How have modern historical methods validated ancient story-telling traditions?
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How have modern historical methods validated ancient story-telling traditions?
I would say there are three basic ways that new historical methods have revolutionized the way we study these ancient myths.
One is the discovery that a lot of modern languages derive from an ancient Indo-European root. This means that even languages that don't survive in their entirety, we can reconstruct aspects of those ancient languages by comparing their words and their grammar to the languages that do survive. This has also helped us to decipher ancient writings that we used to consider to be opaque - for example, Egyptian hieroglyphics. People have been interested in hieroglyphics for centuries but they couldn't read them. And then the Rosetta stone was discovered in the 18th century and that included on it not just hieroglyphics but also Greek and another written language that people could read. And as a result of comparing these languages, for the first time hieroglyphics became decipherable, so that was a huge breakthrough. But there are ancient writing systems that exist that still haven't been deciphered so there is a huge scope for students in the future. One of these, for example, is the language of ancient Crete. Whereas the language of ancient Greece has been deciphered - it was deciphered in the 1950's by two Englishmen who had worked cracking code in World War II, so they were using those skills to bring to ancient languages - the language of Minoan Crete is still eluding us, so that's a real area for new endeavor.
Obviously, scientific archaeology - in the 19th century, archaeologists became convinced that the stories that the Greeks told about themselves, the stories of Troy, for example, must refer to some real, concrete experience. And so, they went looking for these ancient cities like the city of Troy and, lo and behold, they found that these ancient civilizations existed. In fact, they found a whole civilization in ancient Greece that had been considered to not exist. It's called Mycenaean Greece, for the town of Mycenae, and the Greeks of this civilization lived in these enormous palace complexes much bigger than anything that would have survived in Classical Greece many, many centuries later.
The third, I would say, is the discovery that ancient storytelling traditions go back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. The Iliad and the Odyssey were not written by Homer in one sitting - they were the process of a very long period of historical development. So we can read these ancient epics, like the Epic of Gilgamesh, almost as though they are archaeological artifacts. We can peel back layers of meaning from these texts and we can get at what ancient peoples thought their own history was.
So those three things: the deciphering of ancient languages, new developments in archaeology, and then, of course, this understanding of how ancient storytelling traditions are really essentially performance art. History used to be about performance and we now have access to that.
What is historically significant about monotheism, and how did the Hebrews come to worship a single god?
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What is historically significant about monotheism, and how did the Hebrews come to worship a single god?
The conviction that there is a single god who has created the universe and rules the universe is arguably one of the most important historical phenomena. It has tremendous power, this idea of a single god, because it can either create an idea that all human beings are united in a common humanity because they have a common creator, but it can also lead to division when people start arguing about what the attributes of this creator-god are.
In antiquity, in the ancient world, all ancient people so far as we know worshipped an array of gods. This is true also of the Hebrews in the earliest part of their history, and we know this from their own scriptures. In fact, the Ten Commandments suggest this when Yahweh, the god of the Hebrews, says in the first commandment, "You shall have no other gods before me." He means precisely that: there are a lot of gods out there but I'm the one you should be worshipping. The Hebrews make no secret of this fact.
But over time, a group of priests and leaders within the Hebrews become convinced that Yahweh is the most powerful god and they want to promote Yahweh as kind of a national god for the Hebrews. At this time, the Hebrews are a group of tribes, each of whom have their own customs and practices, and when the "Yahwehists," as historians call them (the followers of Yahweh), come to power they try to impose Yahweh on all of these different tribes. And so the two kings whom we associate with this are David and Solomon and they are the first kings to establish Jerusalem, for example, as the national capitol of the Hebrews, who try to found a unified Hebrew kingdom, who build a temple to house Yahweh, rather than carrying him around in a portable ark.
But this attempt to impose monotheism on the Hebrew tribes was actually ultimately unsuccessful. After the death of Solomon, David's son, the Hebrew kingdoms fragment and it's really only when the Hebrews are faced with annihilation that this idea of rallying around a common, national, ancestral god becomes really attractive.
So, the Neo-Assyrian Empire destroys the Kingdom of Israel. A couple hundred years later the Chaldeans destroy Judea and Jerusalem and they cart the Hebrews off bodily into slavery. This is called the Babylonian Captivity, where they remain for several generations. And it is in that period of captivity, in that period of extreme hardship and separation from their homeland, that the Hebrews are able to embrace Yahweh and Yahweh becomes a unifying force.
That's the extraordinary story - that the religion of the Hebrews becomes the religion of Judaism, the religion that can survive outside of Judea as a unifying force.