Religion
In reply to the discussion: Too Simple to Be Wrong: Atheism's Bronze-Age Goat Herder Conceit [View all]okasha
(11,573 posts)As Muriel Volestrangler notes below, the first books of the OT were written during the Iron Age. Specifically, they were written during the Josian reform period, when what we know as Judaism emerged from the background of "pagan" Canaanite religion. Josiah and his priests re-invented monotheism (Egypt's Akhenaten had invented it in Egypt several centuries before.) They divorced Yahweh from his wife of many centuries, Asherah; tossed out the healer serpent-god(dess) Nehushtan, who makes a cameo appearance as the tempter in Genesis; and destroyed the shrines to these other deities, establishing Yahweh as sole god and forbidding ceremonial worship anywhere but the Jerusalem Temple. The men who carried out these changes were not pastoralists. By this time, Judah had emerged as a nation-state, with a central urban government, a literate urban bureaucracy, and strong mercantile ties to the Mediterranean and Central Asia.
They also had close cultural ties with their trading partners. As has been frequently noted, the priest-authors were familiar with the Gilgamesh epic, appropriating its Flood narrative for the Noah story. It's also fairly clear that they were acquainted with archaic Greek literature; the face-off between David and Goliath, for example, follows the same structure as single combats between Homeric champions. This is not accidental, since what they were actually doing in the Pentateuch and conquest narratives was creating an epic for a nation that Josiah intended to expand into the former territory of the northern kingdom of Israel, which had just been conquered and largely deported by Assyria. Judah was, in fact, at the peak of its power and regional influence--so much so that Pharoah Sheshonk of Egypt took exception and summarily executed Josiah. The OT books that follow are all of varying, later age, with the most recent, Daniel, dating from around the second century BCE, when Palestine began to recover its identity under the Hasmonean dynasty.