Quote:
Originally Posted by Textcritic
It is not as difficult as you imagine it to be, if you are willing to recognize that much of what is recorded in the Old Testament never happened in the first place. The exodus probably did not happen as it is recorded; apart from the miracles, it remains unlikely that an entire ethnic group of slaves wandered around in the wilderness for over 40 years on their way to their ancestral homeland. Furthermore, there was almost certainly no conquest, and no truth to the genocidal accounts in the Book of Joshua. These stories were probably based upon ancient legends, and embellished in an effort to promote the 8th–7th century Judeaen aristocracy's attempts at religious reform. The stories of slaughter were greatly exagerated as part of a programme of hyper-nationalism and hyper Yahwism; in my own personal opinion, I tend to think that the embellishment was so extreme in large part because the authors of these accounts were painfully aware of the unreasonable cost of the kind of level of ritual purity that they envisioned.
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I'm not talking about the events described. I take them with a grain of salt. What happened with the birth of Adam and Eve is an example. A pretty far fetched story but IIRC, with some good truths and lessons behind it. Jesus's parables are also pretty good if some weren't botched by the writers so they don't make any sense today.
My take on the ancient Jews was that there were a few knowledgable leaders who didn't share this with the common man and just passed on enough, to appeal to and keep a stable society and now we have our clergy passing on this misdirection as the gospel.
I'm not necessarily blaming these leaders. The old saying 'You can take a horse to water but you can't make them drink' applies to any level of knowledge and yes I guess it does require a level of purity.