September 20th, 2020
Since I’ve finished reading the Old Testament, I wanted to take a moment to organize my thoughts around history in an effort to provide a framework for my understanding of the Bible and the Judeo-Christian tradition as well as other works and ideas. I’d like to do this so I can move forward in an organized and productive way. Firstly there is the Bronze Age. The pertinent things for me were that it lasted from ~3300 BCE to ~1200 BCE, it was characterized by great civilizations that collapsed for particular reasons (The reasons put forward being environmental, cultural and/or a general systems collapse), writing was developed and there was a general transition from an oral tradition to a written literary tradition and that the influences of human history can be traced back to literature and stories developed at the end of the Bronze Age, but that most of Bronze Age Literature did not appear in the collective consciousness until the 19th and 20th centuries CE (I think this is the main point), and what we think of as the Near East and Greece began to develop during this time. There is what I think of as known literature and unknown literature. Known literature would be things like the Judeo-Christian literary tradition or Greek philosophy which has been known throughout human history and has shaped it in an identifiable way. Unknown literature would be like Bronze Age Egyptian or Mesopotamian literature which was only discovered relatively recently. While these most certainly contributed to the shaping of human history they were not identified as a source of this shaping until the 19th and 20th Centuries CE when these sources were discovered. It can be said that these works of literature (Along with other bronze age literary traditions as well as Hebrew and Greek literature), were influenced by oral traditions that pre-date the Bronze Age which may have lasted for thousands of years. The Hebrew and Greek literary tradition (Specifically the Bible and the works of Homer) that has shaped human history looked back to a time near the end of the Bronze Age between 1300 and 1100 BCE and that that is roughly the beginning of “history” in the western consciousness (although the Book of Genesis looks back further and most theologians for a time said that the world began in 4,000 BCE, I consider Genesis to be mostly a prequel to the story of Moses and the Exodus which would be around the time frame listed above. Most Biblical scholars assert that Moses wrote the Book of Genesis which would align with the notion that the beginning of “history” begins with the story of Moses in the Book of Exodus). The time period after the Bronze Age from ~1200 BCE to the rise of Alexander the Great and his conquests in the 330’s BCE is when both the Hebrews and the Greek City-States peaked and where a majority of the philosophy and theology stems from that has shaped the world to this day. I’ve read the Old Testament which covers this history and I’m going to be reading a couple of books that discuss this time period in Jewish history, at present being Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Elliott Friedman, The Bible Unearthed: Archeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and The Origin of Its Sacred Texts by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, and the beginning of A History of the Jews by Paul Johnson to at least Part 2 of 7 (maybe more, we’ll see). I then want to turn my attention to Greece and explore some key moments such as the Greco-Persian War and the Peloponnesian War (The former through The Histories by Herodotus and the latter partly through playing through a campaign of the expansion of the game Total War: Rome II called The Wrath of Sparta, but mostly through The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides) as well as The Illiad and The Odyssey by Homer and the works of Greek philosophers and playwrights. I’m having a hard time determining if I want to read Classical Myth by Barry B. Powell before starting Homer. These are things that I want to read before getting into the time after Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Period. Some key things to learn in that period would be the conquests of Alexander the Great, The Maccabean Revolt, and the influence of the Hellenistic thought in the middle east. Before getting into that I would like to read Volume 1 of A History of Religious Ideas by Mircea Eliade which covers the development of religious ideas from the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries. Essentially I want a fundamental understanding of the Greek thought in an effort to see how it potentially shaped the Hebrews and early Christians as well as seeing the development of other religious ideas and how they may have shaped the Judeo-Christian Tradition (e.g. Zoroastrianism). As much as I would like to read all of the Greek philosopher’s works, I think I can only really engage in an overview at this point. I’ll find something on Amazon. There are other books that I would like to read in conjunction with reading the New Testament but I’ll cover that when I get to it.