@LAGoff, well, I just finished listening to it. Below will be my thoughts on the interview. Before that, though, I'll say that I was incredibly unimpressed, to say the least, with the folks of SOTT who did the interview. It is clear they lacked a lot of knowledge in the fields of history, were not particularly knowledgeable in the works of Plato - not even the central ones most touted by Gmirkin, and in general, lacked an understanding of how literary parallels work. One example, of the third thing, is that early on, the woman there said that one time she read the story of David and Goliath, and was suddenly struck with the realization that that story is basically Perseus and Medusa. Why? Well:
a. Medusa could turn people into stone, and David put stones into his pouch.
b. Perseus cut off Medusa's head and put it into his pouch, and David had a pouch and cut off Goliath's head, but didn't put it into his pouch.
*groan...*
Gmirkin nodded along with all of their crazy suggestions, but I don't know if he did that to be polite or because he actually agreed with them.
Now for my thoughts (note that the seconds aren't exact; I heard an idea, wrote my reaction, and then guessed how many seconds ago prior the idea had been said, more or less. Secondly, the quotes aren't always exact):
14:55 - "Lots of Greek parallels, especially in the David stories" - no
duh, the Plishtim were of Mycenaean Greek origins.
34:40 - "In Yev they swore by [Hashem] and Beth-Anath" - Actually, no. That view stems from the fact that Yadaniah, one of the high ranking military officials there ordered worship supplies both for Hashem and Anat. And we know there were also Aramean soldiers stationed in the colony. Hence the need to stock up on supplies for them.
35:08 - "They [the people of Yev (Elephantine)] asked the people of Jerusalem: Can we have another [temple]? And they said sure." - Oh, really? And where is this purported letter? Because as far as I'm aware, the people of Jerusalem never replied to any of their requests for assistance with rebuilding the temple in Yev.
38:28 - I reject his comparison of Genesis 1 and the Timaeus. Timaeus - and it is highly unclear whether Plato actually agreed with his views - describes a crafting deity, not a creator. Genesis is clear on the creation part - בראשית ברא etc. Furthermore, you don't find the creation of a demiurge nor of lesser maker-deities in Genesis, as you find in the Timaeus.
43:50 - "David, that's legend" - hmmm. I have one certain mention and one possible mention of the House of David on ancient stelae that say otherwise.
43:52 - "The biblical authors don't even cite any sources for those [the "legends" from David and back]" - Books by Natan and Gad are attested in Chronicles. Multiple royal histories are mentioned. Any of this ringing a bell?
49:30 - "Haggai is a collection of oracles from around 515 BCE when they were given permission to rebuild the Temple." - Chaggai is ancient but the rest isn't? Huh? Per his logic, based on what?
1:03:39 - "They were creating a theocracy, which is something Plato invented, ruled not by a king but by a god." - So why make mention of the kings? Why include a law for a king? As Gmirkin stated, Plato thought it would only take a generation for people to forget their true history. Why bother including anything that contradicts this theocratic concept?
1:05:00-18 - "Absolutely horrifying that the only people who took Plato's social engineering seriously and successfully implemented it were the Jews...it's alright as long as they don't have a country...and they didn't have one for 2000 years" - comments from the interviewers, with agreement from Gmirkin - okay, a. Antisemitic. b. While we didn't have a country for nearly 2000 years, we did have one during the Hasmonean period, which was still after this purported date of the "invention" of the Bible, so perhaps you people should learn some history instead of spouting so much psycho-babble.
1:34:00 - "Around 270 BCE...The Jews and the Samaritans were working together on this [the Torah] in Alexandria" - Both the Talmud and Josephus record that the big split between the Jews and the Samaritans happened when Alexander conquered Judea, decades prior. So what's Gmirkin's evidence that the Jews and the Samaritans worked together in Alexandria?
Edit: 1:39:35 - "we know this because the Torah has all sorts of mentions of Gerizzim but doesn't really mention Jerusalem." - And yet, Gerizzim is not mentioned ever as a place of worship. And this still doesn't explain Jerusalem's lack of prominence. Moreover, it doesn't explain why a later edit/redaction of the text, post-split between the Jews and the Samaritans, is non-existent. He claims that the split happened within ten years of the Alexandria project - still early enough in the stage to re-edit everything. Why was that not done?
1:37:29 - "You almost have to erase the memory of the history of these people" - Right, here the real conspiracy begins. How do you erase the entire collective national memory of millions of people dispersed all over the Levant and North Africa?
1:38:40 - "The people who wrote the Bible were demoted to translators...they were kind of erased from history" - So now we have a second conspiracy, that a second group of elders took the new text authored in Alexandria and wiped the signatures of the authors? And you have evidence of this? Oh please, do tell.
General questions:
1. Where are the Greek words? Why can we see an evolution of Hebrew within the texts - an evolution attested by archeological findings - but never find Greek lingual influence? Why are there no Greek words in the bible?
2. Rather than going to war with Antiochus, wouldn't it have been more simple to just explain to the man that Judaism, too, stems from Greek thought? And then they could have fought things out in a philosophical debate?
3. At some point he states that it is impossible that the Jews could have influenced the Greeks because they hadn't yet been in contact. This is false. Yoel (
4:6) hints at Jews being sold into slavery in Greece. But more than that, Plato and other Greeks traveled to Egypt and Persia and other countries decades after the two exiles (Assyria and Babylon), meaning places where there were prominent Jewish communities.
4. Gmirkin finds parallels between Plato's utopian Republic "colony" and the Jewish sages who supposedly invented the Bible. And yet, question: The Jews at the time were not in control of themselves. Moreover, they were dispersed all over the Greek empire, which at the time was divided between four Greco-Macedonian governments. How were they able to force this new text and these new rules onto almost the whole of the Jewish people and in just a mere century or so (onset of the Hasmonean Wars)? Again, he states that the Jews were trying to form a theocracy. If one generation is what's needed to build a brainwashed colony, why did it take them 2.5-5 generations (depending how you number them) to rebel? The "big vision" remained unacted upon for ages. Why?
5. I'm confused as to how Gmirkin explains the huge differences between Judaism and Platonism. Great, you have similarities. How do you explain the differences? Say, they wanted to preserve some old traditions. a. Why? b. They were anyway implementing Plato's social engineering-brainwashing techniques; why not go through with the whole nine yards?
6. Gmirkin believes that all ancient details in the Bible came from ancient traditions. Really, now. We could make lists upon lists of tiny details that match archeological findings that no one would really care to think were significant to these Alexandrian scholars - and yet somehow they thought to include these things? Take for example the Dead Sea. A
study by Prof. Amos Frumkin and Rabbi Dr. Yoel Elitzur shows that the eras of the rising and lowering of the water levels in the Dead Sea are parallel to the varying descriptions in the Bible. However, without modern scientific methods at your disposal, you'd have to be centuries old to be aware of this occurrence of the changing water level in the DS. Why would they think to include such stuff that seemingly had no grounding in the geographical reality as they knew it?
On a final note, I was sorely unimpressed with Gmirkin. He came across as a conspiracy theorist. However, in many ways, he is not too different from many other Minimalistic Bible Critics, who oftentimes push theories that are blatantly disconnected from archeological reality.
