Posted by panchmaster from host-148-244-221-36.block.alestra.net.mx (148.244.221.36) on Tuesday, February 25, 2003 at 1:21PM :
One thing you have to remember about the bible, besides the fact that no diety had anything to do with it,,,I mean really!...is that it was written by a handful of people who even in their own day represented a minor cult centered around the southern kingdom of Judah. Only three of the so-called twelve tribes were to be found in the southern kingdom of Judah, where Jerusalem was made into the cultic center for all Hebrews, the other nine were in the northern kingdom called Israel. The northern tribes, forced by David to become "one nation" for a brief time, always resented, among other things, the Jerusalem cult's insistence that only sacrifices made in the temple there were legal or pleasing or whatever. In all the bible the northerners are treated with scorn and disdain. No northern king is found worthy of mention unless he did some awful thing that would show him and his people (also Jews) in a bad light. You'd be amazed at the petty, vindictive, sophmoric and moronic roots to all this Judeo-Christian nonsense you all swoon over today...though if you could just remove yourselves from the muck you'd see what an awful pass they've brought us to...not humans...but human religions.
During the reign of Josiah, when the Assyrian empire began to wobble, the division went even further with Jerusalem roundly hated and standing alone against all the other tribes. It's odd, but if you come to your fellow villagers with some piece of sensible advice like, "don't kill unoffending children", you are laughed down and said to be some sort of madman. But if you come back with a story about burning bushes that talk...pillars of fire and admonitions to eat sacred excrement, people fall down at your feet and worship you as having had intercourse with the most sacred deity etc. You can't talk simple good sense to people hungry to believe crap.
Anyway, finding himself alone against all the rest of the Hebrews, Josiah decides on, what else, A Revival! He orders the temple in Jerusalem rebuilt, the sheepshit walls need refreshing, and during the renovation a "book" is discovered. It turns out to be Yahwe's real word and when it's brought to Josiah he rends his clothes right off his back cause he KNEW this was the real thing, and not a recent forgery. He calls together the Children of Israel, now down to the people in this one town, and their parents presumably, and has the entire forgery read to them. They're so all fired thriled to "discover" that Yahwe, who we have to be reminded constantly, "works in mysterious ways", has chosen them from among the other Chosen...who he sort of Chose before from all the other people who weren't Chosen, are the ones possessing his REAL words of wisdom, that they go forth and tell a whole lot of other whoppers right down till today when you actually have people getting advanced degrees from Harvard and Yale in something called "Theology", which amounts to "Voodoo Totem Practices" and "Which Came First Chickens or Chickenshit".
Having those sorts of degrees allows such "scholars" as the authors of, "The Bible and the Ancient Near East" to make the following statements and get away with them...not because there is any evidence, but because getting such a degree implies that you wouldn't spin wool out of whole yarn but use said "education" to make "reasoned" interpretations where no facts exist, or when all else fails..."interpret" the facts too...at least it teaches you how to get past professors with pure, well seasoned bullshit...like they had to do to get THEIR degrees and who's gonna blow the whistle on this nifty little scam?
Before setting out on their journey to Neverland, the authors clear the air by stating..."the view that the scroll was forged shortly before its alleged discovery in 621 BCE is based on false premises." That's it. That's all they had to say...and all they have to say about Assyria goes along the same lines..."Assyria was cruel". That's all you have to say when you have an advanced degree. One minor point that sort of goes in the same direction. In their book they replace, "B.C.", which we all know stands for, "Before Christ"...for the more "scientific" and neutral "B.C.E.", which reads, "Before (the) Common Era". Now at first I thought this was a sane approach to dating historical events...I mean why should the birth of a Jew carpenter be used to date events that have nothing to do with Jews...or carpenters. But we all know we're talking about the same date...only removing the name of a Jew who turned out Christian...and who would object to that? Why them Galloping Hebrews, who else. So not only do they give us the first instance...but come back complaining and get scholars and, they hope, the rest of us to make the birth of Christ into the "Common Era". From small beginnings even smaller things can come.
Now Josiah has to beef up the legitimacy of the Jerusalem cult, especially since the rest of the Hebrews were hopping mad at him and his village already for tearing down the "High Places" and removing all the fornicating cow and pig altars, not to mention the Tophet where Hebrews up till that day were still sacrifing their children, so the authors come to his rescue with the most aromatic bit of "reasoning" yet. Let them tell it...
"Throughout the ancient Near East, law codes were disregarded in actual life. At the very time the codes were promulgated, the actual business contracts disregard the codes. The judges regularly omit any reference to codes in their court decisions in Mesopotamia. They are instead guided by tradition, public opinion, and common sense. This is also true of Israel where Solomon's suggestion to divide the harlot's baby was not prompted by any code. This does not prove that the Law did not exist. In Israel, as in Mesopotamia, judges and rulers did not refer to codes or keep law books on hand for consultation. There were two distinct currents: (1) practise and (2) written law. Attempts to codify law naturally reckoned with custom and past experience, but once such laws were written, they were at best studied by a few scholars and had little or no direct influence on legal and social practise. Accordingly, the fact that neither Josiah nor his immediate predecessors had known anything of the Law does not prove it was a forgery by Hilkiah and Shaphan. The rediscovery of Hammurapi's Code would have come as a complete surprise to most kings of Babylon after Hammurapi." (And that last sentence came as a complete surprise to me).
Okay, let's pause here and come up for air...or open a window and fumigate this mess. Those of you in college dilligently writing compositions and generally behaving yourselves in order to get a degree you hope will enable you to buy a house one day and keep it...are almost unfit by years of generating your own bullshit to see much of anything here. I, on the famous other hand, having left school in the third grade and been a hod carrier most of my life...have a different perspective. Go back through that paragraph and see in which instance the word "law" is capitalized and when it's smaller case. Whenever it is a code or a law from Mesopotamia the word "law" is smaller case "l", unless it refers to a specific code or associated with someone's name. When the word "law" is used by itself but means, "Jew Law", it is capitalized. This book, and I suspect many others, is rich in these subtle uses of language. That's one reason our own experts and skolars are so inept, to them language is what you get food or sex with...("Hey, Dolma of mine, vant to fook"?)
Aside from that the entire paragraph is setting up an important point to be made later on, it's called "setting the stage", or "laying the groundwork"...spreading the manure in preparation for planting another seed in your heads that will grow you into more Bloomin' Idiots convinced your ancestors were at their best when they also, like you, turned on themselves.. What counts in this paragraph is that you get the idea that law codes in Mesopotamia...and Israel too (before Josiah), were honored in the breach...that no one much used them for anything....they were just "there". Now things WILL change dramatically in Israel soon...well in Judah actually...well really only in Jerusalem...but they'll stay the same in heathen Mesopotamia where them damn fools never could be bothered to refer to any laws they wrote down...even though in one way and another their laws encompassed and far antedated any Hebrew laws, and went rather well beyond. I like the bit about Solomon, "suggesting" something...what a guy, what a decent king...no orders from him...no sir...just suggestions.
Leave us plow on...take note of the term, "Josianic" for the discovery of this forgery...kind of makes it hallowed...like "Solomonic" for buildings that can't be found.
"The circumstances of the Josianic discovery fit in with what we know of the ancient Near East so well that we may take it at face value. A forgotten book was rediscovered. Since only a few scholars studied such books, law codes (whose practical value was quite limited) were generally forgotten in the Bible World. The significance of 621 B.C.E. is not that a great forgery was foisted onto a gullible world. The significance of that date is that for the first time in human history (brace yourselves) a written document was ACTUALLY (authors' emphasis) adopted FOR ALL TIME and WITHOUT INTERRUPTION (Authors' emphasis again) as the permananet guide of a nation...after 621, oracles have been on the way out, and written scripture holds the field for ALL MANKIND (emphasis mine)."
The authors have told us that few people studied such codes...cared to follow them...live by them...listen to them...guide their lives or business dealings by them. They just sort of resorted to custom and common sense...which is about as good of a definition of how laws come into being in the first place. The idea that you would write them down...after years of presumably guiding your lives by them...and then quickly ignore them from that mment on, forget they ever existed and never refer to them again is...well it's downright "scholarly".
What they're trying to imply is that once the Jews of Jerusalem wrote something down...excuse me, "discovered God's REAL word"...they and only they, followed that law code dilligently...they didn't fuck cows or each other's wives or their own daughters any more...they didn't commit murder or incest or lust, or steal etc...Now if you believe that I'd say the spirt of Yahwe, "lit" on you with a vengeance. The Babylonians, who only bothered to write down their Law after centuries of common usage and custom, in 1750 BC, a good thousand years before Josiah...never bothered to even read the damn thing or refer to it... they forgot it as soon as it was written.
Josiah's little book, which was obviously a fraud, was to become the FIRST instance in which a nation...them Jews could make a nation on an anthill...is guided by written laws. Someone tell that to the Jews today. I'd say from all evidence the Jews don't follow their own Josianic laws any better than the rest of us ever have...and in recent times, a whole lot worse.
During all those pig-fucking years in Canaan, the Mesopotamians and Egyptians were creating what would become Western Civilization...almost every aspect of it EXCEPT child-killing and pig-fucking. After several attempts at civilizing these sorts of people, a few got it sort of right... but had to resort to creating a forgery because there was no "real" word from their god against pig-fucking...then took credit for the whole damn thing. And Christian Assyrians...buying into this nonsense have become their own worst enemies..divided against their Assyrian souls...forced to respect and even revere the very doctrines and writings of people who were no friends of theirs...who shamelessly stole what they wanted from them, took credit for it...and wrote the rest of their despicable practices off to "Pagan influences" among which they brought even you to place your own ancestors. What more shame could there be for us as Assyrians?
This all I can stand at one sitting.
-- panchmaster
-- signature .