Alea iacta est

We all have our phobias...

If you're not getting your fill on religious text-blogging here, I suggest you stop by KafirGirl, a Pakistani Muslim-turned Atheist who is blogging the holy book of her people.

Highlights for me is the hadith of Mohammed being so-shit scared of taking a dump that he asked God to watch out for evil spirits while he was on the can.

In the Beginning, Man Created God, Part V

After an extended break, let's continue our thrilling journey through the history of monotheism. We've heard of the Persian and Egyptian experiments, marvelled at the Hebrew King Josiah's fabrication of Jewish history, seen the end of the Hebrew nations, the long exile in Babylon and the synthesis of Persian and Hebrew theology, followed by Alexander the Great adding in Hellenic thought to the great big cosmopolitan stew.

Next we'll see what ended this era of religious moderation...but first, let's take a side step, and discuss the matter of religious prophecy.

Interlude: Danny Boy, the Lions, the Lions are calling.

In the three main modern monotheistic religions today, prophets are kind of a big deal. In fact, successful lineage of prophets is seen as a yardstick for your religion finally hitting the big time - sort of like winning an Oscar or Golden Globe, but without the tedious teary acceptance speech.

For Christians, one of the most famous prophets is Daniel, the one who is mainly remembered for spending a night in the company of a pride of lions. (Not as kinky as it sounds, don't worry.) This is doubly remarkable, since, to be pedantic, Daniel really isn't a prophet.

In Judaism, to be a "prophet", you have to have spoken directly to God. That is, face to face, just like Moses. Not through an angel, not through dreams, and not through vague signs in the sky. Daniel did not speak with God, so, even though the Jews have the exact same holy text about Daniel as do the Christians, they don't call him a prophet. As a side note this careful distinction means that even if Jews believed every piece of Islamic dogma about Mohammed, they wouldn't see him as a prophet either. Jesus is safe, due to his enthusiasm for talking with God constantly. (or, as Christians see it, talking to himself constantly.)

But back to Daniel!

Anyway, as the story in the aptly named Book of Daniel goes, Daniel was allegedly a Hebrew prisoner in Babylon prior to the Persian conquest. A very pious and orthodox Jew, Daniel refused to go for that oh-so-tempting polytheism drifting above his head seductively. No, sir, Daniel was YHWH's man, through and through.

Then the Babylonian King Nebuchadrezzar (mispelled as Nebuchanezzar, which, as you will see, is significiant), starts having funky dreams, so Daniel is called in to analyze them. The one that gets most biblical literalists excited, is the one where the King dreams of some statue made from different types of metals. Daniel helpfully translates it as an omen of the Babylonian empire, and those that are to come after it. Biblical literalists usually see the analogy as follows:

Hey, that's pretty neat.

Pity it's wrong.

The consensus now is that the most likely empires the author of Daniel was going for were Babylon, Media, Persia and then Alexander's Greco-Macedonian Empire. Later Jews and Christians combined Media and Persia to fit Rome in there, purely to read a meaning into a book that never had that meaning in the first place.

How do we know the author intended Media and Persia to be separate? Why, because of an error written in the Book of Daniel, an error which, combined with others, makes it pretty clear the book was NOT written during the Babylonian exile, and is in fact a later fabrication.

The problem with the book is that the author is purported to be living in the Babylonian Empire but gets many of the details, some which would be common knowledge, completely wrong.

These errors include, but are not limited to:

• Daniel is listed in the Writings of the Jewish canon, rather than the Prophets. This indicates that Daniel was written after the collection of prophetic books had been closed (sometime after 300 BCE), in addition to another pointer that Daniel was never considered a Jewish prophet..
• Parts of the book (2:4-7:28) were written in Aramaic, which suggests a later date when Aramaic had become the common language. By the time of the Babylonian exiles, Hebrew was still in common use, and the other texts written about that time are indeed in that language
• The author of Daniel used Persian and Greek words that would not have been known to residents of Babylon in the 6th century BCE. These only came with the later Persian and Greek conquests
• The book contains numerous historical inaccuracies when dealing with 6th century BCE Babylonian history. Such mistakes would not have been made by an important official in the employ of King Nebuchadnezzar. Such howlers include making Belshazzar the son of Nebuchanezzar, when in fact Belshazzar was the son of Nabonidus, and we know this from contemporary Babylonian records.


• Daniel is the only book in the Old Testament in which angels are given names (such as Gabriel in 8:16 and 9:21 and Michael in 10:13, 10:21, and 12:1 ). Elsewhere in the Bible, names for angels only appear in the in the Apocrypha and the New Testament. As I've noted earlier, angels are a Persian influence on Jewish theology, which did not occur until the Persians conquered Babylon.


• The absence of Daniel's name in the list of Israel's great men in Ecclesiasticus.


• Nebuchadrezzar is spelled Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel, which is the way the king's name was spelled, under Greek influence, at a later time.


• In 2:2 the king's wise men are called "Chaldeans". But at the time of Nebuchadrezzar, "Chaldean" would have referred to a nationality. It was only centuries later that this word came to mean sorcerer or astrologer.


• It's not just Babylonian history the author gets badly wrong. The conquest of the city is said to have first happened by a figure named "Darius the Mede", who conquers Babylon and is then in turn conquered by the Persian Cyrus. But there's a problem. There's no record of this supposed first conquest, nor of Darius the Mede. Indeed, Media was conquered by Cyrus before he conquered Babylon. The author got confused with the much later Darius I of Persia, and invented some fictitious short-lived Median Empire, the same one that appears in the "prophecy" of the statue.

More on the bad history in the Book of Daniel can be found in articles by Farrell Till and William Sierichs Jr.

So when was this book written? Much later, and in fact, the alleged "prophecy" in the story helps us find when. Just as his history is terrible, "Daniel"'s telling of the future is eerily accurate up until a certain point, at which it veers off terribly into the realm of pure fantasy. The prophecies tell of the Persian's letting the Jews rebuild their temple, then of Alexander's conquest, then of the splintering of the empire at his death, then the wars between the "King of the North" (the Seleucid Kings) and the "King of the South" (the Ptolemies of Egypt). Then a figure of pure evil and terrible nastiness is described....which can be none other than Antiochus IV Epiphanes, King of Seleucia...who we will talk about next.

In the Beginning, Man Created God IV

After some delay. let's continue with our journey through those most unctuous of monotheistic creeds, the "Abrahamic" faiths.

In our previous installments, we've watched monotheism's first, tender steps under the Egyptians and Persians, then seen those heady, innocent days of Hebrew history when Yahweh rubbed shoulders with Baal and Chemosh and got along just fine. Then, as King Josiah fabricated most of Hebrew history in an attempt to conquer his neighbours, hordes of rampaging Babylonians destroyed Hebrew civilization and carted the survivors back to Babylon, where they remained until Shahinshah Cyrus (no relation to Billy Ray or Miley) sent them back to Jerusalem, this time with the baggage of a dualistic religion complete with twin afterlives and armies of good and bad angels.

Quite a ride!

But where to next?

Part 4: Alex the Kid in Hellenic World

Life plods on in the Persian province of Yehud (as Judah is now known) and its people enjoy a full and rich life worshipping their great god YHWH and his consort, Anat.

Yes, consort.

Archaelogical evidence uncovered in the Egyptian ruins of Elephantine show that some of the Jews were still polytheistic (or at least henotheistic) even at this late stage. Anat is a Semitic goddess whose name has been preserved in a few traditional Hebrew place names, and even the name of the wife of the Biblical patriarch Joseph. (Asenath, literally "holy to Anath).

Above: Yahweh's main squeeze, Anat, was surprisingly popular for some reason.

Life was good for the chosen.

The Torah was canonised! Synagogues built! Prayers said! Penises cut!

Outside events, however, were beginning to overtake our plucky heroes. Far to the north some Greek named Alexander was being tutored by Aristotle, a fate surely to drive any man to war.

And drive Alex it did. By the end of the fourth century BC, Alexander had completely conquered and dismembered the Persian Empire before dying in Babylon after one particularly brutal binge-drinking session.

His legend would live on, however, in a variety of reliable sources and a collection of wildly inaccurate ones which eventually coalesced into the so-called Alexander Romances, a work which was so influential, it even made it into the Qu'ran, where he is referred to as "Dhul-Qarnayn", Arabic for "two-horned one" - a reference to the horned figure of Alexander that appeared on the coins minted during and after his lifetime.

Above:Alex the Horny, in all his glory.

Of course, the same religious book also claims that said horny king was a Muslim, despite being a pork-eating, uncircumcised Greek bisexual with delusions of divinity, so I think the technical term for that is "load of bullshit".

Lex's Empire was divided by his generals who each came to rule over a portion of it. Yehud/Judah was fought over by Ptolemy, ruler of Egypt, and Seleucus, ruler of Syria. Large numbers of Jews would settle elsewhere in the Hellenic world, particularly in Alexandria, in Egypt, where a Greek-speaking Jewish community would translate the Torah into Greek, which would prove influential later on.

Greek culture and ideas would permeate into the cultures of all the lands conquered by Alexander. In India, it fused with native traditions to form Greco-Buddhism, which contained the first true depictions of Buddha (based on Greek sculpture) and would later form Zen Buddhism, a syncretic combination of the teachings of Zeno and Buddha.

Even the Jews were not immune. Physical and mental exercise would take place in the newly established gymnasium, and Greek philosophy and religion would breath new life into the stuffy, ancient traditions of the Jewish people.

Of course, not everyone saw it that way. Conservative elements of Jewish society became outraged with what they saw as decadent, sinful Hellenism to which the younger generations were becoming attracted to. Flagrant violation of the dietary laws and the flaunting of many an uncut penis would have made them even angrier. All that was needed was a single spark to set things off. But surely no one would be so stupid as to provide one, would they?

For the answer to that, you'll have to wait for the next installment.

COMING UP NEXT: PART 5: I ♥ MACCABEES