The antropological, archeological, and historical information are all guesses. And this ignores that the history of the Jewish people described in the prophets is a people who made many many mistakes in their religious practice. Just because Jewish people at one time performed the circumcision in a specific way, doesn't make it holy or divine. It could have been a mistake.
The religious information is minimal, and that's what counts towards describing the original intention and theology.
If you say there are mistakes in Jewish practice, and naturally there will be mistakes in transmission and interpretation of what's transmitted, then how does one determine what's a mistake, an error in transmission or interpretation, and what's the legitimate foundational idea or truth?
The brilliant and incomparable Ibn Ezra tied himself in knots trying to answer that question. He began by implying that the interpretation most true to the literal meaning of the text is the most trustworthy. But then he ran into cases where the Christian interpretation of the Hebrew text was not only truer to the literal text, but where the allegorical meaning the Christians applied to the literal Hebrew text appeared to fit seamlessly.
Psalms 2:6 is a poster-child for this since Ibn Ezra interpreted it literally when his main concern was exegeting another book in the Tanakh, but when he exegeted the Psalms, and was confronted with what the Christians were doing with 2:6, he changed his original interpretation of the text (that was based on the literal, exegesis of the Hebrew text), to an allegorical interpretation intended to deny the Christian's exegesis and interpretation of the text.
Is it legitimate to change an interpretation of the text based on the fact that the literal interpretation seems to lend itself to other traditions that we don't like? Surely a faithful interpreter shouldn't change his exegetical principles because they make the text say things it shouldn't say if his traditional understanding of the text is sound? Imagine if our exegetical principles were allowed to evolve so that what we believe the text says is what we determine it is saying, rather than determining what its saying by objective rules and principles that should cause the evolution of what we believe the text says.
John
