couple decades ago, there was just this gap where no one would talk about Atlantis. Then some guy wrote a book about it on how it was this crazy lost city

• 1:41:23Danny Jones?

  that somehow was lost during the flood and went underwater. But like, if you go and talk to Plato about it, or if you look at any of Plato's other work, Plato's only wrote about like philosophical allegories.

• 1:41:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:41:37Danny Jones?

  Ideas like his cave, like we aren't out looking for Plato's cave.

• 1:41:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:41:41Danny Jones?

  So why would we be looking for Alexandria? Well, there's people like now you write, like people often write books just to. To build a name for themselves, to make money on things, there's just, there's so many motivations for developing these works even today. So to look at it, to look at history through the same lens we look at now is just, it's kind of crazy.

• 1:42:00Speaker 01

  Right, right. And we need to be always be very careful. We, in academia, we try to, we try to be as methodological about this. So we always, we have to look at, we can't just look at one data point. We have to, to, to find where they, where as many data points meet to draw conclusions. It has to be as scientific as it can be. And in the study of history, we are now moving in this generation, and that's something I'm really trying to, to focus a lot of my energy on, is to make the study of history to be more scientific, or more like the, the hard sciences, rather than just, you

• 1:42:43Speaker 01

  know, coming up with ideas and trying to see if it sticks. Which was the way a lot of the, the history has been done thus far. And, and not saying that a lot, that, I mean, we've, we've made a lot of progress in the study of history. But in order to put history on, on, on very solid ground, and to make it less subjective and more objective, there's a lot we can do. And so, one of my projects, I'm not going to go too much into the details, not to bore people, but the, but we're trying to, to work especially on epigraphy. Now, I mentioned epigraphy already a number of times, which is the study of these original primary documents, the ostracca, the actual documents that were

• 1:43:24Speaker 01

  written in real time, but the people living in real time, not thinking that this will ever be studied again.

• 1:43:32Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:43:33Speaker 01

  So epigraphy is the heart, the beating heart of the study of history, of ancient history at all. Because that, this is the primary material that we have. Okay, it's more than Herodotus, which is not a primary source, right? Herodotus, of course, wrote his, his, his, um, um, his books, but he did not, first of all, we don't have his original document, his original manuscript. But that was, that was not something that, that, that, it's not the daily life, it's not something that people are just, you know, you don't have this visceral experience.

• 1:44:08Speaker 01

  The epigraphic material is the most basic, the most original, the most raw material that you can have and you build. And on top of that, you can start, you should start building a historical

• 1:44:26Speaker 01

  analysis of the, of the, of the data. So epigraphy is really the heart and soul and really the blood of, of historical science. Our mathematics in history is grammar. Okay, so if you look at these texts and you want to, to really identify what they actually say, right, it has to correspond to the rules of grammar and syntax, right? And, and if it does not, then you are probably missing something. So the way for us to, to check whether we are reading it correctly or not is, is through the rules of philology. So we are looking, we are starting to look at history more scientifically, more precisely and, and, and more, and trying to be more objective.

• 1:45:11Speaker 01

  In order to do that, we also have to be as transparent. And I think is the, is really the main innovation now is to shoot for maximum transparency. Now, in my work, I try to be as transparent as possible. That is the most important thing for me, more than accuracy. Now, I try to be as accurate as possible in my restorations of texts.

• 1:45:33Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:45:33Speaker 01

  But I'm human, I'll make mistakes. What's going to, what is more important than me being accurate is me being transparent and explaining with as many photos as I can, and I always offer microscopic photos of different aspects of the text and, and of the object that I'm restoring. But as many photos as I can and always explaining why I reached these conclusions. What were the other options that I had in front of me? And being as transparent as possible because I, the transparency is the, is the key. For the study of history.

• 1:46:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:06Speaker 01

  Because we are always working together, all scholars. And I want them to look at my work and find the mistakes. If it's transparent, they can find where I was wrong, right? Much more easily. And I want them to be able to correct because we are working together for the progress of science ultimately. And so we are really shooting in this generation now of historians, shooting for the maximum transparency. That's new. That that is new. Maximum transparency, maximum methodological rigor. And and I think we are already starting to see the the first fruits of that. Uh, really starting to uh to lead us into a more stable um vision of history.

• 1:46:48Danny Jones?

  Yeah, and it's tough, too. Like even with the Dead Sea Scrolls, I had a gentleman on here who's a um an expert on uh deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls. And he was explaining to me how um when they were doing all that work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, they came across a lot of forgeries where people were basically trying to sell fakes at Dead Sea Scrolls on the antiquities market. And they would put them under microscopes.

• 1:47:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:11Danny Jones?

  And they would see the degradation of the actual. Um, what is the word they use for the animal skins that they were written on?

• 1:47:18Speaker 01

  The parchment.

• 1:47:19Danny Jones?

  Parchment, yeah. So so the parchments, they were they would see like degradations or like like uh depressions where part of it was torn away. And they would see the ink going over that. So they knew that this was like, obviously not an original, this was a forgery.

• 1:47:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:47:35Danny Jones?

  Which is.

• 1:47:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:36Danny Jones?

  Which is crazy, and that's another landmine you gotta try to avoid with this stuff.

• 1:47:39Speaker 01

  Absolutely. You always need to be very careful about these sources to check whether they are actual actually original. Um, you know, if they were found in an archaeological context, that's best.

• 1:47:50Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:47:50Speaker 01

  Because you can actually uh with the stratigraphic um dating, you can know which. Which layer in the archaeological excavation it was found, so you can date it.

• 1:48:01Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:48:02Speaker 01

  Um, so, yeah, but a lot of these documents unfortunately don't have this, this data associated with them. So you have to date them in, in, in, in different ways. But of course, um, checking with whether these are forgeries or not is, is, is really important. It's really tricky.

• 1:48:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And, and people try to do that for multiple different reasons, to help push a narrative, or just to make money.

• 1:48:27Speaker 01

  Just make money. And the thing is, a lot of forgers are very, are people who went to academia and probably did not make it the way they wanted, but they are really good in, I mean, they know how to make, they know, um, they, they've, they've learned how to, um, how, how to copy and, uh, and mimic the hand of scribes. But they also have a lot of money. Um, they are sponsored by people who can sell this and they have more money than we have in academia, for sure. So they have more res- better resources in order to, to make these forgeries. Uh, so we need to be very, very vigilant and, and make sure that we're dealing with actual sourced material. Um, and, and, but again, a lot of these documents

• 1:49:08Speaker 01

  in the Dead Sea Scrolls are clearly ancient. Uh, some of them are not, but, uh, yeah, we, we always need to be on guard, uh, for that.

• 1:49:17Danny Jones?

  I know this is a little bit outside of your expertise, but what language do you think Jesus spoke?

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• 1:50:07Danny Jones?

  Do you think he was a real historical figure?

• 1:50:10Speaker 01

  I mean, I think most historians say that there was a rabbi, a very influential rabbi, at that time, who was probably crucified. And there was a Jesus movement after that. Whether that person also resurrected from the dead, that's more of a faith thing than the historical. But yeah, that's really not my field. The languages, so we're talking about first century of the of the common era, Greek was certainly a major language in Palestine at the time. So I'm sure that people at the time, not sure, I don't know anything about that particular, this particular figure, but people at the time certainly spoke

• 1:50:51Speaker 01

  Greek in the marketplaces. Aramaic was certainly a very important language as well. So I think between these two, between Aramaic and Greek, those are the languages that he would have, or people at the time would have mastered primarily. And Hebrew would not have been a living language as such. But Aramaic and certainly Greek was a very important language.

• 1:51:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah, too. And I also, I get the impression that a lot of these, these cults and these ancient religions like Yahwehism, they, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like that they viewed them much differently than we view religions today. Like, they viewed them as mythological traditions that didn't necessarily have to be objective facts, but they were more of just traditional myths that they subscribed to because, for whatever reason. Maybe it, maybe it helped them get through life. Maybe it was just an important tradition to them. But like, today, it's more of a...

• 1:52:01Danny Jones?

  Hard, black and white thing.

• 1:52:03Speaker 01

  Absolutely. You're making a very good point. The, um, in antiquity, um, things were much more fluid, much, much more fluid, much more interesting as well. And, um, and, and very energetic, the energy. One of the things that always really excites me in my research is the energy that I see in these primary documents. The, the, and how people were so keen on learning and on, um, and exposing themselves to new, to new ideas and to new, uh, um, new traditions and, um, and the, the fluidity is, is, is very, very, very, you know, really stands out in these texts. And what I mean by fluidity, we talked about Yahwism.

• 1:52:48Speaker 01

  Now Yahwism had Yahweh, of course, as the head of the pantheon. But, um, but as it continues, it developed, it evolved like any other uh, cultic system slash religion. Everything evolves, every religion, even today, right? Even today, Christianity is constant and Judaism are constantly being, constantly evolving. Um, and constantly have to deal with new, new things, new, new data, I mean, evolution, right? That's how Christianity has to, or and Judaism have to now elaborate all, what are, what is their position versus, versus new, um, new data that comes out, whether they accept it or not accept it, but how and, and, you know, which texts are, should be read differently or whatever.

• 1:53:33Speaker 01

  So any religion, any cultic system has to develop, to, to evolve over time. In the case of Yahwism, um, it continued to develop into what is called, um, I mean, even, so before, before I talk about how it developed in its own right, even the, uh, the, the quote unquote orthodox with the small o Jews of the time, so those who did live according to the commandments or their interpretation at the time of the commandments are in the Pentecost. In the first century, um, when they had a, a sick child or then they had a problem, they would go and, and use curse texts that are completely, um, you know, come from a different tradition. I mean, from the gnostic.

• 1:54:19Speaker 01

  What's that? What did you say? What was that word you used? Curse, curse text. Curse text, okay. Curse texts, like amulets and all kinds of curse texts and, and the protective, uh, texts that would protect their children or their family or, or whatever. And those texts were typically, were more Yahawistic in that, in, in the sense where, where there's this deity, Yah, really central deity. Um, but they also had other terms that are very, are known to us from the Bible that they saw as deities, like Adonai was saw, was seen as its own, its, its own God. Like the word Adonai, which is very familiar to, to people who are familiar with the Hebrew Bible. Um, that is a, in the Bible, it's really a title for God, or at

• 1:55:02Speaker 01

  least it's seen as a title. Um, but in later Yahawism, or what's called the Gnosticism, not, I, I don't like the term Gnostic because it's a pejorative term. Uh, so I try, I, but there's no, nothing else really available, so I'm using it for convenience. But, uh, the Gnostics are, um, kind of continuing Yahawism as in, in parallel to Judaism and Christianity. So, the lay of the land in the first century, uh, of the common era, the time of Jesus, um, was very complex, very energetic, very effervescent, very, uh, with a lot of, um, kind of cross pollination between the different, uh, the different faith systems

• 1:55:46Speaker 01

  and ideologies. Um, you, you would take something from, I mean, even the idea of the Son of God. Um, if you walk through the Roman Empire, um, every milestone, literally stone that every mile of the road, right, the milestone, um, would have the name of the Caesar that, that established this road, and often will, it will have the name and it's, it would say "Son of God." Right, so that idea of the Son of God would be, would be all around you. Okay, in, at that time, it wasn't just Jesus, right, Son of God, but it was also the empire, the emperor. Um, and so all of these ideas came from imperial cult, from Egyptian cult,

• 1:56:29Speaker 01

  from the, the Gnostic field of, of a lot of different sects there, from different Jewish sects, um, from different readings and even interactions with the Persian world. Um, interactions with, with, you know, this, this early Zoroastrianism that we talked about earlier. Um, everything, you know, you would, there, there were no really kind of strict walls between these different religions that we have today. Uh, like you said, I mean, everything was flowing in and out, cross pollinating. And that's what I love about this, this period, because it's so rich, so energetic. People are always kind of looking and, and you can feel it in the, in the primary sources.

• 1:57:12Speaker 01

  And so, um, and that's what caused ultimately, I think, one of the reasons that Christianity was able to spread quickly and very successfully, was that Yahwism was the engine that, that, that enabled um, the spread of, of, of the cult of Yahweh in general and, and certain, certain, um, ideological, um, ideological concepts that, that enabled Christianity to later. Uh, because people were already very much interested in aspects of Yahwism, but they were not Jews. Okay, but they did have amulets of Yahweh, they did have Sabat as a, as an, as another deity,

• 1:57:57Speaker 01

  or, or Adonai is another deity, so they were, the, the language was more, was becoming more and more familiar. Um, and, um, and, and I think that really helped prepare the ground for the spread of Christianity as well. So Yahwism is, is, is an important engine, uh, in, in that, um, as well.

• 1:58:18Danny Jones?

  Also, are there any other myths that are so as ubiquitous, spread across so many different cultures and so many different parts of the world, like the flood myth? Like the flood of Noah, like the Sumerian flood, and you find it there, you find it in Egypt, you find it in Central and South America. It seems like this, it seems crazy that it's known from all these different cultures, from all these different parts of time.

• 1:58:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:46Danny Jones?

  And it's, and there's been, there's like, literally, I think there's geological evidence that proves that there was like some sort of catastrophe around the time that I think it was talked about, which was like 1200 B.C. or something along those lines?

• 1:59:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you're mixing things here. I mean, the 1200 B.C. is what's called the Bronze Age collapse, roughly speaking. And that's not related to the flood. It's related to a lot of other things, including climate change.

• 1:59:15Danny Jones?

  Well, there's this, there's this, there's this theory called the Younger Dryas Hypothesis, where they imagine that there was, there's a couple of different ideas, but one of the prevailing theories is that there was like a cosmic comet impact that hit the North American ice sheet and some other parts of the world as well, that melted the ice cap, ended the Pleistocene, and then created like an enormous flood that wiped out a huge amount of humans and mammals.

• 1:59:41Speaker 01

  Right. I don't, I'm not familiar with that one, but it might be, maybe. I'm not, again, I'm not familiar with it. I don't think, I have not, that did not cross my path, so I'm not sure that this is real, maybe. But, but I, it's not hard to imagine. I mean, people in agricultural society, we're talking about, all of the ancient societies are agricultural societies, and they have to deal with floods always.

• 2:00:13Speaker 01

  I mean, oh, by definition, if you're in agricultural society, water is critical to your, to your daily life. And you are planting seeds and you're, you're trying to be as close to water as possible. On the flip side of that, flooding, right? If you're close to the water, water sources, you will be flooded.

• 2:00:31Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:00:32Speaker 01

  So flooding was a daily, um, I mean, something that you would constantly be worried about, uh, and concerned, I mean, not, maybe not daily, but, but certainly every year that would become, and around the springtime, that would become a concern, um, about potential flooding. And so it's really easy to, to understand in every agricultural society across the globe.

• 2:00:56Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:00:57Speaker 01

  Why there would be a legend surrounding massive flooding, uh, that would develop. It doesn't necessarily mean that there was a global, uh, event, and it doesn't mean necessarily that they were, they, there was influence from one tradition to another. It's really easy to, uh, to imagine why, you know, massive flooding would become a, a, a mythical force.

• 2:01:20Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:01:21Speaker 01

  It's not, we don't, we don't necessarily need to go that far in order to understand that. It's like with, with pyramids. We find pyramids in different places.

• 2:01:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah, same thing with pyramids.

• 2:01:28Speaker 01

  Um, we find the same structure in South America, we find possibly in Europe, we find possibly in, in, you know, in Asia, in places, and of course, in Egypt.

• 2:01:37Danny Jones?

  Indonesia.

• 2:01:38Speaker 01

  Indonesia, so, but this is just because this is a geometric for, uh, uh, form that make, that is very, very stable. And it makes a lot of sense. It does not necessarily mean that there was any kind of transfer of knowledge. Um, so not necessarily, right? So we can, we can start to think about maybe aliens and, or whatever, but that's not necessarily the case. It's really simple to think that certain elements like the flooding, uh, flooding, again, everyone in, uh, who's living a, in agricultural, in agricultural society has to deal with the danger of floods.

• 2:02:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:02:17Speaker 01

  Everyone has, and some, in some cases, the flooding is so extreme that it would... Destroy the livelihood of people in, you know, miles around. And these things are very, it's very easy to see how that would, would, would eventually develop into a, a, a myth, a mythological story. And that would happen all across the world, really, because every, every society is agricultural in antiquity. And the same again with, with the pyramid. It doesn't have to be necessarily, we don't have to go the, the route of aliens in order to explain it.

• 2:02:49Danny Jones?

  It is great. The pyramid, especially the pyramid, the great pyramid is, is such an astonishing feat.

• 2:02:57Speaker 01

  It is, it is, it is.

• 2:02:59Danny Jones?

  And the Thousand, I mean, five, I think there's like, I don't know if there's thousand ton stones, but I think there's five, at least 500 ton granite blocks that are in, at the top of that pyramid that are from Aswan, which is a long ways away.

• 2:03:12Speaker 01

  We talked about that.

• 2:03:13Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:14Speaker 01

  That's, that's the, that's the

• 2:03:15Danny Jones?

  Like, how in the world?

• 2:03:18Speaker 01

  They were very good.

• 2:03:19Danny Jones?

  Um, yeah. And then these things, I'm sure, I don't know if you're familiar with these vases that they found in the Bent Pyramid, but these vases, uh, the guy you're going to see, Matt Bell, he actually purchased a bunch of these on the antiquities market and they're made out of the hardest granite, I think red granite, one of the hardest granites on earth. And he had them measured in light scanners and they are perfectly symmetrical within the deviation of a human hair from, from top to bottom, perfect set symmetry. And it would, to create that out of granite today, we would need a CNC machine. Like we'd have to create this on a computer. The fact that they did that, 2700 B.C. is like, it doesn't, it doesn't compute, you know, like almost.

• 2:04:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, I, it's, I mean, people were very, very good. I mean, they, they, they were brilliant. Uh, and I don't think that, um,

• 2:04:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I think, I think that the description, I think, I think so, obviously they had to have been to create this stuff. I just don't think like the conventional theory of how they did it with like copper chisels and pounding stones or like a, something like that in the middle of it to make something as perfect, precise as that.

• 2:04:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:04:23Danny Jones?

  It's like a piece that'll go in a jet engine.

• 2:04:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I, I certainly agree with you. There's a lot, we don't know how they did it and we don't have the, uh, the knowledge and the, uh, the technology necessarily today in order to do that. Um, but, um, I, we do know that these were brilliant people and, um,

• 2:04:41Speaker 01

  They were able, I mean, sometimes today, when we look and we try to see, well, how would we produce this today, we are stumped because we think according to our technological knowledge in a certain direction. They did not have those, this technology. So they had to really maybe think on a completely different level and come up with solutions that we don't have access to. So I, you know, I tend to look at these things and just say they were really, really good. Also with the building of the pyramids, I mean, if you look, if you go to Aswan, to that region, and you see the quarries from which they cut these granite stones, you

• 2:05:26Speaker 01

  see that, you see how they worked. You actually can see how they worked. You see because they didn't, in some cases, they didn't finish the work. So you actually see, see the work kind of midway and you can see actually how they did this. And we can see also how they transported it up the Nile, down the Nile. And so the, a lot of this technology, we know how they, I mean, practically, we know how they did this. It's very, very impressive. It's extremely impressive. But it's, you know, we know how they did most of it. In some of these temples, for example, these massive temples in Egypt that you see, parts

• 2:06:11Speaker 01

  of the ramparts that, on which they were able to pull these stones up, still exist. And so we know a lot about how they created these massive buildings. And that's all very, very normal and natural. It's not, you know, it's not extra.

• 2:06:31Danny Jones?

  Have you seen the thousand-ton obelisk that was never finished, that was never pulled out of the quarry?

• 2:06:37Speaker 01

  In Aswan, yeah. I was there, yeah.

• 2:06:39Danny Jones?

  Underneath it, I've seen, I've never been there, but I've seen photos and videos, there's like, it looks like ice cream scoops taken out of the granite.

• 2:06:48Speaker 01

  The holes, yeah.

• 2:06:49Danny Jones?

  Underneath, like when they're underneath it, like digging it out. It's like, it looks like, see, I don't know if you can pull a photo of it, but it literally looks like ice cream scoops out of the rock. And that's in a lot of the places too, even in.

• 2:07:02Danny Jones?

  Even in, uh, what is the, where, where are all those, uh, the serapium? Like the serap, yeah. In the serapium, there's those granite boxes with the scoop marks out of them. It's like, what? It's almost like they had some sort of like chemical that we don't, we just don't have any evidence for that was softening it or something.

• 2:07:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, possibly.

• 2:07:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah, look at, look at that.

• 2:07:23Speaker 01

  Yep, yep.

• 2:07:25Speaker 01

  You know, they, they were very, very impressive people.

• 2:07:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they had to deal with the problems that we don't even

• 2:07:34Speaker 01

  know how to approach. But yeah, but it's all, um, it's all

• 2:07:39Danny Jones?

  Fascinating.

• 2:07:40Speaker 01

  All part of their genius. I mean, they were really amazing, amazing, um, people. They were, and what's amazing also, when you go to Egypt and visit these places and you visit the temples, I don't know if you've been to Egypt.

• 2:07:53Danny Jones?

  Never.

• 2:07:53Speaker 01

  If you're, highly recommend to anyone listening, if they can. These temples are huge, huge. And of course, the pyramids are huge as well. And a lot of this, people in Egypt were driven by the ideology of the Egyptian cult. I mean, the idea was that they really believed in, in the, in, in the life after death. And the idea was that you work for the pharaoh and you will, you will live with the pharaoh after, after death. You would be part of this. So of course, um, you know, every person participating in the construction

• 2:08:36Speaker 01

  of these massive, uh, massive, you know, uh,

• 2:08:42Danny Jones?

  Monument?

• 2:08:42Speaker 01

  Monument, really.

• 2:08:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's the same too.

• 2:08:44Speaker 01

  So, so this is Abu Simbel. Abu Simbel, now what you're seeing here, so this is Abu Simbel today, of course. And you, I don't know if you know this, but the entire, this entire side of the mountains was transported. From its original location in the sixties to what you're seeing here.

• 2:09:02Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 2:09:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so every rock, every, it was cut in, using modern technologies.

• 2:09:10Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:09:11Speaker 01

  Because, you know, Kamal Abdul Nasser wanted to create this dam. And there's Lake Nasser.

• 2:09:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:09:18Speaker 01

  And, and the original location of Abu Simbel is now submerged under that, that lake.

• 2:09:24Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 2:09:25Speaker 01

  So in order to conserve this, they actually moved the entire, the entire temple, because this is a temple inside. The entire temple, they moved it out of its original location in the nineteen sixties. Okay, and modern engineers moved it to this location very, very accurately, except. When you go into this, into this temple, on the, on the solstice day, on the day of the solstice, solstice, the, the, in the morning, the, um, the sun comes into this, into, through this entrance and shines straight on the, there are statues at the end of this, of this tunnel.

• 2:10:07Speaker 01

  There are statues of, of Ramses the second and, and the triad of deities around him. And it shines directly in the, in the center on him and, and, and the other gods around him. And, and that's exactly at a certain point, time, at a certain day of the year, in the original location. Here, modern engineers did that, but they missed one day. It, it's not, so it happens a day.

• 2:10:34Danny Jones?

  Oh, no.

• 2:10:35Speaker 01

  And so in, in, with modern technology, we were not able to replicate this even. It's, I mean, we were able to cut, to, to move it, but we weren't, we're able to be as, as precise as they were.

• 2:10:46Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:10:46Speaker 01

  Um, in antiquity. So this is really, really impressive, right?

• 2:10:51Danny Jones?

  It is astonishing.

• 2:10:52Speaker 01

  People, people at the time were. Truly, I mean, they had, in many ways, they had less distractions. They had, they were able to test things out. And, and, and yeah, I mean, I just think the humanity of it is so, so impressive.

• 2:11:11Danny Jones?

  They were definitely on a different trajectory than we're on right now.

• 2:11:13Speaker 01

  Different trajectory, absolutely, absolutely. And, um, yeah, but I don't think there's anything supernatural about it. It's just, it's just humans, uh, doing what humans do. And, and figuring out solutions to problems. And sometimes we don't, we don't have the solutions today.

• 2:11:28Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:11:28Speaker 01

  But, uh, they were able to do that. And so, and oftentimes they actually write it. They, they, so they did write and they did express, uh, how they did things, how they moved large, uh, slabs of granite around. For example, these are things that, that they sometimes do.

• 2:11:42Danny Jones?

  They had, there's texts that explain that?

• 2:11:44Speaker 01

  They have texts that talk about that.

• 2:11:45Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 2:11:46Speaker 01

  They describe it to a certain degree, maybe not to the level of detail that we want. But, uh, we do.

• 2:11:52Danny Jones?

  What do they, do you know what they say or?

• 2:11:53Speaker 01

  I mean, they talk about, I mean, this is not my field.

• 2:11:56Danny Jones?

  Right, obviously, yeah, we're just talking.

• 2:11:58Speaker 01

  But I do know that they, uh, they do describe to a certain degree how they moved things around and what they did with it. So, I mean, the geop- geoptheologists do know a lot about how the pyramids were. You know, you read in popular culture a lot about, well, we don't know today how they built the pyramids, it must have been aliens. No, we do know a lot about how they, practically everything that is to know. About how they built the pyramids.

• 2:12:24Speaker 01

  And, uh, it is what's truly breathtaking is just the level of ingenuity that they had at the time and the ability to come to, to find solutions for these really engineered problem, deeply engineering, I mean, really serious engineering problems. And, uh, and to do it so precisely.

• 2:12:43Danny Jones?

  There's, um, a gentleman I had on the show a while back named Christopher Dunn, who spent his whole life studying these pyramids and, and he was, uh, actually an engineer at first, he was an aerospace engineer. And, um, he discovered the pyramids, I think it was like in the eighty, early eighties, maybe, uh, maybe even seventies, I think it was. And then he started going, he went to study them and like, look at them and, and measure everything and. Even like like rented out the whole pyramid by himself many times where he could do his own studies and stuff. And he came up with the hypothesis that it was like an ancient power plant. And he's talking and he like through his early years studying the 70s and 80s and 90s,

• 2:13:25Danny Jones?

  he obviously got a lot of pushback from Egyptologists, and now he's published a second book on it. And he's is explaining to me how there is a whole new generation of Egyptologists that are coming up, young people who are questioning the fact that the idea that these things were originally tombs. And they're looking into it more and trying and pushing back on this original idea. And it seems like the idea is evolving with young people coming up in Egypt now. So it's interesting. In his book, it's interesting. He looked at the Serapeum and he measured the blocks and how much they weighed and everything. And he went to a a company, the biggest granite

• 2:14:08Danny Jones?

  company that cuts granite in the United States. And he basically asked them what it would take to replicate one of those boxes in the Serapeum. And the guy was like, we would never do that, first of all, because it's one piece. If we were going to do something like that, we would take multiple, take all the sides and bolt them together. But even just to get a piece of granite like that out of the ground and transport it, he's like, you're talking like $500,000 with today's technology. Right. Which is insane. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. But you know, they didn't have, I mean, they didn't have budget. Right. Exactly. That's my point. Right. I mean, a Pharaoh like

• 2:14:44Speaker 01

  Ramses II was so powerful. I mean, really limitless power practically in his day. And so and but the people believe that participating in the work of the Pharaoh would also bring them and their family into the the next life, right? The life beyond. And so they did this, they were, and they were not slaves. They were not slaves. They were paid for their work and they but they also were deeply

• 2:15:15Speaker 01

  Religious in that sense of the word. I mean, they really believed in what they were doing.

• 2:15:19Danny Jones?

  Weren't there temples that were built specifically for people in the afterlife that weren't like temples people would dwell in? They were just like they existed for when somebody went to the afterlife, like the Osirion and I think Edfu maybe?

• 2:15:32Speaker 01

  I mean, no, these are temples, um, these are temples for, you know, for now, for not for the afterlife per se.

• 2:15:39Danny Jones?

  I thought there were, I thought there was temples that they built that were actually not inhabited. They were like had doors that went nowhere.

• 2:15:45Speaker 01

  Oh, there's all, there are a lot of doors that go nowhere and in many different places, of course. But I'm not sure that that's built for the afterlife. That might be symbolic. Again, that, that's something you should ask an Egyptologist.

• 2:15:56Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right.

• 2:15:58Speaker 01

  But, uh, but having visited Egypt a number of times, uh, this is, uh, yeah, I, I, I'd be very cautious about reading too much into, into, you know,

• 2:16:11Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:16:11Speaker 01

  Supernatural or extra. Uh, this is, uh,

• 2:16:14Danny Jones?

  It's fun. It's fun to talk about. It's super fun.

• 2:16:17Speaker 01

  It's certainly fun, but it is, uh, but as a, from a scientific perspective,

• 2:16:24Speaker 01

  all, I mean, it's when you do go in Karnak, for example, this massive, massive temple, beautiful temple, where the colors, the original colors from, you know, three millennia ago are still there. You can still, the, some of them are still preserved. You walk around this massive building. I mean, really massive, huge. Yeah, that was built, every detail, people really cared about. I mean, the, the level of, of, of professionalism, the, the level of artistry.

• 2:16:57Speaker 01

  Not just art, but artistry, the, the, the, the, the impact of, you know, the working with the material. And you see how people cared about every element that they were working with. And, um, I mean, the Egyptian society, ancient Egyptian society is something that is truly mind blowing. We don't, we don't need to have recourse to, to extra, you know, to, to extraterrestrial or supernatural. The, the, the society itself was so incredible in what was able to, to, to achieve. That now there are a number of features. For example, the fact that there is, the Nile is there.

• 2:17:33Speaker 01

  They don't have to worry too much about rain, right? And they don't have to worry. I mean, they were well fed because they they had all a constant source of of of of nutrition. So they had their fields around the Nile. Of course, there wasn't.

• 2:17:48Danny Jones?

  It wasn't a desert back then.

• 2:17:50Speaker 01

  Well, it was desert around anywhere but the Nile. The Nile was already also desert back then. But just the area surrounding the Nile, okay, was very fertile and is still very fertile. In antiquity, you had the annual inundation of the Nile. So there were three, a period of about three months where you couldn't. Everything was inundated, so you couldn't really work the. But after that, it was very, very fertile. Because the Nile would recede and it would. There would be a residue of very fertile elements that would remain in in the in the soil. So it was very fertile and you don't really didn't have to worry too much about about being fed. So you had time to do other things. You don't have like anywhere else, you always have to to to fight for your for your survival.

• 2:18:35Speaker 01

  In Egypt, you don't really have to fight that much. For for your family's survival and things like that. So you have time to do to to think about other things and to do other things. So there were seasons where they would participate in in building projects like this. And so they were truly an amazing society. In many ways, Egyptians, even to this day, are an amazing society. And I I love Egypt and the people also today.

• 2:19:02Speaker 01

  And and some of the nicest people you'll ever meet, really.

• 2:19:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:05Speaker 01

  Really, really recommend visiting Egypt. And so, but truly, when you think about the innovation, the the groundbreaking ideas that they had and the ability to see them through and actually implement them in such amazing ways. That's due to the people. That's just due to the to their ingenuity, parts of it, which we don't understand. Even today, but they are it's still to be to be kind of assigned to their own ingenuity.

• 2:19:35Danny Jones?

  Definitely. Well, thank you, man. I really appreciate you coming and doing this.

• 2:19:38Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:19:38Danny Jones?

  Where can folks that are listening or watching find more of your work? Get in touch with you.

• 2:19:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think the best way through my academia page, I'll give you the link and you can post it if you want. And my book that just came out, edited book with with articles, my article, but also several of my colleagues, we have nineteen people contributing to this. And that's a lot that that focuses on Yahwism, really on the history of Yahwism, the early history of Yahwism, India, Kambini period. So that's a book that's that's available for free download. So it's open access. If you want the physical copy, you have to pay for it. But obviously, it's physical copy. But you can download the entire book for free from the website.

• 2:20:23Danny Jones?

  That's amazing.

• 2:20:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was really important for me to to be able to to make it available for free for people to just download and read. And that was what was made available through a very generous donation by the or assistance from the Gothenburg University, the August University in in in in Gothenburg, and Professor Reinhard Kraatz, who is the co editor of this book with me. And so they were able to sponsor this open access to the book. So people can read it and just download it for free.

• 2:20:57Danny Jones?

  That's amazing, man. All right, Steve, we got a couple Patreon questions before we wrap up. These are our beautiful paid subscribers on Patreon had a couple of questions for you. All right. Kyle says, Hello, Professor, do you have any thoughts on Homer, the Iliad, and where its inspiration came from? A lot of the look, and a lot of these questions may not be relevant or whatever. We don't spend a lot of time on all of them. We can do like one minute.

• 2:21:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not my field. I'm not a yeah, so I can't talk about this.

• 2:21:27Danny Jones?

  Okay, Sean says, My question is, how much of a leap is it to make the claim that religion came from early drugs and then was adapted by the Catholic Church to control the masses?

• 2:21:38Speaker 01

  I won't talk to the second part of the question, only the first one.

• 2:21:43Speaker 01

  So the first one, early drug use, I mean, I'm sure that drug use was played a part in practically all, all early cultic forms. So, yeah, I mean, to a certain degree, I mean, when we say drugs, we just say, you know, all kinds of mind altering.

• 2:22:04Danny Jones?

  Sure, even medicines, I'm sure.

• 2:22:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and even, I mean, even just certain herbs that you can consume that without any.

• 2:22:11Danny Jones?

  They probably didn't view drugs the same way we do. They definitely didn't.

• 2:22:14Speaker 01

  That's right. I mean, yeah, exactly. So I think that, that, I mean, I'm not saying that religion came from that, but that was a part of the development of religion and the way to communicate with the divine. So clearly, when you're consuming certain substances, substances, even natural substances, that you're consuming that cause you to hallucinate and to, and to kind of enter this, this state where you are communicating with the divine or that you're seeing visions, of course, these play, play a role in practically every, every cultic system to a certain degree.

• 2:22:50Danny Jones?

  Absolutely. Jacob, hello, Dr. Bernay, the podcast with Neil from Gnostic and Form, and I heard you say that the Jews from what is considered the first temple period worshipped a god named IAO?

• 2:23:02Speaker 01

  Yah.

• 2:23:03Danny Jones?

  Yah, okay, Yah, and you equate this god with Yahweh. Is it possible that the god IAO predates the Jews and is worshipped in Greek culture since the name itself is the root for whatever that is?

• 2:23:14Speaker 01

  Yah, yahomi.

• 2:23:15Danny Jones?

  Okay. Which means to heal in ancient Greek, hail Satan.

• 2:23:22Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 2:23:26Danny Jones?

  Thanks, Jacob.

• 2:23:29Danny Jones?

  I got the best, I got the best fans.

• 2:23:30Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yeah. So going back to Yah, yeah, I don't think it's, it goes back, it does not predate because it's not mentioned anywhere. I mean, it only is mentioned much later after the Aramaic slash Hebrew Yah. So it doesn't, I don't think it's, it's, yes, there is a verb that, that's, that sounds similar, but that's just, that there is no, there is nothing that connects this verb to Yah directly. And again, it's not, it's simply not documented anywhere.

• 2:24:00Danny Jones?

  Okay. Blake Blake, what is the Tree of Life and how is it misinterpreted? Straight to the point, these guys.

• 2:24:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. How is it misinterpreted? Yeah, I don't know how to answer this. There is no tree, there's, yeah, it's, that, you know, they're talking, probably if they're talking about the Bible, they're talking about the Eden and the Tree of, and what is considered the Tree of Life there.

• 2:24:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:23Speaker 01

  There were Tree of Lives, the Trees of Life depicted in Neo Syrian and in generally in the ancient Near East in certain places that are considered to be Trees of Life. But that's not necessarily directly related to this.

• 2:24:38Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:24:38Speaker 01

  And yeah, it's not, it's not something that I can talk to, in too much detail.

• 2:24:44Danny Jones?

  Cormac, how do digital tools reshape our understanding of ancient texts? And what is the most compelling evidence of Zoroastrian influence in Jewish traditions?

• 2:24:52Speaker 01

  Okay, so this is a great, these are two great questions. So the digital tools today are still reshaping what we're doing. And I mentioned earlier that we're trying to do, me and some colleagues, we're trying to do, to make the study of history become more and more precise, more and more objective, more and more transparent, closer to the exact sciences. And we are using a lot of digital tools in order to do that, a lot of AI work, both on the visual capture of the doc, of the original documents, so how we capture, the, how we visually capture the date, the visual data for these objects. We do it in 2D and 3D and all kinds of filters, all kinds of mesh algorithms in order to do that, in order to absolutely fully capture, capture the, these original.

• 2:25:38Speaker 01

  Documents in a way that is as precise as possible and at least as transparent as possible. We have an entire team in Germany working on that.

• 2:25:46Danny Jones?

  Oh wow.

• 2:25:46Speaker 01

  We have in developing these algorithms and are also AI, there's an AI component to that.

• 2:25:51Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:25:52Speaker 01

  We have others, other, and other teams also in this project that we're kind of really pushing now.

• 2:26:00Speaker 01

  That does AI-driven OCR, so it's OCR, of course, optical character recognition, but in order to do that for the ancient world. It's not like OCR that we do today for printed documents where everything is printed and everything is obvious. For the ancient world, you have to, you have to be very, I mean, it's a, it's a very, very complex process of how to do that. But yeah, we have a lot of digital tools, a lot of, I mean, really, an entire set of digital tools that we're using now in order to ultimately produce these, these, this historical data in the most transparent way.

• 2:26:36Danny Jones?

  Oh wow, that's fascinating.

• 2:26:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, now the second question is Zoroastrian, the most compelling evidence of Zoroastrian influence in Jewish traditions. I will now start not with the Bible, but with the day-to-day. And again, in, in several of my articles, also in this book, this open access book, so that my article there, I talk about the, about the existence of a fire holder, not a fire altar. I don't like the term fire altar, but an atrodan, the name of the, of the object is. That was, that existed within the temple, the Yahawistic temple at Elefantine.

• 2:27:17Speaker 01

  Well, this is temple, is a temple to Yahweh, it's a, in that sense, it's a Jewish temple. In the fifth century before the Common Era, but they had, according to their own sources. They had a fireholder in the temple, within the confines of the temple. They had a fireholder. And they use the term, the a Western term, atrodan, or the Indo-Iranian term, for a fireholder, which is one of the main components of Zoroastrianism, right? The fireholder, the veneration of the fire. It's not an altar, because nothing is offered on it. It's just, it exists for the veneration of the fire.

• 2:27:59Speaker 01

  And the fire in Zoroastrianism is seen as the son of Ahura Mazda, the son of the deity, of the main deity of Zoroastrianism. So, so we do have, and this is very compelling, because you have within a Yahawistic temple, and they had their own altar, on which they offered other sacrifices. But within the temple, they also had a fireholder, and they are using the term, the Indo-Iranian term for it. And they could have, if it was just a regular fireholder, they could have just used dudadenu ra in Aramaic, or what, you know, they could have expressed it in pure Aramaic. They didn't have to use a technical Celtic term in order to refer to this.

• 2:28:41Speaker 01

  So, within the temple, they actually had a Zoroastrian, a clearly Zoroastrian fireholder within the confines of the temple.

• 2:28:53Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:28:54Speaker 01

  So that is very compelling, and that is very strong in terms of influence. Again, it does not mean that they converted to Zoroastrianism at all. I mean, as I said, there is cross-pollination constantly between all, everyone, everyone is constantly constantly, that is not, that does not mean that they turned into Zoroastrian.

• 2:29:12Danny Jones?

  Nothing was exclusive.

• 2:29:13Speaker 01

  Exactly, there's cross-pollination always, taking ideas, taking concepts, especially with the empire. I mean, this is the empire that is now... Controlling everything about your life. And so, um, and so the, uh, uh, so clearly that does not mean uh, anything more than just showing that you are a good citizen of the, of the, um, of the, of the Akhenint Empire. It does not mean more than that. But clearly they did adopt things in a more intimate level than, than possibly other cultic, uh, cultic traditions. We don't know. This is the, the earliest, um, uh, evidence that we have for a fireholder, uh, directly, uh, in the, I mean, in textual evidence that we have for a fireholder in, uh, anywhere, really.

• 2:29:59Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:29:59Speaker 01

  Um, we have fireholders depicted in the Akhenint Empire, depicted on, um, on, on, um, inscriptions, uh, depicted as a, as an image. Uh, we do have, um, images of, uh, Zoroastrian priests around the fireholder. Uh, so we do know that these, uh, these were, um, these were part, these were part of the cult in the Kemenid times, not just at Elefantine, but we don't have that as a text. We don't have that, a textual reference to it on, uh, uh, outside of Elefantine. So this is the first textual reference that we have. And it's within a Yahristic context. So I think that's really the most compelling, um, evidence of, of this cross pollination between the Yahweh slash Jews and the,

• 2:30:44Speaker 01

  and Zoroastrians, but there's a lot more, uh, there's a lot more. Um, i- in my article, I also talk about this so-called Passover letter where, that has, that actually shows elements that are, uh, uh, of, of an observance that is very close to or, um, or almost identical to the, um, uh, to the Zoroastrian Yazna, which is the Zoroastrian Liturgy. Um, and so we have that, uh, yeah, we have a lot of different elements and even the, uh, even within the Bible, the, uh, the idea of the, um, Of the eternal flame and the eternal, you know, the holy flame that comes down, even the burning bush, which is a supernatural flame, right, the supernatural fire.

• 2:31:28Speaker 01

  I have an lecture coming out two weeks from now in Paris about this, specifically about this, the burning bush and the

• 2:31:35Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 2:31:36Speaker 01

  And the, and the, and the theophany there with, and its Zoroastrian aspects there, which are on several levels there in that, in that particular story. And I have a colleague from Haifa, Dr. Professor Itamar Kiselev, who wrote a great article also in this book about the, about the fire sacrifice in the, in the Bible, in the, in Leviticus and other places as well. Just a great analysis of this dating that to, to Akheminid influences. And so, yeah, we're, we're seeing a lot of, of properly Zoroastrian elements in the,

• 2:32:18Speaker 01

  in the, in Jewish sources, whether in the Bible or, or external to the Bible. One thing we need to be very careful is to identify what we mean by the Zoroastrianism of the Akheminid period. Because most of the sources that we have are much later, from the Sassanian period, that's, you know, roughly third, late third, fourth century really, and, and to the, the rise of the, of Islam. And so, that's most of the sources that we have, and even then, the actual manuscripts that we have from Zoroastrianism are much later than that even. And so, for my research, what I try to do is only limit myself to things that I can

• 2:33:01Speaker 01

  prove already existed in the Akheminid period, whether it's in pictographic representations of these literatures, or texts, or even names, components of names. So, for example, just in one example, the name Darius, Dariyahwahush, in, in Iranian, in Old Persian, is a, is based on a quote, a direct quote from the Avesta. Okay, it's a citat name, we would say in German. So it's a name, it's a citation name from an authoritative text. Oh, wow. So it's not even, it's not Persian, it's Avestan. Okay, in, Daya Wahu'sh means the holder of good. And Wahu'sh element here is, means good. But in Old Persian, you would say naiba to say good.

• 2:33:46Speaker 01

  It's not, it's not, he's not even using Persian, he's using Avestan, which is the liturgical language of Zoroastrianism. And so the fact that he chose that as his throne name when he ascended the throne means that obviously not only that he quoted from the Avestan text, knowledge of the oldest part, the Gaatha, which is the oldest part of the Avestan text, not necessarily all of the Avestas that we know today, really only just the earliest layer of the text, the seventeen hymns that are, that are part of the, what's called the Gaatha in the Avestan. So knowledge of the, all of these quotes are from the Gaathas. And so not just his name, but other names as well.

• 2:34:28Speaker 01

  But it means that he, that he expected people to understand that this is what he's doing with this name. So people were familiar enough with the texts, not just him, but also his citizens. Right. Right? So that, so that teaches us a lot about what, at least, what part of the texts of the Avesta might have been available at that, at that time. And again, pictographic and all of it. So I'm looking at all of this and I'm, and I'm limiting myself in my research to things that I can prove existed in the Akkerman period and not only. Sometimes I more cautiously refer to things that are not yet there and I say, well, I, and I, and I say that I'm speculating, but it might, that these things might have already existed,

• 2:35:13Speaker 01

  but that's much more reserved. To make a, to make a precise point or a strong research point, I always use the stuff that I can, I can, I can show existed in the Akkerman period. But clearly the Akkemenids were Zoroastrian to a certain degree. They're not the Zoroastrian in the same sense that we have. Zoroastrians today, but they did have at least the Goths to this early layer of the of the Avestan texts. And in a Huramazda, I mean, that's, that's, that's the, the, um, clearly the, the, uh, the, uh, Zoroastrian deity, um, and they saw him as almost exclusive, the, the only deity.

• 2:35:53Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 2:35:53Speaker 01

  And, um, I mean, they, they acknowledged the existence of other, other gods, but they talk about the Huramazda. Pretty much almost exclusively, especially in the early period. And, uh, which is interesting also because they were more, they kind of gravitate more towards, uh, monotheism, so to speak. It's not monotheism, but monoletry. Um, in the early period, and then they became more quote unquote, polytheistic later on.

• 2:36:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:36:17Speaker 01

  Usually we think that, that people evolve, so that, I mean, I'm not, not attaching any kind of quality to it, but it, but, move towards more of a mono type, uh,

• 2:36:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah, modest.

• 2:36:29Speaker 01

  Monist.

• 2:36:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:30Speaker 01

  Um, religion later on in, but it's not always the case. Things, things are always. Yeah, cycles. Vassalates. Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:36:39Danny Jones?

  Wow, that's fascinating stuff. Well, thank you again for your time, man. This is,

• 2:36:43Speaker 01

  Thank you, my pleasure.

• 2:36:44Danny Jones?

  This has been super enlightening and I'm, I'm gonna download that thing and read it to myself. Um, it's super cool that you're doing it for free as a free download. That's, I think that's incredible.

• 2:36:52Speaker 01

  That was very important to us, yeah.

• 2:36:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Um, cool. Thank you to the Patreons for your question and thank you again for your time.

• 2:36:58Speaker 01

  My pleasure. Thank you for having me, yeah.

• 2:37:00Danny Jones?

  All right. Good night, everyone.

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