Raksha said:
What that tells me is that you are using the standard traditionalist tactic, of making the burden of proof impossibly high for your opponent and conveniently low for your own position.
and you're not doing the same thing, making out that the truth of your position is self-evident?
In other words, you are applying a double standard here. You can't expect that to be convincing to someone who doesn't share your reverence for the traditional sources, and who is in fact highly suspicious of them in certain areas.
then you fail to see what i am doing. i am not trying to convert you to my point of view, but merely to explain to you how i come to hold it and do so with integrity and without intellectual dishonesty, both of which you continually impugn in connection with traditionalist positions. in other words, the only thing i wish to convince you of is that my position makes sense to me and is logically consistent and rational based on the axioms i espouse as well as being integrated with my larger worldview and, consequently deserving of less contempt than you customarily display.
You also say there has to be texual evidence of patriarchal censorship and/or rewriting before you are willing to concede my point that goddess worship was not only practiced but accepted and considered perfectly normal, valid and proper right through the First Temple and probably well into the Second Temple period also.
NO. there has to be textual evidence that, in this SPECIFIC CASE, your interpretation of the circumstantial evidence concerned is correct - i am perfectly entitled to demand "exceptional proof" for what is in my view an "exceptional claim". the point about goddess worship being practiced, accepted and normal is not that this was not the case, but that it was practiced, accepted and normal
from the point of view of the Tanakh, which explicitly states that 'the land was full of idolatry' which corrupted the biblical israelites away from the sinaitic Revelation and the Torah at the time - and of this there is no evidence other than your assertion that the circumstantial evidence relates to this specific case. in other words, we already know that for the most part, the biblical israelites were a bunch of backsliding, bloodthirsty, idolatrous thugs, because *the Tanakh itself says so*. your only way out of this is to assert the Big Patriarchal Cover-Up, which, of course, you already do, so your position is perfectly consistent - i just don't happen to agree with it because i don't hold the same assumptions.
I believe that the only people who strenuously objected were the Babylonian exile community, both during and after the Babylonian exile.
for that to be true, the *entire* prophetic literature would have to date from this time and not even the most extreme bilical critics, as far as i am aware, holds this to be the case.
I believe that the only people who strenuously objected were the Babylonian exile community, both during and after the Babylonian exile. But they were a highly influential community both in terms of education and social position, so their view was the the one that prevailed and eventually became "normative" or mainstream Judaism. My inadequate Jewish education is showing here--were they the tanaim, the scribes? Is that the word I'm looking for? Please correct me if I'm wrong.
the phrase you're looking for is the "men of the great assembly" as per the book of ezra. the "tannaim" were the sages of the mishnah. if you look at the first chapter of pirkei avot in the Mishnah, it details the chain of tradition from sinai to the tannaitic period and there you will find everything you require to substantiate your belief in the cover-up - if that is what you seek to do. that is the chain of authority where trust-based positions are derived from.
Anyway, I find that the more I learn, the more I don't trust them.
what a surprise.
I am beginning to believe that Ezra and Nehemiah and their circle were what I would call Jewish fundamentalist (or the equivalent), and I absolutely DON'T trust that type because they are shameless revisionists. These are NOT the people I want doing the selecting and editing of texts EVER, because they select on the basis of what they believe is good for the common people, not on the basis of what may have normative and acceptable up to that point.
i respectfully submit that everybody in judaism prior to the C18th would be, by your standards, a "fundamentalist". and, if you could find anyone that agreed with your positions on the Big Beardy Patriarchal Cover-Up, they too would be doing so from a doctrinaire and therefore "fundamentalist" position. what you are doing is no different from anyone else who posits a lost "golden age" before the "rot set in" and "they" "corrupted" the original pristine condition. i've heard it from the fundamentalists in my corner talking about the "decline of the generations", i've heard it from muslims talking about the first companions of muhammad, i've heard it from wiccans talking about ancient goddess worship. all it is is blaming a "them" for screwing up the system - is it any surprise that it quickly gets very shrill? in such a situation, any gainsaying of something which is So Obviously True is bound to be automatically dismissed as "defensive".
In my never-humble opinion, that is simply unforgivable. It's paternalistic and condescending and above all, it's dishonest.
unfortunately, people in bygone ages did not sit around worrying about whether people in the C21st were going to find them condescending or not. as for "dishonesty", if you wanted to make that kind of accusation you would have to show me where the cover-up was taking place. i am aware that it is far more satisfying for you to be able to claim a cover-up, just as it is far more satisfying for people to claim that the moon landings were a conspiracy than to cope with the probably far less exciting reality.
For example: Why wasn't the book of Enoch included in the canon? We know from the number of copies that have been found that it was enormously popular and influential during the Hellenistic period and maybe before (I'm not sure how old it is). And yet it's an apocryphal book and not part of the Tanakh. WHY NOT??? Apparently somebody thought it was "dangerous for the masses," although I'm not really sure why.
ok, firstly how would you know what "somebody thought" if you weren't privy to the discussions? as it happens, to my knowledge at least one of the canonical discussions *was* recorded - the one in which rabbi akiba convinces some doubters that the "song of songs" should be included, because it is the "holy of holies", you know, the same phrase used of the very innermost sanctum of the Temple. isn't it a bit difficult to argue that there's been a systematic cover-up if the discussion is part of the public record? as for the number of copies being important, i dare say that a substantial number of copies of the tv guide are in circulation, will future scholarship thus conclude that they are as significant as, say, the contract for licencing parts of the frequency spectrum for 3g services? why is "bel and the dragon", another part of the jewish apocrypha, not included in the canon? could it be that the sages thought that the masses would not need to know how to rid themselves of the monster that is scourging the land using only cake? two books of maccabees are in the apocrypha too, should we conclude that the story of that rebellion has been expunged from history too?
In other words, for me the question is not why YOU shouldn't trust the traditional sources and give them more weight than the archaeological record. It's why should I trust them when I thoroughly distrust the paternalistic motives of the tanaim?
i'm not saying you should. what i'm saying is that given that you think pretty much everyone in jewish history is a paternalistic liar or just plain fictional i don't really know why you're so keen to be a part of a club whose rules you despise, whose members you detest and whose history, culture and literature you consider to be the product of systematic falsification. in other words, whatever it is you seek to identify with, it isn't with anything that is particularly recognisable as jewish in any way that anyone mainstream can identify, or indeed anything that if it existed at all, has existed in the last 2-3 millennia. in other words, although i 100% support your right to believe whatever the hell you want and live as you choose, i'm not entirely sure i see the point other than that you think it gives you carte blanche to accuse me of being guilty of every sort of "ism" in the Political Correctness Lexicon Of Shame.
Actually, there IS textual evidence of patriarchal censorship and/or rewriting in the Tanakh. As Raphael Patai and others have pointed out, that evidence is most apparent in the "slippages," i.e. the places where the censorship was incomplete or badly handled, in the places where a text simply does not make any sense when an "orthodox" interpretation or translation is applied, but *does* make sense when interpreted or translated in a non-traditional way. I think you probably know what I'm talking about better than I do.
i hope so. and, if you read the discussions i had with bob_x (with whom i have, i believe, come to a place of mutual respect and value) you will note that questions about the authorship and provenance of various bits of Tanakh are not in fact especially controversial to traditionalists - at least as regards NaKh. Torah, on the other hand, is a different matter entirely. my vehemence about the documentary hypothesis notwithstanding, i do not dismiss the tools that biblical criticism brings to us out of hand.
am seriously a channeler, and sometimes it happens spontaneously when I'm in the middle of posting a note on a discussion board. That was only very light channeling, just enough to make my writing a flow a little more easily than it usually does. There have been occasions though when it's been much heavier, when she has actually spoken through me. That usually happens when it's important to get a message across to someone for some specific reason. I don't always know the reason, but there's a kind of imperative that goes along with it. I always follow through if I possibly can, usually by sending the person an e-mail or private message. That's why I sometimes refer to myself as "Lady Sophia's errand girl."
i wonder how you would react if i claimed to be writing under the influence of a maggid - or pointed out that moses wrote the Torah down as Dictated by G!D - thus seeing himself essentially as "G!D's errand boy"?
The same standard applies that I apply to everything: If it's true, it can stand on its own.
that might make it true, but it won't necessarily make it logical. nor does the exclusive authority to define the parameters of "truth" rest entirely with you (no more with me, but then i don't claim that).
b'shalom
bananabrain
!!