"Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey: A biography" by Alberto Manguel

I look for two things in a non-fiction book. First, that I should learn something from it. This shouldn't be a high hurdle since I tend to read to expand my knowledge. However, I learn more from some books that others. My second criterion is that it should be readable by which I mean that I should keep wanting to turn the pages,

This book passed both these tests although perhaps not quite as spectacularly on either criterion as The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson which I found both addictive and fascinating.

Most of the book is not about Homer's Iliad and Odyssey but about the effect of these works on subsequent centuries. Thus Manguel discusses Virgil, Dante, Alexander Pope (who despite not knowing Greek produced a best-selling translation by reading other translations; Gibbon said his version had ‘every merit except that of likeness to the original'; C12), Joyce, and folklore:

• “Virgil ‘did not understand the fundamental principle in Homer’s world, that poetry belongs to the defeated and the dead.” (C4)
• “The model for Dante’s Commedia is a composite of many sources, from Homer ( via Virtgil) to Arabic accounts of Muhammad's journey to the other world, the Mi’raj; one version of the latter was translated into Castilian by order of Alfonso X, and then into Latin, French and Italian, the last of which Dante probably read.” (C8)
• Icelandic saga “Story of Egill One-Hand” influenced by Ulysses and Polyphemus and later became Jack and the Beanstalk. (C7)

He also recounts how a village in war-torn Colombia wanted to retain their library copy of the Iliad. “They explained that Homer’s story reflected their own: it told of a war-torn country in which mad gods mix with men and women who never know exactly what the fighting is about, or when they will be happy, or why they will be killed.” (Introduction)

But he also spends some time talking about the originals. He supports the idea that Homer may have come from Chios: “The language of the poems is mainly Ionic, spoken by the early Greeks who settled on the west coast of Asia Minor and the adjacent islands, including Chios; although it may have been the conventional language of epic poetry.” (C2) But he also supports the idea that the Odyssey may have had a Semitic origin: “Homer calls Circe’s island both Nesos Kirkes and Aiaia. Aiaia means nothing in Greek but in Hebrew it means ‘Island of the She-Hawk’, which in Greek translates as Nesos Kirkes.” (C19) He also tells us that there were once believed to be six other epic poems written about the Trojan war from which only a few quotations now survive: Cypria: prequel: Judgement of Paris; Aithopis: death of Hector to death of Achilles; Little Iliad: from here to up to the Wooden Horse; Ilion Persis: the sack of Troy; Nostoi: the Returns of Menelaus, Agamemnon, Ajax and Neoptolemos; Telegony: the further adventures of Odysseus (C6). Furthermore there were two (forged) eyewitness accounts, one from the Greek side by Dictys of Crete of which a fragment was “discovered in 1899 on at the back of an income tax return for the year 206 AD.” (C6) and another by the Trojan Dares the Phrygian which, after extensive rewriting by Benoit de Saint-Maure in 1165 led to the tale of Troilus and Cressida covered by Chaucer, Caxton and Shakespeare (C6).

Manguel in particular focuses on the Homeric account of the Underworld. His suggestion that it was a sort of retirement home was shockingly brilliant:

• “Homer had described a place without graded categories, an Underworld in which souls wonder about, incorporeal and listless, like the inmates of a retirement home, some still suffering from regret for what they have done or left undone on earth ... Homer’s dead are never pleased to be where they are. ‘No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!’ says the ghost of Achilles when he sees him. ‘By God, I’d rather slave on earth for another man ... than rule down here over all the breathless dead’.”
• “Homer’s ghastly picture of the dead as a confused mingling of sexes and ages, occupations and social classes, extends across many hundreds of future years and will eventually take on its most recognizable shape towards the middle of the fourteenth century in the danse macabre.”

Other insights in this fascinating book:

• “Two of our oldest metaphors tell us that all life is a battle and that all life is a journey” (Introduction)
• “The invention of lower case cursive allowed scribes to produce more copies at a lower cost, since fewer pages were needed to hold a given text.” (C6)
• “Translation of foreign literature into Arabic can be said to have begun in the mid-eighth century during the rule of the celebrated Abbasid caliph al-Mansur.” (C7)
• “Several of Ulysses’ adventures surface in the stories of Sindbad the Sailor.” (C7)
• “Petrarch kept, with devotional care, a Greek manuscript of Homer which he didn't know how to read.” (C8)
• “To the opposition's argument that God had punished humankind with a plurality of tongues after Babel ... Schade answered with the notion that God is a polyglot ... and the angels and saints, being our intercessors, are also polyglots by necessity.” (C10)
• In Spain ignorance of Greek meant that Spaniards had to learn Homer through Latin translations: “When Miguel de Unamuno was given the chair of Greek at the University of Salamanca in 1891, it was pointed out that the celebrated intellectual had no Greek. Juan Valera, chairman of the committee that selected him, explained: ‘’None of the other candidates knows Greek, so we selected the one most like to know it’.” (C10)
• “It was Aristotle, according to Plutarch, prepared the edition of the Iliad that Alexander [the Great] kept ‘with his dagger under his pillow’.” (C12)
• “Many poets work in this way: constructing a poem from prose jottings of ideas and observations.” (C12)
• “Pope is not aiming for verisimilitude; rather a natural artificiality punctuated by cadenced rhymes, composing verses with a repetitive beat not unlike today's rap.” (C12)
• “‘The concept of a definitive text,’ wrote Jorge Luis Borges in 1932, ‘belongs either to religion or weariness’.” (C12)
• “Unlike an ordinary metaphor that catches qualities in one object which it ascribes to another, thereby creating a new literary space in which what is said and what is implied intermingle and increase, the epic simile places side by side two different actions that don't blend but remain visually separate, one colouring or qualifying the other.” (C13)
• “Philosophers in Vico’s age offered two conflicting theories of knowledge: the first was based on evidence and argument ... while the second centred on introspection and thought ... Vico offered a third possibility: the imagination, and independent power of the mind that he called fantasia.” (C 14)
• In Book 2 Iliad Homer “stops his narrative and invokes the Muses. Partly this is a literary device that became codified in the Middle Ages as excusatio propter infirmitatem (‘an apology for one's own shortcomings’); partly, it is a way of lending verisimilitude to the telling by shifting responsibility: ‘It is not I who says this, but something greater than I, and therefore it must be true’.” (C14)
• “In the Iliad, Achilles defines the battle as ‘fighting other soldiers to win their wives as prizes’.” (C15)
• “At the core of ancient Greek culture, is a living tension between, on the one hand, a tendency towards order and individual fulfilment (which Nietzsche called ‘ Apollonian’) and, on the other, violence and destructive rapture (‘Dionysian’).” (C16)
• “In the Underworld, the soothsayer Tiresias announces not what will be but what may be: the possibilities of the foreseeable future are always more than one and the outcome depends on the hero's choice.” (C19)
• “We see ourselves as better than our ancestors, savages of the Bronze Age who, though they wrought fine cups and bangles and sang beautiful songs, massacred each other in horrible wars, possessed slaves and raped women, ate without forks and conceived gods who threw thunderbolts.” (C22)

So Manguel definitely passed the first test: I learned loads. I reasd it in two days flat which means he passed the second test as well.

March 2019; 237 pages

"The Penguin Atlas of Ancient History" by Colin McEvedy

This is the sort of wonderful book where you look at the maps and marvel at the movements of the Hittites in Asia Minor, the growth of iron working, and the dissemination of literacy. And you tend to ignore the writing on the left hand page. But then. You loom at that and you think. Wow! I never knew that! That is an original perspective. How fascinating. How have I lived all this time and never realised that before.

This held me fascinated from the very beginning. It is a ragbag of scholarship (and it is old so some of it is probably by now outdated: “A race is a population that has been isolated sufficiently long to have to developed characteristics that distinguish members from those of the same species but different provenance.”; p 5) and I loved so much of it:

Introduction

• Geography imposed a limit on early-historical movements: Arctic Circle, Atlantic Ocean, Sahara Desert, Arabian Sea. The wastes of Turkestan and the desert of Sind were more porous although “After the expansion of the Iranians into India and Asia in the second millennium BC no western-based power ever extended significantly beyond the Jaxartes or Indus; conversely, only two peoples, the Yue-Chi in the second century BC and the Huns in the 1st century AD, entered Western Asia from the East. In India the desert of Sind was only crossed once, in the fourth century BC by the Mauryas.” (p 4) 
• “Scholars debate whether the island of Thule that lay six days’ sail to the north of Scotland was Iceland or Norway (it was probably only the Shetlands for distances beyond the periphery of usual travel tended to be wildly overestimated)” (p 4)
• “The Canaries were certainly visited and there is a record of an exploratory voyage reaching Sierra Leone; but the Canaries were not occupied” (p 4)
• “The Romans gained a hearsay knowledge of the Niger in its middle, eastward flowing, section. It was speculated that this might be the upper Nile, the course of which was known only as far as the confluence of its White and Blue branches; perhaps it traversed the Sahara from west to east before turning north in Upper Nubia? Nero sent two centurions to Egypt with orders to try and solve the problem; they travelled up the White Nile the point where it emerges from the impenetrable swamps now called the Sudd.” (p 4)
• "Ptolemy’s map of AD 150 shows the river [Nile] rising in the Mountains of the Moon (the Ruwenzori range?) and flowing north by two large lakes that will do for Victoria and Albert.” (p 5)
• “Once we realise that we are considering the classification of human communities we have no reason to be limited to purely physical measurements but can take social behaviour as our index. ... the study of language enables us to draw up a genetic tree for our sub-racial communities: as Dr Johnson said ‘Languages are the pedigrees of nations’.” (p 6) 
• Basque: “Place-name and blood-group evidence indicates that once the Basques occupied not only all of Spain, but also France as least as far north and east as the Loire and Rhone.” (p 6) 
• Etruscan (?): “all that seems certain is that it is not Indo-European”; “The Etruscans claimed that they were immigrants to Tuscany, having come from a Western Anatolia - presumably around 900 BC.” (p 6) 
• Indo-Europeans: “In the first half of the second millennium BC ... Starting from Transoxiana, one group of Iranians spread across Central Asia, becoming a basal population of the steppe, an environment they were the first to master: another group moved south and invaded India, conquering first the Indus and then the Ganges valleys. It was from the Iranians of Central Asia that the Huns, Turks and Mongols ... originally learnt the specialised form of pastoralism that became their hallmark. In the classical period Central Asia was dominated by Iranian peoples, and it was only towards its end that they began to yield to the Altaians - the sub-race consisting of the Turks and Mongols.” (p 8) “The Danubian culture represents the arrival and establishment of the Indo-Europeans in Central Europe.” (p 9)
• “Archaeology was acclaimed as the science of rubbish and as fast as the rubbish was dug up it was written down.” (p 9)
• “History being a branch of the biological sciences it's ultimate expression must be mathematical.” (p 10)
• “On a straight stretch of coast ... the relationships between sea-shore communities are weaker than their relationships with inland communities by a factor of three to two; whereas ... where the coastline is indented, not only is the number of sea-shore communities greatly increased but the relationships between them frequently outnumber their other relationships and are sometimes exclusive.” (p 10)
• “The concept of the natural frontier is much easier to grasp than the concept of an ecosphere boundary.” In a footnote it is added: “Many wars owe their origin to this type of conflict. A river valley is itself an ecosphere and its division is usually unnatural in social terms; for example, both banks of the Rhine have had a German population ever since Roman times, but to the French the line of the river seems a natural frontier. The Eastern Alps are another homogeneously German zone; the southern boundary on an ecological analysis lies along the foothills whereas the natural frontier in Italian eyes is the watershed.” (p 11)
• “Gordium, the capital of the Phrygian kingdom, covered an area of only about twenty-five acres.” (p 11)
• “Britain throughout the first millennium AD, was a patchwork of county-sized communities, and, though the Romans saw the island as a single province, the inhabitants did not. Consequently, the metropolis disappeared with the end of Roman rule ... London did not retain exceptional status till the eleventh century.” (p 12)
• “Human beings prefer urban to rural poverty, ... big cities have an attraction beyond any economic advantage.” (p 12)

And that is just the introduction! Thenceforward the maps are dated:


50,000 BC

• “South of the glaciated zone, rainfall tended to be heavy because of the interaction of warm southern air and air from the ice-chilled north, and this heavier rainfall supported a fairly vigorous flora and fauna in the Sahara and other areas that are now desert.” (p 16)

8500 BC

• “During the ninth millennium BC ... there was a rapid, though largely transitory, improvement in the climate ... thereafter the reindeer and the upper paleolithic tradition only survived near the diminishing icecap ... and the majority of the inhabitants of Europe passed into a new cultural phase, the mesoolithic ... The largest quarry available were deer and oxen, and mesolithic man, to make ends meet, spent most of his time hunting the inglorious snail and frankly sessile nut.” (p 18)
• “As the sea-level rose above the Bosporan shelf, salt water diffused into the Black Sea and killed the freshwater life it contained. The decomposed remains of this ice-age population still poison the lower levels of the stagnant Black Sea which is devoid of life below 250 feet.” (footnote, p 18)
• “The boat was probably an invention of this period. The dog, which presumably was suffering from the disappearance of its prey in much the same way as man, first appears as a mesolithic camp-follower.” (footnote, p 18)

4500 BC

• “The innovations of the Neolithic are many: the cultivation of wheat and barley, the domestication of goats, sheep, pigs and cattle, the use of fired pottery and of polished (as opposed to chipped) stone tools.” (p 20)
• “All of the sites in the pre-pottery neolithic so far discovered are within the fertile crescent.” (p 20)
• “Some of the mesolithic populations of the Baltic and Spanish coasts ... established permanent communities whenever there was a sufficient supply of shellfish.” (p 20)
• “No one has ever challenged the aboriginal status of the Semites in Arabia, and whether or not the related Hamites were neolithic immigrants or merely converts to agriculture ... their dominance in North Africa from this time on is equally certain.” (p 20)

2250 BC

• Trade was rudimentary. “Such exchanges as took place did not lead to the appearance of a merchant class, for they were fixed price affairs, regulated by temple or palace. Similarly, when there was a shortage of a necessary material, the response ... was not merchant venturing but the mounting of a military expedition.” (p 26)

1600 BC
“The migration of the clan of Abraham from the bend of the Fertile Crescent is usually, and plausibly, referred to the first period of Amorite expansion; Joseph's successful move into Egypt to the time of the Hyksos pharaohs, with their presumably favourable attitude to Semitic immigrants. The term ‘Hebrew’ (apiru) is used by Egyptians of the second millennium to describe all aliens of nomadic habits and only became a specific designation after the Exodus.” (p 30)
“In the Rig-veda, the Aryans have left a fairly full picture of an early Indo-European horde of the stock-breeding type. The most significant addition to the repertoire at this time is the horse-drawn chariot.” (p 30)
“Scandinavia, South-Western France and Atlantic Spain remained at the calcolithic level, while North Africa stagnated in the neolithic until the arrival of the Phoenicians.” (p 30)

1300 BC

• “Egypt, preoccupied with the religious revolution of Akhenaten, allowed her Palestinian province to drift to the edge of obedience.” (p 32)
• “Rameses II is the usual choice for the pharaoh of the Exodus because the Hebrews toiled on extensions to Avaris, the old Hyksos capital which Rameses renamed after himself. Many ‘Apiru’ are attested among his slave labourers.” (p 32)
• “About 1500 northern China passed straight from the neolithic into a full Bronze Age.” (p 32)

1300 BC Towns and trade

• “In northern China ... by 1300, the Shang kings were ruling a vigorous urban society and their priests were beginning to use a transitional script that is as clearly dependent on Near-Eastern prototypes as it is ancestral to modern Chinese.” (p 34)
• “The cities song by Homer are revealed by the spade as no more than citadels while the Achaean's surviving accounts proclaim their simple self-sufficiency. Their ships certainly reached as far west as Sicily". (p 34)

1300 BC Literacy

• “Even the pharaohs of the proud eighteenth dynasty conducted their foreign correspondence in cuneiform (and in the Akkadian language, the recognised diplomatic mode of the era).” (p 36)
• “When the Achaeans conquered the Aegean area, they modified Linear A in order to use it for the writing of Greek, the result being the recently deciphered Linear B” (p 36)
• “The consonantal alphabet [was] a Syro-Palestinian invention that followed naturally from the use of an open syllabary for writing a language like Semitic in which the vowels occur in regular relation to the consonants.” (p 36)

1200 BC

• “The Dorians, the northernmost of the Greek tribes, broke into the peninsula and methodically sacked Achaean strongholds; they then took to the sea and meted out the same treatment to Crete and Rhodes. The Phrygians, a Thracian people who crossed to Anatolia in the middle of the thirteenth century, were held in the north-eastern corner by the Hittites until 1200.” (p 38)
• “In the1180s, a horde of what the Egyptians called ‘sea peoples’ overran Palestine and was only beaten back with difficulty from Egypt itself.” (p 38)
• “The dark age that the barbarian invaders brought to the Aegean and Anatolia was to last for some four centuries.” (p 38)

1000 BC

• “About 1000 the Philistines were attempting to guarantee the military inferiority of the Hebrews by forbidding them to use the new metal [iron]” (p 40)
• “About this time the Iranians of the Transoxian region of Asia found that a skillful rider could manage his horse on the battlefield, a discovery that was ultimately to put an end to the chariot as a useful weapon.” (p 40)

825 BC

• “The resurgence of Phoenicia was powered by the Tyrian discovery of Spain with its abundant minerals (c 1000)” (p 42)
• “About 800, the Phoenicians voyaging to Spain founded permanent stations on either side of the Sicilian channel, the halfway point on their route.” (p 42)

560 BC

• c595 “Nebuchadnezzar ... conquered the Van region ... just after the Caucasian kingdom has been finally overthrown and the country settled by the Thraco-Cimmerian people who later became known as Armenians.” (p 48)
• “Croesus, Lydia’s last and greatest king, subdued Ionia in toto. The metropolitan Greeks lacked the political organization that might have enabled them to support their overseas compatriots.” (p 48)
• “It was probably in the seventh century that Buddha began his teaching in the Hindu principalities of the upper Ganges; Zoroaster is thought to have lived in the Oxus region towards the end of the same century.” (p 48)

375 BC Town and Trade

• The key feature of a primitive economy is “a sort of rationing system that is not egalitarian but hierarchical, you are allowed three strings of beads if and when you are entitled to wear them. Consumption is both conspicuous and mandatory and its primary purpose is to express rank. The Communists have partly reverted to this system in protest at the destructive social effects of laissez-faire economics, but the price of re-tribalization is liberty.” (p 54)
• “The node of the Greek trading network lay at the Peloponnesian isthmus, where goods were easily trans-shipped or, especially after 600 when a paved way was built, the ships themselves would be hauled across. The first major town in Greece was the isthmian capital, Corinth.” (p 54) 
• "On land Athens was never strong enough to protect her farmers whose concentration on the cash crops of the Mediterranean world, wine and oil, was not so imprudent as appears at first sight; the walls of the city would resist any assault and while the Athenian navy ruled the waves the grain supply was assured and the cheaper for being imported.” (p 54)
• Tyre dwindled as the Med was split into Carthaginian and Greek zones and “when the Athenian grip on the Aegean was finally broken, the beneficiary was not Tyre but Rhodes ... by then the mines of Laurion were exhausted; their place in the Greek economy was taken by the alluvial deposits in the north which were worked to the profit of Philip of Macedon.” (p 54)
• “Electrum is a gold-silver alloy that occurs naturally in Anatolia.” (p 54 footnote)

323 BC

• Philip II of Macedon could afford the increase in size of his army because of the discovery of gold; his fighting efficiency increased when he “refused to recognise two conventions of Greek warfare ... the restriction of campaigning to a recognized season and of siege technique to a blockade.” (p 58)
• “While the Etruscans never really recovered from the onslaught of the Gauls, Rome ... beat back the invaders.” (p 58)

145 BC Town and trade

• “Macedon, its gold deposits exhausted and its manpower weakened by wars and emigration, could barely hold its place among the great powers.” (p 70)
• Rome “had no natural resources, no manufactures, no trade; in sum, no commercial justification for growing ...Yet grow it did and the beginnings of this growth seem to have preceded the conquests that in economic terms provide a justification for size. ... The need for cheap corn in ever-increasing quantities can be accepted as an important factor in Rome’s overseas aggressions.” (p 70)

AD 230

• “The Roman frontier in Europe, as it does more obviously in Africa and the East, by and large corresponds with the limit of intensive agriculture. Economically the rational frontier in Britain was about halfway up and Hadrian's Wall was a fair military translation of this, but there was always a feeling that, after all, the place was an island, and if you could get to the end you wouldn't need a frontier at all. Accordingly, the annexation of Scotland was attempted at intervals but always failed because the legions could not supply themselves in such a sparsely populated country.” (p 82, footnote)

AD 230 Town and Trade

• “Chinese silk had an instant success in the west despite its high price ,,, the only Mediterranean equivalent, the rough silk of Cos, was driven off the market and forgotten so completely that the nature of silk became a subject for rumour and speculation.” (p 84)

AD 362 Town and trade

• After Diocletian's division of the Roman empire into East and West “Rome herself, after fattening on the produce of the entire Mediterranean basin for three hundred years, lost the corn of Egypt, the tribute of the East and even, as the headquarters of the mobile army at Milan became the seat of the Western court and civil government, its capital status and the official expenditure that this had entailed. The city became a backwater, the home of the lost causes aristocracy and paganism.” (p 90)
• “The reversion to self-sufficiency and barbarism was all too easy; taxation, most readily inflicted on the city dweller, encouraged the process.” (p 90)
• “The government’s price-fixing had made many professions profitless, and its attempts to avoid the economic consequences of its acts by making the practice of such professions obligatory and the liability hereditary, must have created many outlaws.” (p 90)
• “In the Orwellian twilight of the West, citizenship had become slavery and the paradox was completed when serfdom became the free man’s aspiration. To protect himself from the summary requisitions of the tax-gatherer the small farmer bought the protection of the local magnate by the gift of his freehold.” (p 90)
• “Only the evolution of a scientific stance - one foot inside the boundary of the known, the other just outside - could have guaranteed the superiority, and consequently the integrity, of Mediterranean society, and the world was still too young for that.” (p 92)
• “In the early days of her empire Rome did less than nothing for the urbanization of her provinces ... In the already developed areas the legions brought disasters. Carthage and Corinth were razed and Syracuse so treated that it never regained its former rank.” (p 92)

An astounding and outstanding work of reference. How one many can cover so many bases staggers me.

Brilliant. July 2018

"The Book of Genesis" by Gary Rendsburg

Rather than being a book, this is a course of lectures accompanied by a course booklet. There are 24 lectures each lasting about half an hour.

In his own terms, Rendsburg is a ‘maximalist’: he believes that “because so much of the Bible has been demonstrated to be historically accurate” its basic historical accuracy should be accepted even where there is no supporting evidence (except for Gen 1 - 11 which all but fundamentalists agree are mythic).

The aim of Professor Rendsburg is to demonstrate that Genesis should be viewed as a single text, with a coherent narrative, which employs some clever (if rather basic to today's authors) literary devices. Some of these 'literary devices' enable him to explain away inconsistencies in the text which seem to make the single narrative theory less likely than the (more commonly held) multiple sources theory. For example, in lecture 20 (on Genesis 37) he addresses the vexed question of who took Jospeh to Egypt? In Gen 37:25 - 26 the brothers see Ishmaelites and decide to sell J to them. In Gen 37: 28 Midianites take J from pit and sell him to Ishmelites. In Gen 37: 36 Medanites sell Joseph to Potiphar in Egypt. And in Gen 39:1 Potiphar buys J from Ishmaelites. But this, says Rendsburg, is not because there were a variety of conflicting sources. No. It is because “the confusion reflects the confusion in Joseph's mind”. It is a literary device. Yeah. Right.

I find this a problem because there is so much of Rendsburg's work that is enlightening and informative but doubts about one part of his work spreads uncertainty to others.

For example, he acknowledges that the problem of the first person plural to describe god has three possible solutions:

• It is an echo of polytheism
• It is a reference to angels (but angels a later invention).
• It is the use of the royal ‘we’.

This third option is clearly Rendsburg's preferred option even though he admits that the royal first person plural is found nowhere else in “all of ancient Near Eastern literature”. It seems to me that to adopt such an option with zero corroborating evidence is to allow an a priori position to colour one's interpretation. 

Again, Rendsburg acknowledges there are two creation stories. In the first God is called Elohim (God) and in the second Yahweh Elohim (Lord God) in second. God creates by saying in first story and by doing in second story The order of creation is plants, animals, man in the first story but in the second it is man, animals, plants. In the first story men and women are created together and in the second story man is first, f and woman is an afterthought. This sounds like two traditions, two sources, merged to me. To Rendsburg it is the same story but the first has a cosmocentric emphasis and the second is anthropocentric.

Other contradictions acknowledged by Rendsburg include:

• The number of animals of the Ark: one pair of each (Gen 6: 19 - 20) or seven pairs of each pure species and one pair of each impure species (Gen 7:2)
• Esau’s wives have different names in Gen 26:34 cf Gen 36: 2 -3

The alternative to Rendsburg's account is the (mainstream) JEDP theory which identifies four sources for the first five books (the Pentateuch or Torah):

• J in which God is called Yahweh
• E in which God is called Elohim
• D who is the writer of Deuteronomy
• P wrote the Priestly bits, eg offering a difference between Levis and Priests as in Leviticus while D thinks all Levites are priests.

Rendsburg rejects JEDP (although accepting P and D are from different worship traditions) because he regards the dating as wrong (Genesis has no Persian loanwords and is therefore probably entirely written pre 550 BCE) and because he sees the narrative as a literary whole suffused with themes such as the younger son triumphant, the weak woman and the deceiver deceived. I can't quite see whu we can't have both: that Genesis was created from a variety of sources by someone who attempted to impose an overall structure with key themes.

Source materials
Some of the source materials from which Genesis might have been written include:

• The Babylonian Creation story Enuma Elish
• The Gilgamesh Epic which has multiple parallels with the Genesis flood (see this specific section)
• The Canaanite epics of Aqhat and Kret which have 'childless hero' parallels with the story of Abraham
• The Egyptian tale of Two Brothers (c 1200 BC) in which the wife of the older brother attempts to seduce the younger brother and when he says it would be a sin she falsely accuses him of rape has parallels with the Potiphar's wife section of the Joseph story (although Joseph says it would be a sin 'before God')

Pre-Bible sources referred to in the Bible:

• Exodus 15 is a snippet of poetry using archaic language as is Judges 5.
• Joshua 10:13 and 2Samuel 1:18 (containing poetry) refer to the Book of Jashar.
• Numbers 21:14 refers to the Book of the Wars of the Lord (and contains snippets of poetry)

The Joseph story has a distinct Egyptian background:

• Several Egyptian words in the story eg ‘abrek (“heart to you”)
• Names are Egyptian
• Joseph’s father in law is a priest from On city, later Heliopolis
• Joseph shaves, Egyptian custom
• Joseph interprets dreams: Egyptian custom
• Joseph was embalmed after death: Egyptian custom

The literary structure of Genesis

Three main cycles: Abraham, Jacob, Joseph

Abraham and Jacob story have matching halves (eg Abraham cycle has 2 covenant stories, 2 rescues of Lot); second half matchers first half backwards (chiastic structure)

All cycles have a midway turning point (God called Elohim and Abram changes to Abraham, birth of Joseph)

• Chiasm of Abraham:
• Genealogy (of Terah)
• Start of spiritual journey
• Sarai in foreign palace; Abram and Lot part
• Abram rescues Lot
• Covenant with Abram; annunciation of Ishmael
• Abram becomes Abraham; God called Elohim
• Covenant with Abraham; annunciation of Isaac
• Abraham rescues Lot
• Sarah in foreign palace; Abraham and Ishmael part
• Climax of spiritual journey
• Genealogy (of Nahor)
• Jacob cycle (each matching episode linked with a keyword)
• Oracle, struggle in childbirth, Jacob born
• Rebekah in foreign palace
• Jacob fears Esau, flees
• Messengers
• Arrival at Harran
• Jacob’s wives are fertile
• Rachel gives birth to Joseph; Jacob decides to return to Canaan
• Jacob’s flocks are fertile
• Flight from Harran
• Messengers
• Jacob returns; fears Esau
• Dinah in foreign palace
• Struggle in childbirth; Jacob becomes Israel

Themes in Genesis
Rendsburg sees these as evidence that Genesis is a unified piece of literature.

• Rendsburg sees a repeated theme in the Bible of lowly women (who, he says, represent Israel, a relatively powerless state) such as Sarah (lowly when Abraham bosses her around), Hagar (lowly when Sarah bosses her around), Tamar, prostitute Rahab who helps Israel conquer Jericho, Jael who tent-pegs Sisera etc;
• Theme of the barren woman: Sarah: Abraham took slave girl Hagar, Rebekah (ref Gen 25: 21), Rachel (Jacob takes Bilhah);
• Theme of the younger son supplanting the elder: Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and the rest, Judah and his three elder brothers. Also God favoured younger Abel over elder Cain. Also Aaron is older brother of Moses

When was the Bible written?
Part of the argument concerns when the Old Testament was written. Here is Rendburg's take on it.

• Archaic poetry (c 1150 - 1000 BCE):
• Exodus 15, some of Numbers 21, Judges 5
• 1000 BCE - 400 BCE:
• Genesis to Kings
• Prophets
• Psalms, Proverbs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ezra-Nehemiah
• 400 BCE - 150 BCE:
• Ecclesiastes, Esther, Chronicles, Daniel (164 BCE)

Rendsburg argues that oblique references to the Davidic-Solomionic monarchy (17:6 God tells Araham “kings shall spring from you”; 17:16 “kings shall spring from” Sarah; 15:18 God outlines boundaries of D-S kingdom; 49:10 “The sceptre shall not pass from Judah”) suggests Genesis written in 10th Century. Furthermore, Israel a confederation of tribes till 1020 BC when Saul became King. The boundaries in Gen 15.18 correspond to David’s (1000 - 965) or Solomon (965 - 930)

Chronology of the Joseph story

• Egyptian papyrus from late 13th century BC describes a group of semites who arrive in eastern Nile delta with flocks feeling from drought and famine; Egyptians grant them permission to settle.
• Generally scholars assume Joseph served during Hyksos dynasty (1675 - 1575 BCE)
• Rendsburg asserts that 'most' agree that Ramses II (1291 - 1224) enslaved Israelites. This, he asserts, means that Joseph’s pharaoh was the previous pharaoh Seti I (1308 - 1291). On the other hand Rendsburg also says that the characters in Exodus are 3 to 5 generations from sons of Jacob suggesting that the Israelites were in Egypt for about 100 years. This pushes back the Joseph story to 1324 or before. 

The Creation
The creation was not from nothing. The earth predates the creation: “The earth was without form and void" (New English Bible); “The earth was formless and desolate" (Good News Version); “The earth hath existed waste and void" (Young’s Literal Translation); “The earth was without form and void" (Revised Standard Version)

Rendsburg says that this gets over the problem of evil. Polytheists can have evil gods but monotheists can't. But if the creation prior to god was evil (and “four of the five key words ... unformed, void, darkness, deep [are] symbolic of chaos and evil (only the wind is not of that ilk) then it can be argued that evil existed before god.

Of course, the second creation story has a different cause of the origin of evil: the eating of the fruit of the tree.

There are also a number of resonances with the Babylonian Creation story. This is the tale of a conflict between Tiamat, evil goddess of salt water, and Marduk, good sky god. “Marduk kills Tiamat and he creates the world out of her body, using the upper part of her body to create the vault of heaven and the lower part of her body to create the earth. The story continues with the creation of the sun, the moon, and the stars, and it finishes with the creation of man.”

The Flood (Gen 6 - 8)
Other factors influencing our understanding of the source material include climate. Thus, Egypt depends on the regular flooding of the Nile and Mesopotamia is regularly flooded by the Tigris and the Euphrates. Canaan, however, has no major rivers and is dependent principally on rainfall. It seems unlikely that a Flood story could derive from this.

The Flood story seems to be an adaptation of the Gilgamesh epic. This was a literary classic in the ancient Near East existing in several translations including original Akkadian, Hittite and Hurrian. The Genesis story shares with Gilgamesh:

• The building materials: wood, pitch and QNYM (probably qanim, reeds)
• The dimensions
• The number of decks
• The order of description of materials then dimensions then number of decks
• The population
• The detailed description of the flood
• The mountaintop landing
• The birds (in both stories the landing appears before the birds are sent)
• The sacrifices at the end

The differences are essentially theological:

• Why the world was destroyed
• Why a special person was chosen to survive
• The covenant

Rendsburg asserts that the Flood story derived from the Gilgamesh story (rather than the other way round) because:

• Flooding is typical in Mesopotamia but impossible in Canaan;
• Ararat is north of Mesopotamia;
• The Bible has Abraham coming from Mesopotamia;
• adding stuff to a story (the theological stuff) is easier than subtracting it;
• When Noah makes the sacrifice at the end God “smelt the soothing odour” which is a personification of God found nowhere else in the Bible but Gilgamesh Tablet XI line 161 reads “the gods smelled the sweet savour”.

Rendsburg uses this to doubt the JEDP theory because (apart from the discrepancy in the number of animals) the Flood story seems to come from one source. For me, the acknowledgement that bthere is a source for at least one story in the Bible lends credence to the idea that Genesis might be a portmanteau, edited work.

Abraham and Sarah.

On the face of it, these are not the sort of people you'd like to boast of having in your ancestry. When Sarah has a child she insists that Abraham sends his mistress Hagar and her young child Ishmael out into the wilderness so that Ishmael, Abraham's first-born, cannot have a share in Isaac's inheritance. Abraham twice passes his wife Sarah off as his sister thus deceiving other men and bringing down the curse of god on the apparently deceived man rather than on the husband/pimp. Abraham himself is so fundamentalist in his unquestioning obedience to the voice of god that he is prepared to murder his son Isaac because he thinks god has told him too.

Where does Abraham come from? The story says 'Ur' but Rendsburg suggests this is not the city state of Ur from the southern Mesopotamia region but Urfa, a city north of the Euphrates (Joshua 24:3 says Abraham came from “beside the Euphrates” (New English Bible; Rendsburg says “beyond the Euphrates”). This fits with local Urfa tradition, and the route described (through Harran to Canaan), and the homeland from which Isaac's bride comes (Aram-nahairim (Aram of the Two Rivers) Gen 24:10; Rendsburg says this is northern Mesopotamia) and Jacob's wife too (Paddan-aram to Laban’s home (via Harran) Rendsburg says this is also Aram-nahairim; wikipedia locates this as in Harran);
Harran is on the Turkish border, and tablets found there suggest Hurrian customs reflected in Abraham story:

• Childless men adopted servants as heirs
• Adopted sons superseded by later-born natural sons
• Barren wives required by law to give their husbands a slavewoman

There are two odd moments in Genesis in each of which Abraham attempts to pass Sarah off as his sister; at first to pharaoh in Egypt and then to Canaanite king Abi-Melech. In both cases Sarah is taken into the household of the ruler (by implication into the harem) and in both cases the monarch’s apparent adultery (Sarah is married) displeases god and he punishes Pharaoh but only warns A-M, and in both stories the unwitting adulterer is angry with Abraham the deceiver. Abraham’s defence is that Sarah is his half-sister (same father). This suggests that this story is written later than Leviticus which bans incest with half-sisters.

Other interesting things that I learned:

• Our present system of chapters and verses was “accomplished by Stephen Langton (c 1150 - 1228), the Archbishop of Canterbury”
• Genesis is unusual among ancient literature in that it is written in prose not poetry. But Egyptian religious stories were also prose.
• Rendsburg distinguishes between the religion of ancient Israel which was monolatry, worship of one god, and religion during and after Babylonian exile which was monotheism, belief in one god. Belief in antiquity involved localised deities (Exodus 7:16 Moses asks Pharaoh that Israelites be allowed to go into desert to worship Yahweh “let his people go in order to worship him in the wilderness”; 1Sam 26:19 David curses men who have “banished me to serve other gods”). Rendsburg suggests that it was the desire to worship Yahweh whilst in exile that changed Jews from monolatrous to monotheistic.
• Ziggurat figures both in Tower of Babel story and in Jacob’s ‘ladder’ (sullam means ladder or stairway or ziggurat)
• Yahweh is seen as male. Hebrew language has genders and Yahweh always referred to using masculine nouns, pronouns and verbs. There is a metaphor of God as man marrying Israel as woman.
• Genesis 1 God prescribes vegetarianism; Genesis 9 allows meat eating (but not blood)
• Genesis 29:11 is the only place in the Bible where a single man kisses a single woman.
• Gen 24:2: Abraham tells servant to swear while “placing his hand under hid thigh” ==> touch his testicles: ancient custom: single Latin route for testicles and testify.
• The phrase ‘we-hinneh’ = ‘and behold’ is used as a literary device to move us to protagonist’s POV.

 This lecture series had had some extraordinarily interesting moments but it was spoiled by Rendsburg's adherence to a minority perspective. Because his arguments failed to convince me I felt uncertain whether what he said was an accurate reflection of the mainstream scholarship on Genesis. For example, there was no discussion of alternative chronologies for either the writing of Genesis or for the events written about. I even felt it necessary to check Biblical quotes ... and of course the varieties of translation cast doubt on any one argument. In the end I distrusted Rendsburg as an unbiased and I was unsatisfied that I understood the state of play of current Genesis scholarship.

July 2018