Re: Ur not going to believe the nonsense about Ur

    Why play coy? Give it your best shot to support the believer bullshit fantasy
that the myth Ezra did it. Explain how everyone missed his clear statement of
authorship back when people were still stupid enough to believe Abraham and
Moses really existed. Will you need any extra rope?

Possibly, but who wants to suffer your smugness?

It would cost you nothing to reveal it.

The "author/compiler" is unidentified only in your feverish brain.
Check it out and find out his name.

Well, you are mistaken.  In fact, the Greek mythology clearly conceals
the Greek conquest and enlists a continued occupation of the land and
a continuity between Gods and humans.  In fact, you have to peal a few
layers from the Greek mythology to uncover the elements of conquest
(the hybrid myths). No group ever asserted rigths to anybody else on
the basis of conquest.  What was the jury????  The conquered either
accepted the conquest or perished.  A new conqueror could dispose of
the old conqueror any way he/she pleased.  These stories were
organizing myths originate for and by the aristocracy (ordinary humans
have little say in the Iliad and the songs were sung at the megara of
the powerful) to create ruling legitimacy.  The Bible is just such an
organ.  Conquest had to be explained in divine terms (because memories
of it persisted) but it was the divine will and those that served it
(the Pharisees and the Saduccees and the high priests) who benefited
from it.

Ethnic cohesion?  What does ethnic cohesion have to do with anything?
Was the gulf between the Samaritans and orthodox Hebrews any more
severe than the gulf between the Protestants and the Catholics in
France and in Germany (I would contest exactly the opposite).  If
Jesus is an example par excellence of many millennial preachers in the
1st century CE Palestine, this division was not that severe and
certainly not ethnic.

Why are you mistaking religion and ethnic cohesion?  These two notions
are separate and most people can make this distinction easily enough
and they made it through history.  First of all, the Bible itself is
hardly silent about Astarte and the fact that her worship lasted for
at least 400 years until the temples were destroyed by king Josiah
(shortly before the Egyptian and then the Babylonian conquest).  There
is little doubt, despite the hieratic claims in the Bible, that Judah
and Israel were kingdoms in which many religions flourished.  Now, my
guess is that the temple to Astarte that was destroyed by Constantine
was built some time after the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus as it
is unlikely that it would have existed under the severe Hasmonean rule
or the very religiously charged period of the Herodean rule.  Herod
himself was very careful to tiptoe around a profusion of zealots.

Oh, shut up.  Lots of evidence was presented to you.  You simply bury
your head in the sand.

Yes we do.  We actually have a number of inscriptions from Lachish
dating from the 7th century BCE and there are inscriptions of the same
period in Jerusalem.   I am not going to go into every archaeological
find, which, with you, is useless. But listen to yourself.  Nor only
do you have us believe that somebody simply freely associated the
Bible in the 1st century BCE, it also invented a language just for the
fun of it!!!

Did I mention any Babylonians????  Are you reading my text or dreaming
your dreams?

There are duplications and discontinuities but this happens when one
has to reconcile different myths, oral traditions and texts.  If there
was a single inventor, it would have been easy to keep the story
straight.  By the priests, and most likely primarily Ezra, had to
reconcile various traditions.  The easiest way out was to keep both of
them in.

And you have not read it.  That the temple and worship of Astarte and
Baal were present is mentioned various times (and many times is the
central narrative) in the Book of Kings.  The book of Kings actually
dates the introduction of the Astarte worship from the time of Solomon
(apparently, with Solomon's acceptance).

Blah, blah, blah, blah...

...

    As opposed to an unidentified author in the 6th c.? Please explain the
difference.

    As I have pointed out very many times, conquest has been the only basis for a
right to rule from the beginning of recorded history until some time in the
latter half of the 20th c. Indigenous peoples were not considered to have any
rights until the latter half of the 20th c.

    One might expect you and your ilk to have at least a fleeting knowledge of
the New Testament. How does on reconcile ethnic cohesion and the parable of
the good Samaritan? Do not forget to address our knowledge of the Samarian
religion in your response.

    To put it simply, there is no evidence of any ethnic cohesion in Palestine.
We know for certain the religion described in the OT was not the religion of
the people, not even of Jerusalem with its temples to both Astarte and Yahweh,
her's lasting into the early 2nd c. AD.

    As you know there is no evidence of any such conquest.

    As you know there is no evidence any population ever spoke Hebrew.

    As you know there is no evidence of any Babylonian involvement or interest in
exporting any religion.

    Yet you keep reminding me it is not a cohesive narrative. And I keep pointing
out to you it is much more gibberish than you are willing to admit.

    You take Astarte's temple in Jerusalem as evidence of success? You keep
refusing to deal with the fact that we know the religion of bibleland was not
as it is portrayed in either the old or new testaments.

    Failed miserably in light of what we know the religion was really like.

On Jul 3, 1:31 pm, Christopher Ingham <christophering...@comcast.net>
wrote:

No doubt, it was preserved from older oral histories but it is
certainly peculiar.  If anything, despite the addition of a God, it
weakens the case for legitimate occupation of the specific land we are
discussing about.  If, as some wackos here suggest, the Pentateuch was
nothing more and nothing else than a nice story written by an
unidentified author in the 1st century BCE to "provide legitimacy of
occupation", writing about a group of outsiders that conquered a given
land, even with the encouragement of a God, would have been defeating
the said purpose.  Had I 've been given this assignment and making
everything from whole cloth, I would certainly have written about a
founder who was local and prevailed with the assistance of God.  The
document, as written, presents the picture of an external marauding
group that engages in brutal conquest with the encouragement of
"their" God.  This would hardly have managed to elicit sympathy or
legitimacy in the Hellenistic world.

The Bible, as written, is clearly directed to "insiders" rather than
"outsiders" and it was mostly an "ethnogenesis tool" utilizing by a
priesthood in Jerusalem in fashioning a cohesive ethnic group from the
late 6th century onwards (and probably with the encouragement of the
Persian authorities).  There is little doubt that the Babylonian
conquest and destruction of the kingdom of Judah had left in place an
aimless and un-affiliated Hebrew speaking population in the hills and
valleys of Palestine which the Persian installed priesthood eventually
molded into the Hebrews with the Bible and the Temple as the main
organs for this attempt. For the Bible to have been successful in its
goal (and it was), it had to incorporate and also amplify oral and
written stories prevalent in the population, organize this
information  in a cohesive narrative and affiliate it with a deity.  I
think that the high priests achieved their goal admirably well.  They
introduced the main deity far more frequently in pieces set in early
times as to legitimize them.  Thus God, who speaks quite often in the
Pentateuch, seems to be quite silent in later Kings and needs
Prophets.  Interesting approach and one that worked.

Maybe it was a way for a humble people to graft on to themselves the
ancestry of those from a more developed and prestigious culture.  Or
perhaps it was one of the more persistent of several origins legends
preserved in oral histories.

Christopher Ingham

On Jul 3, 10:09 am, Christopher Ingham <christophering...@comcast.net>
wrote:

Christofer,

This actually jives quite well with the Bible having been compiled/
rewritten sometime in the 6th century.

But the connection of Abraham with lower Mesopotamia is, to say the
least, perplexing and probably a mythical explanation of the fact that
the Judeans (Jews/Hebrews) had a long tradition of regarding
themselves late arrivals into Palestine. Why would otherwise a God (or
the God) promise Canaan to a person from southern Mesopotamia??  It is
a little bizarre to me.  In a variety of ethnogenesis myths, the
"founding fathers" are locals.  This reinforces the claim to the land,
if anything.

This is what James H. Platt says in_The Oxford Companion to the Bible_
(1993), s.v. "Ur of the Chaldeans":

"The homeland of Abraham and the starting point of his migration to
Canaan (Gen. 11.28.31; 15.7; Neh. 9.7), Ur of the Chaldeans (AV:
Chaldees) is traditionally identified with the southern Mesopotamian
site Tell el-Muqayyar, on the Euphrates River.  The site was
systematically excavated from 1922 to 1934 by Sir Leonard Woolley.
Among his discoveries were the ziggurat constructed by Ur-nammu, the
founder of the Ur III Dynasty, in the late third millenium BCE and, in
the royal cemetery, the burial of queen Pu-abi, whose grave had never
been robbed.

"The identification of 'Ur of the Chaldees' with Tell el-Muqayyar is
not universally accepted.  Some scholars have suggested that it is
Urfa (Edessa), while others have proposed a connection with a city
named Ura.  It has also been suggested that Ur in his context may
reflect the generic Sumerian word for city, URU; note that in the
Septuagint 'Ur of the Chaldeans' is translated 'land of the
Chaldeans' (cf. Acts 7.4).

"The Chaldeans were a group of five tribes who became dominant in
Babylonia during the late sixth century BCE.  They are not mentioned
by name in any source before the ninth century, which makes the phrase
'Ur of the Chaldeans' relatively late [i.e., anachronistic - CI]."

Christopher Ingham

I am not sure exactly what point you are making, but the Greek has
Khaldaioi in each case.  I am at a loss to see why the Jacobean
translators "modernized" as it were, the term in (putatively) later
books.  Perhaps one of the many posters who know so much more than
either of us can enlighten me.

    This is all the OT has to say about Ur. These are from Genesis. These are
also from the King James Version using the English construction and spellings
of centuries ago. Note while Chaldees and Chaldeans are both used no
distinction is made between them. Obviously no archaeological information was
known in those days.

Genesis

11:28 And Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity, in
Ur of the Chaldees.

11:29 And Abram and Nahor took them wives: the name of Abram's wife was Sarai;
and the name of Nahor's wife, Milcah, the daughter of Haran, the father of
Milcah, and the father of Iscah.

11:30 But Sarai was barren; she had no child.

11:31 And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son's son,
and Sarai his daughter in law, his son Abram's wife; and they went forth with
them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan; and they came
unto Haran, and dwelt there.

11:32 And the days of Terah were two hundred and five years: and Terah
died in Haran.

15:6 And he believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness.

15:7 And he said unto him, I am the LORD that brought thee out of Ur of the
Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it.

15:8 And he said, LORD God, whereby shall I know that I shall inherit
it?

15:9 And he said unto him, Take me an heifer of three years old, and a she
goat of three years old, and a ram of three years old, and a turtledove, and a
young pigeon.

=====

    From these mentions there is nothing special about Ur of the Chaldees. There
is also ZERO information about either the city or the people.

    But some nerfbrains are declaring the Chaldees were mystics. To examine that
assertion we look at IKings. We discover they attacked and invaded bibleland.

I Kings

24:2 And the LORD sent against him bands of the Chaldees, and bands of
the Syrians, and bands of the Moabites, and bands of the children of
Ammon, and sent them against Judah to destroy it, according to the
word of the LORD, which he spake by his servants the prophets.

25:4 And the city was broken up, and all the men of war fled by night
by the way of the gate between two walls, which is by the king's
garden: (now the Chaldees were against the city round about:) and the
king went the way toward the plain.

25:5 And the army of the Chaldees pursued after the king, and overtook
him in the plains of Jericho: and all his army were scattered from
him.

25:6 So they took the king, and brought him up to the king of Babylon
to Riblah; and they gave judgment upon him.

25:7 And they slew the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes, and put out
the eyes of Zedekiah, and bound him with fetters of brass, and carried
him to Babylon.

25:8 And in the fifth month, on the seventh day of the month, which is
the nineteenth year of king Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, came
Nebuzaradan, captain of the guard, a servant of the king of Babylon,
unto Jerusalem: 25:9 And he burnt the house of the LORD, and the
king's house, and all the houses of Jerusalem, and every great man's
house burnt he with fire.

25:10 And all the army of the Chaldees, that were with the captain of
the guard, brake down the walls of Jerusalem round about.

    Warrior mystics anyone? Mystic warriors is already used by some video game.

    But there is no way anyone would have heard about the Chaldeans? Yet their
own magic book (stupidly) claims the following.

Ezra

5:12 But after that our fathers had provoked the God of heaven unto wrath,
he gave them into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, the
Chaldean, who destroyed this house, and carried the people away into Babylon.

    There they are, right? So where does this mystic nonsense come from?

Daniel

2:2 Then the king commanded to call the magicians, and the
astrologers, and the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans, for to shew the
king his dreams. So they came and stood before the king.

2:3 And the king said unto them, I have dreamed a dream, and my spirit
was troubled to know the dream.

2:4 Then spake the Chaldeans to the king in Syriack, O king, live for
ever: tell thy servants the dream, and we will shew the
interpretation.

2:5 The king answered and said to the Chaldeans, The thing is gone
from me: if ye will not make known unto me the dream, with the
interpretation thereof, ye shall be cut in pieces, and your houses
shall be made a dunghill.

5:29 Then commanded Belshazzar, and they clothed Daniel with scarlet,
and put a chain of gold about his neck, and made a proclamation
concerning him, that he should be the third ruler in the kingdom.

5:30 In that night was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain.

    So we have Nebuchadnezzar king and Chaldean who order Chaldeans to explain a
dream and they have, rather had, their own king. Again the mystic king is
taken so we have to go with King of the Mystics.