@Golden Key - Osman's theory sounds like a lot of wishful thinking. "This guy in this other distant place, in a different century, with a different name, is really the REAL guy." Sounds like a PhD thesis at a very indulgent seminary.
I suspect that even if this united Kingdom hadn't split into two after Solomon, it would still have had little chance of long-term prosperity, being squeezed between Egypt and Assyria. If memory serves me right (which it may well not do!), David's (and Israel's) rise happened at a time when Egypt was less active and so less likely to swat down any potential threats.
The golden age of Israel (i.e. the David and Solomon years) took place during a period of general social collapse in the eastern Mediterranean. This was roughly the same era as the Trojan War (for whatever value of historicity you want to assign to the Trojan War). If you read between the lines of the Iliad you see a picture of a society in collapse, where warfare and piracy are replacing other pursuits as means of production. Archæology indicates it was much the same elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean. Large nations shrank (Egypt) and new ones (Israel) arose/consolidated themselves on the margins.
This is also why so much about this era is speculative; the relative lack of contemporary written accounts is a common feature of dark ages.
@Golden Key - Osman's theory sounds like a lot of wishful thinking. "This guy in this other distant place, in a different century, with a different name, is really the REAL guy." Sounds like a PhD thesis at a very indulgent seminary.
If you switch everything, is it still the same guy?
Kind of like imagining salt, but if it was black, came from a plant, and had a zingy taste. And made you sneeze when you got it up your nose.
@Golden Key - Osman's theory sounds like a lot of wishful thinking. "This guy in this other distant place, in a different century, with a different name, is really the REAL guy." Sounds like a PhD thesis at a very indulgent seminary.
If you switch everything, is it still the same guy?
Kind of like imagining salt, but if it was black, came from a plant, and had a zingy taste. And made you sneeze when you got it up your nose.
Now that sounds like a PhD thesis from a very indulgent philosophy department.
@Golden Key - Osman's theory sounds like a lot of wishful thinking. "This guy in this other distant place, in a different century, with a different name, is really the REAL guy." Sounds like a PhD thesis at a very indulgent seminary.
If you switch everything, is it still the same guy?
Kind of like imagining salt, but if it was black, came from a plant, and had a zingy taste. And made you sneeze when you got it up your nose.
The frustrating bit is that because he reigned centuries before the aforementioned social collapse we have a lot better attestation of Thutmose III than we do of David. It's not like we don't know much about Thutmose III and have to fill in the blanks. And of course there's the problem of the complete lack of a Hatshepsut-like person anywhere in David's official biography.
Well, that's one way to find material for your thesis. If you haven't got enough, identify your subject with someone better known. If I had only thought of this...
I suspect that even if this united Kingdom hadn't split into two after Solomon, it would still have had little chance of long-term prosperity, being squeezed between Egypt and Assyria. If memory serves me right (which it may well not do!), David's (and Israel's) rise happened at a time when Egypt was less active and so less likely to swat down any potential threats.
The golden age of Israel (i.e. the David and Solomon years) took place during a period of general social collapse in the eastern Mediterranean. This was roughly the same era as the Trojan War (for whatever value of historicity you want to assign to the Trojan War). If you read between the lines of the Iliad you see a picture of a society in collapse, where warfare and piracy are replacing other pursuits as means of production. Archæology indicates it was much the same elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean. Large nations shrank (Egypt) and new ones (Israel) arose/consolidated themselves on the margins.
This is also why so much about this era is speculative; the relative lack of contemporary written accounts is a common feature of dark ages.
Thanks for this. I sort of knew that but it has been a long time since I read it and wasn't in a position to check my assertion.
@Golden Key - Osman's theory sounds like a lot of wishful thinking. "This guy in this other distant place, in a different century, with a different name, is really the REAL guy." Sounds like a PhD thesis at a very indulgent seminary.
LOL. Quite possibly. FYI: I'm not championing his ideas at all. I was looking up "King David and King Arthur", eventually came across a link to info about the book, thought it was weird, and posted it as part of our musings about David.
So I guess the obvious follow on to "If you switch everything", would be what are the units of the biblical narrative that you could realistically separate off to (possibly) identify another figure as being in some sense the 'real David'?
So the David and Bathsheba tale would be something of that sort. If say there was a story about Thutmoses getting one of his generals done in, and then had someone tell him off with a simile. If that was the verifiable one and David's clearly had been copied from it, then in that sense you could say Thutmoses was the 'real David' (of that tiny narrative).
Being son of Jesse son of Boaz of Judah, would be I think another (of a slightly different kind). If you found a person that matched that description but turned out to have been a musician all his life.
So I guess the obvious follow on to "If you switch everything", would be what are the units of the biblical narrative that you could realistically separate off to (possibly) identify another figure as being in some sense the 'real David'?
So the David and Bathsheba tale would be something of that sort. If say there was a story about Thutmoses getting one of his generals done in, and then had someone tell him off with a simile. If that was the verifiable one and David's clearly had been copied from it, then in that sense you could say Thutmoses was the 'real David' (of that tiny narrative).
Being son of Jesse son of Boaz of Judah, would be I think another (of a slightly different kind). If you found a person that matched that description but turned out to have been a musician all his life.
Or you could say that somebody writing up the David narrative took the Thutmoses story and applied it to David. Or something somewhat like that happened to David and the story grew more like the Thutmoses story in the telling.
In the lives of the saints, many episodes from one saint's life will show up in another saint's life. Entire rafts of saints who all do the same kind of miracle will spring up. It's unlikely they all did whatever-it-was. But not impossible that one did, and that story got fused into the later stories.
Yes, for the record I have no reason to use thutmose as an example except for him being a name mentioned.
It is also the only Davidic story that I can see any possibility of being in common with a new kingdom pharoah, except possibly not building a temple. (Although I am totally ignorant of his life)
Relating back to the op, it gives some idea on what we expect from a king David.
In the lives of the saints, many episodes from one saint's life will show up in another saint's life. Entire rafts of saints who all do the same kind of miracle will spring up.
In the lives of the saints, many episodes from one saint's life will show up in another saint's life. Entire rafts of saints who all do the same kind of miracle will spring up.
The books of Samuel contain at least three different sources, maybe even more. 1 Samuel starts out supporting the role of a prophet, but then the people want a king--or a pro monarch source then there is a pro-Saul source, a pro-David source, something that looks like records from the Court of David, and then a small anti-David source. At least they are the ones I remember. Some of them are pre-exilic, but most appear to come from after the exile. The reference to the United Kingdom comes from post-exilic sources
The books of Samuel contain at least three different sources, maybe even more. 1 Samuel starts out supporting the role of a prophet, but then the people want a king--or a pro monarch source then there is a pro-Saul source, a pro-David source, something that looks like records from the Court of David, and then a small anti-David source. At least they are the ones I remember. Some of them are pre-exilic, but most appear to come from after the exile. The reference to the United Kingdom comes from post-exilic sources
Are you seriously suggesting that any shift in the political environment alluded to in the text is, in and of itself, evidence of a change of source?
The books of Samuel contain at least three different sources, maybe even more. 1 Samuel starts out supporting the role of a prophet, but then the people want a king--or a pro monarch source then there is a pro-Saul source, a pro-David source, something that looks like records from the Court of David, and then a small anti-David source. At least they are the ones I remember. Some of them are pre-exilic, but most appear to come from after the exile. The reference to the United Kingdom comes from post-exilic sources
Are you seriously suggesting that any shift in the political environment alluded to in the text is, in and of itself, evidence of a change of source?
it is not unlikely, therefore, that the book was composed using preexisting traditions or source texts. Initially scholars suggested that these might have belonged to the hypothesised ‘J’ and ‘E’ sources of the Pentateuch, but ever since a 1926 book by Leonhard Rost, the majority scholarly view has been that the source material initially comprised distinct clusters of related stories (...) There is much disagreement over the precise boundaries of most of these segments, mainly because it is possible to recognise narrative foreshadowing and related material in earlier stories.
As you can see, the wording of the text in your link is far more cautious than claiming to "prove" anything. There has been a majority view, based on the work of a single author, for just under a century, but the question is apparently far from settled. It seems to me that if you'd been posting here before 1926, you would probably have been loudly asserting that Samuel was incontrovertibly based on two sources, J and E.
What I was calling out was the unqualified nature of your original statement and the very dubious grounds you gave for it. As is often the case in academic and scientific research, there turns out to be a big gap between your "headline" and the actual state of knowledge.
Comments
The golden age of Israel (i.e. the David and Solomon years) took place during a period of general social collapse in the eastern Mediterranean. This was roughly the same era as the Trojan War (for whatever value of historicity you want to assign to the Trojan War). If you read between the lines of the Iliad you see a picture of a society in collapse, where warfare and piracy are replacing other pursuits as means of production. Archæology indicates it was much the same elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean. Large nations shrank (Egypt) and new ones (Israel) arose/consolidated themselves on the margins.
This is also why so much about this era is speculative; the relative lack of contemporary written accounts is a common feature of dark ages.
If you switch everything, is it still the same guy?
Kind of like imagining salt, but if it was black, came from a plant, and had a zingy taste. And made you sneeze when you got it up your nose.
Now that sounds like a PhD thesis from a very indulgent philosophy department.
The frustrating bit is that because he reigned centuries before the aforementioned social collapse we have a lot better attestation of Thutmose III than we do of David. It's not like we don't know much about Thutmose III and have to fill in the blanks. And of course there's the problem of the complete lack of a Hatshepsut-like person anywhere in David's official biography.
Thanks for this. I sort of knew that but it has been a long time since I read it and wasn't in a position to check my assertion.
LOL. Quite possibly. FYI: I'm not championing his ideas at all. I was looking up "King David and King Arthur", eventually came across a link to info about the book, thought it was weird, and posted it as part of our musings about David.
So the David and Bathsheba tale would be something of that sort. If say there was a story about Thutmoses getting one of his generals done in, and then had someone tell him off with a simile. If that was the verifiable one and David's clearly had been copied from it, then in that sense you could say Thutmoses was the 'real David' (of that tiny narrative).
Being son of Jesse son of Boaz of Judah, would be I think another (of a slightly different kind). If you found a person that matched that description but turned out to have been a musician all his life.
Or you could say that somebody writing up the David narrative took the Thutmoses story and applied it to David. Or something somewhat like that happened to David and the story grew more like the Thutmoses story in the telling.
In the lives of the saints, many episodes from one saint's life will show up in another saint's life. Entire rafts of saints who all do the same kind of miracle will spring up. It's unlikely they all did whatever-it-was. But not impossible that one did, and that story got fused into the later stories.
It is also the only Davidic story that I can see any possibility of being in common with a new kingdom pharoah, except possibly not building a temple. (Although I am totally ignorant of his life)
Relating back to the op, it gives some idea on what we expect from a king David.
Totally irrelevant to my point.
An example that borrows from another faith entirely.
Yes!
Thanks for that link! I have a vague memory that I heard about it long ago. It does sound based on the Buddha's life story.
Are you seriously suggesting that any shift in the political environment alluded to in the text is, in and of itself, evidence of a change of source?
Because if you do, I think you should contribute an article to New Directions In Pooh Studies.
MMM
Mock all you want.
But, if you insist, please go to this article on the Books of Samuel which lists even more sources than what I could remember.
Prove me wrong.
As you can see, the wording of the text in your link is far more cautious than claiming to "prove" anything. There has been a majority view, based on the work of a single author, for just under a century, but the question is apparently far from settled. It seems to me that if you'd been posting here before 1926, you would probably have been loudly asserting that Samuel was incontrovertibly based on two sources, J and E.
What I was calling out was the unqualified nature of your original statement and the very dubious grounds you gave for it. As is often the case in academic and scientific research, there turns out to be a big gap between your "headline" and the actual state of knowledge.