ancient Judaism Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

Did Any Non-Israelite Ancient Cultures Have Their Own “Bibles”?

The Bible is one of the most influential collections of texts in human history. Its influence goes far beyond the Jewish and Christian religious traditions, which regard different versions of it as sacred; it has fundamentally shaped how most people living in the west in the twenty-first century, even those who of us who are not religiously Christian or Jewish, think about religion in general. Because the Hebrew and Christian Bibles are so central to modern Judaism and Christianity respectively, many people have wondered whether any non-Israelite cultures of the ancient world had similar collections of sacred texts.

As it happens, a large number of ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman texts have survived that were relevant in various ways to those peoples’ religious practices, including some texts that people considered to be “divinely inspired” in some sense and some that bear significant parallels to Biblical literature. Nonetheless, the Hebrew Bible bears some remarkable features that set it apart from other sacred writings that existed in the ancient world.

Don’t Blame “Paganism” for the United States’ Problems

On December 25th, 2023, The Atlantic published an op-ed by David Wolpe, a prominent American rabbi, titled “The Return of the Pagans.” In the op-ed, Wolpe asserts that both the political left and right in the United States have embraced fundamentally “pagan” ideas about the world (by which he means ideas derived from and characteristic of the traditional non-monotheistic religions of the ancient Mediterranean, particularly Greece and Rome) and that this supposed “pagan” influence is the cause of many of the problems that the United States faces today.

For those who don’t know, I’m a graduate student in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies and my main research focus is ancient Greek religion. Given this interest, I was quite intrigued to see an article published in a major news outlet with a title proclaiming that “paganism” has returned. Sadly, I soon found that Wolpe’s idea of “paganism” is a wildly inaccurate caricature that has more to do with nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophies than with the non-monotheistic religions of the ancient Mediterranean world. The op-ed got under my skin, so I decided to let it furnish an opportunity to educate interested readers about what ancient polytheistic religions were like—and, just as importantly, what they weren’t like.

Most Memorable Opening Lines in Ancient Literature

Today, if one looks around on the internet, one can find all kinds of lists that purport to present the most memorable opening lines “of all time,” but, invariably, these opening lines are always from famous works of English literature written within the past two centuries. I have therefore decided to compile my own list of most memorable opening lines—but only for works of ancient literature.

I have chosen which lines to include in this post based on how impactful and memorable they are, not on how famous they are. As a result, many of the works I have included on this list are not well known to the general public. Meanwhile, I have omitted the opening lines of certain works that are extremely famous, but not especially memorable in their own right, such as the opening lines of Plato’s Republic and Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, which are famous because the works they come from are famous, not because they are especially memorable. I have chosen opening lines from works produced in a range of ancient cultures, including ancient Mesopotamia, the Levant, India, Greece, and Rome, and have chosen openings that I find memorable for a variety of different reasons.

The Dumbest Fictional Law in Ancient Literature

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that I haven’t posted nearly as much in the past few months as I have previously. Part of the reason for this is because I’m taking several courses this semester with workloads that take up a large proportion of my time. One of these courses is NEJS 113a (“Biblical Aramaic in Context”). The first five weeks of the course were a fast-paced introduction to the grammar of Aramaic, a West Semitic language closely related to Hebrew that was the most widely spoken vernacular language in Mesopotamia and the Levant from around the seventh century BCE to around the third century CE and was also the primary language of administration and public life in the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Currently, we are reading the Book of Daniel chapters 3, 6, and 7 in the original Aramaic and, later in the semester, we will be reading Aramaic texts from inscriptions and papyri.

In doing my readings for this course, I’ve been reminded of what I have long thought is possibly the most poorly-conceived law in all of ancient literature: a supposed Achaemenid law that held that no one—not even the king himself—could ever revoke or alter any decree that had been made in his name for any reason under any circumstances. The law is definitely made up; there’s no attestation of it anywhere in any Persian or Greek sources. Nonetheless, it manages to cause all kinds of trouble as a plot device the Books of Esther and Daniel.

What Do Angels Really Look Like According to the Bible?

There is a popular meme that has been going around on the internet for several years now claiming that “Biblically accurate angels” are actually terrifying, Lovecraftian, otherworldly beings who have all kinds of body parts from different animals and are covered all over in eyes. It’s a fun meme. Unfortunately, as an ancient historian, I’m the sort of person who ruins everything fun, so I’m here to tell you that the “Biblically accurate angel” meme isn’t really “Biblically accurate.”

In both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, beings who are described as angels are always either expressly described as looking like male humans or assumed to look like male humans. Although some texts of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament do indeed describe a variety of heavenly beings with bizarre and frightening appearances, these beings are only described in a few places, were not originally viewed as angels, and are never described as angels in any canonical Biblical text.

Men Have Been Finding Weird and Unsettling Ways to Describe Women’s Breasts Since Ancient Times

It is common knowledge that cisgender straight and bisexual men frequently possess an overriding fascination with women’s breasts—to such an extent that they often devote more attention to a woman’s breasts than to any other aspect of her person. As a result of this fixation, some male writers have a habit of throwing in references to or descriptions of breasts in places where they are contextually inappropriate. Sometimes they also describe breasts using goofy or perplexing figurative language.

These sorts of references and descriptions have become a subject of widespread memes and satire. There is even an entire subreddit called r/menwritingwomen, which is dedicated to examples of male authors writing about women in incompetent (and often comical) ways. A significant proportion of the examples discussed in the subreddit are breast references and its satirical headline reads: “She breasted boobily down the stairs…..”

One thing some people may not realize is that gynophilic men have been doing this exact same thing for literally thousands of years. In this post, I will discuss three different examples of goofy, weird, unsettling, or just downright creepy descriptions of women’s breasts in texts from the ancient Mediterranean world in three different languages: Biblical Hebrew, Ancient Greek, and Latin.

Yes, King David Raped Bathsheba

The legend of how King David saw Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, bathing naked, lusted after her, sent messengers to bring her to the royal palace, had sex with her, impregnated her, and then had her husband effectively murdered to prevent him from finding out is one of the most famous stories in the Hebrew Bible—but also one of the most routinely misunderstood.

Many Christian readers have interpreted Bathsheba as a depraved and nefarious seductress who deliberately bathed in a location where she knew David would be watching in order to seduce him, caused him to lust after her, and gleefully betrayed her husband to have sex with the king. There is, however, absolutely nothing in the Biblical text to support this interpretation. In fact, in the text itself, all the evidence strongly indicates that David spies on her without her knowledge or consent and then rapes her. Bathsheba, far from being a malicious temptress, is actually an innocent rape victim who has been wrongfully victim-blamed for far too long.

How Did People in the Ancient Mediterranean World View Abortion?

The United States Supreme Court is expected to announce its decision in the landmark abortion case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health at some point before the end of the present term, which will most likely end sometime in June or early July of this year. An initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito that has been obtained by Politico indicates that the majority of the justices have already privately decided to completely overturn the previous Supreme Court rulings in the cases of Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which held that the U.S. Constitution protects the inherent right of a pregnant person to choose to have an abortion until the point when the fetus becomes viable outside the womb, which is generally agreed to occur at around twenty-three or twenty-four weeks gestational age.

In this new case, the court is expected to rule that the U.S. Constitution does not protect any right of a pregnant person to choose to have an abortion at any point during pregnancy. Although the verdict is not final and the justices still have time to change their minds, it is unlikely at this point that they will do so. This will be the first (although possibly not the last) time in living memory that the Supreme Court has completely revoked something that it previously deemed a major fundamental right.

Given the current situation, I thought it would be useful to write a post about attitudes toward abortion in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean world. This post will cover attitudes among peoples of the ancient Near East, Greeks, Romans, and early Christians and will give some insight about how and why ancient Christians came to disapprove of abortion in the first place.

Did Archaeologists Really Discover a Hebrew Curse Tablet from Mount Ebal Bearing the Name YHWH?

At a press conference at the Lanier Theological Library in Houston, Texas, on 24 March 2022, Scott Stripling (the Director of Excavations for the Associates for Biblical Research, a fundamentalist Christian apologetics ministry), Pieter van der Veen (a professor of the Old Testament and Biblical archaeology at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz), and Gershon Galil (a professor of Biblical studies and ancient history at the University of Haifa) announced that they have (supposedly) discovered an inscription written in the Hebrew language using the Proto-Canaanite script inside of a 2 cm x 2 cm folded lead tablet that a team led by Stripling found in December 2019 while wet-sifting through the detritus of an earlier excavation that a team led by the late Israeli archaeologist Adam Zertal conducted at Mount Ebal near the Palestinian city of Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank from 1982 to 1986.

Stripling, van der Veen, and Galil claim that the inscription on the inside of the tablet is not visible to the naked eye and that they were only able to find it by examining thousands of tomographic scans made at the Czech Academy of Sciences. They claim that the inscription dates to between 1400 and 1200 BCE. They say that the text of the inscription reads as follows when translated into English: “Cursed, cursed, cursed – cursed by the God YHW. You will die cursed. Cursed you will surely die. Cursed by YHW – cursed, cursed, cursed.” Despite these claims, they still have not shown any of the scans they allegedly made, instead only showing photographs of the outside of the tablet and one drawing made by Galil of one supposed instance of the divine name.

If all the team’s claims are true, this would be the earliest known attestation of writing in the Hebrew language and the earliest known attestation of the divine name YHWH by hundreds of years. Naturally, dozens of news outlets have reported this supposed inscription as though it really were the most astounding discovery in Biblical archaeology of this century. There are, however, very good reasons to be very suspicious of Stripling, van der Veen, and Galil’s claims and it is highly irresponsible for news outlets to report these claims as though they were settled fact. The reasons I am about to highlight are already well known to scholars, but I thought I would share them here for members of the general public who may have read about the supposed Mount Ebal curse tablet in the news.

Proselytism in the Ancient Mediterranean Before Christianity

Today, in the twenty-first century, Judaism is usually thought of as an ethnic religion and Jewish people are not generally known for their proselytizing. At least in the second and first centuries BCE and the first century CE, though, Jewish people in the Mediterranean world were far from totally disinterested in trying to convert other people to their religious practices and way of life. In fact, among ancient Greek and Roman authors in this period, one of the main things Jewish people became known for was their supposed habit of aggressively proselytizing.

Early Christianity’s strong emphasis on proselytism is best understood not as a completely sudden new development or an example of early Christians doing something that no Jewish people had ever done before, but rather an example of Christians taking something that some Jewish people had already been doing and making it a major focus for their movement.