Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
Fri, 18 Apr 2025
Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Dr. Barnea is a Lecturer at the department of Jewish history and biblical studies at the University of Haifa as well as a Research Fellow at “the Bible in its Traditions". SPONSORS https://irestore.com - Use code DANNY for a huge discount on the iRestore Elite. https://trueclassic.com/danny - Upgrade your wardrobe & save on True Classic. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off EPISODE LINKS https://haifa.academia.edu/gadbarnea Gad's book on Yahwism: https://a.co/d/7M4HLAX FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Studying ostraca & ancient Egypt 07:16 - Cyrus the Great's empire 14:08 - Yahwism 25:24 - Judaism came from Yahwism 36:48 - Biblical vs. extra-biblical narratives 50:44 - History's most popular religion 55:04 - The Bible is a "battlefield of ideas" 01:00:16 - Moses is not a historical person 01:06:59 - Advanced tech in ancient Alexandria 01:17:39 - Is the Septuagint originally Greek? 01:29:38 - Greek vs. Hebrew translations 01:41:16 - The problem with history 01:48:31 - Was Jesus a real person? 01:56:48 - Unsolved mysteries of antiquity 02:09:45 - Egyptian texts describe how the pyramids were built 02:19:27 - Patreon questions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the focus of Dr. Gad Barnea's research?
Dr. Gad Barnea, thanks for coming. Pleasure to be here. Yeah, I just got done listening to your podcast with Neil, Gnostic Informant. It was fascinating stuff. And I'm excited to chat with you about this stuff today. Can you just explain what your background is?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of the Achaemenid Empire?
What set you in this direction from the start? Like, how did you get interested in this stuff? And what led you to specifically dig into things like this?
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.
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.
So like in the middle of the Nile, right?
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.
Which is like 500 miles from Giza, roughly.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 3: How did Yahwism influence Judaism?
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.
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.
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.
And when did that empire start, the Achaemenid?
How do you say it? Achaemenid. Achaemenid.
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.
Oh, wow, that's a good map. Look, that's a lot.
So all that pink. Well, yeah, and more. I mean, even all the way to India.
Holy smokes.
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Chapter 4: What evidence exists for early Yahwism?
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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.
So if they participated in Yahwism or if they believed in Yahweh or Yahu, they would incorporate his name into their name.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 5: What role did Alexandria play in biblical history?
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.
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.
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.
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.
14th century. Whoa.
Yeah, we don't know. We really don't know. There are all kinds of theories for that.
I had somebody in here who told me it meant Hail Zeus.
No, that's definitely not.
That's out of the question.
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Chapter 6: Is there a historical basis for Moses?
If we're talking about the person, the people group, or a deity.
Like they would draw little pictures next to it. Yeah, exactly.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
And did Judaism come directly out of Yahwism? It's a great question. Isn't that like the consensus? That's the academic consensus.
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Chapter 7: How do different translations affect the understanding of the Bible?
Okay.
And then they'll go forward from that.
So the earliest people will say is 2000. Something.
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 –
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.
Okay. Yeah.
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.
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.
So Judaism, from a purely extra-biblical perspective, Judaism starts around the second, maybe late third century before the common era.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of the findings on the Bible's historical context?
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,
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 –
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
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.
So that's why for these reasons and others, it is certainly clear to me that these things are mythological, Abraham, all of these.
Is this new or has this been known for forever? Well, certainly not forever. How long have academics been aware of this and been talking about it publicly?
Well, not long. I mean, the fact that there is such a deafening silence before Alexandria, really. Whoa, bless you.
Scared the shit out of me.
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.
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