Danny Jones Podcast
#297 - Ancient Historian: NEW Texts Change Everything We Knew about the Bible | Gad Barnea
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
Full Episode
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.
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.
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