Book Review: 101 Myths of the Bible

[jim_mc]

Now that's a mustache. Good job, Fred.

[Walden]

Has anyone here read this book?

Yes.

I read some of the works of another notable non-believer.



"For England must not fall: it would mean an inundation of Russian and German political degradations which would envelop the globe and steep it in a sort of Middle-Age night and slavery which would last till Christ comes again--which I hope he will not do; he made trouble enough before."

-- Samuel Langhorne "Mark Twain" Clemens

[Ridseard]

Now that's a mustache. Good job, Fred.

I've read a lot of books about him, but they never explain how he managed to find his mouth when eating.

[lilymaid]

1.Moses didn't write the Ten Commandment
2.David didn't kill Goliath
3.Samson did not pull down a Philistine temple
4.Joshua didn't bring down the walls of Jericho
5.Sodom and Gommorah never existed
6.Noah's ark did not land on Mount Ararat
7.The story of Esther originally had nothing to do with the Jews of Persia.

Let's make someone else's religious beliefs out to look stupid and try to start an argument, why don't we. My aren't we thoughtful!

[jim stone]

Here's part of a review of the book. Elsewhere it says that
Mr. Greenberg, a lawyer, ran for governor of NY
in 1978 on the libertarian ticket. Apparently he has
been dismissed as a 'crackpot' in the New York Times
Book Review on account of his earlier book,
The Moses Mystery. On the other hand he went to
Brooklyn College, my alma mater. People
like that don't make mistakes! Sounds like
an interesting book.

New York Press (12/27/00, Vol. 13, No. 52)

The Egyptian Bible
by John Strasbaugh

In his day job, Gary Greenberg is a senior trial lawyer for the Criminal Defense Division of the Legal Aid Society here in the city. He sometimes appears as a commentator on Court TV.

But it's his avocation that brings him to our attention. Some guys race birds, some guys build model trains, some guys coach championship Little League baseball teams.

Greenberg is an avocational biblical scholar. And a controversial one.

In his 1997 The Moses Mystery: The African Origins of the Jewish People (reprinted in paperback as The Bible Myth), Greenberg argued that there was no archaeological or documentary evidence for most of the stories the Old Testament tells about the origins of the Jews-no Abraham living in "Ur of the Chaldees," no 400 years of enslavement in Egypt, no Exodus and wandering 40 years in the desert. Instead, he believes the Hebrews originally were Egyptians, devotees of Akhenaten's monotheism-Moses was his high priest-who had to flee after Akhenaten died and Horemheb violently rejected the new religion.

These were not brand-new notions. Egyptian roots for the biblical Hebrews were theorized back in the 19th century. Afrocentric spins on the origins of Western Civ were a nickel a bushel in the 1990s. And archaeologists have long pointed out that there's no physical record of many cities and places named in the Bible, while existing remains often conflict with biblical dating schemes. (Last year, Tel Aviv University archaeologist Ze'ev Herzog stirred up a maelstrom of denunciation in Israel arguing this last point in the tony Ha'aretz. The problem in Israel with this kind of talk is that if the Bible is bunk, then the legitimacy of the state's claim on the lands it occupies is diminished.)

Familiarity did not stop Greenberg's critics. A brief yet haughty pan in The New York Times effectively wrote him off as a crackpot. The reviewer "went ballistic," Greenberg grins today. Academic Egyptologists and biblical scholars, who get tetchy when outsiders blur the distinctions between their two discrete fields, weren't pleased with him either.

Undaunted, Greenberg argues in his new book, 101 Myths of the Bible (Sourcebooks, 319 pages, $24.95), that the Hebrews' Egyptian roots left numerous literary traces in the Old Testament, in the form of ancient Egyptian myths variously disguised, warped by 1000 years of handling, or ineptly edited by the Bible's redactors. The result, he says, is that much of what you read in the Old Testament ("I'm not into the New Testament," he says) is bull, from the two different versions of Creation in Genesis to the fictional Patriarchs to nonexistent places like Sodom and Gomorrah.

Greenberg comes to his study of mythology and folklore the old-fashioned American way: DIY.

"I've always been interested in the intersections between myth and history," he says. "There's a lot of myth that contains history. There's a lot of history that's mostly myth. I started as a kid-my father gave me the Greek myths, and I sorta got it, but it was just reading the stories. As I got older I started reading other stuff. I was starting to do some independent study, and it resulted in looking at some early parts of the Bible. I wanted to look at the Flood myth."

So he took some classes?

"No, I was a math major. Brooklyn College... Got interested in these subjects and started drafting manuscripts in these subjects. I did a little networking, started going to academic conferences."

Greenberg is the current president of the Biblical Archaeology Society of New York, a group that meets at the Taipei Noodle House on 2nd Ave. near 52nd St. roughly monthly to hear lectures like "Egypt in the Late Period: Gold Treasures from Tanis" and "An Amorite Caravan in Egypt: An Evaluation." Would that I had the time.

[StewySmoot]

I smell get-rich-quick...

[Bretton]

Has anyone here read this book?

Yes.

Wow, that's a mustache!!!

[RonKiley]

There is nothing so convincing as a body of evidence that supports what one wants to believe.
Keep whistling

Ron

[susnfx]

This topic is in extremely poor taste. The Bible is not a fad-diet-of-the-moment book. Countless people have strived their entire lives to live by the teachings/writings in the Bible, believe in it deeply, and accept it as holy scripture. However any one individual feels about Christianity, the Bible, or any other religious matter, starting a thread which is obviously intended to insult beliefs and inflame is ill-advised. I'm disappointed in you, Lorenzo.
Susan

[glauber]

Lorenzo, caro mio,

i think you wasted a perfectly good $25 that you could have used to buy a whistle instead.
:roll:

Next you're going to tell me that Santa does't exist either!

[morgan]

The Taipei Noodle House? Must be a prestigious academic organization of impeccable credentials.

Moral of the Story (of there is one):

People--religious and otherwise--are all too happy to accept "proof" for beliefs they already have, and credit for accomplishments they don't.

G. K. Chesterton was asked by the London Times to answer the question, "What is wrong with the world today?"

His answer:

"Gentlemen,

I am."[/quote]

[serpent]

I don't think anyone is going to deny there is a good deal of mythology in the Bible, as in other "holy works". The point is not that the Bible, or Quran, or whatever, are holy works in their particular venues - simply that they are not to be swallowed whole with no examination. To do so is incautious and inadvisable in the extreme.

To some people, "Mein Kampf" is a holy scripture. Think about it.


serpent

[Walden]

There is nothing so convincing as a body of evidence that supports what one wants to believe.
Keep whistling

Ron

But I was intending to post a Creed that supported what I had always suspected!

[Jack]

Quote @ susnfx

This topic is in extremely poor taste. The Bible is not a fad-diet-of-the-moment book. Countless people have strived their entire lives to live by the teachings/writings in the Bible, believe in it deeply, and accept it as holy scripture. However any one individual feels about Christianity, the Bible, or any other religious matter, starting a thread which is obviously intended to insult beliefs and inflame is ill-advised. I'm disappointed in you, Lorenzo.

Hello, God.

[jim stone]

Chesterton also said: 'If people stop believing in God,
it isn't that they will believe nothing. They will
believe everything.'

P.S. Surely we are in over our heads....
Anybody here know Greek and Hebrew?
Shall we talk about something else?