Gad Barnea
Appearances
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Yeah. So that, I mean, not all of them necessarily, but this would be very, very common. And so Yahwism is simply those people who identify for them, for their identity, for their ethnic identity and for their cultic identity. The main deity, the head of the pantheon is a deity by the name of Yahw.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
There are no specific and unique cultic features such as commandments or observations or feasts that are necessarily unique to them. There are no special sacrifices or anything like that. They are special. very much like any other group around them. They do the same sacrifices.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
They, generally speaking, observe very similar feasts that are not specific necessarily to them, but are like agricultural observances that everyone is obviously going to observe around them. So we don't see anything about early Yahwism that is necessarily unique.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
except for the the main deity that they have and so and so that's that's really early yeah with them very very simple and that started well it's hard to know exactly when it started we can only say when we start seeing it in the record Now, there are debates about where the first place that it's actually documented might be.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
One place, there are two temples in what is today Sudan and what used to be Southern Egypt, or the extreme southern part of Egypt. Two temples of Ramses II, one is in Soleb, in a place called Soleb, and another in Amara West. And these two temples have lists of people groups. And in these two lists, there is a group that's called the Shasu of Yao.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Now, there's a question if Yao is simply a place name. Is that really the deity Yao or not? I actually, for a long time, I thought this could not be.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
uh the deity yahoo but now i think that because of parallelism uh it is within this it's in with it's 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 yahoo it comes after the shasu of baal which is of course with another deity And there's also Anat, if I remember correctly.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So you have parallelism with other deities, the Shasu of another deity within that same list. So it makes sense, or at least the probability now becomes higher that this might be the deity Yahu. And if that's the case, we're talking about 14th century before the common era. Already the name of this deity. What century? 14th century.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
That's the SMS of the ancient world, really. Kind of the WhatsApp of the ancient world. Oh, wow. The WhatsApp. Yeah, exactly. 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 ostraca, whether it's other types of communication.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Yeah, we don't know. We really don't know. There are all kinds of theories for that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
No, that's definitely not.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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. And we find that, of course, in the book of Exodus. But that's a much later folk etymology for the name that explains it as a name of existence.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
But after these two, after Soleb and Amara West in what is modern-day Sudan, we don't hear of this name until the 9th century, the late 9th century. in some stelas like the Mishah stela and the Tel Dan stela. And Tel Dan is interesting because it also has one of these theophoric names in it with Yahweh. And so these are, so for a long time we don't, it goes off the radar and then comes back.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And what's interesting is in the 8th century BCE, we have a person by the name of Yahweh Bedi One of the most fascinating characters, we don't know a lot about this person, but what we do know is absolutely fascinating. He's mentioned in the Neo-Assyrian inscriptions as a king, as a Hittite. And Hittite means that he comes from modern-day Turkey, southern Turkey, maybe the border with Syria.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
But he is a Hittite, according to the inscriptions, who is the king of Hamat, an Aramean city in modern-day Syria. And so he is a Hittite who rules an Aramean city, a non-Hittite city. And his name is Yaw Bidi. Now, the first component of the name, Yaw,
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
is clearly the name of the deity yahoo because in us in the acadian 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 told you if this is
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
If we're talking about the person, the people group, or a deity.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Wow. Next to the noun. And so here we see that there's the dingir. It's called dingir, the terminative that means that this is a deity. So that the Yau 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? This guy is a Hittite, right? from modern-day southern Turkey, who was king of an Aramean city somehow.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And he is a Yahwist. I mean, he is, for all intents and purposes, Jewish in that sense. I mean, proto-Jewish. Yahwism is not synonymous with Judaism, and I'm sure we'll get to that. But he is clearly a Yahwist. And that is fascinating.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
That's really all we know about him, and the only reason we know about him is that he rebelled against the Neo-Assyrians, and the Neo-Assyrians captured him and killed him in a very, very gruesome way. They describe it. 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And you can read what the ordinary people, what they thought about. These are people who never thought that what they are writing will be studied 2,500 years later or even two days later even. I mean, they were just written for someone to read at the same day or the next. And so we learn this is purely unfiltered data from antiquity. It's not Herodotus, which is obviously filtered data.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
But we do have proof that Yahwism existed outside of Judea, Samaria, or Israel, and is certainly recorded up north in modern-day Syria. And so, it looks like from the data that we have, the extra-biblical data, in the Bible there are other hints that I think are much later and not necessarily historically anchored. But from what we have from extra-biblical data, it looks like Yahwism
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
started in the Aramean areas, and so in the areas of modern-day Syria, were adopted by nomadic tribes in that area, and somehow at some point kind of migrated down to Canaan. from Syria, and so Yahwism became more popular in Syria, in Canaan. But we already have, as I mentioned, we already have Yahwism in Canaan already in the 9th century as well.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So the entire region already had the forms of Yahwism in it from, I'd say, at least around the 9th, 8th century before the Common Era.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
That is the consensus and what I'm actually pushing back against. So you're right, Yahwism is seen as kind of proto-Judaism, 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
i don't use bc ad yeah everybody has different things 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 up front right because for me it's just a b c a d yeah yeah yeah yeah and i understand i understand so uh yeah i just use these more objective right right objective terms um so so um about second uh second uh century before the common era we have uh
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Torah-based Judaism. So Judaism per se, when you really want to talk about actual Judaism, 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, observing the Sabbath, et cetera, et cetera.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So Judaism, by definition, depends on knowledge of these commandments and observing these commandments. um now we have we have thousands of documents from different jewish um or yeah whistic 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
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
and all the way through northern egypt and then palestine and then into babylonia okay we have thousands of documents not all of them textual some of them are coins for example but these are also very important right um but we really have thousands of documents all together but none of these documents uh betray the slightest knowledge of the bible
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
They don't show any, they have no knowledge of the Bible in any of these documents. I mean, even not, no idiomatic expressions, for example.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
The Bible in general. In general, okay. In general, but of course the Torah is the main document that you would expect. But yeah, it has absolutely zero, I mean, there's nothing, no, even the names, the personal names of people are not the names that we find in the, 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
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 those primary documents a lot.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
in this entire time period, up until the beginning of the Hellenistic period, none of these people are named after literary heroes from the Torah or from the Bible in general, which is fascinating.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
When you think about this.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Well, you talk about academic and religious. These are going to be different things.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So the religious – I can't talk too much about the religious because there's a lot of different – and I know that – I mean like really kind of fundamentalist religious folks would say, well, Judaism started with Abraham really, right? So it's about 2000 before the common era, somewhere like that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And then they'll go forward from that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
I mean, yeah. Again, I can't talk too much about the religious perspective on this, but I think that that's what is said in certain circles. In academia, Judaism, I think now it's pretty much consensus that Judaism as such, meaning people who observe –
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
who observe these commandments such as the Sabbath and the Passover and all these feasts, tabernacles, et cetera, et cetera, and kosher diet and all of that. Follow the rules. All of these rules, second century before the common era. So second century BCE. That's where we start to see people observing this extra biblically.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Okay, in the Bible, that's a different story. But from what we start seeing extra-biblically, outside the Bible, from these primary sources that I talked about earlier, right? We talked about the ostraca, we talked about the documents that are written by the simple folk. That, you know, they trade things, they do all kinds of activities on the Sabbath, for example.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
that are not permitted by the Torah. They do a lot of stuff that goes squarely against what is prescribed in the 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So Judaism, from a purely extra-biblical perspective, Judaism starts around the second, maybe late third century before the common era.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
I mean, according to the Bible, according to certain interpretations of the Bible, we're talking about Abraham, right? Being kind of the founder of the, 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 mythological. Yes. And so, and I can say that with certainty in terms of as a scholar. When was Abraham again?
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
It was supposed to be around 2000. But 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 any of these stories. Know nothing. I mean, even the name Abraham doesn't exist anywhere within the sphere of Jewish life or Yahwistic life anywhere.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
It's a great question. Like I think everyone in my field, things were not necessarily planned out from the beginning this way. I was initially involved 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 really wasn't specializing in this field.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
But also the idea, so the whole concept of Abraham and the patriarchs, so Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, is people coming from the east to establish a new nation, right? That's the whole concept of the patriarchs. Coming from the east and even when Jacob and Isaac need to marry, they have to go back and marry someone from the east and bring them to Canaan.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So the idea of people coming from the east and establishing a community is such a deeply Hellenistic idea. So in the Hellenistic world... When you say Hellenistic idea, what do you mean by that? Well, in the Hellenistic world, it was really important for a lot of these... Hellenistic means a certain time frame, right? Correct.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So we're talking really the turn of the 3rd century, late 4th century before the Common Era. And really into the common era. I mean, that's a much wider, that's kind of Greco-Roman now that we're talking about, but it's still- So like 550 Bs is as early as it gets, right? No, no, no. About 400. Oh, 400. Okay.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Even not 400, about 300 Bs. let's say 320 to be, so the Hellenistic period around, you know, the conquest of Alexander the Great and forward. So about 320-ish and into the Roman world. The Roman world, 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,
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Creating the mythology, the founding mythology of your people, whether 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 old world, this mystical world that comes from the East and establishes their country. So several polis...
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
in Greece had these legends about 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 heights of its power, under Augustus, Augustus commissioned
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
um virgil to write the aeneads uh 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 yeah number of verses and words as the torah um so it's a lot it's a lengthy work um now he had it to write to write it in meter and rhyme which the torah the torah authors didn't have to deal with so it's much harder what he did is much harder
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
But he did that, and he also, it's called the Aeneid, because after Aeneas, who was this mythological hero from Homer, from the Trojan War, and so they built this entire idea of how he is coming from Troy, so from the East, to establish Rome. So this idea of someone coming from the East to establish Rome,
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
A new race or a new city or a new settlement is something that is deeply Hellenistic, and we see that here. So with the story of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, these founders –
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
coming from the east that is so uh in many ways so hellenistic in its um in its core interesting um and again we don't we simply have absolutely zero zero knowledge anywhere it's not it i mean these patriarchs i mean even and the names of the of the of the matriarchs either sarah rachel um leah etc are not are not found in the document record at all none of the women
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 there's zero... simply zero knowledge of the Bible anywhere up until the beginning of the Hellenistic era.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Sure. So my focus is really on history, especially of the Iranian world, the infant 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 Sasanian Empire. So I'm focusing on these three empires, which together really kind of...
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So that's why for these reasons and others, it is certainly clear to me that these things are mythological, Abraham, all of these.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Well, not long. I mean, the fact that there is such a deafening silence before Alexandria, really. Whoa, bless you.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 there. on the island of Elephantine. So that's an island in Upper Egypt, meaning Southern Egypt.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
The primary narrative. And the biblical narrative has its raison d'etre.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
about the problems of bias. In fact, we talked before we came on air, we actually talked about this Ostracon that I'm republishing that was read the wrong way for 116 years.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
One of the reasons that it was read the wrong way was because of bias, because of this built-in bias. Another article of mine that just came out a few weeks ago in a book that I edited together with Professor Reinhard Kratz from Germany, from Göttingen. re-analyzes a document, a papyrus called the Passover papyrus.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 island... which is just facing the city of Aswan, for those who know, in southern Egypt.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Now, it has nothing to do with the Passover, but it was already analyzed as something related to the Passover because of the date range that is mentioned in this document. And so the day change, that's actually a perfect example.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
In this document, which is very fragmentary, but we do see something related 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 that corresponds to the Passover. Those dates do correspond at least to the Feast of Matzot, part of the Passover feast.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So they saw these dates and like, oh, that's the Passover, right? But that's absolutely, 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 meaningful to me and they mean the Passover. But if you step, yeah, exactly. If you look at this critically,
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
you realize that this is simply the first full moon of the year, the 15th of Nisan. Nisan is the first month of the year both in Babylonian and 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
i mean if the deity if you're about to harvest everything that you worked on for months uh planting and and taking care of your of right you know and so you're about to harvest and if the if the deity is now going to um you know send hail down 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
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
I mean, the month of Nisan, the beginning of the harvest, was an extremely important time for the entire northern hemisphere. I mean, this is the beginning of harvest. And so looking at those dates in the middle of the month of Nisan,
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
as 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 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
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
That's true, but I think in many cases they truly believed this because they were – we – 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 genuine. I mean, they really think when they see these dates automatically, especially if within a Yahwistic context.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
If they see these dates in an Egyptian context, a purely Egyptian context, they wouldn't necessarily connect it to the Passover. But since they're seeing it within a Yahwistic context, they're like, okay, this has to be the Passover. But even within a Yahwistic context, it doesn't necessarily have to be. Now,
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 firsts, you need to be extra careful, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
In miles, I don't know. But 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 far from Cairo. And so Egypt is a pretty large country and a beautiful place. And so Elephantine is this island just facing Aswan. I mean, it's really close to Aswan.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
I mean, it's very different dealing with a second occurrence or a third occurrence because you already know there was a first. So you're not even asking whether such an observant even existed.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
but 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 um as a as a festival but then you need to step back and say well is is what is what we are looking at really the passover okay and and my answer is no um for a lot of reasons that i talk about in this article
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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. But I connected to the Achaemenid version, so really early Zoroastrianism, and I explain why in that article. So in that context,
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
analysis connecting it to a cabinet zoroastrianism is based on a lot of data um or you know on significant data whether it is whereas there is nothing to connect this at that stage to the biblical passover okay so when you compare the two uh it's it the chances are much stronger that it is connected to a zoroastrian or zoroastrian related uh observance than it is to the uh to the biblical passover
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 approach. And I've had a lot of that. I mean, not a lot, but I had some of that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
The thing is, in the article I really try, and in my different lectures about this in different places, I start by showing just how wide the Zoroastrian impact on the Elephantine Yahwista community was, independently of this particular document. And then I zero in on this document after the reader already understand that this is not the only place where you find Zoroastrian influence, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 is not just a singular event. The influence of Achaemenid Zoroastrianism was deep and very intimate. to the people at Elephantine, and I think to the Yahwists or early Jews in general.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Yeah, I mean, there was no, 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 Elephantine, the Ouestic community, we do find documents like where people bless each other by the name of Yao and Canu, who is the local Egyptian god. So, I bless you by both deities.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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. But it was a central... a central island for Egyptian cult.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
all the gods i don't mention a specific name i just you're blessed by the gods and so that's very common in um in that period not just the telephantine but in general just not mentioning all the gods because there are so many you you're blessed by the gods and um but these are yahwists these are yahwists
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
But the reason I use the word cult so much and not religion is because these are systems of adherence to specific deities for specific reasons. But religion, properly speaking, when we talk about religion, it's a system of adherence.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
You know, like going to mass, for example, for Catholics or going to the synagogue and doing certain specific, very specific and unique things for that specific religion. Practices. 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 common.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So if you would go and observe a sacrifice in the Elvistic temple and then you go and you observe a sacrifice in a Phoenician temple, 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 Yahwism being early Judaism or not. And that's really important. Yahwism as such...
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
continued so it spawned judaism around the third century before the common era judaism so when the 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 Yahwism continued unabated. It continued in parallel to that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And you had Yahwists who did not subscribe to these authoritative texts. And in Egypt and other places. So Yahwism continued. It spawned Judaism off and then Judaism spawned off Christianity. But Yahwism continued. the most popular and the most important, really, the most central form of adherence to the deity Yahweh, while Judaism and Christianity were developed in parallel to that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And so, Yaoism, if we were to be transported back now, maybe 1800 years, 1900 years, or 2000 years back, and wanted to know what form of Yao cult is the most popular, Yaoism would be by far the most popular at that period, more than Christianity or Judaism. And the reason I say that is because we find all over the Roman Empire, and even outside the Roman Empire,
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
There were these three deities that were associated with this island that eventually became a triad of deities, Khnum, the ram god, and Satet and Anuket, two female deities, one of which was his wife and the other was considered his daughter.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
We find texts, amulets, curse texts, and all kinds of magical paraphernalia that people used in order to protect themselves by the name of Yahweh. And we find them all over the empire, all over the empire. It's much more, it was so popular that even Roman historians and Roman philosophers wrote about, who are not Jewish, who are not Christian,
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
They would write about Yao and his importance in the federation of deities. And so, Yaoism 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 as a religion, as almost an unseen and unknown religion that we didn't really see before.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Because we are so, again, because of these projections that we have, looking back at the Bible, so there's only New Testament and Hebrew Bible. There's nothing beyond that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Right. So, yeah, so, I mean, that's, I'm not familiar actually with that book, but the Bible, the way I explain the Bible to my students and in general is, and I believe the correct way to look at the Bible is it's a battlefield of ideas.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
and so like people often say well you you you you take the testimony of herodotus right and you you put more weight on what herodotus said about the history of of those 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 but there is a big difference between herodotus and the bible
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
the bible is a book that defined the identity of a people and of different sects within the jewish uh realm right so you had a lot of different sects competing for ideas you know the pharisees the sadducees the essenes etc you had all of these different sects competing for and the enochians and we have a lot of different sects competing for uh for ideas
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Anyway, this island initially was the island of Satet 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 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And theological ideas, what is redemption, what is salvation, what are the end times, all of these different ideas competing against one another. No one's identity was defined by Herodotus. No one said, I'm a Herodotian. But people did define their identity by the Bible. So that's a completely different corpus. And the impact is completely different.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Now, the reason I say it's a battlefield is because the different redactions, different editions, different treatments that the Bible had to go through
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
um where different different ideologies competing against one another and you see that in in the text um you see things that are you know go to one direction and or the other another direction and the text in the text contains all of them and if not if the bible does not contain works that are 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
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
that process also is ideological deciding which book would get in 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 the of this work the fact that it is i mean the bible is a very beautiful work and regardless of of uh of religious um the religious perspective
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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, where that plot of land is, in the map. You see it's the bridge between Asia, between Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
That's the only land bridge between these three continents. Every single empire, every army had to go through that region. So every culture in antiquity from Western Asia and Europe and Egypt, of course not China, but every military, every culture from those areas had to leave a mark on that land and on the people.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And so 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's a big, this huge mixture of different perspectives that were left behind by the great empires and the different groups that came in and out of that region.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 from Indo-Iranian through the Achaemenids, for example. So from the Indo-Iranian sphere, we see from the Greeks, we see a lot of the Egyptian elements. And the Assyrian and the Babylonians, et cetera, and the Hittites.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So we see all of these different elements come in and get kind of mixed up in the biblical text. And I think that's what gives it a lot of its beauty and richness. You have all of these cultures coming together. And for my research, I kind of reverse engineer this. So I look at that and I go back into the actual cultures and try to reverse engineer the original direction that they took.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And it was on that island that in the sixth century before the current era, a Jewish community settled and – or was actually brought there as mercenaries to guard what was for a while the southern border of Egypt – 600 B.C.? Sixth century, so around 550, according to my calculations and my research. There are some scholars who dated much earlier, I mean, about 100 years earlier than that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And especially looking at the Iranian world, which had a tremendous impact.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Well, if Moses is a historical person.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Which he's not. Okay. 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. Why do you say that? Well, so I'll answer your question first. Moses is really kind of the first extra biblical mention of Moses.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
is found in Hecateos 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 and Now there are about, according to my calculation, about between 11 to 13 different Moseses in the Greek sources. And these are very different, it's the same name, but completely different stories about this person.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
No, no, different stories, same name, but different stories. And that's really very, very interesting. So we have Moses as this military leader, great military leader defeating the Ethiopians. We have Moses as an Egyptian priest. We have Moses as the teacher of Orpheus, this great musician, the great singer, musician, and the teacher of, and the reason why, because it sounds like news, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Moses, so he's a teacher of Orpheus. We have him as a magi, as an alchemist, as a magician. So we have a lot of different – and we have him also as a police builder. We have him 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?
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
I mean, the idea of 12 tribes does exist in the Bible, of course, but not as tribes that Moses divided. It's not the same story. So we have 11 to 13 different Moseses, and we have about four different Exodus narratives in the Greek world.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
around in the third century and many of them are simply they don't know about the 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 um how on the flip side actually the biblical version is polemicizing against these uh these other sources So clearly it's later, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
In order to disagree with someone, you have to come later, right? You have to know about it. So the biblical version of the Exodus narrative is polemicizing against a lot of these Greek sources and trying to correct them and to protect the Jewish people from some of these interpretations that seem to be offensive to the Jewish people. And so that we do find in the Bible.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So the Exodus story is clearly later and clearly reacting to many of these Greek sources. And that's a good reason to say this is mythological because you have so many different Moseses And you have at least four different Exodus narratives. And the biblical version of that just polemicizes against all of these other sources. And so it comes later and it's eclectic.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
It looks at all of these different directions.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 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
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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, it's important, but it's simply not a – it's not an absolutely 1% convincing argument.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
I think when you look at the Greek sources and you see how – 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 different, I mean, even several generations of these stories developing in parallel to the biblical one. Oh, wow.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
But I published on this, and I showed that this is the most probable date is around 550 B.C., when they arrived there, 540, 550 B.C. Anyway, so there was a Jewish community on that island, and they had a temple, a fully functioning temple. They had priests. They had sacrifices. I mean, it was a temple about the same size of the Jerusalem temple and also a very important place.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
I mean, we're talking about a very, very rich generation. about a person, a very well-known person called Moses, not necessarily the biblical Moses, although he's always associated with the Jews in some way, shape, or form. But sometimes he's associated with the Jews in a very offensive way. So, for example, he's depicted as a leper. And he's depicted as a leper.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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. There's so much dealing with leprosy and dealing with keeping pure.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So in the story of the burning bush, he kind of puts his hand into his cloak and takes it out and it's leprous 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?
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And so this obsession with leprosy, I believe, is part of the pushback. against this kind of pejorative view of some of the Greek sources against the Jewish people.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Right. I mean, more specifically before the third century BCE, that corresponds to the founding of the library of Alexandria as a phenomenon.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Well, that's Alexander the Great and Ptolemy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Childhood friends who studied in the academy, in Aristo's academy. And later with, I mean, Theophrastus, who was the heir of Aristo, took over the academy and was probably the visionary for the library of Alexandria or for the phenomenon of Alexandria. The reason I say phenomenon of Alexandria is is that Alexandria in antiquity was truly a science fictional city.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
I mean, it was something that the world has ever seen before.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Something like Silicon Valley. But truly, I mean, what they had – if you go to – I mean, it was a new city. I mean, it was built by – I mean, it was conceived by Alexander and constructed in a way to reflect the vision of Aristo for a kind of rational – that is designed in the grid, you know, in the grid, as a grid. And it had the coin-operated machines, for example. It had... What? Yep.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
It had coin-operated machines. Like vending machines? Like vending machines. What? No, it was truly... That's crazy. It was truly...
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
it was truly ahead of its time it had automatic doors that open automatically really yep yeah how did that work 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So you would offer the sacrifice, and that would cause the doors to actually open seemingly automatically and have the deity accept the sacrifice.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Yep.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Yeah, but it was triggered by the heat of the fire. Oh, wow.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
I don't know. All kinds of... I mean, that's very... When you have a coin, I mean, the weight of the coin is open...
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
I mean, that's very straightforward, but you have to think about that in order to do it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
A very important place of worship. So that was what I did my PhD on, on this community. And one thing led to another. Initially, I didn't really look to, like most of my colleagues, I didn't really look to Persia. I didn't look to the Iranian sphere. But then I started noticing certain elements within these texts.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And so, yeah, I mean, in antiquity, 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 much bigger... Metropolis. No, no, just the complex of the palace of Ptolemy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And so there was this huge palace complex that included a temple for the muses, this place where you could walk around and philosophize and think and come up with new ideas. So this place, this museon, which we use for museum today. But this museum, this place of the muse, had within it a library. So that's the Library of Alexandria, the famous Library of Alexandria.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Now what's unique about the Library of Alexandria, technically we had libraries even before Alexandria. But those libraries, like the Library of Ashurbanipal and other great monarchs of antiquity, those libraries were really more archives than libraries.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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. And so those other archives really were very different from the Library of Alexandria.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 Aristo 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And they developed the methodologies to sometimes put them side by side in different versions, 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 we see we see the same type of of um editing methodologies applied to the bible as well like chat gpt of antiquity If you want to look at it that way, yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
But it's the, 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
As we said, there's absolutely no trace of any hint of knowledge of anything biblical in all of these thousands of talking we talked about earlier. There's absolutely nothing. There's this deafening silence before the turn of the third century.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
that pointed my attention more to, because of course this was under the already the Achaemenid Empire, was the empire ruling that area.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Again, 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Right. What I argue is that some of the biblical text is kind of arguing against these Greek sources. Right. But they might reflect certain traditions that were oral traditions among the Jews of Alexandria, for example, at the time. They might reflect all kinds of other traditions that we're not familiar with.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
But they don't necessarily mean that they were familiar with the biblical text, because they are not really arguing with the biblical text. That's the point. 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So that means that that actually hints at 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. By the way, what –
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
I mean, the vast majority, of course, is Greek. And that's another thing. The Library of Alexandria was constructed in order to – organize the Greek world, the works, the great works of the Greek world and to create authoritative additions and clean additions and the most accurate additions according to the scientific standards of that day for the Greek world. So they were very Hellenocentric.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So that's Cyrus, King Cyrus, right? That everyone I'm sure has heard of. Cyrus the Great.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
There is in scholarship and historically a lot of people claim that there's this idea coming from the letter of Aristeas A very famous document written to describe how the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek. But it's also a mythological, I mean, it's not a very historical document. We call it often in scholarship, we call it pseudo-Aristeas.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And there's a lot of- That's what we were talking about before. Yeah. Okay. And so it's a very important document, but it's not a very historically trustworthy document. Okay. But it's a very important one because it does show what the Jews wanted to show to the world in the second century before the Common Era, to the Greek world, how they wanted to present themselves.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And in it, in that document, in this letter of Aristeas, supposedly the king, Ptolemy, wanted to commission a translation of the Hebrew Bible into the Greek. 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Cyrus you've heard. So Cyrus the Great is considered kind of the founder of this empire. And that is the first world superpower, really. It is a very, very important empire in the history of history. of humanity and certainly of Western, so-called Western civilization, the impact of the Achaemenid. So the Achaemenid is just the name of their kind of mythological forefather of this dynasty.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
The idea of them commissioning a work like that is simply antithetical to how Alexandria operated. They were not this cosmopolitan. There's a much later kind of romantic idea
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
that alexander was this cosmopolitan place where all cultures were treated equally and there was this great kumbaya of cultures great supremacy yeah yeah and a lot of that comes from uh actually from the the the time of the french revolution where where the intellectuals wanted to show that christianity is the source of all evil and so look at the how humanity was before christianity with this absolutely
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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. Okay. And the reason I'm saying Greek-related is because it's not actual Greek. It's Hebrew Greek. It's Jewish Greek. It's Judeo-Greek. It's kind of like Yiddish.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
That's crazy. I've never heard of that before. Right. So I come from classical studies, and so I studied 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, It was almost shocking.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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, it seems to be wrong. It seems to be badly written. 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. Interesting. So it's Hebrew.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
It's really very much, I'm sure a lot of people listening to this know about Yiddish. So Yiddish is Jewish German, right? It's a German language, but adopted by the- I didn't even know that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So, okay. So Yiddish is Jewish German. Okay. And it's based on a German language, but it has a lot of words in Hebrew. Also kind of sprinkled in. And that's the same thing with the Greek of the Septuagint. So for Ptolemy or anyone to commission a work that would be written in a Jewish language. not in Greek Greek, makes little sense.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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, the Greek that they had for their own identity in Alexandria. And there was a pretty large community of Jews in Alexandria from the beginning, from Alexander. Alexander had Jewish mercenaries.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
uh with him and he gave them land uh or at least he settled them in alexandria um and so uh and so this language that it was translated into is not greek greek and that's extremely important to realize uh and unfortunately a lot in in many cases that is not really um people don't realize this as they should um so so when you want to compare hebrew to greek
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Oh, that's a great question.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
The Dead Sea Scrolls are later.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Yeah. I mean, some people date really the first fragments to late 3rd century. I'm not sure I would necessarily subscribe to that dating. It's all based on the scripts, on the format of the script rather than anything else.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Almost nothing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
As medical text and philosophical text as such prior to the, you know, to the maybe second century. Oh, wow. Before the common era. You know, it starts maybe if I want to be really generous, the late third century before the common era. But it's hard to date these things, of course. And why do you think that is?
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And so this dynasty and this particular empire was something that the world has never seen before. I mean, they've seen other empires before the Achaemenid Empire, but this is a superpower.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Well, first of all, we don't really have a lot of Hebrew anywhere before the Dead Sea Scrolls. Hebrew was not— Dead language? I mean, that's a really great question, and it wasn't completely dead. Some people obviously knew it because they were able to write the Hebrew Bible using Hebrew.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
But the language that was spoken by the Yahwistic 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 Aramaic was the central language for everybody. And we do have Aramaic text, of course, also among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
uh hebrew was more of um 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 um but but clearly it was preserved somehow because people were able to write um write the hebrew um hebrew text now
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Again, 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 put together as part of this enterprise of putting together an authoritative source based on the same methodologies that were developed in Alexandria.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
I'm not saying all of these texts were composed in the Hellenistic period. And of course, I also have an article about a portion of the book of Amos that I can date, not necessarily the text, but I can date the story.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
uh there to the end of the uh eighth century beginning of the seventh century before the common 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 i'm so every time i have an extra biblical anchor i can i can use that in order to date
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
It had not just conquered 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 Greece or to Macedonia and to parts of the Ukraine, and to Egypt and Libya today. So it's a huge, absolutely huge area that they controlled and administered very, very effectively.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 so we have to be very careful
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
In everything that we do in order 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 my article that there was only a very short window in which these idioms could have been fully understood.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
and I show how they were later misunderstood, so I can narrow down the timeframe to roughly the first part of the 7th century before the Common Era for a small passage from the Book of Amos, because I have these parallels. What I'm trying to say is that clearly there were texts that made it into the Hebrew Bible that were much older, maybe 8th century, 7th century.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
But there were people, Jewish people, that were inspired by what was going on in the Alexandrian library. They were not working under any kind of commission by the king to translate the Bible or anything like that. But they were inspired by what was happening in Alexandria, as others were. They were not the only ones. It inspired Egyptians. It inspired other people.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
uh people uh in in the in the region and um and they said okay we're going to apply this approach there the the the greeks are applying this to their own corpus we're going to apply it to our corpus and so they were able to to get uh 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
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
To put them together and also imagine, in the case of the Torah specifically, imagine all kinds of answers to the Greek view that we mentioned earlier about the leprosy and all of these other things that they were concerned with.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And so this enterprise that happened – started in the third century before the common era to collect, edit, redact, compose, harmonize and really kind of put together a more authoritative version of –
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
deeply impacted the ancient Near East for about a millennium together. So these three empires, unfortunately, in scholarship have been relatively little studied, 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
of the uh of the authoritative corpus uh yeah of history theology ideology and all of that i mean they didn't think of history 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 really No, no. I mean, even Herodotus, that's not history the way we do today.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
I mean, he basically walks around, asks people about certain elements of their culture and writes it down, often through a translator. So it's often even lost in translation. 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, you know, runs with whatever he's been told.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So even Herodotus is not really, he's considered to be the father of history. To Cadetus, who came after him, called him the father of lies because of so many inconsistencies that he has in Herodotus. But Herodotus is certainly an important source, and he is kind of pseudo-historical in many ways. We certainly have to use him as a source, but always with a grain of salt in our research.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
But again, in antiquity, history wasn't really a science per se. It was people writing things that they've heard, sometimes asking questions, sometimes doubting. But it wasn't really 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, in parallel to the Greek one.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
The Greeks were doing the same thing with their sources, with Hesiod, with Homer and other sources, and they were looking at this critically for their day. and the Jews were simply just applying the same methodology to the sources that existed or they would develop new sources. So a lot of this, I mean, according to my research, important layers within the Pentateuch, within the Torah,
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And they controlled it with, I mean, also with an ideology of how to rule these peoples. So it was something that the world has never seen and it impacted everything. The Greek world, it impacted Greek philosophy, it impacted the Egyptians, of course, the Jews as well. It really, the impact of the Achaemenid Empire is with us to this day in many ways.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
are new, are newly written in the Hellenistic period, like the story of the patriarchs that we mentioned earlier, that is so Hellenistic in its overall features. And so these were composed, I believe, in the Hellenistic period. But other elements that found their way into this narrative could be older.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 mean, technically, the translation can happen and it did happen.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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?
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
I'd be surprised 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. In a sense, I think for a lot of the actual people who came from the Greek world, and were exposed to the Septuagint, it made them feel maybe even uncomfortable in a way, because it looks like, parts of it look even erroneous.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Parts of it are just unexpected turns of phrases and things like that. And certainly the vocabulary is different in many cases. It is of course Greek, like Yiddish is German ultimately. But it's not Greek Greek. And it makes you feel like you're in a kind of almost parallel universe. It's not even the difference between British English and American English. It's much more than that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And when did that empire start, the Achaemenid?
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And it is in many ways an artificial language, the Jewish Greek. It's the Greek that was spoken by the Jews in the Ptolemaic Empire and especially in – probably mostly in Alexandria.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 non-existent and i'm not you can't completely discount this but i think 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 you could have
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
but they didn't so it trans it is translated into the jail greek and i think it's translated for the alexandrian jews who are as i said okay pretty pretty significant community and how what like as far as like a time frame of when this translation took place like how how much time is there between the torah and the septuagint with the translation I think very little time.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
A Camelid Empire, roughly around 550, depending on how you look at it. But some people date it from the fall of Babylon to Cyrus, but really the ascension of Cyrus around 550 BCE. And then up to Alexander the Great that destroyed, kind of took over Cyprus.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
We're talking about the third century before the common era. I think in the first quarter of that century, we're talking about kind of the Hebrew texts starting to come together of the Torah. And then the translation was very, you know, within a decade or two later on.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Yeah. I mean, earlier I mentioned Virgil 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, 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 that 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 already in this in the second century before the Common Era in Rome
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So he's using existing material and reworking this to fit certain rhymes and certain meters and adds to it and composes this incredible work known as the Aineads. But it took him 10 years to do. Now, a much more...
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
impressive um example although uh from from much from about thousand years later um is the shahnameh the the the book of kings in the iranian tradition um an amazing i really recommend people look it up the shahnameh probably one of the best greatest epics of humanity uh ever it's an incredible story It's an incredible book written by Ferdowsi, this great Iranian poet, also in rhyme and meter.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
That book is about 150% more than the entire Bible. Okay, including the New Testament.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
It is a humongous work. Okay. And it took him 30 years to write. One person also using existing material, also not inventing everything. But one person working for 30 years producing a work that is a work that is significantly larger than the entire Bible. Okay. Wow. So yeah, the Book of Kings, I really recommend people to become familiar with this incredible work.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Anyway, so this is one person for 30 years. So people, if there is, if the resources are available, if the time is available, if the will is there, People can write large works relatively quickly, I mean within 10 to 30 years, within a lifetime of a single person, well within the lifetime of a single person. So the work of writing and collecting the Torah,
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
could have been accomplished within a decade or two, technically. I'm not saying that it was, but you know, it could have been.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And the translation could have happened even in parallel to it, because if the goal was to work within this Alexandrian state of mind, I mean, if this Alexandrian ideology, this Alexandrian methodology that was developed in Alexandria at the library at the time, and they wanted to follow
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
This way of doing things and to produce something for the people for the Jews in Alexander so that they feel that their identity is also receiving the same kind of treatment as their Greek neighbors. The translation into Jewish Greek again would have happened very quickly.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So all that pink. Well, yeah, and more. I mean, even all the way to India.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Of course, we lost a lot. I mean, the Library of Alexandria continued for centuries later on. It was under Julius Caesar. There was some kind of fire that destroyed parts of the library. But the library continued well into the Common Era and slowly kind of diminished later on. But we lost a lot, of course. I mean, yeah, it was... Truly a treasure trove.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Yeah, this actually shows you the different stages. So the Aryan pink is just what Cyrus, the first campaign or the first phase of Cyrus all the way up to Turkey, to modern Turkey. And then he went down to conquer Babylon. And, yeah, so – and then, of course, his dynasty continued after that. Very complicated picture in reality.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Right, right. And we need to always be very careful. In academia, we try to be as methodological about this. So we always... We can't just look at one data point. We have to find 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
and that's something I'm really trying to focus a lot of my energy on, is to make the study of history to be more scientific, more like the hard sciences, rather than just coming up with ideas and trying to see if it sticks, which was the way a lot of the history has been done thus far.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And I'm not saying that, I mean, we've made a lot of progress in the study of history, but in order to put history 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 we're trying to work, especially on epigraphy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Now, I mentioned epigraphy already a number of times, which is the study of these original primary documents, the ostraca, the actual documents that were written in real time, but the people living in real time. not thinking that this will ever be studied again. So epigraphy is the heart, the beating heart of the study of history, of ancient history at all.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Because this is the primary material that we have. It's more than Herodotus, which is not a primary source. Herodotus, of course, wrote his books, but he did not... First of all, we don't have his original document, his original manuscript. But that was not something that – it's not the daily life. It's not something that people are just – you don't have this visceral experience.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
The epigraphic material is the most – um basic the most um original the most raw material that you can have and you build and on top of that you can start you should start building uh historical uh um 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
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
um 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 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
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
But Cyrus was the one to conquer this from the Medes, the Median Empire, which was there for a short while, and then conquered Babylon. Okay. And through Babylon, of course, he conquered, he took over what was already the Neo-Babylonian Empire before him. And so that included Palestine. And yeah, he was the first to kind of consolidate the first phase of this empire.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
precisely and and and more and trying to be more objective 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
But I'm human. I'll make mistakes. 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 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And being as transparent as possible because transparency is the key for the study of history.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And so we are really shooting in this generation now of historians, shooting for the maximum transparency. That's new. That is new. maximum transparency, maximum methodological rigor. And I think we're already starting to see the first fruits of that really starting to lead us into a more stable vision of history.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Absolutely. You always need to be very careful about these sources to check whether they are actually original. You know, if they were found in an archaeological context, that's best because you can actually, with the stratigraphic dating, you can know which… which layer in the archaeological excavation it was found, so you can date it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
But a lot of these documents, unfortunately, don't have this data associated with them, so you have to date them in different ways. But of course, checking whether these are forgeries or not is really important. It's really tricky.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Just make money. And the thing is, a lot of forgers are people who went to academia and probably did not make it the way they wanted, but they are really good. I mean, they know how to make, they know. They've learned how to copy and mimic the hand of scribes.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 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 in the density scrolls are clearly ancient uh some of them are not but uh yeah we always need to be on guard uh for that
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 a historical thing. But yeah, that's really not my field. The languages, so we're talking about first century of the common era.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Greek was certainly a major language in Palestine at the time. So I'm sure that people at the time, I don't know anything about this particular figure, but people at the time certainly spoke Greek in the marketplaces. Aramaic was certainly a very important language as well.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
He was succeeded by his son, Cambyses, who then added Egypt and parts of Libya to this. And then Darius the Great, Darius the First, actually made it into what it later became as this major superpower. Darius the First is truly one of the greatest leaders in antiquity. Truly an impressive, a very impressive person.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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. And how people were so keen on learning and exposing themselves to new ideas and to new ideas. new traditions. And the fluidity is very, very, very, you know, really stands out in these texts. And what I mean by fluidity, when we talked about Yahwism,
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Now, Yahwism had Yahweh, of course, as the head of the pantheon, but as it continues, it developed, it evolved like any other cultic system slash religion. Everything evolves, every religion, even today, right? Even today, Christianity and Judaism are constantly evolving. and constantly have to deal with new things, new data. I mean, evolution, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
That's how Christianity has to, or Judaism, have to now elaborate what is their position versus new data that comes out, whether they accept it or not accept it, but how and which texts should be read differently or whatever. So any religion, any cultic system has to develop to evolve over time.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
or their interpretation at the time of the commandments in the Pentateuch in the first century, when they had a sick child or they had a problem, they would go and use cursed texts that are completely, you know, come from a different tradition. I mean, from the Gnostic tradition.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
what's that what did you say what was that word you used curse curse text curse text okay curse text like amulets and all kinds of course text and and the protective uh texts that would protect their children or their family or or whatever and those texts were typically were more yahwistic in that in in the sense where where there's this deity yahoo really central deity um but they also had other terms that are very unknown to us from the bible that they saw
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
as deities like adonai was seen as in its own 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 least it's seen as a title um but in later yahwehism or what's called the gnosticism
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
I don't like the term Gnostic because it's a pejorative term, but there's nothing else really available, so I'm using it for convenience. But the Gnostics are kind of continuing Yahwism in parallel to Judaism and Christianity.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So the lay of the land in the first century of the Common Era, the time of Jesus, was very complex, very energetic, very effervescent, with a lot of kind of cross-pollination between the different faith systems and ideologies. You would take something from, I mean, even the idea of the Son of God,
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
If you walk through the Roman Empire, every milestone, literally stone that every mile of the road, right, the milestone, would have the name of the Caesar that established this road. And often it will have the name and it would say Son of God.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
right so that idea of the son of god would be would be all around you okay in in at that time it wasn't just jesus right son of god but it was also the emperor the emperor um and so all of these ideas came from imperial cult from egyptian cult from the the gnostic field of a lot of different sects there from different jewish sects
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
from different readings and even interactions with the Persian world, interactions with this early Zoroastrianism that we talked about earlier. There were no really kind of strict walls between these different religions that we have today. Like you said, everything was flowing in and out, cross-pollinating. And that's what I love about this spirit, because it's so rich, so energetic.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
People are always kind of looking and you can feel it in the primary sources. 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 enabled
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
the spread of the cult of Yahweh in general, and certain ideological concepts that enabled Christianity to later, because people were already very much interested in aspects of Yahwism, but they were not Jews. But they did have amulets of Yahweh. They did have Sabaoth as another deity or Adonai as another deity. So the language was becoming more and more familiar.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And I think that really helped prepare the ground for the spread of Christianity as well. So Yahwism is an important engine in that as well. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So I wasn't finding the actual physical. So I'm not an archaeologist. I wasn't finding the physical objects. These were already excavated at the beginning, most of them at the beginning of the 20th century. Okay. And 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Yeah, I think you're mixing things here. I mean, the 1200 BC 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Right. I'm not familiar with that one, but it might be, maybe. 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 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
I mean, by definition, if you're an agricultural society, water is critical to your daily life. And you are planting seeds and 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 sources, you will be flooded. So flooding was a daily, I mean, something that you would constantly be worried about.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
and concerned, I mean, maybe not daily, but certainly every year that would become, around the springtime, that would become a concern about potential flooding. And so it's really easy to understand
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
every agricultural society across the globe why there would be a legend surrounding massive flooding that would develop it doesn't necessarily mean that there was a global event and it doesn't mean necessarily that they were there was influence from one tradition to another it's really easy to to imagine why you know massive flooding would become a mythical force
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
We don't necessarily need to go that far in order to understand that. It's like with pyramids. We find pyramids in different places.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
We find the same structure in South America. We find possibly in Europe. We find possibly in Asia in places and, of course, in Egypt.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Indonesia. But this is just because this is a geometric form 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. So not necessarily, right? So we can start to think about maybe aliens or whatever, but that's not necessarily the case.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
It's really simple to think that certain elements like the flooding, flooding, again, everyone who's living in agricultural society has to deal with the danger of floods.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 eventually develop into a a myth a mythological story and that would happen all across the world really because every every society is agricultural in antiquity
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
We talked about that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
No, I mean, the reading was wrong. Simply, uh, it's not just translation, but they weren't, um, reading the text correctly. In some cases, they didn't understand the text correctly. In one case that's about to come out, I'm republishing an Ostracon, a relatively long Ostracon that was first published in 1908, but has been since, so for 116 years. It's been read the wrong way.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's I mean, people were very, very good. I mean, they were brilliant.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I certainly agree with you. There's a lot we don't know how they did it, and we don't have the knowledge and the technology necessarily today in order to do that. But we do know that these were brilliant people. Yeah. They were able, I mean, sometimes today when we look and we try to see, well, how would we produce this today?
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
We are stumped because we think according to our technological knowledge in a certain direction. They did not have 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 tend to look at these things and just say they were really, really good. Also with the building of the pyramids.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
I mean, if you go to Aswan, to that region, and you see the quarries from which they cut these granite stones, you see how they worked. You actually can see how they worked. You see because in some cases they didn't finish the work. So you actually see the work kind of midway and you can see
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
actually how they did this and we can see also how they transported it up the nile um down denial and so uh the um the uh um a lot of this technology we know how they i mean practically we know how they did this it's very very impressive uh it's extremely impressive But we know how they did most of it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
In some of these temples, for example, these massive temples in Egypt that you see, parts of the ramparts on which they were able to pull these stones up still exist.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
um and so we are we we know a lot about how they created these massive uh buildings um and that's all very very normal and natural it's not you know it's not extra um have you seen the the thousand ton obelisk that was never finished that was never pulled out of the core in aswan yeah i was there yeah
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Yeah, yeah, possibly. Yeah, look at that. Yep, yep, yep. You know, they were very, very impressive people. Yeah, and they had to deal with problems that we don't even know how to approach. But yeah, but it's all part of their genius. I mean, they were really amazing, amazing people. What's amazing also, when you go to Egypt and visit these places,
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
and you visit the temples, I don't know if you've been to Egypt. I 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 these people in Egypt were driven by the ideology of the Egyptian cult. I mean, the idea was that they really believed in life after death.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And the idea was that you work for the Pharaoh and you will live with the Pharaoh after death. You would be part of this. So of course, every person participating in the construction
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So inside out rather than, you know, so the direction of reading was incorrect for this long. But this, I mean, this is part of what we do. The work of an epigrapher is extremely complex. It's not just reading the text. It's not just trying to say, well, this is an aleph, this is a bet, whatever letter that is.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
these massive massive you know monument monuments really yeah that's so so this is Abu symbol Abu symbol now what you're seeing here so this is Abu symbol today of course and you I know if you know this but the entire this entire side of the mountains was transported by from its original location in the 60s to what you're seeing here.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Yeah. So every rock, it was cut. Using modern technologies, because Kamal Abdel Nasser wanted to create this dam, and there's Lake Nasser. And the original location of Abu Simbel is now submerged under that lake. So in order to conserve this, they actually moved the entire lake.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
the entire temple because this is a temple inside the entire temple they moved it out of its original location in the 1960s okay engine modern engineers moved it to this location um very very accurately except
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
When you go into this temple on the solstice day, on the day of the solstice, in the morning the sun comes through this entrance and shines straight on the – there are statues at the end of this tunnel. There are statues of Ramses II and a triad of deities around him. Wow. and it shines directly in the center on him and the other gods around him.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And that's exactly at a certain time at a certain day of the year in the original location. Here, modern engineers,
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
did that but they missed one day it's not so it happens and so 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're able to be as precise as they were in antiquity so this is really really impressive right but people people at the time were truly amazing they had In many ways, they had less distractions.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
They were able to test things out. And, yeah, I mean, I just think the humanity of it is just so impressive.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Different trajectory. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, yeah, but I don't think there's anything supernatural about it. It's just humans doing what humans do and figuring out solutions to problems. And sometimes we don't have the solutions today. But they were able to do that. And oftentimes they actually write it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So they did write and they did express how they did things, how they moved large slabs of granite around. For example, these are things that they sometimes do.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
They have to actually talk about that. Oh, really? Describe it to a certain degree, maybe not to the level of detail that we want.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
I mean, they talk about – I mean, this is not my field. I'm not an Egyptologist.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
But I do know that they do describe to a certain degree how they move things around and what they did with it. So, I mean, Egyptologists do know a lot about how –
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
But the context, even the materiality of the object needs to be really deeply taken into account. And in my field, we have not been doing this. Really, up until now, the materiality was not given the proper place that it should have.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 um 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
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
really serious engineering problems and to do it so precisely.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Yeah. Crazy. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, they didn't have, I mean, they didn't have budget. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
That's my point, right. I mean, a pharaoh like Ramses II was so powerful. I mean, really limitless power practically in his day. And so – but the people – They believed that participating in the work of the pharaoh would also bring them and their family into the next life, right? The life beyond. And so they did this. And they were not slaves. They were not slaves. They were paid for their work.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 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
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
But they also were deeply… Religious in that sense of the word. I mean, they really believed in what they were doing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
I mean, no, these are temples for, you know, for now, not for the afterlife per se.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Oh, there's a lot of doors that go nowhere in many different places, of course. But I'm not sure that that's built for the afterlife. That might be symbolic. Again, that's something you should ask an Egyptologist, which I'm not. But having visited Egypt a number of times, this is – yeah, I'd be very cautious about reading too much into – supernatural or extra. This is... It's fun.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
It's super fun. It's certainly fun, but it is, but as a, from a scientific perspective, 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. Some of them are still preserved. You walk around this massive building. I mean, really massive, huge.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
That was built. Every detail people really cared about. I mean, the level of... of of professionalism the the level of artistry um not just art but artistry 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
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And, I mean, the Egyptian society, ancient Egyptian society, is something that is truly mind-blowing. We don't need to have recourse to extraterrestrial or supernatural. The society itself was so incredible in what it was able to achieve. Now, there are a number of features. For example, the fact that the Nile is there. They don't have to worry too much about rain, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And they don't have to worry. I mean, they were well fed because they had a constant source of nutrition. So they had their fields around. And now, of course, there wasn't.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Well, it was the desert anywhere but the Nile. The Nile was also desert back then. But just the area surrounding the Nile was very fertile and is still very fertile. In antiquity, you had the annual inundation of the Nile. So there were a period of about three months where you couldn't
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Everything was inundated, so you couldn't really work the – but after that, it was very, very fertile because the Nile would recede, and there would be a residue of very fertile elements that would remain in the soil. So it was very fertile, and you really didn't have to worry too much about – about being fed. So you had time to do other things.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
You don't have, like anywhere else, you always have to fight for your survival. In Egypt you don't really have to fight that much for your family's survival and things like that. So you have time to do to think about other things and to do other things. So there were seasons where they would participate in building projects like this. And so they were truly an amazing society.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
In many ways, Egyptians even to this day are an amazing society. I love Egypt and the people also today. And some of the nicest people you'll ever meet, really. Really, really recommend visiting Egypt. But truly, when you think about the innovation, the groundbreaking ideas that they had, and the ability to see them through and actually implement them in such amazing ways.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
That's due to the people. That's just due to their ingenuity, parts of it which we don't understand even today, but it's still to be kind of assigned to their own ingenuity.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
some of these constructions and some of the context might come from a different culture. So, for example, there are loanwords from Persian, there are loanwords from Egyptian that you need to know. It really requires a lot of contextual knowledge.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Yeah, so I think the best way is 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 articles, my article, but also several of my colleagues. We have 19 people contributing to this. And that's a lot that focuses on Yahwism, really on the history of Yahwism, the early history of Yahwism in the Achaemenid period.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
uh so that's a book that's that's uh available for free download so it's open access uh if you want a physical copy you have to pay for it but obviously it's physical copy uh but you can download the entire book for free uh from the website that's amazing yeah that was really important for me to to be able to um to make it available uh for free for people to just download and read
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And that was made available through a very generous donation or assistance from the Gutenberg University, the Georg August University in Göttingen, and Professor Reinhard Krautz, 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Yeah, it's not my field. I'm not. Yeah. So I can't talk about this.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So I do a lot of epigraphic work dealing with actual papyri, leather scrolls, ostraca and things like that. And ostraca, just for people who don't know, these are shards of jars and ancient objects, household objects that were broken. And so people use that to write short messages on. So these ostraca represent daily communications. So daily communications and short messages.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
I won't talk to the second part of the question, only the first one. So the first one, early drug use. I mean, I'm sure that drug use was played a part in practically 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. Sure.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And even, I mean, even just certain herbs that you can consume without any.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
That's right. I mean, yeah, exactly. So I think 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, even natural substances,
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
that you're consuming that cause you to hallucinate and to kind of enter this state where you are communicating with the divine or that you're seeing visions. Of course, these play a role in practically every cultic system to a certain degree.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Okay. Okay.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So going back to Yao, yeah, I don't think 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 Yao. So it doesn't – I don't think it's – Yes, there is a verb that sounds similar, but there is nothing that connects this verb to Yao directly. And again, it's simply not documented anywhere.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
straight to the point these guys yeah yeah uh how is it misinterpreted um yeah i don't know how to answer this there is no yeah it's that you know they're talking probably if they're talking about the bible they're talking about the the eden and the tree of and what is considered the tree of life there yeah um there were three of lives the the trees of life uh depicted in neo-syrian
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And 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. And yeah, it's not something that I can talk to in too much detail.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Yeah, so that's a great question, but that elephantine is not where it initially developed. So Yahwism, well, I'll give you my definition of Yahwism first. So Yahwism is very simple.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 original documents, so how we capture images, um the uh 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 the
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
these original 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. We have in developing these algorithms and are also AI. There's an AI component to that. We have others and other teams also in this project that we're kind of really pushing now that does AI-driven OCR.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 be very, I mean, it's a very, very complex process of how to do that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 this historical data in the most transparent way.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 several of my articles, also in this book, this open-access book, so my article there, I talk about the existence of a fire holder, not a fire altar.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
I don't like the term fire altar, but an atrodan, the name of the object is, that existed within the temple, the Yahwistic temple at Elephantine. Well, this is a temple to Yahweh. In that sense, it's a Jewish temple in the 5th century before the Common Era. But they had, according to their own sources, they had a fire holder in the temple, within the confines of the temple, they had a fire holder.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And they used the term, the Western term, at-rodan, or the Indo-Iranian term, for a fire holder, which is one of the
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
main um components of zoroastrianism right the fire holder the veneration of the fire it's not an altar because nothing is offered on it it's just it's a it exists for the veneration of the fire and the fire the fire in zoroastrianism is seen as the the son of ahura mazda the son of the deity of the main deity of zoroastrianism so um so we do have and this is a very compelling because you have within a yahwistic temple and they had their own altar
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
which they offered other sacrifices but within the temple they also had a fire holder and they are using the term the indo-iranian term for it and they could have it just if it was just a regular fire holder they could have just used in aramaic or
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
what you know they could have expressed it in our in pure aramaic they didn't have to use a technical cultic term in order to refer to this so within the temple they actually had a zoroastrian a clearly zoroastrian um um uh fire holder within the the the confines of the temple So that is very compelling. That is very strong in terms of influence.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 – that is not – that does not mean that they turned into Zoroastrianism. Exactly. There's cross-pollination always, taking ideas, taking concepts, especially with the empire.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
I mean, this is the empire that is now controlling everything about your life. And so clearly that does not mean… Anything more than just showing that you're a good citizen of the Achaemenid Empire. It does not mean more than that. But clearly they did adopt things in a more intimate level than possibly other cultic traditions. We don't know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
This is the earliest evidence that we have for a fire holder directly. Textual evidence that we have for a fire holder anywhere, really. We have fire holders depicted in the Achaemenid Empire, depicted on inscriptions, depicted as an image. We do have images of Zoroastrian priests around the fire holder. So we do know that these were part of the cult in the Kemenid times, not just at Elephantine.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
But we don't have that as a text. We don't have a textual reference to it outside of Elephantine. So this is the first textual reference that we have. And it's within a Yahoistic context. So I think that's really the most compelling evidence of this cross-pollination between the Yahwists slash Jews and the Zoroastrians. But there's a lot more. There's a lot more.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
In my article, I also talk about this so-called Passover letter that has – that actually shows elements that are of an observance that is very close to or almost identical to the Zoroastrian Jasnah, which is the Zoroastrian liturgy. And so we have that. Yeah, we have a lot of different elements. And even within the Bible, the idea of the eternal flame and the holy flame that comes down
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Even the burning bush, which is a supernatural flame, right? The supernatural fire. I have a lecture coming up two weeks from now in Paris about this, specifically about this, the burning bush and the theophany there in its Zoroastrian aspects there, which are on several levels there in that particular story.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
And I have a colleague from Haifa, Professor Itamar Kislev, who wrote a great article also in this book about the fire sacrifice in the Bible, in Leviticus and other places as well. Just a great analysis of this, dating that to Achaemenid influences. And so, yeah, we're seeing a lot of property Zoroastrian elements in Jewish sources, whether in the Bible or external to the Bible.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
One thing we need to be very careful is to identify what we mean by the Zoroastrianism of the Achaemenid 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 to the rise of Islam.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 prove already existed in the Achaemenid period, whether it's in pictographic representations of these liturgies or texts or even names, components of names.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So for example, just one example, the name Darius, Daryawahush in Iranian, in Old Persian, is based on a quote, a direct quote from the Avesta. It's a citatname, we say in German, so it's a citation name from an authoritative text. It's not Persian, it's Avestan. Darya Vahush means the holder of good. Vahush element here means good, but in Old Persian you would say naiba to say good.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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 Gotha, which is the oldest part of the Avestan text,
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Not necessarily all of the Avesta that we know today, really only just the earliest layer of the text, the 17 hymns that are part of what's called the Gotha in the Avestan. So knowledge of all of these quotes are from the Gothas. And so not just his name, but other names as well. But it means that he expected people to understand that this is what he's doing with this name.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
So people were familiar enough with the texts Not just him, but also his citizens. So that teaches us a lot about what, at least, what part of the texts of the Avesta might have been available at that time. And again, pictographic and all of that. So I'm looking at all of this and I'm limiting myself in my research to things that I can prove existed in the Achaemenid period or not.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Only sometimes I more cautiously refer to things that are not yet there, and I say that I'm speculating, but that these things might have already existed, but that's much more reserved. To make a precise point or a strong research point, I always use the stuff that I can show existed in the Achaemenid period. But clearly the Achaemenids were Zoroastrian to a certain degree.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
They're not Zoroastrian in the same sense that we have Zoroastrians today. But they did have at least the Gothas to this early layer of the Avestan text. And Ahura Mazda. I mean, that's clearly the… the Zoroastrian deity, and they saw him as almost exclusive, the only deity. Oh, really?
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
I mean, they acknowledge the existence of other gods, but they talk about Ahura Mazda pretty much almost exclusively, especially in the early period. And which is interesting also, because they were more, they kind of gravitate more towards monotheism, so to speak. It's not monotheism, but monolatry in the early period. And then they became more, quote unquote, polytheistic later on.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Usually we think that people evolve, not that I'm attaching any kind of quality to it, but move towards more of a monolatry.
Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
It's people for whom a deity by the name of Yahu is the head of the pantheon. Okay, that's pretty much it. They have that element Yahu in many of their names. So it's a theophoric element. Theophoric means holding the deity, holding theos, the deity. And so a name that has a component with Yahu, like Yahushua or Yerusha, Or many other examples like that.