From Gods to God

Secular scholars of the bible view the ancient people of Israel as a western Semitic group, emerging from a welter of other such peoples in the Middle East.  Gradually, something like an Israelite identity emerged, stressing the belief in one god to the exclusion of all others, and later, to the notion that there is only one God alone, the God of Israel.

This move toward one abstract God, who cannot be depicted or visualized, sought to separate early Israelite religion from its mythological elements.  Things we read about in the stories of the Greek gods: multiple gods, fights in heaven, gods and goddesses mating with human partners, were supposed to be expunged from the religion of Israel.

Avigdor Shinan and Yair Zakovitch do an excellent job of explaining these complex moves in their book, From Gods to God: How the Bible Debunked, Suppressed, or Changed Ancient Myths and Legends.  The authors show, in four parts, how the writers and compilers of the bible sought to minimize, transform, change, and shift, Israel’s pagan past. 

They also provide great nuggets that hardly a soul knows about.  Scholars have never been able to find historical evidence for the Exodus from Egypt.  The authors show in a passage from Chronicles how the tribe of Ephraim, one of Joseph’s sons born in Egypt,  never left Canaan!  This is perhaps a holdover from the time before the Exodus story became central to Israelite religion.  Somehow, it was never erased or changed from Chronciles.

Shinan and Zakovitch provide compelling evidence of how the biblical compilers struggled with a legacy they could not completely control, nor eradicate.  The outcome is jarring and illustrative.  Their reading of the bible shows us a culture and religion in the midst of upheval and transformation.

Moortown - Ted Hughes

Now that I live adjacent to farm country, I picked up Ted Hughes Moortown, sometimes called Moortown Diary, to see if reading it again in a land of sheep, lambs, cows and calves would give the poems added resonance.

Hughes must be Hughes, of course, and his farm life is anything but idealized pastoral.  Lambs are stillborn, stuck in the birth canal, and their heads must be removed to dislodge the body from the mother.  A calf born without strength or  will to live is taken in human hands, but no amount of nurturing can save it. 

In this cycle of poems, nature is nature, whether domestic or not.  Hughes sees life and death separated by the thinnest of edges; when we see prancing lambs in a field, he sees a struggle for survival as wild as that on the Serengeti.

Death lurks in Moortown.  It actually lurks everywhere, but we are not as fine-tuned as Hughes to its hues and shades.  We ignore its blossoming shadow.

Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People: wrong lots of times

Jon Entine is a non-specialist in the subject of genetics or Jewish history, a writer with a background in journalism and TV production.  He takes on Jewish genetics in Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People. 

As a non-specialist, Entine has a special mission to be particularly careful with his facts, since he is always open to the charge that he is an untrained, and therefore not a credible source to write about his material.  Unfortunately, he exposes himself to just this charge.

I have no idea if the genetics he discusses is correct in the big picture or small details, but some of the things he gets wrong about Jewish history erodes my confidence overall in this book

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On page 164 of the hardcover version, he claims that the synagogue of the Chinese Jews of Kaifeng still stands.  Actually, it was dismantled in the early nineteenth century, and by the 1850s, there was nothing left but a vacant lot where it once stood.  

On page 173 in a discussion of monotheism in Arabia at the time of the rise of Islam, he claims that Arabia was home to several communities “professing at least a nominal belief in Judaism.”  I’m not sure which communities Entine is referring to, but at the time there were Rabbinical Jewish communities in Arabic, practicing, from what we can tell, a fully normative Judaism for that time.  

  

On page 180 he says that the Ottoman Empire “embraced a secular Islam” in the centuries following the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. I’m not sure what this term means, but certainly the Ottoman Empire embrace a fully religious Islam.  It was not until the revolution of the Young Turks and even more so the founding of the modern state of Turkey, that anything like separation between mosque and state took place in Turkey.

On page 209 he calls Yiddish a “mélange of Slavic tongues, German and Hebrew,” a very distorted view of Yiddish, which is 90 percent  Germanic in vocabulary, syntax and form, with about 10 percent loan words from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic languages.

On page 226, the famous Jewish messianic heretic is called Shabbetai Izevi, which I imagine is a typo from Zevi, or was meant to be Tzevi, a variant spelling.

If Entine is wrong on these facts, what else he is wrong about?

Generally, the book spends more time on history, and less on genetics, its purported topic.  I’m not sure how useful this book is for either an understanding of Jewish history or genetics or both.

The Existence of God: The Best Yet

Seldom do you come across a book that delivers on its promises as much as Yujin Nagasawa’s The Existence of God.  In four clearly written chapters Nagasawa deftly lays out the three traditional arguments for the existence of God.  

Part 1 deals with the Ontological argument in its various incarnations, from Anselm to Godol.  Part 2 handles evolution verses intelligent design, showing the relative absurdity of modern intelligent design arguments.  Part 3 shows the cosmological argument, its relation to the Big Bang Theory, and current work with infinity and the so-called Kalam cosmological argument.  Part 4 deals with scraps of theories, like Pascal’s Wager, and some of the moral arguments for God’s existence.

All in all, this is the best introductory book I have read on natural theology.  Concise yet boldly explanatory, detailed without getting bogged down in them, Nagasawa provides a work that his perfect for the intelligent seeker looking to understand how the mind can grope toward an understanding of God’s existence without recourse to faith or mysticism.