• kromem@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    There’s an interesting detail to the whole “Moses breaking the original tablets in response to the golden calf worship.”

    This parallels the alleged reforms of Josiah.

    Josiah “finds a new book of laws” and then suddenly carries out major religious reforms. He performed human sacrifice slaughtering the priests of the high places on their altars to defile them. He hides away the Ark, the anointing oil, the manna jar. He gets rid of the Asherah worship.

    And he gets rid of the golden calves in Bethel and Dan while getting rid of the old laws and bringing new ones.

    Oh, and he institutes the Passover narrative.

    So suddenly in the events around Moses, the central part of that Passover narrative, is a scene that has old laws being destroyed in response to golden calf worship and new laws taking their place.

    Very sus.

    Even more sus is that Josiah’s reforms appear to be anachronistic given the correspondence over a century later between Elephantine and Jerusalem.

    We should really be taking Hecataeus of Adbera’s claim that the scriptures of the Jews had recently been significantly altered around the Exodus narrative under the Persian and Macedonian conquests more seriously.

    Edit: Also if the Shapira scroll is legit, there was originally an 11th commandment.