Gad Barnea reveals how new texts from Elephantine and Alexandria dismantle traditional biblical narratives, proving Yahwism was a syncretic cult long before the Torah. He argues Moses is a mythic construct shaped by Hellenistic polemic, while the Bible itself emerged as a "battlefield of ideas" edited during the Hellenistic period using Alexandrian methodologies. By debunking alien engineering myths and tracing Zoroastrian influences, Barnea concludes that ancient religions were fluid cross-cultural exchanges rather than rigid dogmas, urging historians to verify sources through epigraphy and stratigraphy instead of accepting conspiracy theories. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Ancient Daily Communications00:03:09
Dr. Gad Barnea, thanks for coming.
Pleasure to be here.
Yeah, I just got done listening to your podcast with Neil, Gnostic Conformant.
It was fascinating stuff.
And I'm excited to chat with you about this stuff today.
Can you just explain what your background is?
Sure.
So my focus is really on history, especially of the Iranian world, the ancient Iranian world, and the role of the Jews within that world of Jewish history.
within the context of the Iranian world, the pre-Islamic, what I call the Age of Empires.
So the Achaemenid Empire, the Parthian Empire, and the Sasanian Empire.
So I'm focusing on these three empires, which together really kind of deeply impacted the ancient Near East for about a millennium together.
So these three empires, unfortunately, in scholarship have been relatively little studied, little researched thus far, and so I'm trying to correct that.
and to focus on that particular perspective of the Iranian empires in the ancient Near East.
And my main work is with the original material, the actual primary sources.
So I do a lot of epigraphic work dealing with actual papyri, leather scrolls, ostraca and things like that.
And ostraca, just for people who don't know, these are shards of jars and ancient things, you know, objects, household objects that were broken.
And so people use that to write short messages on.
And these, so these ostraka um represent uh daily communications.
There you go yeah, so daily communications um and uh short messages.
These are the the, that's the sms of the ancient world, really kind of the whatsapp of the ancient world.
These are, these are yeah, exactly these are short messages that were uh that people uh handed to each other, and so you can learn so much from these documents, whether it's papyri, whether it's Ostraca, whether it's other types of communication.
And you can read what the ordinary people, what they thought about.
These are people who never thought that what they are writing will be studied 2,500 years later or even two days later.
They were just written for someone to read at the same day or the next.
And so we learn this is purely unfiltered data from antiquity.
It's not Herodotus, which is obviously filtered data.
Of course, the Bible is filtered through ideology.
It's not any of that.
It's really the direct record of what reality was in antiquity.
And that's why it's so exciting.
And I work with those primary documents a lot.
What set you in this direction from the start?
Like, how did you get interested in this stuff?
And what led you to specifically dig into things like this?
It's a great question.
Elephantine Island History00:03:22
Like I think everyone in my field, things were not necessarily planned out from the beginning this way.
I was initially involved with an NGO in Israel that was dealing with Jewish-Christian dialogue.
And from that, I started doing a lot of, we started doing conferences and I started doing lectures, but I really wasn't specializing in this field.
And people said, well, you need to kind of really start specializing in this.
And one thing led to another.
And I eventually did my PhD on, On the island of Elephantine.
So that's an island in Upper Egypt, meaning Southern Egypt.
So, like in the middle of the Nile, right?
It's in the middle of the Nile.
and it's an extremely important island, not just for Jewish history, but also for, I mean, mainly for Egyptian history for millennia.
Even before the Jews came there, it was already important for millennia.
Anyway, this island, which is just facing the city of Aswan, for those who know, in southern Egypt.
Which is like 500 miles from Giza, roughly?
In miles, I don't know.
But it's very, it's really, it's not, I mean, it's about, So it's about an hour and a half by airplane from Cairo.
Okay, so I did make that flight.
And so I can tell you it's far from Cairo.
And so Egypt is a pretty large country and a beautiful place.
And so Elephantine is this island just facing Aswan.
I mean, it's really close to Aswan.
And this island was extremely important for the Egyptians' daily life, really, and for Egyptian cult.
And I use cult in terms of just a synonym for religion.
I don't use it pejoratively, just so you know.
But it was a central island for Egyptian cult.
There were these three deities that were associated with this island that eventually became a triad of deities.
Khnum, the ram god, and Satet and Anuket, two female deities, one of which was his wife and the other was considered his daughter.
Anyway, this island initially was the island of Satet as the main deity.
But the island was seen to be, because this is the first cataract of the Nile, it was considered to be the source of the annual inundation of the Nile.
So what happened on that island had implications for the economy of the entire country of Egypt.
And it was on that island that in the sixth century before the current era, a Jewish community settled and, or was actually brought there as mercenaries to guard what was for a while the southern border of the of Egypt, 600 Bce, sixth century, so around 550 550, according to my, to my calculations and my research.
There are some some scholars who date it much much, I mean about 100 years earlier than that um, but I I published on this and I show that that it this is the uh, the most uh probable date is around 550 um Bce.
Cyrus The Great Empire00:04:43
That were they when they arrived there, 540, 550 um anyway.
So there was a Jewish community on that island and they had a temple, a fully functioning temple.
They had priests, they had sacrifices.
I mean, it was a temple about the same size of the Jerusalem temple and also a very important place of worship.
So that was what I did my PhD on, on this community.
And one thing led to another.
Initially, I didn't really look to, like most of my colleagues, I didn't really look to Persia.
I didn't look to the Iranian sphere.
But then I started noticing certain elements within these texts that pointed my attention more to, because, of course, this was under already the Achaemenid Empire, was the empire ruling that area.
What empire?
I'm not familiar with that empire.
So that's Cyrus, King Cyrus, right?
That everyone, I'm sure, has heard of.
Cyrus the Great.
Everyone except me.
I know, I've heard of Cyrus.
Cyrus, you've heard.
So Cyrus the Great is considered kind of the founder of this empire.
is the first world superpower really.
It is a very, very important empire in the history of humanity and certainly of Western, so-called Western civilization.
The impact of the Achaemenids, so the Achaemenids is just the name of their kind of mythological forefather of this dynasty.
And so this dynasty and this particular empire was something that the world has never seen before.
We've seen, I mean, they've seen other empires before the Achaemenid Empire, but this is a superpower.
It had not just conquered an area that is greater than the Roman Empire at its greatest extent, by the way.
a huge area from India all the way to Greece or to Macedonia and to parts of the Ukraine.
So, I mean, and to Egypt and Libya today.
So it's a huge, absolutely huge area that they controlled and administered very, very effectively.
And they controlled it with, I mean, also with an ideology of how to rule these peoples.
So it was something that the world has never seen and it impacted The Greek world, it impacted Greek philosophy, it impacted the Egyptians, of course the Jews as well.
The impact of the Achaemenid Empire is with us to this day in many ways.
And when did that empire start?
The Achaemenid Empire.
How do you say it?
Achaemenid.
Achaemenid.
Achaemenid Empire.
Roughly around 550, depending on how you look at it.
But some people date it from the fall of Babylon to Cyrus, but really the ascension of Cyrus around 550 BCE.
and then up to Alexander the Great that destroyed, kind of took over.
Oh, wow, that's a good map.
Look, that's a lot.
Yeah, exactly.
All that pink.
Well, yeah, and more.
I mean, even all the way to India.
Holy smokes.
Yeah, this actually shows you the different stages.
So the area in pink is just what Cyrus, the first campaign or the first phase of Cyrus, all the way up to Turkey, to modern Turkey.
And then he went down to conquer Babylon.
And then, of course, his dynasty continued after that.
Very complicated picture in reality.
But Cyrus was the one to conquer this from the Medes, the Median Empire, which was there for a short while, and then conquered Babylon.
And through Babylon, of course, he conquered, he took.
over what was already the Neo-Babylonian Empire before him.
And so that included Palestine.
And yeah, he was the first to kind of consolidate the first phase of this empire.
He was succeeded by his son Combides, who then added Egypt and parts of Libya to this.
And then Darius the Great, Darius I, actually made it into what it later became as this major superpower.
Darius I is truly one of the greatest leaders.
In antiquity, truly an impressive, a very impressive person.
Reading Text Materiality00:02:54
Anyway, so.
And these writings that you were finding were in what language?
Aramaic.
They're in Aramaic.
Okay.
Yeah.
Interesting.
When you first started with looking in Elephantine and finding, you were finding these same things that were looking like fragments of vases and things with written Aramaic language on it.
Right.
So I wasn't finding the actual physical.
So I'm not an archaeologist.
I was finding the physical. objects.
These were already excavated in the beginning, most of them at the beginning of the 20th century.
Okay.
And many of them were published, but not necessarily published correctly.
So several of my recent publications are correcting bad readings or incorrect readings.
Like they were getting the translations wrong?
No, I mean, the reading was wrong.
Simply, it's not just translation, but they weren't reading the text correctly.
In some cases, they didn't understand the text correctly.
In one case that's about to come out, I'm republishing in Ostrocon a relatively long ostracon that was first published in 1908 but has been since, so for 116 years, it's been read the wrong way, so inside out rather than, you know, so the direction of reading was incorrect for this long.
But this, I mean, this is part of what we do.
The work of an epigrapher is extremely complex.
It's not just reading the text, it's not just trying to say, well, this is an Aleph, this is a Bed, whatever letter that is.
But the context, even the materiality of the object needs to be really deeply taken into account.
And that we've not, in my field, we've not been doing this really up until now.
The materiality was not given the proper place that it should have.
So we look at the materiality and that might impact the way we read the text because we start seeing elements on the surface of the object that we didn't see before.
point us to a different letter than what we thought originally.
So things like that.
Epigraphy is very complex work.
And it requires encyclopedic knowledge also, because some of these letters, some of these constructions, and some of the context might come from a different culture.
So, for example, there are loanwords from Persian, there are loanwords from Egyptian that you need to know.
It really requires a lot of Contextual knowledge.
So is Elephantine the first place that the idea of Yahwism developed?
Deciphering Ancient Letters00:02:09
No.
Where did Yahwism come from?
Yeah, so that's a great question, but that Elephantine is not where it initially developed.
So Yahwism, well, I'll give you my definition of Yahwism first.
Okay.
So Yahwism is very simple.
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Identifying Ancient Groups00:14:58
It's people for whom a deity by the name of Yao is the head of the pantheon.
Okay, that's pretty much it.
They have that element Yao in many of their names.
So it's a theophoric element.
Theophoric means holding the deity, holding Theos, the deity.
And so a name that has a component with Yao like Yahushua or or Yosha or many other examples like that.
So if they participated in Yahwism or if they believed in Yahweh or Yahoo, they would incorporate his name into their name.
Yeah.
So that, I mean, not all of them necessarily, but this would be very, very common.
And so Yahwism is simply those people who identify for them, for their identity, for their ethnic identity and for their cultic identity.
The main deity, the head of the pantheon is a deity by the name. of Yao.
There are no specific and unique cultic features such as commandments or observations or feasts that are necessarily unique to them.
There are no special sacrifices or anything like that.
They are very much like any other group around them.
They do the same sacrifices.
Generally speaking, observe very similar feasts that are not specific necessarily to them but are like agricultural observances that everyone is obviously going to observe around them.
So we don't see anything about early Yahwism that is necessarily unique, except for the main deity that they have.
And so that's really early Yahwism.
Very, very simple.
And that started, well, it's hard to know exactly when it started.
We can only say when we start seeing it in the record.
Now, there are debates about where the first place that it's actually documented might be.
One place, there are two temples in what is today Sudan in what used to be southern Egypt or the extreme southern part of Egypt.
Two temples of Ramses II.
One is in Soleb, in a place called Soleb, and another in Amara West.
And these two temples have lists of people groups.
And in these two lists, there is a group that's called the Shasu of Yao.
Now, there's a question if Yao is simply a place name, is that really the deity Yao or not?
I actually, for a long time, I thought this could not be the deity Yao, but now I think that because of parallelism, that people group is within a list of other groups where there's a Shasu.
Shasu just means the nomads, so the people who are nomads.
So the Shasu of Yao comes after the Shasu of Baal.
which is, of course, with another deity.
And there's also Anat, if I remember correctly.
So you have parallelism with other deities, the Shasu of another deity within that same list.
So it makes sense, or at least the probability now becomes higher, that this might be the deity Yahuwah.
And if that's the case, we're talking about, you know, 14th century before the Common Era.
Already the name of this deity is what century?
14th century.
14th century.
Whoa.
What does Yahweh mean?
Yeah, we don't know.
We really don't know.
There are all kinds of theories for that.
I had somebody in here who told me it meant Hail Zeus.
No.
No, that's definitely not.
That's out of the question.
That's out of the question.
Yeah.
But we don't know exactly what it means.
I mean, of course, there is a much later folk etymology for it, which just means to be.
And we find that, of course, in the book of Exodus.
Right.
But that's a much later folk etymology for the name that explains it as a name of existence.
But after these two, after Soleb and Amara West in what is modern-day Sudan, We don't hear about this name until the 9th century, the late 9th century, in some stellas like the Mir Shah stella and the Teldon stella.
And Teldon is interesting because it also has one of these theophoric names in it with Yao.
And so these are so for a long time, it goes off the radar and then comes back.
But what's interesting is in the 8th century BCE, We have a person by the name of Yao Bidi, one of the most fascinating characters.
We don't know a lot about this person, but what we do know is absolutely fascinating.
He is mentioned in the Neo-Assyrian inscriptions as a king, as a Hittite.
Hittite means that he comes from modern-day Turkey, southern Turkey, maybe the border with Syria.
But he is a Hittite, according to the inscriptions, who is the king of Hamat, a city, an Aramean city in Modne, Syria.
And so he is a Hittite who rules an Aramean city, a non-Hittite city.
And his name is Yaobidi.
Now, the first component of the name, Yaob, is clearly the name of the deity Yahoo, because in the Akkadian language, there are determinatives.
little drawings next to words that make sure that you understand what the meaning is.
This is a person, this is a deity, it identifies.
So a lot of these ancient languages had identifiers like that or determinatives like that that told you if we're talking about a person, a people group, or a deity.
Like they would draw little pictures next to it.
Exactly, next to the noun.
And so here we see that there's the dingir, it's called dingir, a determinative that means that this is a deity.
So the yao component in his name is clearly the name of the deity.
But he's not Judean, he's not Israelite, he's not even Canaanite, right?
This guy is a Hittite from modern-day southern Turkey who was king of an Aramean city somehow, and he is a Yahwist.
I mean, he is, for all intents and purposes, Jewish in that sense.
I mean, proto-Jewish.
Yahwism is not synonymous with Judaism, and I'm sure we'll get to that.
But he is clearly a Yahwist.
And that is fascinating.
That's really all we know about him.
And the only reason we know about him is that he rebelled against the Neo-Assyrians and the Neo-Assyrians captured him and killed him in a very, very gruesome way.
They describe it.
But the only reason we know about him is because he rebelled.
I'm sure there are many others that simply did not make it into the record.
But we do have proof that Yahwism existed outside of Judea, Samaria, or Israel, and is certainly recorded up north in modern-day Syria.
And so it looks like, from the data that we have, the extra-biblical data, In the Bible, there are other hints that I think are much later and not necessarily historically anchored.
But from what we have from extra-biblical data, it looks like Yahwism started in the Aramean areas, and so in the areas of modern-day Syria, were adopted by nomadic tribes.
in that area and somehow at some point kind of migrated down to Canaan from Syria and so Yahwism became more popular in Canaan.
But we already have, as I mentioned, we already have Yahwism in Canaan already in the 9th century as well.
So the entire region already had forms of Yahwism in it.
from, I'd say, at least around the 9th, 8th century before the Common Era.
And did Judaism come directly out of Yahwism?
It's a great question.
Isn't that like the consensus?
Or is that the academic consensus?
That is the consensus and what I'm actually what you're pushing back against.
Pushing back against.
Yahwism, so you're right, Yahwism is seen as kind of proto-Judaism.
And people usually argue that by the second century before the Common Era, Yahwism kind of disappears and we are left with Torah-based Judaism.
When you say before the Common Era, you mean BC?
Yeah.
Okay, got it.
I don't use BC, AD.
Yeah, everybody has different things.
Every single Bible scholar, they have a different way of doing it and I'm always confused.
So that's why I try to figure out what you mean up front.
Right, because for me it's just BC, AD.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I understand.
So yeah, I just use these more objective terms.
So about the second century before the Common Era, we have Torah-based Judaism.
So Judaism per se, when you really want to talk about actual Judaism, you have to talk about people who are following certain commandments that are written in certain authoritative books, right?
So the commandments that are enumerated in the Torah, for example, observing the Sabbath, etc., etc. by definition, depends on knowledge of these commandments and observing these commandments.
Now, we have thousands of documents from different Jewish, or Yahwistic, I should say, really, settlements in various places in the ancient world.
So from Egypt, from the southern part of Egypt, as I said, Elephantine, and all the way through northern Egypt and then Palestine and then into Babylonia.
We have thousands of documents, not all of them textual.
Some of them are coins, for example, but these are also very important.
But we really have thousands of documents all together.
But none of these documents betray the slightest knowledge of the Bible.
They don't betray.
They don't show any.
They have no knowledge of the Bible in any of these documents.
I mean, even no idiomatic expressions, for example.
And when you say the Bible, you're talking about the Torah?
The Bible in general.
In general.
But of course, the Torah is the main document that you would expect.
But yeah, it has absolutely zero.
I mean, there's nothing.
No.
Even the names, the personal names of people are not the names that we find in the heroes of the Bible, like the 12 tribes or Moses or Aaron or Abraham, Isaac, Jacob.
None of the people that are Yahwists in this entire time period, up until the beginning of the Hellenistic period, none of these people are named after literary heroes from the Torah or from the Bible in general, which is Fascinating.
That is.
When you think about this, now.
So, the academic or religious viewpoint or consensus on this is that Judaism started around 1200.
Is that right?
Or what is the date that Judaism started?
But you talked about academic and religious.
These are totally different things.
They're going to be different things.
Right.
Like, by and large, what is the idea of when Judaism started?
too much about the religious because there's a lot of different okay.
And I know that there are I mean, like really kind of fundamentalist religious folks would say, well, Judaism started with Abraham, really, right?
So it's about 2000 before the Common Era, somewhere like that.
Okay.
And then they'll go forward from that.
So the earliest people will say is 2000?
Something.
BC.
Yeah.
Again, I can't talk too much about the religious perspective on this, but I think that that's what the what is said in certain circles.
In academia, Judaism, I think now it's pretty much consensus that Judaism as such, meaning people who observe these commandments such as the Sabbath and the Passover and all these feasts, tabernacles, et cetera, et cetera, and kosher diet and all of that.
Follow the rules.
All of these rules, second century before the Common Era, so second century BCE.
That's where we start to see people observing this extra biblically.
Okay.
Okay, in the Bible, that's a different story.
But from what we start seeing extra biblically.
Outside the Bible.
Outside the Bible, from these primary sources that I talked about earlier, right?
We talked about the ostraca.
We talked about the documents that are written by the simple folk.
That, you know, they trade things.
They do all kinds of activities on the Sabbath, for example, that are not permitted by the Torah.
They do a lot of stuff that goes squarely against what is prescribed in the Torah, but we don't have anything to show adherence to the Torah.
We have a lot of negative examples, but we don't have anything to show that they knew anything about the Torah at all in that time period.
So Judaism, from a purely extra-biblical perspective, Judaism starts around the second, maybe late third century before the common era.
And if you want to not be extra-biblical, you want to stay inside the Bible.
Mythological Patriarchs00:05:51
When is it from?
I mean, according to the Bible, according to certain interpretations of the Bible, we're talking about Abraham, right?
right, to be kind of the founder of the, in a sense of like the covenant with God and things like that.
Which, I mean, as a scholar looking at this for a lot of reasons, this is mythological.
Okay.
Yes.
And so, and I can say that with certainty in terms of as a scholar.
When was Abraham again?
It was supposed to be around 2000.
2000, got it.
Got it.
Okay.
But the whole, the reason I'm very certain about this is that, first of all, Again, we have thousands of documents and none of them know anything about any of these stories.
No, nothing.
I mean, even the name Abraham doesn't exist anywhere within the sphere of Jewish life or Yahwistic life anywhere.
But also the idea, so the whole concept of Abraham and the patriarch, so Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, is people coming from the East to establish a new nation, right?
That's the whole concept of the patriarchs.
Coming from the East and even when Jacob and Isaac need to marry, They have to go back and marry someone from the East and bring them to Canaan.
So the idea of people coming from the East and establishing a community is such a deeply Hellenistic idea.
So in the Hellenistic world when you say Hellenistic idea, what do you mean by that?
Well, in the Hellenistic world, it was really important for a lot of these hellenistic means a certain time frame, right?
Correct.
So we're talking really the turn of the third century, late fourth century before the Common Era, and really into into the common era.
I mean, that's a much wider, that's kind of Greco-Roman now that we're talking about, but it's still the so like 550 B.C. is as early as it gets, right?
No, no, no, about 400.
Oh, 400, okay.
About 400.
Even not 400, about 300, let's say 320 to be so the Hellenistic period around the conquest of Alexander the Great and forward.
Okay.
So about 320-ish.
into the Roman world.
The Roman world, we call it Greco-Roman, but it's really still kind of continuing a lot of these Hellenistic sensibilities that they had.
And so for the Greek world and for the Greco-Roman world, creating the mythology, the founding mythology of your people, whether it's a polis in the Greek world or even Rome, was someone coming from the East, which for them is always the kind of the early, the old world.
this mystical world that comes from the East and establishes their country.
So several polis in Greece had these legends about this mythical founder coming from the East to establish them.
And even Rome, at the height of its power, so under Augustus, or one of the heights of its power, under Augustus, Augustus commissioned Virgil.
To write the Aeneads, so the story, the mythological story of the founding of Rome, which is about the same size as the Torah, about the same number of verses and words as the Torah.
So it's a lengthy work.
Now he had it to write it in meter and rhyme, which the Torah authors didn't have to deal with.
So it's much harder.
What he did is much harder.
But he did that, and he also, it's called the Aeneads because after Aeneas, who was this.
this mythological hero from Homer, from the Trojan War.
And so they built this entire idea of how he is coming from Troy, so from the East, to establish Rome.
So this idea of someone coming from the East to establish a new race or a new city or a new settlement is something that is deeply Hellenistic.
And we see that here.
So with the story of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, these founders coming from the East.
That is so, in many ways, so Hellenistic in its core.
Yeah, interesting.
And again, we simply have absolutely zero knowledge anywhere.
It's not, I mean, these patriarchs, and the names of the matriarchs either, Sarah, Rachel, Leah, etc., are not found in the document record at all.
None of the women that are mentioned anywhere in these thousands of documents that we have are named like that.
And none of the men are named after these literary heroes found the Bible.
So there's zero simply zero knowledge of the Bible anywhere up until the beginning of the Hellenistic era.
So that's why for these reasons and others, it is certainly clear to me that these things are mythological, Abraham, all of this.
Is this new or has this been known for forever?
Well, certainly not forever.
I mean, how long have academics been aware of this and been talking about it publicly?
Well, not long.
I mean, the fact that there is such a deafening silence before Alexandria, really.
Biblical Narrative Bias00:02:34
Bless you.
Scared the shit out of me.
Okay.
So the fact that there is this deafening silence before the turn of the third century, and I'll talk about Alexandria.
I'll talk about my analysis of the historical background here.
But the fact that there was this deafening silence is relatively new.
Most scholars, unfortunately, Are really looking, I think, too much into the biblical narrative rather than the historical narrative, rather than the primary narrative.
And the biblical narrative has its raison d'etre.
That's something I've talked about on this podcast so many times with the various.
And that's another funny thing about biblical scholars that I've had on the show.
They all have different ideas of things, different opinions on events or historical texts.
And I always thought it was.
An odd thing for someone to be a religious scholar because typically those people are they subscribe to the very religion that they're studying and they're dedicating that their work to, so like there's like a built in bias to doing this.
That's right, that's right.
I write a lot about that and uh about this bias, and I've lectured about this about the problems of bias.
In fact, this um, we talked before we came on air, we actually talked about this ostracon that I'm republishing that was read the wrong way for 116 years.
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Early Yahwism Dates00:16:01
The link's down below.
Now back to the show.
One of the reasons that it was read the wrong way was because of bias, okay?
Because of this built-in bias.
Another article of mine that just came out a few weeks ago in a book that I edited together with Professor Reinhard Kratz from Germany, from Göttingen, reanalyzes a document, a papyrus called the Passover Papyrus.
Now, it has nothing to do with the Passover, but it was already analyzed as something related to the Passover because of the date range that it is mentioned in this document.
And so the date range, that's actually a perfect example.
In this document, which is very fragmentary, but we do see something related to the dates, the 15th and the 21st of Nisan, the Mount of Nisan, which is a Babylonian name, month name, but it is used in the Bible a lot.
And that corresponds to the Passover.
Those dates do correspond at least to the Feast of Matzot, a part of the Passover feast.
So they saw these dates and like, oh, that's the Passover, right?
But that's absolutely, that is not a critical approach to the text, right?
Immediately you say, well, because I was raised in a Jewish or Christian background, therefore these dates are meaningful to me and they mean the Passover.
But if you step, yeah, exactly.
If you look at this critically, you realize that this is simply the first full moon of the year, the 15th of Nisan.
Nisan is the first month of the year, both in Babylonian and in the Persian administration.
So that's the first.
Month of the year and the first full moon of the year and, most importantly, the beginning of the harvest.
Now, in the ancient world, the harvest was the season that would dictate whether you live or die.
I mean, if the deity, if you, you're about to harvest everything that you worked on for months uh, planting and and taking care of the earth right, you know, and so you're about to harvest, and if the if the deity is now going to um, you know, send hail down and destroy the crops, or flooding, or you know all kinds of storms, you will die.
I mean, your family will not be able to survive for the next year.
So this was an extremely important, I mean, the month of Nisan, the beginning of the harvest, was an extremely important time for the entire northern hemisphere.
Not just, I mean, this is the beginning of harvest.
And so looking at the dates of those dates in the middle of the month of Nisan as necessarily being related to the Passover is simply not understanding the ancient world.
And that projection is rampant.
unfortunately in scholarship.
Yes.
And then there's another problem where people don't like to drift from the general narrative.
They don't like to say things that most of their colleagues will disagree with or cast them outside of the lane that they're supposed to be in because they have the risk of being shunned by their colleagues or their university or whatever it is, the institution that they're a part of.
They like to be a part of the team.
They don't want to go outside the box most of the time.
That's true.
But I think in many cases, they truly believe this because they were, we, I mean, when I approached this text, I also had this projection as well.
I was able to step back and look at it more objectively because of all the things that I was seeing.
So then I started questioning this and then I was able to step back.
But I also, at the beginning, had the same projection because I was also brought up in the same sphere, right?
And so I think for a lot of these scholars, this is simply this is genuine.
I mean, they really think when they see these dates automatically, especially if within a Yahwistic context, this is not a, if they see these dates in an Egyptian context, a purely Egyptian context, they wouldn't necessarily connect it to the Passover.
But since they're seeing it within a Yahwistic context, they're like, okay, this has to be the Passover.
But even within a Yahwistic context, it doesn't necessarily have to be.
Now, what they were, a lot of scholars up to very recently have been saying, well, this document, this so-called Passover letter, shows that the Passover was observed in the fifth century before the common era.
Meaning this is the first proof that we have extra biblically of anyone observing this particular festival.
Now every time as a historian, every time you deal with firsts, you need to be extra careful, right?
I mean, it's very different dealing with a second occurrence or a third occurrence because you already know there was a first.
So you're not even asking whether such an observant even existed.
But when you're dealing with a first occurrence of something, you need to be extra vigilant.
And this is, according to many scholars, this would have been the first occurrence of the Passover as a festival.
But then you need to step back and say, well, is what we are looking at really the Passover?
And my answer is no, for a lot of reasons that I talk about in this article.
And actually, I connect it to the Zoroastrian cult.
And again, I use cult not pejoratively, but I use this as a synonym for religion.
But I connect it to the Achaemenid version, so really early Zoroastrianism, and I explain why in that article.
So in that analysis, connecting it to Achaemenid Zoroastrianism is based on a lot of data or on significant data, whereas there is nothing to connect this at that stage to the biblical Passover.
Okay, so when you compare the two, the chances are much stronger that it is connected to a Zoroastrian or Zoroastrian-related observance than it is to the biblical Passover.
Have you received any sort of pushback or any sort of backlash for talking about this kind of stuff?
I mean, I've had people disagree, of course, which is normal.
Nothing really too aggressive against this, but I did have people disagree with this.
But without a lot of, I mean, just people just saying, well, I don't buy this, without explanation, without saying, well, these are the reasons why, you know.
I would expect people to, and I'm fine, of course, I mean, science always progresses through people seeing things differently and disagreeing, and we all progress together.
But when people just say, I disagree without explaining it, you know, just I disagree because I disagree, that's not a good approach.
And I've had a lot of that.
I mean, not a lot, but I had some of that.
The thing is, in the article I really try and in my different lectures about this in different places, I start by showing just how wide the Zoroastrian impact on the Elephantine Yahwistic community was independently of this particular document.
And then I zero in on this document after the reader already understands that this is not the only place where you find Zoroastrian influence, right?
So there is a much wider context, and then we zero in on this particular document.
And it's really important to go that way in order to understand that this is not just a singular event.
The influence of Achaemenid Zoroastrianism was deep and very intimate to the people at Elephantine, and I think to the Yahwists or early Jews in general.
And Yahweh, back then, it wasn't necessarily like an exclusive thing to be a Yahwist.
You could partake, pick and choose a dozen religions and practice them all, just like you go out to a restaurant on any given day of the week.
You can pick and choose.
It's not like today in Christianity and Judaism where you subscribe to one thing for life, essentially.
Yeah, I mean, there was no, you're right.
I mean, it was different.
It wasn't exactly like this.
It wasn't like picking and choosing, but it was also not exclusive.
So in the beginning, in the early period at Elephantine, the Yahwistic community, we do find documents like where people bless.
each other by the name of Yao and Canoe, who is the local Egyptian god.
So I bless you by both deities.
Or they take oaths by the local female deity, goddess Satet, or other cases like that.
And very common, just I bless you by the gods, plural.
All the gods.
I don't mention the specific name, I just, you're blessed by the gods.
And so that's very common.
in that period, not just at Elephantine, but in general.
Just not mentioning all the gods because there are so many, you're blessed by the gods.
But these are Yahwists.
These are Yahwists.
But the reason I use the word cult so much and not religion is because these are systems of adherence to specific deities for specific reasons.
But religion, properly speaking, when we talk about religion, it's a system of observances, you know, like going to Mass, for example, for Catholics, or going to the synagogue and doing certain specific, very specific and unique things for that specific religion.
Practices.
Practices.
In antiquity, you didn't really have religion as such.
You had cultic systems, but a lot of them had common so if you would go and observe a sacrifice in a Aoistic temple, and then you go and you observe a sacrifice in a Phoenician temple, they would be almost identical.
I mean, these observances would be very, very close to one another.
So you'd have cultic differences, but not really religious as such.
The observances themselves were not that different.
The language might have been a little bit different, possibly, and things like that, but the actual practices were not that different from one another.
So we don't use the word religion at that point.
That's really what I wanted to say.
But actually, going back to what you said earlier about Yahwism being early Judaism or not.
And that's really important.
Yahwism as such continued, so it spawned Judaism around the third century before the Common Era.
Judaism, so when authoritative texts that eventually became the Bible started to become, to be collected and made into a corpus of texts, which is about the third century, at that point Judaism started to take its own its own route.
But Yahwism continued unabated.
It continued in parallel to that.
And you had Yahwists who did not subscribe to these authoritative texts in Egypt and other places.
So Yahwism continued.
It spawned Judaism off, and then Judaism spawned off Christianity.
But Yahwism continued.
And Yahwism continued to be the most popular and the most important, really, the most central form of adherence to the deity Yahweh.
while Judaism and Christianity were developed in parallel to that.
And so Yahwism, if we were to be transported back now, maybe 1800 years, 1900 years, or 2000 years back, and wanted to know what form of Yahw cult is the most popular, Yahwism would be by far the most popular at that period, more than Christianity or Judaism.
Really?
And the reason I say that is because we find all over the Roman Empire.
and even outside the Roman Empire.
We find texts, amulets, curse texts, and all kinds of magical paraphernalia that people used in order to protect themselves by the name of Yao.
And we find them all over the empire, all over the empire.
It was so popular that even Roman historians and Roman philosophers wrote about who are not Jewish, who are not Christian, they would write about Yahweh and his importance in the federation of deities.
And so Yahwism continued in parallel to the development of Judaism and Christianity.
And that is something that's really unique about my research.
So my research focuses on Yahwism as a religion, as almost an unseen and unknown religion that we didn't really see before, because we are so, again, Because of these projections that we have, looking back at the Bible, so there's only New Testament and Hebrew Bible.
There's nothing beyond that.
It's so crazy.
Yeah.
These are the blinders that we have.
I just read this book by a guy named Thomas Paine.
I'm sure you're familiar with him, but he lays it out in such a compelling way where he explains that the Bible is essentially a book of testimony.
So today, in today's world, in court, if somebody has a testimony, it doesn't mean it's truth, right?
It's just a testament.
Recollection of something that happened that they claim to be is true.
Doesn't mean it has to be true.
It's up to the jury.
Right.
Okay.
Now take it and make it anonymous.
So now say we have testimony, but we don't know who the person who said this is and we don't actually have it straight from their mouth.
Right.
Now take it to another level and say it's the most extraordinary thing you've ever heard in your life by an anonymous person and his testimony.
They said the sun and the moon stood still by the command of one person.
So, like, if that's what the Bible is made up of.
That's so crazy.
And it's just like, it really, like that book that he, I forget the name of the book right now.
I think it's the Age of Reason, where it really, really lays out the history of the different versions of the Bible and how it was edited, redacted, and added to over millennia.
Right.
So, yeah.
So, I mean, that's I'm not familiar actually with that book, but the Bible, the way I explain the Bible to my students and in general is, and I believe the correct way to look at the Bible is it's a battlefield of ideas.
And so, Like people often say, well, you take the testimony of Herodotus, right?
And you put more weight on what Herodotus said about the history of that period more over the Bible.
So why do you trust Herodotus more than the Bible?
First of all, I don't.
Even with Herodotus, I'm extremely critical and I do not trust anything just blindly, even if it's Herodotus.
But there is a big difference between Herodotus and the Bible.
The Bible is a book that defined the identity of a people.
Bible Battlefield Ideas00:04:24
and of different sects within the Jewish realm, right?
So you had a lot of different sects competing for ideas.
You know, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, etc.
You had all of these different sects competing for, and the Enochians, and we had a lot of different sects competing for ideas.
And theological ideas, what is redemption, what is salvation, what are the end times, you know, all of these different ideas competing against one another.
No one was defined, no one's identity was defined by Herodotus.
Okay, that's not in, he did not, no one said I'm a Herodotian, right?
But people did define their identity by the Bible.
So that's a different, a completely different corpus.
And the impact is completely different.
Now, the reason I say it's a battlefield is because the different redactions, different editions, different treatments that the Bible had to go through were different.
different ideologies competing against one another and you see that in the text.
You see things that go to one direction or another direction and the text contains all of them.
And if not, if the Bible does not contain works that did not make it into the Bible, apocryphal texts do contain them.
So even the addition of the Bible and eventually making the Bible into a canonical work, that process also is ideological.
deciding which book would get in and which book is not going to be in and things like that.
So the Bible is truly a battlefield of ideas.
And I think that's part of the beauty of this work.
The fact that it is, I mean, the Bible is a very beautiful work, regardless of the religious perspective.
And I think the main beauty of this book is its humanity.
And what I mean by that is that the power of this text comes from geography.
And what I mean by that is that it was written at the place which is, if you look at where Palestine is, where Israel is, right, where that plot of land is, in the map, you see it's the bridge between Asia, between Europe, Asia, and Africa.
That's the only land bridge between these three continents.
Every single empire, every army had to go through that.
So every culture in antiquity from Western Asia and Europe and Egypt, of course not China, but every military, every culture from those areas had to leave a mark on that land and on the people.
And so they shared their ideology, they shared their theology, they shared their views with the people of this land.
And that's what gives, I think, the Bible its uniqueness because it's a big, this huge mixture. of different perspectives that were left behind by the great empires and the different groups that came in and out of that region.
So it's really a product of the geography of where it was composed.
And the beauty of it is really that we see elements that from Indo-Iranian through the Achaemenids, for example, so from the Indo-Iranian sphere, we see from the Greeks, we see a lot of the Egyptian and the Assyrian and the Babylonians, etc., and the Hittites.
So we see all of these different elements come in and get kind of mixed up in the biblical text.
And I think that's what gives it a lot of its beauty and richness.
You have all of these cultures coming together.
And for my research, I kind of reverse engineer this.
So I look at that and I go back into the actual cultures and look at the, try to reverse engineer the original direction that they took.
And especially looking at the Iranian world, which had a tremendous impact.
Historical Moses Debate00:06:43
And who was the first person to mention Moses?
This is one of the things I spoke with Neil about this.
Yeah.
And he was explaining to me essentially that Moses wasn't ever mentioned until like a thousand years after he died.
Well, if Moses is a historical person.
If he's real.
Which he's not.
Okay.
I mean, I'm going to say it very clearly.
It's not, and we shouldn't be surprised that it's not a a historical person.
And why do you say that?
Well, so I'll answer your question first.
Moses is really kind of the first extra-biblical mention of Moses is found in Hecateus of Abdera, who was the Greek writer writing around the turn of the third century before the Common Era.
And he talks about a Moses.
Now, there are about, according to my calculation, about between 11 to 13 different Moseses in Greek.
In the Greek sources and these are very different.
It's the same name but completely different stories about this person.
Say, similar stories or no, no different stories.
Different, same name, but different stories.
Um, and that's very really very, very interesting.
Uh, so we have Moses as this military leader, great military leader defeating the Ethiopians.
Um, we have Moses as a Egyptian priest.
We have Moses as the teacher of Orpheus.
So this great musician, the great singer, musician, and the teacher of, and the reason why, because it sounds like Muse, right?
Moses.
So he's a teacher of Orpheus.
We have him as a magi, as an alchemist, as a magician.
So we have a lot of different and we have him also as a police builder.
We have him as the one who built Jerusalem.
We have him as the one who divided the Jewish people into 12 tribes.
things that are not in the Bible, right?
I mean, the idea of 12 tribes does exist in the Bible, of course, but not as tribes that Moses divided.
It's not the same story.
So we have 11 to 13 different Moseses and we have about four different Exodus narratives in the Greek world around in the third century.
And many of them are simply ignorant.
They don't know about the biblical version.
They're not polemicizing.
They're not arguing with the biblical version.
They're just saying this is the way it was.
On the flip side, actually, the biblical version is polemicizing against these other sources.
So clearly it's later.
In order to disagree with someone, you have to come later.
You have to know about it.
So the biblical version of the Exodus narrative is polemicizing against a lot of these Greek sources and trying to correct them and to protect the Jewish people from some of these interpretations that seem to be offensive to the Jewish people.
And so that we do find in the Bible.
So the Exodus story is clearly later and clearly reacting to many of these Greek sources.
Good reason to say this is mythological, because you have so many different Moses' and you have so many and you have at least four different Exodus narratives and and the biblical version of that just polemicizes against all of these other sources.
Wow, and so it comes later and it's, it's eclectic, it it looks at all of these different directions.
So yeah, so that's, I think, a very compelling argument.
It's not from.
A lot of people say well, Moses didn't exist and the Exodus didn't happen because of archaeological reasons.
We don't find any archaeology to support Moses existing and the exodus of the people out of Egypt.
Yeah, but that's an argument from silence.
And that's true.
And it's certainly true.
And it's important to take into account.
But ultimately, people can say, well, you know, they were nomads.
We might have somehow missed that particular point in time.
So archaeology is very convincing up to a point.
But then it's an argument from silence.
What I'm showing in my research is that, and I put archaeology aside, even though, again, it's important, but it's simply not.
It's not a absolutely 1% convincing argument.
I think when you look at the Greek sources and you see how many different views – I mean, even within all of these sources that I mentioned, there are later generations that amplify these stories about Moses and add data to it later on.
So you have a lot of different – I mean, even several generations of these stories.
developing in parallel to the biblical one.
Oh, wow.
I mean, we're talking about a very, very rich corpus about a person, a very well-known person called Moses, not necessarily the biblical Moses, although he's always associated with the Jews in some way, shape, or form.
But sometimes he's associated with the Jews in a very offensive way.
So, for example, he is depicted as a leper.
And he is depicted as a leper, and the Jewish people are a people of leper, according to this Greek.
to some of these Greek sources.
And that was, of course, offensive to the Jewish people.
And within the Torah, they polemicize against it.
They fight against that idea.
And they say, well, and that's why in the Torah you see so much about leprosy.
There's so much dealing with leprosy and dealing with keeping pure.
I mean, leprosy was a fact of daily life in the ancient world.
It wasn't something you would obsess over.
But the Torah deals with leprosy all over the place, even with Moses.
Moses is a leper for a short period of time.
in the story of the burning bush.
So in the story of the burning bush, he kind of puts his hand into his cloak and takes it out and it's leprous and then he puts it back in and it's healed.
But then also all of the people have to deal with leprosy and there's a lot of rules about leprosy, even leprosy of the house and the leprosy of the clothes.
I mean, things that are not natural, right?
And so this obsession with leprosy, I believe, is part of the pushback against this kind of pejorative view of some of the Greek sources against the Jewish people.
Okay.
Alexandria Library Complex00:03:55
I want to talk about Alexandria.
Yeah.
So is it true there was absolutely, so I think basically what you've already said is that there is no evidence of the Bible before the Library of Alexandria.
Right.
I mean, more specifically, before the third of the third century BCE, that corresponds to the founding of the Library of Alexandria as a phenomenon.
And so who, I know you explained this on Neil's podcast.
I thought it was fascinating.
The, the two guys who were students of Aristotle who created Alexandria.
Well, that's Alexander The Great and Ptolemy uh okay, childhood friends who uh studied in the academy, in Aristo's Academy, um and uh, and later, with I mean Theophrastus, who was the heir of Aristo, uh took over the academy and uh was probably the visionary.
Uh, for the, the Library Of Alexander, or for the.
Okay, the Phenomenon Of Alexandria.
The reason I say phenomenon of Alexandria is that Alexandria in antiquity was truly a science fictional city.
I mean, it was something that the world has never seen before.
It wasn't just silicon Valley, something like that.
Something like Silicon Valley, but truly, I mean, what they had, if you go to I mean, it was a new city.
I mean, it was built by I mean, it was conceived by Alexander and constructed in a way to reflect the vision of Aristo for a kind of rational city that is designed in a grid, you know, in a grid as a grid.
And it had the coin operated machines, for example.
It had a what?
Yep.
It had coin operated machines.
Like vending machines?
Like vending machines.
Exactly.
No, it was truly, it was truly it was truly ahead of its time.
It had automatic doors that open automatically.
Really?
Yep.
Yeah.
How did that work?
So that particular, I mean, not everywhere, of course, but in the temple, the automatic doors the heat of the sacrifice that you offered before the door of the temple would cause this hydraulic action below the surface that would make the doors open.
So you would offer the sacrifice and that would cause the doors to actually open seemingly automatically and have the deity accept the sacrifice.
That's crazy.
Yep.
Yep.
Automated.
Oh, this says using ropes and pulleys.
Okay.
Yeah, but it was triggered by the heat of the fire.
Wow.
And what were the coin-operated machines for?
Like, what did they use those for?
I don't know.
All kinds of I mean, that's very when you have a coin, I mean, the weight of the coin would open like a lever and a pulley, right?
I mean, that's very straightforward, but even you have to think about that to do it.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
And so, yeah, I mean, in antiquity, anyone would go there, it would be truly science fictional, something that you've never seen before.
And now the library, we often talk about the library, but the library was a part of a part of a much bigger complex.
No, no, just the complex of the palace of Ptolemy.
And so there was this huge palace complex that included a temple for the Muse, for the Muses.
This place where you could walk around and philosophize and think and come up with new ideas.
So this place, this museum, which we use for museum today, but this museum, this place of the Muse, had within it a library.
Okay, so that's the Library of Alexandria, the famous Library of Alexandria.
Septuagint Traditions00:15:32
Now what's unique about the Library of Alexandria, technically we had libraries even before Alexandria.
But those libraries, like the Library of Afshar Banipal and other great monarchs of antiquity, those libraries were really more archives than libraries.
They were there in order to store texts and to train scribes, and mostly to store omen texts, texts that predict the future, and they wanted to be able to store those texts and refer back to them.
And so those other archives really were very different from the Library of Alexandria.
The Library of Alexandria was also about storing, of course, keeping important texts stored, but the main goal there was to implement the vision of Aristo on how to deal with texts that disagree with one another, so different manuscripts.
So they had different manuscripts, for example, of Homer, and they saw that there are all kinds of contradictions between these manuscripts of the same work.
And they developed the methodologies to sometimes put them side by side in different versions, sometimes harmonize them, sometimes modify them, or remove one version and keep only one.
All kinds of methodologies to deal with different versions of the same story in different manuscripts.
We see the same exact methodologies applied to the Bible.
Okay, exactly the same.
We see like, you know, we see two accounts side by side.
We see harmonizations, we see the same type of editing methodologies applied to the Bible as well.
It's like ChatGPT of antiquity.
If you want to look at it that way, yeah.
But it's the, as I said, before Alexandria, so before the turn of the third century, I should say as a historian, I came to this from a different angle.
I noticed that before the turn of the third century, there is nothing.
Nothing.
What do you mean nothing?
As we said, there's absolutely no trace of any hint of knowledge of anything biblical in all of these thousands of documents we talked about earlier.
There's absolutely nothing.
There's this deafening silence before the turn of the third century.
But around the turn of the third century, we see those Greek writers starting to talk about things that are reminiscent, at least, of the Bible, like Moses and things like that.
That doesn't necessarily mean that they knew of the biblical text.
Again, if we go back to what we talked about earlier about projection, the fact that they mentioned Moses or they mentioned the 12th tribe doesn't mean that they knew about the biblical text.
They might have been familiar with this was the source for the later biblical this could have been the source of the first sources taken out of context for the later biblical.
What I argue is that some of the biblical text is kind of arguing against these Greek sources.
But they might reflect certain traditions that were oral traditions among the Jews of Alexandria, for example, at the time.
They might reflect all kinds of other traditions that we're not familiar with.
But they don't necessarily mean that they were familiar with the biblical text because they are not really arguing with the biblical text.
That's the point.
They're coming in and saying this was the case and they're not trying to show that the biblical text is wrong.
Whereas the biblical text is trying to show that they're wrong.
So that means that but that actually hints at a certain precedence here of the Greek sources over the biblical sources.
Because when you're arguing against something, you clearly are coming later.
By the way, out of all of the texts that were in the Library of Alexandria, do you know what language they were in for the most part?
I mean, the vast majority, of course, is Greek.
And that's another thing.
The Library of Alexandria was constructed in order to organize the Greek world, the great works of the Greek world, and to create authoritative editions and clean editions and the most accurate editions according to the scientific standards of that day for the Greek world.
So they were very Hellenocentric.
There is in scholarship and historically a lot of people claim that there's this idea coming from the letter of Aristeas.
A very famous document written to describe how the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek.
But it's also a mythical, I mean, it's not a very historical document.
We call it often in scholarship, we call it pseudo-Aristas.
And there's a lot of that's what you were talking about before.
Yeah.
And so it's a very important document, but it's not a very historically trustworthy document.
But it's a very important one because it does show what the Jews wanted to show to the world.
in the second century of the common era, before the common era, to the Greek world, how they wanted to present themselves.
And in it, in that document, in this letter of Aristeus, supposedly the king, Ptolemy, wanted to commission a translation of the Hebrew Bible into the Greek, in order to keep that in the Library of Alexander.
There are a lot of problems with that idea.
First of all, as I said, they were not really interested in anything that's not Greek.
The idea of them commissioning a work like that is simply antithetical to how Alexandria operated.
They were not this cosmopolitan.
There's a much later kind of romantic idea that Alexandria was this cosmopolitan place where all cultures were treated equally and there was this great kumbaya of cultures.
Greek supremacy.
Yeah.
And a lot of that comes from actually from the time of the French Revolution where Where the intellectuals wanted to show that Christianity is the source of all evil.
And so look at how humanity was before Christianity with this absolutely great universal, you know, everyone was working together and then it was destroyed.
But the reality was that Alexandria was very Hellenocentric.
Now, another really important point that a lot of scholars miss is that the Septuagint is not Greek as such, it's not Greek.
For people who are new to this stuff, can you explain what the Septuagint was?
So the Septuagint is this translation of the, especially of the Torah, of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible into something that is Greek related.
Okay.
And the reason I'm saying Greek related is because it's not actual Greek.
It's Hebrew Greek.
It's Jewish Greek.
It's Judeo-Greek.
It's kind of like Yiddish.
Judeo-Greek.
That's crazy.
I've never heard of that before.
Right.
It is.
So I come from classical studies, and so I studied Greek, classical Greek for a long time.
And so for me coming into and reading the Septuagint or the New Testament, which is an extension of the Septuagint in terms of its language, it was almost shocking.
It was almost uncomfortable for anyone coming from classical Greek or from Greek Greek to read the Septuagint because it's not, in some cases, it seems to be wrong.
It seems to be badly written.
Some of the terms that it's using don't make sense in Greek, but when you know the Hebrew term behind it, It's an exact translation into the Greek of the Hebrew term.
Interesting.
So it's Hebrew.
It's really very much, and I'm sure a lot of people listening to this know about Yiddish.
So Yiddish is Jewish German, right?
It's a German language, but adopted by the I didn't even know that.
Yeah.
So, okay.
So Yiddish is Jewish German.
Okay.
And it's based on German language, but it has a lot of words in Hebrew also kind of sprinkled in.
And that's the same thing with the Greek of the Septuagint.
It's not for Ptolemy or anyone to commission a work that would be written in a Jewish Greek, not in Greek, makes little sense.
Yeah, why would you create some new Jewish Greek?
Why wouldn't you just make it into real Greek?
Right, so that was probably the Greek that was spoken by the Jews of Alexandria, so it was written for them.
It was not, so that's the language that the Greek that they had for their own identity in Alexandria, and there was a pretty large community of Jews.
in Alexandria from the beginning, from Alexander.
Alexander had Jewish mercenaries with him and he gave them land, or at least he settled them in Alexandria.
And so this language that it was translated into is not Greek Greek.
And that's extremely important to realize.
And unfortunately, in many cases, people don't realize this as they should.
So when you want to compare Hebrew to Greek, how much Hebrew literature is there from that part that time?
Oh, that's a great question.
Um, the Dead Sea scrolls are from when again?
So the dead scrolls are later.
They're like 200.
Yeah, I mean, some people date really the first uh first fragments to uh late third century.
I'm not sure I would necessarily subscribe to that dating.
It's all based on on on the scripts and on the format of the script rather than anything else.
Like how much, like when it comes to uh Hebrew versus Greek, like how much I don't know, how much philosophical text, medical text, legal text do we have in Hebrew?
Almost nothing.
Nothing.
As medical text and philosophical text as such prior to the maybe second century before the Common Era.
It starts, maybe if I want to be really generous, the late third century before the Common Era.
But it's hard to date these things, of course.
And what do you think that is?
Well, first of all, we don't really have a lot of Hebrew.
anywhere before the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Hebrew was not A dead language?
I mean, that's a really great question.
question and it wasn't completely dead.
Some people obviously knew it because they were able to write the Hebrew Bible using Hebrew.
But the language that was spoken by the Yahwistic people living in Babylonia or Egypt or wherever was Aramaic mostly.
Most of them spoke Aramaic most of that period.
In Babylonia there was still some Akkadian that was being used of course even into the Persian period.
But Aramaic was the lingua franca.
It was the language that was spoken all over the place and the language that, for a lot of people, it became not just lingua franca, but also lingua materna, meaning the mother tongue.
And so Aramaic was the central language for everybody.
And we do have Aramaic texts, of course, also among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Hebrew was more of, I wouldn't even say liturgical language.
We don't have any proof that it was liturgical language anywhere.
That's an important point to make.
It could have been, but we don't have any proof of that.
But clearly it was preserved somehow because people were able to write the Hebrew text.
Now, again, it's important to point out, I'm not saying that everything in the Hebrew Bible was written in the Hellenistic period.
Clearly there were texts that were much older as well, that were compiled, that were collected and then implemented and put together.
as part of this enterprise of putting together an authoritative source based on the same methodologies that were developed in Alexandria.
I'm not saying all of these texts were composed in the Hellenistic period.
And of course, I also have an article about a portion of the Book of Amos that I can date.
I can date not necessarily the text, but I can date the story there to the end of the 8th century, beginning of the 7th century before the Common Era.
So this is a very old text.
And the reason I'm able to date it is because I can compare it very precisely to Neo-Assyrian inscriptions that were common at the time.
So every time I have an extra-biblical anchor, I can use that in order to date certain texts.
And even then, you have to be very, very careful and not assume certain things.
Because even if there are certain parallels between texts that are extra-biblical and the biblical text, they were composed at the same time because you have access to that text for centuries later, right?
So we have to be very careful in everything that we do in order to make sure that we are as objective and scientific as possible in coming to our conclusions.
But in the case of Amos, I also show in my article that there was only a very short window in which these idioms could have been fully understood.
And I show how they were later misunderstood so I can narrow down the timeframe to roughly the first part of the seventh century before the common era, for a small passage from the book of Amos, because I have these parallels.
What I'm trying to say is that clearly there were texts that made it into the Hebrew Bible that were much older, maybe eighth century, seventh century.
But there were people, Jewish people, that were inspired by what was going on in the Alexandrian library.
They were not working under any kind of commission by the king to translate the Bible or anything like that, but they were inspired by what was happening in Alexandria as others were, they were not the only ones, it inspired Egyptians, it inspired other people in the region, and they said, okay, we're going to apply this approach.
The Greeks are applying this to their own corpus, we're going to apply it to our corpus.
And so they were able to get texts from various sources and apply these methodologies and compose new texts in many cases as well, and to compose the glue between different texts to put them together.
And also imagine, in the case of the Torah specifically, imagine all kinds of answers to the Greek view that we mentioned earlier about the leprosy and all of these other things that they were concerned with.
Greek Text Methodologies00:15:38
And so this enterprise that happened started in the third century.
before the Common Era to collect, edit, redact, compose, harmonize, and really kind of put together a more authoritative version of the authoritative corpus.
Of history.
Yeah, of history, theology, ideology, and all of that.
I mean, they didn't think of history the way we think of history today, of course.
That wasn't a concern at that time.
precise history.
Really?
No, no.
I mean, even Herodotus, that's not history the way we do today.
I mean, he basically walks around, asks people about certain elements of their culture and writes it down, often through a translator.
So it's often even lost in translation.
And so he writes it down and just goes with it.
And he doesn't necessarily, sometimes he has critical, sometimes he's more reserved, sometimes he's just, you know, runs with whatever he's been told.
So even Herodotus is not really, it's considered to be the father of history, right?
Took Adidas, who came after him, called him the father of lies because of so many inconsistencies that he has in Herodotus.
But Herodotus is certainly an important source and he is kind of pseudo-historical in many ways.
We certainly have to use him as a source, but always with a grain of salt in our research.
But again, in antiquity, history wasn't really a science per se.
It was people writing.
things that they've heard, sometimes asking questions, sometimes doubting, but it wasn't really a main concern.
In the case of the Bible, it was more about identity.
It was about building identity, about establishing their own kind of cocoon, ideological cocoon, in parallel to the Greek one.
The Greeks were doing the same thing with their sources, with Hesiod, with Homer and other sources.
looking at this critically, at these different, critically for their day.
And the Jews were simply just applying the same methodology to the sources that existed, or they would develop new sources.
So a lot of this, I mean, according to my research, certain important layers within the Pentateuch, within the Torah, are new, are newly written within the Hellenistic period, like the story of the patriarch.
of the patriarchs that we mentioned earlier that is so Hellenistic in its overall features.
And so these were composed, I believe, in the Hellenistic period.
But other elements that found their way into this narrative could be older.
So my understanding of the languages and the translation is that especially when it comes to Greek and Hebrew, is that Greek is this deep, complex language that has over a million unique words.
And Hebrew only has like 7,000 unique words, give or take, something around that, which is like an insane, the difference between the two is crazy.
And when you translate that, you can't translate from something less technical to something more technical.
Now, you saying that it's Judeo-Greek is a whole different, it makes it, It really like throws a wrench into this whole thing, right?
But like the way it was described to me before was that Greek, and this is just my analogy for it, is that Greek is like a flying saucer of a language, right?
And then Hebrew is like a single engine prop plane.
So, how do you find a flying saucer and then try to reverse engineer into a single engine prop plane?
Like, it doesn't make sense to go from something super technical and deep to something way less technical and deep that has way fewer words, unique words.
And then, in some instances, I've seen On a debate actually on Neil's channel, where two people were debating this, is that there are words in Greek that actually take like two or three words in Hebrew just to make that one word in Greek.
Yeah, I mean, of course, we're talking also about different language families, right?
I mean, this is Semitic and this is Indo European.
So we're talking about completely different dynamics.
And so the comparison is.
And there are cases where it's the other way around.
I mean, where you can say things in a Semitic language that are much.
More compressed compared to the Indo European version of it.
So, but I mean, technically the translation can happen and it did happen.
Right.
And Julius Africanus also said something I think that I heard around the second century AD or something like that, where he looked at it and said, This looks like an original Greek work.
I don't know if you go that far into history or that.
I've read Julius Africanus.
I don't remember that particular part, but I don't know what.
I mean, he said what?
He said that this Septuagint looks like a.
It reads like a Greek original.
That's what Julius Africanus allegedly said.
Stephen, maybe you can find that on ChatGPT.
I'd be surprised if he did say that because, again, like I said, anyone who has been trained with actual Greek and goes to the Septuagint, it's weird.
In a sense, I think for a lot of the actual people who came from the Greek world and were exposed to the Septuagint, it made them feel maybe even uncomfortable in a way because it looks like.
parts of it look even erroneous.
Parts of it are just unexpected turns of phrases and things like that.
And certainly the vocabulary is different in many cases.
It is, of course, Greek, like Yiddish is German, ultimately.
But it's not Greek, Greek.
And it makes you feel like you're in kind of an almost parallel universe.
It's not even the difference between British English and American English.
It's much more than that.
And so, and it is a, in many ways, an artificial language, the Jewish Greek.
It's the Greek that was spoken by the Jews in the Ptolemaic Empire, and especially in Alexandria, probably mostly in Alexandria.
And so it was written for, it wasn't commissioned by the king.
I mean, the chances of a king commissioning something in Judeo-Greek rather than actual Greek, I think, are slim to non-existent.
And you can't completely discount this, but I think it makes very little sense for a work commissioned by the king to not be written in actual Greek.
And you can.
Of course, you can, you could have.
translated the Hebrew into Greek Greek.
You could have, but they didn't.
So it is translated into Judeo-Greek, and I think it's translated for the Alexandrian Jews, who are, as I said, a pretty significant community.
And how, as far as a time frame of when this translation took place, how much time is there between the Torah and the Septuagint, the translation?
I think very little time.
We're talking about the third century before the Common Era.
I think in the first quarter of that century, We're talking about kind of the Hebrew text starting to come together of the Torah.
And then the translation was very, you know, within a decade or two later on.
A decade or two.
Yeah.
I mean, earlier I mentioned Virgil and him writing the equivalent of the Torah.
That took him 10 years.
That's it.
It took for one person to write the equivalent of the Torah and more because he, again, he had to write it with meter and rhyme.
So it was much more work to do this again, but the same length of text, 10 years to do to write it.
Now, he was also using existing material.
He didn't invent the entire story um, just by himself.
He was, the idea that the Romans were children of this hero, this Homeric hero from Troy, from the Battle of Troy, of course predated him.
And we find the echoes of that already in the second century before the Common Era in Rome.
So he's using existing material and, you know, reworking this to fit certain rhymes and certain meters and adds to it and composes it.
this incredible work known as the Aeneids.
But it took him 10 years to do.
Now, a much more impressive example, although from about 1,000 years later, is the Shanameh, the Book of Kings.
in the Iranian tradition.
I really recommend people look it up, the Shahnameh, probably one of the best, greatest epics of humanity ever.
It's an incredible story.
It's an incredible book.
Written by Ferdowsi, this great Iranian poet, also in rhyme and meter.
That book is about 150% more than the entire Bible, including the New Testament.
It is a humongous work.
Okay?
And it took him 30 years to write.
One person, also using existing material, also not inventing everything, but one person working for 30 years producing a work that is, Sean, there you go, a work that is significantly larger than the entire Bible.
Okay?
Wow.
So, yeah, the Book of Kings, I really recommend people to become familiar with this incredible work.
Anyway, so this is one person for 30 years.
So people can, if the resources are available, if the time is available, if the will is there, people can write large works relatively quickly.
I mean, within 10 to 30 years, within the lifetime of a single person, well within the lifetime of a single person.
So the work of writing and collecting the Torah could have been accomplished within a decade or two, technically.
I'm not saying that it was, but it could have been.
And the translation could have happened even in parallel to it, because if the goal was to work within this Alexandrian state of mind, I mean, if this Alexandrian ideology, this Alexandrian methodology that was developed in Alexandria at the library at the time, and they wanted to follow this way of doing things and to produce something for the people, for the Jews in Alexandria,
so that they feel that their identity is also receiving the same kind of treatment as their Greek neighbors.
the translation into Jewish Greek, again, would have happened very quickly.
Yeah.
And even with the library of Alexandria, it was right on the water, right?
So it was not a great place to store text.
Those works would get diminished by just the climate and the humidity there.
So they constantly had to have people that were rewriting books and making copies of them.
And who knows what was lost during that?
Yeah, of course, we lost a lot.
I mean, the Library of Alexandria continued for centuries later on.
It was under Julius Caesar.
There was some kind of fire that destroyed parts of the library.
But the library continued well into the Common Era and slowly kind of diminished later on.
But we lost a lot, of course.
I mean, yeah, it was truly a treasure trove.
It's such an interesting thing the way you say that they didn't look at history the same way we look at it.
And the way that people today in our culture look at history is so much different.
And then when we try to fit that into our frame of view of history is crazy.
You know, when you have people doing writing about this stuff for different motivations, whether it be just mythological or if you want to call it historical or if you want, if it was for, you know, any sort of economic gain, if you want to get later into like Christianity, these people writing it to develop these religions to create.
this sort of like a society, like Plato's idea of this noble society, you know, he wanted to create this sort of Santa Claus character to make people, you know, to build it around fear so people would obey.
And he wanted to get rid of Homer and in like the schools and stuff.
And they had just different motivations for things.
And then if you extrapolate that to where we are now, like if you want to, like an example would be something we've been talking to, talked about recently on recent podcasts is like, uh, Plato's Atlantis and Plato that like up until a couple, like a couple decades ago, there was just this gap where no one would talk about Atlantis.
And some guy wrote a book about it on how it was this crazy lost city that somehow was lost during the.
flood and went underwater.
But like, if you go and talk to Plato about it or if you look at any of Plato's other work Plato's Only wrote about like philosophical allegories, ideas, like his cave.
Like, we aren't out looking for Plato's cave, right?
So, why were we looking for?
Alexandria.
Well, there's people like now we write books, like people often write books just to build a name for themselves, to make money on things.
There's just, there's so many motivations for developing these works even today.
So to look at it, to look at history through the same lens we look at now is just, it's kind of crazy.
Right, right.
And we need to be always very careful.
In academia, we try to be as methodological about this.
So we always, we have to look at.
We can't just look at one data point, we have to right to to find where they, where as many data points meet uh, to draw uh conclusions.
Um, it has to be as scientific as it can be and in the study of history we are now moving in this generation.
Um, and and that's something i'm really trying to to focus a lot of my energy on, is to make the study of history to be more scientific or more like the, the hard sciences, rather than just, you know, coming up with ideas and trying to see if it sticks, which was the way a lot of the history has been done thus far.
Objective History Study00:08:21
And I'm not saying that a lot, I mean, we've made a lot of progress in the study of history, but in order to put history on very solid ground and to make it less subjective and more objective, there's a lot we can do.
And so one of my projects, I'm not going to go too much into the details, not to bore people, but we're trying to work especially on epigraphy.
Now, I mentioned epigraphy already a number of times.
which is the study of these original primary documents, the ostraca, the actual documents that were written in real time by the people living in real time, not thinking that this will ever be studied again.
So epigraphy is the heart, the beating heart of the study of history, of ancient history at all, because this is the primary material that we have.
It's more than Herodotus, which is not a primary source.
Herodotus, of course, wrote his um his books, but he did not uh.
First of all, we don't have his original document of his original uh manuscript um, but that was uh, that was not something.
That that.
That it's not the daily life, it's not something that people are just.
You know, you don't have this visceral experience um the uh, the epigraphic material is the most um basic, the most um original, the most raw material that you can have and you build, And on top of that, you can start building historical analysis of the data.
So epigraphy is really the heart and soul and really the blood of historical science.
Our mathematics in history is grammar.
So if you look at these texts and you want to really identify what they actually say, it has to correspond to the rules of grammar and syntax.
And if it does not then you are probably missing something.
So the way for us to check whether we are reading it correctly or not is through the rules of philology.
So we are starting to look at history more scientifically, more precisely, and trying to be more objective.
In order to do that, we also have to be as transparent.
And that I think is really the main innovation now, is to shoot for maximum transparency.
Now, in my work, I try to be as transparent as possible.
That is the most important thing for me.
More than accuracy.
Now, I try to be as accurate as possible in my restorations of texts, but I'm human.
I'll make mistakes.
But is more important than me being accurate is me being transparent and explaining with as many photos as I can.
And I always offer microscopic photos of different aspects of the text and of the object that I'm restoring.
But as many photos as I can and always explaining why I reached these conclusions, what were the other options that I had in front of me.
And being as transparent as possible because transparency is the key for the study of history.
Because we're always working together, all scholars.
And I want them to look at my work and find the mistakes.
If it's transparent, they can find where I was wrong much more easily.
And I want them to be able to correct because we are working together for the progress of science ultimately.
And so we are really shooting in this generation now of historians, shooting for the maximum transparency.
That's new.
That is new.
Maximum transparency, maximum methodological rigor.
And I think we're already starting to see the first fruits of that.
really starting to lead us into a more stable vision of history.
Yeah, and it's tough too.
Like even with the Dead Sea Scrolls, I had a gentleman on here who's an expert on deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls.
And he was explaining to me how when they were doing all that work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, they came across a lot of forgeries where people were basically trying to sell fakes at Dead Sea Scrolls on the antiquities market.
And they would put them under microscopes and they would see.
The degradation of the actual um what is the word they use for the animal skins that they were written on there's parchment parchment yeah so, so the parchments they were.
They would see like degradations or like like uh depressions where part of it was torn away and they would see the ink going over that.
So they knew that this was like, obviously not an original.
This was a forgery right, which is yeah, which is crazy, and that's another landmine you got to try to avoid with this stuff.
Absolutely, you always need to be very careful about these sources to check whether they are actual, actually original.
Um, you know, if they were found in an archaeological context, that's best, because you can actually uh with the stratigraphic um dating, you can know which which layer uh in the archaeological uh excavation it was found, so you can date it right.
Um, so yeah, but a lot of these documents unfortunately don't have this, this uh data associated with them, so you have to date them in in in different ways.
But of course um, Checking with whether these are forgeries or not is is really important.
It's really tricky.
Yeah, and people try to do that for multiple different reasons to help push a narrative or just to make money Just make money and the thing is a lot of forgers are very are people who went to academia and probably did not make it The way they wanted, but they are really good in I mean, they know Aramaic they know They've they've learned how to how to copy and and mimic the hand of scribes But they also have a lot of money.
They are sponsored by people who can sell this, and they have more money than we have in academia, for sure.
So they have better resources in order to make these forgeries.
So we need to be very, very vigilant and make sure that we are dealing with actual sourced material.
But again, a lot of these documents in the Dead Sea Scrolls are clearly ancient.
Some of them are not.
But yeah, we always need to be on guard for that.
I know this is a little bit outside of your expertise, but what language do you think Jesus spoke?
Do you think he was a real historical figure?
I mean, I think most historians say that there was a rabbi, a very influential rabbi at that time who was probably crucified.
And there was a Jesus movement after that.
Whether that person also resurrected from the dead, that's more of a faith thing than the historical.
But yeah, that's really not my field.
The languages, so we're talking about first century of the common era.
Greek was certainly a major language in Palestine at the time.
So I'm sure that people at the time, I don't know anything about this particular figure, but people at the time certainly spoke Greek in the marketplaces.
Aramaic was certainly a very important language as well.
So I think between these two, between Aramaic and Greek, those are the languages that he would have, or people at the time would have mastered primarily.
And Hebrew would not have been a living language as such.
But Aramaic and certainly Greek was a very important language.
Yeah, too.
And I also, I get the impression that a lot of these cults and these ancient religions like Yahwism, they and correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like that they viewed them much differently than we view religions today.
Like, they viewed them as mythological traditions that didn't necessarily have to be objective facts, but they were more of just traditional myths that they subscribed to because for whatever reason.
Maybe it helped them get through life.
Maybe it was just an important tradition to them.
Evolving Cultic Systems00:05:53
But today it's more of a.
hard black and white thing.
Absolutely.
You're making a very good point.
In antiquity, things were much more fluid, much, much more fluid, much more interesting as well, and very energetic.
The energy, one of the things that always really excites me in my research is the energy that I see in these primary documents.
And how people were so keen on learning and exposing themselves to new ideas and to new um, new traditions and um and the the fluidity is is is very very very, you know really stands out in these texts.
And what I mean by fluidity when we talked about Yahoism now, Yahoism had Yahweh, of course, as the head of the pantheon but um but, as it continues, it developed, it evolved, like any other uh, cultic system, slash religion.
Everything evolves, every religion.
Even today, right even today, Christianity is constant and Judaism are constantly being, constantly evolving and constantly have to deal with new things, new data.
I mean, evolution, right?
That's right.
Now Christianity has to, or Judaism, have to now elaborate what is their position versus new data that comes out, whether they're accepted or not accepted, but how and which texts should be read differently or whatever.
So any religion, any cultic system has to develop, to evolve over time.
In the case of Yahoism, It continued to develop into what is called, I mean, even, so before I talk about how it developed in its own right, even the quote-unquote Orthodox with the small o Jews of the time, so those who did live according to the commandments or their interpretation at the time of the commandments in the Pentateuch in the first century, when they had a sick child or then they had a problem,
they would go and use curse texts that are completely you know, come from a different tradition.
I mean, from the Gnostic what's that?
What did you say?
What was that word you used?
Curse.
Curse text.
Curse text.
Okay.
Curse text, like amulets and all kinds of curse texts and protective texts that would protect their children or their family or whatever.
And those texts were typically more Yahwistic in the sense where there's this deity Yahw, really central deity.
But they also had other terms that are known to us from the Bible that they saw.
As deities like Adonai was saw, was seen as in its own its, its own god, like the word Adonai, which is very familiar to to people who are familiar with the Hebrew Bible.
Um, that is a.
In the Bible it's really a title for god, or at least it's seen as a title um, but in later Yahoism, or what's called the Gnosticism, not I.
I don't like the term Gnostic because it's a pejorative term, so I try I, but there's no nothing else really available, so i'm using it for convenience.
But uh, the Gnostics are kind of continuing Yahwism in parallel to Judaism and Christianity.
So the lay of the land in the first century of the Common Era, the time of Jesus, was very complex, very energetic, very effervescent, with a lot of kind of cross-pollination between the different faith systems and ideologies.
You would take something from, I mean, even the idea of the Son of God.
If you walk through the Roman Empire, every milestone, literally stone that every mile of the road, right, milestone, would have the name of the Caesar that established this road.
And often it will have the name and it would say Son of God, right?
So that idea of the Son of God would be all around you, okay, at that time.
It wasn't just Jesus, right, Son of God, but it was also the emperor.
And so all of these ideas came from imperial cult.
from Egyptian cult, from the Gnostic field of a lot of different sects there, from different Jewish sects, from different readings and even interactions with the Persian world, interactions with this early Zoroastrianism that we talked about earlier.
There were no really strict walls between these different religions that we have today.
Like you said, I mean, everything was flowing in and out, cross-pollinating.
And that's why I love about this period, because it's so rich, so energetic.
People are always kind of looking and you can feel it in the primary sources.
And that's what caused ultimately, I think, one of the reasons that Christianity was able to spread quickly and very successfully was that Yahoism was the engine that enabled.
The spread of the cult of Yahweh in general and certain ideological concepts that enabled Christianity to later, because people were already very much interested in aspects of Yahwism, but they were not Jews.
Abu Simbel Stones00:12:43
But they did have amulets of Yahweh, they did have Sabaoth as another deity or Adonai as another deity.
So they were the language was becoming more and more familiar.
And I think that really helped prepare the ground for the spread of Christianity as well.
So Yahwism is an important engine in that as well.
Also, are there any other myths that are so as ubiquitous spread across so many different cultures and so many different parts of the world, like the flood myth, like the flood of Noah, like the Sumerian flood?
And you find it there, you find it in Egypt, you find it in Central and South America.
It seems like this, it seems crazy that it's known from all these different cultures, from all these different parts of time.
Yeah.
And it's, and there's been, there's like literally, I think there's geological evidence that proves that there was like some sort of catastrophe around the time that I think it was talked about, which was like 1200 BC or something along those lines.
Yeah, I think you're mixing things here.
I mean, the 1200 BC is what's called the Bronze Age collapse, roughly speaking.
And that's not related to the flood, it's related to a lot of other things, including climate change.
Well, there's this theory called the Younger Dryas Hypothesis.
Where they imagine that there was a couple different ideas, but one of the prevailing theories is that there was like a cosmic comet impact that hit the North American ice sheet and some other parts of the world as well, that melted the ice cap, ended the Pleistocene, and then created like an enormous flood that wiped out a huge amount of humans and mammals.
Right.
I'm not familiar with that one, but it might be, maybe.
Again, I'm not familiar with it.
I have not, that did not cross my path, so I'm not sure that this is real, maybe.
But it's not hard to imagine.
I mean, people in agricultural society, we're talking about all of the ancient societies are agricultural societies, and they have to deal with floods always.
I mean, by definition, if you're an agricultural society, water is critical to your daily life.
and you are planting seeds and you're trying to be as close to water as possible.
On the flip side of that, flooding, right?
If you're close to the water sources, you will be flooded.
So flooding was a daily, I mean, something that you would constantly be worried about and concerned.
I mean, maybe not daily, but certainly every year that would become, around the springtime, that would become a concern about potential flooding.
And so it's really easy to understand.
in every agricultural society across the globe, why there would be a legend surrounding massive flooding that would develop.
It doesn't necessarily mean that there was a global event, and it doesn't mean necessarily that there was influence from one tradition to another.
It's really easy to imagine why massive flooding would become a mythical force.
We don't necessarily need to go that far in order to understand that.
It's like with pyramids.
We find pyramids in different places.
pyramids.
We find the same structure in South America.
We find possibly in Europe.
We find possibly in Asia and places and of course in Egypt.
Indonesia.
Indonesia.
But this is just because this is a geometric form that is very, very stable.
And it makes a lot of sense.
It does not necessarily mean that there was any kind of transfer of knowledge.
So not necessarily, right?
So we can start to think about maybe aliens or whatever, but that's not necessarily the case.
It's really simple to think that certain elements like the flooding, again, everyone who's living in an agricultural society has to deal with the danger of floods.
Right.
Everyone has.
In some cases, the flooding is so extreme that it would destroy the livelihood of people miles around.
And these things it's very easy to see how that would eventually develop into a myth, a mythological story.
And that would happen all across the world, really, because every society is agricultural in antiquity.
And the same again with the pyramid.
It doesn't have to be necessarily, we don't have to go the route of aliens in order to explain it.
It is great.
The pyramid, especially the Great Pyramid, is such an astonishing feat.
It is.
And the thousand, I mean, five, I think there's like, I don't know if there's thousand ton stones, but I think there's at least 500 ton granite blocks that are at the top of that pyramid that are from Aswan, which is a long ways away.
We talked about that.
Yeah.
That's the, that's the, how in the world?
They were very good.
Yeah.
And then these things, I'm sure, I don't know if you're familiar with these vases that they found in the Bent Pyramid, but these vases, the guy you're going to see, Matt Bell, he actually purchased a bunch of these on the antiquities market, and they're made out of the hardest granite.
I think red granite, one of the hardest granites on earth.
And he had them measured in light scanners, and they are perfectly symmetrical within the deviation of a human hair from top to bottom, perfect set of symmetry.
And to create that out of granite today, we would need a CNC machine.
Like we'd have to create this on a computer.
The fact that they did that 2700 BC is like, it doesn't compute.
You know, like almost.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, people were very, very good.
I mean, they were brilliant.
And I don't think that.
Yeah, I think that the description, I think so.
Obviously, they had to have been to create this stuff.
I just don't think the conventional theory of how they did it with copper chisels and pounding stones or something like that in the middle of it to make something as perfect and precise as that.
It's like a piece that'll go in a jet engine.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I certainly agree with you.
There's a lot we don't know how they did it, and we don't have the knowledge and the technology necessarily today in order to do that.
But we do know that these were.
Brilliant people and um, they were able.
I mean sometimes today, when we look and we try to to to see well, how we would, would we produce this.
Today we, we are stumped and we we, because we think, according to our technological knowledge, in a certain direction.
They did not have those, this technology, so they did.
They had to really maybe think on a completely different level and come up with uh, with solutions that we don't uh, don't have access to.
So I tend to look at these things and just say they were really, really good.
Also with the building of the pyramids.
I mean, if you go to Aswan, to that region, and you see the quarries from which they cut these granite stones, you see how they worked.
You actually can see how they worked.
You see because in some cases they didn't finish the work.
So you actually see the work kind of midway and you can see actually how they did this.
And we can see also how they transported it up the Nile, down the Nile.
And so a lot of this technology, we know how they, I mean, practically, we know how they did this.
It's very, very impressive.
It's extremely impressive.
But we know how they did most of it.
In some of these temples, for example, these massive temples in Egypt that you see, parts of the ramparts on which they were able to pull these stones up still exist.
Um, and so we are.
We, we know a lot about how they created these massive uh buildings.
Um, and that's all very, very normal and natural.
It's not, you know, it's not extra um.
Have you seen that the thousand-ton obelisk that was never finished, that was never pulled out of the quarry completely in Aswan?
Yeah, I was there.
Yeah, underneath it, i've seen.
I've never been there, but i've seen photos and videos.
There's like it looks like ice cream scoops taken out of the, out of the granite.
The holes yeah underneath, like when they're They're underneath it, like digging it out.
That's right.
It's like, it looks like, see, I don't know if you can pull a photo of it, but it literally looks like ice cream scoops out of the rock.
And that's in a lot of the places, too.
Even in, even in, what is the, where are all those?
Oh, the Serapium.
Like the Serapium.
Yeah.
In the Serapium, there's those granite boxes with the scoop marks out of them.
It's like, what?
It's almost like they had some sort of like chemical that we don't, we just don't have any evidence for that was softening it or something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Possibly.
Yeah.
Look at that.
Yep.
Yep.
You know, they were very, very impressive people.
Yeah, and they had to deal with problems that we don't even know how to approach.
But yeah, but it's all part of their genius.
I mean, they were really amazing, amazing people.
What's amazing also when you go to Egypt and visit these places and you visit the temple, I don't know if you've been to Egypt, but I highly recommend to anyone listening if they can.
These temples are huge, huge.
And of course, the pyramids are huge as well.
And a lot of this people in Egypt were driven by the ideology of the Egyptian cult.
I mean, the idea was that they really believed in life after death.
And the idea was that you work for the Pharaoh and you will live with the Pharaoh after death.
You would be part of this.
So, of course.
you know, every person participating in the construction of these massive, massive, you know, monuments.
Monuments, really.
Yeah, that's insane.
So this is Abu Simbel.
Abu Simbel, now what you're seeing here, so this is Abu Simbel today, of course.
And I don't know if you know this, but this entire side of the mountain was transported from its original location in the 60s to what you're seeing here.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
So every rock, it was cut using modern technologies because Kamal Abdul Nasser wanted to create this dam and there's Lake Nasser.
And the original location of Abu Simbel is now submerged under that lake.
So in order to conserve this, they actually moved the entire temple, because this is a temple inside, the entire temple, they moved it out of its original location in the 1960s.
Modern engineers moved it to this location very, very accurately, except when you go into this temple on the solstice day, on the day of the solstice, in the morning, the sun comes through this entrance and shines straight on the there are statues at the end of this tunnel.
There are statues of Ramses II and a triad of deities around him.
And it shines directly in the center on him and the other gods around him.
And that's exactly at a certain time, at a certain day of the year, in the original location.
Here, modern engineers did that, but they missed one day.
It's not so it happens a day early.
Egyptian Society Achievements00:08:15
And so with modern technology, we were not able to replicate this even.
I mean, we were able to move it, but we weren't able to be as precise as they were in antiquity.
So this is really, really impressive, right?
It is.
But people at the time were truly amazing.
They had, in many ways, they had less distractions.
They were able to test things out.
And yeah, I mean, I just think the humanity of it is so impressive.
They were definitely on a different trajectory than we're on right now.
Different trajectory, absolutely, absolutely.
And yeah, but I don't think there's anything supernatural about it.
It's just humans doing what humans do and figuring out solutions to problems.
And sometimes we don't have the solutions today.
Right.
But they were able to do that.
And oftentimes they actually write it.
So they did write and they did express how they did things, how they moved large slabs of granite around, for example.
These are things that they sometimes do.
There's texts that explain that?
They have texts that talk about that.
Oh, really?
That describe it to a certain degree, maybe not to the level of detail that we want.
But what do they say?
Do you know what they say?
I mean, they talk about – I mean, this is not my field.
I'm not talking about Egyptology.
Yeah, we're just talking.
But I do know that they do describe to a certain degree how they moved things around and what they did with it.
So, I mean, Egyptologists do know a lot about how the pyramids were.
You know, you read in popular culture a lot about, well, we don't know today how they built the pyramids.
It must have been aliens.
No, we do know a lot about how they practically everything that there is to know about how they built the pyramids.
And it is what's truly breathtaking is just the level of ingenuity that they had at the time and the ability to come to find solutions for these really deeply engineering, I mean, really serious engineering problems and to do it so precisely.
There's a gentleman I had on the show a while back named Christopher Dunn who spent his whole life studying these pyramids and he was actually an engineer at first.
He was an aerospace engineer.
And he discovered the pyramids, I think it was like in the early 80s, maybe even 70s, I think it was.
And then he started going, he went to study them and like look at them and measure everything.
And he even like rented out the whole pyramid by himself many times where he could do his own studies and stuff.
And he came up with the hypothesis that it was like an ancient power plant.
And he's talking, and he like through his early years studying the 70s and 80s and 90s, he obviously got a lot of pushback.
From Egyptologist Zahi Huas.
And now he's published a second book on it.
And he's explaining to me how there is a whole new generation of Egyptologists that are coming up, young people, who are questioning the fact, the idea that these things were originally tombs.
And they're looking into it more and trying and pushing back on this original idea.
And it seems like the idea is evolving with young people coming up in Egypt now.
So it's interesting.
In his book, it's interesting.
He looked at the Serapium and he measured the blocks and how much they weighed and everything.
And he went to a company, the biggest granite company that cuts granite in the United States.
And he basically asked them what it would take to replicate one of those boxes in the Serapium.
And the guy was like, we would never do that, first of all, because it's one piece.
If we were going to do something like that, we would take all the sides and bolt them together.
But even just to get a piece of granite like that out of the ground and transport it, he's like, you're talking like $500,000.
And with today's technology, right?
Which is insane.
Yeah.
Crazy.
Yeah, yeah.
But, you know, they didn't have, I mean, they didn't have budget.
Right.
Exactly.
That's my point, right?
I mean, a pharaoh like Ramses II was so powerful.
I mean, really limitless power practically in his day.
And so, and the, but the people believe that participating in the work of the pharaoh would also bring them and their family into the, the, the, The next life, right?
The life beyond.
And so they did this.
They were, and they were not slaves.
They were not slaves.
They were paid for their work.
And they, but they also were deeply religious in that sense.
Yeah.
I mean, they really believed in what they were doing.
Weren't there temples that were built specifically for people in the afterlife that weren't like temples people would dwell in?
They were just like they existed for when somebody went to the afterlife, like the Osirion and I think Edfu, maybe.
I mean, no, these are temples.
These are temples for.
You know, for now, not for the afterlife per se.
I thought there were temples that they built that were actually not inhabited.
They were like, had doors that went nowhere.
Oh, there's all, there are a lot of doors that go nowhere in many different places, of course.
But I'm not sure that that's built for the afterlife.
It might be symbolic.
Again, that's something you should ask an Egyptologist.
Right, right, right.
But having visited Egypt a number of times, this is, yeah, I'd be very cautious about reading too much into.
you know, supernatural or extra.
This is it's fun.
It's fun to talk about.
It is fun.
It's super fun.
It's certainly fun, but it is but from a scientific perspective, when you do go in Karnak, for example, this massive, massive temple, beautiful temple, where the colors, the original colors from three millennia ago are still there.
Some of them are still preserved.
You walk around this massive building, I mean, really massive, huge, that was built every detail.
People really cared about, I mean, the level of professionalism, the level of artistry, not just art, but artistry, the impact of, you know, working with the material.
You see how people cared about every element that they were working with.
And, I mean, the Egyptian society, ancient Egyptian society, is something that is truly mind-blowing.
we don't need to have recourse to extra, you know, to extraterrestrial or supernatural.
The society itself was so incredible in what it was able to achieve that now there are a number of features.
For example, the fact that there is the Nile is there.
They don't have to worry too much about rain, right?
And they don't have to worry.
I mean, they were well fed because they had a constant source of of nutrition.
So they had their fields around the Nile.
Of course, there wasn't a desert back then.
Well, it was desert around anywhere but the Nile.
The Nile was also desert back then.
But just the area surrounding the Nile was very fertile and is still very fertile.
In antiquity, you had the annual inundation of the Nile.
So there were a period of about three months where you couldn't, everything was inundated, so you couldn't really work.
But after that, it was very, very fertile because the Nile would recede and it would there would be a residue of very fertile elements that would remain in the soil.
So it was very fertile and you really didn't have to worry too much about being fed.
So you had time to do other things.
You don't have, like anywhere else, you always have to fight for your survival.
In Egypt, you don't really have to fight that much for your family's survival and things like that.
So you have time to think about other things and to do other things.
So there were seasons where they would, participating in building projects like this.
Free Digital Access00:02:36
And so they were truly an amazing society.
In many ways, Egyptians even to this day are an amazing society.
I love Egypt and the people also today.
And some of the nicest people you'll ever meet, really.
Really, really recommend visiting Egypt.
But truly, when you think about the innovation, the groundbreaking ideas that they had and the ability to see them through and actually implement them in such amazing ways.
That's due to the people.
That's just due to their ingenuity, parts of it which we don't understand even today, but it's still to be kind of assigned to their own ingenuity.
Definitely.
Well, thank you, man.
I really appreciate you coming and doing this.
Thank you.
Where can folks that are listening or watching find more of your work or get in touch with you?
Yeah, so I think the best way is through my academia page.
I'll give you the link and you can post it if you want.
And my book that just came out, edited book with articles, my article, but also several of my colleagues.
We have 19 people contributing to this.
And that's a lot that focuses on Yahwism, really, on the history of Yahwism, the early history of Yahwism in the Achaemenid period.
So that's a book that's available for free download.
So it's open access.
If you want a physical copy, you have to pay for it, but obviously it's a physical copy.
But you can download the entire book for free from the website.
That's amazing.
Yeah.
That was really important for me to be able to make it available for free for people to just download and read.
And that was made available through a very generous donation or assistance from the Göteborg University, the Georg August University in Göttingen, and Professor Reinhard Kratz, who is the co-editor of this book with me.
And so they were able to sponsor this open access to the book so people can read it and just download it for free.
That's amazing, man.
All right, Steve, we got a couple of Patreon questions before we wrap up.
These are our beautiful paid subscribers on Patreon.
Had a couple questions for you.
All right.
Kyle says Hello, Professor.
Do you have any thoughts on Homer, the Iliad, and where its inspiration came from?
A lot of these questions may not be relevant or whatever.
We don't have to spend a lot of time on all of them.
We can do like one minute.
Yeah, it's not my field.
I'm not a, yeah, so I can't talk about this.
Zoroastrian Elements00:15:33
Okay, Sean says, my question is, how much of a leap is it to make the claim that religion came from early drugs and then was adapted by the Catholic Church to control the masses?
I won't talk to the second part of the question, only the first one.
So the first one, early drug use.
I mean, I'm sure that drug use played a part in practically all early cultic forms.
So, yeah, I mean to a certain degree.
I mean, when we say drugs, we just say, you know all kinds of mind-altering sure, even medicines, i'm sure yeah, and even I mean even just certain herbs that you can consume that without any.
So I think they thought and view drugs the same way we do.
Yeah, they definitely didn't.
That's right.
I mean yeah, exactly.
So I think that uh, that I mean i'm not saying that religion came from that, but that was a part of the development of, of of religion and the way to communicate with the divine, so clearly, when you're consuming certain substances, even natural substances that you're consuming, that cause you to hallucinate and to kind of enter this state where you are communicating with the divine or that you're seeing visions.
Of course, these play a role in practically every cultic system to a certain degree.
Absolutely.
Jacob.
Hello, Dr. Bernay.
In the podcast with Neil from Gnostic Informant, I heard you say that the Jews from what is considered the first temple period worshipped a god named IAO?
Yao.
Yao.
Okay, Yao.
And you equate this God with Yahweh.
Is it possible that the God IAO predates the Jews and is worshipped in Greek culture since the name itself is the root for whatever that is?
Yao.
Yao Mai.
Okay.
Yao Mai.
Which means to heal in ancient Greek.
Hail Satan.
Okay.
Okay.
Thanks, Jacob.
Okay.
I got the best fans.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So going back to Yao, yeah, I don't think it goes back.
It does not predate because it's not mentioned anywhere.
I mean, it only is mentioned much later after the Aramaic slash Hebrew Yao.
So I don't think it's yes, there is a verb that sounds similar, but there is nothing that connects this verb to Yao directly.
And again, it's simply not documented anywhere.
Okay.
Blake Blake.
What is the tree of life and how is it misinterpreted?
Straight to the point, these guys.
Yeah, yeah.
How is it misinterpreted?
Yeah, I don't know how to answer this.
There is no tree.
Yeah, it's that, you know, they're talking, probably, if they're talking about the Bible, they're talking about the Eden and the tree of life and what is considered the tree of life there.
There were trees of life depicted in Neo-Assyrian and generally in the ancient Near East in certain places that are considered to be trees of life.
But that's not necessarily directly related to this.
And yeah, it's not something that I can talk to in too much detail.
Cormac, how did digital tools reshape our understanding of ancient texts?
And what is the most compelling evidence of Zoroastrian influence in Jewish traditions?
Okay, so these are two great questions.
So the digital tools today are still reshaping what we're doing.
And I mentioned earlier that we're trying to do, me and some colleagues, we're trying to do, to make the study of history become more and more precise, more and more objective, more and more transparent, closer to the exact sciences.
And we are using a lot of digital tools in order to do that, a lot of AI work, both on the visual capture of the original documents, so how we visually capture the visual data for these objects.
We do it in 2D and 3D and all kinds of filters, all kinds of mesh.
algorithms in order to do that, in order to absolutely fully capture these original documents in a way that is as precise as possible and at least as transparent as possible.
We have an entire team in Germany working on that.
We have and developing these algorithms and are also AI.
There's an AI component to that.
We have others, other teams also in this project that we're kind of really pushing now that does AI-driven OCR.
So it's OCR, of course, optical character recognition.
But in order to do that for the ancient world.
It's not like OCR that we do today for printed documents where everything is printed and everything is obvious.
For the ancient world, you have to be very, I mean, it's a very, very complex process of how to do that.
But yeah, we have a lot of digital tools, a lot of, I mean, really an entire set of digital tools that we are using now in order to ultimately produce these historical data in the most transparent way.
Oh, wow.
That's fascinating.
Yeah, now the second question is Zoroastrian, the most compelling evidence of Zoroastrian influence in Jewish traditions.
I will now start not with the Bible, but with the day-to-day.
And again, in several of my articles, also in this book, this open access book, so my article there, I talk about the existence of a fire holder, not a fire altar.
I don't like the term fire altar, but in Atrodan, the name of the object is.
that existed within the temple, the Yahwistic temple at Elephantine.
Well, this temple is a temple to Yahweh.
In that sense, it's a Jewish temple.
In the 5th century before the Common Era.
But they had, according to their own sources, they had a fire holder in the temple.
Within the confines of the temple, they had a fire holder.
And they used the term, the Avestan term, Atrodan, or the Indo-Iranian term.
for a fire holder, which is one of the main components of Zoroastrianism, right?
The fire holder, the veneration of the fire.
It's not an altar because nothing is offered on it.
It exists for the veneration of the fire.
And the fire in Zoroastrianism is seen as the son of Ahura Mazda, the son of the deity, of the main deity of Zoroastrianism.
So we do have, and this is very compelling, because you have within a Yahwistic temple, and they had their own altar.
on which they offered other sacrifices.
But within the temple, they also had a fire holder, and they are using the term, the Indo-Iranian term for it.
And they could have, if it was just a regular fire holder, they could have just used Duda de Nura in Aramaic, or they could have expressed it in pure Aramaic.
They didn't have to use a technical cultic term in order to refer to this.
So within the temple, they actually had a Zoroastrian, clearly Zoroastrian, fire holder within the confines of the temple.
So that is very compelling.
That is very strong in terms of influence.
Again, it does not mean that they converted to Zoroastrianism at all.
I mean, as I said, there is cross-pollination constantly between everyone.
Everyone is constantly that does not mean that they turned into Zoroastrianism.
Nothing was exclusive.
Exactly.
There's cross-pollination always, taking ideas, taking concepts, especially with the empire.
I mean, this is the empire that is now controlling everything about your life.
And so clearly that does not mean anything more than just showing that you are a good citizen of the Achaemenid Empire.
It does not mean more than that.
But clearly they did adopt things in a more intimate level than possibly other cultic traditions.
We don't know.
This is the earliest evidence that we have for a fire holder.
directly in the textual evidence that we have for a fire holder anywhere really.
We have fire holders depicted in the Achaemenid Empire, depicted on inscriptions, depicted as an image.
We do have images of Zoroastrian priests around the fire holder.
So we do know that these were part of the cult in Achaemenid times, not just at Elephantine.
But we don't have that as a text.
We don't have a textual reference to it outside of Elephantine.
So this is the first textual reference that we have.
And it's within a Yahwistic context.
So I think that's really the most compelling evidence of this cross-pollination between the Yahwists slash Jews and the Zoroastrians.
But there's a lot more.
There's a lot more.
In my article, I also talk about this so-called Passover letter that actually shows elements that are of an observance that is very close to or almost identical to the Zoroastrian yasna, which is the Zoroastrian liturgy.
And so we have that.
Yeah, we have a lot of different elements.
And even within the Bible, the idea of the eternal flame and the holy flame that comes down, even the burning bush, which is a supernatural flame, right?
The supernatural fire.
I have an electro coming out.
two weeks from now in Paris about this, specifically about this, the burning bush and the theophany there in its Zoroastrian aspects there, which are on several levels there in that particular story.
And I have a colleague from Haifa, Professor Itamar Kislev, who wrote a great article also in this book about the fire sacrifice in the Bible, in Leviticus and other places as well.
just a great analysis of this, dating that to Achaemenid influences.
And so, yeah, we're seeing a lot of properly Zoroastrian elements in Jewish sources, whether in the Bible or external to the Bible.
One thing we need to be very careful is to identify what we mean by the Zoroastrianism of the Achaemenid period, because most of the sources that we have are much later, from the Sasanian period that's roughly late third, fourth century, really, and to the the rise of Islam.
And so that's most of the sources that we have.
And even then, the actual manuscripts that we have from Zoroastrianism are much later than that even.
And so for my research, what I try to do is only limit myself to things that I can prove already existed in the Achaemenid period, whether it's in pictographic representations of these liturgies or texts or even names, components of names.
So for example, just one example, the name Darius, Darya Wahush in Iranian, in Old Persian is based on a quote, a direct quote from the Avesta.
It's a citatname, we say in German.
So it's a citation name from an authoritative text.
Oh, wow.
So it's not even, it's not Persian, it's Avestan.
Darya Wahush means the holder of good.
Wahush element here means good, but in Old Persian you would say Naiba to say good.
He's not even using Persian, he's using Avestan, which is the liturgical language of Zoroastrianism.
And so the fact that he chose that as his throne name when he ascended the throne means that obviously not only that he quoted from the Avestan text, knowledge of the oldest part, the Gatha, which is the oldest part of the Avestan text, not necessarily all of the Avestan that we know today, really only just the earliest layer of the text, the 17 hymns that are part of what's called the Gatha in the Avestan.
So knowledge of all of these quotes are from the Gathas.
And so not just his name, but other names as well.
But it means that he expected people to understand that this is what he's doing with this name.
So people were familiar enough with the texts, not just him, but also his citizens.
Right.
Right.
So that teaches us a lot about what at least what part of the texts of the Avesta might have been available at that time.
And again, pictographic and all of that.
So I'm looking at all of this and I'm limiting myself in my research to things that I can prove existed in the Achaemenid period and not sometimes I more cautiously refer to things that are not yet there and I say, well, and I say that I'm speculating, but that these things might have already existed, but that's much more reserved.
To make a precise point or a strong research point, I always use the stuff that I can show existed in the Achaemenid period.
But clearly the Achaemenids were zoroastrian to a certain degree.
They're not Zoroastrian in the same sense that we have Zoroastrians today, but they did have at least the Gathas to this early layer of the Avestan text and Ahura Mazda.
I mean, that's clearly the Zoroastrian deity, and they saw him as almost exclusive, the only deity.
Oh, really?
And I mean, they acknowledge the existence of other gods, but they talk about Ahura Mazda pretty much almost exclusively, especially in the early period.
Which is interesting also because they were more, they kind of gravitate more towards monotheism, so to speak.
It's not monotheism, but monolatry in the early period.
And then they became more quote unquote polytheistic later on.
Usually we think that people evolve, not that I'm attaching any kind of quality to it, but move towards more of a monotype.
Yeah, monist.
Monist religion later on.
But it's not always the case.
things things are always yeah cycles it vacillates yeah absolutely wow that's fascinating stuff well thank you again for your time man this is thank you my pleasure this has been super enlightening and i'm gonna download that thing and read it to myself um it's super cool that you're doing it for free as a free download that's i think that's incredible that was very important to us yeah yeah um cool thank you to the patrons for your question and thank you again for your time i really i really enjoyed it yeah all right good night everyone