So did J's early narrative originally end in famine, not flood?

 By J, of course, I'm talking about the Yahwist strand within the Torah. (And, yes, while I believe the original version of the documentary hypothesis doesn't hold water, I do believe a modern, updated version is the best explanation of the Torah's development and I reject any full-on fragmentary hypothesis.)

Now that that's out of the way?

Idan Dershowitz, who continues to show himself a name to watch in Torah exegesis, argues well in a brief paper that the earliest version of J's primeval narrative, ie, creation to Flood, did NOT end in a flood but rather a great famine.

Dershowitz starts with the descriptors of Lamech's descendants in Gen. 4. He next notes that Yahweh's promise, after Noah's post-Flood sacrifice, to never curse the ground again has language that elsewhere ties to famines. 

Specifically, that's Genesis 8:22:

“As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.”

Could be a flood, right? But, sounds more like an earth-cursing that spins off that of the expulsion from Eden.

And, here's Dershowitz's exegesis, starting with his note that the Samaritan Penteteuch and LXX differ from the Masoretic Text, which is reflected in the English above, versus the English of their translations below:

As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, for all time shall not cease.

Note that difference. He further explicates:

Without the final pair, nothing remains to support a Flood reference. The six phenomena relate to the regular cycle of seasons, guaranteed to once again follow their natural course »by day and by night«, i.e. permanently . Previously, summers had been cold, winters dry, seedtime and harvest perverted – a famine had devastated the earth.

Pretty convincing.

From there, he connects dots from Lamech to Noah. He then goes to look at the Noah references in Ezekiel and Deutero-Isaiah.

How did this become a flood narrative, then? Dershowitz says the popularity of the Babylonian tradition eventually "flooded" the original J narrative.

Related to that, on Torah criticism? He says this supports the idea of J being a separate narrative, not a supplement to P. In other words, some modernized version of the documentary hypothesis is valid.

Sidebar: Exegesis like this shows that van Seters' semi-strawmanning claim that editors didn't exist in antiquity is not true. Maybe how they worked was different from, and harder than, today. But, they were there.

Sidebar 2: See my "extended haiku stanzas" poem about Genesis 6 here.

Jeff Kloha could have a new boss soon at the Augean stables of Hobby Lobby

Old Concordia Seminary classmate Kloha, who signed on in mid-2020 to clean up the Augean stables at Hobby Lobby's Museum of the Bible, over the Dead Sea Scrolls forgery and other things, will apparently have a new boss in the future.

"Inspired" by Patagonia founder Yves Chouinard saying that he was going to "donate" Patagonia to a nonprofit trust (while not mentioning this made for some great family tax breaks, explained without a paywall here and here), Hobby Lobby founder David Green said last month he was doing the same. (And probably for the same reason, in large part.)

Indeed, Green is only two years younger than Chouinard and was likely to hand off Hobby Lobby anyway. And, he may get an even bigger tax savings. Per Wiki's articles on the two companies, Hobby Lobby has 3x the sales revenue.

RIP Kendrick Frazier — with a big caveat

Unlike Massimo Pigliucci, with some good encomia here, I didn't know Ken in person.

Unlike Massimo on the flip side, though, growing up in the Four Corners and deepening my interest in the world of the Old Ones as an adult, I also knew him, beyond skepticism, as a photographer of and writer about the world of the Anasazi.

Unlike myself until just now, reading his Wikipedia page, I did not know that from 1983-2006 he was a full-time staffer at Sandia National Laboratories. Related to that, I don't know how blank of checks he wrote to either nuclear weapons or to peaceful nuclear fission power being "just around the corner." Sadly, half the hits on Google when I search "Kendrick Frazier" + "nuclear weapons" are bits by UFO nutters claiming that there has been a big conspiracy to cover up UFOs' connection to said weapons.

Young bucks on biblical subreddits pushing young bucks with bad scholarship; we're talking Alan Garrow, especially

The "trigger"? An OP claiming on an AcademicBiblcal a subReddit post about a British academic, Alan Garrow, claiming that the eruption of Vesuvius was the target, with VERY specific alleged terminus a quem/ad quo dates for the writing range of Revelation. Color me skeptical.

That's even more so since Alan Garrow also claims the first part of the Didache precedes even 1 Thessalonians. He gets there by saying this is the same as the "Jerusalem Council," which he claims actually happened and also claims that Acts 15 is paralleled by Galatians 2:1-10. Really? Pass.

Beyond this generally being off the wall? The Didache in general has a an extensive developmental history; see Kloppenborg, about 3/5 down the page, especially. Also see here, page 4 of main text for more on that, and the footnote explicitly referencing Garrow! It's "nice" to see that anything in a canonical book that upsets his theory applecart, he calls a later interpolation in that book.

Also, per Burton Mack at the bottom of the "Didache" link in the paragraph above, how much overlap the Didache group, or a group at some point in its editorial process, had with "Pauline" Christianity, "Markan" Christianity etc is debatable.

I get the feeling that some young bucks at AcademicBiblical are looking for young bucks in biblical scholarship who have one foot, at least, halfway in the Sokol hoax camp. And, Garrow's Sokol hoax is a Didache fetish. Go to his website. Revelation? See the Didache. Paul in the two letters above? See the Didache.

==

By no means is everything there bad, though. There are several people in my general range of dating and editing ideas on both the New Testament and the Tanakh, which is to say, setting aside apologists, people who are in the left one-third of datings without being Dutch Radicals on the NT side or Copenhagians on the TNK side.

There are "apologists," or fundagelicals, there too. A few of them are goalpost shifters. A few others are karma whores. It is what it is.

Anyway, especially with doorknob knows what on the future of Twitter, it's a better alternative to Quora, though I haven't much hit political fora there yet; it's basically this and sports so far.

The case against Delbert Burkett's Proto-Mark claims, part 1

 I recently read Delbert Burkett’s “The Case for Proto-Mark.” That was after someone on the AcademicBiblcal subreddit recommended his previous book, “Rethinking the Gospel Sources: From Proto-Mark to Mark,” where he first broaches his idea of TWO Proto-Marks.

 

I wound up two-starring the book, as described two weeks ago here on site.

 

This is the first of a couple of more extensive posts on issues I found with the book. It's partially in notes form, not full sentences. It's rough version.

 

First thing Burkett gets wrong? Page 8: Lachmann (and others similar) are not proto-Mark. They’re a “common Synoptic source” arguers.

 

My answer? A “Cross Gospel” or similar, per Koester, may well have been used by Mark. That could also have been used by Mt and Lk, along with “actual Mark.” That would address minor agreements in the Passion accounts.

 

Otherwise, assuming my theory of Mark writing early 70s in Rome, spurred by Vespesian’s arrival as Emperior with Jewish slaves, including some Jesus people, in his train, either a deutero-Mark, or a proto-Mark revised just a year or two later by the same author, is possible.

Given the general train of canonical and non-canonical Gospel development, I reject any ideas of a Proto-Mark longer than the final, whether my theory on date and provenance of actual Mark is right or not.

The minor agreements issue can be explained in part by Mark using an earlier version of Q, a la Kloppenborg’s theory of its core not having John the Baptizer language and not being apocalyptic, vs Mt/Lk using Q2. They can also be explained in part by harmonization by later editors, as in hundreds of years later.

 

I also reject Burkett’s claim (also attacked by critics of his 2004 book) that there were two different Proto-Marks, one used by Mt and the other by Lk. The idea that there would be two different proto-versions that survived, and that both of them just happened to fall into the right hands 20 or more years later, but that final Mark would be the only one that survived today? Even for those highly critical of Streeter et al on the minor agreements, this should beggar belief. If it doesn’t, YOU beggar belief. (As I read through the book, I noted that at times, he was arguing for A version of proto-Mark, and at other times, for HIS two-Protos version, even though he tells readers to see his former book for details on that.

 

He later, citing Hengel, notes how many texts from the early Apostolic Fathers that we know of by title have disappeared. I don’t question that, but that’s also an argument from silence. AND, we don’t know how quickly after writing they disappeared.

 

Even without Burkett’s specific proto-Mark, I would still find a deutero-Mark more likely, especially, if allowing for my presumed background of Mark, it’s knocked out within 5 years of the original.

 

Seriously, think about the plausibility of two different proto-Marks. You then have either their author or somebody else editing both, not one, into a final Mark. And, doing that while still leaving the Greek rough and other problems, or else making those problems even worse, if not the original author.

Wrap-up note: Looking at the length of my notes, I'll likely have two more installments.

Nicholas Humphrey drops new ideas on origin of consciousness

Per an Aeon interview about a new book of his, the British philosopher has ideas that I would very largely agree with.

His analogy with "Moby-Dick" is very good, as an introduction to the idea that sensation, vs mere perception, is about brain narratives.

And, the kicker? (Aside from him ignoring or not knowing, or omitting them because extinct, that dinosaurs were also warm-blooded.) Interesting. Warm-bloodedness, and not only greater control of one's self vis a vis one's environment, but more rapid, and more active, response to it? Makes sense. And, especially since I have noted the amount of hype about the octopus in recent years, I agree with his take on them not demonstrating sentience. And, yes, it is hype.

And, I'll keep an eye open for his book!